Slashdot Mirror
The Software Awards Scam
jamie sends us to a blog post about the worthlessness of some download sites' "5-star" awards. Andy Brice, a UK-based software developer, packaged up a little text file full of the words "This software does nothing" as an EXE and named it "awardmestars." So far his self-proclaiming useless program has garnered sixteen 5-star awards from download sites he submitted it to. Brice concludes that many of the download sites are "just electronic dung heaps, using fake awards, dubious SEO and content misappropriated from PAD files in a pathetic attempt to make a few dollars from Google Adwords."
He's obviously missing the point. Among all of the software that does nothing, his is clearly the best.
Seriously, is this any surprise? Every time I go looking for some generic piece of software (as opposed to some specific software I already know and trust), I usually have to sift through a bunch of crap links to sites that exists for no other purpose than to collect ad revenue.
It's not just software, though. Good review sites are really hard to find. A while back, I was looking for a decent web host that would provide inexpensive VPS hosting. I ran across a lot of "review" sites where, surprise surprise, the winner of the review was owned by the same people who posted the review. The really scummy thing was that I would see three or four different review sites, and three or four hosting providers would be at the top of those reviews, and it turned out that all three or four hosting providers--and "review" sites--were all owned by one big company using a bunch of different names.
The lesson to be learned here is that you should never believe anything you read on the Internet that you don't know to already be true or that you get from a source that has proven its trustworthiness repeatedly. Assume that everyone out there is a scum-sucking bottom-feeder who wants to rip you off. I have a short list of around 15 or 20 sites that I know are dependable to be relatively honest, and I consider pretty much everything else junk. (And I often even look at my top 15 or 20 with a skeptical eye, especially when it comes to user-submitted reviews and such.)
Let's see if it works here.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
it said it's full of scams.
SEO? PAD?
Reminds me of Homer Simpson's BYOBBBQ.
"It's not just software, though. Good review sites are really hard to find. "
Yes they are.
Couldn't he have at least had to say "Hello World"?
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
I mean seriously this is nothing new. Most of these sites just browse through the PAD directory and add your application to their directory. Usually I get them in groups of emails which leads me to believe that for the most part it's just one person creating multiple repositories. The ranking is probably random based, I don't always get fives.
There are several sites that are more specific and don't just add apps and give them awards. These don't automatically award you and may even reject your app if they don't meet standards.
As a user you probably care more for these.
As a developer it doesn't really bother me that my app is getting added everywhere for next to no work. I don't get any downloads from these sites anyway which leads me to believe that users know which sites screen the applications and which ones don't. So what's the point of this article anyway?
There are also sites that offer better ranking if you link to their site (some even threaten to revoke your app) and others that you pay for, which makes sense. The people running the site just want to make money, and why not?
Anyway I think the author may be just trying to get some quick exposure for the last link he recommends. There is a global pad database already and most sites will grab it from there already. And for free, unlike the $70 he spent.
Let's look at these software awards as movie reviews. I wouldn't trust some bum off the street to tell me if a movie is good or not; I don't know them, I don't know what biases they might have, and I don't know what tastes they have. Instead, I would go to an established movie critic, a friend, or a family member and see what they have to say about the movie.
Maybe they were just happy to see an .exe that didn't muck everything up, and rewarded him with stars.
Does this mean my website in 1998 may not have really been "BEST OF THE WEB"?! Now that I think about it, what about all those poetry contests I won? The other poems they published sucked. It was Almost like they accepted anybody!
OH MY GOD. SO MANY GOLD STICKERS -- WASTED ON MEDIOCRITY!
He must know what he's talking about, he's listed in Who's Who Among UK-Based Software Developers .
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
But I was impressed the author took the time to point out some of the good ones rather than just vilifying the more craptastic.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
Tucows hasn't failed me for 10 years now.
Why does this come as a big shock to everyone? Freeware/Shareware sites are filled with dead programs. Its though so odd that they are making enough ad money to be wasting bandwidth on some of the sites, because no one goes to "Free Download" sites because M$ decided to make an insecure OS that through unfair business practices and make it so just visiting a site can destroy Windows. So how are they making money, except through banner ads and the popular pop-up ads.
I suppose we "know" to not pay attention to those things, but there's a difference between the 'street smarts' of the web and actually proving it. Here he literally posted something that doesn't work and is worthless, and showed that he can garner ratings. I mean, someone (newb) could really think that some crap download they just grabbed really was 5 stars. In this case we know there's no way that could have occurred.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
I dunno -- Lotus Notes has won all sorts of valid-sounding awards and I bet most users would be happy with an upgrade to Brice's app. At least his thing probably doesn't actively destroy your email.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
You didn't follow the magic recipe. Let's try it again.
This post says nothing
This post says nothing
This post says nothing
This post says nothing
This post says nothing
This comment says nothing.
I see no "reputable" sites like hotfiles or download.com here. Obviously this developer put his worthless program into the darkest trenches of the internet.
Some aren't worth the paper they are printed on.
Deleted
(At this point, there would be a good case for blocking all e-mail traffic on the Internet backbone for a week, then on the assumption that anything still sending after the first day is a zombie, simply banning the entire offending network until it cleans up. Sure, it would cause chaos, but the economic and personal damage done by a week's shutdown would be minuscule compared to the expense paid on a continual basis because of spammers and malware.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The Windows Operating System gets 5 out of 5 stars and is rated the most stable OS in it's market!
...a noddy badge for this brilliantly inspired and researched news story.
Now please visit my websites:-
http://www.deeplinking.net/
http://www.googlesecrets.com/
http://www.mypopularsite.com/
http://www.googleme.com/
http://www.adwords.com/
Yada Yada...
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Five star ratings aren't just abused by the sites that host the software, but often by the people who submit them, as well.
I was recently doing some research on a potential replacement program for limited use at the company I work for. One particular program caught my eye (mainly because I couldn't find competing similar programs), so I tried to find some reviews on it. The only site I found any reviews on was C|Net. The average rating was a 4.something, but I decided to read the reviews to see if any particular bugs they reported might cause problems here.
To my surprise, of the 15 or so reviews I found, 10 were not only positive, but actually used the "negative" boxes to espouse more praise! This in and of itself is very suspicious. I can understand one or two over-zealous users doing that, but 10 of 15 doesn't seem right. Added to this was that most of those were posted one after another, one per day, and had "generic" usernames. Then each account had only one review, the one for that piece of software, and it was made the same day they signed up.
When it comes to reviews I trust "average joes" more than official publications because they are more likely to use it as I would. I don't discount the publications' reviews, but if they say it's bad and Joe says it's good, I'm more likely to go with Joe and give it a try. However, because of reasons like this, I have to make sure to actually read the reviews of users to see just how it fares.
Some sites have set up things to try and combat this. A few web hosting ranking sites display partial IPs (some full) for those who post (anonymously or otherwise) so that users can use their own judgement when reading the reviews- if the same IP is posting a lot of positive reviews for a place, it's likely an inside job.
(We didn't use the program in the end; not because of the reviews, but because their sales department was incompetent and would only set up a demo if we used GoToMyPC. Heh.)
...they have Slashdot moderators handing out the stars.
"Google really needs to go back and tweak their page ranking because whatever it's based on, it's pretty obvious that spammers have figured it out."
Or maybe you just need to be a better searcher?
MOD PARENT UP!!!111!!!!!111!!shift!!!
That works, doesn't it?
I've read some of the user reviews of the software on some sites, and they're very funny. Worthy of /. Most award it 5 stars because of the humor, so the author might be mistaken to think there's another motive.
"They probably won an award."
(from The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman)
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Posting anonymous for not ending up on everyone's Freak-list ;-)
.pad to around 100 sites (1-by-1, I learned about those padfile-autosubmitter programs like 5 minutes after I was done.) Anyway, I leaned back relaxed as I watched the thousand dollars of Adsense-revenue everyone was talking about to come in.
.htaccess file redirecting everyone trying to download the file from outside my page to the index.html. HAH! Take that!
.pads, autogenerated reviews and awards so people would link back to it suddenly right on my mind. And then I did it. I wouldn't say that I invented it but I didn't know of a similar site at the time. And yes, I cloned it to various domains.
Two years ago I did a freeware Breakout/Arkanoid clone... for Windows *looks-to-the-ground-in-shame*. I made a small site, putted some ads on it (hey, the game itself had 100 levels, 10 music tracks, nice graphics and was absolutely free) and I submitted my
Then I woke up. Although around 500 people already downloaded it from my site on the very first day, almost no one of them even saw an ad because most of the freeware-archiv-sites and the like were just linking directly to my installer. Ok, should have see that coming.
I edited my
Ad impressions and clickrate increased dramatically and so I leaned back again... until one day later. It stagnated. Again. Totally.
I looked up a few of the sites I submitted it to and figured that since they couldn't get free hosting from me anymore, they were just hosting the game themselves now, next to their ads of course.
Ok, fine. I polished the game up a bit, just enough to call it 1.1, and added a license that would forbid to host the file.
I wasn't too surprised that they just updated their links and continued to host it on their sites but I tried to email them about it. I got some automated responses. Some guys said that it is not possible to forbid other sites to host freeware in the United States (maybe they were right, what do I know? I'm from the other side of the World.) Most of them didn't respond at all and around 5 guys basically told me fuck off - and oh yeah, I did.
I felt used, and angry, and I knew I had to do something about this unjustice. I thought about hacking their sites and posting sodomy-scandals on wikipedia about their owners and stuff like that (but I didn't do it, it was someone else... no really)
But then I thought, Hey, most of these guys have some amateur frontpage-site or some badly used CMS with some crappy logo of a smiling dog or something. I can do that better. Much better. In fact, I had the system of a fully automated site with a webcrawler looking for
Long story short, my network generates around 2500$ ad-revenue a month today, which is a lot of money over here, and I have a clear conscience. It is perfectly legal, I pay my taxes.
I just figured, why should I cry about people making money on the internet that way and waste my own talent making just some small games and tools and working 9-to-5 programming databases when I could not only be "one of them" but instead do it even better? You only live once and I can now spend money on things that enrich my and my family's life that I couldn't afford before. For me it's just the making-money-method-for-nerds of our days. If you are in front of the monitor hacking stuff anyway, you might as well make some bucks with it as long it's still possible.
Looks like I had to get that off my chest or something but I really don't look back. Now let me put my fireproof vest on while the flames strike upon me (from the people actually reading it before it gets modded down.)
I ran into the same problem. You'd think Google would be able to remove these fake review sites from the top 10 search results. In any event, I found Hostjury.com to be a good place to get reviews of different hosting service providers.
I'm not surprised. Some of the well-known awards aren't worth anything, either. Kind of like the televised award ceremonies of the entertainment industry. 15 years ago PC Magazine would give awards to just about anyone who cared to buy enough advertising in its pages. There's a lot of hype out there and people looking to do nothing but draw attention to themselves in their quest to sell advertising space.
Worthless no-name awards are to quality software as karaoke is to the entertainment industry.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Tucows still exists? Man, I'm glad we moved past the shareware age and on to the open source age. Nowadays I use almost no shareware programs, everything else (a few hundreds) are open source. I will admit, though, that it had a certain magic about it, but maybe it's just the fact that I was young and remember it fondly.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
I like how you still list the awards ;)
http://www.mosasciim2.com/index.php?page=links
Comment removed based on user account deletion
the IMDB numerical rating is what i trust the most for a quick glance to see whether the movie is good or not.
a 5.x is nearly always horrible, and 8.x-9.x is nearly always good or great. I dont look at written reviews or anything like that, just the IMDB score to see if I should download it, and then watch to form my own opinions.
Just odd how reliable it has been for me. MUCH MUCH more than any 'repected' critic giving thumbs up or down.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
I get those all the time for my company's software as well. In almost all cases, the HTML code provided for the "awards" contains a link back to the software download site. That's what they're looking for - a link-back to improve their Pagerank[tm]. What I do with them is I take the image, change it to greyscale so it doesn't clash with our site's design, scale it to a reasonable size, and host it locally, not linking to the site.
Awards do have the benefit of giving a product some appearance of legitimacy, so I like to display them, even if they're not as reputable as I'd like. If at all possible, however, I try to display awards that I know to be legitimate - such as TUCOWS - but getting products rated on the major download sites is a long, tedious process.
I actually don't know if I'd mod you up or down, but it's moot anyway as I don't have the points, so I'll simply pass the responsibility to others.
I do not think it means what you think it means.
Regards,
I. Montoya
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
... and they'll buy it. Even if it's crap. It worked for Microsoft Office*.
* Except Excel, Excel is pretty good, but everything else in Office is complete garbage.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
whether some guy on teh Intarweb thought a program was really worth five stars or was a steaming sack of elephant feces. I can make that assessment for myself. The real problem is when websites start trying to draw in web hits by evaluating whether a program is free of spyware or not. Take Softpedia, for instance. Sure, they have lots of entries, and they claim to test each piece of software for spyware, but to date, I've never heard a straight and impartial answer on whether they're honest or on the take. They also spend a lot of time messing with their own Wikipedia entry to try to lend themselves further legitimacy, and I'm sure they're not the only ones.
There are other goods and services besides software that are "reviewed" by websites that are even more rife with corruption. Take web hosting, for example. I don't think there's a single web host reviewing website that isn't a shill for the web hosts being reviewed. In many cases, the top five or ten web hosts are all owned by the same guy.
...was picked up by Weasel over at: http://sweasel.com/archives/501#comment-4327
earlier today.
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
I find your ideas intriguing, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Oh, now I get it. I had wondered what it took to get mod points. It appears that one of the major criteria is a non-functioning sarcasm meter.
I guess when you spend that much time in the basement, you lose out on a lot of useful social interaction and subsequently miss those subtle clues that people give out from time to time.
Which also explains why nobody can seem to get dates.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
please, someone mod him up one more point! i'm a little short this week, and i can't afford to pay him back until next month...
I still remember when the gamesdomain.com was alive and they had the usual gold and silver awards. Still the best award was the picture of a cute bear handling the game cd as it was nuclear waste. That was the sign of reliable review site.
"Award-winning Software Engineer"
"...recognized by Peers."
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
Linux has it different. No intent to sell -- no trash marketing overhead added. Simple as that.
kdawson strikes again, leaving us bored and in shock of his interpretation of the word "newsworthy"...
www.purevolume.com/martyd
[...] and content misappropriated from PAD files [...]
What are you, some kind of moron?
PAD files exist for those websites to appropriate. It's their entire reason for existence. They're generated as an XML description of the software (including everything from long description text to download URLs to screenshot images and more) so software authors can get publicity and their software downloaded.
For more info on the PAD spec and what it's for, see its site.
There are scores of download sites, maybe hundreds. Why assume they'll ALL trustworthy? Anybody can put up a download site.
I try to deal only with names that have been around a while - MajorGeeks, etc.
Did he submit to the known, recognized sites. Doesn't say so in TFA.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
dashyaoo