I get lots of emails offering “guest articles” for blogs. By which they mean that they’ll pay me to post some bullshit marketing stuff as though I wrote it.
I’m sorry but you lot will continue to get exactly what you pay for. Which is, um… OK, that’s not the best way to put it. Anyhow, you’ll get the Authentic Marcus Experience(tm) whether I can help it or not.
In case it has escaped you, the internet is mostly bullshit, now. You should assume that anything that you see, which has a feedback or review process, or a content promotion algorithm, has been jiggered worse than a North Carolina election-map. Every part of the system has been suborned and nobody should trust any of it. Perhaps some of you recall back when I was still on Twitter and purchased 14,000 followers [stderr] – this is open, dishonest, bullshit. Welcome to the world of open, dishonest, bullshit – we will never escape now.
My inbox this morning:
I am actually tempted to sign up to do that. It might be fun to write reviews that were surreal. The problem is, nobody’d notice it in the other, great torrent of effluent that is the internet. But imagine how fun it would be to write reviews like: [on a table saw] “I loved it. My son, who is 5, did not, but the doctors are giving him a good chance of recovering. This product is one of the best pieces of cheap, unsafe crap I have ever used! If you ever need to murder someone, give them one of these. 5 stars!”
The current trend in online marketing, now that they have realized that they have crapped-up all the avenues for crap, is to suborn content-creators into crapping up their content. Thus, I have to listen to my favorite podcasters humiliate themselves by pretending to be impressed by some stupid product or other, which I know they are not. Some of my favorite youtubers and podcasters have lost me as a listener; I’ve got better things to do with my time than polish my hatred to a glittering edge listening to them spout marketing words that someone put in their mouth. I doubt very much that Malcolm Gladwell will ever read this but, just in case: “@Malcolm Gladwell: Seriously, dude, after a couple bestsellers and a good career, do you need to spit someone else’s marketing in my face? Why don’t you say no to their money and write another book or two with the time? You sound like a jackass talking about those products and services and I know you think you’re being ironic and funny but you’re just a sell-out, and a cheap one at that. Fuck you and all the outliers you rode in on.”
If any of you want to pursue that opportunity, here’s the link. [sell your soul] By the way their business is so legit and un-spammy that they had to conceal their site; go figure.
I did know a guy who, early on, made money going around to small businesses in his area offering them glowing reviews on yelp for a low price. Seriously, this was just a friendly old hippie on a bicycle, who’d collect $20 from restaurants and whatnot, and post glowing reviews from a plethora of identities at a local library’s public access internet terminal. Nowadays, that has been automated into being a big business.
Big media, which runs on a steady influx of bullshit, sometimes gets its surrealism on and kicks against the pricks: [buzzfeed]
Jessica – not her real name – has spent well over $15,000 on Amazon this year, buying everything from Halloween decorations to a queen-size inflatable mattress. She’s purchased over 700 products, including three vacuum cleaners, six desk chairs, and no fewer than 26 pairs of earbuds. And even though most of the products are cheaply made, she’s given each a 5-star review. The twentysomething who lives on the East Coast isn’t a bad judge of quality – the companies that sell these products on Amazon reimburse her for the purchases.
Fake news complains about fake reviews and views:
Although the loot may be free to her, Jessica’s habit does come with a cost – if you’ve considered buying an Instant Pot recently, her 5-star review, complete with photos and a video, might have nudged you toward a knockoff instead of the real thing. It’s entirely fake, but Jessica told BuzzFeed News she doesn’t think she’s gaming the system; she’s trying to help brands grow their businesses in Amazon’s massive marketplace. “I’m just a pawn in their marketing scheme,” she said.
What if someone did the scheme I suggested above, and wrote surreal fake reviews? Would someone complain that the lies were dishonest? “No, you’re supposed to lie like this not like that!” Does the marketing company have a leg to stand on? Of course they can still sic lawyers on you.
Third-party sellers know what it takes to make it on Amazon: Get good reviews and a high search ranking. But attracting genuine customers is tough, so some sellers use a reliable cheat – bribes. Because of Amazon’s vast scale, inscrutable algorithms, and capricious enforcement of its own rules, unscrupulous sellers and paid shills largely get away with it.
It’s actually worse than that: Amazon has been known to manipulate their search rankings to preference Amazon’s own products. So when someone games the search rankings, they are taking money out of Amazon’s pocket and that’s one thing Amazon is never going to tolerate: it’s their scam and don’t you dare play it.
I had an idea as I was driving down to see my folks on thanksgiving, which was to have a day in which consumers show their power by not buying anything. Just for one day. I would, naturally, make that day “black friday” – the day after thanksgiving. The day when nobody spends a cent. And everyone says “if you don’t back off on the marketing bullshit, we can do this for a whole month until you back off on the ads.” The sad irony I bumped up against was that, since I had only had the idea that morning, there wasn’t enough time to market it – to get it out there and get other people to sign up to promote it. Marketing against marketing? Ah, forget it, I have real work to do.
Fake review schemes rely on the reviewers being, for all intents and purposes, untouchable. Back when Amazon started their mechanical turk service, a friend of mine who must remain anonymous, hired units on mechanical turk to post comments to any blog posting or youtube video that a certain other person posted. The comments were not required to be well-written, but they needed to be insulting, negative, and originating from genuine sockpuppet accounts. And each comment, at the bottom had to say: “this comment sponsored by [deleted]” The entire program was not intended to push down someone’s ratings or anything like that – it was intended to push the target’s blood pressure to the point where their head exploded. I believe the entire program cost about $100. There are similar services to mechanical turk in south asia and China; perhaps next time one of you is thinking of tossing $100 into the FTB legal defense fund you’ll toss some money into buying Richard Carrier a few thousand real people who follow him and assiduously and creatively shit all over everything he says. It’d be funny except I think I just described Patreon.
According to Wikipedia, “Buy Nothing Day” was moved to the day after Thanksgiving back in 1997. Or, did they pay me to say that?
You don’t need to – it’s already been done, and its called “Buy Nothing Day“.
Damn, ninja’d!
I’d say it’s a war on cognition, or even just attention. Reality is tough enemy.
So you want content that is simultaneously (1) for free; (2) without advertisements; and (3) good quality?
You ought to understand that this is not how the world works. Of course, I do enjoy that you aren’t shoveling advertisements down my throat in this blog. Just like everybody else I also dislike listening to advertisements. But you ought to understand that you are in a privileged position—you have money and no need to work now that you are retired.
The average person out there needs to earn money in order to pay their daily bills. Creating a good quality podcast takes time and often also costs money. Thus content creators need to somehow earn money with their content. Hence the advertisements. And when podcasters cannot earn money with their podcast, they are forced to quit the hobby and get a “real job” instead in order to pay their bills. Enjoying your hobby and being passionate about it is great, but joy won’t put food on your table nor will it pay your rent.
colinday@4
I don’t think there is any war on cognition or reason (although you’re probably right, in my judgement, about attention). There is a sort of continuing trope nowadays, that somehow we’re left behind some sort of brief Age of Reason, and now everyone has gotten stupid. Now, because of facists and Facebook, everyone has suddenly started basing their beliefs on fables, images, stories.
The thing is, there was never any such change.
The change is that the progressives, imagining themselves to be the smartest kids in the room, have been leaning ever harder on Science, and Reason, and whatnot, which are now and always have been terrible tools for persuading the masses. People. including you and me, operate on stories, fables, images. We wish we operated on Reason, and sometimes we imagine that we do,but mostly we do not.
While the left leans harder on tools that do not work, the right leans harder on tools that do, and Facebook is right there to take their money. So, yeah, you get fascism on the rise. Fascists are really good at this, and they understand how marketing (propaganda) works.
It feels like a progression of the masses, but it’s not. The gap between prog-Left thinkers and the masses is increasing, but it’s because prog-Left strategy is moving, not the masses.
On marketing: yeah, I think I get what you are saying about how overwhelming it is these days. However, as Andreas Avester points out, people need to make a living. You can have the most amazing product, art, whatever, but still – people are not going to hunt you down, beat your door in and force money into your hands. _You have to tell people about your product._ They can’t just guess!
That’s why i have a stupid Facebook page that is basically a giant brag sheet with pics of my work and me saying how wonderful it is. Do I really believe I’m that fantastic? Nope. I mean I do believe my work has a great deal of integrity and attention to detail; nevertheless I do not love trying to think up nice things to say about it. But that’s marketing; unfortunately you have to do it, because people can’t find you by magic.
Now, I do agree that it’s gone way too far and that we don’t need marketing EVERYWHERE. As far as liars: there used to be laws about truth in advertising. We need those. We need better laws about that. We need companies to be held accountable for that. But in the current culture of “money is everything” no one wants to hold anyone accountable. Well, no one who actually could do it successfully, that is. I sure want to hold them accountable but I am only one person.
My ad blocking generally works, but sometimes a sponsored tweet gets through on Twitter. I immediately block that brand.
My experience with this “infused” advertising is limited to youtube videos but … what exactly is stopping anyone from skipping those? In any case I can admire – just a tiny bit – the youtubers who manage to smoothly work these ads into their video, their style or routine. While at the same time despairing that they’re putting their energy into this instead of creating more interesting stuff. I can’t blame them, though.
But even unskippable stuff can be avoided with the classic TV-era strategy of muting the TV and going away for a bit. It’s even easier nowadays as interesting stuff to pass the ad time is just one Alt+Tab away.
I admit though, that I avoid videos on larger news sites like the plague, at least those that invariably play ads beforehand. Three reasons: One, they play “proper” TV ads, which are noisy and infuriating*, two, sometimes it seems the ad is longer than the actual video that follows, and three, sometimes the video is just their re-upload of a youtube/twitter clip with their logo slapped on. Oh, nice “work”, “content creator”!
*I can’t decide whether it’s a psychological defect of mine or intentional design that these ads, no matter what, make my blood boil. It’s not even a good way to stand out as a brand, because I hate them all indiscriminately…
What I don’t understand is, if these (probably mostly Chinese) companies are supposedly spending so much money to pay people to write fake reviews, why can’t they find the cash to hire someone to spell check the product listing, take an actual decent photo of the product, and maybe make sure the product images aren’t full of typos and nonsense half-phrases? I mean, you only need to do that *once* per product, rather than the dozens or more reviews you need to get.
For much of the trash on Amazon (for specific examples, I’m thinking of phone cases, USB cables, and other small electronic or electronic-adjacent devices), it feels like it would be hard to pay someone to make a *worse* product page for marketing. On what planet are paid product reviews really going to counterbalance that?
invivoMark @#10
Can you understand the purpose of some product? If so, then why are you even complaining? To me, that sounds like snobbery. People buy products in order to use them, why make so much fuss about a meaningless text you will only glance over once?
I tend to get annoyed whenever I hear some native English speaker complaining about spelling mistakes in texts written by non-native speakers.
Firstly, most native English speakers are monolingual. When a person who couldn’t have been arsed to learn a second language complains about how other people don’t speak their language perfectly, that’s annoying and stinks of entitlement.
Secondly, English writing system is one of the worst out there. Majority of other languages have more logical and consistent writing systems. Personally, I have no respect for English spelling system whatsoever. It sucks.
Thirdly, it’s really hard to learn a second language perfectly. For me it’s easy to learn some language well enough to communicate in it, but learning it so well that my texts are indiscernible from those written by native speakers in as hard as it gets.
Of course, you were saying that Chinese companies should hire proofreaders to check their English texts. Here’s the problem—the Chinese proofreader probably knows English better than whoever wrote the original text, but the chances are that they still don’t know English perfectly, which is why some mistakes will remain anyway. But wait, you suggested that Chinese companies should hire proofreaders who are native English speakers, right? Here’s the news flash for you—native English speakers live in wealthy countries where all the workers expect to earn huge salaries (huge compared to how much the average person living in China earns). When you live in a poor country, hiring a person who’s from the UK or USA is expensive.
First those damn Americans and Britons conquered the whole world and forced their language upon the rest of the planet. Now whenever we want to communicate internationally, we are expected to pay our dues to proofreaders who are native English speakers. That’s annoying.
For the record: I have purchased a phone case from a Chinese seller that had a product listing with atrocious spelling errors. I never cared—I buy a phone case for a practical purpose, namely to use it. I don’t care about the gorgeous poetic language in some product’s eBay listing.
Firstly, the fact that some product is made in China does not necessarily mean that the person/company selling it on the American Amazon is Chinese. Perhaps these reviews are purchased by American retailers? Maybe the product with the fake reviews isn’t the same one as the product with typos in its listing?
Secondly, some Chinese companies (larger and wealthier ones) usually do hire native English proofreaders. All those spelling mistakes you are seeing could be from smaller companies that don’t hire fake reviewers either.
You could probably get half-decent copy editing service for 1-2 cents a word.
This tells you pretty much exactly how much the purchasers of fake reviews value each review. I suspect the point is not the review text itself, anything that’s not lorem ipsum will be fine, they just don’t want the review pulled. “Most useful” reviews get surfaced, anyways, so some useless but credible mumbling rarely gets read. It does get *saved* though.
The point, I suspect, is merely to goose the metrics. 90% 5 star reviews! Probably reviews with text are weighted higher, or anyways sellers believe they may be weighted higher. They are paying pennies per review here, so there’s very little ventured.
invivoMark@#10:
For much of the trash on Amazon (for specific examples, I’m thinking of phone cases, USB cables, and other small electronic or electronic-adjacent devices), it feels like it would be hard to pay someone to make a *worse* product page for marketing. On what planet are paid product reviews really going to counterbalance that?
All they are trying to do is get on the first page of search results. It turns out most customers just buy something off the first page, and probably never look at anything but the price and maybe how many “stars” it has.
Andrew Molitor@#12:
This tells you pretty much exactly how much the purchasers of fake reviews value each review. I suspect the point is not the review text itself, anything that’s not lorem ipsum will be fine, they just don’t want the review pulled. “Most useful” reviews get surfaced, anyways, so some useless but credible mumbling rarely gets read. It does get *saved* though.
This is probably another problem that AI will solve for us.
AI will write the fake reviews and AI will copy edit them. Then other AI will sort through and delete the ones that look like they were written by AI. Meanwhile, AIs will buy and sell Amazon.com stock.
I feel like there’s a novel in there.
AI researchers give up on making an AI that’s actually smart, a “general” AI or whatever you want to call it, but gradually humanity is replaced by trivial programs which emulate surface behavior in simplistic ways. Dad died, but there’s a Dad sim that knows a few of his catch phrases, smokes the same cigarettes, and drives almost as well as Dad did. Etc.
ANDREAS: You are on fire today in this here comments section! BRAVO!
bmiller @#16
Your comment is incomprehensible. If you either approve or disapprove of something I have said here, you are welcome to state it clearly.
Oh, don’t worry, general AI will get there eventually. It’ll be all the specific AIs cobbled together and run by another AI that over time learns when to best call on which sub-AIs. It would be structurally distinct but not that different from a regular brain with its specialised, yet adaptive regions, and include all the quirks and flaws. (And biases. Oh so many biases…)
And it would be very interesting to see just what kind of brain we’d get, if all our purpose-bound AIs focus on things like marketing, “big data analysis” and product reviews. Okay, we might also see some artistic AI brains, descendants of a growing family of image optimisation and reconstruction algorithms,