391–400 of 549 posts
I wonder how much of Meta the corporation is a scam waiting to crumble. Hundreds of billions of dollars can make people do questionable things. -their revenue is 99% ads with more than 80% coming from FB and IG -they can only sell ads if they have a large and active user base -DAP (daily active people) is reported publicly but calculated internally -ad spending, views, and engagement are calculated by Meta's own plat…
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Ideally this but Section 230 guarantees that you will lose. The laws need to be changed.
The laws need to be changed. My how the worm turns. HN users used to herald that law as the best thing since Betty White (who was older than sliced bread). Without 230, there would be no YouTube. No Facebook. No Instagram. No social media. Forums would likely have gone extinct. Half of the tech industry and a good chunk of the jobs that people on HN do would never have happened. Now people on HN want to get rid of th…
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My guess is the already-existing trend towards walled gardens will simply continue. When a public space is dangerous, people retreat into "safe" enclosed spaces. - "Never download anything unless it's from the Apple App Store" - "Never buy anything unless you're on amazon.com" - "Dont use the internet outside of ChatGPT"
> - "Never buy anything unless you're on amazon.com" Might as well do AliExpress, same quality control/misleading descriptions but lower prices. Is there even a trustworthy online shopping site/platform nowadays?
I never buy food, supplements, OTC meds, etc. online from any source. That stuff I always buy in person at a local retailer.
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The answer isn't ad blocking, the answer is paying directly and in full (so no need to subsidize cost with ads) for the service. I cannot wrap my head around how generally intelligent people are completely blind to this. I guess 20 years of ad-block-is-the-norm has left people totally confused about internet monetization. I've never encoutered a problem that has such a clear answer, and that so many intelligent peopl…
We need to have an easy way to pay small amounts for a one-time service. A lot of websites offer content that you need only a couple of times in your life. It's worth paying for, but not worth all the hassle of setting up a normal payment. This leaves ads as the only form of revenue and because ads don't care about the content, this creates a race to the bottom on generating slop.
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> Preventing fraudulent apps is not a probability problem Unfortunately it is. You've even provided examples of a false positive and a false negative. Every discrimination process is going to have those at some rate. It might become very expensive for developers to go through higher levels of verification.
No, it's already a solved problem. For instance newspapers moderate and approve all content that they print. While some bad actors may be able to sneak scams in through classifieds, the local community has a direct way to contact the moderators and provide feedback. The answer is that it just takes a lot of people. What if no content could appear on Facebook until it passed a human moderation process? As the above po…
The more of those people you hire, the higher the chance that a bad actor will slip through and push malicious things through for a fee. If the scammer has a good enough system, they'll do this one time with one person and then move on to the next one, so now you need to verify that all your verifiers are in fact perfect in their adherence to the rules. Now you need a verification system for your verification system, which will eventually need a verification system^3 for the verification system^2, ad infinitum.
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Normalize paying for things instead of selling your attention to the highest bidder. But you just admitted that you pay for YouTube and it shows you creator promotions. You are literally paying to see ads, then telling people not to do the same. Unless there's some subtlety I'm missing here. I haven't been on YouTube in at least a decade. I see no difference between a blogger pushing a VPN and Google showing an ad fo…
> Unless there's some subtlety I'm missing here. I haven't been on YouTube in at least a decade. Youtube Premium is fighting back against the sponsor segments with this "commonly skipped segment" feature. You hit a fast forward button and it automatically skips ahead to the place most people jumped to.
No idea if that's been borne out in practice, though.
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So by your standards, it's totally fine for Lenovo to use the laptop you bought from them to mine crypto a year after you bought it from them because the necessary hardware to enable that (it having a GPU) was installed at the time. I mean it's a viewpoint, it's a certifiably bonkers one but of all the viewpoints it definitely is one.
Much like the F-150, if the license agreement between you and Lenovo allow Lenovo to do so, yes. I mean, if you didn't want that, you wouldn't have agreed to it, right? You are allowed to say no.
Fraudulent terms of service are not above the law, nor are they above basic expectations in society of fair dealing. You can try to litigate this any which way you choose, based on the language contained in the contract/TOS, and it fundamentally does not matter. At some point, something has to give and it ends with burning down buildings and building guillotines. History is full of abundant lessons about the supremacy of social mores and standards that suborn the law, and the supremacy of the law over the specific parties of any given contract.
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This isn't a situation we accept out of other industries. You water provider doesn't get to pipe you sewage every now and again because its too expensive to moderate. We shouldn't accept it for big tech either. And we certainly shouldn't make it the responsibility of the end use to protect themselves
Water providers in Flint,MI disagree.
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I don't understand why the big advertisers don't scream about this. Facebook gets money from whoever, but the scams dilute the effectiveness of real companies that are not trying to scam you.
Real companies don't give a damn about what they are actually doing. Facebook tells them that their ad which nobody clicked on got them 40 000 new customers. The worker who put the ad on Facebook gets a pat on the back from his boss. The boss gets a raise and maybe a promotion. Leadership gets shown numbers of how great advertising on Meta is and doesn't take 5 minutes to check them. If sales are low it is those god…
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My guess is the already-existing trend towards walled gardens will simply continue. When a public space is dangerous, people retreat into "safe" enclosed spaces. - "Never download anything unless it's from the Apple App Store" - "Never buy anything unless you're on amazon.com" - "Dont use the internet outside of ChatGPT"
The Apple App Store is full of scam apps. It’s all the disadvantages of a walled garden with none of the supposed advantages for users. In that way, the App Store itself is a scam.