Why can't people just run businesses decently without deception & scams?
I'm sure they can be profitable.
This deceptive behaviour actually makes the business loose customers in the long term.
I'm sure they can be profitable.
This deceptive behaviour actually makes the business loose customers in the long term.
A system that tolerates bad actors like this will in time only have bad actors. It’s tolerated because it makes a large amount of money for a small number of people.
We need to resist that call to apathy, stop acquiescing, and start demanding better of others. That, incidentally, often starts at demanding better of ourselves.
I see things in terms of a sharecropping analogy, feudal lords (corrupted government) allow the scammers to harvest the crop (victims) for a share of the proceeds. We cannot fix people to the point they are un-scammable and there does not exist a democratic force strong enough to fix the government. Almost all ads I’ve ever seen are for obvious scams, especially on twitter. You’d think the richest guy in history (possibly?) could afford not to allow industrial exploitation of his users but apparently not.
You have gambling sites and binary auction scams that have a turnover that includes a significant percentage of suicides. I wish we had a democracy that could prevent this but we do not. While many of us here may be smart enough to avoid falling victim to these scams we have family members that we care about who are not so this still indirectly costs us wealth.
If we mean ‘we tech workers’ then you’ll just be replaced, just like how I was when I quit being a researcher at FANG companies over this and other ethical concerns. The only observable outcome is that my clear conscious came with the cost that I’m far poorer than I could have been. I’m lucky as I’m still well off but not everyone can make that call and survive. These scamming behaviors are trivial to detect and especially so at the large internet company level. It exists on these platforms because the owners want them to.
Just because she isn't perfect and wouldn't be all powerful doesn't mean both options were the same.
Owners of platforms can be held accountable, especially if they're turning a blind eye. Disabling message history won't save Google or anyone else.
Doesn't this rely on us as the individual? We get the government we allow. We, humanity, could've had anything we wanted, this is what we gave ourselves.
Consider the US scoped studies studies showing that the population doesn't get what it wants. They showed that policy follows the whims of the wealthy even in the cases where the population overwhelmingly agrees on a contrary direction. So the data says "no", control has been removed from us.
Part of the complication is that the determined action of a few actors can efficiently spoil the efforts of communities.
Humans have built in innate weaknesses that are easily exploited by the unscrupulous. People have been exploiting others since time immemorial, secret police keep libraries of exploits and you can see them used repeatedly and effectively throughout history. Pied-piper strategy (basket of deplorables), Operation Trust (Q-Anon).
I don’t know how to counter it.
Individual action is known to be so inefficient that the oil&gas industries poured money into promoting the idea of the personal climate footprint.
We have no investors to answer to. We're printing money. Yet at every opportunity company leadership reveals itself as this slavering beast where the only people in positions of power have gotten there through duplicity and a lack of empathy.
The tech job market is terrible. I'm trapped in the guts of a machine that was supposed to be one of the "good ones".
I'm not sure there's anything to do for people who want to act ethically and be decent to each other if even the "good" companies show a complete lack of regard for anything but making their profits take off into the stratosphere.
You and I value our privacy but most people don't. That's the truth. The tone of your post assumes people agree with you but, clearly, most people don't.
It isn't the market that creates the demand.
Protects and does not bind vs bind but does not protect. Same as always.
That does not work for corporations, because most people who are customers of these corporations are unaware of the corporation's bad behavior, are unable to avoid the corporation's products, or are stuck with a choice between bad options.
The main solution is regulation, oversight, and legal action, but the first two of these are unlikely to be enacted in the US in the current political climate. The Biden administration made some steps towards stronger regulation (e.g. by putting Lina Khan in control of the FTC), but received little to no political benefit from it and probably harmed fundraising for the Democrats.
Legal action is often prevented by arbitration clauses or disparate funding, where it is financially untenable to restrain bad actors using legal action.
I think it's more often that they don't care.
Their product is supposedly: install a FREE extension and you get discount codes applied for you at retailers when you check out.
It turns out they were able to be profitable by making themselves the affiliate every time you purchase something, but that's scammy because it's stealing from others who actually generated the referral.
But what other non-scammy business model could they have? There's basically no business model for what they're trying to offer that makes sense other than end-users paying for it.
In the rare case there is a prior referral, yes last click attribution comes into play. But that's the same for every shopping extension (Rakuten, Capital One, etc). The extensions have to comply with the affiliate network's "stand down" policies, which means they can't just automatically pop-up and actively try to poach the commission if it's within the same shopping session. And they all comply. MegaLag focuses on a very niche case of going back to the merchant in the same month.
Source: I worked in the affiliate industry for a few years
Thats an extremely generous way to say that they steal referrals from genuine affiliate partners.
I never said Honey doesn't override cookies. I'm not saying this isn't a problem, it's just not a Honey-specific problem. If the affiliate networks used first-click or multi-click attribution, none of this would be an issue.
https://www.businessinsider.com/shawn-hogan-sentenced-in-eba...
1 - Because investors are now the customer. There is no incentive to solve a problem or provide a product for end-users, only to funnel money to investors. That is the business model. 2 - The attention economy is run entirely on deception. Without solving someone's problem, the best option is to keep their attention and prevent them realizing they don't need a subscription. Literally addicting people to notifications and scrolling.
If you assume that purchasing decisions are also affected by scandals -- which would make sense -- then the overall consumer purchasing algorithm could be summarized as "buy whichever brand has existed for the longest period of time without a scandal". So businesses are rewarded for minimizing their scandal rate.
Top story on HN today:
"Since we launched PlasticList, we’ve been heartened to have quite a few food companies reach out and ask for help interpreting their results and tracking down and eliminating their contamination." https://x.com/natfriedman/status/1874884925587087434
Warren Buffet said:
"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently."
"Lose money for the firm, and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless."
And also:
"The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient."
Overall, I think there's a case to be made that doing the right thing is actually the most profitable strategy in the long term. It's not flashy, but it works.
Some aren’t and never will be without the deception and those companies just shouldn’t exist.
https://fee.org/resources/the-road-to-serfdom-chapter-10-why...
But can you be as profitable as your indecent, deceptive, scamming competitor?
If not, it won't matter how much of a goody-two-shoes you are. If the market sets the bar low, you either limbo or leave.
I'm deeply pessimistic about the future of open source. A lot of people are going to give up on it as it becomes clear that it's just free labor for SaaS companies and hustlers. That and I expect far more supply chain attacks in the future. I'm quite surprised there haven't been a lot more like the attempted XZ poisoning... yet. Or maybe there have been and we haven't caught them.
Edit: I forgot free training data for code writing AI. It's that too.
OSS is one of the Internet's last remaining high trust spaces. It'll be dead soon like all the others. The Internet is a dark forest.
Legally and morally they should ask the permission for each content they crawl / ingest, but they do not.
I get linux for free, an entire OS. Tons of giant companies contribute to it. I get llvm and clang mostly paid for by giant companies. I get python, go, node paid for by giant companies. I get free hosting for open source projects and free CI (github) paid for by giant companies. I get free frameworks (React, Flutter). Free languages, free libraries, etc...
My open source is just part of that. Contributing back to all the free stuff I get, much of it from giant companies.
You're right though, centimillionaires feel entitled to become billionaires, and billionaires feel entitled to become centibillionaires. However, I have noticed that the decimillionaires I know are aware that they still aren't in the right lane to even think that way and are largely content.
(wow, you're getting downvoted, the little boys on the site sure are a jealous bunch.)
They seem to be more on the respectful and ethical side btw.
I don’t see any incentives for decency.
Decency is as desired by society as “made locally.” Very few people are willing to pay for it and behaving that way he tremendous opportunity costs.
Are the liars of our society shunned and condemned to penury? Nope.
Jeff Skilling (Mr Enron) got out of jail and raised money for a new company. Pull off the fraud synonymous with corporate fraud and get investors.
Former convicted Enron corporate officers enjoy fat speaking fees and cushy consulting gigs.
You can pull off the fraud everyone knows and pay no social price for it.
You can defraud investors by the billions and get a movie about you (Wolf of Wall Street).
You can cook up the disaster that was WeWork and raise hundreds of millions from the most powerful VCs right after.