The creation of automated friends and general profile gaming has been a part of MySpace for a long time now. The general idea is that by creating more friends and more data you are more likely to gain traffic for what ever it is you are ultimately trying to sell.
YouTube has been fairly immune from widespread gaming to date. YouTube Friend Adders have been around for a while, but given the nature of YouTube, adding friends doesn’t really deliver much in the way of tangible benefits.
A new package, Tube Automator, hit my inbox yesterday. Tube Automator promises to deliver real traffic and results to uploaded YouTube videos by automating the YouTube friend creation process, commenting process and rating process.
The theory is that to gain real interest for a video on YouTube, a video must hit the top lists on YouTube, which includes the most commented videos, most viewed videos and the top rated videos.
According to the Tube Automator site
- [the]Built in account creator creates hundreds of YouTube accounts for you, all you need to do is type in the captcha
- Gets your video featured on the “Top Rated” and “Most “Discussed pages” at YouTube
- Once your video appears on these pages, it gets a large number of page views which makes it appear in the “Most Viewed” section automatically
And just in case YouTube catches on, Tube Automater has the ability to post at random intervals “to make it look like real people have posted and voted” and “Supports proxies to make posts look like they came from visitors across the world.”
I have no idea whether it works or not. In their product demo video (screencast below) they show high rated videos that are claimed to have been successfully promoted using their software; some rated so highly they appear next to videos from well known folks such as Chris Pirillo.
YouTube fans can only hope that Google finds a way of blocking and cracking down on this style of YouTube gaming ASAP. As long as these sorts of packages continue to flourish, the validity of the top lists on YouTube is thrown into question.
You see already we introduced a software called Stealth Friend Bomber.
http://freeyout...riendadder.com/
It is a two in one bot, for myspace and youtube. And it is updated daily. I think this one is better than tube automator.
Rajesh
Is this even a legit business?
lol, these scripts are costing us a lot of money in server utilization and bandwidth
Enough people run them, and we have DDOS on our hands.
Is it really that much more difficult or takes more effort to create a good video than it does to use a product like this? My captcha muscle already gets
I think the most interesting thing about this is that it reveals one of the core problems with YouTube, or any site once it gets large enough: it’s TOO large, and any one item gets lost in the size. Additionally, as it becomes larger, the harder it is for people to “keep up” with what’s new. “most viewed” or “highest rated” are bandaids on the size problem in some respect. These problems breed these kinds of “gaming the system” solutions. Whoever comes up with a better way to judge popularity other than the simple scalar “most viewed” or a “liked/don’t like” voting system will clean up in this space.
Yes Andy, “too large” indeed.
That’s why this is how I see it:
YouTube > Vimeo
MySpace > Virb
The real losers are those that need to cheat a system to get attention. It’s amazing how some actually take pride in developing these tools. YouTube and MySpace too large? How about the quality of your video being too low?
This particular piece of software surfaced some months ago on YouTube and has created a huge spam problem that means I have to either turn comments off entirely or go through all of my comments requests each day.
I got an email from them as well and I emailed him back and told him to #%@ off — Huge pain in the ass…
Rajesh,
Unlike your friend adder which is browser based http://www.tubeautomator.com is sockets based and blazing fast.
And your sales page is a blatant copy of michelle macphersons site http://www.tubeinator.com
Isn’t this sort of fraud? And if it does not fit the legal definition of fraud, perhaps the laws need to be updated so that this kind of crap can be prosecuted.
Seems like the same concept as people are using to game digg.
Hey Rajesh (& other web-ruining fucktards):
Slide under a gas truck and die.
You can always count on the spammy types to try and crash a good party.
It appears the videos pull tons of “clicks” from spammy Blogspot posts which contain Javascript such that the page refreshes every 5 seconds, in this example:
youtube.com/watch?v=yoL4rE7De4c
Pretty lame, YT perhaps could filter reloads from the same machine to discourage this.
Comments appear to be repeated, and are perhaps pulled from other videos.
Hi… you see we are good in creating projects. But we didnt get any big. At that time these guys give some real bucks. Thats why we are creating that (just for few bucks).
Hrm… only problem is, I don’t use anything other than YouTube?