Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I haven't encountered any to be honest. Can you link to one as an example?
Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
431–440 of 549 posts
Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
How would you write that law? So now every social network charges $0.01 per month and makes all the rest of their revenue through advertising. Would you set the minimum price for every service and outlaw advertising entirely?
> and outlaw advertising entirely?
This is the actual solution, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
#433100% of all revenue, of all companies came from scams because everything is a scam.
Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
The night before this story was published I was pondering what percentage of Youtube ads I was watching were scams -- not 100%, but it was higher than 50%. Which raises questions about semi-legitimate looking items might actually be soft scams or some kind of funny billing stuff going on. What percent of the global economy is scams? Sure, the investment manager charging 1% a year to put all of your retirement savings…
>but it was higher than 50% I don't relate with this at all. I get ads for normal insurance companies, uber eats, air bnb, and gacha games to name a few. None of them are scams, so I can't understand understand why so many people on hacker news complain about scams. Do you live in a region with barely any ad inventory?
Uber Eats opaquely inflates the base price of the food so that even when they advertise a low (or zero if you've paid for 'Uber One' to give you zero delivery fees on 'eligible' deliveries, whatever that means) delivery fee, you're still getting charged significantly more compared to picking up the food yourself. Call me crazy, but I would expect the delivery fee to be the difference between the cost to have something delivered and the cost to buy it outright.
Gacha games are famously deceptive and exploitative.
Airbnb has a good justification for keeping the location private, but it's typically pretty hard to get an idea of the value you're getting for your dollar until you actually arrive on site and discover just how functional the HVAC/kitchen actually are and how good the location actually is.
While you might not classify any of the three as "scams", they're certainly classic 'low-rent' advertisements for things that take advantage of information asymmetry to convince customers to pay more than they would be necessarily willing to if what their money got them was actually clear.
Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
#435Snakeoil on every corner these days - from online scams to text message scams to the whole supplements industry to prosperity gospel to ... it sure feels like we're surrounded by hustlers and charlatans.
Supplements industry? I only take whey protein and creatine from known sources. Anything on this?
Creatine is the closest the supplements industry has ever gotten to actually producing something that helps people. If you are physically active, you could probably see minor benefits from it.
If you eat an American diet, you do not need protein supplements. You do not need the absurd amount of protein per day that mens health influencers insist, and they usually push you pretty close to the actual danger zone, and it's all just a fucking waste anyway.
The current protein trend is just a fad diet for men. It doesn't help. Bulk whey protein is literally the least bad part of that industry though, so eh.
Everything else about the supplements industry is fully scam though. If any of it worked, they would scientifically prove it so they could get near infinite American healthcare dollars. Most of it not only doesn't do anything, but the batch quality is atrocious, and plenty often you can buy a supplement that does not include the ingredient it claims at all. I feel like the fact that it is sold next to the literal "poison a child" homeopathic pills should be more meaningful to people than it is.
That shelf is for things that don't work.
Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Forums would likely have gone extinct.
Usenet was a thing. A huge thing. There was zero danger that it would go "extinct" due to the lack of extralegal protections.
> But demonizing 230 just shows a basic lack of knowledge of history, economics, and the reasons it was created.
You're ignoring the context. Section 230 was created when the Internet was nascent and we were trying to encourage broader /business/ investment into the technology.
Now that that investment has occurred and most consumers _prefer_ to do business on the Internet, whereas the opposite was previously true, we no longer need the _additional_ protections for hugely profitable businesses.
Aside from that is there some reason we can't _modify_ the law to bring it more in line with citizen expectations? We're bound to the decisions of the past absolutely? Please...
Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
The night before this story was published I was pondering what percentage of Youtube ads I was watching were scams -- not 100%, but it was higher than 50%. Which raises questions about semi-legitimate looking items might actually be soft scams or some kind of funny billing stuff going on. What percent of the global economy is scams? Sure, the investment manager charging 1% a year to put all of your retirement savings…
>but it was higher than 50% I don't relate with this at all. I get ads for normal insurance companies, uber eats, air bnb, and gacha games to name a few. None of them are scams, so I can't understand understand why so many people on hacker news complain about scams. Do you live in a region with barely any ad inventory?
> air bnb
> gacha games
How are these not scams?
Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
Literally had this conversation this week with my parents. Weird fucking times…
We recently started a company to help with this exact situation! I would love to pick your brain about what features you would be most interested for helping protect your parents. If you'd be willing to chat can you email me at kevin at trylifeguard.com ?
I suspect this may not feel super helpful at first but I thought it worth mentioning, my first reaction to something like that was strongly negative and my guard went up immediately, it’s quite a weird dynamic that you’re stepping into of people who by the nature of their relationship have known each other their entire lives and you’re trying to talk to one on behalf of the other about a topic that requires a bunch of trust despite neither of the people in this scenario knowing you.
None of that is personal obviously just the gut reaction I got reading that initially. I suspect maybe nobody has mentioned it before and it might be helpful to hear on the assumption that others feel similar.
I don’t know how this changes for people who are less sure how to have that conversation and I suspect the fact that I’m a real life security person might have something to do with it.
Edit: I just saw the website after this and I get what you’re doing and can see how maybe it makes sense for some but I’d never recommend this to my own parents, I don’t think sticking an AI in the middle of all of their personal communications is the right answer and I’d have a lot of questions about how that data gets used to be honest.
Again, nothing personal but there’s just no possible universe where I’m setting something up so that every personal message I ever send my parents again is getting silently sucked up into some random company’s cloud to be read and analyzed and then paying them money for that. One of the things I actually had to show them was how to disable that kind of shit on their Gmail accounts for example.
Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how the yearly tech support I do with my parents at Christmas will not one day converge to an outright ban of the internet. I am now demoing the level of sofistication of AI powered scams, telling them that it is now entirely possible they will get a VIDEO CALL from me that's not actually me asking for God knows what in a very convincing way using my face and voice. I am scared and this close to setting u…
> I am scared and this close to setting up a secret passphrase in case they need to tell me appart from a clone. do that sooner rather than later. Voice mimicry is so much easier now, that you might not be able to tell from the phone. This is why a verbal password from family is important, esp. in unusual situations.
Probably wouldn't hurt to add an "I'm being coerced into this" version of the secret passphrase while they're at it.
Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
The scam in online advertising is far more sinister; Google uses their panopticon to show your ad to a user who is just about to buy your product and then claim a conversion. So the stats look like Google is getting you thousands of conversions, when they only actually got a hundred people to look at your product who weren't already interested. This kind of bullshit was not possible in legacy advertisement. A billboa…
If this theory were true companies would see no revenue impact from ad buys on Meta. Then they would stop buying, and Meta would go out of business. You need to face the facts here that no matter how much you hate Meta, it isn't a scam.
Why do you think there is no revenue impact? I would assume there is. Companies should have a good idea how much. That is also why companies should care about scams - if ads on meta lose value they lose.