Click farms: a shadowy internet industry is booming in China

Re:Click farms: a shadowy internet industry is booming in China by trilila on Monday July 22, 2019 @05:36AM (#20496479)

I live in a certain east European country, where the excuse for petty and serious crime is always: "Hey man, I'm just trying to feed my family.". People doing this, and those tolerating it, don't realise that this type of behaviour leads to a bad reputation for that country, and in turn to loss of business. Believing that poverty is a valid justification for continuous shady / criminal work is a fallacy.

Specifically, in the same country, fake reviews are a real issue. I ended up in way too many shady restaurants and dealt with way too many dodgy businesses with 5 star reviews thanks to click / review farms to know that this type of business is actually criminal. I am now at a stage where I simply don't trust reviews anymore.

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Re:Click farms: a shadowy internet industry is booming in China by rightbyte on Monday July 22, 2019 @08:05AM (#20497159)

If you speak a small language reviews might still be valuable for everything but restaurants. I have not noticed any systematic spam reviews in neither swedish nor danish.

The problem with restaurants, being an overall shady business, is probably that way too many customers are too easy to please or hard to please, so the reviews doesn't say much.

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Re:Click farms: a shadowy internet industry is booming in China by noragami on Monday July 22, 2019 @08:12AM (#20497220)

I don't speak any languages with less than a couple hundred million speakers, so I find salvation in some of the smaller, more niche communities, preferably with invite-only registration process, or simply less well known.

Increasing popularity never made anything better.

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