It's an artefact of the "hustle culture" we live in now. An indication of distilled, late-stage capitalism. Where everything is about the money and honesty is optional.
Ask HN: Since when is everything a scam?
21–30 of 114 posts
Re: Ask HN: Since when is everything a scam?
#22This is web2 peaking. The cost to scam everyone and earn a few bucks in the process has become a tenable business opportunity. It‘s not by accident that Elon Musk is now charging an 8 dollar fee on monthly Twitter usage: This is no different than the staking mechanisms invented in the Ethereum community. Since Sybilattacks are virtually unpreventable since no scalable and user friendly identity solution exists, primarily in the web3 space we‘ve started combining submitting information along with stake to fight grifters and spammers who are manipulating the algorithms.
Re: Ask HN: Since when is everything a scam?
#23In the context of tech, the normalisation of grift happened in the last decade. This is due to 2 factors IMO : cryptocurrency ; and, separately, the "tech is the new Wall Street" situation, with an increased influx of tech workers who, compared with the previous generation, tend to be more motivated by money than by societal impact.
Re: Ask HN: Since when is everything a scam?
#24In some areas a "community" culture¹ of "you shall behave - you will behave" has declined into a sort of anarchy of "everything passes"; once you were corrected, and now you are no more; once people would stand and say "wrong behaviour" directly, today such framework is greatly weakened, which causes all kind of deviations. Such weakening encourages abuse and exploitation. ¹Note that said community culture was not re…
I'll add that the decline of community culture was in part due to the greed of the current leaders, like Google and Facebook.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Since when is everything a scam?
#25Don't believe strangers on the internet.
That's a paradox. See also https://xkcd.com/552/
Technically, you don't know if it might be a paradox, because you don't know if I personally know OP or not. Except, I don't know OP, so I can't know that you don't know--hell, you might even be OP.
Re: Ask HN: Since when is everything a scam?
#26Society is visibly decomposing before our eyes. You can tell because trust no longer exists. And those who trust, get burned, because they're taken advantage of. The issue is without trust, society does not exist. What's coming is frankly scary to me.
I think it depends on the country. I'm from Ireland and live in Vietnam. Both of these countries are doing ok. Of course they are not perfect, some things improve and some get worse just as they ever did.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Since when is everything a scam?
#27[dead]
Re: Ask HN: Since when is everything a scam?
#28Because everything has to be a product nowadays, and keep on generating revenue.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Since when is everything a scam?
#29In the context of tech, the normalisation of grift happened in the last decade. This is due to 2 factors IMO : cryptocurrency ; and, separately, the "tech is the new Wall Street" situation, with an increased influx of tech workers who, compared with the previous generation, tend to be more motivated by money than by societal impact.
What crypto currency did is that it showed everyone how fragile these internationally scaled algorithms are; and it blatantly exposed how bad they are for society.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Since when is everything a scam?
#30Is there any specific examples of “everything”? 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.
Amazon is now filled with pseudobrands ( https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co... ), commingling legitimate sellers' inventory with counterfeit products, and outright fraudulent products (try searching for 2TB flash drives). AliExpress allows sellers to ship you fraudulent products like a "USB3 1080p 4k capture card" which is only USB2 with a blue cable and drops frames, then when you request a…
I remember in the 90s when Walmart was the death of the world because they only sold junk.
Turns out retailers just sell cheap stuff no matter the era and the world is still moving on.