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If you have spent a little bit of time online, I’m sure you have seen ads promising you more hits on your website, more followers on twitter and more friends on Facebook. Something along the lines of thousands of hits or followers for a few dollars of your hard-earned cash. It could be that I’m running into all the wrong ads online, but I just keep seeing them all over the place.

Assuming that the people behind these ads actually get some kind of a return on their investment, I’m left with the conundrum of why people pay for hits to their websites. Why would you want that? Is it for people who fear that their hit-counter isn’t working properly? In all seriousness I don’t expect these hits to actually mean diddly-squat in the grand scheme of things, and for all we know it might as well be carried out by some botnet.

Take the insane amounts of asinine tweets about how people can gain thousands of followers with little to no effort, only parting ways with their money. Toss in a scantily clad young woman as the avatar and Bob’s your uncle! Yet another excellent example of getting an increase in a number, which amounts to nothing at all. If one doesn’t gain these followers by doing something people care about, why would the bought followers be any better?

Isn’t that like paying someone to be your friend and listen to you talk over coffee and a cookie?

Which I guess is the weirdest one of them all, as I have seen this far; Buying friends on Facebook. As far as bragging rights go, being able to say you have a couple of thousand friends on Facebook might be pretty neat in some circles, sure. But are these not just an arbitrary number in a counter, not a true measure of your mettle? If I ever saw a hollow pursuit of making others believe you are a person to be reckoned with, this is a prime example.

I suppose this belongs in the same bag of nonsense as the whole camp of SEO, which is another silly online phenomenon I really don’t like. Instead of actually doing things that matter, that people care about, humans appear to have an obsession with taking the shortcut, the quick path to imaginary glory. I really can’t see it any other way, try as I might.

Gaming the system is one thing, but this strikes me more as a cynical milking of people who don’t know better. Just because you put a million monkeys at an equal amount of computers obviously doesn’t mean you will get the complete works of Shakespeare, as much as that you get increasing levels of junk and spam online.

Robert Falck

Robert is a freelance tech writer from Sweden. You can follow his posts here on the British Tech Network, listen to him yap away on the British Tech iOS Show and read even more of his stuff on his site streakmachine.com or you can even follow him on twitter @streakmachine or app.net @streakmachine. (But you won't find him on Facebook!)

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Robert Falck

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