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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

#51

Post by wruza »

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 wish we were better at breaking these cycles.”

It could be better if...

Or maybe that is the way we are, those who extract, those who survive, and those who complain about living in a first-world experiencing a little inconvenience in apple app store.

Or maybe free creation of value is unlocked only after enough wealth is extracted by some big group somewhere else and injected into the market.

If these cycles exist, to break them “we” need to open much better possibilities than subj for everyone. But borders are closed, and when one opens them, they hear yet another complaint.

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

#52

Post by arethuza »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #40
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.…

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…

"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."

Warren Buffet

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

#53

Post by cageface »

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 (…

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.

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

#54

Post by matz1 »

puranjay wrote: post #38
nitwit005 wrote: post #25

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. Spam operations back in the day probably cost even more given what hardware and bandwidth used to cost. Even if they weren't trying to BS you, people committing crimes often come up with some sort of story to justify the whole thing. People like to be the hero of their story.

I'm a marketer and spam is a massive problem in the internet marketing space. The people who are good at spam - the folks topping Google search results for lucrative phrases or spamming social media on an industrial scale - all tend to have a lot of money. A business built on spam (or illegal tactics) is, by nature, unstable. You're one bust away from losing all your income. So the people who enter this space either…

So realize that its indeed unstable, you then extract the money as much as you can while you still can. When it goes bust, you move on and do something else.

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

#56

Post by skunkpocalypse »

Trias11 wrote: post #31
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.

I guess it will work well to launder $50.00

... and can be repeated a hundred thousand times. Voila, $5 million launderized.

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

#58

Post by skunkpocalypse »

pjc50 wrote: post #39
playbigwin wrote: post #37

[flagged]

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

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

#59

Post by marak830 »

trevyn wrote: post #49
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…

I'm curious, how deeply did you investigate social services (food banks, shelters, etc.) available in your area? This is not an accusation — I don't claim to know your individual situation. Yet I suspect that in many cases where people say "I'm doing this to feed my family", there is actually a larger component of preserving pride and reluctance to ask for help. The irony is that this is part of what dehumanizes the…

I'm in a country where I'm not a citizen due to my wife's country of birth. I would have had to leave her pregnant here to return to my country of birth.

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

#60

Post by dbuder »

weego wrote: post #45
nradov wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of those people are just lying about their circumstances to elicit sympathy. They're no different than any other con artist.

And yet we praise the engineers and architects of mass digital surveillance under the guise of social media as the elite of the tech industry

No, they are traitors.
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