Click farms: a shadowy internet industry is booming in China • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by dmix » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 11:50 PM UTC

arbitrary_name wrote: post #99

dmix wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

[citation from this century needed]

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

#122

Post by kevin_thibedeau » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 12:06 AM UTC

lazyjones wrote: post #97

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 oth…

Advertisers pass their costs onto their customers. Everyone is hurt by fraud.

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

#123

Post by kevin_thibedeau » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 12:14 AM UTC

tomp wrote: post #85

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The extremely rich do in fact conspire to keep wages low and economic security precarious, for both political and economic reasons. There's plenty of historical evidence for this. For example: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/aug/28/commen... The counterargument is that the massive increases in wealth inequality since the 50s - a time when the average single wage earner could afford a relatively secure…

> The counterargument is that the massive increases in wealth inequality since the 50s - a time when the average single wage earner could afford a relatively secure lifestyle - "just happened", which is obviously rather implausible. It's not that implausible. It's the effect of technology - not just automation / computers (only since 90s or something) but also before, we had information technology - ever since the te…

It couldn't be tax cuts, low interest rates, or forcing the proles to capitalize the market with their 401Ks.

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

#124

Post by cageface » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 6:49 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #107

cageface wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parasites show up in just about every complex ecosystem. Often they eventually establish some kind of symbiosis with their host. Life is chaotic and messy and that is often hard thing for us to accept. Ecosystems that endure find a way to balance these competing forces.

That can be a useful analogy, but it's important to realize that this is only metaphorically an ecosystem. Human society is created by conscious agents with specific intent. It's a designed system. Talking about parasites can explain what is happening, and point us in the direction of solutions. But is must never be used to justify.

There will always be people willing to break the rules. As much as we’d like to design systems around more optimistic expectations of human behavior reality is always more complex. It’s pragmatism, not justification.

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

#125

Post by cageface » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 6:51 AM UTC

la_barba wrote: post #117

cageface wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parasites show up in just about every complex ecosystem. Often they eventually establish some kind of symbiosis with their host. Life is chaotic and messy and that is often hard thing for us to accept. Ecosystems that endure find a way to balance these competing forces.

Why are the powerless people the parasites? Google (and also others) is not a morally neutral entity here. They created this problem. They could stem the flow of malvertising or click-farming or spamming by hiring more and more review staff as their company has scaled, but its simply not in their DNA. I mean literally they are the richest of the richest of companies in the richest country and their owners are amongst…

They’re not powerless. They’ve simply made the economic decision that it’s more profitable for them to cheat the system then work within it. I’m not making a value judgement here.

And so far Google etc have decided it’s better to tolerate this to some extent than spend the money to eradicate it, which is often the pragmatic choice.

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

#126

Post by wpietri » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 9:04 AM UTC

cageface wrote: post #124

wpietri wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That can be a useful analogy, but it's important to realize that this is only metaphorically an ecosystem. Human society is created by conscious agents with specific intent. It's a designed system. Talking about parasites can explain what is happening, and point us in the direction of solutions. But is must never be used to justify.

There will always be people willing to break the rules. As much as we’d like to design systems around more optimistic expectations of human behavior reality is always more complex. It’s pragmatism, not justification.

I'm saying the opposite of "we’d like to design systems around more optimistic expectations".

Given that people are what they are, I want us to get better at breaking these cycles. But very often, statements like "there will always be people willing to break the rules" are used to act as if things like the number of people willing to break the rules and the amount of harm done when rules are broken are beyond our control.

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

#127

Post by marak830 » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 9:06 AM UTC

belorn wrote: post #80

marak830 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you had ended up being charged for spamming, hacking into bot catchers". I would have setup a way not to be caught. It would be criminal, (this was pre-gdpr it definitely would be now), but I would have done it still. She was supported to an extent, but we knew once she had our son, we wouldn't be able to keep up with necessities. We needed to start buying things then and there.

I think my question is not if you thought you would get caught, but if you think it would be fair trade even in the case you got caught.

Sorry I was tired and I misread the question.

Well yes there was some risk involved. but gamblers fallacy and all that.

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

#128

Post by cageface » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 9:12 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #126

cageface wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will always be people willing to break the rules. As much as we’d like to design systems around more optimistic expectations of human behavior reality is always more complex. It’s pragmatism, not justification.

I'm saying the opposite of "we’d like to design systems around more optimistic expectations". Given that people are what they are, I want us to get better at breaking these cycles. But very often, statements like "there will always be people willing to break the rules" are used to act as if things like the number of people willing to break the rules and the amount of harm done when rules are broken are beyond our con…

What mechanisms would you propose to control bad faith actors?

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

#129

Post by heymijo » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 11:58 AM UTC

close04 wrote: post #106

heymijo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A big corporation is usually seen as an inanimate monolith that you can't "blame". It's not a person and it has no morals. Just like a soldier's morality is mostly obscured by the "morality" of the whole army. But in small companies you can "see" the people behind them. You can suddenly directly assign blame for what they do. It's no longer a giant doing what giants do, it's no longer a blame split between 10.000 ano…

Great example! Reading your comment and politics immediately jumped to mind. Specifically taxes, and paying local (a handful of people) vs. federal (the monolith).

E.g. paying property taxes for schools vs. federal tax dollars allocated to defense spending. School levies can get particularly heated and draw lots of activism on both sides while the same doesn't seem to hold for defense spending. [this is USA specific]

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

#130

Post by moate » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 1:30 PM UTC

mrep wrote: post #120

moate wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A high % of your money" is not "all your money". Let's say I've bought these bogus cards. This is the starting point, with dirty money. Anything bought here is obvious and traceable. I take that money, and I buy Visa gift cards, which basically function as cash. I take those Visas and buy Amex gift cards, losing 6% (ballparking here, it's actually 5.95% for $100) of my take to fees and then another 10% to fees/shipp…

> I now have about 55-65% of my original take in relatively clean money that I convert to bitcoin and back. I'm no tax investigator expert, but I cannot think of a more sketchy/illegal way to "make a lot of money" than by receiving a bunch of bitcoin especially considering every bitcoin transaction is recorded on a public leger. They have every accounts history you received money from. How are you going to explain re…

I mean the whole plan was to steal credit cards and then launder the money through several intermediaries. It's like the textbook definition of "sketchy/illegal".

THAT SAID, there's nothing illegal about using money from your app store company to purchase bitcoin. IDK that it even feels that weird these days with crypto being proto-mainstream at this point. Easily hand waved away as "Oh, he's one of those weird tech guys".

Most criminal activity is risky. The bet you're making is "this is unlikely to be investigated thoroughly enough for me to be caught". Considering how the government keeps gutting the IRS, and how difficult investigating cybercrimes is for most police departments, this isn't even implausible in the US.