Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

https://www.garbageday.email/p/when-the-traffic-firehose-is-pointed

by antoniokov • 5 years ago

346 145 5 years ago

creato2• 5 years ago

I greatly enjoyed this sentence:

The one mystery we weren’t able to figure out is why any sane person working at Facebook would feel comfortable publishing a content report that admitted that the most viral publisher on its platform this year was a barely active drop-shipping scam page full of stolen video content run by an LLC that doesn’t even exist anymore.

Causality1• 5 years ago

They're not paid to care.

kwertyoowiyop• 5 years ago

Even worse: They’re paid to not care.

avalys• 5 years ago

Well, perhaps whoever generated this report was simply reporting the truth and not trying to fabricate or distort the truth in order to make Facebook look better?

The fact that the author of the linked article apparently just presumes that they would do so and "[can't] figure out" why they wouldn't says a lot about their own integrity.

mitchdoogle3• 5 years ago

I don't think it says anything about their own integrity. I think it's just a tongue-in-cheek remark about how this information makes Facebook look ridiculous.

mdaidc• 5 years ago

When corporations hide facts we call them immoral, and when they publish the facts we are scratching our heads?

Facebook does a lot of internal research which to me seems to be coming from a good place. Doing that research carries a lot of risk for them; e.g. the recent 'whistleblowers' mainly leaked that exact research reports. But instead of giving Facebook credit for even doing that, we always take a negative approach.

Note: I don't like facebook, I don't even have a facebook account, but unless we encourage good behavior (even at places we dont' like) how do we expect things to get better?

dan-robertson2• 5 years ago

Yeah I also find it surprising that people are shocked that Facebook have internal studies into e.g. whether instagram causes depression in teenage girls (answer: inconclusive), like they’re a bad company for investigating whether their products have negative effects on people…

creato2• 5 years ago

In hindsight, I can see this quote is generating a lot of discussion about the content reporting, but I intended to focus the latter part of the sentence, which I thought really highlights the ridiculousness of social media.

jancsika• 5 years ago

When corporations hide facts we call them immoral

Not really.

When corporations hide externalities that negatively impact the entire population we call them immoral.

I mean, nobody has ever called KFC immoral for having "secret spices."

pessimizer• 5 years ago

Just because you were honest with your partner about cheating on them doesn't mean they have to stay with you. That isn't a mixed message about whether your partner wants to hear the truth or not. You're not being punished for telling the truth about what you did, you're being punished for what you did.

stefan_• 5 years ago

I think you are just missing the backstory. Of course if you are approaching what Facebook does with naivety you end up sounding.. naive.

The whole reason this report was put out by Facebook in the first place is because people used their own tool Crowdtangle to point out how the most popular pages of all were pushing political and medical misinformation to billions and were run by foreign spam mills. So they gutted Crowdtangle and published this report cleansed of any reference to "questionable" pages. But as a previous submission [1] showed, the numbers they state don't add up. And as this submission shows, if you dig into what Facebook wants to tell you is popular, it's all still the most garbage, devoid of value scam content - and it is their algorithm that is promoting it above all.

1: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2021/08/18/facebooks-new-transpar...

snowwrestler• 5 years ago

Every reply so far has missed the point of this sentence, so here it is:

Facebook reporting accurately is sane, but Facebook is in charge of what is being reported, which is not sane.

Like, imagine if your friend was slowly poisoning himself by flavoring his food with lead for a month. Even if he is honest with you about what he’s been doing, it’s still not a sane situation. If anything it’s less sane to be seemingly lucid and forthright about a month of self-destructive behavior, but not actually do anything to change it.

The question here is: why did Facebook allow the situation to get so bad that this page was the top for a whole month? Why didn’t someone at Facebook notice this stupid pointless scam page was surging and do even a little of research and tweaking to change that?

They have seemingly abandoning any responsibility for the behavior of the machine they built and operate. Personally I don’t give them many points for just reporting that.

klyrs• 5 years ago

It's more complicated than that. Facebook is a company. People in different parts of the company do different things, have different motivations, etc. One cannot look at a large organization as an individual. I tried to come up with a more apt analogy... but analogies are awful here.

thinkloop• 5 years ago

It doesn't seem like facebook pumped the whole page, all other posts have extremely low engagement, literally < 10 likes. What's wrong with pumping individual "good" posts? If anything it can be seen as honorable/egalitarian giving folks a chance to make it even if they aren't some media behemoth.

MrAwesome2• 5 years ago

Ex-FB here. My guess is that it's primarily a combination of two factors:

1) Someone / some org was slow to notice that this was happening. 2) Bureaucratic muck slowed resolution down. Even once escalated, there would be a lot of red tape to go through to make the necessary changes to how things are ranked. The people noticing the problem most likely aren't the people able to make changes, the changes would need to be tested at scale and their effects evaluated, and the people making the changes would have a lot of deliberating, politicking, explaining, and appeasing to do. Add onto that that everyone is stressed out of their minds, worried about performance reviews, and having to balance changes they want to make against how they and everyone else are evaluated at perf time...

Igelau3• 5 years ago

You just don't understand the Metav3rse.

worace• 5 years ago

I enjoy this author's podcasts and newsletters, and an interesting angle they've covered recently is that Facebook, ostensibly trying to "clean up their act" with regard to being seen as a platform for disinformation and radicalization, has been tweaking their algorithm to not promote so much alt-right and similar content.

But the problem is, once they exclude all that stuff, there's just not a lot left. So you end up with inane garbage like this account being the most popular content on the platform. Like the whole platform is just Ben Shapiro and drop-shipping scammers. Really paints an "emperor has no clothes" picture of what's going on on Facebook these days.

tantalor• 5 years ago

Burying the lead, to be sure.

r721• 5 years ago

18M comments

That is just sad. I wonder how many times each one of those 18M comments was viewed on average.

newaccount74• 5 years ago

It's been a few years since I've been on Facebook, but doesn't facebook show your comments to your friends by default? It's not like Reddit or Hacker News where everyone sees the same comments, is it?

FilthyAnalyst• 5 years ago

Yes, you will see comments from friends on posts like these. Even if they have a million comments it will come into your feed with a friends replies visible.

dreyfan• 5 years ago

There are millions of fake social profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc that use fake generated profile photos, friend networks among both themselves and gullible real users, and automated markov chain style comments on popular content. It's a self-perpetuating system and an effective way to see inside the walled gardens.

raunak2• 5 years ago

How do you know this and where can I read more

cblconfederate• 5 years ago

facebook's commenting interface, showing only the few latest comments and discouraging threading is aiming to create the largest number of duplicate comments with immediate (and thus outrageous) reactions.

hirundo• 5 years ago

"Facebook flipped a switch, favoring comments and reactions over shares, and suddenly a food blogger from Utah became the largest publisher in the country, if not the world."

While the firehose volume is disproportionate, the direction wasn't random. Whoever is copywriting these messages is an artist, drawing an outstanding number of responses. I felt the urge to react when I read them and bravely restrained myself. There's a lot of power in asking someone the right personal question.

oh_sigh• 5 years ago

Have you ever seen the posts? Some relatives comment on them so they show up on my feed, but the post will be something like "do you like dogs or cats better?" And my aunt and 10 million other people will make a post just saying "cat" or "dog"

ethbr02• 5 years ago

It's a series of gates too, right?

To propagate (show up on more feeds), they need people to interact with it. So successful content will be that that best drives interaction, and I guess comments still weigh more heavily than likes?

Consequently, Facebook itself is a brute force algorithm for discovering the more virulently memetic content and phrasing.

Igelau3• 5 years ago

It's sort of weird to have watched the target demographic switch from college kids to everyone's older aunts and uncles. We went from "you should know better than to post that picture" to "you should know better than to engage with that order of operations question".

wingerlang2• 5 years ago

Open LinkedIn today and you're almost guaranteed to see some engagement bait prompting you to react X or Y for different opinions.

wiether2• 5 years ago

And my aunt

Facebook really ruined the opinion I had of my relatives because of that kind of stuff. Man, you taught me how to fish but look at you now, jumping on every bait thrown at you...

deathanatos3• 5 years ago

I felt the urge to react when I read them and bravely restrained myself.

You feel an urge to react at bizarro twilight zone non-sequitur text posts?

I'm sitting here trying to fathom why millions of people would even react to something like that. Like… what was "thumbs up" worthy in any of those?

erulabs• 5 years ago

I mean, you must see the primal appeal - essentially the posts are "haha, who else does {{COMMON_THING}}?!". Millions of people want other people to know they too are just like them.

Facebook's algorithm is optimized for engagement - but people aren't desperate to engage - they are desperate to be engaged with.

brendoelfrendo4• 5 years ago

I mean, the "who here has never had a DUI?" question is tailored for engagement. The actual % of people who have had a DUI is really low, and so the number of people who can engage with that honestly is really high. Then there's the fact that DUIs tend to evoke a strong moral response, so people will dive into the comments to wag the finger at all the DUI havers.

We're all here commenting on posts about tech and tech-adjacent concerns, so the community is pretty niche and interesting (to us). This is what you get when someone crafts content for literally everyone, and you'd be right to find it simultaneously bland and bizarre. But people, it turns out, do engage with it.

piyh• 5 years ago

Imagine someone asked that at an informal gathering of friends and people you only met once or twice before. It'd make good conversation.

14• 5 years ago

I totally agree with you. These posts all seem like a way to scape data about me. Why would anyone want to know if someone else had a DUI? If I sold insurance I would like to know that about you so I can increase your cost and lower my risk. All these questions seem to ask questions you are better off not answering because it builds a profile about you. I just don’t get it but definitely see aunts and coworkers who are totally into posts like these. Bizarre

giarc• 5 years ago

I agree - The author hits at topics that are somewhat controversial but at the same time everyone has a story. I suspect, and I could be wrong, but majority of the comments on that DUI post are people over the age of 40 or 50. They all want to share their story of how drinking and driving wasn't a big issue when they grew up, that their dad always had a drink in hand. People love to talk about themselves and this topic, combined with that audience creates a lot of "nostalgia" for lack of a better term.

DaiPlusPlus• 5 years ago

combined with that audience creates a lot of "nostalgia" for lack of a better term.

Memberberries

seltzered_• 5 years ago

not trying to make a conspiracy theory, but the Utah association is interesting considering how many lifestyle influencers are supposedly Mormon : https://twitter.com/Karnythia/status/1442840097032921088

hedgehog• 5 years ago

We have built the paperclip factory only instead of paperclips it is making clicks.

tapgnid• 5 years ago

Paperclicks.

goldenkey• 5 years ago

Vaporclicks ;-)

woudsma• 5 years ago

https://clickclickclick.click

blackearl2• 5 years ago

You see this on Youtube as well. Comments acknowledge "The Algorithm", mentioning that the algorithm suddenly chose this video from 2013 to be popular, or that people who were picked by the algorithm to like this video must be cool. This has happened with music too, Plastic Love and Ryo Fukui's Scenery being some examples I noticed. Maybe it really is "the algorithm" right now but it seems like this could be easily manipulated.

selwynii• 5 years ago

Plastic Love doesn't quite serve your point, it's just they released the MV after literally decades, and nostalgia is handy for engagement.

Granted I do see that YT has the same issues. I don't think its easy to manipulate, but all recommendation systems are going to have people trying to manipulate it.

blackearl2• 5 years ago

Plastic Love is pretty much the face of city pop/future funk and it blew up on youtube a few years ago. That crappy video they just released is a money grab.

Damogran62• 5 years ago

"All hail the algorithm" - SuperfastMat on Youtube

(which is a highly entertaining channel, it's good he's self-aware)

rgoulter• 5 years ago

Many channels I saw were inspired by SpiffingBrit's claims.

He claimed that creators using the Community tab was disproportionately rewarded by the recommendation algorithm. (Since the community tab was a new feature, YouTube wanted the feature to show up in peoples' feeds; but since few creators were using the community tab, it meant those that did got a big boost). -- IIRC, this evened out once everyone started using the feature.

SpiffingBrit also suggested that copy-pasting many of the trending keywords in comments would help the recommendation algorithm show the video. -- This turned out to be incorrect; but for about a week, most of the comments I saw in a bunch of videos had the same 300 words copied and pasted.

jazzyjackson2• 5 years ago

when I see these posts i always figured it was a kind of bot-net role call. imagine you pay a contractor for one million sock puppets and you want to check how many of them aren’t shadowbanned - the bots already follow each other and are programmed to “engage” with posts their bot-friends engage with, so it becomes a follow the leader effect, and allows the purchaser of a botnet to inspect their army, kind of like Obi-Wan getting a tour of the Kaminoan’s clone army after finding the official records were deleted from the archive.

no official list of which accounts are bots == check the size of the network myself, and if a few million retirees get caught up in the net, all the better for camouflage

just a conjecture :)

h2odragon2• 5 years ago

Interesting notion. I've seen people speculating on "WTF are these nonsensical google ads about", perhaps botnet C&C could be an answer there too.

h2odragon2• 5 years ago

"The Algorithm" or "Its Zuckerberg's fault" etc are all simplistic, comforting narratives to distract from the horrifying truth. The Clickfarm bots and fake account NPCs have collectively achieved an emergent intelligence. We humans aren't the majority of our social networks anymore, and we don't have any idea what it is the bots are pushing for.

The people we want to hold accountable for this mess are being run over by this steamroller just as we are.

FredPret2• 5 years ago

That's a book I'd read

ffhhj2• 5 years ago

Waiting for the movie of the book

ALittleLight• 5 years ago

A while back I was trying to get twitter followers. I experimented with a few different strategies - quick reactions to big accounts I agreed with or disagreed with, saying what I thought people wanted to hear, saying what I thought would be controversial hot takes, tweeting about everything trending, etc. I basically got no traction. I was getting low tens of thousands of impressions a month according to the twitter analytics tool and maybe 1 or 2 new followers a month - and, to be honest, those new followers were probably bots.

Eventually, I hit on a new strategy. Instead of trying to generate good tweets I just followed people at random. I forget the exact number, but somewhere between 15-30% of the people I followed at random would follow me back. I realized I could probably get an arbitrary number of followers this way but it would be a pretty stupid and meaningless achievement so I quit doing it.

The "viral post" strategy of the article, asking things like "Who the heck sleeps with the fan on?" maybe similar as a kind of brainless strategy to get followers. I guess some people like responding to these prompts. I suspect it has the same weakness as the "follow back" strategy though. Nobody really cares about the account or connects with it or even understands what you're trying to do. These people aren't your followers so much as they are people who like small talk and coalesced around you for a time.

rconti• 5 years ago

I suspect it has the same weakness as the "follow back" strategy though. Nobody really cares about the account or connects with it or even understands what you're trying to do. These people aren't your followers so much as they are people who like small talk and coalesced around you for a time.

But if the entire point is to get impressions so you can sell a product, or whatever, do you are if people don't particularly like you?

kingcharles2• 5 years ago

OK, I can give you a real world example of why parent commenter's strategy is useless.

I had two pages on Facebook based on a very popular movie from the 1980s.

One was the actual studio's page for the movie that I was given access to (as the studio admitted they don't give a fuck about any IP that doesn't have an immediate release - e.g. Blu-ray etc - planned for it), which had over 2 million likes. When you opened a Facebook account this page was one of the list that was often presented to a new user as something they should "like".

The other was a fan page I'd made which was niche, had to be actively sought out, and had 30,000 likes.

I experimented with selling branded products through the accounts. The small fan page sold 10X as many products as the official page that had almost 100X more followers.

tl;dr: if you want to sell shit to your followers they need to be engaged with you - just having people follow you on autopilot is going to create nothing of value.

kevinmchugh• 5 years ago

Twitter users with 1:1 followers: following are known to be trying to get followers and aren't actually reading posts from those users. It's all circular, a bunch of people juicing each other's follower stats.

They use lists or separate accounts to read the accounts they care about. They have bad engagement on their posts

Traster4• 5 years ago

Eventually, I hit on a new strategy. Instead of trying to generate good tweets I just followed people at random. I forget the exact number, but somewhere between 15-30% of the people I followed at random would follow me back.

This is exactly what my teenage cousins used to do (maybe not twitter maybe snaphat?) but with one tweak- they'd go through following people, and then once they'd followed they unfollow them again so now it looked like they were following you but you weren't following them back.

nefitty• 5 years ago

"Oh wow, this person with 20k followers just followed me! He only follows 600 other people... I knew I was special. Twittersphere here I come!"

miohtama• 5 years ago

I just followed people at random.

AFAIK follower building like this is now banned in Twitter ToS

zentiggr• 5 years ago

And they can tell? I'm not on Twitter but I can see just following everyone that passes in front of my mouse, and so be it. If that's banned, I'd egg people on to do it more and more and help tear down the idea that follower counts mean f** all.

Traster4• 5 years ago

I can't help but think it's not a coincidence that Facebook decides to produce a content report that lists the top 20 most viewed items and it just so happens that the top 20 items are inexplicably spam. Either facebook is enitrely dominated by spam (possible) or facebook figured out they could just boost a few items to make sure anything embarassing doens't make the short list.

jedimastert• 5 years ago

I mean, at that point they could just drop stuff off of the list they didn't like. Does anyone have independently verifiable data to compare against?

Traster4• 5 years ago

They link to the page - so if someone can say "Hold on, page X only has N likes/shares, page Y has >N likes/shares!" they'd have problems.

minimaxir• 5 years ago

The entire existence of the Facebook Transparency report is as a counter to the Facebook Top 10 Twitter account (https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10) showing that Facebook tends to surface right-wing content.

Facebook prefers to be known for facilitating spam than right-wing content.

mitchdoogle3• 5 years ago

The purpose of this report is to show widely-viewed content. Maybe the embarrassing stuff is not as widely-viewed as you imagine.

Traster4• 5 years ago

Well what I'm saying is... if it were would facebook tell you? Or would they find a way to produce a report that tells you something else? As another commentor points out - the independent version of this consistently ends up listing right wing content.

tyingq• 5 years ago

I had a somewhat similar experience at a much smaller scale a long time ago. I used to buy and sell domains. Bought one that was very close to being on the first page of Google results for a keyword related to personal finance.

Did a bit of sprucing up the page, dropped a few links, and it did get on the front page for a few months, with AdSense paying me several thousands dollars a month while it lasted. The page itself wasn't a scam per se, but it was roughly 1000 medium-effort words on the topic I wrote in a day, along with a few original photos that took another day, and a couple of inline AdSense ads.

It didn't deserve to be on the first page of results. I guess the "kingmaker" thing still exists where big tech decides who today's winner is, and doesn't always get it right.

vmception3• 5 years ago

in a similar vein it is hilarious thinking about the people at the Donuts registrar confused about the sudden interest in .finance domains

the .finance people are monetizing way more way faster without ads

irrational• 5 years ago

I haven’t heard of this. What are people doing with finance domains?

majani2• 5 years ago

On the bright side, the algorithms are way more fair and even handed than the human editors of old. I don't think the majority of YouTubers, Twitch streamers and bloggers would ever have made it past the editorial desk at traditional media companies

sundvor2• 5 years ago

Editorial desks still exist?

Saying this in jest, but there was a time when this was highly respected and I feel that the number of places that have them must be diminishing quickly - or a shadow of their former pasts.

mrpopo• 5 years ago

Because traditional media companies (I assume TV, radio stations) have a limited outgoing bandwidth in terms of outputting content, so they have to prune a lot more? The argument you are making is not in favour of content-ranking algorithms vs humans, but in favour of Internet-based media platforms (YouTube, Twitch, blogs).

cm2012• 5 years ago

This is fascinating.

I'd posit that this random blog is harmless. It's better that some random dropship site is connected to this traffic than a more sophisticated organization IMO.

Damogran62• 5 years ago

What I hate is that Facebook's intentionally nerfed reporting mechanisms keep it's customers from self-reporting.

For a period of time I'd get a post 'From %Person%, With some other %entity%' and they're less than interesting...and you CAN'T block it. One of your friends comments on a stupid post and the only option you have to send a signal is 'mute my friend for 30 days'...because the 'with' account always changes.

This actively makes Facebook unfun and had the great side-effect of sending my on a 2 week hiatus.

If I could block posts 'commented on by a friend, but has engagement above 100,000 people' I'd block it in a heartbeat...because the content has NEVER been entertaining, and has often been half-a step away from learning people's security questions....at scale.

IncRnd2• 5 years ago

If that bothers you, now imagine if, instead of being a random woman, you were a company with employees, and the same thing happened. Imagine if Facebook allowed you to reach inconceivable levels of scale and then, one day, they flipped a switch and made it all disappear. Pretty messed up, right?

This was buried right at the end. I estimate this is the real import of the article, but it went virtually unnoticed and unattended, only mentioned in passing.

coldcode• 5 years ago

One thing that gets me is that people have such a pathetic life that they feel they have to share these lame posts.

ffhhj2• 5 years ago

I developed software for lottery and casino services, and when I read stories like this the first thing that comes to my mind is this "golden ticket winner" effect that ranking algorithms are designed to generate.

The chances of winning the lottery are so low, but whoever wins will get so much media coverage that everybody believes they can win.

I don't think it's a coincidence that "poor" content makers are on top of the transparency list, it's just the algorithm exploiting this "you can be a winner too" effect.

tomcam• 5 years ago

Down for a while now. Hugged to death?

dinobones• 5 years ago

A pretty wild idea, but what if this is just a hash collision or id encoding bug going unnoticed?

Some recommendation or news feed pipeline accidentally keeps boosting “Thinkarete” posts. Would be funny.

It’s very unlikely that this is the case. Whatever the cause, it’s extremely surprising such a low quality page and low quality content have become so popular.

People here are saying that the questions are broad and well formed enough to encourage “engagement.” The thing is, Facebook has millions of pages trying to do this, entire firms with big money and research on their side. I’d be shocked if an attempt at engagement this poor won out organically, Facebook is after all an advertising platform.

vmception3• 5 years ago

Pessimistic conclusion when this easily fits into a common ethos: success is laying down all the infrastructure to get lucky!

Facebook is selling a dream. A lottery. The idea that your form of engagement will become the favored form of engagement, just like this page creator got into dropshipping after falling for that dream.

Uehreka• 5 years ago

I clicked through to the Q3 transparency report, and when I got to the list with Thinkarette at the top, I looked at the next handful of slots and audibly exclaimed “THESE GUYS” (substitute an expletive for “guys”).

- 96.9 The Eagle KKGL

- 101.9 KISS FM

- That ain't right

These pages have been all over my timeline the past year. I blocked “That ain’t right” a few months ago because I found them particularly obnoxious, but I had assumed that the radio station ones were just local Baltimore area radio stations that people followed (I don’t listen to the radio). But no, it turns out these are actually EVERYONE’S local radio station! We’re all calling in to tell the same person whether we flip over our pillow to get to the cold side!

Really though, I find this absolutely fascinating. For about a year, big corporations with hundreds of social media marketers who get paid bundles to spend their day figuring out how to win social media were undercut by a couple radio DJs and food bloggers who had the guts to ask the big questions everyone was really thinking about, like “What happens if you spell your name but use predictive text after each letter?”

naniwaduni• 5 years ago

We had a breakthrough about what exactly is going on here after we put “thinkarete.com” into WhoIs Domain Tools, which listed “thinkarete.com” as “ThinkaRete.com”. It’s a small difference, but after we googled “Thinka Rete,”

Another poor soul misled to believe that DomainFools isn't just totally guessing at word boundaries!

Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

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