Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the idiom says. In online communities, sometimes there’s even a more sincere form of flattery – users trying to abuse your site and the content in it. You discover abuse cases when you start to attract more users, have more content and appear higher in search results – but that’s also when abusive content and behavior can kill your momentum. Exactly at that point where even your best users start to complain that “things are not as they used to be”, you want to be able to maintain quality and stop sockpuppets, scammers and social media “experts” who mess with your reputation score.
We like to think about it sometimes as TTA – your Time To Abuse. For some, like Quora, abuse takes months to build. For others, like Apple’s Ping, only days.
This is why we started Signifyd, the anti virus for abusive behavior: through our joint experience fighting fraud and abuse in multiple scenarios, we can create a service that’s easy to integrate to, easy to operate, and provides quick results as it learns your system and improves with it. We’re excited to put our alpha website out for first customers to look at – come help your community thrive with us!
