/tech/ - Technology★

>>1013898 (OP)

It's all marketing by whoever holds the strings

>>1013905

This. Buy gold, guns, water filters, & Canned food

>>1013918

Even those are fake.

>>1013927

But until there's a verifiable way to manipulate quantum probabilities on a macro scale, those are as real as it gets.

>>1013898 (OP)

>Reddit voting or likes on Youtube

Small-scale likes on youtube are real. I have reasonable certainty.

Large scale? Easy enough to buy views and interaction on blackhat forums. It's a legitimate business. Could be artificial tampering by YT themselves but I wouldn't bank on it. The bigger issue is unintended inaccuracy (bot spam, real views removed by trying to remove bot spam, youtube-dl views, etc.)

Reddit is provably and openly inaccurate. Try refreshing and looking at the vote count changing, even for inactive communities and maybe even archived posts, I'm not sure about that though. By and large, it is probably real until someone knowingly manipulates it.

>>1013905

see: Enron

for example, they artificially inflated stocks for years even while they lost money. eventually collapsed and major jail time got handed out.

>>1013942

As a site owner, it benefits you to inflate your numbers. If you have 5 reddit clones, people will go to the one that gives them the most upvotes. So you fake them and make people think there's more there than there are.

>>1013898 (OP)

I don't doubt that the platforms count votes properly, but the problem is that many votes are coming from repeatedly-registered people. As in, one person might have 10,000 accounts, all of which upvote something. You can pretty easily automate the process of signing up for accounts, using VPNs and different browser profiles or VMs and also just setting up your browser to delete cookies. You can also use APIs to automate the process, though captcha complicates it. But it would be really easy to have AutoHotKey automate the process of everything aside from the captcha entry. Once you set up all the software, just use Amazon Mechanical Turk or some third world country for outsourcing the labor to get it done quickly and cheaply. Or there are even some dark web markets that sell bulk accounts. There was even one online forum that wasn't on the dark web that was about cheating in Runescape, but there was someone who would sell thousands of Yahoo email accounts at a time (this was a while ago).

Then you get shit like r/LateStageCapitalism getting upvoted to the front page of reddit even though most of the subscribers and votes are fake.

Lots of followers on Twitter and Instagram are also fake. You can tell when someone has a million followers on Twitter but they only get like 20 likes and retweets.

I read a research paper a while ago where the researchers presented people with different music, and they had made up statistics about the number of listeners and downloads. They changed the numbers from one person to the next, and they concluded that people liked the music with the higher numbers.

If you view a Youtube video with 500 views and 2 likes and 5 dislikes, you're not going to like it. When you see something with a million views and 10,000 likes and 72 dislikes, your brain will subconsciously tell you that you're supposed to like it because you think other people have widely accepted it. But those numbers might be fake. It doesn't matter if the site itself doesn't make it up, other users of the site can do that.

>>1013954

>If you view a Youtube video with 500 views and 2 likes and 5 dislikes, you're not going to like it. When you see something with a million views and 10,000 likes and 72 dislikes, your brain will subconsciously tell you that you're supposed to like it because you think other people have widely accepted it.

I get your point, but you say "you" as if /tech/ has many normalfags.

I have actually unironically upliked videos with more dislikes than likes. It had controversial humor. Far more often I dislike popular videos (no, not because they are popular). Much of it is shit.

maybe im just a hipster

>>1013898 (OP)

Even if reddit doesn't fake their vote

counts, the majority of votes on the major subs are going to be bots working for various groups attempting consensus cracking.

>>1013954

>I don't doubt that the platforms count votes properly

Really? I feel like you're being incredibly naive. They have a huge incentive to fuck with vote counts.

https://archive.li/aLQdG

>>1013898 (OP)

Reddit began as bots. Same as twitter. Neither of those sites ever became real.

Youtube is meh. A chunk of the channels are clearly spam. Most of the user accounts are fake but the bot spam is not that bad.

Some sites I've used I've only ever had bot followers, bots will follow randoms so they seem statistically legit.

Then again bots is only half the fakery. Reddit and youtube are fake from an internal perspective too. Never trust stats from a company that 1. they can't be sued or put in jail for lying about and 2. they produced themselves with no paper trail or proof.

You should discount the entire internet "industry" as being fake until further notice.

>>1013954

>You can tell when someone has a million followers on Twitter but they only get like 20 likes and retweets.

This is the best way to spot botted accounts and ad faggot companies use this.

The numbers wouldn't be made up, that would be illegal.

It would be highly inaccurate though, counting the same person multiple times (and they're quite happy to)

>>1013975

>/tech/ has few normalfags

>I have actually unironically upliked videos with more dislikes than likes. It had controversial humor. Far more often I dislike popular videos (no, not because they are popular)

Maybe you can leave so we have none?

Ed Sheeran - Shape of You [Official Video]

3,978,709,594 views

>>1013898 (OP)

who cares? all the users are faggots and they vote for fake bullshit in the first place without any rigging

>>1013905

no

>>1013918

buy guns, canned food, water and air filters, military clothing

>>1014210

>no

yes

>>1014387

imagine saying shit like this unironically

>>1014396

Care to explain? Or just want to remain smug4life?

>>1014004

>>1014387

>>1014396

law has nothing to do with this you fucking faggots. just don't visit cancer websites if you don't like them. reddit is literally a treehouse where the only form of human contact is writing on a chalkboard there (people can't see each other or touch each other).