After that report from Reuters came out saying that 10% of META's revenue comes from ads pushing scams and prohibited products I'm starting to think a very large chunk of the internet (and national economy) basically runs on scamming people.
And that's not even considering perfectly legal "scams" like shitcoin pumps and politicians awarding shady contracts to buisness people who donated to them without a technical bribe happening. I would love to know how much of the actual economy is above-board business and how much isn't, but the older I get the larger the "isn't" seems to grow. Is the scam-economy 1% of all real financial transations? 5%? 10%? 20%? I'm honestly not sure.
I think it's worse than that. Even what people think of as a "legit business" like Amazon and Walmart are scamming a significant percentage of their customers.
Selling people mountains of cheap garbage that will break almost immediately is not much different than theft to me. But it's a scam that benefits enough other people like the shipping industry than nobody will rock the boat.
The economy in general is trending more into figuring out how to siphon wealth from people without money into the pockets of people who already have everything. Poor people are actually pretty profitable because they have little choice in spending.
> The economy in general is trending more into figuring out how to siphon wealth from people without money into the pockets of people who already have everything. Poor people are actually pretty profitable because they have little choice in spending.
There are levels to the game everywhere. One example that I can think of is on the timeshare stuff in Mexico where they exploit retired older people into buying fake ownership of something and end up instead just owning a huge debt.
It’s like the world has entered an era of abundance where the game is no longer about value but rather perception of value and ways to pressure your psychological makings.
> It’s like the world has entered an era of abundance where the game is no longer about value but rather perception of value and ways to pressure your psychological makings.
Not to preach, but it's stuff like this that always makes me itch slightly and start wondering if there's something to the idea of an epochal Tendency in the Rate of Profit to Fall.
On the flip side, all the money for timeshares could be plowed into construction in those old rich peoples' communities, but they have NIMBY'd themselves out of that legitimate, straightforward investment and growth. So: absolutely no sympathy.
Amazon is explicitly auctioning off (and not even second-price auction) search spots. So if you search for something you don't get shown what you search for but something that Amazon extracts the maximum amount of money from.
Amazon and Walmart are weird targets. They are some of the most consumer-friendly places to shop (low prices, good return policies). It's easy to take for granted, but the variety, quality, and prices at mass merchants like those (and Target, Costco, Aldi, etc.) are absolute modern miracles.
I don't consider selling cheap junk as a scam. To me its more an indicator of what consumers want and are willing to pay for.
If we wanted better quality stuff and weren't willing to buy cheap crap they would stop selling it or they'd go out of business.
These businesses haven't shifted from selling high quality products to junk quietly and without lowering prices. We all know the quality, how is that a scam?
I question that people truly want this cheap throwaway garbage. Just look at all the seasonal produced use once stuff (think Easter, Halloween, xmas, etc.) that people buy because they are cheap and do it for a moment, the. They go into the bin. When I was young such decoration was previous, cherished and stored for next season. Over time it grew. Now everyone buys some plastic spiderweb because it's cheap and the neighbors down street have deco up as well. Mountains or crap.
People clearly want it or they wouldn't buy it. No one forces you to buy cheap junk, and there's plenty of non-disposable decorations you can buy and use, or you can go really old school and make your own decorations. That people are buying this tells you that they do want it, because they wouldn't buy it otherwise.
Broke people, or simply people looking to stay frugal, existing in a society that subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) conditions it's citizens towards ever-increasing levels of consumption maybe aren't overtly "forced" to buy cheap junk but if you are conditioned to consume and you can't otherwise afford to consume, you will buy cheap junk. It's a bit of a manufactured demand. I would reckon, all things being equal, most people would take quality goods over poorly-made junk.
I guess you could say to simply get a hold of yourself but there are powerful forces at play in this conditioning process. There's a reason the ad industry is worth so much money.
Broke people in days of old would make their own decorations because in days of old they couldn’t afford pre made decorations. That is still an option, so the fact that they buy cheap disposable decorations instead tells you that they want that. They would prefer to spend their limited budget on a cheap disposable mass made product than spend their limited time making their own. It’s still a choice, but unlike the good old days that you long for, they have that choice today. And they’re choosing the cheap decorations.
> I would reckon, all things being equal, most people would take quality goods over poorly-made junk.
Sure, they absolutely would do that, "all things being equal". But all things are not equal and "quality goods" tend to cost more money that could be better spent elsewhere, thus people choose "poorly made junk" that's good enough, even if it's strictly worse than the "quality goods"
This type of view takes away effectively all agency away from the individual.
Yes advertising is coercive, and yes people will look at their neighbors and feel the need to compete.
People also make their own decisions. If they choose to buy cheap crap as a single use product its their choice. They don't have to decorate for Halloween, as the example, and they don't have to follow what others around them are doing just to fit in.
People have agency within the framework of their environment (time, place, culture etc etc), and ingrained behaviors are often hard to override.
Consider diet; grubs are considered a tasty snack in many places whereas in most of the "western" world, the vast majority of people would be completely turned off from even thinking about it. Sure, if you were literally dying of starvation this aversion could be overcome but it would take extreme desperation to make most Americans or Europeans consider this option.
This is a very obvious and easy to parse example for ease of demonstration but it extends to lots of other, less obvious behaviors
This is my thought too. Nobody is surprised when their $12 bluetooth headphones break. As much as I may dislike it, some things are purchased to be used a few times and then thrown out. If you want nice things you need to pay for them
Amazon, for sure, is well aware of bogus product reviews, and does nothing to fix them. The most galling: hundreds of reviews for products not related to the item.
It's okay to have cheap junk, but not okay to fraudulently pretend it's high quality.
I think, though I have no way to prove it, that the "Amazon's Choice" is also a "scam"-like moniker. In many of the electronic products I come across, it is often a poorly reviewed product compared to many other options, making me think it is the one that Amazon profits from the most.
Hey, it's Amazon choice. Whatever positive attributes you associate with the term is up to you. Treat is as any sticker a shop puts onto a product. Its the equivalent to Costco or Walmart home brand.
The person sending their life savings is absolutely partly at fault there, you do still have to pay attention. Your example is very different though, it isn't Microsoft on the other end of that scam, its a person lying about who they are and using Microsoft's name to run a con.
Someone can tell me the product they own and want me to buy is top quality, its up to me to believe them.
Its also a bit of a fool me once situation. If I believe their quality claims and buy a product to find its junk, shame on them. If I keep going back expecting quality, shame on me.
This is why many governments have "anti-capitalist" functions like the FCC and FTC...
But there's also private industry solutions like Angie's List (at one point) and non-profits like Consumer Reports.
Basically, the junk enshittifies until people demand society dedicates money to stop snake oil salesmen.... Or it becomes a legitimate business model to say your product is your reputation on vetting products.
Unfortunately that is the same mentality that drives offshoring and such.
Most people are fully aware of it, hence why cheap 1 euro shops (nowadays a bit more than that however) are so prevalent across the globe, or buying counterfeit goods at street bazaars.
Most will rather buy something five times, than one good enough that will last.
I'm in the buy for quality camp, but with rampant enshitification and private equity cashing in on brand cachet, plus the manipulation of reviews and astroturfing, I find discoverability a real challenge.
I wouldn’t consider that a scam so much as the inevitable result of brand reputation being diluted into nothing. Intermingling is part of the problem, but the real scam is every single Reddit-brand-check for BIFL is always “20 years ago this was a top-tier brand, now it’s garbage. Check craigslist/ebay”
Which is probably a direct result of things like consumer reports going down the gutter.
With the massive expansion of information available today, reputation should be utterly paramount to sort out the chaff and somehow it’s instead become entirely meaningless
> Selling people mountains of cheap garbage that will break almost immediately is not much different than theft to me.
Really? Let me help. Selling something anything involves respecting them enough to allow them to make a choice, and deliver an item in exchange for money. Stealing is the exact opposite - you deprive someone of what they lawfully acquired by choice.
It only gets mixed up if you think you’re qualified to make consumer decisions for others.
It's surprising most MLM's are still so obvious. AI is going to be revolutionary for scammers. We're rapidly moving past call-bots that are good enough to bilk seniors. Imagine a MLM where the thousands of other suckers lining up to do the same thing are effectively invisible to the mark. That small fee the mark pays will seem like an unusual and extraordinary exception, but a necessary one. Suspicions will be allayed slickly, deadlines will be adjusted to add just the right amount of pressure, and the payoff will always be tantalizingly close. Every mark's online presence will be scraped so they can receive a custom tailored experience designed to press all their buttons.
It's also going to be about as easy to hold a data-centre in Nigeria responsible for scams running on their hardware as it is to prosecute a crooked call-centre in Mumbai today. AI-supercharged MLM's are going to be harder to block too. A call-centre can be blocked by telecoms (even if most don't currently bother). A MLM exploiting multiple forms of social media, websites, and networking apps on top of phones?
We need to start pressuring our governments to devote more resources to police anti-fraud units. We can't rely on journalists do this job.
>"It's surprising most MLM's are still so obvious."
From what I have heard & read, the obviousness is either intentional or unintentionally helpful, because it filters out people who would eventually figure out the scam (and would take up the scammers' efforts in the meantime). That said, more complicated frauds like what you're describing will likely proliferate.
My personal theory, which has no evidence either, is that the obvious scams exist to make you believe that you can easily distinguish scam from non scam.
That's a trick used by street con artists anyway.
I had a phone call the other day from someone identifying as police officer saying they raided a house and found something likely belonging to me and there is ongoing investigation. They knew my basic personal details. What was interesting that there was almost no gap between what I said and their response and voice sounded quite natural. I kept it for a while, because once I had a doctor call me who sounded like AI, but it was actually his real voice and it was embarrassing as I called him out for being AI. Anyway, they tried to get me to fill a police form (they knew my email as well) - this is where I realised this is a 100% scam. The email was spoofed. I reported this to the police, but they were not interested. I thought impersonation of police officer would be a serious matter. Apparently not in the UK.
There's a specialist action fraud line you can call for this, and I believe they track this stuff. Otherwise it will be like trying to tell a traffic cop about a non traffic offence
It's a continuum. Ranging from competitive markets that deliver high-quality useful goods at historically amazing prices (food and automobiles come to mind) all the way to pure scams like shitcoins and Bernie Madoff. The majority of businesses are in the middle where they exploit their customers lack of knowledge and or manipulate them with advertising and marketing: HVAC companies, car dealerships, financial advisors, dentists, non-profit, etc. etc. etc.
Yep. And it's only going to get worse as the population of wealthy older people suffering from mild cognitive impairment continues to grow. They're the perfect target for online scams: still able to use computers and in control of substantial assets but also lonely and gullible.
Fraud has been the fastest growing sector for about 20 years now. Much of this is movement of previously simply scammy products into actual scams. The kinds of things that you used to find advertised on late night television are now supercharged by Amazon availability, by ads that can directly target likely marks, and by the terrible state of reviews; it's so easy to manipulate that there's effectively zero correlation between quality and reviews on any major site, and paradoxically the sites actually selling products are the least awful at this.
This is only the start, though, because growing even faster are obviously criminal exploitations. Flat out forgeries dominated the Amazon marketplace due to Amazon's binning practices. This ruined the margins and destroyed the reputations of every quality vendor. They have reversed this course, but too late, the quality vendors mostly went under or were bought up by scammers to ride their reputations, and we are left with marketplaces full of fly-by nights. Every major retailer dropped their quality to zero to keep up.
And last, we get to do the brazen criminality, pig fattening scams, tech support scams, identity theft, criminal gangs raiding supermarkets en-mass, and all manner of wire fraud. These are growing even faster, as an aging population has provided ample prey for these sorts of scams. They are generally headquartered overseas and effectively immune from prosecution.
It is not all Doom. These are problems that have been dealt with before. There is an idiom that has softened with use, "wild west", that accurately describes this. The solution, historically, was the posse system, state authorized activity that otherwise looked an awful lot like vigilante justice. We haven't demanded that yet, but we will soon.
Why isn't there, like, a website that is like Amazon but not a scam, and people actually use? Actually I know many of these, but nobody talks about them and everyone only talks about Amazon - why is that?
I think part of the dynamic is that Amazon allows itself to be “scammed” a certain percentage of the time by its own consumers, in order to provide genuinely desired convenience features, but passes the costs and burdens on to you in other more subtle ways.
Look no further than return policies. The brutal truth is that all return policies will be abused and really they need to charge a fee to make any real impact - but consumers dislike this, and often will “run the risk” of getting a crappy product with a good return policy rather than run a smaller risk with a “bad” return policy. Unironically, if a website charges a restocking fee, it’s often a good sign. (Businesses like Wayfair aside which, in a classic evolved predator style, reorient a huge portion of their entire business around milking restocking fees)
The logic of profit turns everything towards allowing scammers. eBay, Etsy, and many more have started out with high minded marketplaces of trust before they succumbed to the reality that crap shovelers are lucrative.
Land of the lie, home of the scam, the worst of which is the red team / blue team garbage you people devour everyday designed by the political elite to give you a distinction without a difference and keep you distracted and in conflict with your fellows.
I got one of those many years ago when I was in college. I desperately needed money, so I found a job listing on Craigslist, sent my resume, got a call back, we agreed on the in-person time and place, it was neat.
I show up at a building 2 blocks from school, a random tenant tells me to form a line by the door that was locked. I was confused because I was the only one there. A second person came in, joined the line. Then a third, fourth, fifth. We were a crowd, standing in front of a door, where I thought I'd interview for a entry level job in tech.
When the door opened and the person on the other side greeted us and a good number of people immediately left. More luck for me to get this job. But turns out, it was going to be a group interview. In fact, not exactly an interview. It was a pitch. And a few lucky ones would have the privilege to sell high tech knives. All we had to do was buy the first batch of knives for something like $300.
I had the same exact experience in high school. I think I found the ad online and the interview was at the mall. I knew something was off but couldn’t pin it down exactly at the time (now I know it was probably some MLM type scam). I stuck around and was “interviewed” but didn’t accept anything. Later they called my house and my parents told them I wasn’t interested.
I took over an abandoned daytrading sub on Reddit. I think when I took over it had something like 30k weekly visitors.
It basically had no rules, anyone could post whatever they wanted. It was mostly ads, funnels to some apps or YouTube videos, courses, private chat groups, and so on.
I decided to do a cleanup and ban all the cross posts, obvious AI posts, bots, and ads. And it killed the entire sub, it had zero legitimate posts after.
Makes me wonder how much of LinkedIn is actually just fake jobs, either MLM or ghost jobs, etc.
My last 4 jobs were all LinkedIn; but the last was 8y ago. They were all Apply Now.
I clicked. Provided a few things. Had an interview within a few days and the offer a day or two later. It was absolutely lovely compared to Monster or ZipRecuiter or CareerBuilder or whatever was popular at the time.
Now the only Apply Now links appear to be resume harvesters or agencies reposting other open reqs.
While I'm not in your side of the truth I'm glad you posted this. It's good to know it's not a total waste of time at least for some (I don't really use it, except for scanning through to see what folks deem worthy talking about on LI, time to time.)
This is just a drop in the bucket. Hopefully, this snowballs into a sustained effort to enforce no ghost listings. Its understandable from both the recruiter and recruitee perspective, but something needs to change and it’s probably policy.
How do people even go about finding jobs these days? I've been with my current place for a few years and it seems like all the ways I used to find jobs just don't work at all anymore.
I honestly don't think so, at least not in the scammy way most people think.
Most of them are simply deprioritized and situationally used. Most companies with more than 50 employees (and less than 5,000 let's say) want something more like a pipeline. They often have some interchangeable work and might decide to hire 3 SWEs. So they interview a pool and eventually fill the 3 roles. But why take down the listing? When they post they get 1,000 resumes instantly, but every week they get 100 new ones. So if they decide to hire again they just cull the top 50 most recent and take a look. You could be the best person in the world but if you are resume 51, you are ignored.
AI (on both sides) and hiring manager laziness has made lucky timing the most important factor for any hiring chance.
I made a job board scraper when I was looking for work. I found job listings from at least 6 years prior. I replied to some of them to call them on their stale listings. Not surprisingly no response. The lack of oversight or quality control is annoying, so make your own
One place laid everyone off, in the job hunt after that I found job ads from the same
company, for my own role, for enough less than I earned that the ad had to have been many years out of date.
As everyone was laid off, nobody inside to contact. Messaged the (by this point former) CTO on LinkedIn, was a surprise to him too.
Its really bad (scamming everywhere), and worse - anyone who tries to market anything with intentions to be good/not scam, have to compete with the scammers.
Even companies I would not have thought did anything scammy.. I've seen very obvious fake people, 100s, maybe 1000s of AI bots (just my guess) posting fake posts (what's it like having a job in marketing these days?) claiming to love the product, or even bash / make up fake stories about their competition.
Some of this is obvious to me but I can see that a lot of people don't notice and start trying to engage with the bots. Maybe it has to do with people's assumptions that they can easily detect AI - but its only the super obvious / lower effort stuff that's 'slop' looking. Plenty of it looks human, you have to spend time digging in like a P.I. to figure out the truth.
Also people use the appeal to authority trick, "I'm a doctor, thanks for tuning in to my show, The Statin Scam" and... buy my b.s. supplement that does nothing"
Maybe I'm old fashioned. In my opinion people who prey on others who are desperate looking for food/job, and who prey on elderly/kids/disabled, are the lowest scum.
As a parent of two young boys, I am seriously confused in what values I should teach them. I am defaulting to traditionally "good" values because that's how I was raised and all I know. But there's a part of me that feels my kids will be at a disadvantage when they grow up, if they carry my values.
There have always been bad people in the world. Scammers were a thing 20 years ago. They were a thing thousands of years ago. One of the oldest documents we have is a complaint about someone peddling substandard copper.
Morals that only survive in a perfect world are no morals at all. A value is only a value if you also do it when it is hard.
religion used to promise a heaven for those who did good, and hell for those who do evil
life taught me that living well grants you admission to heaven here while you're alive, while committing things society still considers sin makes you live through hell right here on earth
cant imagine how much better/worse it gets if theres more after death
nah even ignoring religion, there was this story of if you work hard study hard listen to your parents and your teachers and people of authority you will generally wind up more-or-less okay (not rich! just _okay_, and that's okay).
It's not that confusing to be good to people by default,but look out for your self and not be a sucker?
Unless you mean life skills to survive corporate culture. Then you just look out for your self,but give the impression you care lol. None of it's real relationships anyway
Oh that's the easy part. Those things, I can teach, am teaching, or will teach when the time comes.
No, the hard part is teaching them on how to _actively_ do bad things. To actively seek out people that can be taken advantage, and to actively seek out ways to take advantage of said people. To be in that mindset all the time, so it becomes their nature. i.e. to be a hacker of people and society.
Just to let you know you are not alone and I could feel exactly the same guilt when trying to teach my own kids into doing the right things; especially wrt selfishness.
Solace will come soon, when you realise that the influence parents have over their children's education is in reality much less than what they think it is.
"A virtue is something that is valuable even if it gives you nothing. A virtue persists without payment or compensation. Positive thinking is great. Vital. Useful. But it has to remain so even if it gets you nothing. Belief, truth, honor … if these exist only to get you something, you’ve missed the storming point." - Kaldin Stormblessed
As a parent of two young boys I've had the same concerns, but I would rather have them grow up to be men of virtue in poverty that can go to bed at night with a clear conscience than the most powerful man in the world without integrity.
I've got a friend, who is on SSDI due to mental and physical health issues. And yes, they are real. I've known this friend for 20 years, they are a good person, but they have serious challenges integrating into society between past trauma and the MH/PH problems.
Her sister often 'borrows'[0] from her food stamps or SSDI income to pay for her own shit. Her sister's husband gets a new car every 1-2 years, charges his wife (the sister) and their daughter rent every month, and votes in a specific way because 'people are scamming away our tax dollars'.
IOW, "You're right but it's curious to look at the people who think that and how they pose"
LinkedIn, Indeed, Monster, all the same scam jobs. I don't bother with any of them, any more since jobs are sadly disappearing.
Microsoft, Recruit Holdings, BOLD Holdings all making money off people's suffering. Basically, same old, same old. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
You're not misremembering, Ontario did pass a law, but there are exceptions, and you have to trust the Ontario government is actually going to take action (hard to do with Doug Ford in power).
More shocking is, some non-fake postings also turn out to be result of company internal politics and not really to hire someone. They do conduct interviews, but don't select anyone. They probably want to have unfilled positions as a justification for all their failures or for some other mysterious reason.
Seriously, this platform is a big shitshow - lots of premium profiles posting AI-polished or AI-generated posts, corporate bootlickers, cringe posts, messages from random recruiters who didn't even bother to read your description.
at first I was just going to say that screenshot of McCovy looks like a cringey amateur rap video but zooming in I see his eyes and I'm unsettled, distracted
After that report from Reuters came out saying that 10% of META's revenue comes from ads pushing scams and prohibited products I'm starting to think a very large chunk of the internet (and national economy) basically runs on scamming people.
And that's not even considering perfectly legal "scams" like shitcoin pumps and politicians awarding shady contracts to buisness people who donated to them without a technical bribe happening. I would love to know how much of the actual economy is above-board business and how much isn't, but the older I get the larger the "isn't" seems to grow. Is the scam-economy 1% of all real financial transations? 5%? 10%? 20%? I'm honestly not sure.
I think it's worse than that. Even what people think of as a "legit business" like Amazon and Walmart are scamming a significant percentage of their customers.
Selling people mountains of cheap garbage that will break almost immediately is not much different than theft to me. But it's a scam that benefits enough other people like the shipping industry than nobody will rock the boat.
The economy in general is trending more into figuring out how to siphon wealth from people without money into the pockets of people who already have everything. Poor people are actually pretty profitable because they have little choice in spending.
> The economy in general is trending more into figuring out how to siphon wealth from people without money into the pockets of people who already have everything. Poor people are actually pretty profitable because they have little choice in spending.
There are levels to the game everywhere. One example that I can think of is on the timeshare stuff in Mexico where they exploit retired older people into buying fake ownership of something and end up instead just owning a huge debt.
It’s like the world has entered an era of abundance where the game is no longer about value but rather perception of value and ways to pressure your psychological makings.
> It’s like the world has entered an era of abundance where the game is no longer about value but rather perception of value and ways to pressure your psychological makings.
Not to preach, but it's stuff like this that always makes me itch slightly and start wondering if there's something to the idea of an epochal Tendency in the Rate of Profit to Fall.
On the flip side, all the money for timeshares could be plowed into construction in those old rich peoples' communities, but they have NIMBY'd themselves out of that legitimate, straightforward investment and growth. So: absolutely no sympathy.
This rests on the assumption that the specific old people buying time shares are also the ones NIMBY-ing their communities.
I'm sure you have some solid evidence for that and your comment isn't just lazy Reddit-tier boomer hate, right?
Amazon is explicitly auctioning off (and not even second-price auction) search spots. So if you search for something you don't get shown what you search for but something that Amazon extracts the maximum amount of money from.
Add eBay to that club. “Promoted listings”, yuck.
Amazon and Walmart are weird targets. They are some of the most consumer-friendly places to shop (low prices, good return policies). It's easy to take for granted, but the variety, quality, and prices at mass merchants like those (and Target, Costco, Aldi, etc.) are absolute modern miracles.
I don't consider selling cheap junk as a scam. To me its more an indicator of what consumers want and are willing to pay for.
If we wanted better quality stuff and weren't willing to buy cheap crap they would stop selling it or they'd go out of business.
These businesses haven't shifted from selling high quality products to junk quietly and without lowering prices. We all know the quality, how is that a scam?
I question that people truly want this cheap throwaway garbage. Just look at all the seasonal produced use once stuff (think Easter, Halloween, xmas, etc.) that people buy because they are cheap and do it for a moment, the. They go into the bin. When I was young such decoration was previous, cherished and stored for next season. Over time it grew. Now everyone buys some plastic spiderweb because it's cheap and the neighbors down street have deco up as well. Mountains or crap.
I feel that way about software.
One of the advantages of LLMs, is likely to be a fairly significant rise in the base quality of most software.
We've become so used to developing and selling garbage, that there's nowhere left to go, but up.
The abyss has no bottom, as you’ll realise soon!
People clearly want it or they wouldn't buy it. No one forces you to buy cheap junk, and there's plenty of non-disposable decorations you can buy and use, or you can go really old school and make your own decorations. That people are buying this tells you that they do want it, because they wouldn't buy it otherwise.
>No one forces you to buy cheap junk
Broke people, or simply people looking to stay frugal, existing in a society that subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) conditions it's citizens towards ever-increasing levels of consumption maybe aren't overtly "forced" to buy cheap junk but if you are conditioned to consume and you can't otherwise afford to consume, you will buy cheap junk. It's a bit of a manufactured demand. I would reckon, all things being equal, most people would take quality goods over poorly-made junk.
I guess you could say to simply get a hold of yourself but there are powerful forces at play in this conditioning process. There's a reason the ad industry is worth so much money.
Broke people in days of old would make their own decorations because in days of old they couldn’t afford pre made decorations. That is still an option, so the fact that they buy cheap disposable decorations instead tells you that they want that. They would prefer to spend their limited budget on a cheap disposable mass made product than spend their limited time making their own. It’s still a choice, but unlike the good old days that you long for, they have that choice today. And they’re choosing the cheap decorations.
> I would reckon, all things being equal, most people would take quality goods over poorly-made junk.
Sure, they absolutely would do that, "all things being equal". But all things are not equal and "quality goods" tend to cost more money that could be better spent elsewhere, thus people choose "poorly made junk" that's good enough, even if it's strictly worse than the "quality goods"
This type of view takes away effectively all agency away from the individual.
Yes advertising is coercive, and yes people will look at their neighbors and feel the need to compete.
People also make their own decisions. If they choose to buy cheap crap as a single use product its their choice. They don't have to decorate for Halloween, as the example, and they don't have to follow what others around them are doing just to fit in.
People have agency within the framework of their environment (time, place, culture etc etc), and ingrained behaviors are often hard to override.
Consider diet; grubs are considered a tasty snack in many places whereas in most of the "western" world, the vast majority of people would be completely turned off from even thinking about it. Sure, if you were literally dying of starvation this aversion could be overcome but it would take extreme desperation to make most Americans or Europeans consider this option.
This is a very obvious and easy to parse example for ease of demonstration but it extends to lots of other, less obvious behaviors
> This type of view takes away effectively all agency away from the individual.
That's the goal of monopolists, yes.
This is my thought too. Nobody is surprised when their $12 bluetooth headphones break. As much as I may dislike it, some things are purchased to be used a few times and then thrown out. If you want nice things you need to pay for them
One example of scam behavior:
Amazon, for sure, is well aware of bogus product reviews, and does nothing to fix them. The most galling: hundreds of reviews for products not related to the item.
It's okay to have cheap junk, but not okay to fraudulently pretend it's high quality.
I think, though I have no way to prove it, that the "Amazon's Choice" is also a "scam"-like moniker. In many of the electronic products I come across, it is often a poorly reviewed product compared to many other options, making me think it is the one that Amazon profits from the most.
Hey, it's Amazon choice. Whatever positive attributes you associate with the term is up to you. Treat is as any sticker a shop puts onto a product. Its the equivalent to Costco or Walmart home brand.
so the cheap stuff raises their prices to match the good stuff, how would you know which to buy? Reviews can't be trusted.
Doesn't that mean the Microsoft tech support scam isn't a scam then because the customer willingly transferred his life savings to the scammer?
A microsoft support scam involves pretty straightforward deception through. The same can't be said of cheap "junk" on amazon.
The person sending their life savings is absolutely partly at fault there, you do still have to pay attention. Your example is very different though, it isn't Microsoft on the other end of that scam, its a person lying about who they are and using Microsoft's name to run a con.
> I don't consider selling cheap junk as a scam.
What about selling cheap junk while claiming it is a high-quality long lasting premium product?
while it may be legal, and may be hard to outlaw, it is still a scam
Someone can tell me the product they own and want me to buy is top quality, its up to me to believe them.
Its also a bit of a fool me once situation. If I believe their quality claims and buy a product to find its junk, shame on them. If I keep going back expecting quality, shame on me.
What happens when you have no reliable way to discern whether any product is of any quality?
Well then I either don't buy it or I accept that I'm risking buying a piece of junk.
I've walked away from multiple used cars because the few mechanics I trust weren't available to do an inspection at the time.
This is why many governments have "anti-capitalist" functions like the FCC and FTC...
But there's also private industry solutions like Angie's List (at one point) and non-profits like Consumer Reports.
Basically, the junk enshittifies until people demand society dedicates money to stop snake oil salesmen.... Or it becomes a legitimate business model to say your product is your reputation on vetting products.
These products are under hundreds of different companies. So you can shame on them a few hundred times but you're the one learning a lesson.
> Selling people mountains of cheap garbage that will break almost immediately is not much different than theft to me.
Whilst paying less than a living wage. It’s scams all the way down.
I think the overarching term you're looking for is "kleptocapitalism"
Unfortunately that is the same mentality that drives offshoring and such.
Most people are fully aware of it, hence why cheap 1 euro shops (nowadays a bit more than that however) are so prevalent across the globe, or buying counterfeit goods at street bazaars.
Most will rather buy something five times, than one good enough that will last.
I'm in the buy for quality camp, but with rampant enshitification and private equity cashing in on brand cachet, plus the manipulation of reviews and astroturfing, I find discoverability a real challenge.
I wouldn’t consider that a scam so much as the inevitable result of brand reputation being diluted into nothing. Intermingling is part of the problem, but the real scam is every single Reddit-brand-check for BIFL is always “20 years ago this was a top-tier brand, now it’s garbage. Check craigslist/ebay”
Which is probably a direct result of things like consumer reports going down the gutter.
With the massive expansion of information available today, reputation should be utterly paramount to sort out the chaff and somehow it’s instead become entirely meaningless
> Selling people mountains of cheap garbage that will break almost immediately is not much different than theft to me.
Really? Let me help. Selling something anything involves respecting them enough to allow them to make a choice, and deliver an item in exchange for money. Stealing is the exact opposite - you deprive someone of what they lawfully acquired by choice.
It only gets mixed up if you think you’re qualified to make consumer decisions for others.
It's surprising most MLM's are still so obvious. AI is going to be revolutionary for scammers. We're rapidly moving past call-bots that are good enough to bilk seniors. Imagine a MLM where the thousands of other suckers lining up to do the same thing are effectively invisible to the mark. That small fee the mark pays will seem like an unusual and extraordinary exception, but a necessary one. Suspicions will be allayed slickly, deadlines will be adjusted to add just the right amount of pressure, and the payoff will always be tantalizingly close. Every mark's online presence will be scraped so they can receive a custom tailored experience designed to press all their buttons.
It's also going to be about as easy to hold a data-centre in Nigeria responsible for scams running on their hardware as it is to prosecute a crooked call-centre in Mumbai today. AI-supercharged MLM's are going to be harder to block too. A call-centre can be blocked by telecoms (even if most don't currently bother). A MLM exploiting multiple forms of social media, websites, and networking apps on top of phones?
We need to start pressuring our governments to devote more resources to police anti-fraud units. We can't rely on journalists do this job.
>"It's surprising most MLM's are still so obvious."
From what I have heard & read, the obviousness is either intentional or unintentionally helpful, because it filters out people who would eventually figure out the scam (and would take up the scammers' efforts in the meantime). That said, more complicated frauds like what you're describing will likely proliferate.
that's what you've read, and everyone's read. I'm not sure it has actual evidence behind it.
My personal theory, which has no evidence either, is that the obvious scams exist to make you believe that you can easily distinguish scam from non scam. That's a trick used by street con artists anyway.
I had a phone call the other day from someone identifying as police officer saying they raided a house and found something likely belonging to me and there is ongoing investigation. They knew my basic personal details. What was interesting that there was almost no gap between what I said and their response and voice sounded quite natural. I kept it for a while, because once I had a doctor call me who sounded like AI, but it was actually his real voice and it was embarrassing as I called him out for being AI. Anyway, they tried to get me to fill a police form (they knew my email as well) - this is where I realised this is a 100% scam. The email was spoofed. I reported this to the police, but they were not interested. I thought impersonation of police officer would be a serious matter. Apparently not in the UK.
There's a specialist action fraud line you can call for this, and I believe they track this stuff. Otherwise it will be like trying to tell a traffic cop about a non traffic offence
It's a waste of time. I've done it before and nothing ever came out of this.
They probably get dozens of calls per day about that sort of thing and the anti-fraud unit is already overwhelmed.
It's a continuum. Ranging from competitive markets that deliver high-quality useful goods at historically amazing prices (food and automobiles come to mind) all the way to pure scams like shitcoins and Bernie Madoff. The majority of businesses are in the middle where they exploit their customers lack of knowledge and or manipulate them with advertising and marketing: HVAC companies, car dealerships, financial advisors, dentists, non-profit, etc. etc. etc.
Meta is malware. I’m surprised nobody thinks this.
include Google and Microsoft.
Yep. And it's only going to get worse as the population of wealthy older people suffering from mild cognitive impairment continues to grow. They're the perfect target for online scams: still able to use computers and in control of substantial assets but also lonely and gullible.
If Your Bank Could Detect Dementia, Would You Let It? - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-11-13/how-finan... | https://archive.today/K2zXK - November 13th, 2026
It's probably best returns use case for LLM too
>how much of the actual economy is above-board business
Illegal drugs are absolutely a single digit percentage of the economy.
Scams and worse. I've reported ads that basically imply or offer up CSAM and Meta says "Not against our standards".
Fraud has been the fastest growing sector for about 20 years now. Much of this is movement of previously simply scammy products into actual scams. The kinds of things that you used to find advertised on late night television are now supercharged by Amazon availability, by ads that can directly target likely marks, and by the terrible state of reviews; it's so easy to manipulate that there's effectively zero correlation between quality and reviews on any major site, and paradoxically the sites actually selling products are the least awful at this.
This is only the start, though, because growing even faster are obviously criminal exploitations. Flat out forgeries dominated the Amazon marketplace due to Amazon's binning practices. This ruined the margins and destroyed the reputations of every quality vendor. They have reversed this course, but too late, the quality vendors mostly went under or were bought up by scammers to ride their reputations, and we are left with marketplaces full of fly-by nights. Every major retailer dropped their quality to zero to keep up.
And last, we get to do the brazen criminality, pig fattening scams, tech support scams, identity theft, criminal gangs raiding supermarkets en-mass, and all manner of wire fraud. These are growing even faster, as an aging population has provided ample prey for these sorts of scams. They are generally headquartered overseas and effectively immune from prosecution.
It is not all Doom. These are problems that have been dealt with before. There is an idiom that has softened with use, "wild west", that accurately describes this. The solution, historically, was the posse system, state authorized activity that otherwise looked an awful lot like vigilante justice. We haven't demanded that yet, but we will soon.
Why isn't there, like, a website that is like Amazon but not a scam, and people actually use? Actually I know many of these, but nobody talks about them and everyone only talks about Amazon - why is that?
I think part of the dynamic is that Amazon allows itself to be “scammed” a certain percentage of the time by its own consumers, in order to provide genuinely desired convenience features, but passes the costs and burdens on to you in other more subtle ways.
Look no further than return policies. The brutal truth is that all return policies will be abused and really they need to charge a fee to make any real impact - but consumers dislike this, and often will “run the risk” of getting a crappy product with a good return policy rather than run a smaller risk with a “bad” return policy. Unironically, if a website charges a restocking fee, it’s often a good sign. (Businesses like Wayfair aside which, in a classic evolved predator style, reorient a huge portion of their entire business around milking restocking fees)
The logic of profit turns everything towards allowing scammers. eBay, Etsy, and many more have started out with high minded marketplaces of trust before they succumbed to the reality that crap shovelers are lucrative.
A prohibited product and a scam are not the same thing, like, at all. Putting both of them together is disingenuous.
Dead Internet theory.
Isn’t DIT mainly about how no one online posting is actually a person?
Maybe we need a new term/definition. The idea of you aren't engaging with something in good faith.
Evil internet theory wooah
Joining them both, that makes a Lich internet theory...
Originally, yes
Well I know for a fact I’m not a person
Land of the lie, home of the scam, the worst of which is the red team / blue team garbage you people devour everyday designed by the political elite to give you a distinction without a difference and keep you distracted and in conflict with your fellows.
Wait till you visit China.
I got one of those many years ago when I was in college. I desperately needed money, so I found a job listing on Craigslist, sent my resume, got a call back, we agreed on the in-person time and place, it was neat.
I show up at a building 2 blocks from school, a random tenant tells me to form a line by the door that was locked. I was confused because I was the only one there. A second person came in, joined the line. Then a third, fourth, fifth. We were a crowd, standing in front of a door, where I thought I'd interview for a entry level job in tech.
When the door opened and the person on the other side greeted us and a good number of people immediately left. More luck for me to get this job. But turns out, it was going to be a group interview. In fact, not exactly an interview. It was a pitch. And a few lucky ones would have the privilege to sell high tech knives. All we had to do was buy the first batch of knives for something like $300.
I had the same exact experience in high school. I think I found the ad online and the interview was at the mall. I knew something was off but couldn’t pin it down exactly at the time (now I know it was probably some MLM type scam). I stuck around and was “interviewed” but didn’t accept anything. Later they called my house and my parents told them I wasn’t interested.
> and a good number of people immediately left.
"If any of you think you're too good to sell perfume in a parking lot, leave now."
I hadn't even considered I might be too good to sell perfume in a parking lot until that moment, but it turned out that I was.
Semi-related personal story:
I took over an abandoned daytrading sub on Reddit. I think when I took over it had something like 30k weekly visitors.
It basically had no rules, anyone could post whatever they wanted. It was mostly ads, funnels to some apps or YouTube videos, courses, private chat groups, and so on.
I decided to do a cleanup and ban all the cross posts, obvious AI posts, bots, and ads. And it killed the entire sub, it had zero legitimate posts after.
Makes me wonder how much of LinkedIn is actually just fake jobs, either MLM or ghost jobs, etc.
I never got a job in 15 years applying on LinkedIn
My last 4 jobs were all LinkedIn; but the last was 8y ago. They were all Apply Now.
I clicked. Provided a few things. Had an interview within a few days and the offer a day or two later. It was absolutely lovely compared to Monster or ZipRecuiter or CareerBuilder or whatever was popular at the time.
Now the only Apply Now links appear to be resume harvesters or agencies reposting other open reqs.
While I'm not in your side of the truth I'm glad you posted this. It's good to know it's not a total waste of time at least for some (I don't really use it, except for scanning through to see what folks deem worthy talking about on LI, time to time.)
I got interviews and two jobs via LinkedIn, in Europe.
Some "AI" HR tools will check your CV matches the online social media profile.
It is lame, but some people treat perspective employees as a fungible service. =3
It makes me very sad that people are pressured into joining a social network in order to get a job.
Post on the investigation (only 2 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50448222
This is just a drop in the bucket. Hopefully, this snowballs into a sustained effort to enforce no ghost listings. Its understandable from both the recruiter and recruitee perspective, but something needs to change and it’s probably policy.
Most online job listings these days are fake.
How do people even go about finding jobs these days? I've been with my current place for a few years and it seems like all the ways I used to find jobs just don't work at all anymore.
Personal network, or direct applications. The job boards are all worthless now.
I honestly don't think so, at least not in the scammy way most people think.
Most of them are simply deprioritized and situationally used. Most companies with more than 50 employees (and less than 5,000 let's say) want something more like a pipeline. They often have some interchangeable work and might decide to hire 3 SWEs. So they interview a pool and eventually fill the 3 roles. But why take down the listing? When they post they get 1,000 resumes instantly, but every week they get 100 new ones. So if they decide to hire again they just cull the top 50 most recent and take a look. You could be the best person in the world but if you are resume 51, you are ignored.
AI (on both sides) and hiring manager laziness has made lucky timing the most important factor for any hiring chance.
Run by scammers to collect personal data, asses wealth, get address...
I made a job board scraper when I was looking for work. I found job listings from at least 6 years prior. I replied to some of them to call them on their stale listings. Not surprisingly no response. The lack of oversight or quality control is annoying, so make your own
Many places post job ads, but they don't really look for anyone, they just need CVs in case they'll need someone in the future. Waste of time.
Yet nobody ever gets contacted by one of these companies in the future saying they have your CV and they're hiring now
One place laid everyone off, in the job hunt after that I found job ads from the same company, for my own role, for enough less than I earned that the ad had to have been many years out of date.
As everyone was laid off, nobody inside to contact. Messaged the (by this point former) CTO on LinkedIn, was a surprise to him too.
60% of the internet is now bots, We can come to the conclusion that Silicon Valley is one big grift of companies funded by corrupt VCs and Ad revenue.
Its really bad (scamming everywhere), and worse - anyone who tries to market anything with intentions to be good/not scam, have to compete with the scammers.
Even companies I would not have thought did anything scammy.. I've seen very obvious fake people, 100s, maybe 1000s of AI bots (just my guess) posting fake posts (what's it like having a job in marketing these days?) claiming to love the product, or even bash / make up fake stories about their competition.
Some of this is obvious to me but I can see that a lot of people don't notice and start trying to engage with the bots. Maybe it has to do with people's assumptions that they can easily detect AI - but its only the super obvious / lower effort stuff that's 'slop' looking. Plenty of it looks human, you have to spend time digging in like a P.I. to figure out the truth.
Also people use the appeal to authority trick, "I'm a doctor, thanks for tuning in to my show, The Statin Scam" and... buy my b.s. supplement that does nothing"
Maybe I'm old fashioned. In my opinion people who prey on others who are desperate looking for food/job, and who prey on elderly/kids/disabled, are the lowest scum.
It no longer works that way. Scumminess is now directly defined by how much money you don't have. The more money you have, the less scummy you are.
As a parent of two young boys, I am seriously confused in what values I should teach them. I am defaulting to traditionally "good" values because that's how I was raised and all I know. But there's a part of me that feels my kids will be at a disadvantage when they grow up, if they carry my values.
There have always been bad people in the world. Scammers were a thing 20 years ago. They were a thing thousands of years ago. One of the oldest documents we have is a complaint about someone peddling substandard copper.
Morals that only survive in a perfect world are no morals at all. A value is only a value if you also do it when it is hard.
religion used to promise a heaven for those who did good, and hell for those who do evil
life taught me that living well grants you admission to heaven here while you're alive, while committing things society still considers sin makes you live through hell right here on earth
cant imagine how much better/worse it gets if theres more after death
nah even ignoring religion, there was this story of if you work hard study hard listen to your parents and your teachers and people of authority you will generally wind up more-or-less okay (not rich! just _okay_, and that's okay).
This is still true.
its the ability to pass down stories which made us the ?best? species
editing seems to be an emergent property :P
One very powerful quality of oral tradition is the malleability of the narrative which is lost when things are committed to the written word.
Why do you think your values conflict with teaching your kids to look out for themselves?
It's not that confusing to be good to people by default,but look out for your self and not be a sucker?
Unless you mean life skills to survive corporate culture. Then you just look out for your self,but give the impression you care lol. None of it's real relationships anyway
Oh that's the easy part. Those things, I can teach, am teaching, or will teach when the time comes.
No, the hard part is teaching them on how to _actively_ do bad things. To actively seek out people that can be taken advantage, and to actively seek out ways to take advantage of said people. To be in that mindset all the time, so it becomes their nature. i.e. to be a hacker of people and society.
Just to let you know you are not alone and I could feel exactly the same guilt when trying to teach my own kids into doing the right things; especially wrt selfishness.
Solace will come soon, when you realise that the influence parents have over their children's education is in reality much less than what they think it is.
If you're seriously considering teaching them that, you are not the good person you think you are.
"A virtue is something that is valuable even if it gives you nothing. A virtue persists without payment or compensation. Positive thinking is great. Vital. Useful. But it has to remain so even if it gets you nothing. Belief, truth, honor … if these exist only to get you something, you’ve missed the storming point." - Kaldin Stormblessed
As a parent of two young boys I've had the same concerns, but I would rather have them grow up to be men of virtue in poverty that can go to bed at night with a clear conscience than the most powerful man in the world without integrity.
I take this to mean my negative-karma comments are at least virtuous
If they are made in good faith, and you believe what you say in your heart, they are.
This does crack me up though...
I've got a friend, who is on SSDI due to mental and physical health issues. And yes, they are real. I've known this friend for 20 years, they are a good person, but they have serious challenges integrating into society between past trauma and the MH/PH problems.
Her sister often 'borrows'[0] from her food stamps or SSDI income to pay for her own shit. Her sister's husband gets a new car every 1-2 years, charges his wife (the sister) and their daughter rent every month, and votes in a specific way because 'people are scamming away our tax dollars'.
IOW, "You're right but it's curious to look at the people who think that and how they pose"
[0] - Often without properly repaying
Please report this to the attorney general.
The money for those payments is taken from me, from all taxpayers, under threat of violence from the government.
LinkedIn, Indeed, Monster, all the same scam jobs. I don't bother with any of them, any more since jobs are sadly disappearing.
Microsoft, Recruit Holdings, BOLD Holdings all making money off people's suffering. Basically, same old, same old. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Only 50,000,000 more to go!
The fundamental problem here is that it took a CBC investigation to bust the cache. These data should be constantly invalidated.
If job boards were in the business of matching job seekers to open positions, yes.
That’s not how they make money though. They make money by selling listings.
Same mistake that people make about journalism (including journalists). The amount of news reported is a function of ads sold.
Did I say it should be enforced by the job boards themselves? Obviously it must be enforced by restructured incentives.
Hey HN, you hear that? "Fake job postings"!
What about a cleanup on "Who's Hiring"?
Just 1000? That seems hilariously low for the number of fake postings I see every day.
Am I misremembering that Ontario recently passed some laws regarding job posting transparency?
You're not misremembering, Ontario did pass a law, but there are exceptions, and you have to trust the Ontario government is actually going to take action (hard to do with Doug Ford in power).
https://www.ontario.ca/document/your-guide-employment-standa...
Didn't the Ford government pass the law? I believe they've been in power for many years?
many hard to believe names in the article
I had to do a double take on the title alone
More shocking is, some non-fake postings also turn out to be result of company internal politics and not really to hire someone. They do conduct interviews, but don't select anyone. They probably want to have unfilled positions as a justification for all their failures or for some other mysterious reason.
Who depends on LinkedIn for finding a job anyway?
Seriously, this platform is a big shitshow - lots of premium profiles posting AI-polished or AI-generated posts, corporate bootlickers, cringe posts, messages from random recruiters who didn't even bother to read your description.
at first I was just going to say that screenshot of McCovy looks like a cringey amateur rap video but zooming in I see his eyes and I'm unsettled, distracted