[HN Gopher] Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
___________________________________________________________________
Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
Author : donohoe
Score : 601 points
Date : 2025-11-07 12:39 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sherwood.news)
(TXT) w3m dump (sherwood.news)
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Seems low, they need to pump those numbers up if they want to
| compete with the trp administration, russia or twittee.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| Hungarian ruling party is or was at some point the largest
| advertiser on Google in EU so yes, the refined recommendation
| machine has become the perfect polarization machine especially
| against demographics which tend to believe what they read and
| watch.
| random9749832 wrote:
| Scams seem like the norm in 2020s. Crypto, Quantum Computing
| startups, "AI" (LLMs), Amazon delivering fakes, electric
| vehicles (what happened to all electric by 2030?). Yesterday I
| saw that the Playstation Store started doing "personalised
| discounts" where they will now discount the same game at
| different rates for different people within the same country
| without explicitly telling people.
|
| Someone recently even tried to attempt scamming me when buying
| a burger by telling me if I want certain toppings without
| telling me it will cost more. Apparently now have to play mind
| games when buying a burger.
| miyuru wrote:
| Original Reuters article:
| https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
| mrweasel wrote:
| That probably depends on your definition of a scam, but it seems
| fairly low. Many products and services advertised online just
| skirts the border of being scams or fraud.
| chrischen wrote:
| Agreed. At best most of the stuff I ended up buying from an
| Instagram ad turned out to be oversold or overpromised and
| underdelivered. While not a scam outright, it's sort of
| training me to avoid buying anything from ads...
| piva00 wrote:
| It got so bad that even non-tech savvy people around me
| learnt to do a lot of research about any product shown on
| Instagram ads.
|
| To me any product advertised on Instagram, or through
| YouTubers sponsorships, have become synonymous with
| overpromised bullshit if not outright scams. Every single
| time I see a sponsorship deal on a YouTube video I do some
| research just to validate it, and the vast majority of it are
| outright shitty products.
|
| It's been working great as a signal of what products _not_ to
| buy.
| mrweasel wrote:
| One of my theories is that there isn't actually enough honest
| companies buying ad space to satisfy the shareholders in
| companies like Alphabet or Meta. If they actually care to
| also filter out the ads for junk products and services, there
| would probably be a minor collapse in the industry.
| chrischen wrote:
| Honest companies are priced out by scammy companies, and as
| long as these companies share the profits they are totally
| fine profiting off scams. They make more money off the
| scams, simply put.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| There is an entire network of "get rick quick just by my pdf"
| intagramers, who peddle a pdf teaching you how to find a
| chinese product, make a website, and then drop ship that
| chinese product for 3x the cost to unsuspecting buyers.
|
| Probably 75% of products you see on instagram ads, you can go
| find on temu for their actual cost, usually at 80% discount.
| zahlman wrote:
| > Probably 75% of products you see on instagram ads, you
| can go find on temu for their actual cost, usually at 80%
| discount.
|
| But when you _do_ buy it on Temu, is it even a legitimate
| product?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| It's the same product.
| zahlman wrote:
| I understand that. Doesn't answer the question.
| LtWorf wrote:
| There's lots of legit stuff on temu
| wslh wrote:
| > That probably depends on your definition of a scam, but it
| seems fairly low.
|
| That probably depends on your definition of a scam but I'd
| argue we need to resynchronize that definition. They are scams,
| because the people behind them know what they're saying is
| plainly false, and they exploit the explosion of digital
| networks (like ads) to spread those lies. In the 20th century,
| the channels for scams were far narrower and easier to
| pinpoint.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Those are the other 90% of Meta revenue. Pure criminal fraud is
| 10%.
| croisillon wrote:
| i came to say that, even outdoor advertising probably gets 10
| or 20% revenue from snake oil
| AbstractH24 wrote:
| And what percentage of infomericals and other off-peek TV
| advertising is in the grey area around scams?
| balderdash wrote:
| I wonder what their definition of scammy is? I bet it's pretty
| narrow.
| procaryote wrote:
| It catches abouth 10% of scams ;)
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Probably limited to strictly criminal scams so as to avoid
| liability.
| cjonas wrote:
| At least 50% of the YouTube promoted videos I get are crypto
| currency scams where some paid actor walks you though deploying
| an eth contract that empties your wallet. I report every one and
| nothing changes :(
| Kelteseth wrote:
| Same. About half of Youtube ads that I get on my AppleTV (no
| adblock there sadly) are now AI generated scam products.
| iso1631 wrote:
| My TV has ad block for youtube. I pay 20 minutes salary per
| month and see no adverts at all, on TV, on phone, on
| computer.
|
| I never understand why well-paid HN commentators refuse to
| pay for their entertainment.
|
| On the web at large, sure use an ad blocker, there's no
| choice there. There is on youtube though.
| ruszki wrote:
| I think it really depends on how much you use it. For
| example, there is no way that I would pay for Facebook. It
| annoys me greatly that I'm forced to use it a few times per
| year, and I have to sell all of my data for it, but
| unfortunately I don't pay just to avoid data gathering
| about me, because it happens anyway, no matter what I do.
|
| But I pay happily for YouTube, because I use it daily, and
| my home country's propaganda was annoying enough to make it
| worth.
| phantasmish wrote:
| Paying Google to _not_ attempt to scam me is... not
| something I plan to do.
| grayhatter wrote:
| > I never understand why well-paid HN commentators refuse
| to pay for their entertainment.
|
| People don't want to pay (help) people they don't like.
| YouTube ads do not feel fair, they feel manipulative and
| unethical. It's expected that most people wouldn't want to
| willingly engage with that kind of asshattery.
|
| Contrast that with platforms like twitch. I'd say the
| average twitch viewer (that interacts with streams/chats)
| has a slightly negative view of Twitch. But many will still
| willingly donate dozens of subs to streamers they like.
| This removes ads for other people, not themselves.
|
| People think YouTube is greedy and untrustworthy. Why would
| you willingly feed that machine?
| ryandrake wrote:
| I don't pay because it feels like paying protection money
| to the mafia. "Here's an annoyance/danger we created for
| you. If you pay us, we'll stop doing it."
| HeWhoLurksLate wrote:
| on the other hand, it's how their business model is able
| to work? People get wayyyy more views on YouTube than
| they do on Patreon or federated platforms or Nebula or
| Floatplane or or or or or or or
| r0fl wrote:
| It's crazy how bad it has gotten and some channels have like
| 10 ads if it's a long enough video
|
| YouTube premium lite has been a game changer. Otherwise I
| would have given up on watching on Apple TV
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Signs of collapse
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| For some reason all the YouTube ads on my TV are very very
| normal ads for well known companies and products.
|
| As soon as I disable my adblocker on my PC though I only get
| fake scam ads.
| cryptoegorophy wrote:
| And sadly I have to compete with them trying to sell physical
| products on YouTube. Just no way
| jasonlotito wrote:
| For what it's worth, I see no crypto videos. YouTube recommends
| stuff I find enjoyable (lots of sketch comedy, TTRPG videos,
| interesting documentary style stuff, BTS on video game
| development, etc). I really have to wonder if your tastes align
| with crypto currency scams.
|
| That being said, I am paying for Premium, so I wonder if you
| are, and if you are blocking ads.
| infecto wrote:
| We are talking about ads and promoted videos. Nothing to do
| with what it is recommending unless I am entirely conflating
| the root of this subject. If that is true, then of course you
| would never have seen these as a premium user.
|
| Scam videos are the chum box ads of the video world. Usually
| the lowest cost ads and so if you block tracking or are
| viewing a video in a private session you will have the
| highest chance of hitting these ads.
| mavhc wrote:
| Only see ads when watching youtube via chromecast, but
| they're all from real brands, holiday companies, cars,
| google pixel, etc
| infecto wrote:
| And? YouTube web absolutely has ads and if they have not
| built a model on your user you will absolutely get the
| chum ads like scams. I am not sure what you're trying to
| tell us.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > I am not sure what you're trying to tell us
|
| Gotcha. So you are ignorant of why people are commenting.
|
| The OP was talking about seeing 50% scam crypto ads. Our
| responses were to provide a comparison. Not to say that
| it doesn't happen, but that 50% scam crypto ads are not
| the norm for everyone. It's helpful to have that
| comparison when providing anecdotal information.
|
| No one is saying those ads don't happen, only that it's
| probably not normal.
|
| Next time, instead of being unnecessarily antagonistic,
| admit to being ignorant and ask.
| infecto wrote:
| Please don't start drama where nothing exists. You were
| confused and I pointed out that 1) I believe we are
| talking about promoted, which is paid, videos not the
| recommendation engine. These of course are not purely ads
| but are paid for. And 2) that these chum style ads and
| promoted videos have a much higher prevalence with folks
| that block tracker where user profiles have not been
| built. It's the chum ads of the video world.
|
| I am simply asking what is the point of the response to
| my comment. Ads of all degree exist but these scams do
| exist in a pretty large % of the ads shown but perhaps
| much lower dollar value since they get shown to profiles
| without a tangible viewer model.
|
| Next time, instead of using inflammatory language please
| just slow down and reread or have a more thoughtful
| discussion. Thanks.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > We are talking about ads and promoted videos.
|
| Ad and "promoted" videos are different in this context. And
| the OP was mentioning promoted videos, not ads.
|
| > At least 50% of the YouTube promoted videos
|
| I've never seen a "promoted video" (whatever that is
| specfically) that deals with crypto. Note: Premium users
| can still see promoted videos. I imagine these are more
| targetted to people who would want to watch these sorts of
| videos.
|
| > Nothing to do with what it is recommending unless I am
| entirely conflating the root of this subject.
|
| I was referring to recommended not in a strictly technical
| sense, but in a way any normal person would use the term.
| e.g. Recommended videos meaning: All the videos youtube
| shows me that it thinks I might want to watch. Whether
| these are officially "Recommended" or "Subscribed" or
| "Promoted" or whatever, I don't know.
|
| What I do know is that I don't see any crypto scam videos
| or ads.
|
| > If that is true, then of course you would never have seen
| these as a premium user.
|
| Apparently, that's not the case.
|
| tl;dr: We are talking about videos like normal people. You
| are wrong.
| cjonas wrote:
| No... these are "paid promoted" videos that show up in
| your feed[0]. They are different from ads that roll when
| a video is playing. Example screenshot I found on reddit
| [1].
|
| - video from screenshot[2]
|
| - coe from video[3]
|
| I'm guessing I get served these because I typically
| interact with them because I'm curious to read the code
| they link to see how obvious the scam is. It's also fun
| to reverse face search the actors and find them on
| fiverr.
|
| [0](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/141808?hl=e
| n) [1](https://imgur.com/ckAxmuk)
| [2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvsGCvw9AFM)
| [3](https://pastecode.io/s/pcp4ao4q)
| infecto wrote:
| As I originally stated I am happy to be corrected but I
| don't think you understand it either. Promoted videos are
| ads. Premium removes in-stream ads, not in-feed ones.
| They're paid placements, not recommendations.
|
| And again as a premium user you won't see chum style feed
| or promoted videos because premium removed the feed style
| and promoted will be more tailored to your preferences.
|
| Which coming full circle leads us back to my original
| statement. If they don't have a good user profile for
| you, you will get lower cost ads (promoted videos) which
| generally are going to be the chum box of ads, crypto,
| magic formula powders, get rich quick.
| timpera wrote:
| Same for me, and the worst thing is that they always take 3
| days to review my report and delete the scam.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Ironically, one of the potentially greatest uses of AI, and
| it doesn't seem to be getting applied at all.
| JohnConnorX99 wrote:
| Why do you provide free labor to Google by reporting those ads?
| Just block the adds...
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Even better, block them _and_ click them _all_ with the
| Adnauseam extension.
| lm28469 wrote:
| I get 50% AI generated tai chi promising strength gain, weight
| loss and enlightenment, the other 50% israel sponsored ads
| assuring me people in gaza are not starving at all and
| completely healthy
| ben_w wrote:
| Had a few of those too.
|
| Mostly, I'm getting things like German ads for my local
| German supermarket (that I would've gone to anyway without
| the ad) dubbed badly into English with an AI that can't tell
| how to pronounce the "." in a price, plus a Berlin-specific
| "pay less rent" company that I couldn't use even if I wanted
| to because I don't rent.
|
| But when I get 30 seconds of ads a minute into a video that
| had 30 seconds of ads before I could start watching... I
| don't care what the rest of the video was going to be about,
| I don't want to waste my life with a 30:60:30:... pattern of
| adverts and "content" whose sole real purpose is now to keep
| me engaged with the adverts. (This is also half of why I
| don't bother going to Facebook, every third post is an ad,
| although those ads can't even tell if I'm a boy or a girl,
| which language I speak, nor what my nationality is, and the
| first-party suggested groups are just as bad but grosser as
| they recently suggested I join groups for granny dating, zit
| popping, and Elon Musk).
| bluedino wrote:
| Remember broadcast TV, early in the morning or late at night?
|
| Infomercials for all kinds of scams from buying real estate
| with zero down, crap products that didn't work...
| RajT88 wrote:
| It's still like that! Late Night Broadcast TV still exists
| and is as weird as it ever was!
|
| Arguably weirder, since stuff like this is on sometimes:
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15737708/
|
| It's a low-budget horror host show which was made for
| streaming, and coincidentally ended up on the air late on
| Friday nights.
| asadotzler wrote:
| None of those scams were intermixed with popular legitimate
| content. If Facebook had a tab at the top called "Scams and
| Other Nonsense" and you clicked on that and it had a bunch
| of scammy content, that would be an equivalent to late
| night infomercials. But Meta doesn't do that. It mixes the
| scams in with all of its popular and non-scam content so
| you cannot easily tell it's scammy. Worse, it targets
| people vulnerable to those scams by tapping directly into
| their interests and sentiments in a way TV never could.
|
| You are making a silly argument here. There's no
| equivalence at all.
| yard2010 wrote:
| Haha it goes both ways!
| iammrpayments wrote:
| I get a lot of ads from unicef asking money to send good to
| Gaza so I'm not sure how they target users
| zahlman wrote:
| > israel sponsored ads assuring me people in gaza are not
| starving at all and completely healthy
|
| I've never seen anything like this and I see the reverse
| quite a bit.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| I only ever see "Pray for the people of Israel" ads which
| is basically thinly veiled "fuck Palestine" messaging
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| if only there were some websites, an Ads Library or Ads
| Transparency Center of some kind, where people could
| easily verify any or all of this
| vkou wrote:
| Would anything change if there were?
| progval wrote:
| There is: https://adstransparency.google.com/
| colechristensen wrote:
| I pay for YouTube so all I get is paid creator promotions for
| VPNs and Squarespace unless it's someone being sent a free
| thing in exchange for a review
|
| Normalize paying for things instead of selling your attention
| to the highest bidder.
| cryptoegorophy wrote:
| Buying YouTube premium is the single best online decision
| one can make.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| So, now we should all pay money to avoid being advertised
| scams?
|
| That's a pretty good scam.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Normalize paying for things instead of selling your
| attention to the highest bidder._
|
| But you just admitted that you pay for YouTube and it shows
| you creator promotions. You are literally paying to see
| ads, then telling people not to do the same.
|
| Unless there's some subtlety I'm missing here. I haven't
| been on YouTube in at least a decade. I see no difference
| between a blogger pushing a VPN and Google showing an ad
| for a VPN.
|
| The big draw for cable TV was that you could watch TV
| without ads. Then ads started appearing on cable and people
| said it's OK, because the content is higher quality and not
| available elsewhere. Then that changed, and now there is no
| difference between broadcast, cable/satellite, and
| streaming services. Except that you don't have to pay for
| broadcast. (Yet. It's coming.)
| jldugger wrote:
| > Unless there's some subtlety I'm missing here. I
| haven't been on YouTube in at least a decade.
|
| Youtube Premium is fighting back against the sponsor
| segments with this "commonly skipped segment" feature.
| You hit a fast forward button and it automatically skips
| ahead to the place most people jumped to.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| A year or two ago somebody asked Adam Ragusea about
| whether this type of skipping causes problems for
| creators - and what he said was basically that if viewers
| see the brand name / call to action at the end of the ad,
| that's mostly what matters to sponsors.
|
| No idea if that's been borne out in practice, though.
| stickfigure wrote:
| If you don't like youtubers with sponsors, don't watch
| those videos. Not all do.
|
| Personally I pay for youtube and I don't mind the sponsor
| sections. They're easy to fast forward through and income
| goes directly to the creator. Youtube doesn't take a cut.
| These are the only kinds of ads that work on me - in the
| rare case that the product is something I'm interested
| in, I go out of my way to make sure I use the creator's
| link.
|
| The long story short is that there are creators I like
| and I want them to devote all their time to making more
| content. I'm glad some of them get sponsors. For many I
| just straight up give them money on Patreon.
| macintux wrote:
| > But you just admitted that you pay for YouTube and it
| shows you creator promotions.
|
| It's easy to skip creator promotions. You can also choose
| not to engage with creators that conduct ads.
|
| I'm fine paying YouTube not to force me to watch their
| ads. I can deal with product placement on my own.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >Unless there's some subtlety I'm missing here.
|
| I've gotten rid of 90% of the ads by paying for YouTube,
| the rest of the ads I skip by jumping forward in the
| video which is annoying but only a little OR by being
| legitimately interested in what the person has to say if
| they're reviewing a product which has been in some way
| paid for. I'm also just fine with someone promoting their
| own merch or patreon which I am sometimes actually
| interested in.
|
| The subtlety I don't get why you're missing is I now have
| very much reduced ad exposure and the rest I do have is
| entirely controllable.
| r0fl wrote:
| YouTube on Apple TV was one of the last places I saw ads. Ad
| blockers on browser and iPhone and all other streaming
| providers I pay for have no ads
|
| Paying for YouTube premium lite (I think it's new) has been the
| best thing in ages! The toxic ads are finally gone!
| piva00 wrote:
| YouTube Premium Lite used to exist years ago, then they
| discontinued it in 2024 (I know because I used to be a very
| happy subscriber), now they brought it back but only in a few
| selected markets[0].
|
| Google products' bullshit as usual, I never needed/wanted
| YouTube Music and the other bloat they wanted to force me to
| pay for, I was happily paying to not have ads...
|
| [0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6307365?sjid=93
| 860...
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| What if you take YouTube to court
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Ideally this but Section 230 guarantees that you will lose.
|
| The laws need to be changed.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| I don't know if ads count as content posted by users.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| It does. Advertisers are also users and ads are generated
| by them.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Then yeah it's a stupid law.
| vkou wrote:
| Changed to what? Should dang become legally responsible for
| any of the bad legal advice I've been giving people on this
| forum? Should Murdoch go to prison for the lies in the paid
| advertising that Fox anchors and opinion wonks are doing
| every day?
|
| Let me take things back a step - it's nearly impossible to
| hold _people who are lying_ accountable. Surely the
| platform bears less responsibility than the liars on it?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I don't know but I think there is a room for compromise.
| If you post illegal things online and the site cannot
| identify you so that you can be held accountable then the
| site should be held accountable. As it stands people are
| harmed and nobody is liable so we end up in this
| situation.
| vkou wrote:
| There's a simple way to do that. Legislate a requirement
| for ID, the users will provide it to the platform, the
| platform will provide it to law enforcement when
| requested.
|
| Kind of like how South Korea (where you need a national
| ID to access digital services) is doing, or the UK is
| trying to do with their ID push.
|
| (And then who wants this could go have a fight with the
| people who _don 't_ want this.)
| reaperducer wrote:
| _The laws need to be changed._
|
| My how the worm turns.
|
| HN users used to herald that law as the best thing since
| Betty White (who was older than sliced bread).
|
| Without 230, there would be no YouTube. No Facebook. No
| Instagram. No social media. Forums would likely have gone
| extinct. Half of the tech industry and a good chunk of the
| jobs that people on HN do would never have happened.
|
| Now people on HN want to get rid of the law. People who are
| too young to know what it was like before that protection
| set the internet free to create and collaborate.
|
| I despise social media. But demonizing 230 just shows a
| basic lack of knowledge of history, economics, and the
| reasons it was created.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| > Without 230, there would be no YouTube. No Facebook. No
| Instagram. No social media.
|
| Sounds like a good thing to me?
|
| > Half of the tech industry and a good chunk of the jobs
| that people on HN do would never have happened.
|
| And it would be good. It's not like we do any real work.
| I know I don't.
| deathanatos wrote:
| Well, give us the argument, then, instead of the mere
| allegation that history is frowning at us. Why is it not
| possible to change the law to permit platforms to not be
| liable for _speech_ of their users, particularly when
| users are engaging in a platform in the capacity of
| communicating and exchanging information, (i.e., 230 as
| it is today) but not permit _advertisers_ from displaying
| ads which contain blatant fraud, for which the
| advertising platform is profiting off that fraud?
| themafia wrote:
| > Forums would likely have gone extinct.
|
| Usenet was a thing. A huge thing. There was zero danger
| that it would go "extinct" due to the lack of extralegal
| protections.
|
| > But demonizing 230 just shows a basic lack of knowledge
| of history, economics, and the reasons it was created.
|
| You're ignoring the context. Section 230 was created when
| the Internet was nascent and we were trying to encourage
| broader /business/ investment into the technology.
|
| Now that that investment has occurred and most consumers
| _prefer_ to do business on the Internet, whereas the
| opposite was previously true, we no longer need the
| _additional_ protections for hugely profitable
| businesses.
|
| Aside from that is there some reason we can't _modify_
| the law to bring it more in line with citizen
| expectations? We're bound to the decisions of the past
| absolutely? Please...
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| It's because google has no profile on you, likely because you
| block all tracking. Which is fine, but at least understand that
| it's not the norm.
|
| Normal non-tech users (from watching youtube at friends houses
| or at my parents), mostly get ads for fabric softener and cat
| litter.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yeah, it's wild how poorly the hackernewses understand this.
| If the ad platform has few signals for targeting, but it does
| have the available signals of you're using a weird VPN or
| tor, and a weird user agent on an uncommon platform, then
| it's just going to assume you're a crypto loser like the
| other people sharing those traits.
| deathanatos wrote:
| ... I'll bite, then. I not only accept cookies in this
| case, I'm _logged in._ I get these same cryptocurrency scam
| ads.
| reaperducer wrote:
| If Google doesn't know what ad to show me, why not show no
| ad, instead of a scam?
|
| Does trillion-dollar Google desperately need the 31/2C/ of
| revenue the scam ad generates?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| It's not that Google doesn't know what to show you, it's
| that no advertiser outbids the scam ad for your 30 seconds
| of attention.
|
| To put it another way, you have next to no value, and it's
| only by the goodwill of Google that they even let you on
| the platform.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Goodwill doesn't explain why Google Ads will show scam
| ads on other people's web sites.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Most FAANG executive and engineers use premium plans or
| AdBlockers, they probably don't care or even notice how
| dangerous their products are getting.
| yard2010 wrote:
| I dunno,I saw a video of mister Elon Musk himself telling me
| without twitching a muscle in his face except his lips to put
| all my money on his new crypto venture. Seems pretty legit to
| me.
| jrmg wrote:
| I'm buying his new heater that will heat my house in minutes
| with virtually no electricity usage!
|
| Home Depot doesn't want me to know about it, but I saw the
| ad!
| cuu508 wrote:
| protip, install uBlock Origin - no more ads in Youtube
| getnormality wrote:
| As my children become old enough to have more unfettered internet
| access, I plan to tell them the lessons of my experience: that
| all online ads are for products that range from disappointing to
| fraudulent, so do your best to completely ignore them. I would
| hope that every parent does the same and we end up with a
| generation that dries up the revenue for this sick racket.
|
| I suppose the next move by advertisers will be corrupting all the
| other metrics of quality that I rely on. At that point, paywalled
| services like Consumer Reports (which has its own massive
| limitations) may be the only relatively authentic signals of
| quality left in the digital world.
|
| A convergence to that equilibrium can be predicted based on it
| having already happened in the financial advice industry. The
| dictum that "if it's free, you're the product" is just as true of
| old-school in-person finance as it is of the digital world,
| except in finance the exploitative free system has been carefully
| carved out by decades of industry-honed regulation.
| AbstractH24 wrote:
| Do you think your kids are old enough to internalize that? I
| assume they are somewhere around pre-teen.
|
| I don't have any kids, so asking because I don't know and am
| curious.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think even more general lessons are appropriate: "Anyone
| approaching you trying to sell you something, is selling
| garbage." which includes ads but also other forms of
| unsolicited commercial communication. Or "Anyone approaching
| you, when you can't figure out what it is they want, is likely
| trying to sell you garbage." You need to have your shields way
| up these days.
| getnormality wrote:
| I have never forgotten this since the day I naively sat
| through a meandering two hour pitch from hell for James
| Hardie siding.
|
| Honestly, in every area of my life where I have to rely on
| others, someone has tried to grift me at least once. And
| that's only the cases where I have definitive evidence.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Scam ads and the sale of banned goods. They don't do anything
| about it because they aren't liable.
|
| Repeal section 230
|
| If you place these ads you should be held accountable. Meta has a
| duty to know who they're taking money from.
| r0fl wrote:
| Not sure why you got downvoted so hard!
|
| Banks can't take money from drug cartels. Why can meta and
| google take money from crypto scams ripping people off
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Repealing section 230 scares the users here but a lot of
| these problems stem from a lack of liability.
|
| They say the people placing ads should be liable. This sounds
| reasonable but in practice they're anon overseas and can't be
| held accountable but Meta will still take their money!
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Repeal section 230
|
| SS230 protects Meta from liability for user-generated content.
| Ads are not user-generated content. So repealing it would do
| absolutely nothing in this case.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Advertisers are business users and the ads are generated by
| them.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Naah, I'd rather not go back to the days of noted penny-stock
| scammer Jordan Belfort suing every online forum to hide
| evidence of his crimes as "defamation", thank you very much.
|
| Furthermore, the precedent that CDA 230 was intended to
| overturn would not help much. Fraud isn't defamation, and
| there's all sorts of lying you can do in advertising that
| doesn't rise to the level of fraud in the eyes of the law. So
| the courts might just decline to extend the Belfort precedent
| to the advertising business altogether.
|
| What you want is a law that explicitly says "CDA 230 does not
| apply to fraudulent advertising", explicitly defining
| advertising as any speech that the speaker is paying to publish
| on the platform. This neatly exempts all the same speech that
| CDA 230 was intended to protect while still allowing you to sue
| the shit out of Facebook[0] for taking money from scammers.
|
| tl;dr Free Speech should only apply to free speech. Money
| speech is not Free Speech.
|
| [0] It is always ethical to deadname corporations.
| baggachipz wrote:
| I would posit that nearly 100% of their revenue comes from scams
| of one sort or another.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| you must work in adtech!
| notahacker wrote:
| Certainly puts the PS3m lawsuit settlement with Martin Lewis (UK
| consumer financial advice guru who sued because he's the go-to
| fake endorsement of any scam product targeting Britons using
| Facebook ads) into perspective.
|
| No wonder scammers are still spamming his likeness all over
| Facebook paid ads even though it's technically _trivial_ for them
| to algorithmically flag it
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| The news here per https://arstechnica.com/tech-
| policy/2025/11/bombshell-report... is that Meta set an internal
| policy that scammers above 0.15% of Meta's revenue must be
| protected from any flagging. It's not a technical challenge.
| It's something they desire to maintain and have codified.
| joering2 wrote:
| This just came out yesterday but what the hell man! its like
| only keeping your top cocaine sellers in hope less of your
| people on the streets, less possibility to get caught.
| Everyone else out.
|
| How the heck are they not being raided and at least
| temporarily shut down at this exact moment? No wonder Trump
| is best friend of Mark as of recently... it really does
| scream "guilty".
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| > Despite those efforts, this spring, Meta's safety team
| "estimated that the company's platforms were involved in a
| third of all successful scams in the US,"
|
| 1 third of all scams, crazy.
| macNchz wrote:
| Alongside a password manager and keeping things up to date, using
| an ad blocker is truly a foundational security practice these
| days. The big advertising players simply have all of the wrong
| incentives to control this problem. They _could_ massively reduce
| the volume of scams advertised on their networks, but it'd be
| worse for them on two fronts: they'd have to pay for more
| moderation, _and_ they'd lose billions in revenue in the process.
| Shoulder surfing while a non-savvy user browses Facebook or
| YouTube without an ad blocker and engages with obviously
| fraudulent ads is painful.
| redwood wrote:
| Is there a top recommended ad blocker that has strong security
| Bona fides you recommend for android?
| c0brac0bra wrote:
| Brave Browser
| coldpie wrote:
| Use Firefox and install the uBlock Origin extension in
| Firefox.
|
| I also suggest turning on the Annoyances and Cookie Banner
| filters in the uBO settings. They get rid of many popups.
|
| Blocking in-app ads is a whole other ballgame. I don't have
| any suggestions for that.
| macNchz wrote:
| I don't use Android, but I understand uBlock Origin works
| with Firefox on it, which is kind of the gold standard on
| desktop, given the other browsers now restrict extensions in
| ways that make ad blockers less effective.
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| Yes, this works very well. The element zapper interface is
| a little challenging or I intuitive, but just using a
| default block list is so much better than using the
| internet without any ad blocking.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| Besides Firefox and unlock, I recommend rethink and the block
| lists, it will block ads in other apps.
| Larrikin wrote:
| You can actively poison your ad profile by using AdNauseum,
| which clicks on all the ads and then throws away the
| response. The actual ads are still hidden using UBO under the
| hood.
|
| You can also use AdGuard+Tailscale to get DNS blocking of all
| ads on all devices. Tailscale will let you block in app ads,
| even on your phone even when on the cell network.
|
| I combine both to block as much as possible.
| Noaidi wrote:
| Get Mullvad VPN. It has ad and many other DNS blockers built
| into the app.
| asadotzler wrote:
| uBlock Origin with Firefox. Nothing blocks as well, or from
| as trustworthy a provider.
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| I don't see how the yearly tech support I do with my parents at
| Christmas will not one day converge to an outright ban of the
| internet. I am now demoing the level of sofistication of AI
| powered scams, telling them that it is now entirely possible
| they will get a VIDEO CALL from me that's not actually me
| asking for God knows what in a very convincing way using my
| face and voice. I am scared and this close to setting up a
| secret passphrase in case they need to tell me appart from a
| clone.
| cj wrote:
| My guess is the already-existing trend towards walled gardens
| will simply continue. When a public space is dangerous,
| people retreat into "safe" enclosed spaces.
|
| - "Never download anything unless it's from the Apple App
| Store"
|
| - "Never buy anything unless you're on amazon.com"
|
| - "Dont use the internet outside of ChatGPT"
| deaux wrote:
| A little ironic when Amazon is filled to the brim with
| scams.
| nxpnsv wrote:
| Yeah, I'm def having more success using the Never buy
| anything from Amazon rule...
| da02 wrote:
| What have been your alternative(s) to Amazon?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Local stores, or manufactures' own retail sites, for me.
| Been burned too many times by Amazon for them to ever
| regain my trust.
| ZiiS wrote:
| Where the consumer ends up out of pocket? I realise
| scamming ligament sellers and brands is endemic; but it
| is still a safe place to buy as far as I can tell?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Where the consumer ends up out of pocket?
|
| A lot of consumers have no idea they got a cheap
| imitation. Counterfeiters have gotten quite good, and in
| many cases the scam is "falls apart in a year instead of
| ten", not "it's completely non-functional".
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| Out of pocket? Perhaps not, especially if it "works" as
| intended. Putting your life in danger and house burnt
| down though? More likely than you realize.
|
| Could I interest you in some very durable car fuses that
| don't actually trip?
| https://youtu.be/B90_SNNbcoU?si=5QUpXUHwSlZj4i4G
|
| Or perhaps radioactive protection pendants are your
| thing? https://shungite-c60.com/quantum-pendant/
|
| Could I interest you in some Amazon choice firecrackers?
| https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/10/business/amazonbasics-
| ele...
|
| Let's not even mention the health and nutrient products
| that make the FDA shudder.
|
| Sure, you can ask for your money back, and flag the
| seller. But new sellers pop up selling the same crap all
| over again with a new name and company ID. This is all
| while real sellers of real (and safety certified
| products) get pressured by Amazon and dissuaded from
| taking their business off platform.
|
| Avoid Amazon if at all possible. It's not good for
| consumers nor sellers, and it's keeping a leach on online
| retail.
|
| Most countries have laws around liability of sold
| products. This is often set up to fall on the importer of
| said product. Amazon Europe (and perhaps USA) is doing
| something very funny with these laws; You, the consumer,
| is the importer. If your house burns out, then it's
| between you and a random chineese ghost companny that
| just disappeared into smoke. Amazon is "handling the
| import paperwork for you", and not taking liability for
| anything.
| berkes wrote:
| Not sure how this works on Amazon, but Bol.com (dutch
| "amazon competitor") sells a lot of crap too. Stuff that
| sometimes has the images and literal description taken
| from e.g. aliexpress. People literally re-sell stuff from
| chinese webshops on there with profit.
|
| Technically, on Bol.com, a EU-platform, EU consumer
| protection is in place. So if a product breaks within
| guarantee terms, is dangerous, never gets delivered etc.
| the person re-selling is responsible. They are importing
| "illegal" goods and could even go to jail for it.
|
| So, technically, that premium price brings me me the
| assurance that I am protected by EU consumer laws. That a
| TV I buy can be returned, is CE certified, won't explode
| and isn't a 12" TV pictured in a tiny living-room on the
| images on unpacking.
|
| Except these products often don't meet EU criteria,
| aren't adhering to (food, safety, chidren protection) EU
| laws and money-back is often hard because the re-seller
| just dissapears. In the last case, Bol.com will step up
| and refund, because they have to. But for the rest, they
| plead innocence: It wasn't us that sold illegal goods, it
| was that reseller from which we skim a lot of fees.
|
| The incentives are just wrong. And the solution simple:
| Make platforms by proxy legally responsible for their
| "users". Resellers in my case. Or advertisers in the case
| of TLA.
|
| If some-guy sells a TV that explodes, and can't be found
| or held responsible, then make Bol.com responsible. Let
| their CEO go to jail in the very worst case. Let's see
| how fast they solve this.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Not sure how this works on Amazon, but Bol.com (dutch
| "amazon competitor") sells a lot of crap too. Stuff that
| sometimes has the images and literal description taken
| from e.g. aliexpress._
|
| That is bog-standard drop-shipping. Every open online
| market had a pile of that. It isn't that they've taken
| the images from AliExpress it is that both sets of
| sellers are drop-shipping product from the same source or
| collection of sources (or buying and reselling though
| that is much less common as it means managing stock) and
| the images come & other sales material come from there.
|
| _> So, technically, that premium price brings me me the
| assurance that I am protected by EU consumer laws._
|
| When comparing Amazon (UK) or eBay to the sellers on, for
| example, Facebook, often there isn't a premium, Amazon
| (or AliExpress, or similar) are often _cheaper_ than
| sellers on social media and /or advertising via adverts
| on YouTube and their ilk. Those sellers will often try to
| make the product out to be some unique high quality item
| with a price to match (which of course is heavily
| discounted if you buy in the next hour or two), and if
| you check your preferred general marketplace you'll find
| several people with the same thing, often with the same
| images, making no such pretence of it being unique or
| high-value, at a price noticeably cheaper than the seller
| from SM/etc. I assume this is the same with Amazon in
| other jurisdictions and other marketplaces like Boi.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > If some-guy sells a TV that explodes, and can't be
| found or held responsible, then make Bol.com responsible.
|
| Shouldn't the manufacturer have some liability?
| dspillett wrote:
| Amazon has the advantage over some company I don't have
| experience with, of that I know returns are pretty easy
| and generally not questioned at all (at least for me,
| long-standing account in the UK, with infrequent returns,
| it might vary for new accounts, those who return more
| than they keep, or those in countries with worse consumer
| rights at the legally enforced level).
|
| My two most recent examples: a couple of rolls of 3D
| printer filament that looked nothing like as advertised
| (bad sales images there I think, rather than a comingled-
| with-a-cheap-scammy-alternative issue) which was taken
| back unquestioned for same-day full refund despite one of
| them being opened, and a couple of years ago a
| replacement drive for my media RAID array that, while the
| right drive and not, as far as I could tell, counterfeit,
| certainly wasn't new/unused which is what I ordered,
| which again was taken back with no quibble or cost (other
| than my time of course).
|
| There _are_ problems dealing with Amazon sellers, but
| those can mostly be avoided with care and a healthy dose
| of cynicism (to avoid ordering crap in the first place).
| I 'd never buy some things from there though: safety
| equipment, for instance.
| philistine wrote:
| Your experience with no questions asked returns is not
| what everybody is experiencing these days.
| dspillett wrote:
| The most recent was recent: about two months ago.
|
| Though as mentioned, I find it very easy to believe this
| will vary by location and account for various reasons.
| ghaff wrote:
| I order a _lot_ from Amazon--especially over the past
| year for house-related reasons. I just haven 't had
| (touch wood) the apparently pervasive problems that some
| people seem to experience. Maybe I'm more selective about
| not picking whatever is cheapest regardless of brand that
| I've never heard of.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| My preferred brands on Amazon are Qweasdooo, I999admm,
| and Growthyy. Fantastic stuff at unbeatable prices! /s
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Those sound like pretty legit brands, last time I checked
| (admittedly a while ago) the slop was mostly [A-Z]{6}
| georgemcbay wrote:
| Yeah there were entire categories of products I'd never
| buy again on Amazon because of the scams and the list got
| so large that I cancelled Prime a while ago.
|
| The most common one I've run into is third party sellers
| taking items that come in multiple to a pack from the
| manufacturer and splitting them up but then also listing
| the single item for the same price as the multi-pack's
| MSRP.
|
| As an example, pouches of cat food treats that come 10 to
| a pack. Scam sellers will split the pack and sell each
| pouch for the same price as the full 10 pack and because
| Amazon has historically done nothing to guard against
| this, their scam listing appears fully comingled with the
| manufacturer's listing in a way where it is very hard to
| recognize the scam option even if you are aware of the
| possibility.
|
| Amazon has made some noise about fixing these comingling
| issues this year, but their plans have been vague and for
| me the well is already poisoned after years of letting it
| go.
|
| Its actually shocking that it took until this year for
| Amazon to really acknowledge this as an issue.
| Manufacturer/brands can't have been happy about this
| considering that for any item that can be scammed like
| this you'll find lots of bad reviews on Amazon where the
| review isn't really complaining about the product, but
| the scam.
|
| Some example reviews that I just randomly and easily
| found on Amazon:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1KZ41Q9MZL7UX
|
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3UUT2K2Q4OROF
| 1over137 wrote:
| That's a truly horrendous thought.
| jerf wrote:
| Yes, but observe how that for all three of the things that
| immediately came to your mind, you have respectively 1. a
| thing that still has a lot of scams in it (though it may be
| the best of the three) [1] 2. A thing so full of scams and
| fake products that using it is already a minefield (one my
| mother-in-law is already incapable of navigating
| successfully, based on the number of shirts my family has
| gotten with lazy-AI-generated art [2]) and 3. a thing well
| known for generating false statements and incorrect
| conclusions.
|
| I'm actually somewhat less critical of
| Apple/Google/Facebook/etc. than probably most readers would
| be, on the grounds that it simply isn't possible to build a
| "walled garden" at the scale of the entire internet. It is
| not possible for Big Tech to exclude scammers. The scammers
| collectively are firing more brain power at the problem
| than even Big Tech can afford to, and the game theory
| analysis is not entirely unlike my efforts to keep my cat
| off my kitchen counter... it doesn't matter how diligent I
| am, the 5% of the time the cat gets up there and finds a
| tasty morsel of shredded cheese or licks some dribble of
| something tasty barely large enough for me to notice but
| constitutes a nice snack with a taste explosion for the
| much-smaller cat means I'm never going to win this fight.
| The cat has all day. I'm doing dozens of other things.
|
| There's no way to build a safe space that retains the
| current size and structure of the current internet. The
| scammers will always be able to overpower what the walled
| garden can bring to bear because they're so many of them
| and they have at least an order of magnitude more
| resources... and I'm being very conservative, I think I
| could safely say 2 and I wouldn't be really all that
| surprised if the omniscient narrator could tell us it's
| already over 3.
|
| [1]: https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/25/new-study-shows-
| massive-spike...
|
| [2]: To forstall any AI debate, let me underline the word
| "lazy" in the footnote here. Most recently we received a
| shirt with a very large cobra on it, and the cobra has at
| least three pupils in each eye (depending on how you count)
| and some very eye-watering geometry for the sclera between
| it. Quite unpleasant to look at. What we're getting down
| the pipeline now is from some now very out-of-date models.
| zahlman wrote:
| > To forstall any AI debate, let me underline the word
| "lazy" in the footnote here. Most recently we received a
| shirt with a very large cobra on it, and the cobra has at
| least three pupils in each eye (depending on how you
| count) and some very eye-watering geometry for the sclera
| between it.
|
| Okay, but _if it matches the illustration on the
| storefront_ , can it really be called a scam?
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Setting that aside, Amazon is well known to sell/ship
| knock offs and not take down offending listings.
| jerf wrote:
| Fair, I was sloppy there. The cobra isn't a scam itself,
| it's just a demonstration that it's already a hard place
| to navigate what with everything that is going on there.
| A deluge of AI garbage may not be a "scam" in the
| strictest sense of the term but it still breaks certain
| unspoken expectations the Boomer generation has about
| goods and what exactly it is you are buying.
|
| We have also received a number of shirts where AI has
| been used to create unlicensed NFL shirts and other such
| actual frauds. And whatever your feeling about IP laws,
| it was definitely low quality stuff... looked good if you
| just glanced at it but when you went to look at any
| particular detail of the shirt it was AI garbage. (I say
| "AI garbage" precisely because not all stuff from AI is
| necessarily garbage... but this was.)
| zahlman wrote:
| > it still breaks certain unspoken expectations the
| Boomer generation has about goods and what exactly it is
| you are buying.
|
| Sigh. I learned from my pre-boomer parents that if the
| product were any good it wouldn't need to be advertised.
|
| > looked good if you just glanced at it but when you went
| to look at any particular detail of the shirt it was AI
| garbage.
|
| To be fair, that was also all over the place before "AI"
| as currently understood. (And I don't think that previous
| iterations of machine learning techniques were involved.)
| mrguyorama wrote:
| > It is not possible for Big Tech to exclude scammers
|
| It's 100% _possible_. It might not be _profitable_
|
| An app store doesn't have the "The optimum amount of
| fraud is not zero" problem. Preventing fraudulent apps is
| not a probability problem, you can actually continuously
| improve your capability without also blocking "good" apps
| accidentally.
|
| Meanwhile, apple regularly stymies developers trying to
| release updates to _already working and used by many_
| apps for random things.
|
| And despite that, they let through _clear and obvious
| scams_ like a "Lastpass" app not made by Lastpass.
| That's just unacceptable. Anything with a trademark
| should _never_ be possible to get a scam through. There
| 's no excuse.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Preventing fraudulent apps is not a probability problem
|
| Unfortunately it is. You've even provided examples of a
| false positive and a false negative. Every discrimination
| process is going to have those at some rate. It might
| become very expensive for developers to go through higher
| levels of verification.
| gtowey wrote:
| No, it's already a solved problem. For instance
| newspapers moderate and approve all content that they
| print. While some bad actors may be able to sneak scams
| in through classifieds, the local community has a direct
| way to contact the moderators and provide feedback.
|
| The answer is that it just takes a lot of people. What if
| no content could appear on Facebook until it passed a
| human moderation process?
|
| As the above poster said, this is not profitable which is
| why they don't do it. Instead they complain about how
| hard it is to do programmatically and keep promising they
| will get it working soon.
|
| A well functioning society would censure them. We should
| say that they're not allowed to operate in this broken
| way until they solve the problem. Fix first.
|
| Big tech knows this which is why they are suddenly so
| politically active. They reap billions in profit by
| dumping the negative externalities onto society. They're
| extracting that value at a cost to all of us. The only
| hope they have to keep operating this way is to forestall
| regulation.
|
| Move fast and break things indeed.
| ambicapter wrote:
| > The answer is that it just takes a lot of people.
|
| The more of those people you hire, the higher the chance
| that a bad actor will slip through and push malicious
| things through for a fee. If the scammer has a good
| enough system, they'll do this one time with one person
| and then move on to the next one, so now you need to
| verify that all your verifiers are in fact perfect in
| their adherence to the rules. Now you need a verification
| system for your verification system, which will
| eventually need a verification system^3 for the
| verification system^2, ad infinitum.
| gtowey wrote:
| > The more of those people you hire, the higher the
| chance that a bad actor will slip through and push
| malicious things through for a fee.
|
| Again, the newspaper model already solves this.
| Moderation should be highly localized, from the
| communities for which they are moderating the content.
| That maximizes the chance that the moderator's values
| will align with the community. Small groups are harder to
| hide bad actors, especially when you can be named and
| shamed by people that you see every day. Managers and
| their coworkers and the community itself are the
| "verifiers."
|
| Again, this model has worked since the beginning of time
| and it's 1000x better than what FB has now.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| > _It 's 100% possible. It might not be profitable_
|
| These are the effectively the same thing. Asking a
| business to harm its profits is like asking a person to
| self-harm.
| saulpw wrote:
| No, sorry. It's eminently reasonable to ask or demand
| that a business to _reduce_ its (fantastic) margins
| /profits in order to remain a prosocial citizen in the
| marketplace. In fact we do this all the time with things
| like "regulations".
|
| It may be unreasonable to demand that a small business
| tackle a global problem at the expense of its survival.
| But we are not talking about small or unprofitable
| business. We are talking about Meta, Alphabet, Apple,
| Amazon. Companies with more money than they know what to
| do with. These global companies need to funnel some % of
| their massive profits into tackling the global problems
| that their products have to some degree created.
| gummydogg wrote:
| I don't accept the excuse it's too hard. If they have to
| spend $10 billion per year to maintain an acceptable
| level trust on their platforms then so be it. It's the
| cost of doing business. If I went into a mall and opened
| up a fake Wells Fargo bank branch it would be shut down
| pretty instantly by human intervention. These are the
| conditions most businesses run under. Why should these
| platforms given such leeway just because 'it's hard'?
| Size and scale shouldn't be an excuse. If its not viable
| to prevent fraud then they don't have a viable business.
| thfuran wrote:
| Yes, it's not that it's impossible, it's that it's
| impossible _while operating how they want to operate,
| scaling as much as they want to scale, and profiting as
| much as they want to profit_. But no business model that
| can 't be pursued ethically and profitably should be
| execused as simply inevitably unethical. It should be
| regulated and/or banned.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| We have laws on truth in advertising, and we should start
| holding advertising channels liable if they don't do
| enough due diligence.
| usrusr wrote:
| But what actually _is_ an acceptable level of trust?
| Acceptable for whom? For the billionaires, it 's good
| enough if outside is worse, or even if it merely
| _appears_ worse.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| That would be one possible dystopia, but I think we
| actually are going to dodge it.
|
| Smart, on device agents that are aligned with a user's
| interests will be able to act as the "walled garden" the
| user needs. In fact, this future is anti-dysopian, because
| the agent will not care about existing walled gardens and
| digital fiefdoms, and to the extent that it's using them
| it's going to deprive them of ad revenue, and they'll have
| to sit and take it because being agent unfriendly will be a
| death sentence for a business.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| > - "Never buy anything unless you're on amazon.com"
|
| Might as well do AliExpress, same quality
| control/misleading descriptions but lower prices.
|
| Is there even a _trustworthy_ online shopping site
| /platform nowadays?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I use walmart.com, they have fast local delivery (often
| next day) but you do have to be careful, as they also
| have listings for third party sellers and they are just
| as shady as Amazon. I only buy items sold by Walmart,
| never a third party. You can filter your searches for
| that pretty easily.
|
| I never buy food, supplements, OTC meds, etc. online from
| any source. That stuff I always buy in person at a local
| retailer.
| toddmorey wrote:
| The Apple App Store is full of scam apps. It's all the
| disadvantages of a walled garden with none of the supposed
| advantages for users. In that way, the App Store itself is
| a scam.
| EduardoBautista wrote:
| I haven't encountered any to be honest. Can you link to
| one as an example?
| fsflover wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45411915
| datavirtue wrote:
| Well said
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> "Never buy anything unless you're on amazon.com"_
|
| Too late for that one. I have been scammed a few times from
| Amazon sellers.
| asadotzler wrote:
| The walled gardens belong to the Big Tech billionaires
| creating the scams. You're actually safer out on the web
| than in Facebook, for example.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > it is now entirely possible they will get a VIDEO CALL from
| me that's not actually me asking for God knows what in a very
| convincing way using my face and voice
|
| Worse, your fake version will be convincingly _begging_ on
| the call for God knows what while being horribly tortured.
| Audio versions of this are already a thing.
| Noaidi wrote:
| > I am scared and this close to setting up a secret
| passphrase in case they need to tell me apart from a clone.
|
| I have done this already and convinced a friend to do it
| after her father fell victim to a scam where he was convinced
| the sheriffs department wanted him to pay off a fine in gift
| cards.
|
| I am also concerned that one might steal a trove of texts
| from someone and plug it into AI which could mimic the
| writing and tone of someone.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Your friend set up a passphrase with the sheriff's
| department?
| frankc wrote:
| We are all going to need to have personal passwords/safe
| words we don't reveal to untrusted parties for
| authentication. Or maybe personal retinal scanners? I think
| personal auth might be an interesting startup to get ahead of
| this.
| james_marks wrote:
| So they'll call you first with the fake video of your mom.
|
| You'll be suspicious and ask for the pass phrase. The
| attacker now knows the nature of the protection you setup
| between you and your mom.
|
| And then the real attack on your mom, with you describing
| the system you'd agreed to, and claiming you can't remember
| the word/phrase.
|
| Better is the Terminator-style lie to see if it gets
| detected.
| fainpul wrote:
| Mom-in-the-middle attack
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I already setup a secret passphrase with my family. My mother
| is particularly naive when it comes to what's online. Of
| course she is going to get abused.
|
| A passphrase is cheap. If you never need to use it, so what?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| And if she got a desperate, pleading call from "you" and
| "you" claim you can't remember the passphrase, then what?
|
| These scams are imaginary. Yes they have probably happened
| but it's far more likely that your mother will get scammed
| by a "legitimate" financial advisor than some stranger
| using an AI to impersonate you.
| ScamLifeguard wrote:
| The scams that people don't even know they are getting
| scammed on - GenZ has the one of the highest scam rates,
| but the dollar amount per scam is way low and they often
| dont even know they were scammed. Also, the political
| donation scams where the people "think" they are giving
| to a party or candidate but nope, just a PAC that spends
| all the money its collects on "operations" and
| "consulting fees" to its partners. Wild times.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| In the future AI bots which are a near perfect facsimile of
| yourself will indeed call, and an AI facsimile of your mother
| will answer, and once the appropriate security protocols are
| exchanged, you'll get through.
|
| God help anyone not armed with AI in the future, that's why
| it cannot be locked up by corporations or government.
| monknomo wrote:
| cannot or should not?
|
| trends point to will be locked up by corporations for the
| near to medium term
| nostrademons wrote:
| I think the Internet will, sometime in the near future, just
| get shut down. That's been what actually happens in countries
| that are undergoing civil unrest or war like Russia, Lebanon,
| Afghanistan, Tanzania, Israel, Myanmar, etc. And it's fairly
| likely civil unrest or perhaps even war may spread to an
| increasing fraction of the developed world too.
|
| So my strategy here has been to start downloading anything
| that I think I might need from the Internet and keeping a
| local copy. It's free and abundant now. It could become
| inaccessible within a matter of minutes if the right powerful
| person says so. There may be a low probability of that
| happening, but given the potential disruptions to our life of
| our always-on connectivity going away, it's worth being
| prepared.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Keeping an offline copy of the Wikipedia is fine, but if
| "the Internet just get[s] shut down" I would think we'll
| all be more worried more about not being able to use our
| bank accounts, have medical providers see our records, etc.
| nostrademons wrote:
| We're back to whatever forms of trade you can source
| locally in that case, but that should not surprise anyone
| who observes regions that are actually in crisis, because
| that is how the economy functions in those regions. You
| do your best to do something nice for your neighbors and
| they do their best to do something nice for you, and
| anything that requires global trade or supply lines
| simply doesn't happen.
|
| Having a copy of your own medical records could be
| critically important if suddenly your friend who is a
| doctor is now your doctor because there's nobody else.
|
| Money tends to be worthless is such situations anyway -
| it's backed by the full faith and credit of a government
| that best case no longer cares about you and worst case
| no longer exists. So you aren't going to worry about your
| bank account, nobody will accept credit or debit anyway.
|
| There is a whole lot of other data on the Internet that
| can be very, very useful in such situations. Even just
| having a few hundred hours of collected kids TV shows
| means you can sit them down in front of Bluey while the
| adults do stuff that is critical for survival. Knowing
| how to build a smelter and bellows out of clay that you
| can find locally means you can restart metal production
| in a matter of days rather than thousands of years.
| Knowing what the local plant species are and which are
| edible might keep you from starving. Knowing how to
| scavenge parts and wiring, as well as what their
| datasheets are and how you need to hook them up, means
| you can fix broken electronics and potentially create new
| ones, which gives you continuing access to knowledge.
| chii wrote:
| > I am scared and this close to setting up a secret
| passphrase in case they need to tell me appart from a clone.
|
| do that sooner rather than later.
|
| Voice mimicry is so much easier now, that you might not be
| able to tell from the phone. This is why a verbal password
| from family is important, esp. in unusual situations.
| godshatter wrote:
| Probably wouldn't hurt to add an "I'm being coerced into
| this" version of the secret passphrase while they're at it.
| jtokoph wrote:
| I half joke that the term "parental controls" will change
| meaning from restrictions set by parents on children to the
| opposite: restrictions now set up by children to protect
| their parents.
| fer wrote:
| I have the feeling that there's a sandwiched generation who
| will have to protect both their parents and their children
| from these things.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| "You know you live in a predatory system when..."
| ScamLifeguard wrote:
| It's so funny how millennials grew up and we were told
| "Don't trust the internet, you can't cite wikipedia, the
| internet is all a lie" And now, I look around and the
| people who engrained that in us just never listened to
| what they were telling us. And somehow, no one thought to
| tell that to Gen Z so they just just get scammed a ton.
| robrtsql wrote:
| That's me! I use parental controls to try and protect my
| elderly father on other platforms (he's always quick to
| fall for ads and download Android apps he doesn't need).
| Unfortunately Facebook doesn't allow you to enable parental
| controls on an adult, and they also pretty severely limit
| your ability to update your birthday! Which is unfortunate
| because Facebook is such a hostile platform.
| ScamLifeguard wrote:
| I started a company a few months ago that is trying to
| help people like you do exactly this! I would love to
| chat with you to hear what has worked, what hasn't, what
| product features you would be most excited about. If
| you'd be willing to chat, please email me kevin at
| trylifeguard.com
| ScamLifeguard wrote:
| Not a joke at all these days, I was at home with my mother
| for 2 weeks helping her with stuff around the house,
| watching how she uses her phone, scrolls facebook, clicks
| on everything, it was really shocking for me. I looked
| around and didn't see the product I wanted to help me help
| her, so we started a company to try and give tools to help
| make it easier for people like us (techy people) who want
| to protect our loved ones. Our original idea was around
| education/elearning and we have expanded to doing real
| integrations to just stop the spam from getting in inboxes
| (gmail, SMS, call filtering).
| mdhb wrote:
| Literally had this conversation this week with my parents.
| Weird fucking times...
| ScamLifeguard wrote:
| We recently started a company to help with this exact
| situation! I would love to pick your brain about what
| features you would be most interested for helping protect
| your parents. If you'd be willing to chat can you email me
| at kevin at trylifeguard.com ?
| mdhb wrote:
| I suspect this may not feel super helpful at first but I
| thought it worth mentioning, my first reaction to
| something like that was strongly negative and my guard
| went up immediately, it's quite a weird dynamic that
| you're stepping into of people who by the nature of their
| relationship have known each other their entire lives and
| you're trying to talk to one on behalf of the other about
| a topic that requires a bunch of trust despite neither of
| the people in this scenario knowing you.
|
| None of that is personal obviously just the gut reaction
| I got reading that initially. I suspect maybe nobody has
| mentioned it before and it might be helpful to hear on
| the assumption that others feel similar.
|
| I don't know how this changes for people who are less
| sure how to have that conversation and I suspect the fact
| that I'm a real life security person might have something
| to do with it.
|
| Edit: I just saw the website after this and I get what
| you're doing and can see how maybe it makes sense for
| some but I'd never recommend this to my own parents, I
| don't think sticking an AI in the middle of all of their
| personal communications is the right answer and I'd have
| a lot of questions about how that data gets used to be
| honest.
|
| Again, nothing personal but there's just no possible
| universe where I'm setting something up so that every
| personal message I ever send my parents again is getting
| silently sucked up into some random company's cloud to be
| read and analyzed and then paying them money for that.
| One of the things I actually had to show them was how to
| disable that kind of shit on their Gmail accounts for
| example.
| ulrashida wrote:
| Frankly, that passphrase should already have been established
| when you were a kid: it would have been used for if a
| stranger / unexpected person needed to give you a ride on
| behalf of your parents.
| jprd wrote:
| My mom did this in the '80s so we weren't kidnapped, even by
| a family member. I'm not going to share the secret phrase,
| but it has stuck with me and I use it with my kids too.
|
| I know most of that was driven by the tragedy of Adam Walsh,
| but it was still great OpSec I'll never drop.
| malfist wrote:
| This isn't a situation we accept out of other industries. You
| water provider doesn't get to pipe you sewage every now and
| again because its too expensive to moderate. We shouldn't
| accept it for big tech either. And we certainly shouldn't make
| it the responsibility of the end use to protect themselves
| strogonoff wrote:
| If everybody on social media was an actual paying customer of
| social platforms, like we pay mobile providers (I originally
| wrote "water providers", which was in fact a somewhat unfit
| analogy), we could demand better service and switch away to a
| competitor who offers it. Unfortunately, we are robbed of our
| ability to pay with our wallets.
| HPsquared wrote:
| You don't generally get to choose who pipes the water to
| your house.
| dahart wrote:
| Would it help if you could? Hasn't the bottled water
| industry demonstrated lower standards and more scams and
| marketing FUD than the EPA?
| malfist wrote:
| Water in the pipes is higher standards precisely because
| we don't accept that the water utility can pump sewage to
| us 10% of the time.
| strogonoff wrote:
| The problem with this analogy as I see it is that water
| supply is heavily regulated and uncompetitive due to
| exactly the fact of it being impossible to switch.
|
| For this to work for the likes of Meta, it would mean
| elevating Meta's services to some sort of country-wide
| public utility, which I'm sure would create probably an
| even stronger moat than network effects, hindering any
| competiton.
|
| However, is there such a constraint in case of social
| media? There are mechanisms and open standards that could
| allow interoperability between providers who implement
| them. It seems that it should be possible to leave it up
| to market forces and competition, but for that we have to
| _have competition_ and be able to vote with our wallets.
| strogonoff wrote:
| That is true and it makes my analogy not so fit. Oh well.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| We can pay with our attention, if we stopped using social
| media that takes advantage of us and use others that don't.
| They will change the way, they act.
| the_snooze wrote:
| "If you're not paying for the product, you are the
| product." It's an outdated way of looking at tech. Many
| classes of paid products (e.g., cars, streaming services,
| IoT, operating systems) double-dip into tracking and
| advertisement. Why would a business actually want to do the
| hard work of serving user needs when they can hedge their
| bets with ad revenue? Line must go up.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| They aren't double dipping, they are subsidizing the cost
| with ads.
| malfist wrote:
| When ford deployed LexusNexus tracking to my F150, they
| didn't refund any of my purchase price.
|
| Samsung isn't refunding any of their $3k fridges that now
| have mandatory ads
| 9rx wrote:
| They didn't need to offer a refund. It was already priced
| in. You maybe forgot to ask what was coming in future
| software updates while standing starry-eyed at the
| impossibly low price it was being offered at, but they
| knew it was coming. After all, appropriately specced
| hardware to be able to do it was already onboard.
| noir_lord wrote:
| This is the most HN of HN takes.
|
| Saying it's your (the consumers) fault because you didn't
| read the crystal ball for what was coming in the future.
|
| The price a product is offered at is _the price for the
| product at that time_ , you don't get to say well I sold
| it for $10 but it's worth $20 so I'll just sell your data
| until I recoup that $10 I "lost".
| 9rx wrote:
| _> the price for the product at that time_
|
| Exactly. The necessary hardware to enable the tracking
| was installed at the time of purchase. It is not like 10
| years later someone dreamed up the idea and decided to
| stealthy in the night start bolting on new components to
| every vehicle they could find. It was a feature that was
| there at the time of purchase and the sale was priced
| accordingly.
| noir_lord wrote:
| So by your standards, it's totally fine for Lenovo to use
| the laptop you bought from them to mine crypto a year
| after you bought it from them because the necessary
| hardware to enable that (it having a GPU) was installed
| at the time.
|
| I mean it's a viewpoint, it's a certifiably bonkers one
| but of all the viewpoints it definitely is one.
| 9rx wrote:
| Much like the F-150, if the license agreement between you
| and Lenovo allow Lenovo to do so, yes. I mean, if you
| didn't want that, you wouldn't have agreed to it, right?
| You are allowed to say no.
| noir_lord wrote:
| Ah... so we find ourselves at
|
| > "But look, you found the notice, didn't you?"
|
| >"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the
| bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused
| lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the
| Leopard."
| 9rx wrote:
| If a contractual party is not acting in good faith, there
| is a legal system to address that.
|
| But I know you will say that the legal system doesn't act
| in good faith, so... I guess you're screwed. Such is the
| pitfall of living under a dictatorship.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| What are we supposed to do about the fact that you are
| not arguing in good faith? I'm not buying what you're
| selling.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> I 'm not buying what you're selling_
|
| Which is why I'm not providing what you seek. Production
| goes to he who is paying, and in this case I am the one
| doing the paying. Thus, you know the content is written
| for me and me alone.
|
| _> What are we supposed to do about the fact that you
| are not arguing in good faith?_
|
| A rational actor acting in good faith would start talking
| terms to see the sale go through, but as you are also
| here in bad faith we can continue to write only for
| respective selves. Nobody was expecting anything else
| anyway. I don't imagine anyone has ever paid someone else
| to write a comment on HN and that isn't about to change
| today.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| You mean "Which is why I'm not arguing in good faith". Or
| rational, either.
| lostapathy wrote:
| The "you can just not agree to it" argument is so bogus.
| You can only buy good/services that are for sale, and
| when they all have the same crappy terms, you have to
| agree to somebody's to live in the modern world.
|
| That's like the people who claim only idiots live in HOAs
| but neglect the fact that, in some markets, nearly all
| real estate worth living in is covered by an HOA of some
| sort so your alternative isn't "buy a different house"
| it's "live in an apartment forever"
| 9rx wrote:
| _> You can only buy good /services that are for sale_
|
| The world is full of custom car builders. Buying a
| something like the F-150, but without the undesirable
| computing components, is quite practical and very
| possible.
|
| It'll be _expensive_ , which I expect is what you were
| really trying to say when you pretend there is no such
| thing for sale, but you're just returning us to the heart
| of discussion: The F-150 is cheap, comparatively, because
| it has already priced in the tracking subsidy. You're
| accepting of those undesirable terms because the lower
| price makes it compelling enough to do so.
| lostapathy wrote:
| Is it really "accepting a concession" if the
| "alternative" is so expensive as to not be an option
| anyway?
|
| This is like telling someone who doesn't like that they
| have to wait in traffic they should just take a
| helicopter to work everyday. Yes, it's technically an
| option for some people, but for the vast majority it's
| not.
| 9rx wrote:
| Yes. That concession is what gets one with limited means
| into an F-150. If it was sold at its true market value,
| absent of all value diminishing systems like tracking,
| they wouldn't be able to afford that either.
|
| Same goes for roads. You most definitely can build roads
| that don't have traffic, but only the rich will be able
| to afford to use them. Traffic is what enables those of
| lesser means to also participate.
|
| It's a pretty good tradeoff for those who are poor. And
| the rich can buy whatever they want anyway.
| malfist wrote:
| Yes, the world is full of custom car builders. I'm sure
| I'll find someone that can build me a replica of the f150
| lightning that doesn't enable spyware on me.
|
| Mind to help me out a bit and point me at a few companies
| doing that? Around Kentucky if you don't mind since
| that's where I am.
| 9rx wrote:
| I'd start with Ford. They're well known for their custom
| builds -- what they call VSO. And they're already tooled
| up for production of an F-150-style vehicle around
| Kentucky to boot.
|
| It won't come cheap like an F-150, but nobody can expect
| it to be cheap when the value proposition is much higher.
| malfist wrote:
| Ford VSO doesn't include the F150 lightning, just the
| F150.
| 9rx wrote:
| That's exactly what they told you when you slapped a
| billion dollars down in front of them? Color me
| skeptical. I bet you haven't even talked to them.
| malfist wrote:
| Dude. They have a website. It lists what they do.
| tristor wrote:
| A license agreement, or a contract in general, cannot
| permit either party to violate the law. What you're
| describing in this scenario, and what has actually
| happened in some cases, is effectively theft of use and
| arguably fraud.
|
| Fraudulent terms of service are not above the law, nor
| are they above basic expectations in society of fair
| dealing. You can try to litigate this any which way you
| choose, based on the language contained in the
| contract/TOS, and it fundamentally does not matter. At
| some point, something has to give and it ends with
| burning down buildings and building guillotines. History
| is full of abundant lessons about the supremacy of social
| mores and standards that suborn the law, and the
| supremacy of the law over the specific parties of any
| given contract.
| seeingnature wrote:
| Your comment is so naive. Most products out there have a
| terms and conditions that equate to 'the company can
| change the product at any time and you're always free to
| stop using it', while giving their salespeople little to
| no idea about future progress because that would limit
| sales. Even if you didn't "maybe forgot to ask", there
| isn't anyone to respond with the truth.
|
| If you purchase a product that doesn't have ads and then
| they introduce ads - that is a huge change in the value
| proposition of the product.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> that is a huge change in the value proposition of the
| product._
|
| It is, but one that is already calculated at time of
| purchase. You'd pay a lot more if there were strict
| guarantees that it would never display ads.
|
| The Belarus tractor company learned that lesson. Once
| upon a time they tried to infiltrate western agriculture
| with, under the backing of the USSR, heavily subsidized
| products offered on the cheap. But farmers saw through
| the thin veneer and realized that they wouldn't be able
| to get parts for the machines down the road. As such, the
| much cheaper price wasn't a winner. Farmers were willing
| to pay _significantly_ more to American companies,
| knowing that they would provide not just on day one but
| also long into the future. The economic lesson learned
| was that the marketplace doesn 't value just initial
| purchase price, but the full value proposition over its
| entire lifetime.
|
| Many people are willing to gamble, of course, especially
| for "disposable" things.
| strogonoff wrote:
| I read it as more rhetorical than not. No one was
| literally expected to ask about the future. However, one
| could be expected to ask oneself "what could such a low
| price tag on such capable hardware mean for the future?"
|
| It is unrealistic, of course, because it is a textbook
| case of information asymmetry (the enemy of the
| market)--only a vanishingly small number of people can
| adequately assess the pricing, having to know enough
| about hardware and all the various forces that could
| bring it down, like potential upcoming lineup changes or
| inventory overflow.
|
| The right move is to fight information asymmetry. Many
| developed countries, including the US, already do it in
| countless cases. A mild way could be requiring to
| disclose things like this in addition to the ToS; a more
| thorough way could be simply banning this business model.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| > You maybe forgot to ask what was coming in future
| software updates
|
| Who exactly was I supposed to ask that? The check out
| cashier at the store? The CTO of the company that
| manufactures it? Who even knows the answer to that
| question, and how are millions of consumers supposed to
| find that out and contact them directly, and why are they
| permitted to reveal proprietary plans if they even know?
|
| Your arguments are delusionally detached from reality.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> The check out cashier at the store?_
|
| Normally F-150s, and fridges for that matter, are sold
| not by cashiers, but salesmen. I suppose there isn't any
| meaningful difference in the end -- _except_ , unlike a
| cashier, salesmen are named as such because there is
| greater expectation of them being intimately familiar
| with the product so that they can answer such questions.
|
| If they can't, that's a pretty big red flag. Why would
| you conduct business with someone who has proven to be
| shady (or at least incompetent)?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I'd rather not buy a refrigerator that a salesman has
| been intimately familiar with.
| lostapathy wrote:
| Who exactly would you ever ask to find out that the
| samsung fridge you were looking at was going to get ads
| in the future?
|
| Certainly not the appliance salesman, they don't know
| samsung's plans. And good luck calling samsung and asking
| for the "future plans" department. This is such a
| dishonest take.
| 9rx wrote:
| They do know their own plans, though, and thus can offer
| a contractual guarantee on how the product they are
| selling will be treated in the future.
|
| If they aren't willing to stand buy what they are
| selling, why would you want to buy it from them in the
| first place? That's what we call a scam.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The norm is reduced costs because there are ads. The same
| Samsung also sells deeply discounted TVs that are ridden
| with ads. Netflix, amazon prime, Hulu, and youtube offer
| ad-subsidized subscriptions.
| pacifika wrote:
| It's just moving the goal posts though, ars technica was
| reporting on a 3400 dollars for a Samsung fridge with
| ads.
| the_snooze wrote:
| There's really no difference. If a company must subsidize
| costs with ad revenue, it clearly shows that they don't
| want paying customers to be the sole judges of the
| product's value proposition.
| strogonoff wrote:
| First, in any case, the right solution is to make this
| business model (treating your users as a product, whether
| by offering free service or heavily discounted/subsidised
| product) simply illegal. It violates the way market is
| supposed to work and exploits information asymmetry--
| regulation against which there is plenty of precedent of.
|
| This makes the rest moot, but I will still list why I
| don't think it's like you say at least in case of social
| media.
|
| If social media was paid only (like any actual product or
| service intended to benefit the customer) and users were
| choosing between paying different amounts rather than
| paying vs. not paying, it would kill the network effect
| outright; platforms would have to struggle to keep users,
| and to that end would start implementing features users
| want and need (rather than exploiting their emotional
| state and employing dark patterns[0] to boost ad
| impressions).
|
| The interest of a service provider is aligned with the
| interest of the customer. The incentive to do bad
| unethical things to the user may exist either way, but it
| is _when the user is not the customer_ that it becomes a
| natural course of things. It is still possible to
| "double-dip"[1], but the difference between users being
| customers and users not being customers is that in the
| former you _can_ be an honest service provider and
| sustain yourself by doing things in the benefit of the
| user.
|
| [0] For example, have you noticed how Instagram's GUI is
| carefully designed to require you to tap two times, with
| a teeny tiny chevron as the only indicator, every time
| you open the app to switch to the timeline of people you
| actually follow, rather than whatever the algorithm
| suggests (and how carelessly swiping photo carousel left
| makes you exist that carousel, and lose the scroll
| position)?
|
| [1] Additionally, note that the examples you named (cars,
| IoT, OS[2]) make a lot of money from a single purchase
| and/or are fairly inflexible to switch away from,
| compared to social media where interoperability is pretty
| much solved with open standards.
|
| [2] What is a paid-only streaming service that "dips"
| into advertisement in some unethical way?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| When someone opens with "there oughta, be a law"...
| they're almost always shouldn't be.
|
| No. You're not going to regulate out human behavior or
| scammers or MBA's looking for every avenue to maximize
| profit.
|
| Make a better system.
| strogonoff wrote:
| This is not about regulating away illegal behaviour.
| Criminals will exist. It is about making [what we have
| reasons to consider] _de facto_ scammy behaviour to be
| _de jure_ illegal behaviour. Then it becomes a matter of
| enforcement.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| >Then it becomes a matter of enforcement.
|
| Really strong record there, especially internationally.
|
| Make a better system.
| jimbokun wrote:
| How would you write that law?
|
| So now every social network charges $0.01 per month and
| makes all the rest of their revenue through advertising.
|
| Would you set the minimum price for every service and
| outlaw advertising entirely?
| fsflover wrote:
| > and outlaw advertising entirely?
|
| This is the actual solution,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| We weren't robbed, we voluntarily gave it up.
|
| Nebula is youtube that works for you. But the conversion
| rate from youtube-ad-viewer to nebula-subscription-payer is
| <1%.
| strogonoff wrote:
| I have heard of Nebula and Floatplane. Is Nebula good?
|
| My issue is that in presence of _one_ large player who
| does it for free competition is already impossible: $2 is
| twice as much more than $1, but $1 is infinity /NaN times
| more than $0. It's one of the many problems with the fact
| that it is legally allowed.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >Is Nebula good?
|
| Nebula is good in that it properly allows me to pay the
| people who's content and reporting and art I like and
| support them without giving the toxic sludge of Youtube a
| dime.
|
| It also allows them to focus on doing their job: Making
| the good videos I want and that they want to make, rather
| than play some absurd algorithm games.
|
| Floatplane is similarly better aligned with what artists
| and creators want to do. The guy from DankPods is much
| happier on that platform than something like Twitch which
| gave him constant problems.
|
| The GunTubers and "Current military events but from
| former soldiers who act like they know what they are
| talking about in reference to _geopolitics_ " have
| created their own platform and I hope that succeeds too.
| I do not agree with a lot of the politics from some of
| these people (and believe some others are liars) but
| diversity is good.
|
| Armchair Historian also created their own platform. That
| might not have panned out though, they had financial
| troubles that led to them abandoning another project.
|
| IMO, the best platform is Patreon linking to a bunch of
| MP4s on S3 (or whatever cheaper medium exists). Nebula
| started out just using a "Youtube copycat" whitelabling
| service.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| I don't know very many people who have a choice of water
| providers. Generally you are stuck with whoever owns the
| pipes to your home. And since you don't have a lot of
| choice, the government tends to regulate the shit out of
| water providers - and I don't see we have any other real
| choice when it comes to too-big-to-fail social media
| providers either.
| vladms wrote:
| I can choose not to use a social medial platform, it is
| kind of hard to choose not to drink water/wash/etc.
|
| I do not use much social media platforms, while I try to
| stay social, like posting one picture a month and sending
| a message here and there, watching a cat video sometimes,
| etc. I think social networks are much more similar to
| drugs - you can try to regulate to prevent people hurting
| themselves, but people will find a way if they can't
| refrain themselves.
|
| Scams existed before social networks, and maybe is a bit
| easier using them, but I do not feel it is a fundamental
| shift. Along the ages people were taught/encouraged "to
| believe (without checking)" into a multitude of subjects
| (state, church, horoscope, etc.), now seems a bit
| hypocritical to be amazed that they do just that.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > I can choose not to use a social medial platform, it is
| kind of hard to choose not to drink water/wash/etc.
|
| I don't think that's actually true for WhatsApp in a lot
| of countries - it's the default communication for many,
| to the point I'm not sure I could get parcel deliveries
| reliably here in Spain if I didn't have WhatsApp.
|
| Ditto for communicating with the entire generations who
| moved onto Facebook after we all abandoned it. I could
| delete Facebook entirely, but then I'd spend every family
| gathering hearing the chorus "why aren't you on Facebook?
| Your cousins are all on Facebook. They all know the
| family drama" (instead I keep Facebook off the homescreen
| of my phone, and check it about once a month).
| energy123 wrote:
| We could demand it either way. There's no iron law of the
| universe that says otherwise. The application of the law is
| supposed to be objective but the contents are just made up
| by those with the power to do it.
| strogonoff wrote:
| Not enough people would demand it for it to be
| actionable, and not having to pay is part of the reason.
| Why would we spend effort on actively demanding things
| when we are spending not a cent on this in the first
| place, and can instead passively-aggressively deploy
| adblockers while waiting for the next iteration of this
| arms race (which something makes me think might involve
| LLMs)?
| monknomo wrote:
| I pay good money for phone calls and I get so much spam I
| don't like to answer the phone.
|
| The paying relationship is not sufficient for these
| technologies that are required
| gosub100 wrote:
| I had a similar thought regarding OS'. Especially in they
| heydey of malware in the early 2000s when 3rd party apps were
| the only way to remove it. You don't buy a truck and accept
| that its wheel falls off every time you hit a bump. Therefore
| Microsoft should have been civilally liable for all the costs
| of software removal and loss of enjoyment of computers that
| ran Windows (along with OEMs that sold them).
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| GM is not liable when your wheels fall off because a
| criminal removed the nuts.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Then why do they have locks on the doors? They know there
| are these things called criminals. MSFT did nothing to
| stop spyware for at least a decade.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Most locks are trivially defeatable and easy to force.
| Heck, there's often a large window right beside a
| suburban door. Break the glass, open the door. Locks are
| only there to deter crimes of opportunity and make it
| more likely you'll actually notice a theft in a timely
| fashion.
| gosub100 wrote:
| And Microsoft didn't even bother to do that much. Spyware
| was able to embed itself in any windows installation for
| a solid decade, just by visiting a website. removing it
| required at least 30m of updating and installing
| specialized tools and was well out of reach of the
| average user.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> Then why do they have locks on the doors?_
|
| Because the customer eventually decided it was worth
| paying for. Emphasis on eventually. It took over 30 years
| from the first car having optional door locks to locks
| becoming a standard feature.
|
| _> MSFT did nothing to stop spyware for at least a
| decade._
|
| More like half a decade. The first real instance of
| spyware was recognized in 1999. Microsoft began working
| on their anti-spyware software in 2004.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Microsoft bought GeCAD RAV in 2003 with the intent of
| using that antivirus engine in Windows.
|
| It's also worth pointing out that the 1998 antitrust case
| against Microsoft is most known as a Browser fight, but
| it included a heavy hand from Adobe and all of the major
| Anti-Virus tools of the time. It was seen by many at the
| time, including Microsoft, that the delivered court
| decision forbade Microsoft from including PDF software,
| anti-virus tools, firewalls, and other such software in
| Windows (and arguably against building some of them at
| all).
|
| It's somewhat easy to understand why that decision almost
| made sense in 1998, but real easy to see why it aged very
| quickly like spoiled milk (including the wide spread of
| spyware and malware that soon followed).
| gosub100 wrote:
| The time they "began" working on it is irrelevant. Were
| you even alive during that time to experience it?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Car door locks are wafer locks and can be defeated
| sometimes with a flathead screwdriver.
|
| Security is about "good enough" though so that's usually
| sufficient.
|
| Most of the worms of the early 2000s worked by exploiting
| vulnerabilities that Microsoft had _already found,
| patched, and deployed_ , but users, including giant
| businesses just didn't install the patches.
|
| Bonzai Buddy and the days of the toolbar didn't happen
| because Windows is insecure, it happened because at a
| fundamental level the only difference between spyware and
| a perfectly valid and runnable program is _intent_ , and
| an OS has no insight into the user's mind. When you
| doubleclick on a desktop icon, Windows cannot know
| whether you totally intend to send most of your precious
| data to a sketchy server, or whether you have no idea
| what you are running.
|
| Microsoft is moving more towards preventing users from
| running whatever they want.
|
| "The user is god and the OS serves them" and "Never let
| the user run spyware or malicious code" are _mutually
| exclusive_ , so be careful what you wish for.
| gosub100 wrote:
| > the only difference between spyware and a perfectly
| valid and runnable program is intent
|
| This is true if you completely ignore that spyware was
| impossible to remove without specialized removal apps
| that were funded by volunteers, not Microsoft.
|
| Telling me that locks are pickable is completely
| irrelevant and avoids the point I was making.
| montroser wrote:
| Social media is hardly a public utility. Regulation could be
| part of the picture, but at some point the nanny state is the
| greater of evils.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| There's a pretty big gulf between what Facebook is
| currently permitted to do, and the nanny state
| willvarfar wrote:
| (An aside, there is a lot of scandal in the UK about how the
| privatised water providers have been basically shitting on
| the public and environment, and literally discharging raw
| sewage because its too expensive to moderate!)
| noir_lord wrote:
| It's just another form of "socialise the costs, privatise the
| profits".
|
| In any sane world we'd regulate big tech far more rigorously
| than we do (we'd tax them more as well but that's a separate
| issue).
| philipallstar wrote:
| This is totally backwards. We "socialise" the profits and
| leave the risk and losses to the private sector.
| foft wrote:
| Yes. If you haven't yet read it Cory Doctorow's new book
| Enshittification is well worth a read. I am still reading it
| but it certainly explains some of the bad practices by these
| major advertising/spying giants and the resulting market
| distortion. We need to up our game as technologists and hold
| our employers to account.
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| Water, power, etc infrastructure regulations and things like
| the environmental movement happened when there was more
| working class solidarity and the working class had more power
| over the capital owning class. Now the working class have
| been propagandized to believe "regulations bad" and have been
| depowered as capitalism decays and the capital owning class
| further takes and consolidate power. The regulations you want
| are impossible in this political climate and probably
| impossible without an extremely radical reform movement or
| some mass resignation or revolution of government.
|
| I mean, lets face it, no government that makes hard right
| turns and has intense corruption like the USA just goes back
| to being a proper liberal democracy. Most likely things will
| get a lot worse before they even get better and on a
| timescale thats unpredictable. We may be talking 20+ years
| before any sort of baby steps towards liberal reforms are
| even possible on the federal level. The right has the
| gerrymandering, scotus, the courts, the media machine, etc.
| Pro-working class regulations are just not going to happen
| like they did in the 60s and 70s for a very long time if
| history is any guide.
|
| Its so odd to me people just have a "dont worry we'll got
| back to normal next election." To get back to what we had
| during those times of pro-worker regulation will take many,
| many, years if not decades of work now. At the very least
| until many in SCOTUS retire or pass away from old age. That
| just isnt happening anytime soon.
| brians wrote:
| The permitted number of rat parts per pound of breakfast
| cereal is not zero.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Rat parts are in RFK Jr's food pyramid for America.
| mmmlinux wrote:
| Water providers in Flint,MI disagree.
| tristor wrote:
| I'm sure it felt good to write something pithy like that,
| but the Flint, MI case is not one of a water utility
| screwing up, or causing harmful contaminants to enter the
| water. It's a story of the city switching providers, and
| that other provider having different water chemistry that
| was incompatible with the existing piping in the city which
| caused harmful contaminants to be introduced into the
| water. Neither water provider had failed to provide what
| they were intending to provide, the city failed to plan
| ahead and test things before moving the source of their
| water.
| herbst wrote:
| Is there any reason you accept it then? Facebook and all
| their platform is a danger to people, there is nothing to add
| there.
| bluGill wrote:
| I don't understand why the big advertisers don't scream about
| this. Facebook gets money from whoever, but the scams dilute
| the effectiveness of real companies that are not trying to scam
| you.
| vintermann wrote:
| Do they? The difference may not be so clear cut always. A
| policy which got rid of scammy ads might get rid of a lot of
| "real companies" ads too.
| bluGill wrote:
| We can debate what is a scam on the margins, but some
| things are clear scams.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Real companies don't give a damn about what they are actually
| doing. Facebook tells them that their ad which nobody clicked
| on got them 40 000 new customers. The worker who put the ad
| on Facebook gets a pat on the back from his boss. The boss
| gets a raise and maybe a promotion. Leadership gets shown
| numbers of how great advertising on Meta is and doesn't take
| 5 minutes to check them. If sales are low it is those god
| damned customers, better hike prices and reduce product
| quality to show the bastards!
| bluGill wrote:
| Yet in the days of newspapers companies collected data to
| see how well their ads worked. There are a lot of
| statisticians working in this area - or there were 20 years
| ago.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The scam in online advertising is far more sinister;
|
| Google uses their panopticon to show your ad to a user
| who _is just about to buy your product_ and then claim a
| conversion. So the stats look like Google is getting you
| thousands of conversions, when they only actually got a
| hundred people to look at your product who weren 't
| already interested.
|
| This kind of bullshit was not possible in legacy
| advertisement. A billboard cannot change itself to always
| be showing an ad that can be claimed as a conversion to
| every single user.
|
| The newspaper ads could not change to ensure that you saw
| an ad that matched what you were about to purchase.
|
| >There are a lot of statisticians working in this area -
| or there were 20 years ago
|
| Weren't those people the exact ones who came up with
| "Half of ad spend is wasted but we don't know which
| half"?
|
| Targeted and online tracking based advertising has
| fundamental information asymmetry problems that fuck over
| everyone but Google and Meta.
| bluGill wrote:
| Statisticians can figure out if the ad google shows was
| to someone who would buy anyway.
|
| yes a lot of ad spend is wasted but they can prove what
| was still useful enough to be worth spending despite the
| waste and which was not.
| terminalshort wrote:
| If this theory were true companies would see no revenue
| impact from ad buys on Meta. Then they would stop buying,
| and Meta would go out of business. You need to face the
| facts here that no matter how much you hate Meta, it
| isn't a scam.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Companies will falsely attribute positive revenue impact
| to whatever sales channels they are using, including
| Meta. The option would be for dozens of people having to
| admit that they made a mistake and wasted money on ads
| which didn't work. It's 2025, people would rather let
| their company bankrupt than admit they made a mistake.
| bluGill wrote:
| Why do you think there is no revenue impact? I would
| assume there is. Companies should have a good idea how
| much. That is also why companies should care about scams
| - if ads on meta lose value they lose.
| terminalshort wrote:
| The comment I was replying to implied that targeted
| advertising is a scam that finds people who were going to
| buy anyway and then advertises to them. If that were
| true, there would be no revenue increase because all the
| customers would have bought anyway.
| bluGill wrote:
| oh. That makes sense. so long as other people see the ads
| that shows up in the stastics. Though companies should be
| pushing back on google doing that. (Though it may be they
| were going to buy but the ad influenced where which is
| worth the price)
| terminalshort wrote:
| What the adds really do is target people who are going to
| buy a certain category of product anyway, and then
| advertise the specific product made by the company that
| buys adds. It's hard to convince someone to buy something
| out of the blue. Much easier to convince them to buy a
| particular brand of something they were going to buy
| anyway, which is why targeted ads are so valuable.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| And you can use the exact same methods today on digital
| channels to see exactly how efficient your ads are,
| without tracking or invading the privacy of anybody. But
| companies trust Meta and their sales department
| instead...
| terminalshort wrote:
| I understand that impact calculation for ads is, at best,
| an inexact science. But I refuse to believe that businesses
| spend hundreds of billions of dollars on ads every year for
| absolutely no gain. That's chips in the vaccine level
| conspiratorial thinking.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Go talk to any small business owner of your choosing.
| When they have a slow day and nothing to do they like to
| chip in a few hundred dollars into the Meta casino. Since
| you can tweak endless parameters on which people will see
| the ads, you can always spend more until you find your
| winning number, like on the horse race track or in the
| lottery.
| bluGill wrote:
| I was talking about large business which should track
| this. Small do gamble on hope like that.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The answer isn't ad blocking, the answer is paying directly and
| in full (so no need to subsidize cost with ads) for the
| service.
|
| I cannot wrap my head around how generally intelligent people
| are completely blind to this. I guess 20 years of ad-block-is-
| the-norm has left people totally confused about internet
| monetization. I've never encoutered a problem that has such a
| clear answer, and that so many intelligent people get totally
| spun around the axle on.
|
| _We need to start paying for ad-free services. Wake up._
| vintermann wrote:
| Facebook has made it very clear that they don't want you to
| do this: you can pay for ad-free (I believe it's because
| they're legally obliged to offer that as a result of some
| things they'be done and deals they've made), but the cost is
| easily 100 times what they can make _directly_ on ads for me.
| The only conclusion can be that they place an immensely high
| _indirect_ value on serving me ads.
| patentatt wrote:
| Same with streaming services, ad-free services seem to be
| unusually higher priced than the ad-supported tiers.
| Netflix for example charges $10 for ad-free over the ad
| support tier ($18 vs. $8). I've seen estimates that ad
| revenue per subscriber is less than that, maybe $4-$8. And
| there's a cost to that revenue as well, so their profit is
| even lower. Why go through all that trouble? Maybe the
| economics works out somehow, in that users willing to pay
| to get rid of ads are so price insensitive they may as well
| squeeze them for more money? Or the lower subscription cost
| opens up enough new subscribers to make it worthwhile to
| tolerate a much lower margin. I am very suspicious though
| and wonder if there is a more insidious or otherwise opaque
| motivation behind it. Is there some kind of 'soft power'
| benefit to being in the ad business?
| mr_toad wrote:
| They're probably assuming that anyone who would pay for
| Facebook has a large disposable income, which means that
| they're a juicy add target, and they are worth much more
| than the average Facebook user.
| terminalshort wrote:
| They charge around $15 per month IIRC. It's more like 3x
| revenue per user.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > We need to start paying for ad-free services. Wake up.
|
| Where are all these ad-free services everyone keeps talking
| about? Social media companies don't even find it worth it to
| offer an ad-free plan last I checked...
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| If people demanded ad-free paid services with the same
| vigor that they evangelize ad-blocking, we would have it.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| I don't really get why that's the responsibility of the
| consumer? Businesses offer shitty deal, consumer works
| around said deal... it's on the businesses to offer a
| better deal (a la Spotify vs limewire, or Netflix vs
| thepiratebay)
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| People don't work around the shitty deal, businesses work
| around the shitty consumers.
|
| That's in large part why the Internet sucks, it's not
| made for people who ad-block.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, Apple Music, Kagi etc etc
| swiftcoder wrote:
| I would submit that maybe the first one qualifies as a
| social media network
| carlosjobim wrote:
| My mistake, I thought the discussion was about online
| services in general.
| Noaidi wrote:
| This would create a two tiered social commons however.
| Someone like me, homeless and on disability, what could I
| afford? Where would my word be heard?
|
| It could also create "free" platforms, funded by
| billionaires, to control the speech on the platform.
|
| The answer is a communal, government owned social media
| platform, that mimics the rules of the town square. in the
| US, this includes the same 1st amendment rights. This would
| allow equal access to everyone's voice.
|
| IMHO, social media should not exists at all. It is too huge
| and too fast for our tiny brains.
| vladms wrote:
| > Where would my word be heard?
|
| You do realize that we are on a platform without ads where
| your word is heard, so it still is possible.
|
| And before "social media" there were plenty of free forums
| (each with a certain main topic, but in which people were
| discussing occasionally more than that), so it was not that
| bad. And in fact that continues today (ex: this one), with
| more relevant discussions in my opinion than what I glimpse
| from my occasional social media incursions.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| FYI, HN is a giant advertisement.
|
| It's a place with bait for software engineers (lots of
| tech stories and discussion), and YC then gets lots of
| eyes on job postings for their companies. This is
| explicitly why it exists.
|
| HN is not ad free, it is an ad.
| hajile wrote:
| We need to have an easy way to pay small amounts for a one-
| time service. A lot of websites offer content that you need
| only a couple of times in your life. It's worth paying for,
| but not worth all the hassle of setting up a normal payment.
|
| This leaves ads as the only form of revenue and because ads
| don't care about the content, this creates a race to the
| bottom on generating slop.
| terminalshort wrote:
| The advertisers do care about the content. Ad based models
| ensure that content doesn't piss off advertisers. User
| payment models ensure that content doesn't piss off the
| user base, which does sound better, but audience capture
| can be every bit as bad.
| seeingnature wrote:
| A lot of people did pay for ad-free Netflix, only to wake up
| one day in the future to find that product ending, and a
| similarly priced tier that has ads in it.
|
| Amazon Prime Video didn't have ads. Then one day it did.
|
| Maybe you're right that _the masses_ need to start rejection
| ad-tiers, but so far we've seen that people will accept
| advertising to get more.
| macNchz wrote:
| I pay for some ad free services, but it's infeasible across
| the entire internet and every possible link you might follow.
| Additionally, I fundamentally disagree with the concept of
| paying someone so that they don't show me malicious ads. If
| they cannot or will not ensure the ads that they accept money
| to display are not malicious, I will not look at their ads.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > We need to start paying for ad-free services. Wake up.
|
| The services (FB etc.) don't want this model, and it's not
| like the users can force them to switch to a paid model.
|
| Also, a large percentage of users don't care and believe that
| "free" is better.
| scott_w wrote:
| > The answer isn't ad blocking, the answer is paying directly
| and in full
|
| Netflix started showing ads on their lower tiers:
| https://help.netflix.com/en/node/126831
|
| If you pay for Sky/Virgin/insert Cable provider in your
| country, you still get copious amounts of ads. If you pay to
| go to the cinema, you have to sit through 15 minutes of
| adverts before the film starts.
|
| I'm buying off Amazon, they're showing sponsored products
| (so... ads).
|
| EA were looking at putting ads into games that you bought
| back in 2024: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ea-are-
| thinking-about-inser...
|
| Hell, I pay for public transport, they have adverts on.
| vladms wrote:
| > We need to start paying for ad-free services. Wake up.
|
| You make it sound like there are no people that pay for ad-
| free services they find valuable. Or that there are no free
| ad-free services (ex: WhatsApp).
|
| My feeling is that people know some "services" are not that
| "valuable" (ex: facebook, instagram, etc.), so they would not
| pay for them, but, like with drugs, they can't reduce their
| usage.
| terminalshort wrote:
| But the truth is that people don't want that. We had that
| before and it lost in the open market to free but ad
| supported. There is a very small and vocal group of people
| (which is massively over represented on HN) that really hate
| the ad supported model, but the vast majority don't really
| care and prefer it to paying in cash.
| vintermann wrote:
| Facebook is one of the few pages my ad-blocker can't handle. In
| part I think this is because they do it differently by country,
| but mostly it's because Facebook makes _a ton_ of effort to
| make it hard to recognize what 's an ad from the page code.
| asadotzler wrote:
| Get uBlock Origin, it works, even on Facebook.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Just curious what password manager I should use? I'm
| considering using a password manager instead of the Google ones
| and gradually switch all passwords to generated ones instead
| the one I usually use. Searched through HN for the last 6
| months but found just too many posts about PM.
| 542458 wrote:
| I believe Bitwarden, 1Password, or the stock Apple one are
| the typically recommended ones. Bitwarden is free (and can be
| self-hosted), 1Password is paid and has a slightly nicer UX,
| and the Apple one is good but requires you to be in their
| ecosystem. I personally use Bitwarden and have had no issues.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Thanks, I heard about the 1Password leak, but just checked
| online and looks their it's just their Okta system, not
| client info?
| jeffbee wrote:
| The Google one is quite good if you use Chrome anyway.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Thanks, I use Firefox but I did save all of my past
| passwords in Google password already. So I guess I could
| keep it. I might switch anyway though as I'm switching to
| Brave.
| terminalshort wrote:
| IMO MFA (or a passkey) is much more important. Most online
| accounts I have I couldn't give a rats ass if someone got in.
| (Not that they would because there would be no monetary value
| to them). Best to focus on those that are important and set
| MFA on them. If they don't offer MFA, find someone else who
| does. MFA + crappy password is better than strong PW w/o MFA,
| because even a PW manager can be leaked. This isn't to say
| you shouldn't care about secure PWs, but IMO it's the less
| important factor here.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| *>They could massively reduce the volume of scams advertised on
| their networks
|
| I'm not entirely sure that's true. It's equivalent to asking a
| platform to moderate all "harmful content" off the site. "Scam"
| is fundamentally subjective, just as "harm" is.
|
| The real solution is to reform the justice system such that a
| citizen feeling they've been defrauded has a quick and easy
| process to get satisfaction for themselves and other similarly
| harmed people. We need a streamlined, totally online court that
| excels at gathering and interpreting data, and a decision in
| days not years. The ad networks are themselves the natural
| allies of such a reform, but such a change can and should start
| small as a pilot program at the state level. If successful, it
| removes the considerable legal-cost moat protecting scammers,
| and so it no longer makes sense to even attempt such a
| business, and the world becomes a slightly better place.
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| Scams are absolutely not subjective and capitalism fails at
| every level without regulation like this. Your comment is
| very libertarian housecat coded.
|
| Also 'just go to court' is such a naive take. As someone who
| has been in litigation before I can tell you those $350/hr
| billings add up quick. How many consumers can afford a 5 or
| even 6 digit legal bill for being scammed for a few hundred
| or thousands dollars on a FB ad? Of those who can, how many
| would see this pricetag as worth it? Sorry but small claims
| court isn't going to do discovery for you for some company
| hidden behind who knows how many storefronts and foreign
| proxies. You're going to have to do real litigation. Its
| absurd to expect every working class person to sue all
| scammers constantly. Instead ad providers should be policing
| their own ad networks and the working class should be using
| the government to implement proper regulations to protect
| ourselves.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| People's first instinct is to attack the thing they don't
| like directly. The second instinct should be to consider
| the system in which those things arise, and what the
| incentives are for everyone involved. If you have a roomful
| of loud children, you could apply draconian rules on
| silence; or, if you notice there is no sound-deadening and
| so the children are unwittingly participating in a positive
| feedback loop to be heard above the din, you can add
| material. My goal is not a libertarian one, its a
| minimalism one. Streamlining the court system has many
| other benefits besides this one; the excessive cost and
| time required to use the court is used systematically by
| malefactors at every level of society. From patent trolls
| to absurd rates of criminal prosecutions that are never
| heard by a jury, it's an enormous problem in our society.
|
| Regulation always seems simple, but there are inevitable
| unintended consequences. Sadly, those who see regulation as
| the only or best tool to shape behavior are quick to
| suggest yet more regulation to fix those unintended
| consequences, either unaware of the positive feedback loop
| or certain there exists some set of regulation that will
| finally, perfectly fix the system. I find this way of
| thinking naive; it is almost always better to make
| adjustments to the system to shape behavior that way. And
| in this case, the obvious way to do that is to fix the
| courts, and make justice affordable again.
| vladms wrote:
| Wonder how it would sound if we would use the same
| paragraph about "deregulation".
|
| > Deregulation always seems simple, but there are
| inevitable unintended consequences. Sadly, those who see
| deregulation as the only or best tool to shape behavior
| are quick to suggest yet more deregulation to fix those
| unintended consequences ...
|
| Which sounds more reasonable: "Deregulation always seems
| simple" or "Regulation always seems simple" ? Will let
| the reader decide, because in the end it is a subjective
| choice.
|
| I personally don't think there is one optimum that we can
| reach. At certain points in time and for certain subjects
| deregulation should be applied at other points in time
| regulation should be applied. I don't see any point in
| talking "generally", this depends on topic, country,
| priorities, etc.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| _> I personally don't think there is one optimum that we
| can reach._
|
| I agree with this, and the containing paragraph.
| Everything is trade-offs. It may very well be that
| Facebook is under-regulated (and it probably is the
| case). I suppose I'm thinking of ways to use the
| situation to fix the much bigger and arguably worse
| problem with the justice system in general. Non-rich
| people (I don't say "poor" because I include middle-class
| as well) are totally boxed out of the justice system in
| the USA. A pox of scammers is just one of the side-
| effects of the ossification and decay of the system. I'd
| like to solve a big chunk of problems all at once,
| including this one.
| scott_w wrote:
| > "Scam" is fundamentally subjective, just as "harm" is.
|
| From the article:
|
| > Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams _and
| banned goods_ , Reuters reports
|
| I think we can agree that there's no "subjective" situation
| when a product is banned.
|
| > The ad networks are themselves the natural allies of such a
| reform
|
| The article (and the person you're replying to) point out
| that a _significant portion of Meta 's revenue_ comes from
| such scams. I'm really struggling to see how they're "natural
| allies" and not "antagonists" here. You're going to have to
| show me some research that backs up your claim because it
| flies in the face of the available information.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| _> I'm really struggling to see how they're "natural
| allies"_
|
| Ah, sorry. Perhaps I should have spelled it out. Meta
| desperately wants to avoid being regulated. One way they
| can avoid it is to help make the out-of-band justice system
| (much) more efficient such that they avoid messy moderation
| policies and don't need to be regulated anymore. Victims
| would be happier too, especially if they get remunerated
| for their pain, time, and trouble. The message to scammers
| everywhere (not just on Meta) becomes clear: go ahead and
| try it, you will get caught and put out of business, and
| likely sent to jail. Eventually the scammers will realize
| it's not worth it.
|
| The unintended side-effect, sadly, is that legitimate
| business will be attacked as scams by profit-seeking or
| malicious individual malefactors.
|
| In any event, I think reforming the US justice system is
| way overdue; it is far too expensive and time-consuming for
| most matters, and that means we live in a place with _de
| facto_ lack of courts. And I don 't like that.
| scott_w wrote:
| > Meta desperately wants to avoid being regulated. One
| way they can avoid it is to help make the out-of-band
| justice system (much) more efficient such that they avoid
| messy moderation policies and don't need to be regulated
| anymore.
|
| I might have bought that but a delayed flight spent
| reading Careless People swiftly disabused me of any such
| notions.
|
| > In any event, I think reforming the US justice system
| is way overdue; it is far too expensive and time-
| consuming for most matters, and that means we live in a
| place with de facto lack of courts. And I don't like
| that.
|
| Most countries have regulators that come with teeth, such
| that the only times they need to go to court are to
| confirm they have the teeth they're using. After that,
| companies fall in line. From the outside, it seems the
| USA does not have this system and has no desire to
| develop such a system.
| macNchz wrote:
| While some things may exist in a grey area, there's an
| immense volume of blatant, obvious fraud in mainstream ads. A
| deepfake of Elon Musk promoting a way to get rich with crypto
| is just so clearly a scam, and yet it's one I've seen in
| preroll YouTube ads multiple times.
|
| Making the platforms have some liability for facilitating
| fraud would be good, though. In the meantime I block ads.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Except in this case, the platform is actually paid real money
| for that content, so yeah, I absolutely expect them to review
| each and every piece of it.
|
| If ads worked this way:
|
| - Victim clicks crypto scam ad, loses their savings ($xx,xxx)
|
| - Forensic investigation happens, determines that this
| happened due to a paid ad on site X. Site X knew that this
| was an ongoing problem and didn't manage to control it, but
| was still showing ads.
|
| - Site X is considered complicit and just as liable for the
| loss as the scammer. Since the scammer is hard to find, the
| user sues the site and the site has to pay the losses.
|
| - The site is now free to pursue their "business partner" for
| the damages, the user doesn't have to care.
|
| I bet the ads would suddenly get reviewed a lot more. No sane
| publisher would allow ads from an ad platform that doesn't
| provide a guarantee against this issue. If a "good" ad
| platform started showing scams, the site would drop it once
| notified (because now they're on notice, and would be liable
| for any future scams). Thus, the platform would make damn
| sure that this doesn't happen.
|
| "Scam" might be subjective but the legal system usually has a
| definition for it and judges to apply any remaining
| subjective judgement necessary. It's usually also pretty easy
| to avoid the need for a judge deciding by not trying to max
| out the we-think-this-is-technically-not-illegal grey area.
|
| This doesn't require huge legal costs for the ad networks -
| they can simply refuse to do business with entities that are
| not verified, or allow ads for shady business areas where 40%
| of the businesses are borderline scams and 50% blatant
| scams...
| Semaphor wrote:
| Honestly, not just ad networks. It's also publishers. We tried
| 2 major non-google ad networks. The amount of scams and
| borderline scams were crazy. And apparently asking for some
| quality control is complicated. Even with google and ad-
| exchange, we had to raise the minimum costs by quite a bit to
| keep most of the scams out. This lowers revenue so most
| publishers have the same interest in fighting those scams as
| the networks.
|
| The only reason to fight against the scams is because one cares
| a little about ones viewers (well, and I guess maybe a bit of
| brand safety). Which seems to not be the case for the vast
| majority.
| zahlman wrote:
| Just to be clear, the _engagement_ is the problem, yes? We 're
| reasonably secure against zero-click malware from ads by now I
| would hope?
| ozim wrote:
| I think you don't see ads that are served in there. Those are
| outright scams like fake investments and not just crypto but
| outright "buy big company X shares to get rich, photo of
| celebrity" with celebrities not even knowing they are used
| for those scam ads - meta doesn't do shit about it.
|
| Zero click malware would be most likely too sophisticated.
|
| You click the ad contact people who will tell you where to
| wire money that's the level we are talking about here.
| zahlman wrote:
| Right. My point is that it still requires on social-
| engineering someone who reasonably ought to be primed to
| ignore all ads in the first place.
| macNchz wrote:
| Zero click browser exploits still do pop up--it's also hard
| to say how common they are, because they're hard to detect,
| and likely to be used very judiciously by the people who
| discover them to avoid showing their hand. Ad networks have
| certainly been a direct vector for malware in the past.
|
| Within the past few years there were quite many malicious ads
| floating around that would trigger a redirect on load on iOS
| Safari, sending the user to a scam page (phishing, "you've
| won!", or instant redirect to the App Store), no engagement
| necessary.
|
| Some recent browser zero days/malicious ads situations, not
| necessarily "an ad loaded in my browser -> pwned", but
| reasonably applicable:
|
| https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/malicious-
| ads...
|
| https://www.welivesecurity.com/en/eset-research/romcom-
| explo...
|
| https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/chrome-zero-
| day-f...
| duxup wrote:
| I have my view history turned off on Youtube. It appears that
| means I get a lot of low quality ads. Questionable health
| products, really questionable health products, "5G blocking
| beanies that prevent brain fuzzing", gross out advertisements
| about poop, and so on.
|
| It really lowers my perception of Youtube as a product as just
| any old site with content, but also scams / creepy stuff.
| Youtube don't care I suspect, it's money for them, and it re-
| enforces my desire to not give them money... so yeah they take
| money form who they can.
| AJ007 wrote:
| The night before this story was published I was pondering what
| percentage of Youtube ads I was watching were scams -- not
| 100%, but it was higher than 50%. Which raises questions about
| semi-legitimate looking items might actually be soft scams or
| some kind of funny billing stuff going on.
|
| What percent of the global economy is scams? Sure, the
| investment manager charging 1% a year to put all of your
| retirement savings in ETFs that also charge 1-1.5% a year
| funneling money in to companies being raided by executives and
| employees isn't a _scam_ scam, but it is a massive mis-
| allocation of resources and probably more damaging than some
| dumb item purchased from a Meta ad that never showed up. Same
| for recently legalized (in the US) sports betting.
|
| The startling thing is AI is being applied at scale to make
| this crap more pervasive. 10% scams? Meta would like
| advertisers to use their generative AI tools to create image
| and video ads of non-existent products.
|
| Best thing we can do is delete all phone apps and only access
| online media from behind firewalls that block all ads and
| tracking. Windows is dead. Apple is transitioning to an adtech
| company. Linux is the only option.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| I am not following the meta, so could you please explain
|
| >Windows is dead.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >but it was higher than 50%
|
| I don't relate with this at all. I get ads for normal
| insurance companies, uber eats, air bnb, and gacha games to
| name a few. None of them are scams, so I can't understand
| understand why so many people on hacker news complain about
| scams.
|
| Do you live in a region with barely any ad inventory?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| "Algorithms". Even if your region has plenty of ad
| inventory, Google's micro-targeting can mean even people in
| the same household see wildly different subsets of the ad
| inventory. You could just be lucky and aren't in any of the
| micro-target "demographics" scams want (or at least, can
| afford) right now.
|
| Micro-Targeting is one of the worst mistakes of the entire
| advertising industry and we'll be probably dealing with its
| consequences for a while to come.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Uber Eats opaquely inflates the base price of the food so
| that even when they advertise a low (or zero if you've paid
| for 'Uber One' to give you zero delivery fees on 'eligible'
| deliveries, whatever that means) delivery fee, you're still
| getting charged significantly more compared to picking up
| the food yourself. Call me crazy, but I would expect the
| delivery fee to be the difference between the cost to have
| something delivered and the cost to buy it outright.
|
| Gacha games are famously deceptive and exploitative.
|
| Airbnb has a good justification for keeping the location
| private, but it's typically pretty hard to get an idea of
| the value you're getting for your dollar until you actually
| arrive on site and discover just how functional the
| HVAC/kitchen actually are and how good the location
| actually is.
|
| While you might not classify any of the three as "scams",
| they're certainly classic 'low-rent' advertisements for
| things that take advantage of information asymmetry to
| convince customers to pay more than they would be
| necessarily willing to if what their money got them was
| actually clear.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > air bnb
|
| > gacha games
|
| How are these not scams?
| vadoff wrote:
| What if you were required to put down a % of ad spend as a
| security deposit. Then if you were ever caught running a scam,
| you'd lose the deposit.
|
| It would make running scams unprofitable, or at the very least
| cut into profit a lot / disincentivize it.
| pigeons wrote:
| Wouldn't that still not address the two problems mentioned,
| moderation costs and loss of scam ad revenue?
| liquid_thyme wrote:
| Apple and Microsoft need to wake up and bake it into the OS.
| Hopefully that will take meta and google down a notch.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| I don't understand how more countries don't hold the publisher
| responsible, especially after they are notified. I'm sure that
| in a classic newspaper, the publisher would be held responsible
| for obvious scam ads. But by intentionally automating and
| outsourcing everything, suddenly that responsibility goes away?
|
| Hold the publisher responsible, let them deal with the ad
| platform. Suddenly, it becomes very attractive to have an ad
| platform that doesn't allow scams.
|
| If the publisher and the ad platform are the same, even better.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Ad blockers don't block Facebook ads because they appear as
| legitimate posts.
| asadotzler wrote:
| You can use uBlock Origin's element blocker to kill cards
| that deliver ads (or any other standardized blocks)
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| I switched back to Firefox after Chrome watered down uBlock
| Origin's capabilities
| igleria wrote:
| X's scam originated revenue is probably a bigger percent, but 10%
| is too much... Shame on Meta.
|
| edit: wow, some people REALLY don't like getting told they are
| knowingly contributing negatively to society.
| mk89 wrote:
| Imagine going in the streets as a normal human being and
| advertising these companies (the scammers, I mean).
|
| You would never see the light again, after fighting countless
| battles with lawyers (rightly so!), ending up in prison.
|
| But these guys just can exploit it, because that's what they do,
| and literally never be accountable for it.
| bjourne wrote:
| > "We aggressively fight fraud and scams because people on our
| platforms don't want this content, legitimate advertisers don't
| want it, and we don't want it either."
|
| I wonder if those who market illegal Israeli settlements counts
| as "legitimate advertisers":
| https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/3/31/meta-profits-as... I
| have a hunch that "legitimacy" is directly proportional to the
| dollar amount of the ad bid...
| IronyMan100 wrote:
| If i Look at all the finfluences and "get thin in 30h with my
| cale diet eBook"-influencer, i though it was substantially more
| than 10%.
| jm4 wrote:
| If my company inadvertently made money from scams, I would try to
| make the victims whole or donate that money. It's so scummy that
| they sit around waiting to be fined. It's just plain stupid
| management to document this in emails and not also document a
| good faith attempt to make it right. I always assume my emails
| could be made public after my entire mailbox was subpoenaed in a
| lawsuit my employer was involved in and I was deposed to answer
| questions about email threads and source code comments from years
| ago. (I didn't do anything wrong personally, but my employer most
| likely did.) If I'm going to discuss something that could make me
| or the company look bad, I'm sure as hell going to write it in a
| way that's defensible when it gets out.
| Havoc wrote:
| Meta is cooked. It's not just scam portion - their entire
| strategy is in trouble
|
| FB - nobody I know actively uses it anymore.
|
| Insta - is being overrun with AI slop and given meta's stated
| goal of adding more AI interactions on their platforms I doubt
| they'll even try to get a grip on it let alone succeed
|
| Whatsapp & FB messenger - some use but has zero moat over other
| messengers. It's a completely fungible service in a space that
| has fractured across many providers.
|
| VR/meta/AI/etc - they keep trying. Maybe one day
|
| ...that leaves their adtech which only works due to their
| invasive tracking...that is directly dependent on their other
| properties succeeding: Their targeting edge comes directly from
| front row seats tracking users behaviour on their platforms. No
| users, no insights.
| clickety_clack wrote:
| Disagree on WhatsApp, it's the de facto standard messaging app
| outside the US.
| zzzoom wrote:
| Yeah, Whatsapp is probably the largest moat in the world atm.
| Havoc wrote:
| > it's the de facto standard messaging app outside the US.
|
| Agreed and in combination with FB messenger they've got most
| of the market...but what of it?
|
| They're literally competing against a donation supported app.
| Pause for a second and think about what that says about how
| little direct money there is in the space.
|
| Plus it's E2E encrypted & has significant user privacy
| expectations so significant limitations on how you can
| leverage it for their adtech biz
|
| I'm not saying whatsapp is dead or a failure as a messenger.
| It's a great addition to round out an ecosystem but don't
| think it's any good as the primary load bearing pillar of a
| 1.5 trillion company in the same way search is for google
| newsclues wrote:
| Facebook appeared cooked after the parents of the original user
| base started using it (boomers). But it seems like that's
| profitable because they are so dumb
| salil999 wrote:
| I hear this on almost every bad post about Meta. No they are
| not cooked. They still generate tons of profit and their user
| base is one of the biggest in the world. They're not going
| anywhere any time soon.
| empath75 wrote:
| Blackberry made their best profits in 2008, a year after the
| iPhone was released, with a stock price of around $140 in May
| of 2008, their all time high. By December of 2008, their
| stock price was $30, by 2012 -- $7. That FB are making a ton
| of profit right now is nothing but inertia.
| Havoc wrote:
| A current big user base is not enough on a ,,line must go up"
| world
| csomar wrote:
| Just because they generate tons of profit doesn't mean they
| are not vulnerable. Tiktok has shown that their position is
| not as solid like some here tend to believe.
| smt88 wrote:
| You're using anecdata to decide if a company with billions of
| users is viable? Literal nonsense.
|
| I hate Meta, but their ad business is still doing well and
| WhatsApp is the core of Indian society.
|
| AOL, Yahoo, and Tumblr still operate. Meta won't be dead in our
| lifetimes.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > AOL, Yahoo, and Tumblr still operate.
|
| As empty shells of what they once were.
|
| I've no doubt there'll be something at Facebook.com in ten
| years. But if it looks like your three examples, that's not a
| success.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| my aunt/uncle etc., who must certainly still use FB, just
| discovered Reels. I know this because they now send me 10 a
| day. and last year was the first time i heard them talking
| about finding christmas gifts advertised on FB, so i don't
| think they are cooked yet.
| empath75 wrote:
| FB and google are both basically doomed, IMO.
| randycupertino wrote:
| Is anyone actually buying and using their glasses? I've tried
| to find actual sales figures but they keep it very opaque. I am
| so curious if despite how hard they are pushing them they will
| just be another flash-in-the-pan. I just can't see wide-market
| adoptability, maybe some niche users, but maybe I am just a
| hater/cynic.
| mstipetic wrote:
| I was thinking that for the last 7 years and every year they
| grow revenue massively. I don't get it.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| The will just buy their next move. You're not cooked when
| you're a trillionaire; you never are or will be.*
|
| *Unless you steal from other wealthy folks.
| samlinnfer wrote:
| A new car built by my company leaves somewhere travelling at 60
| mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns
| with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall?
| Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the
| probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court
| settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the
| cost of a recall, we don't do one.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| I don't think the analogy applies the same way. Meta simply
| choose to be evil not because it costs less overall but because
| they're unable to provide/filter actually useful ads to
| consumers. The rear diff is instead a filthy window but
| consumers don't sue for better quality because everything else
| works good enough and those that do crash could have cleaned
| the windows themselves.
| ruined wrote:
| ability "to provide/filter actually useful ads" is a function
| of moderation budget and not much else
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| To them it's all an algorithm. Human moderation is
| completely infeasible at their massive scale.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| And if the algorithm can't moderate then what? We should
| all suffer because doing it right isn't feasible?
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Yes. You can choose to drive a broken car, not drive it,
| or fix with aftermarket parts and then drive it. The
| company that made it cannot deliver solution.
| bradlys wrote:
| I think there needs to be some moderation here because Meta
| clearly does offer useful ads to consumers, otherwise it
| wouldn't have so much insane revenue from ads. If people
| don't find the ads useful then they won't click on them or
| give the company money.
|
| I think the average user on HN (who blocks ads constantly,
| uses things like AdNauseam, pihole, etc.) is not going to be
| your typical purchaser. If you look at your typical American,
| they buy a lot of shit through those ads _and a lot of people
| actually like the ads_.
|
| My only complaint with the ads has been the targeting has
| always been crap. If you allow personalization, they do get
| more relevant. But, that complaint of mine is my own personal
| one. I'm like a typical HN user, ads don't typically read me
| well due to my blocking on all kinds of platforms.
| xandrius wrote:
| Ohh, so naive. They choose inaction because it's profitable,
| that's it. They can claim they were unaware and they are out
| either scot-free or with a slap on their gigantic wrist.
| thinkmoore wrote:
| Recalls happen because they are required by regulators...
| unglaublich wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Fuel_system_fires,_...
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's a quarter to a third of its entire margin. And that's what
| it admits to.
| Noaidi wrote:
| I wonder if the government and lawmakers would care if 10% of my
| income came from selling heroin...
| vintermann wrote:
| That's not the right comparison. The question should rather be,
| would they care if 10% of their tax revenue came from heroin
| sales?
|
| And the answer would depend on where the externalities from all
| that heroin sale happened (e.g. if it was abroad), whether the
| government would be expected to carry the cost of them (e.g. by
| having a public healthcare system), and probably also on how
| actually democratic they are.
| jeffbee wrote:
| 10% scams is bush league rookie stats. They gotta pump that up to
| play in the same league as Nextdoor.
| dkdcio wrote:
| ban digital advertisement
| StayTrue wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
| dkdcio wrote:
| https://dkdc.dev/posts/ban-advertisement/ (not as much
| content I admit)
| hightrix wrote:
| I'd add billboards and other physical ads too.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe] Earlier on source:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45834840
| stusmall wrote:
| Once I got an Instagram ad for buying ketamine that just linked
| to a telegram channel. They didn't even bother being coy or using
| mispelling or slang. A simple keyword search to flag for more
| review would have caught it. I can't even wrap my head around
| what internal controls exist when something like that makes it
| out to users.
| seelmobile wrote:
| The bad actor serves a benign ad to the ad review system, and
| only serves the scam to real users. It's called "cloaking" - an
| interesting (but a bit depressing) topic to explore.
| zahlman wrote:
| So the ad review system is just requesting the ad from the
| advertiser, and not ever bothering to disguise itself? Didn't
| we have this shit figured out for brick-and-mortar restaurant
| reviews decades ago?
| igleria wrote:
| As far as I understood, the problem happens when the ad has
| a link to a website. I can't imagine that happening with
| static images or videos that don't link a website (that
| could be solved quite trivially...)
| herbst wrote:
| You can change the link target, but you cannot change the
| media afterwards without a new check.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| That's called a broken system and implies either incompetence
| or malicious intent by the ad platform.
|
| The fact the ad platforms are multi-billion dollar companies
| leans my opinion towards malicious intent.
| iammrpayments wrote:
| There's zero to none manual review. The people who run these
| type of ads probably burn 100 facebook ad accounts per day
| stusmall wrote:
| Oh definitely. I have zero expectation of high level of
| manual reviews. You can run limited runs of adds for next to
| a couple dollars. The math could never work out. I understand
| a lot with make it through the system, this was just so
| blatant. It should be _so easy_ to catch with an automated
| system. It was nothing but red flags. The automated systems
| could reject outright or _maybe_ escalate to manual review if
| it met enough criteria (account reputation, spend floor, etc)
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >The math could never work out.
|
| Horseshit. Running an ad in a local publication was also
| pretty damn cheap and was _always_ human reviewed.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Meta wants to have big scammers. It's hugely profitable.
| That's why they codified internal policy that if the scam
| generates at least 0.15% of Meta's revenue, they must be
| protected and never moderated.
|
| There was a big "bombshell" report on this yesterday (it
| didn't hit HN frontpage though).
|
| Meta knowingly gets a lot of its funding from scams. They
| love it! They don't care about technical solutions for it:
| they've banned any solutions from being implemented because
| it would impact revenue.
| cantor_S_drug wrote:
| Zuck and Meta are playing the role of Robinhood. They take the
| money from scammers and advance their philanthrophy.
|
| https://x.com/a16z/status/1986486508355002584
|
| Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg on Curing All Disease
|
| We sat down with Dr. Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, co-
| founders of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to discuss their
| ambitious plan to cure, prevent, and manage all disease by the
| end of the century.
| spencerflem wrote:
| I'm assuming this is satire but in case it's not- He's
| PROVIDING A SERVICE for the scammers. Not stealing from them
| lol
| stusmall wrote:
| Did Facebook's LLM write this comment?
| danny_codes wrote:
| Zuck has donated something like 2% of his net worth. Not
| really "ambitious". For a normal American that's like
| donating to "cars for kids" every 8 years when you upgrade
| your Mercedes and claiming you're a philanthropist
| ok123456 wrote:
| There are Facebook groups devoted to selling stolen cars
| (strikers).
| podgorniy wrote:
| What a business/ethical dilemma ~not~ to solve
| whatamidoingyo wrote:
| I've been seeing legitimate pornography on Facebook while
| scrolling through reels. I thought it was "just my algorithm",
| but co-workers brought it up during lunch. Quite a few of them
| are seeing the exact same ads.
|
| I've reported them a few times, but surprisingly (or maybe not),
| Facebook responds back with "we didn't find anything that goes
| against our community standards".
|
| These ads usually link to a website where you can download an
| application (a chat app, or some AI generation). Of course,
| they're not in the play store. It's frustrating when I think of
| the times I was flat out rejected for my legitimate ads related
| to programming, or a job board, or real estate, but they approve
| PORNOGRAPHY. What in the world do those posters of pornography
| know that I don't? How could they get that approved? There has to
| be some cleverness going on.
| tryauuum wrote:
| the obvious question to you is "have you tried adding
| pornography to your ads"?
| LtWorf wrote:
| I've once seen an ad for escorts (literal word they used) in my
| area on fb. But that one did get removed.
| overfeed wrote:
| > What in the world do those posters of pornography know that I
| don't?
|
| The power of persistence. I'm not being glib: these people
| probably get most of their ads/accounts blocked or banned, and
| have a dismal success rate baked into their business model, but
| they keep submitting until one goes through.
|
| Misrepresentation is another key ingredient, but I hope you're
| not willing to buy a network of bot or havked accounts just so
| you can get an ad approved.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Yea, I have got ads for hardcore porn starting a month or two
| ago on Facebook. I only use marketplace, have no friends on the
| platform and have only used it to buy and sell as marketplace
| is unfortunately the only platform which is used for private
| transactions where I live.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| It's very clear that social media is dead. My mom sometimes tells
| me to go look at a picture on Facebook. I'm astonished that there
| is literally nothing on there to see but ads.
|
| I and anyone I know only post stories on Instagram at best. My
| feed is JAM packed with ads and cringe people still trying to be
| influencers.
|
| Threads is a rounding error.
|
| X is blah
|
| Meta is desperate to move to AI because they know this. They see
| the data and are not dumb. They want to squeeze every last dime
| out while they still can.
| input_sh wrote:
| Meta doesn't know anything, the last successful "product" that
| they built (as opposed to buying) was splitting off Messenger
| into a separate app.
|
| Since then, they invested heavily in providing free internet
| that failed (Free Basics), wasted a bunch of money on some sort
| of a global cryptocurrency that never even launched
| (Libra/Diem), tried to invent a whole new market with VR and it
| went nowhere, and now they're going all in on "AI" but the only
| thing they have to show for it are some sort of celebrity-
| impersonating Instagram bot accounts and some glasses whose
| selling point is that they're branded as Ray-Bans.
| danny_codes wrote:
| FB is an extractive institution. The business model is to get
| people addicted and profit from it. It's little different in
| my eyes from drug dealing. Well, I guess there's a lot more
| harm done by FB
| seydor wrote:
| They should remove the marketplace, i know so many people who got
| scammed
| carefulfungi wrote:
| Snakeoil on every corner these days - from online scams to text
| message scams to the whole supplements industry to prosperity
| gospel to ... it sure feels like we're surrounded by hustlers and
| charlatans.
| random9749832 wrote:
| Supplements industry? I only take whey protein and creatine
| from known sources. Anything on this?
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| i think they're talking about Hims-type businesses and the
| type of stuff that makes low/mid-level right-wing grifters
| their money: colloidal silver, methylene blue, anything else
| Alex Jones is hawking. maybe you could group Tucker Carlson's
| Nicotine Pouches For Christian Nationalists in there too,
| idk.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Guys they are putting chemicals in the water that make
| frogs gay!!!!
|
| Anyway you should buy my bottle of research chemicals that
| will make your balls bigger. Evidence? What are you, the
| Illuminati?
|
| Also check out this hat purported to protect your head from
| electromagnetic radiation even though it is shaped exactly
| like a lens pointed directly at your brain.
|
| Don't forget to harass random telecom repairman about how
| dangerous 5G is! We will be talking all about it on our app
| you can buy so you can watch us anywhere!
|
| I just... I just don't understand. There are people who
| seem to have near infinite credulity, at least for the
| "right" people.
|
| At least something like "Miracle Mineral Solution" had a
| partially fake "study" where they actually gave people a
| harmful thing to drink just to say they did.
|
| That guy from FoldingIdeas had a comment that resonates
| with me: There are people who trust something implicitly
| _entirely because_ an actual authority told them not to
| trust it. "They believe the fake facebook story _because_
| facebook told them it was fake ". But even those people are
| still demonstrably unable to connect past actions to
| current results to a point that I'm not sure how they trust
| that breathing is required for being alive.
|
| Like there's so much about reality that is so simple and
| clear and _demonstrable_ , and they just don't seem to be
| at all capable of squaring even those simple facts... No,
| crystals can't do shit. No "vibrations" just aren't a
| thing. These people live in a different reality than I do,
| but I don't understand how they can look around them and
| match that to the reality they have been sold. Those pills
| haven't made you any fucking smarter! Haven't you noticed?!
|
| Like even Joe Rogan told Matt Walsh "Hey, you are wrong,
| there's really only a few thousand sex change operations a
| year" instead of the _millions_ Walsh claimed and he just
| said "I don't believe that" and I'm like what the hell
| buddy do some basic math _how many people do you know that
| got a sex change operation last year_?
| bradlys wrote:
| They're talking about all the other types of supplements with
| questionable benefits like turkesterone.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Creatine is the closest the supplements industry has ever
| gotten to actually producing something that helps people. If
| you are physically active, you could probably see minor
| benefits from it.
|
| If you eat an American diet, you do not need protein
| supplements. You do not need the absurd amount of protein per
| day that mens health influencers insist, and they usually
| push you pretty close to the actual danger zone, and it's all
| just a fucking waste anyway.
|
| The current protein trend is just a fad diet for men. It
| doesn't help. Bulk whey protein is literally the least bad
| part of that industry though, so eh.
|
| Everything else about the supplements industry is fully scam
| though. If any of it worked, they would scientifically prove
| it so they could get near infinite American healthcare
| dollars. Most of it not only doesn't do anything, but the
| batch quality is atrocious, and plenty often you can buy a
| supplement that _does not include the ingredient it claims at
| all_. I feel like the fact that it is sold next to the
| literal "poison a child" homeopathic pills should be more
| meaningful to people than it is.
|
| That shelf is for things that don't work.
| random9749832 wrote:
| I do weightlifting so taking 1.5-2 grams * bodyweight of
| protein makes sense. I am not American but a lot of it just
| looks like sodium, carbs, sugar and fat rather than lean
| meat.
| jesse_dot_id wrote:
| https://jesse.id/blog/posts/im-telling-yall-its-adbotage
|
| I wrote a blog about turning advertising against advertisers, and
| as I see more and more stuff like this, I wonder how the ad-based
| Internet survives this era of unfettered and unpunished scamming.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| 10% seems very conservative as estimates go.
| throw7 wrote:
| "...scammers obtain sexual images of a user, often a teenager,
| under false pretenses and then blackmail them - ... was becoming
| commonplace on Meta's platforms"
|
| There you go U.K. OFCOM. Here's child endangerment propagated
| knowingly by Facebook. Don't worry, I know you won't do anything
| to Facebook because you "protecting" kids is pretext.
| swarnie wrote:
| Listen throw7, Meta paid almost PS30 million in tax in 2023, an
| effective tax rate of 12%. I'm unsure why numbers for 2024
| aren't available but you'll need to speak to legal about that.
|
| If you want to throw7 that all away over some media speculation
| be my guest. I'll tell the NHS to fund themselves for 11
| minutes next year to make up the shortfall.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| If you include speculation and gambling I'd bet 10% of all
| economic activity is heavily dependent on either outright scams
| or scam-adjacent behavior.
| mv4 wrote:
| As a former Meta employee (also dealt with Shopping and Ads), I
| am quite shocked at the percentage of "commerce" scams in my
| Instagram feed now. Easily 9 out of 10 promoted "buy" posts use
| AI videos of non-existent products leading to scammy sites. Any
| current employees willing to chime in?
| bensonn wrote:
| I wonder how much of Meta the corporation is a scam waiting to
| crumble. Hundreds of billions of dollars can make people do
| questionable things. -their revenue is 99% ads with more than 80%
| coming from FB and IG -they can only sell ads if they have a
| large and active user base -DAP (daily active people) is reported
| publicly but calculated internally -ad spending, views, and
| engagement are calculated by Meta's own platform
|
| Anecdote (why I think it is a scam)- I had a FB account, I needed
| it for a previous job but didn't want it. I set up a random email
| address at a host I had never used, had a made-up FB name, and
| used a password generator for both the email address and FB
| accounts. My FB account had almost no activity besides viewing
| company posts. FB was only used from a single desktop computer.
| Passwords were stored in my (local only desktop) password
| manager.
|
| After a couple years, FB emailed me and claimed my account was
| hacked. The "hacker" changed my profile picture (was a blank
| avatar icon) to an AI photo of a random guy. Facebook says it is
| hacked but they keep it visible, my two friends are still friends
| with the old account (they know it was hacked). FYI - I didn't
| care enough to send them a copy of my ID, nor did my ID match my
| user name, so I couldn't reclaim my account.
|
| How would a hacker combine a random username, with a random email
| (has not been pwnd) only used for FB, guess a ~20 character
| random password, etc? And why, to steal an account with no
| followers and to do nothing with the account? That is a lot of
| work and criminal charges for nothing.
|
| I am fine with FB saying the account was hacked and closing it.
| It has been years and the account is still live. Is it "active"
| and counted towards their users? They have a HUGE financial
| incentive to keep and count all accounts, and they have no
| oversite to verify accounts since it is all calculated internally
| with opaque algorithms.
| m_a_g wrote:
| Did they take control of the email account?
| noslenwerdna wrote:
| Your desktop was hacked or your email was hacked?
| jddj wrote:
| Sad, because I know first hand of legitimate businesses who
| struggle to run Instagram ads due to unexplained blocks or
| payment gateway issues
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| Google and Meta are kinda like cattle ranches --- they're not
| being run to benefit the cattle.
|
| Users of these platforms are being farmed like cattle.
| almosthere wrote:
| So Meta made billions of dollars so that your mom could lose her
| entire life savings?
| wagwang wrote:
| Meta makes hundreds of billions on people collectively spending
| trillions of hours doom scrolling and you're worried about
| scams?
| diob wrote:
| I tried to get Kickstarter to take down an obvious scam a while
| back. Best I could do was post on Reddit to warn folks though.
|
| Checked on it recently, so many comments of folks asking for
| shipping details / anything. Hundreds of thousands of dollars
| just scammed from folks. And they're still raising / stringing
| folks along.
|
| It's wild.
| stickfigure wrote:
| That sounds tantalizing! Link please?
| Telaneo wrote:
| Why aren't we (society) fining Meta et cetera for collaborating
| in scams again? Or at least having the fines actually be equal to
| the money they're earning so the fines aren't just cost of
| business?
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| Forget fines, they should be liable for any losses incurred by
| people scammed.
| xandrius wrote:
| Because there is no "we". It's currently just who has the money
| and they all seem to be pal somehow.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I got scammed on Instagram when I was in the hospital getting
| chemotherapy.
|
| It was christmas time, and I got an ad for a cool looking steam
| punk keyboard. I ordered it for my kid who had recently got into
| PC gaming. It was only $60, and when it didn't come I checked my
| bank and credit card and didn't see any charges, so I assumed
| that I didn't actually finish the order. Until almost a year
| later when I realized I paid with paypal, and they used funds I
| had sitting in there for some reason. By then it was too late to
| challenge.
| skizm wrote:
| To me this basically says roughly 10% of all internet advertising
| revenue is from scams. I'd bet Google has a much higher number
| than 10%, since they do more volume.
| zipy124 wrote:
| Imagine if a bank admitted 10% of it's revenue came from
| criminals or money laundering. A staggering proportion with no
| government action.
| schmookeeg wrote:
| Seems like the word for this is "complicit"
| iamleppert wrote:
| It's also full of people selling counterfeit money as well. I am
| shocked how they allow it, there's a guy with a profile that
| shows him printing and testing his "bills" along with a link to
| buy them. Not trying to hide it, no code words, nothing.
|
| The same on Tiktok. I have reported it multiple times but every
| time they say "no violation".
|
| (facebook wouldn't copy a URL, but here he is on Tiktok):
| https://www.tiktok.com/@blastedbills
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Their entire business model is corrupt and a significant driver
| of the degraded state of our society, civility, and politics.
|
| What is the core of their business? Maximizing and totalizing
| surveillance, in service whoever has money in hand, including
| those interested not (just) in selling you shit, but steering
| your behavior, mood, and beliefs.
|
| There's a reason for the constant drumbeat of stories about
| whistleblowing, lawsuits, suppressed research, literal
| criminality, and contempt for the wellbeing of their "users."
|
| It's not "polite" to talk about this on HN, but if you work there
| or do business with them, you better be at peace with your moral
| complicity.
|
| There's also a reason they pay so well. It's to make people hold
| their noses.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| The key sentences:
|
| > the company prioritized enforcement in regions where the
| penalties would be steepest, the reporting found. The cost of
| lost revenue from clamping down on the scams was weighed against
| the cost of fines from regulators.
|
| The companies don't necessarily want scams, and they might even
| be willing to forgo the scam revenue itself. But if the
| consequence of allowing the scam is low, and the consequence of
| doing something about it would be a loss of non-scam revenue
| (e.g. by disallowing legit customers or verification requirements
| making customers go to an "easier" competitor), they won't do
| anything about it.
|
| It's time to treat them as accomplices. As the report shows - if
| they had to pay the damage they're helping to cause, priorities
| would shift and they would find a way to make the problem go
| away. As is, they have no reason to even try.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Let's hope they don't let a paperclip-maximizing AI decide how to
| maximize revenue!
| mattmcknight wrote:
| Can we fix the title to be "scams and banned items"?
|
| It seems like the banned items bit is misleadingly left out, and
| this title falsely implies it is 10% from scams alone.
| gummydogg wrote:
| I deal with domain impersonation and fraudulent ad takedowns
| nearly every day. A year ago, Meta would remove fake ads falsely
| using my company's branding within a day or two. Now these same
| ads run for over a month with no action taken. This isn't just an
| inconvenience these scams cause real harm. The money fraudsters
| extract fuels their expansion into larger operations. Meta has
| become completely negligent in its enforcement responsibilities
| and shows no empathy for the victims it enables. Meta is the
| single largest enabler of this fraud ecosystem the operations
| fund human trafficking, force, labor, and systematic financial
| fraud, targeting vulnerable populations, particularly elderly
| victims, who lose their life savings at a point in time where
| they have no time to earn it back. Every dollars these criminals
| make through Meta platform goes to some of the most depraved
| actors on the planet.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| I actually got suckered by the 3d printer scam. My bank helped
| while PayPal figured it out (2 months). Facebook is still showing
| the fake Bambu labs ads. There's no FBI to enforce online fraud
| so why would they care?
| sentrysapper wrote:
| There is. It's known as the Internet Crimes Complaint Center
| (IC3).
| keeda wrote:
| This is why, despite being a huge fan of their engineering, I'm
| leery of Facebook and Google and any advertising-based tech
| company in the long run. The incentives to block fraudulent,
| malicious and even simply ineffective ads are _just not there_.
|
| Anybody remember this?
| https://consumerwatchdog.org/uncategorized/google-shells-out...
|
| Google stopped that practice then... or it might not have! We'll
| never know since, apparently unlike silly little Meta, it has
| been much more careful about not having any kind of incriminating
| internal documents or correspondence being preserved for
| discovery.
|
| And in any case, it could fall back to the much more lucrative
| business of anti-competitive manipulation of the ads market:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...
|
| I've had a hint that the ad industry was rotten for a decade+
| when in a prior life I saw our regional head of marketing
| casually throw stats on the whiteboard showing something insane
| like 30 - 50% of ad clicks on all major platforms being
| fraudulent. She was cynical but also jaded to the fact that,
| despite being widely known and accepted in the industry, it
| wasn't clear if things would ever improve. Shocked, I followed
| the ad industry and such reports for a while, anticipating a
| crash. Glad I didn't bet on it, because the crash never came.
|
| Unfortunately, there is so much money in this that it seems
| nothing will happen.
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| Well, they need to be fined 10% then
| estebarb wrote:
| That would explain why they never do anything against obvious
| financial scams.
| jongjong wrote:
| 100% of all revenue, of all companies came from scams because
| everything is a scam.
| celestialcheese wrote:
| Google should have to make this disclosure as well. I'd guess
| >50% of their AdX revenue is from click-trick, fake button, scam
| ads. Across the board I'd expect Google's ad revenue to be at
| least 10% from scams, if not more.
|
| Source: a decade of running a website monetized with adx and
| having to hire people to manually monitor and block scam display
| ads multiple times a day.
| 555watch wrote:
| In my country there are obvious clones of known portals with
| clickbaity titles, visually hard to distinguish from real. Always
| with some random url. Sometimes just fake news and propaganda,
| sometimes selling fake things. Under paid sponsorship. Reported
| them multiple times. Always the response is as follows: we looked
| at it and found nothing wrong. All the disputes are also killed.
| So its done on purpose
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