[holidayacct]

Pay close attention to social media companies and privately run social networks and forums. I used to work for a major social media network that was growing and eventually stalled.

If you run a social network and it gets popular you're going to run into major problems that no one talks about.

1.) Multiple governments, private organization and luddites send people to your company to compromise the source code.

2.) People eventually find out they can use the social network as a covert advertising platform. They end up trying to make side money using the platform to slip ad campaigns as normal human interactions.

3.) Eventually someone figures out they can control the behavior of people on the social media platform in strange ways. One guy figured out he could create sock puppet accounts and automate the process of bringing women he liked everywhere he went. Don't do this!!! If you start slipping covert advertising in the platform and you get caught you're eventually going to run into organized crime, the govt or both.

4.) And my favorite, people start offering your best employees obscsene amounts of money to try and stop you from starting another social network.

[novok]

> automate the process of bringing women he liked everywhere he went

So what is that exactly? Somehow these women would show up to meetups or something? Or were the sockpuppet accounts 'women'?

[holidayacct]

Surprisingly, they were real women that fell for sock puppet accounts.

[novok]

So whenever they arrived somewhere, would they be very confused and then leave because mr.sockpuppet wasn't around? You got to give more details, otherwise this story is pretty confusing.

[holidayacct]

Not at all. More like, pretend to be a woman in a sock puppet account and eventually let them know there is a discount on clothing at XYZ department store. Then they just show up at the location.

[DethNinja]

Could you please give more details on how your company was stalled?

Was it through the legal ways as in a government entity said that it must be shut-down or through some other methods from third parties?

[holidayacct]

This is how it works in reality. People take over parts of your company and do everything to make employees feel bad about the company. They then do everything to make your employees feel good about something/anything else to keep them distracted.

You start seeing really strange things like a severly overweight coworker suddenly having a trophy gf who starts talking poorly about everyone. People suddenly start becoming lazy out of nowhere because someone outside of the company has made them believe they are guaranteed millionaires when they haven't even IPO'd. People who used to be focused on their jobs suddenly start slending money wildly on ridiculous garbage.

While everyone is distracted in different ways people who had nothing to do with the success of the company silently takeover key parts of the company and start firing people that figure out what is happening.

[jolmg]

I didn't understand the 4th. Besides competitor networks, what would anyone have against another social network being started?

[holidayacct]

Keeping track of communication channels. It is what governments and private security firms do all the time. No one wants to have to keep track of the activities of another social networking platform and figure out how to compromise it. They also have to keep track of anyone else who has compromised the platform.

Just a further note, the entire internet is comrpomised in one way or another. The worst offenders are linkedin, amazon and facebook. The US govt and various organizations have the complete ability to monitor any account, control what shows up on the user interfaces and replace the content however they please. A ton of people arent even aware their accounts are being used to control their behavior via reinforcement learning. Its just advertising but when people use it effectively it is a destructive tool.

See for how these kinda of techniques are used. https://www.amazon.com/Psychological-Operations-Principles-C...

[octoberfranklin]

I didn't understand any of it, especially the organized crime bit.

Methinks OP has had a few too many pints this evening.

[jjones2]

That is very interesting. Did you ever catch any spooks trying to manipulate your source code?

[holidayacct]

You're never going to see the government walking in the door modifying source code. Those are tales they tell ppl. They are going to just blackmail someone or make some poor kid believe he/she can be a hacker by slipping backdoors into the software.

[snypher]

Does anyone recall the person who got a call in the middle of the night from the 'FBI' requesting a source code handover?

[jjones2]

Yup. But I thought it was the NSA for an encryption program?

[jjones2]

Ain't that the truth