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jkaufman comments on The Valentine’s Day Gift That Saves Lives - Less Wrong Discussion
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I agree that it's not beneficial for community building, but here's what makes me think you have paid "followers":
Looking back over the past 12 posts on Intentional Insights, I see the following accounts consistently liking your posts:
These all look fake to me, but let's look at the last one because it's the weirdest. The most recent 19 posts are all re-shares of Intentional Insights posts or posts elsewhere by Gleb. Looking at the fb pages they "like" I see:
Additionally, looking through the people who like typical Intentional Insights posts, they're from a wide range of third world countries, with (as far as I can see) no one from richer countries. This also points to paid likes, since poor-country likes are cheaper than rich-country ones, and being popular only in third world countries doesn't seem likely from your writing.
Is there some other explanation for this pattern? "Paid likes" is the only thing that seems plausible to me.
They are not fake in the sense of fake people -- Gleb runs meatpuppets, err... paid virtual assistants. These are real people, it's just that they are employed by InIn and their job is social media promotion which means they are paid to retweet, like, upvote. See e.g. this comment and the follow-up.
Why don't you think there are reasons that Intentional Insights might be more popular in poor-countries? Do you think you have a good idea what kind of content an Bangladeshi atheist wants to read?
I would guess they want to read about operational security and how to run away from a mob intent on hacking them to pieces.
The likely do have practical concerns but they also want tribal belonging. InIn might be able to provide an answer on the level of tribal belonging that they like.
Thanks for explaining your claims, and the evidence that led to it.
Let's take Sargin indeed as an example. He's someone who has read Intentional Insights content for a while, and has been getting into rationality and effective altruism as a result. He offered to volunteer for the organization, and has proved a good volunteer. We then brought him on as a part-time contractor. We have several people like him, who volunteer 2/3rds of their time, and work for 1/3 of their time.
InIn social media and our website are targeted to all people around the world. Our website gets about 12K hits per month, with the following countries being the top 5 in the last month: US, India, Phillipines, Malaysia, Indonesia. Our FB page is "liked" mostly by people in developing countries as well.
Why is this? Partially because of how our advertising works. We follow the "drowning child" model of advertising - we don't place higher value on people in rich countries than in poorer countries when we promote content, as we believe our content can help people around the world. So when we boost a post on FB, we boost it in the most cost-effective means possible, which means it gets delivered mostly to the countries where the clicks are cheapest, namely India, Phillipines, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc. They then have the option of clicking "like" on the post and "liking" the FB page, if they wish.
While we boost posts on FB, we don't boost posts on Twitter or Pinterest, as we don't have the skills within the organization to do so. So you can see the difference in our followers on Twitter, of whom we have around 11K or so - most are not from developing countries, and the same is true of our 4.5K followers on Pinterest.
This is highly different from buying likes, namely specifically paying people to like the page or posts. Doing so doesn't build community or engagement, which is the point of social media, and would not align with the Intentional Insights mission of spreading rational thinking and effective altruism broadly. Since that's the goal of InIn, it really doesn't make sense for us to do so.
We only do what advances our mission, even if some folks here might disagree with our methods or goals - orienting toward asking what advances our mission and working backward from that might help you model us better :-)
P. S. For anyone wanting to help us update, the best way to convince us to do so is to show how what we're doing is not advancing the mission of promoting rational thinking and effective altruist ideas broadly.
Let's. He is an, ahem, professional virtual assistant. Here is his Google+ page. Notice that it consists entirely of InIn reposts.
That is what you do. Your likes come from people you pay money to.
You seem to believe your statement about Sargin contradicts mine. Please explain how iit does so.
Your statement makes it sound like a claim that most of our likes comes from those we paid money to. I hope you see from the description above that is clearly not the case :-)
You are mistaken. I believe my statement about Sargin Rukevwe (you're employing his relatives as well, I think) expands on your statement. As to contradiction, well, I have strong doubts about him getting into effective altruism...
I don't know about most of your likes and I suspect that varies. But your statement makes it sound like your likes do not come from people you pay to like the posts. In fact some of them do.
Isn't it interesting how the list of people jkaufman compiled from just looking at who likes your Facebook posts looks very much like the list of people you pay money to?
A post like "Trump Feels Your Anger and Anxiety: How Neuroscience Helps Explain Trump's Triumphs" has 242 likes on the InIn facebook page. If five of those are people that Gleb pays money to that's doesn't really matter. That also wouldn't be the main concern that jkaufman talks about.
Those 242 likes come from what I sampled from places like Bangladesh and Indonesia. jkaufman charges that those are mostly paid likes.
If Gleb only pays money to those five people and not to the 237 other people who liked the post then, a huge part of jkaufman charge isn't correct.
I think we're on slightly different semantic grounds here. "Paid likes" is a specific practice, one that we've never engaged in, because it's highly counterproductive to creating an engaged FB community.
Now, are there people we pay who also like our FB posts? Sure. They are the ones who most consistently like them. This is one reason we hired them to work for us. It's a pretty typical thing to do for a nonprofit to hire on volunteers who are passionate about the cause.
I accept that you're skeptical. Here's an example of one of our virtual assistants describing his getting into EA.
Yes, but that is not what you are doing. You are not hiring especially passionate volunteers. You're hiring cheap third-world virtual assistants who repost, like, and generally promote your posts for money, not because they are especially fond of InIn.
Don't see anything about EA in there. Charity work, yes, EA, no.
Sorry, yes, you're interpreting my use of "paid likes" as being a very specific thing, and I mean it differently. Specifically, I'm talking about accounts that (a) click like and (b) are operated by someone who received money from InIn and (c) wouldn't have done (a) without (b).
Ah, I see there was a miscommunication. In that case, sure, there are people who are paid for social media management, and as part of doing so, click like on our posts. Yes, I suppose they would not be doing so as consistently as they are if they were not paid, although someone who was let go due to financial constraints still keeps liking our posts consistently due to his enthusiasm for the content.
You're saying that first they start liking all of your posts, then you reach out to them, and in many cases decide to hire them? The hiring doesn't come before the mass-liking?
Not necessarily. Sometimes they expressed enthusiasm in ways other than liking our posts, such as sending me private emails and expressing a desire to volunteer, etc. We only take on as contractors people who are passionate about the cause, have benefited personally from the content, and volunteer at least 2/3 of their time or more.
*snort*
Let's translate: "We pay our contractors at most 1/3 of the stated rate".
You are being silly. What makes you believe any contractor would work for 1/3 the standard rate?