Ask HN: Since when is everything a scam? It feels like you need to look up if something is a scam or not rather than just the user reviews. I mean it started in the 70s with the prominent make up Pyramide schemes but in the last 2 years it just got mainstream to scam everyone around you. How do you navigate it? I deactivated personalized ads on YouTube and every ad is for a scam now. |
You don't want to make things that people will buy anymore. You need to maximize engagament, please investors, sell your user's telemetry to the highest bidder.
I blame capitalism and especially America for this.
Such weakening encourages abuse and exploitation.
¹Note that said community culture was not restricted to small communities: it was present in metropolis of millions. And it is related to a vaster area of consequences of the "weakening of the "low-culture" (i.e. "the teacher and neighbour" as opposed to "the professor and professional") presence".
The active removal of any (even semblance) of community in society, to be replaced with radical individualism, has been horribly detrimental. There is no shame, there is no right or wrong, there is no responsibility to others.
And this extends to both sides of the political spectrum. The right glorify this "Don't step on me", "I don't care about others that don't exactly fit into my in-group", "no taxes (contributions to society)" mentality, while the left cultivates "we must take care of everyone and make everyone feel included as they are, no matter what, but we can't ask anyone to be responsible to society in any way in return".
We descended in to madness.
As an example, SF has the highest tax revenue per capita in the USA
https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/slideshows/us-cities-with...
So why is it so dysfunctional? My guess is the right would say because so much is wasted on the wrong things.
Note: I'm not saying the right is correct. I'm only suggesting a different interpretation of their POV.
The left puts effort into responsibility and care for community. Why do you think the right advocates for dismantling social services and the left champions them?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2056992.Left_Behind_In_R...
Summary of the book by a far-right nutjob:
https://twitter.com/GodCloseMyEyes/status/141461967105629798...
Community culture still exists in some places. Those places generally aren’t trying to solve massively complex racial or mass-migration conflicts at the same time as healthcare, housing, education and so on. Voters and leaders have limited time and attention. Fewer problems to solve means more resources available per problem.
In fact I think that these communities are in fact the REASON more scams seem to exist today because with the internet all types of communities are possible because you can connect with like-minded people from all over to form one, rather than having to rely on those in your specific geographic area. These communities form trust relationships which are then exploited by scammers (either internally or externally). Crypto bros are a great example.
And in such environment, under the "you shall behave - you will behave rule", scams are not tolerated by society and are eliminated as soon as they show up through the force of radical opposition that meets the active intention of Enforcement. On the contrary, in the "anarco-decadent" society, the enforcement itself will be hindered and burdened ("I wish I could", "What can you do about it", etc).
Think the dislike button or the normalization of exploiting any data that was previously made to reduce storage pressures.
In fact many features like search seem to be performing worse now than a decade ago, because they want to extend user time for ads.
They kill an organic culture that had its own safety checks for slightly more money, and in turn make the internet more dangerous as the vacuum is filled by predators who happily fork pennies to Google to hunt new prey.
In fact I’m willing to bet you’re ~27-28 years old, because what you are seeing is your profile getting moved from the 18-25 market segment to the 26-35 segment.
The scams where always there, it’s just that people thought you were too poor to market them to you.
Youtube profiled me as a pure dumbass, and it might have to do with all the Rogan videos I watch.
Just watch a few minutes of this: https://www.digitalpodcastmillionaire.com/episode13
These are the types of ads I'm seeing 24/7.
Never said they were.
They’re likely looking for men, specially young (but old enough to have some savings), middle class (so you have a high enough paying job), preferably single, and even better with low to no financial know how.
Look at old advertising and all the literal snake oil that used to be sold.
I think it is jus the internets effect to make everything more discoverable and new schemes enabled by new technology.
Navigation is easy:
If it is too good to be true it probably is a lie.
There is no money on the streets and nobody is giving it away for free.
If it is claimed that something works on "everything" (like all the newfangled health food) it probably works on nothing.
What's coming is frankly scary to me.
Apart from robocalls and junk mails, I don’t think I’ve personally experienced a notable amount of scams. When I buy something, I almost always get what I buy, except a few incidents of lost delivery, where the orders was promptly refunded or reissued.
Take Google Maps for example: There are now many restaurants that have a rating that is far off from reality. This is because there is no or very little cost associated with leaving a review. So click farms have gotten wind of this and hence a restaurant owner may just buy their way to a 4.5 star rating.
Remove the problem of earning money to achieve independent housing, remove 75% of the hussle for most people to participate in scams.
Do you all live in California?
It's a global problem, it doesn't matter where you go. People and companies have an absolute fetish with real state that makes young people like me give up with hope. What is work good for if you're just a slave to the system?
Right now, it'd take me 7 years of salary JUST to afford the initial down payment for a house. If we're talking about purchasing it out-right after basic expenses, 40 years. Is this normal? Well, in the fucked up we live in, yes!
Start working in your 20s, own your house in your 60s. Nice.
It is ridiculous.
Thanks globalization to make it possible for a chinese billionaire to own property in Schneizlreuth, BY.
But it can be difficult when a new owner buys a good media and transform it to make more profits. LesNumériques (French) was a good source and is not trustworthy anymore. Tek.no (Norwegian) may be alright on average, even though the owner is so-so.
I also stopped to use Google Search. It is a completely useless search engine for this usage. I prefer DuckDuckGo/Bing and I usually append "reddit" to my searches. It’s still a lot of astroturfing on Reddit though. Some is obvious but it’s not perfect.
I never trust online user reviews. For example for restaurants I prefer to look at the guide Michelin than fake reviews. Online reviews can still show when a restaurant is likely bad but it’s not a good indication of a restaurant worth a trip.
I also ask friends.
I suppose as we trust Amazon less we will begin shopping at the curated store more.
As we trust Google less, maybe people who curate links will become valuable again.
As we trust Google ads less (to get our product in front of real people) we will trust specialist advertisers more.
Since there is no scrutiny from the consumer anymore, these vendors don't care about accountability or their own reputation. I absolutely hate that marketplace paradigm where you don't even know who you are buying from anymore and everything is obfuscated.
I automatically assume any online influencer trying to sell me something is a grifter. I also don't use social media.
The best part is that there's zero downside and you don't have to do anything.
Your average YouTube creator doesn't want scam ads. If the FTC forced YouTube to say "this ad is endorsed by us and we'll pay any legal damages if this is found to be a scam in court", those ads would disappear.
The bigger issue is why this is just a thread on Hacker News and not a major talking point for politicians looking to dunk on Big Tech.
Since I've been using adblockers forever, I went ten years or so before I even realized YouTube was showing ads...
I'm reminded of a post from a few months ago: a guy had a massager who got annihilated by Chinese competition because they knew how to exploit Amazon's systems.
I came from an European country, a not heavy-populated area, where a lot of feedback are shared in the community. Before buying something, is helpful asking friend, relatives or colleagues about their previous experience and what model/brand they advise. I think is a great benefit that I missed when I went to live in other countries. There's less feedback sharing abroad and most of the people rely on: the same brand, the price of the product, the advice for shopping center staff (which are often biased). If I ask to some friend about a car mechanic or a restaurant advice, he would have no preference.
It's partly due to technology completely removing barriers to entry and providing global and powerful amplification, coupled with sociocultural "bonkers insanity" (a technical term) where almost everything has become an advertise or a performance or etc, which has its own effect of lowering barriers and amplification.
The feedback loops there just accelerate it.
It's not new (watch any set of TV infomercials, or most of what happens on QVC or Home Shopping Network or whatever the equivalents to these things are today) but there really is more of it, and they're getting better at it, as above.
Technology + Humans. IMO.
Extremely rare occurrence before the last 10 years of influencer hustle culture. Now, not so much.
You must not have been arount > 10 years ago ... see Amway, tupperware, etc.
https://www.history.com/news/tupperware-parties-brownie-wise
Such an old story it is in the "history" section.
I have some guesses about underlying drivers, but they're just guesses. At the top, we have regulatory 'avoidance' masquerading as 'innovation', and enough regulators stood down for it to have consequences. We have the entire journalism industry brought to it's knees financially, and turning to low-quality opinion written predominantly by immature, inexperienced people. We have politics-- international actors leveraging social media to sow disinformation, and domestic actor(s) enthusiastically and successfully denying truths with impunity. And we have official sources of truth corrupted-- the trends above, and others led to ready availability of bad information in sources previously regarded as authoritative.
Unfortunately, the epicenter in many cases can be traced to changes in society and power brought about by the technology industry, which 'disrupted' society and replaced it with substitutes that empowered anti-factual narratives and personalities. The recipes for avoiding being scammed are nice, but this is a structural problem that shouldn't be laid at the feet of individual people unfortunate enough to be conned.
Regulators, and checks and balances of all kinds, have been systematically dismantled and de-fanged. People literally can't fathom the full scale of the power disparities.
Still, trust in authority is at a record low - if not yet low enough! You're 100% right that this is a structural problem. It's too easy for bad actors to not only avoid accountability but to even get the crowd blaming the wrong people.
Turns out, eventually it became the exact opposite. With more and better means of communication, it was possible to expose all the lies of the ruling class and build a better and more fair society.
See also https://xkcd.com/552/
It technically isn't, because it's not an "Epimenides" - the poster is not asking to be believed, but just encouraging.
It is not that ¬B(¬B(x)) would promote a truth value of x.
Which results in a "rodeo" uprising against the parasitic scam culture by the lower tiers of society, against the useless elites which has taken over the institutions and societyorgans. In these purges usually violent antisemitism is involved and a "anti"-education stance expressed. Society eats itself. Democracy was a attempt to pacify these purges, but its in the nature of elites to hack the process, which would get rid of them or force them back into productivity.
After the "purge" usually a large war or famine starts and the state reconstitutes itself, promising to do better, and the whole cycle begins again.
The usual useful "progress" happen in the war/reconstitution phase, when the elites are still productive, instead of engaging in the gambling/hacking competition and the memory of the purges is still fresh.
For YouTube, I also highly recommend SponsorBlock.
When the economy is pushing you to compete for financial resources and the Neo-liberal narrative for market ethics is pushing the line of each person is responsible for his own actions, or in other words, if you found yourself in a scam that is your fault.. As a business, it's just a question of finding the most legal way to scam people to get more resources..
Cases in point - planned/perceived obsolescence..
But visibly decomposing? No. We're doing ok, as is much of the world, especially considering that we're at the tail end of a pandemic that massively disrupted the social order. I think we're doing pretty well when I consider that, in fact.
Some other countries - the US, Brazil, Hungary and of course Russia, are not doing so well right now. But they are not the entire world.
It's messy.
Most people I meet are trustworthy but on Facebook I get the message, from my own neighbors, that it's dangerous to even go outside.
Think about how trust is built. If you really believe it's something precious (I do), think about what your part is in creating more or less of it.
I admit, it's often very hard to take the first step, to be willing to look like the naive sucker, or to try to see the humanity in someone who's angry and, I guess, often scared just like me.
It's pretty easy to not say things like "society is falling apart", "you can't trust anyone these days", and things like that though. At least out loud. Then it seems like it's easier to see signs of the opposite being true.
Trust has always been an issue too. I don't think you could ever blindly trust everyone. I generally trust a random person I meet will be telling truths as they understand the world, but I wouldn't rely on them. However, crime is historically low, the chance of being assaulted, mugged etc is lower than it has been, so it seems you can trust your fellow person more now.
There are community and social issues. But I know my neighbours pretty well, if they needed help I'd be there, they would be there for us and have been.
edit: I don't live in the US but I have done in the past and I generally found Americans as or more helpful and friendly neighbours, friends and colleagues.
Turns out retailers just sell cheap stuff no matter the era and the world is still moving on.
Among the things you mentioned and addressed by the article you linked, I consider counterfeit and fake reviews to be scammy.
Pseudo brands themselves, to me, are just shit products. The fact that they use a unique, random letter combination means they aren’t trying to impersonate anyone else. Huge pain in the ass for real brands, though, having to compete with these flooding cheap goods.
And Amazon has never refused to issue a refund to me if the product is defective or of poor quality.
I’ve never used Aliexpress, so I can’t say anything about that.
Kickstarter I’ve also never used, but I feel like if they legitimately tried but failed, it’s not a scam. If they set out to take the cash and run, that’s certainly a scam.
(To be honest, I just don’t understand the idea of “backing” a kick starter campaign. If I want to back something, I’d want my share of profit when the project succeed, or at least my money back with interest. If there’s no share and no pay back, it’s not really “backing”, it’s just pre-buying something you haven’t seen, possibly at a discount. That feels to me like taking an unnecessary risk without much of a reward.)
I think one or two orders were late by a day, Amazon just gave me a month of prime as compensation each time.
This is already the case currently. Once scams are identified as such, then they are eliminated. But the problem of course is that scams start off as seeming legitimate. That's the definition of scam, something that appeared legitimate but wasn't.
Even in "anarco-decadent" societies, scams would not flourish once they are revealed as scams because, why would anyone participate in something with a 100% chance of them losing all their money? The scammers may not face punishment from an overseeing authority like the state, but may very well by individual victims of the scam. Either way, scams can't continue as known scams in any arrangement of society. edit An exception to this is a fully corrupted authoritarian society. In this special case there could be 'approved scams' by some officials or people in power that everyone knows to be a scam, but they have to go along with over fear of violent reprisal.
Individual plugins may be trustworthy, but they may be breached too.
But most European countries have far more plurality in their party systems. Main exception being Britain, with a two party system, but they don't even want to be European.
So in Europe there's certainly a strong left and right. Just also a lot in-between. Not black-white, binary, but a spectrum of colors, analogue.
"Scams have been around forever" does not really address (nor refute) "Scams have become more far more prevalent".
Not invited to an Amway party back in the day??
But now in your 5th decade being invited to tiktok teen multi level marketing crypto supplement parites?
Respect to you for living your best life in your 50/60s
SF is a mess because of liberal mismanagement (I say that as someone who identifies as left). Spending money at massive scale without asking the people you're spending money on to fix something in society (whether it's their own actions, or something that they are responsible for). SF went from a 80B surplus to a 15B deficit... and what get it gain from that? How is the city better... It's not.
Everyone wants to spend money on something or someone they identify with. It's not like the left has showed any leniency against those it deems unworthy.
I don't know if the majority agrees but we've all become addicted to e-commerce spending. The number of shoes is not counted in number of total shoes owned but number of shoes bought per month. A stock metric vs a flow metric.
Everybody has a vague idea that they're addicted but nobody seems to want to acknowledge it or even track it.
It's almost as if cutting frivolous spending is no longer a virtue.
Sorry if that's a rant.
I myself bought a house in Newcastle(not major, but not a tiny city) two years ago for £180k, we needed a 10% but me and my wife are in IT so we saved that in a year.
My point is that yes - it's a global problem, but I honestly don't think everyone everywhere needs to save up for 7 years just to get a deposit. Maybe if you live in London you do, but elsewhere? Meh. Basic 3 bed houses are not so crazy expensive in most places, at least here in UK.
LMAO, this is not normal anywhere else in Europe. Also, I bet she either has a lot of money saved up somewhere else, had her mortgage cosigned by someone else with a lot of income, etc. this is not normal at all.
I am not from Germany, but take Germany as an example: https://n26.com/en-eu/blog/cost-of-buying-a-house
"A good rule of thumb is to have at least 35% of the estimated cost. Germany: German residents can generally borrow up to 80% of the assessed property value, but non-residents usually get the short end of the stick. They have to put up 40–45% of the property value as down payment."
>two years ago for £180k
The average UK price house is 256k... https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/640/cpsprodpb/117DF/production...
You lucked out, arguably.
>My point is that yes - it's a global problem, but I honestly don't think everyone everywhere needs to save up for 7 years just to get a deposit. Maybe if you live in London you do, but elsewhere? Meh. Basic 3 bed houses are not so crazy expensive in most places, at least here in UK.
I make 12k after taxes and before other expenses... what are you talking about. And I am lucky not to pay rent with a terrible commute because I live with my parents.
In UK 5% mortgages are readily available to first time buyers. It's a completely normal thing here in UK. And I can assure you she doesn't have a lot of money and the mortgage wasn't cosigned by anyone else lol.
>>A good rule of thumb is to have at least 35% of the estimated cost.
Well now that's absolutely nuts. Here in UK 10% deposit is normal, 15% is high, and I don't know anyone who paid 20% or more - and everyone in my group of friends(we all just turned 30) bought a house recently.
>>The average UK price house is 256k
Yes, because London destroys the averages completely. Like I said, my sister just bought a 3 bed house with a garden and driveway for £150k, and it wasn't particularly cheap, neither for the street nor for the area .
https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/dk-graph...
There is such a thing as too much of a good thing (or good things used to advance perverse incentives).
Too Much of a Good Thing: Methadone and "clean needle" clinics on 125th and Brooklyn under the guis of "harm reduction". The goal should be to reduce drug usage. Not make a shopping mall for dealers and zombies. Another is the total hands off approach of the mentally ill and aggressive homeless on the subways and on the streets.
Good Things Use To Advance Perverse Incentives: The entire homeless industrial complex in California, which does absolutely nothing but syphon money to these homeless "nonprofits". I lived in both San Jose and LA and frankly the situation was addressed in a maddeningly regressive fashion.
You sometimes have to ask yourself WHY someone is championing something. Very often it's not because of altruism.
Criminalizing drug addiction increases harm. Treating it as a disease provably reduces harm. And, in fact, reduces drug use.
Methadone and clean needle clinics are pointed in the right direction, but they're not enough. They just happen to be all the people who got them put in place could manage.
I also said nothing of criminalization of addicts. Seller's, sure.
> Methadone and clean needle clinics are pointed in the right direction, but they're not enough. They just happen to be all the people who got them put in place could manage.
This makes no sense. The halfass'd effort is worse than nothing at all.
Or none at all. Or ones for people in a select group.
Most people live in towns, cities, states and nations, not communities. State and national governments cannot rely on the good of the neighbour. Larger, more equitable systems need to be put in place.
Bureaucrats do this too. See the history of communism in Europe, or present state of communism in China. Centralized welfare is a centralized system of control in the hands of politicians.
I think it's similar, at least where I live. With a better support system, people seem to be less likely to get dependent on it. Seems like a good thing to do in the long run, even if you just think about it economically.
Unless, perhaps, you need a class of people that are in a sort of benefits bondage. I don't really want to think that this is by design though.
Funny, I use this same line about the right (at least in reference to politicians) in the US.
Perhaps "more people who claim/pretend to be Christian"? You can hardly call someone Christian if they're not following Jesus; it makes as much as calling someone an atheist just because they call themselves an atheist right before talking about how God exists.
