Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Dislike Hype Exploited In Phishing Campaign
An anonymous reader writes: A new Facebook scam is quickly spreading across the social network which plays on the announcement of the highly-anticipated 'Dislike' button. A new scamming campaign is now exploiting impatient Facebook users anxiously awaiting the dislike button addition, by tricking them into believing that they can click on a link to gain early access to the feature. Once the unsuspecting victim selects a link, they are led to a malicious website, which enables access to their private Facebook accounts and allows the hackers to share further scam links on their behalf.
It's an interesting comparison. While the slashdot system obviously allows us a more fine-grained expression of opinion, it's widely abused, e.g. people modding down posts as redundant or overrated because they disagree with the content of the post. And the maximum +5 score means you can't tell if just a handfull of people found a post interesting, or thousands of people. You also can't really tell how controversial a post is from the score on slashdot, you just get a majority result, whereas e.g. on theregister.co.uk, if your post gets a lot of upvotes and downvotes, you can see that it was controversial, not just that you got a few more of one than the other. While the like/dislike or upvote/downvote system is much simpler, there is some power in that simplicity; you get a very simple measure of approval/disapproval, and it lets the content of a post speak for itself as to why it was approved/disapproved of. I actually kind of prefer that system.
BTW I'm assuming that facebook intends to separately show how many likes and dislikes a post gets, rather than just having dislikes cancel out likes, which would be lame. But I'm not interested enough to actually go and confirm that, as I don't used fb.