Slide Caught Posting Fake Positive Reviews For Their Own App

Companies do this all the time. On download.com, on digg.com, ect… It’s considered normal by now I think.

nice catch, now, ask how many reall users they have!

This is absolutely disgusting behavior for a joke of company that didn’t deserve its valuation and won’t survive a bad recession. You cannot FAKE your way into being a great company. The web should revolt against companies that pull this kind of crap. Add Slide to the deadpool!

sad

Hey,

This is so low. C’mon, it is natural to like your product. Let others to judge if it is crap or not. But in this case the guys at Slide just lableled themselfs as … lamers.
Go Slide…. not

Slide is the best thing since sliced bread
by Max Levchin at 5:43 on April 3rd, 2008
http://www.Slide.com

Imagine my surprise when I came across this review!!! I must admit, I was a little suspicious….

jenkins..totally agree i wrote up a whole anti slide comment but deleted it at the last minute.. slide is seriously somewhat of a joke..if thats where we are heading i can totally see the internet bubble bursting sometime soon..

This is bullshit. Its sad that fake reviews are becoming the norm. Not sure what kind of ‘normal’ world we live in these days. Sigh.

I dont think this is the first time this has happened it seems to be happening all over the place… sad very sad

And the below slide user, has posted a nice profile pic too

http://www.facebook.com/s.php?.....amp;init=r

This seems to be the norm nowadays. #6 hehehe, sliced bread comment about their product is so hilarious. I mean why go to that extent and make it so obvious. Weird..

lol @ Caramelhoneys !

Hey companies even do this on techcrunch, blame their marketing deps. There should severe penalties / legislation to at least regulate this.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen fake reviews on a good product. It’s always the companies, authors, etc., who know what they’ve created is crap that feel the need to fake the reviews.

Well, if you haven’t seen it then they probably were too good to be found out. The market is obviously crowded and you will never know good from bad when it comes to users comments, in this case they were dum enough to be related to their company. No polemic, just realistic.

Who don’t honestly, let’s not be hypocrite here

What!! im REAL!!!!

I have to admit I will almost always discount any review that isn’t either a) very detailed - e.g. some Amazon book reviews or b) if it is very positive, doesn’t also list some downsides.

Well done to those who expose this kind of activity!

keep it real!! slide is part of the silicon valley “in crowd” they will always land on their feet, thats why they do stunts like that without any fear… one day new startups will begin to see that silicon valley is “fixed” JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER VENTURE IN THIS COUNTRY..

FIVE STAR RATING
Fantastic Application!!
by meh at 2:44pm on April 3rd, 2008

I love funwall! lets people post clips from pornos and big booty women and then spam my friends with them.

Mike have you ever thought about making a video blog for techcrunch? I find them much more exciting, especially when viewed through FunWall ™ the world’s greatest video sharing tool. And people can leave photo comments using Guestbook ™, giving your site more “punch”.
If you do I promise to put you in my “hotties” section of ScreenSaver, which is really a cool app.

@13: Well there is a solution to this problem and it’s not new legislation - this isn’t an isolated problem: there is a whole ocean of info and opinions floating on the web, and some are bound to be biased - we users just need to learn to sift out bad and useless opinion - i.e. ignore all the rubbish general unsupported statements like “this product is great!” or “this product is rubbish!” - look at the REASONS WHY they hold such an opinion. Then you can decide for yourself whether you agree or disagree with their reasoning and make your own mind up.

Nowadays I automatically ignore opinions - I only listen to reason.

Slide + Digg = $0

The first review above said “I can’t live without it!”

I don’t see any problem here. The employee who wrote it probably can’t live without it, because she wouldn’t have a job without funwall, and might be on the streets starving to death.

“Slide, founded by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, makes widgets that help people express themselves.”

…and, in light of these recent outings, my own interpertation of the above quote…

“Slide, founded by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, makes it’s employees falsely express themselves about their widgets.”

WTF were these people thinking??

@22, Tim

Spot on, you can’t legislate against this kind of monkey business, it’s an inevitable consequence of openness meeting greed. The signal:noise ratio is just too low to be able to take anything useful away.

Qualifying the reasons you feel a certain product is good or bad is a good way of imparting at least a bit useful information. Another avenue is some sort of reputation system. A combination of both would be best I think.

Aren’t the best reviews a qualitative assessment from someone you can trust? I’m not sure the perfect system is out there but we can at least strive for it.

Incidentally, the same goes for blog/forum comments in places like this. The background chatter is often too overwhelming to pick out the really useful comments.

Paul Graham wrote an interesting essay on How to Disagree http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

Curious thing is, I haven´t even started…

App’s rating suddenly cut in half?
http://forum.developers.facebo.....p?id=12851

From the looks of it, no one has realized what is going on…

Is this porn?
http://forum.developers.facebo.....p?id=11408

Slide makes some of the spammiest apps anyway. I have to block them all as they drive me nuts. Not surprised they’re spamming the review boards too. Tiresome.

@23

Slide + Digg + RockYou = $0.00

Slide + Digg + RockYou + Facebook = $100.00

Slide + Digg + RockYou + Facebook + Twitter = $0.00

classy. just the behavior you would come to expect from a $200 million dollar company.

sadly companies do it all the time.

It makes me laugh when people also take registered user numbers , downloaded numbers, monthly visits as a sign of a companies value.

All these things can be made up and cooked to value the company higher. whether its be buying visitors from bots , or just making the figures up or whatever.

How did you tracked it down?

Love the music choice here! Perhaps blog posts need theme music like scenes in movies This one perfectly sums up this story.

Now its time to investigate if they have done the reverse to rival applications. Rating them down and leaving negative comments. If this exists, FaceBook should punish them.

Brilliant, insightful article. I forwarded to all my friends. Thank you.

-Dungan Rigley

What amazes me is that they felt the need to spam an application that is already ridiculously and inexplicably popular. You might write a fake review or two on Amazon if you’re a desperate, struggling author or everyone else is slagging your book off, but not if you’re J. K. Rowling and have just released the last Harry Potter novel.

Just like a spamming company to write great reviews that helps them spam your friends through your own profile.

Let’s all poke Adora
http://www.facebook.com/poke.php?id=1069530799

I appreciate the Ben Folds love…

companies.do.this.all.the.time

is it right? no. is it newsworthy? not really. who cares. leave max alone… RIGHT NOW!!!

@30
so truuuuuuuuuuuuu!

people are leaving Slide, tough environment, especially in PM, some dev

Yes, slide made a mistake. But can you blame them for giving that type of job to their interns? My opinion is they need to stop copying others work and actually do/create some stuff that is new and unique. Haven’t seen that yet out of slide.

hahahah OWNED

I fucking hate slide

@38
everyone hates slide, nobody is going to leave max alone.

their comments sound like detergent commercial

Their CEO isn’t qualified to run the company after this. This is a big deal, folks. There is something called integrity, and it is ok to do things right. This guy obviously knows about this, no way he doesn’t, and should take the fall. If I was a board member I would be very concerned about what other unethical things this guy is doing. Yikes, this is BAD!

Seth - is that an unforgivable reference?

Jenkins: Let’s just call it a few bad apples and just go on our way. It’s not like Abu Ghraib where the whole chain of command is complicit. Maybe.

Mike: Wait, are you saying those 40,000 test accounts I created with a script aren’t real users?

I think it’s funny…. the fake accounts are lame but nothing wrong with the real employees tooting their own horns.

@mike#30 I agree I see so many inflated numbers - easily manipulated.

I think the more shocking thing is that people think it’s the norm, and are fine with it. It’s easy to get caught doing these types of astroturfing campaigns, and the smarter PR and marketing people have abandoned such tactics.

This is probably been known internally, and nothing has been done to stop it should make you concerned with a lot of things about the application. Where are the internal marketing controls? Where are the internal PR controls?

Slide does a lot of shady things. Include having a network of anonymous untraceable servers that constantly crawl Myspace and Facebook and index users’ data–info that they give out to competitors of Myspace and Facebook as leverage in business deals. They probably did this to optimize FunWall to show up higher than RockYou’s Superwall on the Facebook application directory.

Damn that SeeqPod© widget is so COOL! And it’s so EASY to email it to your friends or get the embed code for your own site. Hmm…except the text is a little cut off on the popups. I’ll have to fix that. I mean THEY’LL have to fix that….damn.

yeah, whatever.
everybody posts fake reviews for their apps through friends’ or own fake accounts.
no biggie.

Slide is a junk company with junk products so it’s not really a surprise. There is a big difference between posting to tell people about your new product and posting multiple fake reviews. Maybe their valuation is $500mm virtual dollars.

What douche bags, I hate Slide, I always get spammed from them.

#52 and all the others above who say it’s OK…

No doubt you work for Slide and are here to “spin” the comments.

Wow, really?

Leave slide alone! Slide is amazing I can’t live without it!! They’d never write fake reviews of themselves.

This is a pity coming from a company founded by Paypal founder. Whatever happened to “innovate and users will like your product and review it.” This shows total lack of innovation from these widget companies. All they do is copy stuff from one another or steal ideas from some teenager and market it better because they have more money. This is really killing the widget market.

Boycott Slide Now! Boycott Slide Now!

What do we want? Brains. When do we want it? Brains.

Harry “always gets his protests confused” Wang

hey guys…check out the comments on this video
http://www.flixya.com/video/1059371/Bowling_Trick

Try checking out comments for few more videos. Not a single comments is from a HUMAN.

“Slide writing fake reviews on their own reviews board is hilarious! is that really the behavior of a company worth $500M?”

I’ve seen worse from companies worth over $50B

What is this - Valleywag?

Yipes. Hopefully a learning lesson for any others tempted to go this route.

If you’re dumb enough to even consider making a “slide show,”
you get what’s coming to you.

ff

It is bad karma for sure.

The thing about FB reviews is that you really can’t control that stuff and it makes it honest. I think you gotta roll with what you got and let people say what they want. We get some great reviews and then some seriously nasty ones - that is the name of the game.

http://www.facebook.com/apps/a.....7507616578

What I like is that at least with FB when someone gives a review you can see if their legit - if they don’t have friends then they are fake. I think it is pretty hard to fake a bunch of real profiles - sure you can do it but it is not an easy thing to do. Like I said this is bad karma!

Cheers - Eric

Who uses FoolBook anymore??

It kills me that people get all up in arms about this. It’s been done since the dawn of the Internet, and it will continue to happen. Take a look at JBoss… four years ago they were busted with folks from the CEO on down astroturfing on Slashdot as well as sites like The Server Side. Didn’t seem to hurt them when it came time for Red Hat to purchase. Whole Foods’ CEO did it so successfully on Yahoo Finance boards for years that he may likely have been able to buy the competitor he bashed. Some companies like the subtler approach of pumping themselves up and trashing competitors.

Average TC reader #52
I thought so as well. Much better catalog at Seeqpod than Last.fm who only had 30 seconds of Bad Idea.

Andrew #38
happy to oblige

This is so common and makes it hard to believe many reviews for anything.

When some kind of voting poll or award comes up, EVERY company I have worked for has told the employees to help tip the balance by voting multiple times.

They did use real names and the company name in the account name.

Since when NOT HIDING your identity is called DISHONESTY ? Did I miss something? Did I fall asleep for 100 years? Am I called Rip Van Winkle?

Would you actually prefer stupid and open people over smart and deceptive?

GIVE ME ANOTHER SILICON VALLEY !

Perhaps a good starting point for all would be to realize that there are literally THOUSANDS of fake profiles out there on Facebook. This idea that “if they don´t have friends proves they are fake” is not always the case.

We have had access to all the evidence… enough to prove you are wrong.

Just take a look at this topic, posted at the Developers´ Forum some days back:

http://forum.developers.facebo.....01&p=3

Goes to show people knew this was going on… or did they?

Wonder what the New York Times is doing research on right now?

Slide slides into some cash
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/.....some-cash/

Perhaps they are watching this video from You Tube…

Rich Media, Poor Democracy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....re=related

Facebook group to boycott Slide & RockYou for the hell of it..created 1 min ago
join if you want
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7728654996

One word: Hilarious!!

Yah. Hard to trust these new reviews coming up. It looks fake, this confirms it. Slide should really watch their ass. From where I’m at, do anything but don’t get caught. Slide should really take on some stealth training (or stupidity, if that applies).

Fara- http://www.pickmeuptoday.com

The fish rots at the head..

Not surprised. There are a lot of slimy people on Facebook who self-promote themselves. I admit that I’ve done it before, but just don’t bother anymore. Just let it organically and virally grow - what’s the point in making all these accounts?

Slide… tsk tsk.

Click forward to see what happens next.

[slide's other low-brow activity generating tactic]

slide(number) is slide’s family last name
appdev is rockyou’s family last name

Self promotion is the hallmark of wise startups. The only difference here is, these guys got caught. You wouldn’t have heard of many sites, had it not been for their “unethical” guerilla tactics. Get over it: Everyone is out for a buck, the really smart ones just cover their tracks.

WAIT…WAIT…What if: someone wants to destroy the reputation of a company, and purposely post promotion that are so obviously not well-done promotion-reviews. I’m not talking about Slide here, I’m talking about possibilities. You never know if there are such people exist.

“The Adora Slidexxx names are a particularly classy touch: not only is Slide spamming Facebook with fake reviews, they’re also using fake accounts with fake names and more staggeringly adding the fake accounts to the company only Facebook group (The name Adora comes from Slides Sr. Product Manager Adora Cheung). A full list of the fake accounts on Slide Inc here; there are pages upon pages of fake accounts, which also breach Facebook’s TOS.”

This is a joke, right?

ANTI-SPAM SQUAD - Adora Cheung (creator)
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=11737790158