archive: https://archive.is/9TRB6
Wow, that entire article is so interesting. To be honest, I’m slowly coming around to cheering for people with low incomes in developing countries destroying Facebook.
It’s good, honest spam like in the good old days. Not like those dreadful Kremlin disinfo campaigns kids are into now.
Within the ad manager, they upload an image that has been modified to look like a Facebook gallery post (there are tools for this), and then they delete the headline and description that is autogenerated by Facebook to make it look like the ad is just an image and not a link. Then, they generate a preview for their ad. This creates a preview link, which can then be pushed to their phone (it has to be a separate device), then shared to their own personal Facebook page as a “test.” From there, the link can be grabbed and shared to a page as a normal post, even though it is not a published ad, meaning that, to do this trick, you do not actually have to spend any money.
I don’t think it’s what I was supposed to get out of the article, but… this is so cool… Honestly I’m in awe.
to get on my developing-nation[0] soapbox for a little bit: it is, and it’s also hilarious how often this sort of shit happens with things developed by people who you could largely handwave as “their smallest computer is a 3yo max-spec mbp” (I know this isn’t precise but ygwim). “talk to your users” is obviously useful and it’s often largely clear that a lot of these orgs don’t, but it’s even more clear in places further down the economic ladder. the one thing people in such markets often have is bucketloads of time. I do like that the phrasing used in the article was “you do not actually have to spend any money” rather than calling it “free” - this is still work. but you will readily find maaaaaany people who will do this sort of thing
[0] - speaking from experience, large consideration in stuff I have to design for in services
bigger picure:
so, fb puts a premium on views, because they sell ads like every senator should know by now, and views mean more eyeballs on ads, which means more money. over time this metric became more important to zucc than actual revenue, it seems, but it’s not actually important because they rake so much money either way. they like views so much they decided to give a cut of that ad revenue to select spammers content creators in spammer welfare content creators program. but then again, because of ritual firings in name of Line Go Up fb has no actual moderation so actual high volume spam spreads everywhere
in the other part of the same creatively bankrupt torment nexus in the name of Line Go Up after so many AI winters someone decided to spin up this brain damaged hype train up again. its main utility seems to be 1. manufacturing hype for VCs and stock holders, and 2. mass production of spam. because it’s never repeats it passes many automated spam filters, like the above
managerial corporate ghouls, completely isolated from normal human experience, in pursuit of new numbers to put on their weekly powerpoint presentations and ammo for their office politics created a machine that boils oceans, surveils every box on the internet and corrodes everybody’s attention span, with for now tiny and short lasting side effect of generating shrimp jesus and paying some broke people a livable wage for generating shrimp jesus. that and scammy guides and mentors who grew on top of this, selling shovels for selling shovels for selling shovels
how many layers away from real economy are we now? business gives a cut of profits to ad company, which gives a cut of profits to facebook (that also rakes investor money), which gives a cut of profits to spammers, which give a cut of profits to people who build and maintain spamming automation tools like fewfeed. nothing of this is concerned with making actual things people want to use
in many ways this is similar to what already happened on tiktok https://www.404media.co/inside-the-world-of-tiktok-spammers-and-the-ai-tools-that-enable-them/
That was fascinating… kinda like shining a bright light through the side of a boil. Repulsive, but still neat.