Hacker News Reader

Unless of course, you can drown it out by sheer volume of sales.

The traveling huckster model breaks down eventually too, there's only so many people you can scam.

Also, that life isn't a good one.

At internet scale though you can get pretty far and if a new huckster is born every minute then it’s a revolving door of trolling. State sponsored money can’t hurt either.

But only if repeat business is relatively frequent. This isn't particularly true for durable goods sellers or people who sell one-off things.

Is the car salesman ever going to see you again? Is the realtor ever going to see you again? Is the mattress store salesman ever going to see you again? Is the artist who sells you band merch or paintings going to see you again? Probably not.

Sometimes the buyer doesn't have much choice: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Opium-Wars .