Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Five Reasons Social Media gets Gamed

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
I've been reading more about spam and phishing in abbreviated links (and hence, Twitter) and I think that social media in general is becoming more and more spam-filled every day. "I think we're all aware that there are an especially large number of hucksters out there," wites Ian Delaney. But why? It's easy to fake, you can easily fake click counts, reads and comments, you can scare the uninformed with them, and people keep falling for 'easy'. I like that last point the most. "You wouldn't stand for a ‘top five reasons why' post in your favourite newspaper, so why are these silly lists continually at the top of social media tracking charts? I think it's because we all want easy rather than hard, even though hard might be better for us." Actually, you would stand for those silly lists in newspapers; we see them all the time, and even sillier 'easy' items like poll results and celebrity tracking. We've always had spam and phishing in traditional media, it's just that we called it advertising and telemarketing.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Nov 22, 2024 04:46 a.m.

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