Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
50 real people beat 4,700 retweets
Spotting fake engagement
Many launches now use the same slop cinematic video from the same template, and plenty of the engagement is bought. One post had around 100 likes and 4,700 retweets. The signs are easy to read: the engagement is far out of proportion to how interesting the post is, and the accounts engaging are random ones in developing countries with no tweets except shilling products like this.
What fakes cost
A company with a fake video and fake engagement reads as a fake company with a fake founder. People who spot it won't buy the product, do business with the company, or recommend that anyone go work there.
What fakes can't copy
Some things fakes can't replicate. Relationships with other humans are one: telling friends and contacts about the work and partnering with people trusted for a long time. Doing things in the real world is another, such as bringing people over to your house to talk about it. Friends who come along for the journey and support the founder belong on that list too.
How common are bot accounts on social media?
A 2017 study by researchers at Indiana University and the University of Southern California, led by Onur Varol, estimated that between 9 and 15 percent of active Twitter accounts were bots. The team built a classifier trained on features such as posting times and follower networks. Many of the bots in the study were built to amplify particular accounts or topics.
How many relationships can a person keep?
The anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed in the 1990s that people can maintain about 150 stable relationships, a figure he based on the relationship between primate brain size and group size. Within that circle, he describes smaller layers of roughly five close friends, 15 good friends, and 50 friends.
Why do friends' recommendations carry more weight?
In Nielsen's 2012 Global Trust in Advertising survey, 92 percent of respondents said they trusted recommendations from friends and family more than any other form of advertising. Online consumer reviews ranked second, at 70 percent.
More from David Senra
