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by walrus01 2074 days ago
> By the way, there are no fake accounts. There are only accounts or not.

Yes, until we see a great advancement in AI, actual meat based mammals are driving these accounts.

> There are no sockpuppet

Sometimes it seems like half of Twitter is fake accounts. You've never seen photos or videos of a Bangladeshi click farm? 50 people sitting in small cubicles running proxy-connected virtual machines on desktop PCs, posting stuff, upvoting things on reddit, etc?

I assure you that such things exist. Some of the places that used to do MMORPG gold mining to trade virtual currency for real money have shifted into the market, because it's much more lucrative.

You've never seen the pictures from China of 1 person sitting in front of a board with 40 budget android phones mounted on it, upvoting and reviewing apps?

2 comments

looks honestly like the worst job ever.
it probably pays about the same as manually assembling cheap plastic and fabric children's toys or christmas ornaments or whatever.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/dec/04/the-grim-tr...

Precisely that.
Those are iPhones.
I can't find the photo right now, but absolutely the same thing exists in the android app ecosystem. If you read and write fluent Mandarin you can probably find such in 30 seconds of searching within-the-GFW search engines.
I’m with you that it’s a serious problem. If it weren’t, Amazon and others wouldn’t be working so hard on AI to combat the AI or human that’s beaten their AI.

Those aren’t “fake accounts”, though. They’re real accounts being abused. There’s a difference. If Amazon and Twitter allow it to happen, it will happen. But what does shaming accomplish here? It just means people waste time talking about it. It has little chance to change behavior. More likely the outcome could become Reddit and HN enforcing a real ID. That may hurt the community, because not all of us want our name on everything; it’s not because I don’t stand behind what I’m saying- I’m just not going to treat every post like I want to carry it around with me on a sign for the rest of my life, even though at some point, maybe I’ll have to!