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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."
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.
Yes, but Wikipedia is your friend...
Seriously, I even use it to find websites these days. Need to find the web-page of the APA but don't want to google it because you will just get a bunch of stupid comercial sites with the same acronym ? Wikipedia... It is essentially a search engine with peer-reviewed entries. Yes, it isn't perfect, but name a better alternative...
Which is why software packaging groups like Debian rely on pure statistics for such things. Popcon does more than measure downloads, it measures installed user base and I believe frequency of use. It's not a perfect system for recommendations, but it's clearly better than the five star ratings this man recieved. For example, if you're looking for a PDF reader or something, popularity may be a good indicator of quality. While Debian's system is committed to keeping bad software like spyware, it's still nice to prioritize your software search by such metrics.
;)
It might be neat to come up with a better evaluation system that considers popularity, rate of new releases and critical bug counts, so by no means am I suggesting that popcon is perfect
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
(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)
As far as I can tell, this is a phenomenon unique to proprietary software.
I would assume that this is largely because most popular open source operating systems use some kind of package manager for installing software, mostly eliminating the need to search websites for an installer file.
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.)
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.)
Wikipedia already has bots in place to automatically revert vandalized articles. Almost anything that spammers would do to a page has already been tried by regular vandals, and Wikipedia already has effective ways of dealing with them.
The real dangers are from paid corporate shills who post "articles" that are adverts or introduce bias into existing articles. Fortunately, those modifications are hard to make in volume.
Most of what is on the internet or comes through the internet is an attempt to sell you something that you don't really want. Unfortunately, that's how the internet turned out.
True. It seems like most of what makes up the American (er, global) economy is an attempt to sell you something that you don't really want. Unfortunately, that's what a free market churns out.
My grandmother was showing me the other day some of the junk she gets in the mail. She thinks its some kind of mistake that 6 different non-profit veteran's organizations are hitting her up for contributions by phone and mail. Especially after she's already given donations to two. She doesn't quite get the insidiousness of it all.
Anyway, I suppose one person's sleazy scam artist is another person's brilliant entrepreneur.
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
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.
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