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Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

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Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#511

Post by ghtbircshotbe »

charcircuit wrote: post #296
AJ007 wrote: post #283

Earlier 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?

I don't see scam video ads on YouTube but pretty much all article/info sites like cnbc or weather are filled with garbage, possibly also served up by Google.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#512

Post by tcfhgj »

swiftcoder wrote: post #99
Workaccount2 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 start paying for ad-free services. Wake up. Where are all these ad-free services everyone keeps talking about? Social media companies don't even find it worth it to offer an ad-free plan last I checked...

Mastodon

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#513

Post by swiftcoder »

tcfhgj wrote: post #512
swiftcoder wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need to start paying for ad-free services. Wake up. Where are all these ad-free services everyone keeps talking about? Social media companies don't even find it worth it to offer an ad-free plan last I checked...

Mastodon

That's somewhat apples and oranges. Mastodon-the-software is free-as-in-AGPL, but most instances are funded by donations. I don't know of very many instances that offer explicitly paid subscription (in order to keep their interests aligned with their customers)

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#514

Post by vladms »

simpaticoder wrote: post #309
vladms wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder how it would sound if we would use the same paragraph about "deregulation". > Deregulation always seems simple, but there are inevitable unintended consequences. Sadly, those who see deregulation as the only or best tool to shape behavior are quick to suggest yet more deregulation to fix those unintended consequences ... Which sounds more reasonable: "Deregulation always seems simple" or "Regulation always see…

>I personally don't think there is one optimum that we can reach. I agree with this, and the containing paragraph. Everything is trade-offs. It may very well be that Facebook is under-regulated (and it probably is the case). I suppose I'm thinking of ways to use the situation to fix the much bigger and arguably worse problem with the justice system in general. Non-rich people (I don't say "poor" because I include mid…

From across an ocean (in Europe) the USA justice systems seems definitely "weird" and hard to understand between news, movies and what probably actually happens in real life.

Me, as an engineer, I always look for most impactful issue to solve at once, but with social system I am constantly reminded that human "powered" systems (like economics, justice, politics, etc.) depend on what human do, think and hope. We can find things to fix, and we should definitely look, but boy I was surprised by how people react to some changes (irrationally, to say the least). Good luck convincing enough people that the system needs fixing (I agree with you that it does need some fixing, but I am not there, so my opinion does not matter much)!

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#515

Post by vladms »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #255
vladms wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where would my word be heard? You do realize that we are on a platform without ads where your word is heard, so it still is possible. And before "social media" there were plenty of free forums (each with a certain main topic, but in which people were discussing occasionally more than that), so it was not that bad. And in fact that continues today (ex: this one), with more relevant discussions in my opinion than wha…

FYI, HN is a giant advertisement. It's a place with bait for software engineers (lots of tech stories and discussion), and YC then gets lots of eyes on job postings for their companies. This is explicitly why it exists. HN is not ad free, it is an ad.

What is your threshold of what you consider advertisement?

In the same way, speaking with a friend (or anybody) can be seen as "advertising your ideas".

For me, HN is more of an open discussion forum, where you can find lots of critical opinions on the topics, which for me makes it less "advertisement" than lot of other things.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#516

Post by Hammershaft »

yard2010 wrote: post #156
cjonas wrote: post #8

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.

I've seen many variants of this, often with deepfake Elon sharing his new crypto project with "10% returns per day"

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#517

Post by smt88 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #91
smt88 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're using anecdata to decide if a company with billions of users is viable? Literal nonsense. I hate Meta, but their ad business is still doing well and WhatsApp is the core of Indian society. AOL, Yahoo, and Tumblr still operate. Meta won't be dead in our lifetimes.

> AOL, Yahoo, and Tumblr still operate. As empty shells of what they once were. I've no doubt there'll be something at Facebook.com in ten years. But if it looks like your three examples, that's not a success.

Unless it gets broken up, I'd wager Meta will continue buying competitors and have a market cap above $1T in 10 years.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#518

Post by ben_w »

gtowey wrote: post #339
pjc50 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> What if no content could appear on Facebook until it passed a human moderation process?

While I'd be just fine with Meta, X etc. (even YouTube, LinkedIn, and GitHub!) shutting down because the cost of following the law turned out to be too expensive, what you suggest here also has both false positives and false negatives.

False negatives: Polari (and other cants) existed to sneak past humans.

False positives: humans frequently misunderstand innocent uses of jargon as signs of malfeasance, e.g. vague memories of a screenshot from ages ago where someone accidentally opened the web browser's dev console while on Facebook, saw messages about "child elements" being "killed", freaked out.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#519

Post by ben_w »

array_key_first wrote: post #469
ambicapter wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The answer is that it just takes a lot of people. 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…

This is simply not true in every single domain. The fact people think tech is different doesn't mean it necessarily is. It might just mean they want to believe it's different. At the end of the day, I can't make an ad and put it on a billboard pretending to be JP Morgan and Chase. I just can't.

> This is simply not true in every single domain. The fact people think tech is different doesn't mean it necessarily is. It might just mean they want to believe it's different.

Worldwide and over history, this behaviour has been observed in elections (gerrymandering), police forces (investigating complaints against themselves), regulatory bodies (Boeing staff helping the FAA decide how airworthy Boeing planes are), academia (who decides what gets into prestigious journals), newspapers (who owns them, who funds them with advertisements, who regulates them), and broadcasts (ditto).

> At the end of the day, I can't make an ad and put it on a billboard pretending to be JP Morgan and Chase. I just can't.

JP Morgan and Chase would sue you after the fact if they didn't like it.

Unless the owners of the billboard already had a direct relationship with JP Morgan and Chase, they wouldn't have much of a way to tell in advance. If they do already have a relationship with JP Morgan and Chase, they may deny the use of the billboard for legal adverts that are critical of JP Morgan and Chase and their business interests.

The same applies to web ads, the primary difference being each ad is bid on in the first blink of an eye of the page opening in your browser, and this makes it hard to gather evidence.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#520

Post by ben_w »

EduardoBautista wrote: post #400
toddmorey wrote: post #381

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?

IMO, Duolingo. Makes claims about language learning that I found to substantially exceed what was delivered.
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