Facebook sends traffic!!11eleven

pete_dushenski: o.O mp has representation on facebook. nuts.

Of course I do. It's cheap, pointless and ineffectual. Just like the rest of social media.i That said, it is not particularly difficult to "succeed"ii by the various meaningless metrics "available".iii

As an illustrative example : a recent "campaign"iv produced

$ grep -c "/fb/" 'trilema.com-Oct-2015'

111

That's 111 website clicks in ~8 hours, and because of the particular way your mind is broken I can almost hear you go "not bad".v Then I could mention Facebook aims to sell these at 26 to 52 cents each, as it quoted me, and your eyes light up even if you "don't understand this web stuff", ie, your mind is broken but not in this particular way : "That's almost 50 dollars!". No, it is not. "And you made it while you slept." No, I did not.

But in any case, let's look deeper into it :

$ grep "/fb/" 'trilema.com-Oct-2015' | awk '{print $1}'

190.55.116.88 ; 66.220.156.100 ; 66.220.156.96 ; 66.220.156.99 ; 66.220.156.97 ; 66.220.156.121 ; 66.220.156.106 ; 66.220.156.115 ; 66.220.156.103 ; 66.220.156.122 ; 66.220.156.113 ; 66.220.156.101 ; 66.220.156.121 ; 66.220.156.115 ; 66.220.156.113 ; 66.220.156.115 ; 66.220.156.101 ; 66.220.156.101 ; 66.220.156.115 ; 66.220.156.120 ; 66.220.156.118 ; 66.220.156.119 ; 66.220.156.98 ; 66.220.156.103 ; 66.220.156.115 ; 66.220.156.98 ; 66.220.156.103 ; 66.220.156.112 ; 66.220.156.123 ; 66.220.156.114 ; 66.220.156.111 ; 66.220.156.104 ; 66.220.156.107 ; 173.252.102.116 ; 66.220.158.109 ; 66.220.158.109 ; 66.220.158.114 ; 66.220.158.100 ; 66.220.158.119 ; 66.220.158.105 ; 66.220.158.116 ; 66.220.158.116 ; 66.220.158.123 ; 66.220.158.114 ; 66.220.158.121 ; 66.220.158.112 ; 181.174.106.249 ; 114.108.217.117 ; 114.108.217.117 ; 103.246.39.212 ; 112.210.15.14 ; 177.207.117.65 ; 192.249.130.61 ; 98.239.27.122 ; 201.102.173.228 ; 31.185.220.102 ; 216.4.56.160 ; 177.221.23.51 ; 223.196.16.220 ; 189.120.42.53 ; 189.93.186.79 ; 105.182.88.108 ; 223.196.76.62 ; 41.228.58.237 ; 200.85.80.122 ; 36.77.159.191 ; 213.55.25.27 ; 107.167.109.99 ; 66.220.145.243 ; 202.69.11.23 ; 117.74.121.3 ; 112.215.36.143 ; 179.131.35.19 ; 185.81.141.79 ; 103.25.13.77 ; 103.246.38.196 ; 122.52.65.160 ; 39.43.59.250 ; 191.247.226.24 ; 39.34.182.5 ; 176.44.244.31 ; 94.122.89.213 ; 175.110.218.183 ; 180.251.16.221 ; 180.251.16.221 ; 191.202.229.17 ; 177.79.33.24 ; 8.37.227.21 ; 175.143.184.196 ; 5.109.0.224 ; 5.109.0.224 ; 187.56.23.211 ; 39.55.186.8 ; 185.15.63.24 ; 186.153.197.69 ; 189.40.81.96 ; 189.40.81.96 ; 189.40.81.96 ; 189.106.200.73 ; 39.41.95.152 ; 118.137.10.198 ; 109.129.103.118 ; 109.129.103.118 ; 188.247.74.232 ; 185.88.24.27 ; 168.235.197.210 ; 14.195.185.19 ; 14.195.185.19 ; 41.36.33.133 ; 105.106.55.220 ; 31.31.180.152

I wonder who that 66.220.0.0/16 is, don't you ? Easy enough to find out

$ whois 66.220.156.101

NetRange: 66.220.144.0 - 66.220.159.255

CIDR: 66.220.144.0/20

NetName: TFBNET3

NetHandle: NET-66-220-144-0-1

Parent: NET66 (NET-66-0-0-0-0)

NetType: Direct Assignment

OriginAS: AS32934

Organization: Facebook, Inc. (THEFA-3)

Awww. Strike half of the "traffic", it's directly self-generated. So what of the remainder ?

Nothing.

Yeah, that's right, read that again : nothing.

A previous "campaign" running for three days a week ago resulted in... 6`058 clicks. (Hey, That's almost three thousand dollars!!11). It included a call to action. It got 0 actions.

The call to action wasn't for someone to buy something, it was for someone to get paid, to do something trivial. Something in the spirit of that time when a guy was claiming in #b-a that he is running a rental business, but then NOT A SINGLE ONE of his supposed renters was willing to take a picture for fifty dollars. Because people don't clip coupons to save fifty cents, that's all a dream, it never happened, it was hallucinated retrospectively.

If not a single one out of 6k "uniques", "visitors", "people" and what else you might wish to call these empty numbers to delude yourself (worth 3k!!1) was interested in picking up fifty bucks lying on the ground, what chances do you think you have ?vi

No, seriously, what chances do you think you have ? Oh, that's right, I forgot, you've just not found the exactly correct arrangement of electrically isolated knobs, if you straighten the plates just so then who knows, maybe your real life suddenly begins, with an audible pop.

Good luck, buster, keep arranging those plates. I hear it tenderizes the asshole.

———One quote :

ascii_field http://btcbase.org/log/?date=13-10-2015#1297760 i huckster set lives.

assbot: Logged on 13-10-2015 16:16:53; mircea_popescu binaryatrocity that's not what it does. What it does is, it allows keybase.io to PRETEND like they're relevant, based on your own work.

ascii_field 'I'm on arsebook, but I have a brain!' 'Good work, now arsebook can say, 'some of our users have brains!'' lubing up the chumpatronic intake hopper.

mircea_popescu Aye. Just for my own amusementii, I had a subreddit created ; and seeded it with a coupla posts. One week later traffic on it ? 0. "Reddit is relevant". To what ? "Well if you're already there it looks like there's people there". Sure. Same is true of Grand Central station.iii

davout What's the subreddit?

mircea_popescu "No you don't understand, reddit drives traffic!!1" Orly ? It drives exactly 0, on its own.

mircea_popescu davout no, because "irrelevant" MP is going to accidentally by an apropos drive 50000% more traffic than reddit and then reddit will go "see ? REDDIT DRIVES TRAFFIC!!11".

———

He means Sillicon Valley. Yes, all of it.

By the way : do you know its name comes from the fact that at some point they used to make silicon ? [↩]

That's right : you might not be interested in things. The things are interested in you. Only one of these two sides actually has any power, and it isn't you. [↩]

Think about it : the fact that it rains now and again does not mean the ridiculous derp sitting in a conference room he can't afford, alone with a burn rate that's splitting his ass open "drove rain". He drove nothing, rain is a natural phenomena.

He provably has absolutely NO power to make it rain in an arbitrarily chosen spot at an arbitrarily chosen time, which is how these sorts of claims are evaluated by sane people. The fact that "it rains now and again" and "he's the one working on rain" does not create a relation between the two. Thinking otherwise is known as the attribution error, which is how chimps and very stupid people "think". [↩]

[↩]The account we're discussing is a week old and has ~1k friends. It uses a Trilema picture for a background which happens to depict a woman in a red dress and heels on her knees with a shiny metal cuff on her wrist.

This is enough to attract MULTIPLE daily chat requests, from horny males who wish to go through the following checklist : "hi" "how are you" "where are you from" "are you looking for a dude". It diverges around the 3rd spot formally, but not substantially. Because yes, this is what God put women on this earth for : 5 billion instances a day of "hi" "how are you" "where are you from". That's why they're here, to appreciate the smooth-as-butter variation between 4.89765976 "are you married" and 4.90932897 "do you have big tits ???". Someone somewhere actually has time for this shit, someone somewhere actually is interested in what random derp on social media has to say privately, and that someone somewhere is supposedly ALL WOMEN EVERYWHERE. ALL THE TIME. Insanity.

"Feminism" in the monstrous, mayogendered shape it occupies today is not sent down by aliens to destroy you, it's not a conspiracy by the illuminati to oppress you. It is nemesis, a righteous infliction of punishment. It's for your sins.

You suck, people. And the ones that "don't suck" actually suck even worse. [↩]Here's the problem with meaningless metrics : not only do they deliver no actual benefit, they actually hinder thought and the accumulation of knowledge.

Just because they're available doesn't mean they should be used. Whether they should be used or not is predicated upon whether they're meaningful, not upon whether they're shiny, or accessible, or lend themselves to easy processing with the sorts of tools you're familiar with.

"Analytics" in the web sense of that term is roughly speaking fast-food, and that a generation of derps spend their time between "metrics" and "pizza" seems to me particularly amusing. [↩]Here's an idea of what I mean by "campaign" : Ask.fm laid bare, or what's half a million uniques to you ?

As I said, just because you're not interested in things doesn't mean things aren't interested in you. In point of fact all social media, not just Fetlife, not just any one example of the day is incredibly vulnerable. A few engineers' few hours away, a coupla scripts later, a few boxes' labour spent one can just write his own numbers. And one sometimes does - but most of the time one does not. Because here's the thing with meaningless metrics : even if you steal them, you're still losing.

If a metric is merely bad, like for instance the US Dollar is a bad metric for wealth, then getting a million dollars a thousand times easier than your greengrocer may not be a wasted exercise. It may well be true that the million is not worth a million, but it is probable it is still worth something, and it is also probable you might trade it to the greengrocer for more paltas than you'd have been able to grow on your own in the same time.

Meanwhile, if a metric is actually meaningless (like ALL web analytics, without exception), then you having stolen the million puts you in no better position than his. This is the great difference between multiplying by epsilon and multypling by zero. It matters.

The very easy error to make is to imagine that "there's no such thing as zero in nature", and then apply this to the web. The problem with this is that we're not actually discussing nature. Yes, it is improbable to have a potato, no matter how rotten, old, stale, dry, that is actually worth zero. Nevertheless, it is not merely probable, it is an absolute certainty that if you spend an entire day, or the entire remainder of your days satisfying the "hi" "how are you" "where are you from" checklist of a billion derps you will be no further along than if you just watched TV. Which is why people watch TV instead of "communicating" or whatever. [↩]Hey, at the currently seen 0.01% CTR, this would be equivalent to a display ad campaign running over one million impressions, which is roughly speaking what Gawker does in a month or two.

So it's basically... I just borrowed Gawker's ad space for a while. Go me. [↩]Yes, I am in the fortunate position where I can afford to spend my own money to find out the truth, and then publish it as a public service.

It's not merely that you aren't - it's that you aren't actually taking any steps to protect and promote the functional mechanism, and to discourage and defund the dysfunctional mechanisms. How many letters to your senator did you write pointing out that he should force the SEC to apply to be a MPEx subsidiary, on the grounds that MPEx actually polices the fraud in its space whereas the SEC is the principal driver of fraud in its space ?

Ah, none ? Cool.

I guess the world just sucks by itself, then. It must be.

The thing is, though : I will regulate you whether you want to or not. The only thing that's at stake is how I look upon you, nothing more. [↩]

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Category: Meta psihoza

Monday, 19 October, Year 7 d.Tr.