Slashdot Mirror
Friendster Fights Fakesters
jerkface writes "Matchmaking/personal networking site Friendster is experiencing a 'problem'. Unruly individuals like John Locke, Socrates, Alf, and many incarnations of Jesus Christ are trying to take over the site, according to SFWeekly.com. For a few months, the 'fakesters' were mostly tolerated, so long as they didn't offend anyone with the images they posted. Fakester profiles exist claiming to be famous people (alive and dead), cities, buildings, abstract concepts, and - increasingly - Friendster CEO Jon Abrams. Abrams is now saying they're all going to be deleted because they ruin the site. Fakesters argue he's stifling the full potential of the site, and many people report that 100% genuine profiles have been deleted in the recent campaigns against fakesters."
Surely Slashdot (karma whoring, karma whoring) has shown that a self-moderating system can tolerate huge amounts of noise and still turn up valuable content.
There are several rules that a site like Friendsters has to follow to allow value to emerge and be protected:
1. No democracy: status depends on time spent in the system and behaviour, and high status gives more power. (Basically like Karma).
2. Reputation: aliases, so if you troll, people know who you are.
3. Tools for promoting good and punishing bad behaviour (like moderation).
4. Design around the social aspects of the groups, i.e. if people want to use the system a certain way, let them.
The last is a bummer when people don't do what you expect them to. But if ten million fakesters create a happy community, why not?
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According to Passport .Net, my name is Mickey Mouse101, and I live in Disneyland. Am I a lovable cuddly creature, or a detestable, copyright-extended, DRMed pesky little mouse?
Lindows distributes Linux, but sponsors an XBox hack, and pays license fees to SCO. Friend or freak?
Confusing, consufing...
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Friendster is in beta right now, and in several months anyone wishing to browse profiles or send messages will have to pay $8 a month. It will still be free to make a profile for others to browse. The fee is why I'm not taking the site seriously. Friendster will end up just another dating site. I expect free open source versions to appear in its place though that could be worthwhile if they reach a level of popularity similar to Kazaa.
They are planning to do so anyway, the fakesters disruptions just give them a good reason to do so.
Granted, it won't eliminate the fakers, but at least they will be paying for the privilege.
I've always been of the mind that you should be able to get a (PGP, X.509, whatever) key signed when you go to get your drivers' license or ID card renewed, or equivalent in non-US countries. Certifying people's identities is certainly something governments should be able to do.
Of course, I suppose there's a potentially justified fear that if they decide to become involved in that, you'd better hand over your private key at the same time...
It might take a bit more time but implementing a the principle of slash dot might do the trick
Dont just mail it - Maileet
But outside of that, I think he is right to setup the rules for his site and operate his site the way that he wants to.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
The likely reason that it was posted is that /. has typically posted stories related to free content vs regulated content. It has come from the likes of public forums and games alike (EverQuest/Sims bannings).
I fail to see why people still have interest in this. Anytime you create some freedom, a few dicks will come along and ruin it for everyone else. Perhaps this dating service could benefit from the ability for users to 'vote' other users into the abusers category. Get enough votes and you get banned. The Sims has something like this, but then the dicks just team up and pummel the good users.
There are dicks in the world who like to ruin things. There are people who think they can create enough rules to get rid of the dicks. That leads to the ruin of a great many things. That's just the way these things go.
The 14th Amendment, and its jurisprudence, requires the States to abide by the First Amendment as well. This is good. You live in a republic, not a collection of co-equal states.
Q:How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A:None. Obviously market forces will take care of it.
You have a point, but you're also missing the point just a little bit..
It's more than just people not posting their real name, it's people who aren't even TRYING to be "people"... Instead it's people who (literally) use an abstract idea and then add lists of thousands of people to their friend lists.
The problem is that this completley opposes the entire purpose of the website. The point of friendster is that if you find someone who is linked to one of your friends, and you think that you might want to meet them, you can be sure that they're a real person.. But, now, all these Fakesters come along and suddenly you have no idea who is a real person or not; all these 'people' that you're connected are in fact just random people who probably have no idea who they are anymore. Now all of a sudden the promise of knowing that you might be able to meet these real people is gone, and at that point why would you even bother going to the site, much less pay money for it?
If these fakesters are allowed to spread, friendster will end up being full of 'networks' of completely artificial individuals, and all the real people will leave because they can't FIND any real people. Eventually these fakesters will get bored; there's only so long that you can be "Pure Evil", and everyone disappears, and the site collapses.
Reading through the article I realize that these fakesters are making a huge fuss bout 'free speech' and 'censorship', using all the latest buzzwords and ideas, when in fact they are BREAKING THE RULES of the website. Friendster and it's ceo are COMPLETLEY justfied in what they are doing; they are trying to protect Friendster for the "real" people, and they are simply enforcing the rules which these fakesters are not exempt from. While I admit that they're being a bit heavy-handed about it, I see NO legitimate reason AT ALL for these fakesters to be pissed off because someone called them on the fact that they are *breaking the rules* and completely destroying the purpose of the website, which WILL eventually bring about it's destruction (who's gonna pay to add a bunch of 'jesus' and 'evil' and 'death' figured to their list?!). It's NOT a free speech issue; it's an issue of people breaking the rules in a way which they find amusing but will eventually destroy the entire system.
The fakester interviewed in the article also mentions how they're "honest about being fake", as compared to these "really fake" people who like Adam Sandler. This argument is also complete bullshit; Plenty of people in real life are 'fake' and try to be something they're not; their lifestyle is to conform, and they end up dating and finding other people who follow the same conformity lifestyle... These are *REAL* people, following a specific lifestyle. These fakesters who are admitting flouting the rules have no right at all to make judgements about people whom they consider "fake"; they are the ones who are being honest, not the fakesters.
So, to summarize; these fakesters are breaking the rules of the WEB SITE (not newspaper, not media outlet, not government agency, merely a dating website), and are using all the latest loaded terms to try and get people outraged about the fact that the website is merely enforcing it's rules. Friendster is there so you can meet people, not find nouns linked to thousands of other nouns. No one's gonna pay to link to nouns. Frienster is merely protecting itself, and looking out for the interests of it's target REAL audience, albiet in a fairly heavy handed way.
I guess it just goes to show you how screaming 'free speech' is all that it takes to get a crowd of people to ignore blatant violations of policy and actions which will result in the destruction of the entire medium anyway.
ìì!
There's no reason this isn't equivalent to spamming Friendster. What's going to stop "Viagra" or "UltraMegaPenis supplements" from joining up and making 'friends'?
When you create an infrastructure for people to communicate with, you must make a basic choice: are you the publisher, or only the provider?
Scenario:
I decide to start my own club, and I decide it will be a, say, fantasy football club, and that the only people allowed in will be those with an interest in fantasy football, and that most discussion *during the club meetings* will be about fantasy football.
Given the above scenario, I've created a private infrastrucure for communication, dedicated to one thing: fantasy football. Now, someone says they want to join, and says that they like fantasy football and wish to discuss it, but then come meeting time they show up dressed in a multi-colored jumpsuit with one of those stupid jester hats on, and only want to sing '60s folk tunes. If I kick this person out of my club, am I censoring them? Hell no. They can go somewhere else and sing whatever they want. I'm not denying them the *right* to say whatever they want, I'm just protecting my club member's right to do what they signed up for in the first place. That's not censorship. Now, if the government created a webforum for all US citizens to use however they wanted (ostensibly) and then they started deleting profiles they didn't like, *that* would be censorship. However, if the government started a web forum for discussion of tax policies, and they deleted all profiles that did not discuss tax policies, that would NOT be censorship. If a system is designed for a certain use, and people are not using it for that, the creator of the system can remove them. That isn't censorship. It says before you join up what the site is for. If you don't want to use it for that, go somewhere else. There is no 'well-defined constitution' on friendster.com that says you can be anyone other than yourself, or that you can post fake pictures/profiles. Your example and reasoning are both flawed.
http://xkcd.com/386/
One of the biggest problems with this arbitrary deleting of accounts is that they are also deleting the accounts which represent groups/institutions people may belong to. For example, I added a "friend" which represented the college I attend, and it had been deleted recently due to this cleanup. I have met several people from my own school whom I would otherwise not have known existed due to this connection, and that account was deleted because it did not represent a real-live human being. My friend was also pissed off because by "friending" an account named after a celebrity, she was able to connect with many other fans of that celebrity, yet now that account may soon be deleted as well because it is "fake". Since friendster advertises itself as a system to connect to people of similar interests (as opposed to a dating service), it should continue to allow such accounts
meanwhile, since it will soon charge, my friends and I are switching over to Ringo, another similar free service which seems to be the most popular alternative.
h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-org
About time. Fauxsters, and the people who link with them, have seriously diluted the usefulness of Frienster as a social device.
If I see an interesting profile of someone who knows a friend of mine, that's a legitimate social connection. But if the chain of relationships goes through "Mr. T", "New York City", and "Sex", it means nothing.
I do worry that actual celebrities might get incorrectly labeled as fake and have their accounts deleted. I've come across a few minor celebrities in my network (the Snickers voiceover guy, the Pets.com sockpuppet) and although mutual acquaintances have confirmed to me that they are who they are, it would be easy for a Friendster Cleanup Agent to assume it was fraudulent.
One of the funny things about Friendsters trying to recreate a natural society... society is almost driven by the arms race between the fakers and the cheat-detectors. We are constantly trying to fake each other, and constantly spotting and defeating these fakes.
At least, this is the theory used by social scientists to explain emotions, and I tend to agree. Emotions evolved to be unfakable demonstrations of sincerity, which is why we're so impressed by good actors.
So the problems that Friendster is having with fakesters is actually a very good mirror of real society, except that Friendster lacks the tools for detecting and punishing cheats!
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The guy who runs it seems to be one of those totally joyless bean-counter types the other programmers all make fun of. He checked out the journalist's friends list, didn't approve of their whimsical photos, got snotty about it, and *while hitting on* one of the journalist's friends, got snotty with her, chiding her for using a "silly" picture!!! What kind of creep insults a chick he's trying to pick up, I mean really! No WONDER he can't get laid.
I suspect this guy is some kind of AV geek with zero social skills and a serious superiority complex, who can't understand why women (and others) don't like him, and who built a website to help him get laid -- then couldn't get laid and got pissed because everyone was having fun but him, so he retaliated by kicking out all the fun people.
Yeeaaah. Riiiight.
Hang out with us... Unlike the crowd at Friendster, we don't care if you post potato chip bags (maybe they're good chips! You'd probably get +1 informative...).
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
If someone really feels like they want to 'have a friend in Jesus', why would they want to connect themself to someone pretending to be Jesus?
In any case, on further consideration, the 'hubbing' aspects of some of these features is somewhat interesting, but if i'm not mistaken, friendster allows you to search via keywords, so if you want to associate yourself with Jesus, just put Jesus as one of your keywords and use it that way, rather than just connecting yourself to some user who decides 'hey, look at me, I'm Jesus, wouldn't it be great if i made a Jesus account? That way me and the other fifty people pretending to be Jesus can feel special'
So, what I'm basically saying is that there are ways for people on friendster to associate themselves with groups and topics without having to violate any rules or corrupt the "real people who actually exist"-ness of the website.
ìì!
I will say that I've seen very funny, very entertaining fake profiles. Like Christopher Walken. And he's got like 400 friends. That profile probably serves to connect people who otherwise never would be ...
and that's good AND bad. For the purposes of Friendster, for it to be what its creators and a lot of its users WANT it to be, these fakesters really do fsck up the system. There's no real chain of communication. You can't go to your friend's friend and say "What an ass!" or "Damn s/he is awesome!" cuz there's no real logical connection if it is thru one of these fake profiles.
I think the fakesters are abusing the system and watering down the experience and intent. I also think that they are obfuscating a very neat idea of building a semi-accountable community of people that can really trace thru who they know all these myriad individuals around the world.
The Fakesters may add flair, but ultimately they dilute any value it has.
Now, do I support deleting these Fakesters? No - but there must be a way to cap the account in some way, i.e. make it impossible for someone to add friends with or to these fake accounts. This would solve the problem of bad relationship data while at the same time not putting valid profiles at risk.
But y'know, in the long run, its their site, their bandwidth, their service - they can delete who they want, and if your actual profile gets deleted by accident, then be pissed at the fakesters who created the situation in the first place.
Just my 2
Deleting fake profiles may be more drastic of a solution, but I think the post indicating the use of a "karma" system is the best solution. Basically have a system where people can rate each other. Act like an ass, and you get an ass profile.
The thing is, there really is no reason to do this. On Friendster, you get to pick who your friends are. No interested in knowing fictional characters? Then don't let them be your friends. It's pretty simple.
All Friendster needs to do is add a 'killfile' property and let people 'hide' people they don't like who are in their social network.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Right, so we've got a community site, and some people start using it in a way the owner didn't anticipate, and the owner decides the new use is contrary to the "purpose" of the site, and decides to engage in an increasingly draconian crackdown on the "disruptive" users, yeah?
Hmm.
I'll betting it's only a matter of time before we find Jon Abrams blaming Friendster's every shortcoming, and its overall failure to quite live up to his "vision," on the tro^H^H^H fakesters.