191–200 of 549 posts
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If everybody on social media was an actual paying customer of social platforms, like we pay mobile providers (I originally wrote “water providers”, which was in fact a somewhat unfit analogy), we could demand better service and switch away to a competitor who offers it. Unfortunately, we are robbed of our ability to pay with our wallets.
You don't generally get to choose who pipes the water to your house.
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Amazon has the advantage over some company I don't have experience with, of that I know returns are pretty easy and generally not questioned at all (at least for me, long-standing account in the UK, with infrequent returns, it might vary for new accounts, those who return more than they keep, or those in countries with worse consumer rights at the legally enforced level). My two most recent examples: a couple of roll…
Your experience with no questions asked returns is not what everybody is experiencing these days.
Though as mentioned, I find it very easy to believe this will vary by location and account for various reasons.
At least 50% of the YouTube promoted videos I get are crypto currency scams where some paid actor walks you though deploying an eth contract that empties your wallet. I report every one and nothing changes :(
I get 50% AI generated tai chi promising strength gain, weight loss and enlightenment, the other 50% israel sponsored ads assuring me people in gaza are not starving at all and completely healthy
I've never seen anything like this and I see the reverse quite a bit.
At least 50% of the YouTube promoted videos I get are crypto currency scams where some paid actor walks you though deploying an eth contract that empties your wallet. I report every one and nothing changes :(
I dunno,I saw a video of mister Elon Musk himself telling me without twitching a muscle in his face except his lips to put all my money on his new crypto venture. Seems pretty legit to me.
Home Depot doesn’t want me to know about it, but I saw the ad!
Alongside a password manager and keeping things up to date, using an ad blocker is truly a foundational security practice these days. The big advertising players simply have all of the wrong incentives to control this problem. They could massively reduce the volume of scams advertised on their networks, but it’d be worse for them on two fronts: they’d have to pay for more moderation, and they’d lose billions in reven…
Just to be clear, the engagement is the problem, yes? We're reasonably secure against zero-click malware from ads by now I would hope?
Zero click malware would be most likely too sophisticated.
You click the ad contact people who will tell you where to wire money that’s the level we are talking about here.
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When ford deployed LexusNexus tracking to my F150, they didn't refund any of my purchase price. Samsung isn't refunding any of their $3k fridges that now have mandatory ads
They didn't need to offer a refund. It was already priced in. You maybe forgot to ask what was coming in future software updates while standing starry-eyed at the impossibly low price it was being offered at, but they knew it was coming. After all, appropriately specced hardware to be able to do it was already onboard.
Certainly not the appliance salesman, they don't know samsung's plans. And good luck calling samsung and asking for the "future plans" department. This is such a dishonest take.
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*>They could massively reduce the volume of scams advertised on their networks I'm not entirely sure that's true. It's equivalent to asking a platform to moderate all "harmful content" off the site. "Scam" is fundamentally subjective, just as "harm" is. The real solution is to reform the justice system such that a citizen feeling they've been defrauded has a quick and easy process to get satisfaction for themselves a…
> "Scam" is fundamentally subjective, just as "harm" is. From the article: > Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams and banned goods , Reuters reports I think we can agree that there's no "subjective" situation when a product is banned. > The ad networks are themselves the natural allies of such a reform The article (and the person you're replying to) point out that a significant portion of Meta's revenue…
Ah, sorry. Perhaps I should have spelled it out. Meta desperately wants to avoid being regulated. One way they can avoid it is to help make the out-of-band justice system (much) more efficient such that they avoid messy moderation policies and don't need to be regulated anymore. Victims would be happier too, especially if they get remunerated for their pain, time, and trouble. The message to scammers everywhere (not just on Meta) becomes clear: go ahead and try it, you will get caught and put out of business, and likely sent to jail. Eventually the scammers will realize it's not worth it.
The unintended side-effect, sadly, is that legitimate business will be attacked as scams by profit-seeking or malicious individual malefactors.
In any event, I think reforming the US justice system is way overdue; it is far too expensive and time-consuming for most matters, and that means we live in a place with de facto lack of courts. And I don't like that.
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First, in any case, the right solution is to make this business model (treating your users as a product, whether by offering free service or heavily discounted/subsidised product) simply illegal. It violates the way market is supposed to work and exploits information asymmetry—regulation against which there is plenty of precedent of. This makes the rest moot, but I will still list why I don’t think it’s like you say…
When someone opens with “there oughta, be a law”… they’re almost always shouldn’t be. No. You’re not going to regulate out human behavior or scammers or MBA’s looking for every avenue to maximize profit. Make a better system.
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Agreed. At best most of the stuff I ended up buying from an Instagram ad turned out to be oversold or overpromised and underdelivered. While not a scam outright, it's sort of training me to avoid buying anything from ads...
There is an entire network of "get rick quick just by my pdf" intagramers, who peddle a pdf teaching you how to find a chinese product, make a website, and then drop ship that chinese product for 3x the cost to unsuspecting buyers. Probably 75% of products you see on instagram ads, you can go find on temu for their actual cost, usually at 80% discount.
But when you do buy it on Temu, is it even a legitimate product?
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Yes, but observe how that for all three of the things that immediately came to your mind, you have respectively 1. a thing that still has a lot of scams in it (though it may be the best of the three) [1] 2. A thing so full of scams and fake products that using it is already a minefield (one my mother-in-law is already incapable of navigating successfully, based on the number of shirts my family has gotten with lazy-A…
> To forstall any AI debate, let me underline the word "lazy" in the footnote here. Most recently we received a shirt with a very large cobra on it, and the cobra has at least three pupils in each eye (depending on how you count) and some very eye-watering geometry for the sclera between it. Okay, but if it matches the illustration on the storefront , can it really be called a scam?