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Comment by jayess | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me the simplest answer is that they're fully aware and not doing anything about it. It doesn't take the best and brightest to figure it out. I've purchased thousands of twitter and facebook followers before for $5 on fiverr just for fun. There's no reason twitter or facebook can't do the same and identify the fake accounts. The logical conclusion is that they don't want to.

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I agree. Just buy them. If they spend $100K a year on buying fake accounts and then banning those accounts, that will be more effective than messing about paying a team of 10 engineers to do pattern analysis. If they spent $2M a year on buying and then banning fake accounts, they would squash it completely.

They're not doing it because they like the big follower counts themselves. They're in on the con.

How does paying the botters market rate raise their cost of entry?

The price of a single bot is amortized across thousands upon thousands of follows. If it costs a penny to have one bot issue one follow, and a single bot performs 5,000 follows, then that bot has earned $50. If Twitter were to buy follows for the market rate (one penny) then ban those accounts, it would drive the market rate for bots up to (using our hypothetical example) $50 per follow. (This is an oversimplified example, of course, but reducing the average number of follows that a given bot can perform would indeed have the effect of raising the market rate, though we can continue to argue over the magnitude; it's self-evident that if generating bots didn't have fixed cost overheads, then we'd see fewer bots with incredulously inhuman numbers of followed accounts.)

This seems liable to cause unintended side effects...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

I disagree. The cobra effect occurred because the English provided a market for cobras where there was no market before. There's already a large market for followers and twitter adding itself to that market in such a limited way does not add significant new demand.

The Reagan administration tried this in the Iran-Contra affair. They only succeeded in incentivizing more terrorism and abduction of US citizens.

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