Fortnite Creators are farming “Likes” and “Favorites” with dark patterns.
What, if anything, should Epic do?
Discovery is king on user-generated content (UGC) platforms, where a flood of content competes for attention. Manipulating discovery algorithms to promote your content has long been a strategy on everything from Youtube to App Stores to Yelp. Fortnite Creative has particularly poor discovery, with weak genre categories and practically no personalization. If a game can manage to get a spot in the coveted top rows, the organic exposure does wonders to bring players in and earn that juicy revenue share.
Recently, some Fortnite maps found a trick to boost their “Likes” and “Favorites” to the top of the discovery page. This video shows the method and its impact (4:17-5:52). But in case you can’t watch it, here’s a lower-fidelity explanation in text:
A lightning bolt item is shown to players in-game
In base Fortnite, this is a powerful and desirable weapon
Players interact with the lightning bolt, hoping to pick it up.
A pop-up appears, saying “Like & Favorite to Support!”
Players may interpret this as “I need to Like and Favorite in order to get the lightning bolt”
Note, the lightning bolt is not actually obtainable
This trick has boosts “Likes” and “Favorites” for the game, promoting discovery
“The Pit” added this lightning bolt on March 24, and shot up from #8 to #1 most favorited within 3 days.
It has since dropped back down, possibly due to other games adding this trick. “The Pit” currently sits at #5 as of April 5.
“The Pit” review farmed to a brief stint as #1
This innovation has caused quite a controversy among Fortnite influencers, who are calling it “abuse” and “fraud” and calling on Epic to ban the practice. Social media drama aside, should Epic do something about this? I think this basically breaks down into two questions:
Is review-farming harmful to the platform? (I think a little bit)
Are there enforceable policies to prevent it? (I don’t think so)
To clarify, when I say “review farming”, I am only referring to organic user nudges. While you can buy artificial reviews by paying for Instagram followers or 5-star app reviews, I think this is certainly fraud and not the object of the current controversy.
—
Review farming is ubiquitous on other platforms. Mobile apps often prompt users to review. Youtubers interject their videos with “Like, subscribe, and hit that little bell icon.” Restaurants sometimes offer discounts in exchange for a positive Yelp review. LinkedIn posts sometimes contain polls asking readers to respond with an emoji. All of these boost discovery algorithms to feature your content and drive new customers.
Is he actually curious, or is he just farming your engagement?
For platforms where reviews can be positive or negative (ex: mobile apps, Yelp), this could arguably improve the signal with a larger sample size. However, review farming techniques try to select for reviewers who will leave positive reviews. Many mobile apps first ask “are you enjoying this app?” and only prompt a review if the user responds positively. For unambiguously positive signals such as “Like” and “Subscribe”, this clearly skews results.
Platforms use reviews and “Likes” as signals to identify what content is high or low quality. If only a subset of reviews were boosted, this would certainly distort the signal and skew results in favor of the boosters. However, if everybody employs these techniques, then all reviews will be inflated, and this actually levels the playing field and removes the distortion. As long as the boosting is ubiquitous and uniform, then it doesn’t actually harm the quality signal. If everyone is boosted, then no one is.
In reality, review farming capabilities are not uniform. It is likely easier for a mobile game to nudge a positive review than a mobile banking app. With that said, as long as comparisons are made within-category, this problem should be mitigated.
Review farming in Fortnite Creative is relatively new and only employed by a few games. At the moment, the distortionary effects are quite strong. However, once this prompt to “Like & Favorite” becomes commonplace, things will settle down.
A secondary effect of review farming is an annoyance tax on the users. If every mobile app has a review farming pop-up and every Youtube video has a “like and subscribe” callout, this wastes a little bit of everyone’s time. In those contexts, the cost is mild. Games might offer more surface area for ear flicks though. In the lightning bolt example, the item presents itself as a power-up, but in reality is just a pop-up. These “dark patterns” are certainly jarring at first, but I think in time, users will become familiar with these interactions and learn to avoid them.
—
Even if you believe review farming is harmful, there are already some basic guardrails in place. You could imagine a mechanism where positive reviews grant power-ups or are required to access the game. This creates a scenario similar to “pay-to-win” where some entry cost is required to compete on a level playing field. However, Fortnite Creative does not allow the game to know which players have “Liked” the game, so this is not possible. Similarly, mobile apps do not know which users have left reviews, so they cannot grant players in-game perks for leaving positive reviews.
Content moderation on review farming is certainly possible. There is a gray area for what counts as harmful review farming. Are enticing lightning bolts “dark patterns”? What about just the words “Like & Favorite” appearing in the game? Or the image of a heart that evokes the notion of “Like”? Moderators’ time is costly and better spent looking for hate speech and pornography.
—
Fortnite Creative is still quite new. Basic techniques like review farming are only just getting introduced, and the community seems quite raw. I think there’s quite a lot of professionalization and optimization yet to occur in the space. I’m curious to see what other mainstays of UGC platforms become “controversial” introductions to Fortnite.
—
If you liked this content, be sure to like, subscribe, and hit that little bell icon!