a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by lessismore
lessismore  ·  4283 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 83 million Facebook accounts are fakes and dupes
Once upon a time, I had to make monthly reports on our company user registration and active users. I provided them detailed metrics of registrations and engagement, legitimate and otherwise. Let's just say that the CEO picked the most optimistic numbers. And if something didn't sound right to the people asking her the questions, new terms were made up to avoid answering the ultimate questions of what percentage of the accounts were actively engaged.




mk  ·  4283 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Hubski has thousands of users with tens of thousands of page views per week!

We have 3603 accounts atm, actually. About 350 unique users visit us on an average day.

About three dozen of us are probably responsible for 90% of the comments and posts.

I guess that follows a 10:1% rule for lurkers, and engagement.

lessismore  ·  4282 days ago  ·  link  ·  
We had a little more than 1 million registered accounts. I think that perhaps 5% of them were legitimate accounts and about only 1% of them were truly engaged on a daily basis.

FB has some interesting accounting methods. For example, if you login to Digg, but never visit FB, you're counted as an active user.

mk  ·  4282 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Only 5% legitimate? Were ther rest made by bots?

This is one reason most advertising models are so awful. The motivation becomes numbers. On the other hand, if people pay for the service, the motivation is to improve the service. I don't want to get into a situation where I am focusing on the number of visits we are getting. I want to only worry about the quality of the time spent here.

Not saying that I am planning on charging a fee, but I'm not going to get painted into a corner. That's not why I started this site. Getting hits has no purpose.

lessismore  ·  4282 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Yups. Only 5%. I would say that most of them were spam bots. It got so bad that I just started blacklisting whole countries.
mk  ·  4282 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Well, you must have felt mighty blacklisting countries.

I have a forum for my RPG, and the biggest problem I have is with non-bot SEO spammers. I actually feel bad for them. They probably get paid $0.01 per spam post.

lessismore  ·  4282 days ago  ·  link  ·  
I felt like Michael Phelps!!
thenewgreen  ·  4282 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Take that Guam!
thenewgreen  ·  4283 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Funny, I had just read this post about ecological fallacy and then read your comment. They seem related.