Ask HN: What online businesses do you find dumb but make a lot of money?

Last week searched for to get a refund for a travel ticket (German train company). Several online companies claim the process is complex and offer an express service, for a 30% cut. The refund process is actually pretty straight forward.

Same with a company that ranked high for "cancel $big_company subscription membership". You fill out a form, pay 10 Euro, and they will print a letter and mail it to $big_company on your behalf.

Porn. There's so much free content (even amateur), yet some people pay big money for it.

Hah, you're totally right.

I'm one of those guilty of spending hundreds (or maybe low thousands? yeesh, I don't want to know) of dollars on Path of Exile cosmetics that have no gameplay impact. My justification (ok, self-rationalization) is that it supports a small company* making a really good free-to-play game that has no pay to win elements. As a gamer, I want more games like that, and cosmetics is a way for the whales who can afford it to subsidize free players, while still giving the game a large and thriving community.

That model is so much better than the typical Asian MMO (or Diablo Immortal) that are straight-up pay to win, gating progression behind various currencies that you have to spend real money on.

But yeah, at the end of the day, these are totally ephemeral things with no real value, disappearing into the ether when that game shuts down or the company goes away (which has happened with many of my favorite games, sadly, like Firefall).

*Side note: Path of Exile is actually mostly owned by the Chinese conglomerate Tencent. But development for the Western market still happens at Grinding Gear Games in New Zealand, and the monetization is still cosmetics-only in the West. I think Tencent made a separate version with pay to win for the Asian markets.

(E-commerce example) Well I was surprised to find out the PetRock from the 70s had its own website and was still being sold - for USD29.99 a pop. Guess its easy to survive as a company with (I'd assume) ridiculously low production costs

is it still a thing ?