The Software Awards Scam

jamie sends us to a blog post about the worthlessness of some download sites' "5-star" awards. Andy Brice, a UK-based software developer, packaged up a little text file full of the words "This software does nothing" as an EXE and named it "awardmestars." So far his self-proclaiming useless program has garnered sixteen 5-star awards from download sites he submitted it to. Brice concludes that many of the download sites are "just electronic dung heaps, using fake awards, dubious SEO and content misappropriated from PAD files in a pathetic attempt to make a few dollars from Google Adwords."

Is this any surprise?

He's obviously missing the point. Among all of the software that does nothing, his is clearly the best.

Seriously, is this any surprise? Every time I go looking for some generic piece of software (as opposed to some specific software I already know and trust), I usually have to sift through a bunch of crap links to sites that exists for no other purpose than to collect ad revenue.

It's not just software, though. Good review sites are really hard to find. A while back, I was looking for a decent web host that would provide inexpensive VPS hosting. I ran across a lot of "review" sites where, surprise surprise, the winner of the review was owned by the same people who posted the review. The really scummy thing was that I would see three or four different review sites, and three or four hosting providers would be at the top of those reviews, and it turned out that all three or four hosting providers--and "review" sites--were all owned by one big company using a bunch of different names.

The lesson to be learned here is that you should never believe anything you read on the Internet that you don't know to already be true or that you get from a source that has proven its trustworthiness repeatedly. Assume that everyone out there is a scum-sucking bottom-feeder who wants to rip you off. I have a short list of around 15 or 20 sites that I know are dependable to be relatively honest, and I consider pretty much everything else junk. (And I often even look at my top 15 or 20 with a skeptical eye, especially when it comes to user-submitted reviews and such.)

Re:Is this any surprise?

Wikipedia already has bots in place to automatically revert vandalized articles. Almost anything that spammers would do to a page has already been tried by regular vandals, and Wikipedia already has effective ways of dealing with them.

The real dangers are from paid corporate shills who post "articles" that are adverts or introduce bias into existing articles. Fortunately, those modifications are hard to make in volume.

Re:Is this any surprise?

Most of what is on the internet or comes through the internet is an attempt to sell you something that you don't really want. Unfortunately, that's how the internet turned out. Using the internet is inherently an exercise in filtering, sifting through, and blocking unwanted crap advertisements.

I think it's absurd that we can't build an informational network or communications infrastructure without having it jammed pack full of ads and scam-artists, but apparently that's the world we live in.

Re:Is this any surprise?

Most of what is on the internet or comes through the internet is an attempt to sell you something that you don't really want.

I think it's absurd that we can't build an informational network or communications infrastructure without having it jammed pack full of ads and scam-artists, but apparently that's the world we live in.


I hope that everyonewho reads this (and the other similar opinions that will no doubt be echoed in this thread), understands that this is a neccesary evil that we must endure in order to enjoy the greater freedoms that the internet has to offer (anonymity, freedom of speech, freedom for censorship). If enough people start complaining about ads, illegal porn and security breaches (mark my words on that last one), these freedoms will be put up on the chopping block. We all know the poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller [wikipedia.org]... It works both ways. Please do what you can to help educate people that the problem isn't the internet, but rather a societal problem.

IOW: don't say "this website is a scam", Say this company is a scam, and they have sold their credibilty. I hope I am making the distinction clearly, I am late for lunch and my blood sugar is low o.0

Re:Is this any surprise?

>>> The lesson to be learned here is that you should never believe anything you read on the Internet that you don't know to already be true or that you get from a source that has proven its trustworthiness repeatedly.

..... unless it is written in Times New Roman font. If it's in Times New Roman.. it's true.

Re:Is this any surprise?

Good points. I take it a step further and say it's a civic duty to fellow netizens to recommend the good sites you've found. Especially to your Joe Sixpack friends so they don't get sucked in by the deceptive crap.

Btw, if most are like me, product decisions are usually based on other user's feedback as opposed to formally published reviews. Here's my "Top 10 List" contribution of sites in that vein:

1) Online stores: www.resellerratings.com
2) A/V: www.avsforum.com
3) Hosting: www.webhostingtalk.com
4) General product reviews: www.amazon.com (yeah, really)
5) Hardware: www.newegg.com
5) Anything CD/DVD related: www.cdfreaks.com
6) ATI: www.rage3d.com
7) Nvidia: www.nvnews.net
8) Storage (forums mainly): www.storagereview.com
9) Just plain interesting and informative threads: www.arstechnica.com (anyone remember the endless, very informative Dell 2000FP thread?)
10) Opinions on Microsoft: www.slashdot.org

FWIW, YMMV.

Mod me up!

Let's see if it works here.

Re:Mod me up!

You only get modded up if you increase traffic and therefore ad revenue to the site. Try using often searched words in your post.
Boobs Torrent Paris Hilton Leprechauns

Egads...

Couldn't he have at least had to say "Hello World"?

Re:Egads...

No, that would have been more useful, and might have conceivably deserved stars.

What a suprise!

I mean seriously this is nothing new. Most of these sites just browse through the PAD directory and add your application to their directory. Usually I get them in groups of emails which leads me to believe that for the most part it's just one person creating multiple repositories. The ranking is probably random based, I don't always get fives.

There are several sites that are more specific and don't just add apps and give them awards. These don't automatically award you and may even reject your app if they don't meet standards.

As a user you probably care more for these.

As a developer it doesn't really bother me that my app is getting added everywhere for next to no work. I don't get any downloads from these sites anyway which leads me to believe that users know which sites screen the applications and which ones don't. So what's the point of this article anyway?

There are also sites that offer better ranking if you link to their site (some even threaten to revoke your app) and others that you pay for, which makes sense. The people running the site just want to make money, and why not?

Anyway I think the author may be just trying to get some quick exposure for the last link he recommends. There is a global pad database already and most sites will grab it from there already. And for free, unlike the $70 he spent.

Never heard of these sites...

Let's look at these software awards as movie reviews. I wouldn't trust some bum off the street to tell me if a movie is good or not; I don't know them, I don't know what biases they might have, and I don't know what tastes they have. Instead, I would go to an established movie critic, a friend, or a family member and see what they have to say about the movie.

An exe?

Maybe they were just happy to see an .exe that didn't muck everything up, and rewarded him with stars.

Fake Awards?!

Does this mean my website in 1998 may not have really been "BEST OF THE WEB"?! Now that I think about it, what about all those poetry contests I won? The other poems they published sucked. It was Almost like they accepted anybody!

OH MY GOD. SO MANY GOLD STICKERS -- WASTED ON MEDIOCRITY!

Re:Fake Awards?!

Does this mean my website in 1998 may not have really been "BEST OF THE WEB"?!

You think that's bad, the guy in the next office to mine has a coffee cup that reads "World's Greatest Dad!"

You mean *the* Andy Brice?

He must know what he's talking about, he's listed in Who's Who Among UK-Based Software Developers .

Obvious, possibly

But I was impressed the author took the time to point out some of the good ones rather than just vilifying the more craptastic.

I'll stick with Tucows

Tucows hasn't failed me for 10 years now.

Knowing vs "Knowing"

I suppose we "know" to not pay attention to those things, but there's a difference between the 'street smarts' of the web and actually proving it. Here he literally posted something that doesn't work and is worthless, and showed that he can garner ratings. I mean, someone (newb) could really think that some crap download they just grabbed really was 5 stars. In this case we know there's no way that could have occurred.

He's too modest...

So far his self-proclaiming useless program has garnered sixteen 5-star awards from download sites he submitted it to.

I dunno -- Lotus Notes has won all sorts of valid-sounding awards and I bet most users would be happy with an upgrade to Brice's app. At least his thing probably doesn't actively destroy your email.

Like university degrees

Some aren't worth the paper they are printed on.

 

5 Gold Stars and ...

...a noddy badge for this brilliantly inspired and researched news story.

Now please visit my websites:-

http://www.deeplinking.net/ [deeplinking.net]
http://www.googlesecrets.com/ [googlesecrets.com]
http://www.mypopularsite.com/ [mypopularsite.com]
http://www.googleme.com/ [googleme.com]
http://www.adwords.com/ [adwords.com]

Yada Yada...

Not just the sites themselves

Five star ratings aren't just abused by the sites that host the software, but often by the people who submit them, as well.

I was recently doing some research on a potential replacement program for limited use at the company I work for. One particular program caught my eye (mainly because I couldn't find competing similar programs), so I tried to find some reviews on it. The only site I found any reviews on was C|Net. The average rating was a 4.something, but I decided to read the reviews to see if any particular bugs they reported might cause problems here.

To my surprise, of the 15 or so reviews I found, 10 were not only positive, but actually used the "negative" boxes to espouse more praise! This in and of itself is very suspicious. I can understand one or two over-zealous users doing that, but 10 of 15 doesn't seem right. Added to this was that most of those were posted one after another, one per day, and had "generic" usernames. Then each account had only one review, the one for that piece of software, and it was made the same day they signed up.

When it comes to reviews I trust "average joes" more than official publications because they are more likely to use it as I would. I don't discount the publications' reviews, but if they say it's bad and Joe says it's good, I'm more likely to go with Joe and give it a try. However, because of reasons like this, I have to make sure to actually read the reviews of users to see just how it fares.

Some sites have set up things to try and combat this. A few web hosting ranking sites display partial IPs (some full) for those who post (anonymously or otherwise) so that users can use their own judgement when reading the reviews- if the same IP is posting a lot of positive reviews for a place, it's likely an inside job.

(We didn't use the program in the end; not because of the reviews, but because their sales department was incompetent and would only set up a demo if we used GoToMyPC. Heh.)

A scam? Maybe. But perhaps...

...they have Slashdot moderators handing out the stars.

5 star awards from reviewers

I've read some of the user reviews of the software on some sites, and they're very funny. Worthy of /. Most award it 5 stars because of the humor, so the author might be mistaken to think there's another motive.

obligatory Donald Norman quote

"They probably won an award."

(from The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman [wikipedia.org])

Been there, done that

Posting anonymous for not ending up on everyone's Freak-list ;-)

Two years ago I did a freeware Breakout/Arkanoid clone... for Windows *looks-to-the-ground-in-shame*. I made a small site, putted some ads on it (hey, the game itself had 100 levels, 10 music tracks, nice graphics and was absolutely free) and I submitted my .pad to around 100 sites (1-by-1, I learned about those padfile-autosubmitter programs like 5 minutes after I was done.) Anyway, I leaned back relaxed as I watched the thousand dollars of Adsense-revenue everyone was talking about to come in.

Then I woke up. Although around 500 people already downloaded it from my site on the very first day, almost no one of them even saw an ad because most of the freeware-archiv-sites and the like were just linking directly to my installer. Ok, should have see that coming.
I edited my .htaccess file redirecting everyone trying to download the file from outside my page to the index.html. HAH! Take that!
Ad impressions and clickrate increased dramatically and so I leaned back again... until one day later. It stagnated. Again. Totally.
I looked up a few of the sites I submitted it to and figured that since they couldn't get free hosting from me anymore, they were just hosting the game themselves now, next to their ads of course.

Ok, fine. I polished the game up a bit, just enough to call it 1.1, and added a license that would forbid to host the file.
I wasn't too surprised that they just updated their links and continued to host it on their sites but I tried to email them about it. I got some automated responses. Some guys said that it is not possible to forbid other sites to host freeware in the United States (maybe they were right, what do I know? I'm from the other side of the World.) Most of them didn't respond at all and around 5 guys basically told me fuck off - and oh yeah, I did.

I felt used, and angry, and I knew I had to do something about this unjustice. I thought about hacking their sites and posting sodomy-scandals on wikipedia about their owners and stuff like that (but I didn't do it, it was someone else... no really)
But then I thought, Hey, most of these guys have some amateur frontpage-site or some badly used CMS with some crappy logo of a smiling dog or something. I can do that better. Much better. In fact, I had the system of a fully automated site with a webcrawler looking for .pads, autogenerated reviews and awards so people would link back to it suddenly right on my mind. And then I did it. I wouldn't say that I invented it but I didn't know of a similar site at the time. And yes, I cloned it to various domains.

Long story short, my network generates around 2500$ ad-revenue a month today, which is a lot of money over here, and I have a clear conscience. It is perfectly legal, I pay my taxes.
I just figured, why should I cry about people making money on the internet that way and waste my own talent making just some small games and tools and working 9-to-5 programming databases when I could not only be "one of them" but instead do it even better? You only live once and I can now spend money on things that enrich my and my family's life that I couldn't afford before. For me it's just the making-money-method-for-nerds of our days. If you are in front of the monitor hacking stuff anyway, you might as well make some bucks with it as long it's still possible.

Looks like I had to get that off my chest or something but I really don't look back. Now let me put my fireproof vest on while the flames strike upon me (from the people actually reading it before it gets modded down.)

No surprise

I'm not surprised. Some of the well-known awards aren't worth anything, either. Kind of like the televised award ceremonies of the entertainment industry. 15 years ago PC Magazine would give awards to just about anyone who cared to buy enough advertising in its pages. There's a lot of hype out there and people looking to do nothing but draw attention to themselves in their quest to sell advertising space.

Worthless no-name awards are to quality software as karaoke is to the entertainment industry.

Yep

I released a new version of one of my programs [mosasciim2.com] a couple weeks ago.. I did the usual submission to 1000 freeware sites (via robosoft) and most of the "awards" you get are sent as an auto reply!

They're looking for link-backs

I get those all the time for my company's software [mvpsoft.com] as well. In almost all cases, the HTML code provided for the "awards" contains a link back to the software download site. That's what they're looking for - a link-back to improve their Pagerank[tm]. What I do with them is I take the image, change it to greyscale so it doesn't clash with our site's design, scale it to a reasonable size, and host it locally, not linking to the site.

Awards do have the benefit of giving a product some appearance of legitimacy, so I like to display them, even if they're not as reputable as I'd like. If at all possible, however, I try to display awards that I know to be legitimate - such as TUCOWS - but getting products rated on the major download sites is a long, tedious process.

Convince everybody crap is useful...

... and they'll buy it. Even if it's crap. It worked for Microsoft Office*.

* Except Excel, Excel is pretty good, but everything else in Office is complete garbage.

I don't really give a rat's ass

whether some guy on teh Intarweb thought a program was really worth five stars or was a steaming sack of elephant feces. I can make that assessment for myself. The real problem is when websites start trying to draw in web hits by evaluating whether a program is free of spyware or not. Take Softpedia, for instance. Sure, they have lots of entries, and they claim to test each piece of software for spyware, but to date, I've never heard a straight and impartial answer on whether they're honest or on the take. They also spend a lot of time messing with their own Wikipedia entry to try to lend themselves further legitimacy, and I'm sure they're not the only ones.

There are other goods and services besides software that are "reviewed" by websites that are even more rife with corruption. Take web hosting, for example. I don't think there's a single web host reviewing website that isn't a shill for the web hosts being reviewed. In many cases, the top five or ten web hosts are all owned by the same guy.

This link

...was picked up by Weasel over at: http://sweasel.com/archives/501#comment-4327 [sweasel.com]
earlier today.

Good old trash award

I still remember when the gamesdomain.com was alive and they had the usual gold and silver awards. Still the best award was the picture of a cute bear handling the game cd as it was nuclear waste. That was the sign of reliable review site.

Update Your Resume!!

"Award-winning Software Engineer"

"...recognized by Peers."

Who did he submit to?

There are scores of download sites, maybe hundreds. Why assume they'll ALL trustworthy? Anybody can put up a download site.

I try to deal only with names that have been around a while - MajorGeeks, etc.

Did he submit to the known, recognized sites. Doesn't say so in TFA.

Re:Where's the download sites that "i" frequent?

According to the article he used another site, shady-sounding itself, to mass submit to a bunch of sites, and a fair deal of them did reject the "program". There's still hope for humanity in that there's a number of reputable sites doing the right thing, but like everything else aside from download sites, Sturgeon's law [wikipedia.org] applies. It remains to be seen how many sites accepted his submission through malice and cluelessness, respectively.

So, in other words, it's not the case that he didn't "put his worthless program into the darkest trenches of the internet"; he just didn't put it there *exclusively*.

Re:The internet called

Oh my God... it's full of scams...

Re:In other news today ..

I don't know why people always criticize Windows stability. I've never had a