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Click farms: a shadowy internet industry is booming in China

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Re: Click farms: a shadowy internet industry is booming in China

#91

Post by sgift »

rightbyte wrote: post #84
Merrill wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the Game of Life. People play it according to whatever rules and penalties they perceive to be in place using whatever strategies and tactics they think will succeed.

And they have the wrong tactic and strategy? That they do it becouse they think it benefits them is obvoius. These schemes to make money without doing ordinary boring dull work are ofent a waste of time if you compare your hourly wage to whatever you would get carrying bags of seed up the hill to the sawmill. A programmer that is competent enough to write spamscripts is competent enough to work as a programmer.

> A programmer that is competent enough to write spamscripts is competent enough to work as a programmer.

Only if competence were the only measure you'd need to get a job. In reality, there are various other factors like: Where one lives, how good one is at interviewing and so on.

Re: Click farms: a shadowy internet industry is booming in China

#92

Post by heymijo »

social_quotient wrote: post #90
marak830 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just before my son was born, I was struggling to find a stable job. So I worked on online web dev jobs for some seriously shady characters. I made between 10 and 15 sites that they would buy databases and mass mail users in various industries to try and get them to sign up for really shitty programs. (One for example was a roofing company promising 100's of clients). The amount of work I did on the back end to track…

So how different is this from CRO, form abandonment, tracking, and advanced user analytics? I get the sense that if it pays really well and is for a large company it’s not often judged, in fact it’s amazing, but if it’s for a smaller company with a less clear business model then it seems shady? How do we sure that up? In our technical morality brains?

I really appreciate this question. Illuminated my cognitive dissonance.

My mind didn't even think to ask it as I was reading the GPs comment and thinking about that small company as scummy.

Re: Click farms: a shadowy internet industry is booming in China

#93

Post by Hitton »

nitwit005 wrote: post #41
onion2k wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can afford buying a thousand used iPhones to start such a business, you aren't exactly living in poverty. Or you start small and grow. Or you borrow money to start. Or you find an angel investor who is rich. Etc. Kind of like any other start up really.

There's a minimum scale below which no one would bother to hire you. No one is going to hire someone with 4 phones set up. If you can get business loans and financing, that's just another version of not exactlty being poor.

There is no minimum scale, because those who start are working for companies which organize it. Try searching on youtube: beermoney phone farm

They run 3rd party apps on their phones which automate whole process and they get some percent of profit. I imagine that when they grow they can start working for themselves.

Re: Click farms: a shadowy internet industry is booming in China

#94

Post by dillonmckay »

wpietri wrote: post #7

There was a reply here, now dead, that I wanted to discuss: "Hey man, I'm just trying to feed my family. I have kids so that means I can behave however I want so long as it benefits my kids. And rather than trust some reviews on a platform anyone can sign up for, how about you do some reading on the app developer and their ToS and Privacy Policy." I'm adamantly opposed to spam, and back in the early days of the web (…

Well, how would you classify streaming audio or video services of pre-recorded content?

That is quite wasteful and only exists to solve a legal, not technological problem.

Re: Click farms: a shadowy internet industry is booming in China

#95

Post by mpalmer »

wpietri wrote: post #7

There was a reply here, now dead, that I wanted to discuss: "Hey man, I'm just trying to feed my family. I have kids so that means I can behave however I want so long as it benefits my kids. And rather than trust some reviews on a platform anyone can sign up for, how about you do some reading on the app developer and their ToS and Privacy Policy." I'm adamantly opposed to spam, and back in the early days of the web (…

> Moloch is introduced as the answer to a question [...] - what does it? Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination?

> And Ginsberg answers: Moloch does it.

> There’s a passage in the Principia Discordia where Malaclypse complains to the Goddess about the evils of human society. “Everyone is hurting each other, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war.”

> The Goddess answers: “What is the matter with that, if it’s what you want to do?”

> Malaclypse: “But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!”

> Goddess: “Oh. Well, then stop.”

> The implicit question is – if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. It’s powerful not because it’s correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything – but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent.

From the slatestarcodex classic: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Re: Click farms: a shadowy internet industry is booming in China

#96

Post by pjc50 »

skunkpocalypse wrote: post #58
pjc50 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative might have been trying to "contain" China like Iran. Not cooperating with China does not make China go away.

Not enabling Russian IP theft didn't make Russia go away either. What it did was make them lose the Cold War, since they couldn't cheat anymore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Vetrov

Sure, and then what? The US still has bad relations with Russia, a dictatorial petrostate which has shot down a civilian airliner and sent its agents to murder people on British soil.

That's what I mean by "doesn't make China go away". Collapsing the CCP raises the question of what next. Going through a period of shortened life expectancy and government by organised crime but with a nuclear arsenal?

Re: Click farms: a shadowy internet industry is booming in China

#97

Post by lazyjones »

wpietri wrote: post #7

There was a reply here, now dead, that I wanted to discuss: "Hey man, I'm just trying to feed my family. I have kids so that means I can behave however I want so long as it benefits my kids. And rather than trust some reviews on a platform anyone can sign up for, how about you do some reading on the app developer and their ToS and Privacy Policy." I'm adamantly opposed to spam, and back in the early days of the web (…

> Things like click farming do extract wealth, but they increase systemic waste, meaning less value can be produced. That in turn increases the amount of desperation, making people more likely to join them in doing something exploitative just to survive.

Perhaps these click farms are just an evolving reaction to the PITA that is online advertising. It's the advertising industry that gets harmed by it and not some other poor people and it should eventually lead to more transparency for their customers, who would like to compare their traffic with what the adtech provider logged and isolate the fraudulent clicks.

Re: Click farms: a shadowy internet industry is booming in China

#98

Post by driverdan »

neurostimulant wrote: post #71
mrep wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

App stores are also used for money laundering. Create a bogus app, spend a bunch of money "buying" your app and now you have "legitimate" money.

Is 30% cut by Apple/Google actually competitive compared to other money laundering methods?

No. The standard is 10%.

Re: Click farms: a shadowy internet industry is booming in China

#99

Post by arbitrary_name »

dmix wrote: post #16
wpietri wrote: post #7

There was a reply here, now dead, that I wanted to discuss: "Hey man, I'm just trying to feed my family. I have kids so that means I can behave however I want so long as it benefits my kids. And rather than trust some reviews on a platform anyone can sign up for, how about you do some reading on the app developer and their ToS and Privacy Policy." I'm adamantly opposed to spam, and back in the early days of the web (…

You had me until the part you suggested there was some subset of the upper class conspiring to keep an underclass of poor people... in order to make/keep themselves rich?Wouldn't rich people get much richer if there was more economically healthy middle class people buying their products and real estate or w/e they are making money off of? What could they possibly gain from ruining the economy and keeping others poor.…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Labourers_1351

Parliament and nobility literally got together to a) ban unionisation b) fix wages at an unfairly low level c) punish anyone who refused to work at the wages that were fixed below market d) refused to work for an employer who treated him unfairly.

And that cycle has repeated itself all the way through to the 21st Century (Bay View Massacre, etc)

IF you don't think the wealthy actively work to suppress the working classes indirectly or directly, you are truly naive.

Re: Click farms: a shadowy internet industry is booming in China

#100

Post by 1asterisk »

wpietri wrote: post #7

There was a reply here, now dead, that I wanted to discuss: "Hey man, I'm just trying to feed my family. I have kids so that means I can behave however I want so long as it benefits my kids. And rather than trust some reviews on a platform anyone can sign up for, how about you do some reading on the app developer and their ToS and Privacy Policy." I'm adamantly opposed to spam, and back in the early days of the web (…

I can remember asking my mail delivery person if they could stop delivering all the junk mail as it was truly unwanted. They looked at me like I had lost my mind and told me that was what paid their salary. I asked if they could return the junk mail to the sender they said not possible. You'd think they would gladly send it back because it paid their salary twice in that instance!
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