Alongside a password manager and keeping things up to date, using an ad blocker is truly a foundational security practice these days. The big advertising players simply have all of the wrong incentives to control this problem. They could massively reduce the volume of scams advertised on their networks, but it’d be worse for them on two fronts: they’d have to pay for more moderation, and they’d lose billions in revenue in the process. Shoulder surfing while a non-savvy user browses Facebook or YouTube without an ad blocker and engages with obviously fraudulent ads is painful.
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 up a secret passphrase in case they need to tell me appart from a clone.
My guess is the already-existing trend towards walled gardens will simply continue. When a public space is dangerous, people retreat into "safe" enclosed spaces.
- "Never download anything unless it's from the Apple App Store"
- "Never buy anything unless you're on amazon.com"
Yes, but observe how that for all three of the things that immediately came to your mind, you have respectively 1. a thing that still has a lot of scams in it (though it may be the best of the three) [1] 2. A thing so full of scams and fake products that using it is already a minefield (one my mother-in-law is already incapable of navigating successfully, based on the number of shirts my family has gotten with lazy-AI-generated art [2]) and 3. a thing well known for generating false statements and incorrect conclusions.
I'm actually somewhat less critical of Apple/Google/Facebook/etc. than probably most readers would be, on the grounds that it simply isn't possible to build a "walled garden" at the scale of the entire internet. It is not possible for Big Tech to exclude scammers. The scammers collectively are firing more brain power at the problem than even Big Tech can afford to, and the game theory analysis is not entirely unlike my efforts to keep my cat off my kitchen counter... it doesn't matter how diligent I am, the 5% of the time the cat gets up there and finds a tasty morsel of shredded cheese or licks some dribble of something tasty barely large enough for me to notice but constitutes a nice snack with a taste explosion for the much-smaller cat means I'm never going to win this fight. The cat has all day. I'm doing dozens of other things.
There's no way to build a safe space that retains the current size and structure of the current internet. The scammers will always be able to overpower what the walled garden can bring to bear because they're so many of them and they have at least an order of magnitude more resources... and I'm being very conservative, I think I could safely say 2 and I wouldn't be really all that surprised if the omniscient narrator could tell us it's already over 3.
[2]: To forstall any AI debate, let me underline the word "lazy" in the footnote here. Most recently we received a shirt with a very large cobra on it, and the cobra has at least three pupils in each eye (depending on how you count) and some very eye-watering geometry for the sclera between it. Quite unpleasant to look at. What we're getting down the pipeline now is from some now very out-of-date models.
I don’t accept the excuse it’s too hard. If they have to spend $10 billion per year to maintain an acceptable level trust on their platforms then so be it. It’s the cost of doing business. If I went into a mall and opened up a fake Wells Fargo bank branch it would be shut down pretty instantly by human intervention. These are the conditions most businesses run under. Why should these platforms given such leeway just because ‘it’s hard’? Size and scale shouldn’t be an excuse. If its not viable to prevent fraud then they don’t have a viable business.
Yes, it's not that it's impossible, it's that it's impossible while operating how they want to operate, scaling as much as they want to scale, and profiting as much as they want to profit. But no business model that can't be pursued ethically and profitably should be execused as simply inevitably unethical. It should be regulated and/or banned.
But what actually is an acceptable level of trust? Acceptable for whom? For the billionaires, it's good enough if outside is worse, or even if it merely appears worse.
> To forstall any AI debate, let me underline the word "lazy" in the footnote here. Most recently we received a shirt with a very large cobra on it, and the cobra has at least three pupils in each eye (depending on how you count) and some very eye-watering geometry for the sclera between it.
Okay, but if it matches the illustration on the storefront, can it really be called a scam?
Fair, I was sloppy there. The cobra isn't a scam itself, it's just a demonstration that it's already a hard place to navigate what with everything that is going on there. A deluge of AI garbage may not be a "scam" in the strictest sense of the term but it still breaks certain unspoken expectations the Boomer generation has about goods and what exactly it is you are buying.
We have also received a number of shirts where AI has been used to create unlicensed NFL shirts and other such actual frauds. And whatever your feeling about IP laws, it was definitely low quality stuff... looked good if you just glanced at it but when you went to look at any particular detail of the shirt it was AI garbage. (I say "AI garbage" precisely because not all stuff from AI is necessarily garbage... but this was.)
> it still breaks certain unspoken expectations the Boomer generation has about goods and what exactly it is you are buying.
Sigh. I learned from my pre-boomer parents that if the product were any good it wouldn't need to be advertised.
> looked good if you just glanced at it but when you went to look at any particular detail of the shirt it was AI garbage.
To be fair, that was also all over the place before "AI" as currently understood. (And I don't think that previous iterations of machine learning techniques were involved.)
> It is not possible for Big Tech to exclude scammers
It's 100% possible. It might not be profitable
An app store doesn't have the "The optimum amount of fraud is not zero" problem. Preventing fraudulent apps is not a probability problem, you can actually continuously improve your capability without also blocking "good" apps accidentally.
Meanwhile, apple regularly stymies developers trying to release updates to already working and used by many apps for random things.
And despite that, they let through clear and obvious scams like a "Lastpass" app not made by Lastpass. That's just unacceptable. Anything with a trademark should never be possible to get a scam through. There's no excuse.
> 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 poster said, this is not profitable which is why they don't do it. Instead they complain about how hard it is to do programmatically and keep promising they will get it working soon.
A well functioning society would censure them. We should say that they're not allowed to operate in this broken way until they solve the problem. Fix first.
Big tech knows this which is why they are suddenly so politically active. They reap billions in profit by dumping the negative externalities onto society. They're extracting that value at a cost to all of us. The only hope they have to keep operating this way is to forestall regulation.
> 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 a verification system for your verification system, which will eventually need a verification system^3 for the verification system^2, ad infinitum.
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.
> 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.
Again, the newspaper model already solves this. Moderation should be highly localized, from the communities for which they are moderating the content. That maximizes the chance that the moderator's values will align with the community. Small groups are harder to hide bad actors, especially when you can be named and shamed by people that you see every day. Managers and their coworkers and the community itself are the "verifiers."
Again, this model has worked since the beginning of time and it's 1000x better than what FB has now.
> 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?
A lot of people = a lot of cost. That would probably settle out lower than the old classified ads, but paying even a dollar per Facebook post would be a radically different use than the present situation.
And of course you'd end up with a ban of some sort on all smaller forums and BBS that couldn't maintain compliance requirements.
No, sorry. It's eminently reasonable to ask or demand that a business to reduce its (fantastic) margins/profits in order to remain a prosocial citizen in the marketplace. In fact we do this all the time with things like "regulations".
It may be unreasonable to demand that a small business tackle a global problem at the expense of its survival. But we are not talking about small or unprofitable business. We are talking about Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon. Companies with more money than they know what to do with. These global companies need to funnel some % of their massive profits into tackling the global problems that their products have to some degree created.
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.
Amazon has the advantage over some company I don't have experience with, of that I know returns are pretty easy and generally not questioned at all (at least for me, long-standing account in the UK, with infrequent returns, it might vary for new accounts, those who return more than they keep, or those in countries with worse consumer rights at the legally enforced level).
My two most recent examples: a couple of rolls of 3D printer filament that looked nothing like as advertised (bad sales images there I think, rather than a comingled-with-a-cheap-scammy-alternative issue) which was taken back unquestioned for same-day full refund despite one of them being opened, and a couple of years ago a replacement drive for my media RAID array that, while the right drive and not, as far as I could tell, counterfeit, certainly wasn't new/unused which is what I ordered, which again was taken back with no quibble or cost (other than my time of course).
There are problems dealing with Amazon sellers, but those can mostly be avoided with care and a healthy dose of cynicism (to avoid ordering crap in the first place). I'd never buy some things from there though: safety equipment, for instance.
I order a lot from Amazon--especially over the past year for house-related reasons. I just haven't had (touch wood) the apparently pervasive problems that some people seem to experience. Maybe I'm more selective about not picking whatever is cheapest regardless of brand that I've never heard of.
Not sure how this works on Amazon, but Bol.com (dutch "amazon competitor") sells a lot of crap too. Stuff that sometimes has the images and literal description taken from e.g. aliexpress. People literally re-sell stuff from chinese webshops on there with profit.
Technically, on Bol.com, a EU-platform, EU consumer protection is in place. So if a product breaks within guarantee terms, is dangerous, never gets delivered etc. the person re-selling is responsible. They are importing "illegal" goods and could even go to jail for it.
So, technically, that premium price brings me me the assurance that I am protected by EU consumer laws. That a TV I buy can be returned, is CE certified, won't explode and isn't a 12" TV pictured in a tiny living-room on the images on unpacking.
Except these products often don't meet EU criteria, aren't adhering to (food, safety, chidren protection) EU laws and money-back is often hard because the re-seller just dissapears. In the last case, Bol.com will step up and refund, because they have to. But for the rest, they plead innocence: It wasn't us that sold illegal goods, it was that reseller from which we skim a lot of fees.
The incentives are just wrong. And the solution simple: Make platforms by proxy legally responsible for their "users". Resellers in my case. Or advertisers in the case of TLA.
If some-guy sells a TV that explodes, and can't be found or held responsible, then make Bol.com responsible. Let their CEO go to jail in the very worst case. Let's see how fast they solve this.
> Not sure how this works on Amazon, but Bol.com (dutch "amazon competitor") sells a lot of crap too. Stuff that sometimes has the images and literal description taken from e.g. aliexpress.
That is bog-standard drop-shipping. Every open online market had a pile of that. It isn't that they've taken the images from AliExpress it is that both sets of sellers are drop-shipping product from the same source or collection of sources (or buying and reselling though that is much less common as it means managing stock) and the images come & other sales material come from there.
> So, technically, that premium price brings me me the assurance that I am protected by EU consumer laws.
When comparing Amazon (UK) or eBay to the sellers on, for example, Facebook, often there isn't a premium, Amazon (or AliExpress, or similar) are often cheaper than sellers on social media and/or advertising via adverts on YouTube and their ilk. Those sellers will often try to make the product out to be some unique high quality item with a price to match (which of course is heavily discounted if you buy in the next hour or two), and if you check your preferred general marketplace you'll find several people with the same thing, often with the same images, making no such pretence of it being unique or high-value, at a price noticeably cheaper than the seller from SM/etc. I assume this is the same with Amazon in other jurisdictions and other marketplaces like Boi.
Where the consumer ends up out of pocket? I realise scamming ligament sellers and brands is endemic; but it is still a safe place to buy as far as I can tell?
Out of pocket? Perhaps not, especially if it "works" as intended. Putting your life in danger and house burnt down though? More likely than you realize.
Let's not even mention the health and nutrient products that make the FDA shudder.
Sure, you can ask for your money back, and flag the seller. But new sellers pop up selling the same crap all over again with a new name and company ID. This is all while real sellers of real (and safety certified products) get pressured by Amazon and dissuaded from taking their business off platform.
Avoid Amazon if at all possible. It's not good for consumers nor sellers, and it's keeping a leach on online retail.
Most countries have laws around liability of sold products. This is often set up to fall on the importer of said product. Amazon Europe (and perhaps USA) is doing something very funny with these laws; You, the consumer, is the importer. If your house burns out, then it's between you and a random chineese ghost companny that just disappeared into smoke. Amazon is "handling the import paperwork for you", and not taking liability for anything.
A lot of consumers have no idea they got a cheap imitation. Counterfeiters have gotten quite good, and in many cases the scam is "falls apart in a year instead of ten", not "it's completely non-functional".
Yeah there were entire categories of products I'd never buy again on Amazon because of the scams and the list got so large that I cancelled Prime a while ago.
The most common one I've run into is third party sellers taking items that come in multiple to a pack from the manufacturer and splitting them up but then also listing the single item for the same price as the multi-pack's MSRP.
As an example, pouches of cat food treats that come 10 to a pack. Scam sellers will split the pack and sell each pouch for the same price as the full 10 pack and because Amazon has historically done nothing to guard against this, their scam listing appears fully comingled with the manufacturer's listing in a way where it is very hard to recognize the scam option even if you are aware of the possibility.
Amazon has made some noise about fixing these comingling issues this year, but their plans have been vague and for me the well is already poisoned after years of letting it go.
Its actually shocking that it took until this year for Amazon to really acknowledge this as an issue. Manufacturer/brands can't have been happy about this considering that for any item that can be scammed like this you'll find lots of bad reviews on Amazon where the review isn't really complaining about the product, but the scam.
Some example reviews that I just randomly and easily found on Amazon:
I use walmart.com, they have fast local delivery (often next day) but you do have to be careful, as they also have listings for third party sellers and they are just as shady as Amazon. I only buy items sold by Walmart, never a third party. You can filter your searches for that pretty easily.
I never buy food, supplements, OTC meds, etc. online from any source. That stuff I always buy in person at a local retailer.
That would be one possible dystopia, but I think we actually are going to dodge it.
Smart, on device agents that are aligned with a user's interests will be able to act as the "walled garden" the user needs. In fact, this future is anti-dysopian, because the agent will not care about existing walled gardens and digital fiefdoms, and to the extent that it's using them it's going to deprive them of ad revenue, and they'll have to sit and take it because being agent unfriendly will be a death sentence for a business.
I half joke that the term “parental controls” will change meaning from restrictions set by parents on children to the opposite: restrictions now set up by children to protect their parents.
It's so funny how millennials grew up and we were told "Don't trust the internet, you can't cite wikipedia, the internet is all a lie" And now, I look around and the people who engrained that in us just never listened to what they were telling us. And somehow, no one thought to tell that to Gen Z so they just just get scammed a ton.
Not a joke at all these days, I was at home with my mother for 2 weeks helping her with stuff around the house, watching how she uses her phone, scrolls facebook, clicks on everything, it was really shocking for me. I looked around and didn't see the product I wanted to help me help her, so we started a company to try and give tools to help make it easier for people like us (techy people) who want to protect our loved ones. Our original idea was around education/elearning and we have expanded to doing real integrations to just stop the spam from getting in inboxes (gmail, SMS, call filtering).
That's me! I use parental controls to try and protect my elderly father on other platforms (he's always quick to fall for ads and download Android apps he doesn't need). Unfortunately Facebook doesn't allow you to enable parental controls on an adult, and they also pretty severely limit your ability to update your birthday! Which is unfortunate because Facebook is such a hostile platform.
I started a company a few months ago that is trying to help people like you do exactly this! I would love to chat with you to hear what has worked, what hasn't, what product features you would be most excited about. If you'd be willing to chat, please email me kevin at trylifeguard.com
> 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.
while ostensibly true, the more different types of passphrase/words you have, the less easy it is to remember.
You probably only need just one, for authentication purposes. I doubt grandmother can perform this sort of "spycraft" well if it's more complicated. Better to have something simple and easy, than to forget and panic later.
> 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
Worse, your fake version will be convincingly begging on the call for God knows what while being horribly tortured. Audio versions of this are already a thing.
My mom did this in the '80s so we weren't kidnapped, even by a family member. I'm not going to share the secret phrase, but it has stuck with me and I use it with my kids too.
I know most of that was driven by the tragedy of Adam Walsh, but it was still great OpSec I'll never drop.
We are all going to need to have personal passwords/safe words we don't reveal to untrusted parties for authentication. Or maybe personal retinal scanners? I think personal auth might be an interesting startup to get ahead of this.
I think the Internet will, sometime in the near future, just get shut down. That's been what actually happens in countries that are undergoing civil unrest or war like Russia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Tanzania, Israel, Myanmar, etc. And it's fairly likely civil unrest or perhaps even war may spread to an increasing fraction of the developed world too.
So my strategy here has been to start downloading anything that I think I might need from the Internet and keeping a local copy. It's free and abundant now. It could become inaccessible within a matter of minutes if the right powerful person says so. There may be a low probability of that happening, but given the potential disruptions to our life of our always-on connectivity going away, it's worth being prepared.
Keeping an offline copy of the Wikipedia is fine, but if "the Internet just get[s] shut down" I would think we'll all be more worried more about not being able to use our bank accounts, have medical providers see our records, etc.
We're back to whatever forms of trade you can source locally in that case, but that should not surprise anyone who observes regions that are actually in crisis, because that is how the economy functions in those regions. You do your best to do something nice for your neighbors and they do their best to do something nice for you, and anything that requires global trade or supply lines simply doesn't happen.
Having a copy of your own medical records could be critically important if suddenly your friend who is a doctor is now your doctor because there's nobody else.
Money tends to be worthless is such situations anyway - it's backed by the full faith and credit of a government that best case no longer cares about you and worst case no longer exists. So you aren't going to worry about your bank account, nobody will accept credit or debit anyway.
There is a whole lot of other data on the Internet that can be very, very useful in such situations. Even just having a few hundred hours of collected kids TV shows means you can sit them down in front of Bluey while the adults do stuff that is critical for survival. Knowing how to build a smelter and bellows out of clay that you can find locally means you can restart metal production in a matter of days rather than thousands of years. Knowing what the local plant species are and which are edible might keep you from starving. Knowing how to scavenge parts and wiring, as well as what their datasheets are and how you need to hook them up, means you can fix broken electronics and potentially create new ones, which gives you continuing access to knowledge.
Frankly, that passphrase should already have been established when you were a kid: it would have been used for if a stranger / unexpected person needed to give you a ride on behalf of your parents.
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.
This is really useful feedback, thanks for sharing. And 100% agree it is an interesting dynamic and I think there are a lot of people who share the "I don't want to give you my data" mindset. The original idea we started with was focused on elearning - trying to make really simple, short, effective lessons to highlight basic patterns for users to identify fraud & scams online. We have generic lessons on various channels (txts, emails, paper mail, phone, etc) and then we have scam specific lessons (grandparent scam, forgotten password scam, etc). We got some early feedback from users that were more in the "can you just automatically handle/prevent the scams from getting to my inbox!" so we expanded there. What do you think about eLearning content? I kind of view it as "I'm the IT admin for my mom and I set her the goal to complete one of the trainings." And again, thanks for the feedback you provided already.
In the future AI bots which are a near perfect facsimile of yourself will indeed call, and an AI facsimile of your mother will answer, and once the appropriate security protocols are exchanged, you'll get through.
God help anyone not armed with AI in the future, that's why it cannot be locked up by corporations or government.
> I am scared and this close to setting up a secret passphrase in case they need to tell me apart from a clone.
I have done this already and convinced a friend to do it after her father fell victim to a scam where he was convinced the sheriffs department wanted him to pay off a fine in gift cards.
I am also concerned that one might steal a trove of texts from someone and plug it into AI which could mimic the writing and tone of someone.
I already setup a secret passphrase with my family. My mother is particularly naive when it comes to what's online. Of course she is going to get abused.
A passphrase is cheap. If you never need to use it, so what?
And if she got a desperate, pleading call from "you" and "you" claim you can't remember the passphrase, then what?
These scams are imaginary. Yes they have probably happened but it's far more likely that your mother will get scammed by a "legitimate" financial advisor than some stranger using an AI to impersonate you.
The scams that people don't even know they are getting scammed on - GenZ has the one of the highest scam rates, but the dollar amount per scam is way low and they often dont even know they were scammed. Also, the political donation scams where the people "think" they are giving to a party or candidate but nope, just a PAC that spends all the money its collects on "operations" and "consulting fees" to its partners. Wild times.
This isn't a situation we accept out of other industries. You water provider doesn't get to pipe you sewage every now and again because its too expensive to moderate. We shouldn't accept it for big tech either. And we certainly shouldn't make it the responsibility of the end use to protect themselves
If everybody on social media was an actual paying customer of social platforms, like we pay mobile providers (I originally wrote “water providers”, which was in fact a somewhat unfit analogy), we could demand better service and switch away to a competitor who offers it. Unfortunately, we are robbed of our ability to pay with our wallets.
"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." It's an outdated way of looking at tech. Many classes of paid products (e.g., cars, streaming services, IoT, operating systems) double-dip into tracking and advertisement. Why would a business actually want to do the hard work of serving user needs when they can hedge their bets with ad revenue? Line must go up.
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 at least in case of social media.
If social media was paid only (like any actual product or service intended to benefit the customer) and users were choosing between paying different amounts rather than paying vs. not paying, it would kill the network effect outright; platforms would have to struggle to keep users, and to that end would start implementing features users want and need (rather than exploiting their emotional state and employing dark patterns[0] to boost ad impressions).
The interest of a service provider is aligned with the interest of the customer. The incentive to do bad unethical things to the user may exist either way, but it is when the user is not the customer that it becomes a natural course of things. It is still possible to “double-dip”[1], but the difference between users being customers and users not being customers is that in the former you can be an honest service provider and sustain yourself by doing things in the benefit of the user.
[0] For example, have you noticed how Instagram’s GUI is carefully designed to require you to tap two times, with a teeny tiny chevron as the only indicator, every time you open the app to switch to the timeline of people you actually follow, rather than whatever the algorithm suggests (and how carelessly swiping photo carousel left makes you exist that carousel, and lose the scroll position)?
[1] Additionally, note that the examples you named (cars, IoT, OS[2]) make a lot of money from a single purchase and/or are fairly inflexible to switch away from, compared to social media where interoperability is pretty much solved with open standards.
[2] What is a paid-only streaming service that “dips” into advertisement in some unethical way?
This is not about regulating away illegal behaviour. Criminals will exist. It is about making [what we have reasons to consider] de facto scammy behaviour to be de jure illegal behaviour. Then it becomes a matter of enforcement.
The norm is reduced costs because there are ads. The same Samsung also sells deeply discounted TVs that are ridden with ads. Netflix, amazon prime, Hulu, and youtube offer ad-subsidized subscriptions.
They didn't need to offer a refund. It was already priced in. You maybe forgot to ask what was coming in future software updates while standing starry-eyed at the impossibly low price it was being offered at, but they knew it was coming. After all, appropriately specced hardware to be able to do it was already onboard.
Your comment is so naive. Most products out there have a terms and conditions that equate to 'the company can change the product at any time and you're always free to stop using it', while giving their salespeople little to no idea about future progress because that would limit sales. Even if you didn't "maybe forgot to ask", there isn't anyone to respond with the truth.
If you purchase a product that doesn't have ads and then they introduce ads - that is a huge change in the value proposition of the product.
> that is a huge change in the value proposition of the product.
It is, but one that is already calculated at time of purchase. You'd pay a lot more if there were strict guarantees that it would never display ads.
The Belarus tractor company learned that lesson. Once upon a time they tried to infiltrate western agriculture with, under the backing of the USSR, heavily subsidized products offered on the cheap. But farmers saw through the thin veneer and realized that they wouldn't be able to get parts for the machines down the road. As such, the much cheaper price wasn't a winner. Farmers were willing to pay significantly more to American companies, knowing that they would provide not just on day one but also long into the future. The economic lesson learned was that the marketplace doesn't value just initial purchase price, but the full value proposition over its entire lifetime.
Many people are willing to gamble, of course, especially for "disposable" things.
I read it as more rhetorical than not. No one was literally expected to ask about the future. However, one could be expected to ask oneself “what could such a low price tag on such capable hardware mean for the future?”
It is unrealistic, of course, because it is a textbook case of information asymmetry (the enemy of the market)—only a vanishingly small number of people can adequately assess the pricing, having to know enough about hardware and all the various forces that could bring it down, like potential upcoming lineup changes or inventory overflow.
The right move is to fight information asymmetry. Many developed countries, including the US, already do it in countless cases. A mild way could be requiring to disclose things like this in addition to the ToS; a more thorough way could be simply banning this business model.
Saying it's your (the consumers) fault because you didn't read the crystal ball for what was coming in the future.
The price a product is offered at is the price for the product at that time, you don't get to say well I sold it for $10 but it's worth $20 so I'll just sell your data until I recoup that $10 I "lost".
Exactly. The necessary hardware to enable the tracking was installed at the time of purchase. It is not like 10 years later someone dreamed up the idea and decided to stealthy in the night start bolting on new components to every vehicle they could find. It was a feature that was there at the time of purchase and the sale was priced accordingly.
So by your standards, it's totally fine for Lenovo to use the laptop you bought from them to mine crypto a year after you bought it from them because the necessary hardware to enable that (it having a GPU) was installed at the time.
I mean it's a viewpoint, it's a certifiably bonkers one but of all the viewpoints it definitely is one.
Much like the F-150, if the license agreement between you and Lenovo allow Lenovo to do so, yes. I mean, if you didn't want that, you wouldn't have agreed to it, right? You are allowed to say no.
>“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
If a contractual party is not acting in good faith, there is a legal system to address that.
But I know you will say that the legal system doesn't act in good faith, so... I guess you're screwed. Such is the pitfall of living under a dictatorship.
Which is why I'm not providing what you seek. Production goes to he who is paying, and in this case I am the one doing the paying. Thus, you know the content is written for me and me alone.
> What are we supposed to do about the fact that you are not arguing in good faith?
A rational actor acting in good faith would start talking terms to see the sale go through, but as you are also here in bad faith we can continue to write only for respective selves. Nobody was expecting anything else anyway. I don't imagine anyone has ever paid someone else to write a comment on HN and that isn't about to change today.
The "you can just not agree to it" argument is so bogus. You can only buy good/services that are for sale, and when they all have the same crappy terms, you have to agree to somebody's to live in the modern world.
That's like the people who claim only idiots live in HOAs but neglect the fact that, in some markets, nearly all real estate worth living in is covered by an HOA of some sort so your alternative isn't "buy a different house" it's "live in an apartment forever"
> You can only buy good/services that are for sale
The world is full of custom car builders. Buying a something like the F-150, but without the undesirable computing components, is quite practical and very possible.
It'll be expensive, which I expect is what you were really trying to say when you pretend there is no such thing for sale, but you're just returning us to the heart of discussion: The F-150 is cheap, comparatively, because it has already priced in the tracking subsidy. You're accepting of those undesirable terms because the lower price makes it compelling enough to do so.
Is it really "accepting a concession" if the "alternative" is so expensive as to not be an option anyway?
This is like telling someone who doesn't like that they have to wait in traffic they should just take a helicopter to work everyday. Yes, it's technically an option for some people, but for the vast majority it's not.
Yes. That concession is what gets one with limited means into an F-150. If it was sold at its true market value, absent of all value diminishing systems like tracking, they wouldn't be able to afford that either.
Same goes for roads. You most definitely can build roads that don't have traffic, but only the rich will be able to afford to use them. Traffic is what enables those of lesser means to also participate.
It's a pretty good tradeoff for those who are poor. And the rich can buy whatever they want anyway.
Yes, the world is full of custom car builders. I'm sure I'll find someone that can build me a replica of the f150 lightning that doesn't enable spyware on me.
Mind to help me out a bit and point me at a few companies doing that? Around Kentucky if you don't mind since that's where I am.
I'd start with Ford. They're well known for their custom builds — what they call VSO. And they're already tooled up for production of an F-150-style vehicle around Kentucky to boot.
It won't come cheap like an F-150, but nobody can expect it to be cheap when the value proposition is much higher.
When someone comes to you with a unique custom request for something, your response is: “Nope. Not on my website, not going to do it”?
Must be nice to have the luxury of being able to do nothing. Ford doesn’t have that luxury, though. It has to answer to angry shareholders if it lets a lucrative customer slip through.
A license agreement, or a contract in general, cannot permit either party to violate the law. What you're describing in this scenario, and what has actually happened in some cases, is effectively theft of use and arguably fraud.
Fraudulent terms of service are not above the law, nor are they above basic expectations in society of fair dealing. You can try to litigate this any which way you choose, based on the language contained in the contract/TOS, and it fundamentally does not matter. At some point, something has to give and it ends with burning down buildings and building guillotines. History is full of abundant lessons about the supremacy of social mores and standards that suborn the law, and the supremacy of the law over the specific parties of any given contract.
Who exactly would you ever ask to find out that the samsung fridge you were looking at was going to get ads in the future?
Certainly not the appliance salesman, they don't know samsung's plans. And good luck calling samsung and asking for the "future plans" department. This is such a dishonest take.
> You maybe forgot to ask what was coming in future software updates
Who exactly was I supposed to ask that? The check out cashier at the store? The CTO of the company that manufactures it? Who even knows the answer to that question, and how are millions of consumers supposed to find that out and contact them directly, and why are they permitted to reveal proprietary plans if they even know?
Your arguments are delusionally detached from reality.
Normally F-150s, and fridges for that matter, are sold not by cashiers, but salesmen. I suppose there isn't any meaningful difference in the end — except, unlike a cashier, salesmen are named as such because there is greater expectation of them being intimately familiar with the product so that they can answer such questions.
If they can't, that's a pretty big red flag. Why would you conduct business with someone who has proven to be shady (or at least incompetent)?
There's really no difference. If a company must subsidize costs with ad revenue, it clearly shows that they don't want paying customers to be the sole judges of the product's value proposition.
I don't know very many people who have a choice of water providers. Generally you are stuck with whoever owns the pipes to your home. And since you don't have a lot of choice, the government tends to regulate the shit out of water providers - and I don't see we have any other real choice when it comes to too-big-to-fail social media providers either.
I can choose not to use a social medial platform, it is kind of hard to choose not to drink water/wash/etc.
I do not use much social media platforms, while I try to stay social, like posting one picture a month and sending a message here and there, watching a cat video sometimes, etc. I think social networks are much more similar to drugs - you can try to regulate to prevent people hurting themselves, but people will find a way if they can't refrain themselves.
Scams existed before social networks, and maybe is a bit easier using them, but I do not feel it is a fundamental shift. Along the ages people were taught/encouraged "to believe (without checking)" into a multitude of subjects (state, church, horoscope, etc.), now seems a bit hypocritical to be amazed that they do just that.
> I can choose not to use a social medial platform, it is kind of hard to choose not to drink water/wash/etc.
I don't think that's actually true for WhatsApp in a lot of countries - it's the default communication for many, to the point I'm not sure I could get parcel deliveries reliably here in Spain if I didn't have WhatsApp.
Ditto for communicating with the entire generations who moved onto Facebook after we all abandoned it. I could delete Facebook entirely, but then I'd spend every family gathering hearing the chorus "why aren't you on Facebook? Your cousins are all on Facebook. They all know the family drama" (instead I keep Facebook off the homescreen of my phone, and check it about once a month).
The problem with this analogy as I see it is that water supply is heavily regulated and uncompetitive due to exactly the fact of it being impossible to switch.
For this to work for the likes of Meta, it would mean elevating Meta’s services to some sort of country-wide public utility, which I’m sure would create probably an even stronger moat than network effects, hindering any competiton.
However, is there such a constraint in case of social media? There are mechanisms and open standards that could allow interoperability between providers who implement them. It seems that it should be possible to leave it up to market forces and competition, but for that we have to have competition and be able to vote with our wallets.
I have heard of Nebula and Floatplane. Is Nebula good?
My issue is that in presence of one large player who does it for free competition is already impossible: $2 is twice as much more than $1, but $1 is infinity/NaN times more than $0. It’s one of the many problems with the fact that it is legally allowed.
Nebula is good in that it properly allows me to pay the people who's content and reporting and art I like and support them without giving the toxic sludge of Youtube a dime.
It also allows them to focus on doing their job: Making the good videos I want and that they want to make, rather than play some absurd algorithm games.
Floatplane is similarly better aligned with what artists and creators want to do. The guy from DankPods is much happier on that platform than something like Twitch which gave him constant problems.
The GunTubers and "Current military events but from former soldiers who act like they know what they are talking about in reference to geopolitics" have created their own platform and I hope that succeeds too. I do not agree with a lot of the politics from some of these people (and believe some others are liars) but diversity is good.
Armchair Historian also created their own platform. That might not have panned out though, they had financial troubles that led to them abandoning another project.
IMO, the best platform is Patreon linking to a bunch of MP4s on S3 (or whatever cheaper medium exists). Nebula started out just using a "Youtube copycat" whitelabling service.
We can pay with our attention, if we stopped using social media that takes advantage of us and use others that don't. They will change the way, they act.
We could demand it either way. There's no iron law of the universe that says otherwise. The application of the law is supposed to be objective but the contents are just made up by those with the power to do it.
Not enough people would demand it for it to be actionable, and not having to pay is part of the reason. Why would we spend effort on actively demanding things when we are spending not a cent on this in the first place, and can instead passively-aggressively deploy adblockers while waiting for the next iteration of this arms race (which something makes me think might involve LLMs)?
(An aside, there is a lot of scandal in the UK about how the privatised water providers have been basically shitting on the public and environment, and literally discharging raw sewage because its too expensive to moderate!)
I'm sure it felt good to write something pithy like that, but the Flint, MI case is not one of a water utility screwing up, or causing harmful contaminants to enter the water. It's a story of the city switching providers, and that other provider having different water chemistry that was incompatible with the existing piping in the city which caused harmful contaminants to be introduced into the water. Neither water provider had failed to provide what they were intending to provide, the city failed to plan ahead and test things before moving the source of their water.
I had a similar thought regarding OS'. Especially in they heydey of malware in the early 2000s when 3rd party apps were the only way to remove it. You don't buy a truck and accept that its wheel falls off every time you hit a bump. Therefore Microsoft should have been civilally liable for all the costs of software removal and loss of enjoyment of computers that ran Windows (along with OEMs that sold them).
Most locks are trivially defeatable and easy to force. Heck, there's often a large window right beside a suburban door. Break the glass, open the door. Locks are only there to deter crimes of opportunity and make it more likely you'll actually notice a theft in a timely fashion.
And Microsoft didn't even bother to do that much. Spyware was able to embed itself in any windows installation for a solid decade, just by visiting a website. removing it required at least 30m of updating and installing specialized tools and was well out of reach of the average user.
Because the customer eventually decided it was worth paying for. Emphasis on eventually. It took over 30 years from the first car having optional door locks to locks becoming a standard feature.
> MSFT did nothing to stop spyware for at least a decade.
More like half a decade. The first real instance of spyware was recognized in 1999. Microsoft began working on their anti-spyware software in 2004.
Microsoft bought GeCAD RAV in 2003 with the intent of using that antivirus engine in Windows.
It's also worth pointing out that the 1998 antitrust case against Microsoft is most known as a Browser fight, but it included a heavy hand from Adobe and all of the major Anti-Virus tools of the time. It was seen by many at the time, including Microsoft, that the delivered court decision forbade Microsoft from including PDF software, anti-virus tools, firewalls, and other such software in Windows (and arguably against building some of them at all).
It's somewhat easy to understand why that decision almost made sense in 1998, but real easy to see why it aged very quickly like spoiled milk (including the wide spread of spyware and malware that soon followed).
Car door locks are wafer locks and can be defeated sometimes with a flathead screwdriver.
Security is about "good enough" though so that's usually sufficient.
Most of the worms of the early 2000s worked by exploiting vulnerabilities that Microsoft had already found, patched, and deployed, but users, including giant businesses just didn't install the patches.
Bonzai Buddy and the days of the toolbar didn't happen because Windows is insecure, it happened because at a fundamental level the only difference between spyware and a perfectly valid and runnable program is intent, and an OS has no insight into the user's mind. When you doubleclick on a desktop icon, Windows cannot know whether you totally intend to send most of your precious data to a sketchy server, or whether you have no idea what you are running.
Microsoft is moving more towards preventing users from running whatever they want.
"The user is god and the OS serves them" and "Never let the user run spyware or malicious code" are mutually exclusive, so be careful what you wish for.
> the only difference between spyware and a perfectly valid and runnable program is intent
This is true if you completely ignore that spyware was impossible to remove without specialized removal apps that were funded by volunteers, not Microsoft.
Telling me that locks are pickable is completely irrelevant and avoids the point I was making.
Yes. If you haven’t yet read it Cory Doctorow’s new book Enshittification is well worth a read. I am still reading it but it certainly explains some of the bad practices by these major advertising/spying giants and the resulting market distortion. We need to up our game as technologists and hold our employers to account.
Water, power, etc infrastructure regulations and things like the environmental movement happened when there was more working class solidarity and the working class had more power over the capital owning class. Now the working class have been propagandized to believe "regulations bad" and have been depowered as capitalism decays and the capital owning class further takes and consolidate power. The regulations you want are impossible in this political climate and probably impossible without an extremely radical reform movement or some mass resignation or revolution of government.
I mean, lets face it, no government that makes hard right turns and has intense corruption like the USA just goes back to being a proper liberal democracy. Most likely things will get a lot worse before they even get better and on a timescale thats unpredictable. We may be talking 20+ years before any sort of baby steps towards liberal reforms are even possible on the federal level. The right has the gerrymandering, scotus, the courts, the media machine, etc. Pro-working class regulations are just not going to happen like they did in the 60s and 70s for a very long time if history is any guide.
Its so odd to me people just have a "dont worry we'll got back to normal next election." To get back to what we had during those times of pro-worker regulation will take many, many, years if not decades of work now. At the very least until many in SCOTUS retire or pass away from old age. That just isnt happening anytime soon.
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 in ETFs that also charge 1-1.5% a year funneling money in to companies being raided by executives and employees isn't a scam scam, but it is a massive mis-allocation of resources and probably more damaging than some dumb item purchased from a Meta ad that never showed up. Same for recently legalized (in the US) sports betting.
The startling thing is AI is being applied at scale to make this crap more pervasive. 10% scams? Meta would like advertisers to use their generative AI tools to create image and video ads of non-existent products.
Best thing we can do is delete all phone apps and only access online media from behind firewalls that block all ads and tracking. Windows is dead. Apple is transitioning to an adtech company. Linux is the only option.
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.
"Algorithms". Even if your region has plenty of ad inventory, Google's micro-targeting can mean even people in the same household see wildly different subsets of the ad inventory. You could just be lucky and aren't in any of the micro-target "demographics" scams want (or at least, can afford) right now.
Micro-Targeting is one of the worst mistakes of the entire advertising industry and we'll be probably dealing with its consequences for a while to come.
I don't understand why the big advertisers don't scream about this. Facebook gets money from whoever, but the scams dilute the effectiveness of real companies that are not trying to scam you.
Real companies don't give a damn about what they are actually doing. Facebook tells them that their ad which nobody clicked on got them 40 000 new customers. The worker who put the ad on Facebook gets a pat on the back from his boss. The boss gets a raise and maybe a promotion. Leadership gets shown numbers of how great advertising on Meta is and doesn't take 5 minutes to check them. If sales are low it is those god damned customers, better hike prices and reduce product quality to show the bastards!
Yet in the days of newspapers companies collected data to see how well their ads worked. There are a lot of statisticians working in this area - or there were 20 years ago.
And you can use the exact same methods today on digital channels to see exactly how efficient your ads are, without tracking or invading the privacy of anybody. But companies trust Meta and their sales department instead...
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 billboard cannot change itself to always be showing an ad that can be claimed as a conversion to every single user.
The newspaper ads could not change to ensure that you saw an ad that matched what you were about to purchase.
>There are a lot of statisticians working in this area - or there were 20 years ago
Weren't those people the exact ones who came up with "Half of ad spend is wasted but we don't know which half"?
Targeted and online tracking based advertising has fundamental information asymmetry problems that fuck over everyone but Google and Meta.
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.
The comment I was replying to implied that targeted advertising is a scam that finds people who were going to buy anyway and then advertises to them. If that were true, there would be no revenue increase because all the customers would have bought anyway.
oh. That makes sense. so long as other people see the ads that shows up in the stastics. Though companies should be pushing back on google doing that. (Though it may be they were going to buy but the ad influenced where which is worth the price)
What the adds really do is target people who are going to buy a certain category of product anyway, and then advertise the specific product made by the company that buys adds. It's hard to convince someone to buy something out of the blue. Much easier to convince them to buy a particular brand of something they were going to buy anyway, which is why targeted ads are so valuable.
Companies will falsely attribute positive revenue impact to whatever sales channels they are using, including Meta. The option would be for dozens of people having to admit that they made a mistake and wasted money on ads which didn't work. It's 2025, people would rather let their company bankrupt than admit they made a mistake.
I understand that impact calculation for ads is, at best, an inexact science. But I refuse to believe that businesses spend hundreds of billions of dollars on ads every year for absolutely no gain. That's chips in the vaccine level conspiratorial thinking.
Go talk to any small business owner of your choosing. When they have a slow day and nothing to do they like to chip in a few hundred dollars into the Meta casino. Since you can tweak endless parameters on which people will see the ads, you can always spend more until you find your winning number, like on the horse race track or in the lottery.
I don't understand how more countries don't hold the publisher responsible, especially after they are notified. I'm sure that in a classic newspaper, the publisher would be held responsible for obvious scam ads. But by intentionally automating and outsourcing everything, suddenly that responsibility goes away?
Hold the publisher responsible, let them deal with the ad platform. Suddenly, it becomes very attractive to have an ad platform that doesn't allow scams.
If the publisher and the ad platform are the same, even better.
Facebook is one of the few pages my ad-blocker can't handle. In part I think this is because they do it differently by country, but mostly it's because Facebook makes a ton of effort to make it hard to recognize what's an ad from the page code.
I have my view history turned off on Youtube. It appears that means I get a lot of low quality ads. Questionable health products, really questionable health products, "5G blocking beanies that prevent brain fuzzing", gross out advertisements about poop, and so on.
It really lowers my perception of Youtube as a product as just any old site with content, but also scams / creepy stuff. Youtube don't care I suspect, it's money for them, and it re-enforces my desire to not give them money... so yeah they take money form who they can.
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 people get totally spun around the axle on.
We need to start paying for ad-free services. Wake up.
If you pay for Sky/Virgin/insert Cable provider in your country, you still get copious amounts of ads. If you pay to go to the cinema, you have to sit through 15 minutes of adverts before the film starts.
I'm buying off Amazon, they're showing sponsored products (so... ads).
A lot of people did pay for ad-free Netflix, only to wake up one day in the future to find that product ending, and a similarly priced tier that has ads in it.
Amazon Prime Video didn't have ads. Then one day it did.
Maybe you're right that _the masses_ need to start rejection ad-tiers, but so far we've seen that people will accept advertising to get more.
Facebook has made it very clear that they don't want you to do this: you can pay for ad-free (I believe it's because they're legally obliged to offer that as a result of some things they'be done and deals they've made), but the cost is easily 100 times what they can make directly on ads for me. The only conclusion can be that they place an immensely high indirect value on serving me ads.
Same with streaming services, ad-free services seem to be unusually higher priced than the ad-supported tiers. Netflix for example charges $10 for ad-free over the ad support tier ($18 vs. $8). I’ve seen estimates that ad revenue per subscriber is less than that, maybe $4-$8. And there’s a cost to that revenue as well, so their profit is even lower. Why go through all that trouble? Maybe the economics works out somehow, in that users willing to pay to get rid of ads are so price insensitive they may as well squeeze them for more money? Or the lower subscription cost opens up enough new subscribers to make it worthwhile to tolerate a much lower margin. I am very suspicious though and wonder if there is a more insidious or otherwise opaque motivation behind it. Is there some kind of ‘soft power’ benefit to being in the ad business?
They’re probably assuming that anyone who would pay for Facebook has a large disposable income, which means that they’re a juicy add target, and they are worth much more than the average Facebook user.
> 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...
I don't really get why that's the responsibility of the consumer? Businesses offer shitty deal, consumer works around said deal... it's on the businesses to offer a better deal (a la Spotify vs limewire, or Netflix vs thepiratebay)
> We need to start paying for ad-free services. Wake up.
You make it sound like there are no people that pay for ad-free services they find valuable. Or that there are no free ad-free services (ex: WhatsApp).
My feeling is that people know some "services" are not that "valuable" (ex: facebook, instagram, etc.), so they would not pay for them, but, like with drugs, they can't reduce their usage.
I pay for some ad free services, but it’s infeasible across the entire internet and every possible link you might follow. Additionally, I fundamentally disagree with the concept of paying someone so that they don’t show me malicious ads. If they cannot or will not ensure the ads that they accept money to display are not malicious, I will not look at their ads.
We need to have an easy way to pay small amounts for a one-time service. A lot of websites offer content that you need only a couple of times in your life. It's worth paying for, but not worth all the hassle of setting up a normal payment.
This leaves ads as the only form of revenue and because ads don't care about the content, this creates a race to the bottom on generating slop.
The advertisers do care about the content. Ad based models ensure that content doesn't piss off advertisers. User payment models ensure that content doesn't piss off the user base, which does sound better, but audience capture can be every bit as bad.
This would create a two tiered social commons however. Someone like me, homeless and on disability, what could I afford? Where would my word be heard?
It could also create "free" platforms, funded by billionaires, to control the speech on the platform.
The answer is a communal, government owned social media platform, that mimics the rules of the town square. in the US, this includes the same 1st amendment rights. This would allow equal access to everyone's voice.
IMHO, social media should not exists at all. It is too huge and too fast for our tiny brains.
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 what I glimpse from my occasional social media incursions.
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.
But the truth is that people don't want that. We had that before and it lost in the open market to free but ad supported. There is a very small and vocal group of people (which is massively over represented on HN) that really hate the ad supported model, but the vast majority don't really care and prefer it to paying in cash.
Just curious what password manager I should use? I'm considering using a password manager instead of the Google ones and gradually switch all passwords to generated ones instead the one I usually use. Searched through HN for the last 6 months but found just too many posts about PM.
I believe Bitwarden, 1Password, or the stock Apple one are the typically recommended ones. Bitwarden is free (and can be self-hosted), 1Password is paid and has a slightly nicer UX, and the Apple one is good but requires you to be in their ecosystem. I personally use Bitwarden and have had no issues.
IMO MFA (or a passkey) is much more important. Most online accounts I have I couldn't give a rats ass if someone got in. (Not that they would because there would be no monetary value to them). Best to focus on those that are important and set MFA on them. If they don't offer MFA, find someone else who does. MFA + crappy password is better than strong PW w/o MFA, because even a PW manager can be leaked. This isn't to say you shouldn't care about secure PWs, but IMO it's the less important factor here.
Thanks, I use Firefox but I did save all of my past passwords in Google password already. So I guess I could keep it. I might switch anyway though as I'm switching to Brave.
*>They could massively reduce the volume of scams advertised on their networks
I'm not entirely sure that's true. It's equivalent to asking a platform to moderate all "harmful content" off the site. "Scam" is fundamentally subjective, just as "harm" is.
The real solution is to reform the justice system such that a citizen feeling they've been defrauded has a quick and easy process to get satisfaction for themselves and other similarly harmed people. We need a streamlined, totally online court that excels at gathering and interpreting data, and a decision in days not years. The ad networks are themselves the natural allies of such a reform, but such a change can and should start small as a pilot program at the state level. If successful, it removes the considerable legal-cost moat protecting scammers, and so it no longer makes sense to even attempt such a business, and the world becomes a slightly better place.
> "Scam" is fundamentally subjective, just as "harm" is.
From the article:
> Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams and banned goods, Reuters reports
I think we can agree that there's no "subjective" situation when a product is banned.
> The ad networks are themselves the natural allies of such a reform
The article (and the person you're replying to) point out that a significant portion of Meta's revenue comes from such scams. I'm really struggling to see how they're "natural allies" and not "antagonists" here. You're going to have to show me some research that backs up your claim because it flies in the face of the available information.
>I'm really struggling to see how they're "natural allies"
Ah, sorry. Perhaps I should have spelled it out. Meta desperately wants to avoid being regulated. One way they can avoid it is to help make the out-of-band justice system (much) more efficient such that they avoid messy moderation policies and don't need to be regulated anymore. Victims would be happier too, especially if they get remunerated for their pain, time, and trouble. The message to scammers everywhere (not just on Meta) becomes clear: go ahead and try it, you will get caught and put out of business, and likely sent to jail. Eventually the scammers will realize it's not worth it.
The unintended side-effect, sadly, is that legitimate business will be attacked as scams by profit-seeking or malicious individual malefactors.
In any event, I think reforming the US justice system is way overdue; it is far too expensive and time-consuming for most matters, and that means we live in a place with de facto lack of courts. And I don't like that.
> Meta desperately wants to avoid being regulated. One way they can avoid it is to help make the out-of-band justice system (much) more efficient such that they avoid messy moderation policies and don't need to be regulated anymore.
I might have bought that but a delayed flight spent reading Careless People swiftly disabused me of any such notions.
> In any event, I think reforming the US justice system is way overdue; it is far too expensive and time-consuming for most matters, and that means we live in a place with de facto lack of courts. And I don't like that.
Most countries have regulators that come with teeth, such that the only times they need to go to court are to confirm they have the teeth they're using. After that, companies fall in line. From the outside, it seems the USA does not have this system and has no desire to develop such a system.
Except in this case, the platform is actually paid real money for that content, so yeah, I absolutely expect them to review each and every piece of it.
If ads worked this way:
- Victim clicks crypto scam ad, loses their savings ($xx,xxx)
- Forensic investigation happens, determines that this happened due to a paid ad on site X. Site X knew that this was an ongoing problem and didn't manage to control it, but was still showing ads.
- Site X is considered complicit and just as liable for the loss as the scammer. Since the scammer is hard to find, the user sues the site and the site has to pay the losses.
- The site is now free to pursue their "business partner" for the damages, the user doesn't have to care.
I bet the ads would suddenly get reviewed a lot more. No sane publisher would allow ads from an ad platform that doesn't provide a guarantee against this issue. If a "good" ad platform started showing scams, the site would drop it once notified (because now they're on notice, and would be liable for any future scams). Thus, the platform would make damn sure that this doesn't happen.
"Scam" might be subjective but the legal system usually has a definition for it and judges to apply any remaining subjective judgement necessary. It's usually also pretty easy to avoid the need for a judge deciding by not trying to max out the we-think-this-is-technically-not-illegal grey area.
This doesn't require huge legal costs for the ad networks - they can simply refuse to do business with entities that are not verified, or allow ads for shady business areas where 40% of the businesses are borderline scams and 50% blatant scams...
While some things may exist in a grey area, there’s an immense volume of blatant, obvious fraud in mainstream ads. A deepfake of Elon Musk promoting a way to get rich with crypto is just so clearly a scam, and yet it’s one I’ve seen in preroll YouTube ads multiple times.
Making the platforms have some liability for facilitating fraud would be good, though. In the meantime I block ads.
Scams are absolutely not subjective and capitalism fails at every level without regulation like this. Your comment is very libertarian housecat coded.
Also 'just go to court' is such a naive take. As someone who has been in litigation before I can tell you those $350/hr billings add up quick. How many consumers can afford a 5 or even 6 digit legal bill for being scammed for a few hundred or thousands dollars on a FB ad? Of those who can, how many would see this pricetag as worth it? Sorry but small claims court isn't going to do discovery for you for some company hidden behind who knows how many storefronts and foreign proxies. You're going to have to do real litigation. Its absurd to expect every working class person to sue all scammers constantly. Instead ad providers should be policing their own ad networks and the working class should be using the government to implement proper regulations to protect ourselves.
People's first instinct is to attack the thing they don't like directly. The second instinct should be to consider the system in which those things arise, and what the incentives are for everyone involved. If you have a roomful of loud children, you could apply draconian rules on silence; or, if you notice there is no sound-deadening and so the children are unwittingly participating in a positive feedback loop to be heard above the din, you can add material. My goal is not a libertarian one, its a minimalism one. Streamlining the court system has many other benefits besides this one; the excessive cost and time required to use the court is used systematically by malefactors at every level of society. From patent trolls to absurd rates of criminal prosecutions that are never heard by a jury, it's an enormous problem in our society.
Regulation always seems simple, but there are inevitable unintended consequences. Sadly, those who see regulation as the only or best tool to shape behavior are quick to suggest yet more regulation to fix those unintended consequences, either unaware of the positive feedback loop or certain there exists some set of regulation that will finally, perfectly fix the system. I find this way of thinking naive; it is almost always better to make adjustments to the system to shape behavior that way. And in this case, the obvious way to do that is to fix the courts, and make justice affordable again.
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 seems simple" ? Will let the reader decide, because in the end it is a subjective choice.
I personally don't think there is one optimum that we can reach. At certain points in time and for certain subjects deregulation should be applied at other points in time regulation should be applied. I don't see any point in talking "generally", this depends on topic, country, priorities, etc.
>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 middle-class as well) are totally boxed out of the justice system in the USA. A pox of scammers is just one of the side-effects of the ossification and decay of the system. I'd like to solve a big chunk of problems all at once, including this one.
Zero click browser exploits still do pop up—it's also hard to say how common they are, because they're hard to detect, and likely to be used very judiciously by the people who discover them to avoid showing their hand. Ad networks have certainly been a direct vector for malware in the past.
Within the past few years there were quite many malicious ads floating around that would trigger a redirect on load on iOS Safari, sending the user to a scam page (phishing, "you've won!", or instant redirect to the App Store), no engagement necessary.
Some recent browser zero days/malicious ads situations, not necessarily "an ad loaded in my browser -> pwned", but reasonably applicable:
I think you don’t see ads that are served in there. Those are outright scams like fake investments and not just crypto but outright “buy big company X shares to get rich, photo of celebrity” with celebrities not even knowing they are used for those scam ads - meta doesn’t do shit about it.
Zero click malware would be most likely too sophisticated.
You click the ad contact people who will tell you where to wire money that’s the level we are talking about here.
I don’t use Android, but I understand uBlock Origin works with Firefox on it, which is kind of the gold standard on desktop, given the other browsers now restrict extensions in ways that make ad blockers less effective.
Yes, this works very well. The element zapper interface is a little challenging or I intuitive, but just using a default block list is so much better than using the internet without any ad blocking.
You can actively poison your ad profile by using AdNauseum, which clicks on all the ads and then throws away the response. The actual ads are still hidden using UBO under the hood.
You can also use AdGuard+Tailscale to get DNS blocking of all ads on all devices. Tailscale will let you block in app ads, even on your phone even when on the cell network.
Honestly, not just ad networks. It’s also publishers. We tried 2 major non-google ad networks. The amount of scams and borderline scams were crazy. And apparently asking for some quality control is complicated. Even with google and ad-exchange, we had to raise the minimum costs by quite a bit to keep most of the scams out. This lowers revenue so most publishers have the same interest in fighting those scams as the networks.
The only reason to fight against the scams is because one cares a little about ones viewers (well, and I guess maybe a bit of brand safety). Which seems to not be the case for the vast majority.
> the company prioritized enforcement in regions where the penalties would be steepest, the reporting found. The cost of lost revenue from clamping down on the scams was weighed against the cost of fines from regulators.
The companies don't necessarily want scams, and they might even be willing to forgo the scam revenue itself. But if the consequence of allowing the scam is low, and the consequence of doing something about it would be a loss of non-scam revenue (e.g. by disallowing legit customers or verification requirements making customers go to an "easier" competitor), they won't do anything about it.
It's time to treat them as accomplices. As the report shows - if they had to pay the damage they're helping to cause, priorities would shift and they would find a way to make the problem go away. As is, they have no reason to even try.
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 get 50% AI generated tai chi promising strength gain, weight loss and enlightenment, the other 50% israel sponsored ads assuring me people in gaza are not starving at all and completely healthy
None of those scams were intermixed with popular legitimate content. If Facebook had a tab at the top called "Scams and Other Nonsense" and you clicked on that and it had a bunch of scammy content, that would be an equivalent to late night infomercials. But Meta doesn't do that. It mixes the scams in with all of its popular and non-scam content so you cannot easily tell it's scammy. Worse, it targets people vulnerable to those scams by tapping directly into their interests and sentiments in a way TV never could.
You are making a silly argument here. There's no equivalence at all.
I pay for YouTube so all I get is paid creator promotions for VPNs and Squarespace unless it's someone being sent a free thing in exchange for a review
Normalize paying for things instead of selling your attention to the highest bidder.
I choose to not watch YouTube. I was born in the 80s, am a software engineer, and I’ve watched maybe 10 total hours of YouTube, all 100% of those hours were car-repair related.
Normalize paying for things instead of selling your attention to the highest bidder.
But you just admitted that you pay for YouTube and it shows you creator promotions. You are literally paying to see ads, then telling people not to do the same.
Unless there's some subtlety I'm missing here. I haven't been on YouTube in at least a decade. I see no difference between a blogger pushing a VPN and Google showing an ad for a VPN.
The big draw for cable TV was that you could watch TV without ads. Then ads started appearing on cable and people said it's OK, because the content is higher quality and not available elsewhere. Then that changed, and now there is no difference between broadcast, cable/satellite, and streaming services. Except that you don't have to pay for broadcast. (Yet. It's coming.)
> Unless there's some subtlety I'm missing here. I haven't been on YouTube in at least a decade.
Youtube Premium is fighting back against the sponsor segments with this "commonly skipped segment" feature. You hit a fast forward button and it automatically skips ahead to the place most people jumped to.
A year or two ago somebody asked Adam Ragusea about whether this type of skipping causes problems for creators - and what he said was basically that if viewers see the brand name / call to action at the end of the ad, that's mostly what matters to sponsors.
No idea if that's been borne out in practice, though.
If you don't like youtubers with sponsors, don't watch those videos. Not all do.
Personally I pay for youtube and I don't mind the sponsor sections. They're easy to fast forward through and income goes directly to the creator. Youtube doesn't take a cut. These are the only kinds of ads that work on me - in the rare case that the product is something I'm interested in, I go out of my way to make sure I use the creator's link.
The long story short is that there are creators I like and I want them to devote all their time to making more content. I'm glad some of them get sponsors. For many I just straight up give them money on Patreon.
I've gotten rid of 90% of the ads by paying for YouTube, the rest of the ads I skip by jumping forward in the video which is annoying but only a little OR by being legitimately interested in what the person has to say if they're reviewing a product which has been in some way paid for. I'm also just fine with someone promoting their own merch or patreon which I am sometimes actually interested in.
The subtlety I don't get why you're missing is I now have very much reduced ad exposure and the rest I do have is entirely controllable.
Mostly, I'm getting things like German ads for my local German supermarket (that I would've gone to anyway without the ad) dubbed badly into English with an AI that can't tell how to pronounce the "." in a price, plus a Berlin-specific "pay less rent" company that I couldn't use even if I wanted to because I don't rent.
But when I get 30 seconds of ads a minute into a video that had 30 seconds of ads before I could start watching… I don't care what the rest of the video was going to be about, I don't want to waste my life with a 30:60:30:… pattern of adverts and "content" whose sole real purpose is now to keep me engaged with the adverts. (This is also half of why I don't bother going to Facebook, every third post is an ad, although those ads can't even tell if I'm a boy or a girl, which language I speak, nor what my nationality is, and the first-party suggested groups are just as bad but grosser as they recently suggested I join groups for granny dating, zit popping, and Elon Musk).
> I never understand why well-paid HN commentators refuse to pay for their entertainment.
People don't want to pay (help) people they don't like. YouTube ads do not feel fair, they feel manipulative and unethical. It's expected that most people wouldn't want to willingly engage with that kind of asshattery.
Contrast that with platforms like twitch. I'd say the average twitch viewer (that interacts with streams/chats) has a slightly negative view of Twitch. But many will still willingly donate dozens of subs to streamers they like. This removes ads for other people, not themselves.
People think YouTube is greedy and untrustworthy. Why would you willingly feed that machine?
I don't pay because it feels like paying protection money to the mafia. "Here's an annoyance/danger we created for you. If you pay us, we'll stop doing it."
on the other hand, it's how their business model is able to work? People get wayyyy more views on YouTube than they do on Patreon or federated platforms or Nebula or Floatplane or or or or or or or
I think it really depends on how much you use it. For example, there is no way that I would pay for Facebook. It annoys me greatly that I’m forced to use it a few times per year, and I have to sell all of my data for it, but unfortunately I don’t pay just to avoid data gathering about me, because it happens anyway, no matter what I do.
But I pay happily for YouTube, because I use it daily, and my home country’s propaganda was annoying enough to make it worth.
The recent YouTube updates made me disabled my adblocker for a bit. Almost every ad I got was a scam. I reported one to YouTube, a deepfake investment scam. They actually got back to me and said they had removed the ad.
YouTube Premium Lite used to exist years ago, then they discontinued it in 2024 (I know because I used to be a very happy subscriber), now they brought it back but only in a few selected markets[0].
Google products' bullshit as usual, I never needed/wanted YouTube Music and the other bloat they wanted to force me to pay for, I was happily paying to not have ads...
Changed to what? Should dang become legally responsible for any of the bad legal advice I've been giving people on this forum? Should Murdoch go to prison for the lies in the paid advertising that Fox anchors and opinion wonks are doing every day?
Let me take things back a step - it's nearly impossible to hold people who are lying accountable. Surely the platform bears less responsibility than the liars on it?
I don't know but I think there is a room for compromise. If you post illegal things online and the site cannot identify you so that you can be held accountable then the site should be held accountable. As it stands people are harmed and nobody is liable so we end up in this situation.
There's a simple way to do that. Legislate a requirement for ID, the users will provide it to the platform, the platform will provide it to law enforcement when requested.
Kind of like how South Korea (where you need a national ID to access digital services) is doing, or the UK is trying to do with their ID push.
(And then who wants this could go have a fight with the people who don't want this.)
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 the law. People who are too young to know what it was like before that protection set the internet free to create and collaborate.
I despise social media. But demonizing 230 just shows a basic lack of knowledge of history, economics, and the reasons it was created.
Well, give us the argument, then, instead of the mere allegation that history is frowning at us. Why is it not possible to change the law to permit platforms to not be liable for speech of their users, particularly when users are engaging in a platform in the capacity of communicating and exchanging information, (i.e., 230 as it is today) but not permit advertisers from displaying ads which contain blatant fraud, for which the advertising platform is profiting off that fraud?
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...
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.
For what it's worth, I see no crypto videos. YouTube recommends stuff I find enjoyable (lots of sketch comedy, TTRPG videos, interesting documentary style stuff, BTS on video game development, etc). I really have to wonder if your tastes align with crypto currency scams.
That being said, I am paying for Premium, so I wonder if you are, and if you are blocking ads.
We are talking about ads and promoted videos. Nothing to do with what it is recommending unless I am entirely conflating the root of this subject. If that is true, then of course you would never have seen these as a premium user.
Scam videos are the chum box ads of the video world. Usually the lowest cost ads and so if you block tracking or are viewing a video in a private session you will have the highest chance of hitting these ads.
And? YouTube web absolutely has ads and if they have not built a model on your user you will absolutely get the chum ads like scams. I am not sure what you’re trying to tell us.
Gotcha. So you are ignorant of why people are commenting.
The OP was talking about seeing 50% scam crypto ads. Our responses were to provide a comparison. Not to say that it doesn't happen, but that 50% scam crypto ads are not the norm for everyone. It's helpful to have that comparison when providing anecdotal information.
No one is saying those ads don't happen, only that it's probably not normal.
Next time, instead of being unnecessarily antagonistic, admit to being ignorant and ask.
Please don’t start drama where nothing exists. You were confused and I pointed out that 1) I believe we are talking about promoted, which is paid, videos not the recommendation engine. These of course are not purely ads but are paid for. And 2) that these chum style ads and promoted videos have a much higher prevalence with folks that block tracker where user profiles have not been built. It’s the chum ads of the video world.
I am simply asking what is the point of the response to my comment. Ads of all degree exist but these scams do exist in a pretty large % of the ads shown but perhaps much lower dollar value since they get shown to profiles without a tangible viewer model.
Next time, instead of using inflammatory language please just slow down and reread or have a more thoughtful discussion. Thanks.
Ad and "promoted" videos are different in this context. And the OP was mentioning promoted videos, not ads.
> At least 50% of the YouTube promoted videos
I've never seen a "promoted video" (whatever that is specfically) that deals with crypto. Note: Premium users can still see promoted videos. I imagine these are more targetted to people who would want to watch these sorts of videos.
> Nothing to do with what it is recommending unless I am entirely conflating the root of this subject.
I was referring to recommended not in a strictly technical sense, but in a way any normal person would use the term. e.g. Recommended videos meaning: All the videos youtube shows me that it thinks I might want to watch. Whether these are officially "Recommended" or "Subscribed" or "Promoted" or whatever, I don't know.
What I do know is that I don't see any crypto scam videos or ads.
> If that is true, then of course you would never have seen these as a premium user.
Apparently, that's not the case.
tl;dr: We are talking about videos like normal people. You are wrong.
No... these are "paid promoted" videos that show up in your feed[0]. They are different from ads that roll when a video is playing. Example screenshot I found on reddit [1].
- video from screenshot[2]
- coe from video[3]
I'm guessing I get served these because I typically interact with them because I'm curious to read the code they link to see how obvious the scam is. It's also fun to reverse face search the actors and find them on fiverr.
As I originally stated I am happy to be corrected but I don’t think you understand it either. Promoted videos are ads. Premium removes in-stream ads, not in-feed ones. They’re paid placements, not recommendations.
And again as a premium user you won’t see chum style feed or promoted videos because premium removed the feed style and promoted will be more tailored to your preferences.
Which coming full circle leads us back to my original statement. If they don’t have a good user profile for you, you will get lower cost ads (promoted videos) which generally are going to be the chum box of ads, crypto, magic formula powders, get rich quick.
Yeah, it's wild how poorly the hackernewses understand this. If the ad platform has few signals for targeting, but it does have the available signals of you're using a weird VPN or tor, and a weird user agent on an uncommon platform, then it's just going to assume you're a crypto loser like the other people sharing those traits.
I've gave up reporting scams on FB, they don't care. It always an automated response "we've reviewed the content and it doesn't break our community guidelines" or similar.
These are for obvious scams, account in different country to items they are trying to purchase/sell, haven't been used in a long time and suddenly active. When selling vehicles the account tries to make you go to malicious websites to pay for vehicle checks falsely insisting the seller is legally required to do so.
When 10% of their revenue is from scams, without government policy there's no incentive for FB to fix. Scams feels like a feature they silently tolerate while doing the bare minimum by providing a button and automated responses to look like they are trying to prevent it.
This is why, despite being a huge fan of their engineering, I'm leery of Facebook and Google and any advertising-based tech company in the long run. The incentives to block fraudulent, malicious and even simply ineffective ads are just not there.
Google stopped that practice then... or it might not have! We'll never know since, apparently unlike silly little Meta, it has been much more careful about not having any kind of incriminating internal documents or correspondence being preserved for discovery.
I've had a hint that the ad industry was rotten for a decade+ when in a prior life I saw our regional head of marketing casually throw stats on the whiteboard showing something insane like 30 - 50% of ad clicks on all major platforms being fraudulent. She was cynical but also jaded to the fact that, despite being widely known and accepted in the industry, it wasn't clear if things would ever improve. Shocked, I followed the ad industry and such reports for a while, anticipating a crash. Glad I didn't bet on it, because the crash never came.
Unfortunately, there is so much money in this that it seems nothing will happen.
I deal with domain impersonation and fraudulent ad takedowns nearly every day. A year ago, Meta would remove fake ads falsely using my company’s branding within a day or two. Now these same ads run for over a month with no action taken. This isn’t just an inconvenience these scams cause real harm. The money fraudsters extract fuels their expansion into larger operations. Meta has become completely negligent in its enforcement responsibilities and shows no empathy for the victims it enables. Meta is the single largest enabler of this fraud ecosystem the operations fund human trafficking, force, labor, and systematic financial fraud, targeting vulnerable populations, particularly elderly victims, who lose their life savings at a point in time where they have no time to earn it back. Every dollars these criminals make through Meta platform goes to some of the most depraved actors on the planet.
"...scammers obtain sexual images of a user, often a teenager, under false pretenses and then blackmail them – ... was becoming commonplace on Meta’s platforms"
There you go U.K. OFCOM. Here's child endangerment propagated knowingly by Facebook. Don't worry, I know you won't do anything to Facebook because you "protecting" kids is pretext.
Listen throw7, Meta paid almost £30 million in tax in 2023, an effective tax rate of 12%. I'm unsure why numbers for 2024 aren't available but you'll need to speak to legal about that.
If you want to throw7 that all away over some media speculation be my guest. I'll tell the NHS to fund themselves for 11 minutes next year to make up the shortfall.
Certainly puts the £3m lawsuit settlement with Martin Lewis (UK consumer financial advice guru who sued because he's the go-to fake endorsement of any scam product targeting Britons using Facebook ads) into perspective.
No wonder scammers are still spamming his likeness all over Facebook paid ads even though it's technically trivial for them to algorithmically flag it
The news here per https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/bombshell-report... is that Meta set an internal policy that scammers above 0.15% of Meta’s revenue must be protected from any flagging. It’s not a technical challenge. It’s something they desire to maintain and have codified.
> Despite those efforts, this spring, Meta’s safety team “estimated that the company’s platforms were involved in a third of all successful scams in the US,”
This just came out yesterday but what the hell man! its like only keeping your top cocaine sellers in hope less of your people on the streets, less possibility to get caught. Everyone else out.
How the heck are they not being raided and at least temporarily shut down at this exact moment? No wonder Trump is best friend of Mark as of recently... it really does scream "guilty".
Once I got an Instagram ad for buying ketamine that just linked to a telegram channel. They didn't even bother being coy or using mispelling or slang. A simple keyword search to flag for more review would have caught it. I can't even wrap my head around what internal controls exist when something like that makes it out to users.
The bad actor serves a benign ad to the ad review system, and only serves the scam to real users. It's called "cloaking" - an interesting (but a bit depressing) topic to explore.
So the ad review system is just requesting the ad from the advertiser, and not ever bothering to disguise itself? Didn't we have this shit figured out for brick-and-mortar restaurant reviews decades ago?
As far as I understood, the problem happens when the ad has a link to a website. I can't imagine that happening with static images or videos that don't link a website (that could be solved quite trivially...)
Oh definitely. I have zero expectation of high level of manual reviews. You can run limited runs of adds for next to a couple dollars. The math could never work out. I understand a lot with make it through the system, this was just so blatant. It should be so easy to catch with an automated system. It was nothing but red flags. The automated systems could reject outright or maybe escalate to manual review if it met enough criteria (account reputation, spend floor, etc)
Meta wants to have big scammers. It's hugely profitable. That's why they codified internal policy that if the scam generates at least 0.15% of Meta's revenue, they must be protected and never moderated.
There was a big "bombshell" report on this yesterday (it didn't hit HN frontpage though).
Meta knowingly gets a lot of its funding from scams. They love it! They don't care about technical solutions for it: they've banned any solutions from being implemented because it would impact revenue.
Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg on Curing All Disease
We sat down with Dr. Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, co-founders of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to discuss their ambitious plan to cure, prevent, and manage all disease by the end of the century.
Zuck has donated something like 2% of his net worth. Not really “ambitious”. For a normal American that’s like donating to “cars for kids” every 8 years when you upgrade your Mercedes and claiming you’re a philanthropist
That probably depends on your definition of a scam, but it seems fairly low. Many products and services advertised online just skirts the border of being scams or fraud.
Agreed. At best most of the stuff I ended up buying from an Instagram ad turned out to be oversold or overpromised and underdelivered. While not a scam outright, it's sort of training me to avoid buying anything from ads...
There is an entire network of "get rick quick just by my pdf" intagramers, who peddle a pdf teaching you how to find a chinese product, make a website, and then drop ship that chinese product for 3x the cost to unsuspecting buyers.
Probably 75% of products you see on instagram ads, you can go find on temu for their actual cost, usually at 80% discount.
One of my theories is that there isn't actually enough honest companies buying ad space to satisfy the shareholders in companies like Alphabet or Meta. If they actually care to also filter out the ads for junk products and services, there would probably be a minor collapse in the industry.
Honest companies are priced out by scammy companies, and as long as these companies share the profits they are totally fine profiting off scams. They make more money off the scams, simply put.
It got so bad that even non-tech savvy people around me learnt to do a lot of research about any product shown on Instagram ads.
To me any product advertised on Instagram, or through YouTubers sponsorships, have become synonymous with overpromised bullshit if not outright scams. Every single time I see a sponsorship deal on a YouTube video I do some research just to validate it, and the vast majority of it are outright shitty products.
It's been working great as a signal of what products not to buy.
> That probably depends on your definition of a scam, but it seems fairly low.
That probably depends on your definition of a scam but I'd argue we need to resynchronize that definition. They are scams, because the people behind them know what they're saying is plainly false, and they exploit the explosion of digital networks (like ads) to spread those lies. In the 20th century, the channels for scams were far narrower and easier to pinpoint.
I wonder how much of Meta the corporation is a scam waiting to crumble. Hundreds of billions of dollars can make people do questionable things.
-their revenue is 99% ads with more than 80% coming from FB and IG
-they can only sell ads if they have a large and active user base
-DAP (daily active people) is reported publicly but calculated internally
-ad spending, views, and engagement are calculated by Meta's own platform
Anecdote (why I think it is a scam)-
I had a FB account, I needed it for a previous job but didn't want it. I set up a random email address at a host I had never used, had a made-up FB name, and used a password generator for both the email address and FB accounts. My FB account had almost no activity besides viewing company posts. FB was only used from a single desktop computer. Passwords were stored in my (local only desktop) password manager.
After a couple years, FB emailed me and claimed my account was hacked. The "hacker" changed my profile picture (was a blank avatar icon) to an AI photo of a random guy. Facebook says it is hacked but they keep it visible, my two friends are still friends with the old account (they know it was hacked). FYI - I didn't care enough to send them a copy of my ID, nor did my ID match my user name, so I couldn't reclaim my account.
How would a hacker combine a random username, with a random email (has not been pwnd) only used for FB, guess a ~20 character random password, etc? And why, to steal an account with no followers and to do nothing with the account? That is a lot of work and criminal charges for nothing.
I am fine with FB saying the account was hacked and closing it. It has been years and the account is still live. Is it "active" and counted towards their users? They have a HUGE financial incentive to keep and count all accounts, and they have no oversite to verify accounts since it is all calculated internally with opaque algorithms.
> I wonder how much of Meta the corporation is a scam waiting to crumble.
I imagine almost none of it. Social networks solve connectivity problems that people want solved. Talk to some "casuals" who aren't in tech about how they find out about new restaurants, social trends, arts and crafts, places to go visit, etc. and the answer is Instagram or TikTok. And FB does the same but for older generations.
Ads are also a fundamental revenue pillar in this world. You can layer in relevance ads for a product to anyone, at any time, for any topic. If something exists and people pay attention to it, there's a way to make money advertising around it.
There's ... certainly deeper questions to be had about if this stuff is actually good for us, but in the mean time, it's very real and worth a lot of money.
I tried to get Kickstarter to take down an obvious scam a while back. Best I could do was post on Reddit to warn folks though.
Checked on it recently, so many comments of folks asking for shipping details / anything. Hundreds of thousands of dollars just scammed from folks. And they're still raising / stringing folks along.
As a former Meta employee (also dealt with Shopping and Ads), I am quite shocked at the percentage of "commerce" scams in my Instagram feed now. Easily 9 out of 10 promoted "buy" posts use AI videos of non-existent products leading to scammy sites. Any current employees willing to chime in?
I actually got suckered by the 3d printer scam. My bank helped while PayPal figured it out (2 months). Facebook is still showing the fake Bambu labs ads. There’s no FBI to enforce online fraud so why would they care?
I got scammed on Instagram when I was in the hospital getting chemotherapy.
It was christmas time, and I got an ad for a cool looking steam punk keyboard. I ordered it for my kid who had recently got into PC gaming. It was only $60, and when it didn't come I checked my bank and credit card and didn't see any charges, so I assumed that I didn't actually finish the order. Until almost a year later when I realized I paid with paypal, and they used funds I had sitting in there for some reason. By then it was too late to challenge.
In my country there are obvious clones of known portals with clickbaity titles, visually hard to distinguish from real. Always with some random url. Sometimes just fake news and propaganda, sometimes selling fake things. Under paid sponsorship. Reported them multiple times. Always the response is as follows: we looked at it and found nothing wrong. All the disputes are also killed. So its done on purpose
A new car built by my company leaves somewhere travelling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
I don't think the analogy applies the same way. Meta simply choose to be evil not because it costs less overall but because they're unable to provide/filter actually useful ads to consumers. The rear diff is instead a filthy window but consumers don't sue for better quality because everything else works good enough and those that do crash could have cleaned the windows themselves.
Ohh, so naïve. They choose inaction because it's profitable, that's it. They can claim they were unaware and they are out either scot-free or with a slap on their gigantic wrist.
Yes. You can choose to drive a broken car, not drive it, or fix with aftermarket parts and then drive it. The company that made it cannot deliver solution.
I think there needs to be some moderation here because Meta clearly does offer useful ads to consumers, otherwise it wouldn’t have so much insane revenue from ads. If people don’t find the ads useful then they won’t click on them or give the company money.
I think the average user on HN (who blocks ads constantly, uses things like AdNauseam, pihole, etc.) is not going to be your typical purchaser. If you look at your typical American, they buy a lot of shit through those ads and a lot of people actually like the ads.
My only complaint with the ads has been the targeting has always been crap. If you allow personalization, they do get more relevant. But, that complaint of mine is my own personal one. I’m like a typical HN user, ads don’t typically read me well due to my blocking on all kinds of platforms.
Google should have to make this disclosure as well. I'd guess >50% of their AdX revenue is from click-trick, fake button, scam ads. Across the board I'd expect Google's ad revenue to be at least 10% from scams, if not more.
Source: a decade of running a website monetized with adx and having to hire people to manually monitor and block scam display ads multiple times a day.
NextDNS or a similar solution is absolutely essential these days. You can't always configure every device your loved ones use. And Chrome on mobile will always be a problem. NextDNS solves this for me to a large extent.
As my children become old enough to have more unfettered internet access, I plan to tell them the lessons of my experience: that all online ads are for products that range from disappointing to fraudulent, so do your best to completely ignore them. I would hope that every parent does the same and we end up with a generation that dries up the revenue for this sick racket.
I suppose the next move by advertisers will be corrupting all the other metrics of quality that I rely on. At that point, paywalled services like Consumer Reports (which has its own massive limitations) may be the only relatively authentic signals of quality left in the digital world.
A convergence to that equilibrium can be predicted based on it having already happened in the financial advice industry. The dictum that "if it's free, you're the product" is just as true of old-school in-person finance as it is of the digital world, except in finance the exploitative free system has been carefully carved out by decades of industry-honed regulation.
I think even more general lessons are appropriate: "Anyone approaching you trying to sell you something, is selling garbage." which includes ads but also other forms of unsolicited commercial communication. Or "Anyone approaching you, when you can't figure out what it is they want, is likely trying to sell you garbage." You need to have your shields way up these days.
I have never forgotten this since the day I naively sat through a meandering two hour pitch from hell for James Hardie siding.
Honestly, in every area of my life where I have to rely on others, someone has tried to grift me at least once. And that's only the cases where I have definitive evidence.
Snakeoil 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.
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.
I do weightlifting so taking 1.5-2 grams * bodyweight of protein makes sense. I am not American but a lot of it just looks like sodium, carbs, sugar and fat rather than lean meat.
i think they're talking about Hims-type businesses and the type of stuff that makes low/mid-level right-wing grifters their money: colloidal silver, methylene blue, anything else Alex Jones is hawking. maybe you could group Tucker Carlson's Nicotine Pouches For Christian Nationalists in there too, idk.
Guys they are putting chemicals in the water that make frogs gay!!!!
Anyway you should buy my bottle of research chemicals that will make your balls bigger. Evidence? What are you, the Illuminati?
Also check out this hat purported to protect your head from electromagnetic radiation even though it is shaped exactly like a lens pointed directly at your brain.
Don't forget to harass random telecom repairman about how dangerous 5G is! We will be talking all about it on our app you can buy so you can watch us anywhere!
I just... I just don't understand. There are people who seem to have near infinite credulity, at least for the "right" people.
At least something like "Miracle Mineral Solution" had a partially fake "study" where they actually gave people a harmful thing to drink just to say they did.
That guy from FoldingIdeas had a comment that resonates with me: There are people who trust something implicitly entirely because an actual authority told them not to trust it. "They believe the fake facebook story because facebook told them it was fake". But even those people are still demonstrably unable to connect past actions to current results to a point that I'm not sure how they trust that breathing is required for being alive.
Like there's so much about reality that is so simple and clear and demonstrable, and they just don't seem to be at all capable of squaring even those simple facts... No, crystals can't do shit. No "vibrations" just aren't a thing. These people live in a different reality than I do, but I don't understand how they can look around them and match that to the reality they have been sold. Those pills haven't made you any fucking smarter! Haven't you noticed?!
Like even Joe Rogan told Matt Walsh "Hey, you are wrong, there's really only a few thousand sex change operations a year" instead of the millions Walsh claimed and he just said "I don't believe that" and I'm like what the hell buddy do some basic math how many people do you know that got a sex change operation last year?
I wrote a blog about turning advertising against advertisers, and as I see more and more stuff like this, I wonder how the ad-based Internet survives this era of unfettered and unpunished scamming.
To me this basically says roughly 10% of all internet advertising revenue is from scams. I’d bet Google has a much higher number than 10%, since they do more volume.
I've been seeing legitimate pornography on Facebook while scrolling through reels. I thought it was "just my algorithm", but co-workers brought it up during lunch. Quite a few of them are seeing the exact same ads.
I've reported them a few times, but surprisingly (or maybe not), Facebook responds back with "we didn't find anything that goes against our community standards".
These ads usually link to a website where you can download an application (a chat app, or some AI generation). Of course, they're not in the play store. It's frustrating when I think of the times I was flat out rejected for my legitimate ads related to programming, or a job board, or real estate, but they approve PORNOGRAPHY. What in the world do those posters of pornography know that I don't? How could they get that approved? There has to be some cleverness going on.
> What in the world do those posters of pornography know that I don't?
The power of persistence. I'm not being glib: these people probably get most of their ads/accounts blocked or banned, and have a dismal success rate baked into their business model, but they keep submitting until one goes through.
Misrepresentation is another key ingredient, but I hope you're not willing to buy a network of bot or havked accounts just so you can get an ad approved.
Yea, I have got ads for hardcore porn starting a month or two ago on Facebook. I only use marketplace, have no friends on the platform and have only used it to buy and sell as marketplace is unfortunately the only platform which is used for private transactions where I live.
If my company inadvertently made money from scams, I would try to make the victims whole or donate that money. It's so scummy that they sit around waiting to be fined. It's just plain stupid management to document this in emails and not also document a good faith attempt to make it right. I always assume my emails could be made public after my entire mailbox was subpoenaed in a lawsuit my employer was involved in and I was deposed to answer questions about email threads and source code comments from years ago. (I didn't do anything wrong personally, but my employer most likely did.) If I'm going to discuss something that could make me or the company look bad, I'm sure as hell going to write it in a way that's defensible when it gets out.
It's very clear that social media is dead. My mom sometimes tells me to go look at a picture on Facebook. I'm astonished that there is literally nothing on there to see but ads.
I and anyone I know only post stories on Instagram at best. My feed is JAM packed with ads and cringe people still trying to be influencers.
Threads is a rounding error.
X is blah
Meta is desperate to move to AI because they know this. They see the data and are not dumb. They want to squeeze every last dime out while they still can.
Meta doesn't know anything, the last successful "product" that they built (as opposed to buying) was splitting off Messenger into a separate app.
Since then, they invested heavily in providing free internet that failed (Free Basics), wasted a bunch of money on some sort of a global cryptocurrency that never even launched (Libra/Diem), tried to invent a whole new market with VR and it went nowhere, and now they're going all in on "AI" but the only thing they have to show for it are some sort of celebrity-impersonating Instagram bot accounts and some glasses whose selling point is that they're branded as Ray-Bans.
FB is an extractive institution. The business model is to get people addicted and profit from it. It’s little different in my eyes from drug dealing. Well, I guess there’s a lot more harm done by FB
Meta is cooked. It's not just scam portion - their entire strategy is in trouble
FB - nobody I know actively uses it anymore.
Insta - is being overrun with AI slop and given meta's stated goal of adding more AI interactions on their platforms I doubt they'll even try to get a grip on it let alone succeed
Whatsapp & FB messenger - some use but has zero moat over other messengers. It's a completely fungible service in a space that has fractured across many providers.
VR/meta/AI/etc - they keep trying. Maybe one day
...that leaves their adtech which only works due to their invasive tracking...that is directly dependent on their other properties succeeding: Their targeting edge comes directly from front row seats tracking users behaviour on their platforms. No users, no insights.
> it’s the de facto standard messaging app outside the US.
Agreed and in combination with FB messenger they've got most of the market...but what of it?
They're literally competing against a donation supported app. Pause for a second and think about what that says about how little direct money there is in the space.
Plus it's E2E encrypted & has significant user privacy expectations so significant limitations on how you can leverage it for their adtech biz
I'm not saying whatsapp is dead or a failure as a messenger. It's a great addition to round out an ecosystem but don't think it's any good as the primary load bearing pillar of a 1.5 trillion company in the same way search is for google
I hear this on almost every bad post about Meta. No they are not cooked. They still generate tons of profit and their user base is one of the biggest in the world. They're not going anywhere any time soon.
Just because they generate tons of profit doesn’t mean they are not vulnerable. Tiktok has shown that their position is not as solid like some here tend to believe.
Blackberry made their best profits in 2008, a year after the iPhone was released, with a stock price of around $140 in May of 2008, their all time high. By December of 2008, their stock price was $30, by 2012 -- $7. That FB are making a ton of profit right now is nothing but inertia.
Is anyone actually buying and using their glasses? I've tried to find actual sales figures but they keep it very opaque. I am so curious if despite how hard they are pushing them they will just be another flash-in-the-pan. I just can't see wide-market adoptability, maybe some niche users, but maybe I am just a hater/cynic.
my aunt/uncle etc., who must certainly still use FB, just discovered Reels. I know this because they now send me 10 a day. and last year was the first time i heard them talking about finding christmas gifts advertised on FB, so i don’t think they are cooked yet.
Facebook appeared cooked after the parents of the original user base started using it (boomers). But it seems like that’s profitable because they are so dumb
It's also full of people selling counterfeit money as well. I am shocked how they allow it, there's a guy with a profile that shows him printing and testing his "bills" along with a link to buy them. Not trying to hide it, no code words, nothing.
The same on Tiktok. I have reported it multiple times but every time they say "no violation".
That's not the right comparison. The question should rather be, would they care if 10% of their tax revenue came from heroin sales?
And the answer would depend on where the externalities from all that heroin sale happened (e.g. if it was abroad), whether the government would be expected to carry the cost of them (e.g. by having a public healthcare system), and probably also on how actually democratic they are.
Scams seem like the norm in 2020s. Crypto, Quantum Computing startups, "AI" (LLMs), Amazon delivering fakes, electric vehicles (what happened to all electric by 2030?). Yesterday I saw that the Playstation Store started doing "personalised discounts" where they will now discount the same game at different rates for different people within the same country without explicitly telling people.
Someone recently even tried to attempt scamming me when buying a burger by telling me if I want certain toppings without telling me it will cost more. Apparently now have to play mind games when buying a burger.
Hungarian ruling party is or was at some point the largest advertiser on Google in EU so yes, the refined recommendation machine has become the perfect polarization machine especially against demographics which tend to believe what they read and watch.
§230 protects Meta from liability for user-generated content. Ads are not user-generated content. So repealing it would do absolutely nothing in this case.
Repealing section 230 scares the users here but a lot of these problems stem from a lack of liability.
They say the people placing ads should be liable. This sounds reasonable but in practice they're anon overseas and can't be held accountable but Meta will still take their money!
Naah, I'd rather not go back to the days of noted penny-stock scammer Jordan Belfort suing every online forum to hide evidence of his crimes as "defamation", thank you very much.
Furthermore, the precedent that CDA 230 was intended to overturn would not help much. Fraud isn't defamation, and there's all sorts of lying you can do in advertising that doesn't rise to the level of fraud in the eyes of the law. So the courts might just decline to extend the Belfort precedent to the advertising business altogether.
What you want is a law that explicitly says "CDA 230 does not apply to fraudulent advertising", explicitly defining advertising as any speech that the speaker is paying to publish on the platform. This neatly exempts all the same speech that CDA 230 was intended to protect while still allowing you to sue the shit out of Facebook[0] for taking money from scammers.
tl;dr Free Speech should only apply to free speech. Money speech is not Free Speech.
[0] It is always ethical to deadname corporations.
> “We aggressively fight fraud and scams because people on our platforms don’t want this content, legitimate advertisers don’t want it, and we don’t want it either.”
I wonder if those who market illegal Israeli settlements counts as "legitimate advertisers": https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/3/31/meta-profits-as... I have a hunch that "legitimacy" is directly proportional to the dollar amount of the ad bid...
Their entire business model is corrupt and a significant driver of the degraded state of our society, civility, and politics.
What is the core of their business? Maximizing and totalizing surveillance, in service whoever has money in hand, including those interested not (just) in selling you shit, but steering your behavior, mood, and beliefs.
There's a reason for the constant drumbeat of stories about whistleblowing, lawsuits, suppressed research, literal criminality, and contempt for the wellbeing of their "users."
It's not "polite" to talk about this on HN, but if you work there or do business with them, you better be at peace with your moral complicity.
There's also a reason they pay so well. It's to make people hold their noses.
Why aren't we (society) fining Meta et cetera for collaborating in scams again? Or at least having the fines actually be equal to the money they're earning so the fines aren't just cost of business?
Alongside a password manager and keeping things up to date, using an ad blocker is truly a foundational security practice these days. The big advertising players simply have all of the wrong incentives to control this problem. They could massively reduce the volume of scams advertised on their networks, but it’d be worse for them on two fronts: they’d have to pay for more moderation, and they’d lose billions in revenue in the process. Shoulder surfing while a non-savvy user browses Facebook or YouTube without an ad blocker and engages with obviously fraudulent ads is painful.
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 up a secret passphrase in case they need to tell me appart from a clone.
My guess is the already-existing trend towards walled gardens will simply continue. When a public space is dangerous, people retreat into "safe" enclosed spaces.
- "Never download anything unless it's from the Apple App Store"
- "Never buy anything unless you're on amazon.com"
- "Dont use the internet outside of ChatGPT"
Yes, but observe how that for all three of the things that immediately came to your mind, you have respectively 1. a thing that still has a lot of scams in it (though it may be the best of the three) [1] 2. A thing so full of scams and fake products that using it is already a minefield (one my mother-in-law is already incapable of navigating successfully, based on the number of shirts my family has gotten with lazy-AI-generated art [2]) and 3. a thing well known for generating false statements and incorrect conclusions.
I'm actually somewhat less critical of Apple/Google/Facebook/etc. than probably most readers would be, on the grounds that it simply isn't possible to build a "walled garden" at the scale of the entire internet. It is not possible for Big Tech to exclude scammers. The scammers collectively are firing more brain power at the problem than even Big Tech can afford to, and the game theory analysis is not entirely unlike my efforts to keep my cat off my kitchen counter... it doesn't matter how diligent I am, the 5% of the time the cat gets up there and finds a tasty morsel of shredded cheese or licks some dribble of something tasty barely large enough for me to notice but constitutes a nice snack with a taste explosion for the much-smaller cat means I'm never going to win this fight. The cat has all day. I'm doing dozens of other things.
There's no way to build a safe space that retains the current size and structure of the current internet. The scammers will always be able to overpower what the walled garden can bring to bear because they're so many of them and they have at least an order of magnitude more resources... and I'm being very conservative, I think I could safely say 2 and I wouldn't be really all that surprised if the omniscient narrator could tell us it's already over 3.
[1]: https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/25/new-study-shows-massive-spike...
[2]: To forstall any AI debate, let me underline the word "lazy" in the footnote here. Most recently we received a shirt with a very large cobra on it, and the cobra has at least three pupils in each eye (depending on how you count) and some very eye-watering geometry for the sclera between it. Quite unpleasant to look at. What we're getting down the pipeline now is from some now very out-of-date models.
I don’t accept the excuse it’s too hard. If they have to spend $10 billion per year to maintain an acceptable level trust on their platforms then so be it. It’s the cost of doing business. If I went into a mall and opened up a fake Wells Fargo bank branch it would be shut down pretty instantly by human intervention. These are the conditions most businesses run under. Why should these platforms given such leeway just because ‘it’s hard’? Size and scale shouldn’t be an excuse. If its not viable to prevent fraud then they don’t have a viable business.
We have laws on truth in advertising, and we should start holding advertising channels liable if they don't do enough due diligence.
Yes, it's not that it's impossible, it's that it's impossible while operating how they want to operate, scaling as much as they want to scale, and profiting as much as they want to profit. But no business model that can't be pursued ethically and profitably should be execused as simply inevitably unethical. It should be regulated and/or banned.
But what actually is an acceptable level of trust? Acceptable for whom? For the billionaires, it's good enough if outside is worse, or even if it merely appears worse.
> To forstall any AI debate, let me underline the word "lazy" in the footnote here. Most recently we received a shirt with a very large cobra on it, and the cobra has at least three pupils in each eye (depending on how you count) and some very eye-watering geometry for the sclera between it.
Okay, but if it matches the illustration on the storefront, can it really be called a scam?
Setting that aside, Amazon is well known to sell/ship knock offs and not take down offending listings.
Fair, I was sloppy there. The cobra isn't a scam itself, it's just a demonstration that it's already a hard place to navigate what with everything that is going on there. A deluge of AI garbage may not be a "scam" in the strictest sense of the term but it still breaks certain unspoken expectations the Boomer generation has about goods and what exactly it is you are buying.
We have also received a number of shirts where AI has been used to create unlicensed NFL shirts and other such actual frauds. And whatever your feeling about IP laws, it was definitely low quality stuff... looked good if you just glanced at it but when you went to look at any particular detail of the shirt it was AI garbage. (I say "AI garbage" precisely because not all stuff from AI is necessarily garbage... but this was.)
> it still breaks certain unspoken expectations the Boomer generation has about goods and what exactly it is you are buying.
Sigh. I learned from my pre-boomer parents that if the product were any good it wouldn't need to be advertised.
> looked good if you just glanced at it but when you went to look at any particular detail of the shirt it was AI garbage.
To be fair, that was also all over the place before "AI" as currently understood. (And I don't think that previous iterations of machine learning techniques were involved.)
> It is not possible for Big Tech to exclude scammers
It's 100% possible. It might not be profitable
An app store doesn't have the "The optimum amount of fraud is not zero" problem. Preventing fraudulent apps is not a probability problem, you can actually continuously improve your capability without also blocking "good" apps accidentally.
Meanwhile, apple regularly stymies developers trying to release updates to already working and used by many apps for random things.
And despite that, they let through clear and obvious scams like a "Lastpass" app not made by Lastpass. That's just unacceptable. Anything with a trademark should never be possible to get a scam through. There's no excuse.
> 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 poster said, this is not profitable which is why they don't do it. Instead they complain about how hard it is to do programmatically and keep promising they will get it working soon.
A well functioning society would censure them. We should say that they're not allowed to operate in this broken way until they solve the problem. Fix first.
Big tech knows this which is why they are suddenly so politically active. They reap billions in profit by dumping the negative externalities onto society. They're extracting that value at a cost to all of us. The only hope they have to keep operating this way is to forestall regulation.
Move fast and break things indeed.
> 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 a verification system for your verification system, which will eventually need a verification system^3 for the verification system^2, ad infinitum.
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.
> 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.
Again, the newspaper model already solves this. Moderation should be highly localized, from the communities for which they are moderating the content. That maximizes the chance that the moderator's values will align with the community. Small groups are harder to hide bad actors, especially when you can be named and shamed by people that you see every day. Managers and their coworkers and the community itself are the "verifiers."
Again, this model has worked since the beginning of time and it's 1000x better than what FB has now.
> 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?
A lot of people = a lot of cost. That would probably settle out lower than the old classified ads, but paying even a dollar per Facebook post would be a radically different use than the present situation.
And of course you'd end up with a ban of some sort on all smaller forums and BBS that couldn't maintain compliance requirements.
> It's 100% possible. It might not be profitable
These are the effectively the same thing. Asking a business to harm its profits is like asking a person to self-harm.
No, sorry. It's eminently reasonable to ask or demand that a business to reduce its (fantastic) margins/profits in order to remain a prosocial citizen in the marketplace. In fact we do this all the time with things like "regulations".
It may be unreasonable to demand that a small business tackle a global problem at the expense of its survival. But we are not talking about small or unprofitable business. We are talking about Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon. Companies with more money than they know what to do with. These global companies need to funnel some % of their massive profits into tackling the global problems that their products have to some degree created.
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?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45411915
Well said
A little ironic when Amazon is filled to the brim with scams.
Amazon has the advantage over some company I don't have experience with, of that I know returns are pretty easy and generally not questioned at all (at least for me, long-standing account in the UK, with infrequent returns, it might vary for new accounts, those who return more than they keep, or those in countries with worse consumer rights at the legally enforced level).
My two most recent examples: a couple of rolls of 3D printer filament that looked nothing like as advertised (bad sales images there I think, rather than a comingled-with-a-cheap-scammy-alternative issue) which was taken back unquestioned for same-day full refund despite one of them being opened, and a couple of years ago a replacement drive for my media RAID array that, while the right drive and not, as far as I could tell, counterfeit, certainly wasn't new/unused which is what I ordered, which again was taken back with no quibble or cost (other than my time of course).
There are problems dealing with Amazon sellers, but those can mostly be avoided with care and a healthy dose of cynicism (to avoid ordering crap in the first place). I'd never buy some things from there though: safety equipment, for instance.
Your experience with no questions asked returns is not what everybody is experiencing these days.
The most recent was recent: about two months ago.
Though as mentioned, I find it very easy to believe this will vary by location and account for various reasons.
I order a lot from Amazon--especially over the past year for house-related reasons. I just haven't had (touch wood) the apparently pervasive problems that some people seem to experience. Maybe I'm more selective about not picking whatever is cheapest regardless of brand that I've never heard of.
My preferred brands on Amazon are Qweasdooo, I999admm, and Growthyy. Fantastic stuff at unbeatable prices! /s
Those sound like pretty legit brands, last time I checked (admittedly a while ago) the slop was mostly [A-Z]{6}
Not sure how this works on Amazon, but Bol.com (dutch "amazon competitor") sells a lot of crap too. Stuff that sometimes has the images and literal description taken from e.g. aliexpress. People literally re-sell stuff from chinese webshops on there with profit.
Technically, on Bol.com, a EU-platform, EU consumer protection is in place. So if a product breaks within guarantee terms, is dangerous, never gets delivered etc. the person re-selling is responsible. They are importing "illegal" goods and could even go to jail for it.
So, technically, that premium price brings me me the assurance that I am protected by EU consumer laws. That a TV I buy can be returned, is CE certified, won't explode and isn't a 12" TV pictured in a tiny living-room on the images on unpacking.
Except these products often don't meet EU criteria, aren't adhering to (food, safety, chidren protection) EU laws and money-back is often hard because the re-seller just dissapears. In the last case, Bol.com will step up and refund, because they have to. But for the rest, they plead innocence: It wasn't us that sold illegal goods, it was that reseller from which we skim a lot of fees.
The incentives are just wrong. And the solution simple: Make platforms by proxy legally responsible for their "users". Resellers in my case. Or advertisers in the case of TLA.
If some-guy sells a TV that explodes, and can't be found or held responsible, then make Bol.com responsible. Let their CEO go to jail in the very worst case. Let's see how fast they solve this.
> Not sure how this works on Amazon, but Bol.com (dutch "amazon competitor") sells a lot of crap too. Stuff that sometimes has the images and literal description taken from e.g. aliexpress.
That is bog-standard drop-shipping. Every open online market had a pile of that. It isn't that they've taken the images from AliExpress it is that both sets of sellers are drop-shipping product from the same source or collection of sources (or buying and reselling though that is much less common as it means managing stock) and the images come & other sales material come from there.
> So, technically, that premium price brings me me the assurance that I am protected by EU consumer laws.
When comparing Amazon (UK) or eBay to the sellers on, for example, Facebook, often there isn't a premium, Amazon (or AliExpress, or similar) are often cheaper than sellers on social media and/or advertising via adverts on YouTube and their ilk. Those sellers will often try to make the product out to be some unique high quality item with a price to match (which of course is heavily discounted if you buy in the next hour or two), and if you check your preferred general marketplace you'll find several people with the same thing, often with the same images, making no such pretence of it being unique or high-value, at a price noticeably cheaper than the seller from SM/etc. I assume this is the same with Amazon in other jurisdictions and other marketplaces like Boi.
> If some-guy sells a TV that explodes, and can't be found or held responsible, then make Bol.com responsible.
Shouldn't the manufacturer have some liability?
Yeah, I'm def having more success using the Never buy anything from Amazon rule...
What have been your alternative(s) to Amazon?
Local stores, or manufactures' own retail sites, for me. Been burned too many times by Amazon for them to ever regain my trust.
Where the consumer ends up out of pocket? I realise scamming ligament sellers and brands is endemic; but it is still a safe place to buy as far as I can tell?
Out of pocket? Perhaps not, especially if it "works" as intended. Putting your life in danger and house burnt down though? More likely than you realize.
Could I interest you in some very durable car fuses that don't actually trip? https://youtu.be/B90_SNNbcoU?si=5QUpXUHwSlZj4i4G
Or perhaps radioactive protection pendants are your thing? https://shungite-c60.com/quantum-pendant/
Could I interest you in some Amazon choice firecrackers? https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/10/business/amazonbasics-ele...
Let's not even mention the health and nutrient products that make the FDA shudder.
Sure, you can ask for your money back, and flag the seller. But new sellers pop up selling the same crap all over again with a new name and company ID. This is all while real sellers of real (and safety certified products) get pressured by Amazon and dissuaded from taking their business off platform.
Avoid Amazon if at all possible. It's not good for consumers nor sellers, and it's keeping a leach on online retail.
Most countries have laws around liability of sold products. This is often set up to fall on the importer of said product. Amazon Europe (and perhaps USA) is doing something very funny with these laws; You, the consumer, is the importer. If your house burns out, then it's between you and a random chineese ghost companny that just disappeared into smoke. Amazon is "handling the import paperwork for you", and not taking liability for anything.
> Where the consumer ends up out of pocket?
A lot of consumers have no idea they got a cheap imitation. Counterfeiters have gotten quite good, and in many cases the scam is "falls apart in a year instead of ten", not "it's completely non-functional".
Yeah there were entire categories of products I'd never buy again on Amazon because of the scams and the list got so large that I cancelled Prime a while ago.
The most common one I've run into is third party sellers taking items that come in multiple to a pack from the manufacturer and splitting them up but then also listing the single item for the same price as the multi-pack's MSRP.
As an example, pouches of cat food treats that come 10 to a pack. Scam sellers will split the pack and sell each pouch for the same price as the full 10 pack and because Amazon has historically done nothing to guard against this, their scam listing appears fully comingled with the manufacturer's listing in a way where it is very hard to recognize the scam option even if you are aware of the possibility.
Amazon has made some noise about fixing these comingling issues this year, but their plans have been vague and for me the well is already poisoned after years of letting it go.
Its actually shocking that it took until this year for Amazon to really acknowledge this as an issue. Manufacturer/brands can't have been happy about this considering that for any item that can be scammed like this you'll find lots of bad reviews on Amazon where the review isn't really complaining about the product, but the scam.
Some example reviews that I just randomly and easily found on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1KZ41Q9MZL7UX
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3UUT2K2Q4OROF
> - "Never buy anything unless you're on amazon.com"
Might as well do AliExpress, same quality control/misleading descriptions but lower prices.
Is there even a trustworthy online shopping site/platform nowadays?
I use walmart.com, they have fast local delivery (often next day) but you do have to be careful, as they also have listings for third party sellers and they are just as shady as Amazon. I only buy items sold by Walmart, never a third party. You can filter your searches for that pretty easily.
I never buy food, supplements, OTC meds, etc. online from any source. That stuff I always buy in person at a local retailer.
That would be one possible dystopia, but I think we actually are going to dodge it.
Smart, on device agents that are aligned with a user's interests will be able to act as the "walled garden" the user needs. In fact, this future is anti-dysopian, because the agent will not care about existing walled gardens and digital fiefdoms, and to the extent that it's using them it's going to deprive them of ad revenue, and they'll have to sit and take it because being agent unfriendly will be a death sentence for a business.
We can also fight back and jail people that are ruining lives.
> "Never buy anything unless you're on amazon.com"
Too late for that one. I have been scammed a few times from Amazon sellers.
Lucky you. I have been scammed by Amazon.
The walled gardens belong to the Big Tech billionaires creating the scams. You're actually safer out on the web than in Facebook, for example.
That’s a truly horrendous thought.
I half joke that the term “parental controls” will change meaning from restrictions set by parents on children to the opposite: restrictions now set up by children to protect their parents.
I have the feeling that there's a sandwiched generation who will have to protect both their parents and their children from these things.
It's so funny how millennials grew up and we were told "Don't trust the internet, you can't cite wikipedia, the internet is all a lie" And now, I look around and the people who engrained that in us just never listened to what they were telling us. And somehow, no one thought to tell that to Gen Z so they just just get scammed a ton.
"You know you live in a predatory system when..."
Not a joke at all these days, I was at home with my mother for 2 weeks helping her with stuff around the house, watching how she uses her phone, scrolls facebook, clicks on everything, it was really shocking for me. I looked around and didn't see the product I wanted to help me help her, so we started a company to try and give tools to help make it easier for people like us (techy people) who want to protect our loved ones. Our original idea was around education/elearning and we have expanded to doing real integrations to just stop the spam from getting in inboxes (gmail, SMS, call filtering).
That's me! I use parental controls to try and protect my elderly father on other platforms (he's always quick to fall for ads and download Android apps he doesn't need). Unfortunately Facebook doesn't allow you to enable parental controls on an adult, and they also pretty severely limit your ability to update your birthday! Which is unfortunate because Facebook is such a hostile platform.
I started a company a few months ago that is trying to help people like you do exactly this! I would love to chat with you to hear what has worked, what hasn't, what product features you would be most excited about. If you'd be willing to chat, please email me kevin at trylifeguard.com
> 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.
while ostensibly true, the more different types of passphrase/words you have, the less easy it is to remember.
You probably only need just one, for authentication purposes. I doubt grandmother can perform this sort of "spycraft" well if it's more complicated. Better to have something simple and easy, than to forget and panic later.
> 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
Worse, your fake version will be convincingly begging on the call for God knows what while being horribly tortured. Audio versions of this are already a thing.
My mom did this in the '80s so we weren't kidnapped, even by a family member. I'm not going to share the secret phrase, but it has stuck with me and I use it with my kids too.
I know most of that was driven by the tragedy of Adam Walsh, but it was still great OpSec I'll never drop.
We are all going to need to have personal passwords/safe words we don't reveal to untrusted parties for authentication. Or maybe personal retinal scanners? I think personal auth might be an interesting startup to get ahead of this.
So they’ll call you first with the fake video of your mom.
You’ll be suspicious and ask for the pass phrase. The attacker now knows the nature of the protection you setup between you and your mom.
And then the real attack on your mom, with you describing the system you’d agreed to, and claiming you can’t remember the word/phrase.
Better is the Terminator-style lie to see if it gets detected.
Mom-in-the-middle attack
I think the Internet will, sometime in the near future, just get shut down. That's been what actually happens in countries that are undergoing civil unrest or war like Russia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Tanzania, Israel, Myanmar, etc. And it's fairly likely civil unrest or perhaps even war may spread to an increasing fraction of the developed world too.
So my strategy here has been to start downloading anything that I think I might need from the Internet and keeping a local copy. It's free and abundant now. It could become inaccessible within a matter of minutes if the right powerful person says so. There may be a low probability of that happening, but given the potential disruptions to our life of our always-on connectivity going away, it's worth being prepared.
Keeping an offline copy of the Wikipedia is fine, but if "the Internet just get[s] shut down" I would think we'll all be more worried more about not being able to use our bank accounts, have medical providers see our records, etc.
We're back to whatever forms of trade you can source locally in that case, but that should not surprise anyone who observes regions that are actually in crisis, because that is how the economy functions in those regions. You do your best to do something nice for your neighbors and they do their best to do something nice for you, and anything that requires global trade or supply lines simply doesn't happen.
Having a copy of your own medical records could be critically important if suddenly your friend who is a doctor is now your doctor because there's nobody else.
Money tends to be worthless is such situations anyway - it's backed by the full faith and credit of a government that best case no longer cares about you and worst case no longer exists. So you aren't going to worry about your bank account, nobody will accept credit or debit anyway.
There is a whole lot of other data on the Internet that can be very, very useful in such situations. Even just having a few hundred hours of collected kids TV shows means you can sit them down in front of Bluey while the adults do stuff that is critical for survival. Knowing how to build a smelter and bellows out of clay that you can find locally means you can restart metal production in a matter of days rather than thousands of years. Knowing what the local plant species are and which are edible might keep you from starving. Knowing how to scavenge parts and wiring, as well as what their datasheets are and how you need to hook them up, means you can fix broken electronics and potentially create new ones, which gives you continuing access to knowledge.
There might be a locked-down subset of the internet available, like we saw with AOL. Maybe there's a subnet for medical, a subnet for banking, etc.
shutdown -- never. just limited to the $COUNTRY_NAME social network and $COUNTRY_NAME messenger
Frankly, that passphrase should already have been established when you were a kid: it would have been used for if a stranger / unexpected person needed to give you a ride on behalf of your parents.
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.
This is really useful feedback, thanks for sharing. And 100% agree it is an interesting dynamic and I think there are a lot of people who share the "I don't want to give you my data" mindset. The original idea we started with was focused on elearning - trying to make really simple, short, effective lessons to highlight basic patterns for users to identify fraud & scams online. We have generic lessons on various channels (txts, emails, paper mail, phone, etc) and then we have scam specific lessons (grandparent scam, forgotten password scam, etc). We got some early feedback from users that were more in the "can you just automatically handle/prevent the scams from getting to my inbox!" so we expanded there. What do you think about eLearning content? I kind of view it as "I'm the IT admin for my mom and I set her the goal to complete one of the trainings." And again, thanks for the feedback you provided already.
In the future AI bots which are a near perfect facsimile of yourself will indeed call, and an AI facsimile of your mother will answer, and once the appropriate security protocols are exchanged, you'll get through.
God help anyone not armed with AI in the future, that's why it cannot be locked up by corporations or government.
cannot or should not?
trends point to will be locked up by corporations for the near to medium term
> I am scared and this close to setting up a secret passphrase in case they need to tell me apart from a clone.
I have done this already and convinced a friend to do it after her father fell victim to a scam where he was convinced the sheriffs department wanted him to pay off a fine in gift cards.
I am also concerned that one might steal a trove of texts from someone and plug it into AI which could mimic the writing and tone of someone.
Your friend set up a passphrase with the sheriff's department?
I already setup a secret passphrase with my family. My mother is particularly naive when it comes to what's online. Of course she is going to get abused.
A passphrase is cheap. If you never need to use it, so what?
And if she got a desperate, pleading call from "you" and "you" claim you can't remember the passphrase, then what?
These scams are imaginary. Yes they have probably happened but it's far more likely that your mother will get scammed by a "legitimate" financial advisor than some stranger using an AI to impersonate you.
The scams that people don't even know they are getting scammed on - GenZ has the one of the highest scam rates, but the dollar amount per scam is way low and they often dont even know they were scammed. Also, the political donation scams where the people "think" they are giving to a party or candidate but nope, just a PAC that spends all the money its collects on "operations" and "consulting fees" to its partners. Wild times.
This.
This isn't a situation we accept out of other industries. You water provider doesn't get to pipe you sewage every now and again because its too expensive to moderate. We shouldn't accept it for big tech either. And we certainly shouldn't make it the responsibility of the end use to protect themselves
If everybody on social media was an actual paying customer of social platforms, like we pay mobile providers (I originally wrote “water providers”, which was in fact a somewhat unfit analogy), we could demand better service and switch away to a competitor who offers it. Unfortunately, we are robbed of our ability to pay with our wallets.
"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." It's an outdated way of looking at tech. Many classes of paid products (e.g., cars, streaming services, IoT, operating systems) double-dip into tracking and advertisement. Why would a business actually want to do the hard work of serving user needs when they can hedge their bets with ad revenue? Line must go up.
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 at least in case of social media.
If social media was paid only (like any actual product or service intended to benefit the customer) and users were choosing between paying different amounts rather than paying vs. not paying, it would kill the network effect outright; platforms would have to struggle to keep users, and to that end would start implementing features users want and need (rather than exploiting their emotional state and employing dark patterns[0] to boost ad impressions).
The interest of a service provider is aligned with the interest of the customer. The incentive to do bad unethical things to the user may exist either way, but it is when the user is not the customer that it becomes a natural course of things. It is still possible to “double-dip”[1], but the difference between users being customers and users not being customers is that in the former you can be an honest service provider and sustain yourself by doing things in the benefit of the user.
[0] For example, have you noticed how Instagram’s GUI is carefully designed to require you to tap two times, with a teeny tiny chevron as the only indicator, every time you open the app to switch to the timeline of people you actually follow, rather than whatever the algorithm suggests (and how carelessly swiping photo carousel left makes you exist that carousel, and lose the scroll position)?
[1] Additionally, note that the examples you named (cars, IoT, OS[2]) make a lot of money from a single purchase and/or are fairly inflexible to switch away from, compared to social media where interoperability is pretty much solved with open standards.
[2] What is a paid-only streaming service that “dips” into advertisement in some unethical way?
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
When someone opens with “there oughta, be a law”… they’re almost always shouldn’t be.
No. You’re not going to regulate out human behavior or scammers or MBA’s looking for every avenue to maximize profit.
Make a better system.
This is not about regulating away illegal behaviour. Criminals will exist. It is about making [what we have reasons to consider] de facto scammy behaviour to be de jure illegal behaviour. Then it becomes a matter of enforcement.
>Then it becomes a matter of enforcement.
Really strong record there, especially internationally.
Make a better system.
Don't keep us in suspense. What is this better system you speak of?
"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product."
Technically, it doesn't logically follow that paying means you aren't the product.
They aren't double dipping, they are subsidizing the cost with ads.
When ford deployed LexusNexus tracking to my F150, they didn't refund any of my purchase price.
Samsung isn't refunding any of their $3k fridges that now have mandatory ads
The norm is reduced costs because there are ads. The same Samsung also sells deeply discounted TVs that are ridden with ads. Netflix, amazon prime, Hulu, and youtube offer ad-subsidized subscriptions.
They didn't need to offer a refund. It was already priced in. You maybe forgot to ask what was coming in future software updates while standing starry-eyed at the impossibly low price it was being offered at, but they knew it was coming. After all, appropriately specced hardware to be able to do it was already onboard.
Your comment is so naive. Most products out there have a terms and conditions that equate to 'the company can change the product at any time and you're always free to stop using it', while giving their salespeople little to no idea about future progress because that would limit sales. Even if you didn't "maybe forgot to ask", there isn't anyone to respond with the truth.
If you purchase a product that doesn't have ads and then they introduce ads - that is a huge change in the value proposition of the product.
> that is a huge change in the value proposition of the product.
It is, but one that is already calculated at time of purchase. You'd pay a lot more if there were strict guarantees that it would never display ads.
The Belarus tractor company learned that lesson. Once upon a time they tried to infiltrate western agriculture with, under the backing of the USSR, heavily subsidized products offered on the cheap. But farmers saw through the thin veneer and realized that they wouldn't be able to get parts for the machines down the road. As such, the much cheaper price wasn't a winner. Farmers were willing to pay significantly more to American companies, knowing that they would provide not just on day one but also long into the future. The economic lesson learned was that the marketplace doesn't value just initial purchase price, but the full value proposition over its entire lifetime.
Many people are willing to gamble, of course, especially for "disposable" things.
I read it as more rhetorical than not. No one was literally expected to ask about the future. However, one could be expected to ask oneself “what could such a low price tag on such capable hardware mean for the future?”
It is unrealistic, of course, because it is a textbook case of information asymmetry (the enemy of the market)—only a vanishingly small number of people can adequately assess the pricing, having to know enough about hardware and all the various forces that could bring it down, like potential upcoming lineup changes or inventory overflow.
The right move is to fight information asymmetry. Many developed countries, including the US, already do it in countless cases. A mild way could be requiring to disclose things like this in addition to the ToS; a more thorough way could be simply banning this business model.
This is the most HN of HN takes.
Saying it's your (the consumers) fault because you didn't read the crystal ball for what was coming in the future.
The price a product is offered at is the price for the product at that time, you don't get to say well I sold it for $10 but it's worth $20 so I'll just sell your data until I recoup that $10 I "lost".
> the price for the product at that time
Exactly. The necessary hardware to enable the tracking was installed at the time of purchase. It is not like 10 years later someone dreamed up the idea and decided to stealthy in the night start bolting on new components to every vehicle they could find. It was a feature that was there at the time of purchase and the sale was priced accordingly.
So by your standards, it's totally fine for Lenovo to use the laptop you bought from them to mine crypto a year after you bought it from them because the necessary hardware to enable that (it having a GPU) was installed at the time.
I mean it's a viewpoint, it's a certifiably bonkers one but of all the viewpoints it definitely is one.
Much like the F-150, if the license agreement between you and Lenovo allow Lenovo to do so, yes. I mean, if you didn't want that, you wouldn't have agreed to it, right? You are allowed to say no.
Ah... so we find ourselves at
> “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
>“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
If a contractual party is not acting in good faith, there is a legal system to address that.
But I know you will say that the legal system doesn't act in good faith, so... I guess you're screwed. Such is the pitfall of living under a dictatorship.
What are we supposed to do about the fact that you are not arguing in good faith? I'm not buying what you're selling.
> I'm not buying what you're selling
Which is why I'm not providing what you seek. Production goes to he who is paying, and in this case I am the one doing the paying. Thus, you know the content is written for me and me alone.
> What are we supposed to do about the fact that you are not arguing in good faith?
A rational actor acting in good faith would start talking terms to see the sale go through, but as you are also here in bad faith we can continue to write only for respective selves. Nobody was expecting anything else anyway. I don't imagine anyone has ever paid someone else to write a comment on HN and that isn't about to change today.
You mean "Which is why I'm not arguing in good faith". Or rational, either.
The "you can just not agree to it" argument is so bogus. You can only buy good/services that are for sale, and when they all have the same crappy terms, you have to agree to somebody's to live in the modern world.
That's like the people who claim only idiots live in HOAs but neglect the fact that, in some markets, nearly all real estate worth living in is covered by an HOA of some sort so your alternative isn't "buy a different house" it's "live in an apartment forever"
> You can only buy good/services that are for sale
The world is full of custom car builders. Buying a something like the F-150, but without the undesirable computing components, is quite practical and very possible.
It'll be expensive, which I expect is what you were really trying to say when you pretend there is no such thing for sale, but you're just returning us to the heart of discussion: The F-150 is cheap, comparatively, because it has already priced in the tracking subsidy. You're accepting of those undesirable terms because the lower price makes it compelling enough to do so.
Is it really "accepting a concession" if the "alternative" is so expensive as to not be an option anyway?
This is like telling someone who doesn't like that they have to wait in traffic they should just take a helicopter to work everyday. Yes, it's technically an option for some people, but for the vast majority it's not.
Yes. That concession is what gets one with limited means into an F-150. If it was sold at its true market value, absent of all value diminishing systems like tracking, they wouldn't be able to afford that either.
Same goes for roads. You most definitely can build roads that don't have traffic, but only the rich will be able to afford to use them. Traffic is what enables those of lesser means to also participate.
It's a pretty good tradeoff for those who are poor. And the rich can buy whatever they want anyway.
Yes, the world is full of custom car builders. I'm sure I'll find someone that can build me a replica of the f150 lightning that doesn't enable spyware on me.
Mind to help me out a bit and point me at a few companies doing that? Around Kentucky if you don't mind since that's where I am.
I'd start with Ford. They're well known for their custom builds — what they call VSO. And they're already tooled up for production of an F-150-style vehicle around Kentucky to boot.
It won't come cheap like an F-150, but nobody can expect it to be cheap when the value proposition is much higher.
Ford VSO doesn't include the F150 lightning, just the F150.
That's exactly what they told you when you slapped a billion dollars down in front of them? Color me skeptical. I bet you haven't even talked to them.
Dude. They have a website. It lists what they do.
When someone comes to you with a unique custom request for something, your response is: “Nope. Not on my website, not going to do it”?
Must be nice to have the luxury of being able to do nothing. Ford doesn’t have that luxury, though. It has to answer to angry shareholders if it lets a lucrative customer slip through.
Call them. Talk to a real person.
A license agreement, or a contract in general, cannot permit either party to violate the law. What you're describing in this scenario, and what has actually happened in some cases, is effectively theft of use and arguably fraud.
Fraudulent terms of service are not above the law, nor are they above basic expectations in society of fair dealing. You can try to litigate this any which way you choose, based on the language contained in the contract/TOS, and it fundamentally does not matter. At some point, something has to give and it ends with burning down buildings and building guillotines. History is full of abundant lessons about the supremacy of social mores and standards that suborn the law, and the supremacy of the law over the specific parties of any given contract.
Who exactly would you ever ask to find out that the samsung fridge you were looking at was going to get ads in the future?
Certainly not the appliance salesman, they don't know samsung's plans. And good luck calling samsung and asking for the "future plans" department. This is such a dishonest take.
They do know their own plans, though, and thus can offer a contractual guarantee on how the product they are selling will be treated in the future.
If they aren't willing to stand buy what they are selling, why would you want to buy it from them in the first place? That's what we call a scam.
> You maybe forgot to ask what was coming in future software updates
Who exactly was I supposed to ask that? The check out cashier at the store? The CTO of the company that manufactures it? Who even knows the answer to that question, and how are millions of consumers supposed to find that out and contact them directly, and why are they permitted to reveal proprietary plans if they even know?
Your arguments are delusionally detached from reality.
> The check out cashier at the store?
Normally F-150s, and fridges for that matter, are sold not by cashiers, but salesmen. I suppose there isn't any meaningful difference in the end — except, unlike a cashier, salesmen are named as such because there is greater expectation of them being intimately familiar with the product so that they can answer such questions.
If they can't, that's a pretty big red flag. Why would you conduct business with someone who has proven to be shady (or at least incompetent)?
I'd rather not buy a refrigerator that a salesman has been intimately familiar with.
There's really no difference. If a company must subsidize costs with ad revenue, it clearly shows that they don't want paying customers to be the sole judges of the product's value proposition.
It’s just moving the goal posts though, ars technica was reporting on a 3400 dollars for a Samsung fridge with ads.
I don't know very many people who have a choice of water providers. Generally you are stuck with whoever owns the pipes to your home. And since you don't have a lot of choice, the government tends to regulate the shit out of water providers - and I don't see we have any other real choice when it comes to too-big-to-fail social media providers either.
I can choose not to use a social medial platform, it is kind of hard to choose not to drink water/wash/etc.
I do not use much social media platforms, while I try to stay social, like posting one picture a month and sending a message here and there, watching a cat video sometimes, etc. I think social networks are much more similar to drugs - you can try to regulate to prevent people hurting themselves, but people will find a way if they can't refrain themselves.
Scams existed before social networks, and maybe is a bit easier using them, but I do not feel it is a fundamental shift. Along the ages people were taught/encouraged "to believe (without checking)" into a multitude of subjects (state, church, horoscope, etc.), now seems a bit hypocritical to be amazed that they do just that.
> I can choose not to use a social medial platform, it is kind of hard to choose not to drink water/wash/etc.
I don't think that's actually true for WhatsApp in a lot of countries - it's the default communication for many, to the point I'm not sure I could get parcel deliveries reliably here in Spain if I didn't have WhatsApp.
Ditto for communicating with the entire generations who moved onto Facebook after we all abandoned it. I could delete Facebook entirely, but then I'd spend every family gathering hearing the chorus "why aren't you on Facebook? Your cousins are all on Facebook. They all know the family drama" (instead I keep Facebook off the homescreen of my phone, and check it about once a month).
You don't generally get to choose who pipes the water to your house.
That is true and it makes my analogy not so fit. Oh well.
Would it help if you could? Hasn’t the bottled water industry demonstrated lower standards and more scams and marketing FUD than the EPA?
Water in the pipes is higher standards precisely because we don't accept that the water utility can pump sewage to us 10% of the time.
The problem with this analogy as I see it is that water supply is heavily regulated and uncompetitive due to exactly the fact of it being impossible to switch.
For this to work for the likes of Meta, it would mean elevating Meta’s services to some sort of country-wide public utility, which I’m sure would create probably an even stronger moat than network effects, hindering any competiton.
However, is there such a constraint in case of social media? There are mechanisms and open standards that could allow interoperability between providers who implement them. It seems that it should be possible to leave it up to market forces and competition, but for that we have to have competition and be able to vote with our wallets.
We weren't robbed, we voluntarily gave it up.
Nebula is youtube that works for you. But the conversion rate from youtube-ad-viewer to nebula-subscription-payer is <1%.
I have heard of Nebula and Floatplane. Is Nebula good?
My issue is that in presence of one large player who does it for free competition is already impossible: $2 is twice as much more than $1, but $1 is infinity/NaN times more than $0. It’s one of the many problems with the fact that it is legally allowed.
>Is Nebula good?
Nebula is good in that it properly allows me to pay the people who's content and reporting and art I like and support them without giving the toxic sludge of Youtube a dime.
It also allows them to focus on doing their job: Making the good videos I want and that they want to make, rather than play some absurd algorithm games.
Floatplane is similarly better aligned with what artists and creators want to do. The guy from DankPods is much happier on that platform than something like Twitch which gave him constant problems.
The GunTubers and "Current military events but from former soldiers who act like they know what they are talking about in reference to geopolitics" have created their own platform and I hope that succeeds too. I do not agree with a lot of the politics from some of these people (and believe some others are liars) but diversity is good.
Armchair Historian also created their own platform. That might not have panned out though, they had financial troubles that led to them abandoning another project.
IMO, the best platform is Patreon linking to a bunch of MP4s on S3 (or whatever cheaper medium exists). Nebula started out just using a "Youtube copycat" whitelabling service.
We can pay with our attention, if we stopped using social media that takes advantage of us and use others that don't. They will change the way, they act.
We could demand it either way. There's no iron law of the universe that says otherwise. The application of the law is supposed to be objective but the contents are just made up by those with the power to do it.
Not enough people would demand it for it to be actionable, and not having to pay is part of the reason. Why would we spend effort on actively demanding things when we are spending not a cent on this in the first place, and can instead passively-aggressively deploy adblockers while waiting for the next iteration of this arms race (which something makes me think might involve LLMs)?
I pay good money for phone calls and I get so much spam I don't like to answer the phone.
The paying relationship is not sufficient for these technologies that are required
(An aside, there is a lot of scandal in the UK about how the privatised water providers have been basically shitting on the public and environment, and literally discharging raw sewage because its too expensive to moderate!)
Is there any reason you accept it then? Facebook and all their platform is a danger to people, there is nothing to add there.
The permitted number of rat parts per pound of breakfast cereal is not zero.
Rat parts are in RFK Jr's food pyramid for America.
Water providers in Flint,MI disagree.
I'm sure it felt good to write something pithy like that, but the Flint, MI case is not one of a water utility screwing up, or causing harmful contaminants to enter the water. It's a story of the city switching providers, and that other provider having different water chemistry that was incompatible with the existing piping in the city which caused harmful contaminants to be introduced into the water. Neither water provider had failed to provide what they were intending to provide, the city failed to plan ahead and test things before moving the source of their water.
I had a similar thought regarding OS'. Especially in they heydey of malware in the early 2000s when 3rd party apps were the only way to remove it. You don't buy a truck and accept that its wheel falls off every time you hit a bump. Therefore Microsoft should have been civilally liable for all the costs of software removal and loss of enjoyment of computers that ran Windows (along with OEMs that sold them).
GM is not liable when your wheels fall off because a criminal removed the nuts.
Then why do they have locks on the doors? They know there are these things called criminals. MSFT did nothing to stop spyware for at least a decade.
Most locks are trivially defeatable and easy to force. Heck, there's often a large window right beside a suburban door. Break the glass, open the door. Locks are only there to deter crimes of opportunity and make it more likely you'll actually notice a theft in a timely fashion.
And Microsoft didn't even bother to do that much. Spyware was able to embed itself in any windows installation for a solid decade, just by visiting a website. removing it required at least 30m of updating and installing specialized tools and was well out of reach of the average user.
> Then why do they have locks on the doors?
Because the customer eventually decided it was worth paying for. Emphasis on eventually. It took over 30 years from the first car having optional door locks to locks becoming a standard feature.
> MSFT did nothing to stop spyware for at least a decade.
More like half a decade. The first real instance of spyware was recognized in 1999. Microsoft began working on their anti-spyware software in 2004.
Microsoft bought GeCAD RAV in 2003 with the intent of using that antivirus engine in Windows.
It's also worth pointing out that the 1998 antitrust case against Microsoft is most known as a Browser fight, but it included a heavy hand from Adobe and all of the major Anti-Virus tools of the time. It was seen by many at the time, including Microsoft, that the delivered court decision forbade Microsoft from including PDF software, anti-virus tools, firewalls, and other such software in Windows (and arguably against building some of them at all).
It's somewhat easy to understand why that decision almost made sense in 1998, but real easy to see why it aged very quickly like spoiled milk (including the wide spread of spyware and malware that soon followed).
The time they "began" working on it is irrelevant. Were you even alive during that time to experience it?
Car door locks are wafer locks and can be defeated sometimes with a flathead screwdriver.
Security is about "good enough" though so that's usually sufficient.
Most of the worms of the early 2000s worked by exploiting vulnerabilities that Microsoft had already found, patched, and deployed, but users, including giant businesses just didn't install the patches.
Bonzai Buddy and the days of the toolbar didn't happen because Windows is insecure, it happened because at a fundamental level the only difference between spyware and a perfectly valid and runnable program is intent, and an OS has no insight into the user's mind. When you doubleclick on a desktop icon, Windows cannot know whether you totally intend to send most of your precious data to a sketchy server, or whether you have no idea what you are running.
Microsoft is moving more towards preventing users from running whatever they want.
"The user is god and the OS serves them" and "Never let the user run spyware or malicious code" are mutually exclusive, so be careful what you wish for.
> the only difference between spyware and a perfectly valid and runnable program is intent
This is true if you completely ignore that spyware was impossible to remove without specialized removal apps that were funded by volunteers, not Microsoft.
Telling me that locks are pickable is completely irrelevant and avoids the point I was making.
Yes. If you haven’t yet read it Cory Doctorow’s new book Enshittification is well worth a read. I am still reading it but it certainly explains some of the bad practices by these major advertising/spying giants and the resulting market distortion. We need to up our game as technologists and hold our employers to account.
It's just another form of "socialise the costs, privatise the profits".
In any sane world we'd regulate big tech far more rigorously than we do (we'd tax them more as well but that's a separate issue).
This is totally backwards. We "socialise" the profits and leave the risk and losses to the private sector.
Water, power, etc infrastructure regulations and things like the environmental movement happened when there was more working class solidarity and the working class had more power over the capital owning class. Now the working class have been propagandized to believe "regulations bad" and have been depowered as capitalism decays and the capital owning class further takes and consolidate power. The regulations you want are impossible in this political climate and probably impossible without an extremely radical reform movement or some mass resignation or revolution of government.
I mean, lets face it, no government that makes hard right turns and has intense corruption like the USA just goes back to being a proper liberal democracy. Most likely things will get a lot worse before they even get better and on a timescale thats unpredictable. We may be talking 20+ years before any sort of baby steps towards liberal reforms are even possible on the federal level. The right has the gerrymandering, scotus, the courts, the media machine, etc. Pro-working class regulations are just not going to happen like they did in the 60s and 70s for a very long time if history is any guide.
Its so odd to me people just have a "dont worry we'll got back to normal next election." To get back to what we had during those times of pro-worker regulation will take many, many, years if not decades of work now. At the very least until many in SCOTUS retire or pass away from old age. That just isnt happening anytime soon.
Social media is hardly a public utility. Regulation could be part of the picture, but at some point the nanny state is the greater of evils.
There's a pretty big gulf between what Facebook is currently permitted to do, and the nanny state
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 in ETFs that also charge 1-1.5% a year funneling money in to companies being raided by executives and employees isn't a scam scam, but it is a massive mis-allocation of resources and probably more damaging than some dumb item purchased from a Meta ad that never showed up. Same for recently legalized (in the US) sports betting.
The startling thing is AI is being applied at scale to make this crap more pervasive. 10% scams? Meta would like advertisers to use their generative AI tools to create image and video ads of non-existent products.
Best thing we can do is delete all phone apps and only access online media from behind firewalls that block all ads and tracking. Windows is dead. Apple is transitioning to an adtech company. Linux is the only option.
>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.
"Algorithms". Even if your region has plenty of ad inventory, Google's micro-targeting can mean even people in the same household see wildly different subsets of the ad inventory. You could just be lucky and aren't in any of the micro-target "demographics" scams want (or at least, can afford) right now.
Micro-Targeting is one of the worst mistakes of the entire advertising industry and we'll be probably dealing with its consequences for a while to come.
> air bnb
> gacha games
How are these not scams?
Being overpriced or having a bad value is not the same thing as a scam.
I am not following the meta, so could you please explain
>Windows is dead.
I don't understand why the big advertisers don't scream about this. Facebook gets money from whoever, but the scams dilute the effectiveness of real companies that are not trying to scam you.
Do they? The difference may not be so clear cut always. A policy which got rid of scammy ads might get rid of a lot of "real companies" ads too.
We can debate what is a scam on the margins, but some things are clear scams.
Real companies don't give a damn about what they are actually doing. Facebook tells them that their ad which nobody clicked on got them 40 000 new customers. The worker who put the ad on Facebook gets a pat on the back from his boss. The boss gets a raise and maybe a promotion. Leadership gets shown numbers of how great advertising on Meta is and doesn't take 5 minutes to check them. If sales are low it is those god damned customers, better hike prices and reduce product quality to show the bastards!
Yet in the days of newspapers companies collected data to see how well their ads worked. There are a lot of statisticians working in this area - or there were 20 years ago.
And you can use the exact same methods today on digital channels to see exactly how efficient your ads are, without tracking or invading the privacy of anybody. But companies trust Meta and their sales department instead...
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 billboard cannot change itself to always be showing an ad that can be claimed as a conversion to every single user.
The newspaper ads could not change to ensure that you saw an ad that matched what you were about to purchase.
>There are a lot of statisticians working in this area - or there were 20 years ago
Weren't those people the exact ones who came up with "Half of ad spend is wasted but we don't know which half"?
Targeted and online tracking based advertising has fundamental information asymmetry problems that fuck over everyone but Google and Meta.
Statisticians can figure out if the ad google shows was to someone who would buy anyway.
yes a lot of ad spend is wasted but they can prove what was still useful enough to be worth spending despite the waste and which was not.
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.
The comment I was replying to implied that targeted advertising is a scam that finds people who were going to buy anyway and then advertises to them. If that were true, there would be no revenue increase because all the customers would have bought anyway.
oh. That makes sense. so long as other people see the ads that shows up in the stastics. Though companies should be pushing back on google doing that. (Though it may be they were going to buy but the ad influenced where which is worth the price)
What the adds really do is target people who are going to buy a certain category of product anyway, and then advertise the specific product made by the company that buys adds. It's hard to convince someone to buy something out of the blue. Much easier to convince them to buy a particular brand of something they were going to buy anyway, which is why targeted ads are so valuable.
Companies will falsely attribute positive revenue impact to whatever sales channels they are using, including Meta. The option would be for dozens of people having to admit that they made a mistake and wasted money on ads which didn't work. It's 2025, people would rather let their company bankrupt than admit they made a mistake.
I understand that impact calculation for ads is, at best, an inexact science. But I refuse to believe that businesses spend hundreds of billions of dollars on ads every year for absolutely no gain. That's chips in the vaccine level conspiratorial thinking.
Go talk to any small business owner of your choosing. When they have a slow day and nothing to do they like to chip in a few hundred dollars into the Meta casino. Since you can tweak endless parameters on which people will see the ads, you can always spend more until you find your winning number, like on the horse race track or in the lottery.
I was talking about large business which should track this. Small do gamble on hope like that.
I don't understand how more countries don't hold the publisher responsible, especially after they are notified. I'm sure that in a classic newspaper, the publisher would be held responsible for obvious scam ads. But by intentionally automating and outsourcing everything, suddenly that responsibility goes away?
Hold the publisher responsible, let them deal with the ad platform. Suddenly, it becomes very attractive to have an ad platform that doesn't allow scams.
If the publisher and the ad platform are the same, even better.
Facebook is one of the few pages my ad-blocker can't handle. In part I think this is because they do it differently by country, but mostly it's because Facebook makes a ton of effort to make it hard to recognize what's an ad from the page code.
Get uBlock Origin, it works, even on Facebook.
I have my view history turned off on Youtube. It appears that means I get a lot of low quality ads. Questionable health products, really questionable health products, "5G blocking beanies that prevent brain fuzzing", gross out advertisements about poop, and so on.
It really lowers my perception of Youtube as a product as just any old site with content, but also scams / creepy stuff. Youtube don't care I suspect, it's money for them, and it re-enforces my desire to not give them money... so yeah they take money form who they can.
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 people get totally spun around the axle on.
We need to start paying for ad-free services. Wake up.
> The answer isn't ad blocking, the answer is paying directly and in full
Netflix started showing ads on their lower tiers: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/126831
If you pay for Sky/Virgin/insert Cable provider in your country, you still get copious amounts of ads. If you pay to go to the cinema, you have to sit through 15 minutes of adverts before the film starts.
I'm buying off Amazon, they're showing sponsored products (so... ads).
EA were looking at putting ads into games that you bought back in 2024: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ea-are-thinking-about-inser...
Hell, I pay for public transport, they have adverts on.
A lot of people did pay for ad-free Netflix, only to wake up one day in the future to find that product ending, and a similarly priced tier that has ads in it.
Amazon Prime Video didn't have ads. Then one day it did.
Maybe you're right that _the masses_ need to start rejection ad-tiers, but so far we've seen that people will accept advertising to get more.
Facebook has made it very clear that they don't want you to do this: you can pay for ad-free (I believe it's because they're legally obliged to offer that as a result of some things they'be done and deals they've made), but the cost is easily 100 times what they can make directly on ads for me. The only conclusion can be that they place an immensely high indirect value on serving me ads.
Same with streaming services, ad-free services seem to be unusually higher priced than the ad-supported tiers. Netflix for example charges $10 for ad-free over the ad support tier ($18 vs. $8). I’ve seen estimates that ad revenue per subscriber is less than that, maybe $4-$8. And there’s a cost to that revenue as well, so their profit is even lower. Why go through all that trouble? Maybe the economics works out somehow, in that users willing to pay to get rid of ads are so price insensitive they may as well squeeze them for more money? Or the lower subscription cost opens up enough new subscribers to make it worthwhile to tolerate a much lower margin. I am very suspicious though and wonder if there is a more insidious or otherwise opaque motivation behind it. Is there some kind of ‘soft power’ benefit to being in the ad business?
They’re probably assuming that anyone who would pay for Facebook has a large disposable income, which means that they’re a juicy add target, and they are worth much more than the average Facebook user.
They charge around $15 per month IIRC. It's more like 3x revenue per user.
> 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...
If people demanded ad-free paid services with the same vigor that they evangelize ad-blocking, we would have it.
I don't really get why that's the responsibility of the consumer? Businesses offer shitty deal, consumer works around said deal... it's on the businesses to offer a better deal (a la Spotify vs limewire, or Netflix vs thepiratebay)
People don't work around the shitty deal, businesses work around the shitty consumers.
That's in large part why the Internet sucks, it's not made for people who ad-block.
YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, Apple Music, Kagi etc etc
I would submit that maybe the first one qualifies as a social media network
My mistake, I thought the discussion was about online services in general.
> We need to start paying for ad-free services. Wake up.
You make it sound like there are no people that pay for ad-free services they find valuable. Or that there are no free ad-free services (ex: WhatsApp).
My feeling is that people know some "services" are not that "valuable" (ex: facebook, instagram, etc.), so they would not pay for them, but, like with drugs, they can't reduce their usage.
WhatsApp isn't free, you pay with your data. Facebook isn't running a charity.
I pay for some ad free services, but it’s infeasible across the entire internet and every possible link you might follow. Additionally, I fundamentally disagree with the concept of paying someone so that they don’t show me malicious ads. If they cannot or will not ensure the ads that they accept money to display are not malicious, I will not look at their ads.
We need to have an easy way to pay small amounts for a one-time service. A lot of websites offer content that you need only a couple of times in your life. It's worth paying for, but not worth all the hassle of setting up a normal payment.
This leaves ads as the only form of revenue and because ads don't care about the content, this creates a race to the bottom on generating slop.
The advertisers do care about the content. Ad based models ensure that content doesn't piss off advertisers. User payment models ensure that content doesn't piss off the user base, which does sound better, but audience capture can be every bit as bad.
> We need to start paying for ad-free services. Wake up.
The services (FB etc.) don't want this model, and it's not like the users can force them to switch to a paid model.
Also, a large percentage of users don't care and believe that "free" is better.
This would create a two tiered social commons however. Someone like me, homeless and on disability, what could I afford? Where would my word be heard?
It could also create "free" platforms, funded by billionaires, to control the speech on the platform.
The answer is a communal, government owned social media platform, that mimics the rules of the town square. in the US, this includes the same 1st amendment rights. This would allow equal access to everyone's voice.
IMHO, social media should not exists at all. It is too huge and too fast for our tiny brains.
> 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 what I glimpse from my occasional social media incursions.
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.
Most people's words do not need to be heard.
But the truth is that people don't want that. We had that before and it lost in the open market to free but ad supported. There is a very small and vocal group of people (which is massively over represented on HN) that really hate the ad supported model, but the vast majority don't really care and prefer it to paying in cash.
With so many sites refusing to serve you without an ad blocker, is there any solution?
I've very rarely encountered this with Firefox + uBlock Origin. The few sites that do are easily ignored.
What if you were required to put down a % of ad spend as a security deposit. Then if you were ever caught running a scam, you’d lose the deposit.
It would make running scams unprofitable, or at the very least cut into profit a lot / disincentivize it.
Wouldn't that still not address the two problems mentioned, moderation costs and loss of scam ad revenue?
Just curious what password manager I should use? I'm considering using a password manager instead of the Google ones and gradually switch all passwords to generated ones instead the one I usually use. Searched through HN for the last 6 months but found just too many posts about PM.
I believe Bitwarden, 1Password, or the stock Apple one are the typically recommended ones. Bitwarden is free (and can be self-hosted), 1Password is paid and has a slightly nicer UX, and the Apple one is good but requires you to be in their ecosystem. I personally use Bitwarden and have had no issues.
Thanks, I heard about the 1Password leak, but just checked online and looks their it's just their Okta system, not client info?
IMO MFA (or a passkey) is much more important. Most online accounts I have I couldn't give a rats ass if someone got in. (Not that they would because there would be no monetary value to them). Best to focus on those that are important and set MFA on them. If they don't offer MFA, find someone else who does. MFA + crappy password is better than strong PW w/o MFA, because even a PW manager can be leaked. This isn't to say you shouldn't care about secure PWs, but IMO it's the less important factor here.
The Google one is quite good if you use Chrome anyway.
Thanks, I use Firefox but I did save all of my past passwords in Google password already. So I guess I could keep it. I might switch anyway though as I'm switching to Brave.
*>They could massively reduce the volume of scams advertised on their networks
I'm not entirely sure that's true. It's equivalent to asking a platform to moderate all "harmful content" off the site. "Scam" is fundamentally subjective, just as "harm" is.
The real solution is to reform the justice system such that a citizen feeling they've been defrauded has a quick and easy process to get satisfaction for themselves and other similarly harmed people. We need a streamlined, totally online court that excels at gathering and interpreting data, and a decision in days not years. The ad networks are themselves the natural allies of such a reform, but such a change can and should start small as a pilot program at the state level. If successful, it removes the considerable legal-cost moat protecting scammers, and so it no longer makes sense to even attempt such a business, and the world becomes a slightly better place.
> "Scam" is fundamentally subjective, just as "harm" is.
From the article:
> Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams and banned goods, Reuters reports
I think we can agree that there's no "subjective" situation when a product is banned.
> The ad networks are themselves the natural allies of such a reform
The article (and the person you're replying to) point out that a significant portion of Meta's revenue comes from such scams. I'm really struggling to see how they're "natural allies" and not "antagonists" here. You're going to have to show me some research that backs up your claim because it flies in the face of the available information.
>I'm really struggling to see how they're "natural allies"
Ah, sorry. Perhaps I should have spelled it out. Meta desperately wants to avoid being regulated. One way they can avoid it is to help make the out-of-band justice system (much) more efficient such that they avoid messy moderation policies and don't need to be regulated anymore. Victims would be happier too, especially if they get remunerated for their pain, time, and trouble. The message to scammers everywhere (not just on Meta) becomes clear: go ahead and try it, you will get caught and put out of business, and likely sent to jail. Eventually the scammers will realize it's not worth it.
The unintended side-effect, sadly, is that legitimate business will be attacked as scams by profit-seeking or malicious individual malefactors.
In any event, I think reforming the US justice system is way overdue; it is far too expensive and time-consuming for most matters, and that means we live in a place with de facto lack of courts. And I don't like that.
> Meta desperately wants to avoid being regulated. One way they can avoid it is to help make the out-of-band justice system (much) more efficient such that they avoid messy moderation policies and don't need to be regulated anymore.
I might have bought that but a delayed flight spent reading Careless People swiftly disabused me of any such notions.
> In any event, I think reforming the US justice system is way overdue; it is far too expensive and time-consuming for most matters, and that means we live in a place with de facto lack of courts. And I don't like that.
Most countries have regulators that come with teeth, such that the only times they need to go to court are to confirm they have the teeth they're using. After that, companies fall in line. From the outside, it seems the USA does not have this system and has no desire to develop such a system.
Except in this case, the platform is actually paid real money for that content, so yeah, I absolutely expect them to review each and every piece of it.
If ads worked this way:
- Victim clicks crypto scam ad, loses their savings ($xx,xxx)
- Forensic investigation happens, determines that this happened due to a paid ad on site X. Site X knew that this was an ongoing problem and didn't manage to control it, but was still showing ads.
- Site X is considered complicit and just as liable for the loss as the scammer. Since the scammer is hard to find, the user sues the site and the site has to pay the losses.
- The site is now free to pursue their "business partner" for the damages, the user doesn't have to care.
I bet the ads would suddenly get reviewed a lot more. No sane publisher would allow ads from an ad platform that doesn't provide a guarantee against this issue. If a "good" ad platform started showing scams, the site would drop it once notified (because now they're on notice, and would be liable for any future scams). Thus, the platform would make damn sure that this doesn't happen.
"Scam" might be subjective but the legal system usually has a definition for it and judges to apply any remaining subjective judgement necessary. It's usually also pretty easy to avoid the need for a judge deciding by not trying to max out the we-think-this-is-technically-not-illegal grey area.
This doesn't require huge legal costs for the ad networks - they can simply refuse to do business with entities that are not verified, or allow ads for shady business areas where 40% of the businesses are borderline scams and 50% blatant scams...
While some things may exist in a grey area, there’s an immense volume of blatant, obvious fraud in mainstream ads. A deepfake of Elon Musk promoting a way to get rich with crypto is just so clearly a scam, and yet it’s one I’ve seen in preroll YouTube ads multiple times.
Making the platforms have some liability for facilitating fraud would be good, though. In the meantime I block ads.
Scams are absolutely not subjective and capitalism fails at every level without regulation like this. Your comment is very libertarian housecat coded.
Also 'just go to court' is such a naive take. As someone who has been in litigation before I can tell you those $350/hr billings add up quick. How many consumers can afford a 5 or even 6 digit legal bill for being scammed for a few hundred or thousands dollars on a FB ad? Of those who can, how many would see this pricetag as worth it? Sorry but small claims court isn't going to do discovery for you for some company hidden behind who knows how many storefronts and foreign proxies. You're going to have to do real litigation. Its absurd to expect every working class person to sue all scammers constantly. Instead ad providers should be policing their own ad networks and the working class should be using the government to implement proper regulations to protect ourselves.
People's first instinct is to attack the thing they don't like directly. The second instinct should be to consider the system in which those things arise, and what the incentives are for everyone involved. If you have a roomful of loud children, you could apply draconian rules on silence; or, if you notice there is no sound-deadening and so the children are unwittingly participating in a positive feedback loop to be heard above the din, you can add material. My goal is not a libertarian one, its a minimalism one. Streamlining the court system has many other benefits besides this one; the excessive cost and time required to use the court is used systematically by malefactors at every level of society. From patent trolls to absurd rates of criminal prosecutions that are never heard by a jury, it's an enormous problem in our society.
Regulation always seems simple, but there are inevitable unintended consequences. Sadly, those who see regulation as the only or best tool to shape behavior are quick to suggest yet more regulation to fix those unintended consequences, either unaware of the positive feedback loop or certain there exists some set of regulation that will finally, perfectly fix the system. I find this way of thinking naive; it is almost always better to make adjustments to the system to shape behavior that way. And in this case, the obvious way to do that is to fix the courts, and make justice affordable again.
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 seems simple" ? Will let the reader decide, because in the end it is a subjective choice.
I personally don't think there is one optimum that we can reach. At certain points in time and for certain subjects deregulation should be applied at other points in time regulation should be applied. I don't see any point in talking "generally", this depends on topic, country, priorities, etc.
>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 middle-class as well) are totally boxed out of the justice system in the USA. A pox of scammers is just one of the side-effects of the ossification and decay of the system. I'd like to solve a big chunk of problems all at once, including this one.
Just to be clear, the engagement is the problem, yes? We're reasonably secure against zero-click malware from ads by now I would hope?
Zero click browser exploits still do pop up—it's also hard to say how common they are, because they're hard to detect, and likely to be used very judiciously by the people who discover them to avoid showing their hand. Ad networks have certainly been a direct vector for malware in the past.
Within the past few years there were quite many malicious ads floating around that would trigger a redirect on load on iOS Safari, sending the user to a scam page (phishing, "you've won!", or instant redirect to the App Store), no engagement necessary.
Some recent browser zero days/malicious ads situations, not necessarily "an ad loaded in my browser -> pwned", but reasonably applicable:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/malicious-ads...
https://www.welivesecurity.com/en/eset-research/romcom-explo...
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/chrome-zero-day-f...
I think you don’t see ads that are served in there. Those are outright scams like fake investments and not just crypto but outright “buy big company X shares to get rich, photo of celebrity” with celebrities not even knowing they are used for those scam ads - meta doesn’t do shit about it.
Zero click malware would be most likely too sophisticated.
You click the ad contact people who will tell you where to wire money that’s the level we are talking about here.
Right. My point is that it still requires on social-engineering someone who reasonably ought to be primed to ignore all ads in the first place.
Apple and Microsoft need to wake up and bake it into the OS. Hopefully that will take meta and google down a notch.
Ad blockers don’t block Facebook ads because they appear as legitimate posts.
You can use uBlock Origin's element blocker to kill cards that deliver ads (or any other standardized blocks)
Is there a top recommended ad blocker that has strong security Bona fides you recommend for android?
I don’t use Android, but I understand uBlock Origin works with Firefox on it, which is kind of the gold standard on desktop, given the other browsers now restrict extensions in ways that make ad blockers less effective.
Yes, this works very well. The element zapper interface is a little challenging or I intuitive, but just using a default block list is so much better than using the internet without any ad blocking.
Use Firefox and install the uBlock Origin extension in Firefox.
I also suggest turning on the Annoyances and Cookie Banner filters in the uBO settings. They get rid of many popups.
Blocking in-app ads is a whole other ballgame. I don't have any suggestions for that.
You can actively poison your ad profile by using AdNauseum, which clicks on all the ads and then throws away the response. The actual ads are still hidden using UBO under the hood.
You can also use AdGuard+Tailscale to get DNS blocking of all ads on all devices. Tailscale will let you block in app ads, even on your phone even when on the cell network.
I combine both to block as much as possible.
Besides Firefox and unlock, I recommend rethink and the block lists, it will block ads in other apps.
uBlock Origin with Firefox. Nothing blocks as well, or from as trustworthy a provider.
Brave Browser
Get Mullvad VPN. It has ad and many other DNS blockers built into the app.
Honestly, not just ad networks. It’s also publishers. We tried 2 major non-google ad networks. The amount of scams and borderline scams were crazy. And apparently asking for some quality control is complicated. Even with google and ad-exchange, we had to raise the minimum costs by quite a bit to keep most of the scams out. This lowers revenue so most publishers have the same interest in fighting those scams as the networks.
The only reason to fight against the scams is because one cares a little about ones viewers (well, and I guess maybe a bit of brand safety). Which seems to not be the case for the vast majority.
I switched back to Firefox after Chrome watered down uBlock Origin's capabilities
The key sentences:
> the company prioritized enforcement in regions where the penalties would be steepest, the reporting found. The cost of lost revenue from clamping down on the scams was weighed against the cost of fines from regulators.
The companies don't necessarily want scams, and they might even be willing to forgo the scam revenue itself. But if the consequence of allowing the scam is low, and the consequence of doing something about it would be a loss of non-scam revenue (e.g. by disallowing legit customers or verification requirements making customers go to an "easier" competitor), they won't do anything about it.
It's time to treat them as accomplices. As the report shows - if they had to pay the damage they're helping to cause, priorities would shift and they would find a way to make the problem go away. As is, they have no reason to even try.
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 get 50% AI generated tai chi promising strength gain, weight loss and enlightenment, the other 50% israel sponsored ads assuring me people in gaza are not starving at all and completely healthy
> israel sponsored ads assuring me people in gaza are not starving at all and completely healthy
I've never seen anything like this and I see the reverse quite a bit.
I only ever see "Pray for the people of Israel" ads which is basically thinly veiled "fuck Palestine" messaging
if only there were some websites, an Ads Library or Ads Transparency Center of some kind, where people could easily verify any or all of this
Would anything change if there were?
There is: https://adstransparency.google.com/
Remember broadcast TV, early in the morning or late at night?
Infomercials for all kinds of scams from buying real estate with zero down, crap products that didn't work...
None of those scams were intermixed with popular legitimate content. If Facebook had a tab at the top called "Scams and Other Nonsense" and you clicked on that and it had a bunch of scammy content, that would be an equivalent to late night infomercials. But Meta doesn't do that. It mixes the scams in with all of its popular and non-scam content so you cannot easily tell it's scammy. Worse, it targets people vulnerable to those scams by tapping directly into their interests and sentiments in a way TV never could.
You are making a silly argument here. There's no equivalence at all.
They had popular non-scam content like music collections. Sounds of the 80's etc. Time life music and all that. Ron Popeils cooking gadgets.
Then you had guys like Kevin Trudeau and Don Lapre.
It's still like that! Late Night Broadcast TV still exists and is as weird as it ever was!
Arguably weirder, since stuff like this is on sometimes:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15737708/
It's a low-budget horror host show which was made for streaming, and coincidentally ended up on the air late on Friday nights.
I get a lot of ads from unicef asking money to send good to Gaza so I’m not sure how they target users
I pay for YouTube so all I get is paid creator promotions for VPNs and Squarespace unless it's someone being sent a free thing in exchange for a review
Normalize paying for things instead of selling your attention to the highest bidder.
Buying YouTube premium is the single best online decision one can make.
I choose to not watch YouTube. I was born in the 80s, am a software engineer, and I’ve watched maybe 10 total hours of YouTube, all 100% of those hours were car-repair related.
So, now we should all pay money to avoid being advertised scams?
That's a pretty good scam.
Normalize paying for things instead of selling your attention to the highest bidder.
But you just admitted that you pay for YouTube and it shows you creator promotions. You are literally paying to see ads, then telling people not to do the same.
Unless there's some subtlety I'm missing here. I haven't been on YouTube in at least a decade. I see no difference between a blogger pushing a VPN and Google showing an ad for a VPN.
The big draw for cable TV was that you could watch TV without ads. Then ads started appearing on cable and people said it's OK, because the content is higher quality and not available elsewhere. Then that changed, and now there is no difference between broadcast, cable/satellite, and streaming services. Except that you don't have to pay for broadcast. (Yet. It's coming.)
> Unless there's some subtlety I'm missing here. I haven't been on YouTube in at least a decade.
Youtube Premium is fighting back against the sponsor segments with this "commonly skipped segment" feature. You hit a fast forward button and it automatically skips ahead to the place most people jumped to.
A year or two ago somebody asked Adam Ragusea about whether this type of skipping causes problems for creators - and what he said was basically that if viewers see the brand name / call to action at the end of the ad, that's mostly what matters to sponsors.
No idea if that's been borne out in practice, though.
> But you just admitted that you pay for YouTube and it shows you creator promotions.
It's easy to skip creator promotions. You can also choose not to engage with creators that conduct ads.
I'm fine paying YouTube not to force me to watch their ads. I can deal with product placement on my own.
If you don't like youtubers with sponsors, don't watch those videos. Not all do.
Personally I pay for youtube and I don't mind the sponsor sections. They're easy to fast forward through and income goes directly to the creator. Youtube doesn't take a cut. These are the only kinds of ads that work on me - in the rare case that the product is something I'm interested in, I go out of my way to make sure I use the creator's link.
The long story short is that there are creators I like and I want them to devote all their time to making more content. I'm glad some of them get sponsors. For many I just straight up give them money on Patreon.
>Unless there's some subtlety I'm missing here.
I've gotten rid of 90% of the ads by paying for YouTube, the rest of the ads I skip by jumping forward in the video which is annoying but only a little OR by being legitimately interested in what the person has to say if they're reviewing a product which has been in some way paid for. I'm also just fine with someone promoting their own merch or patreon which I am sometimes actually interested in.
The subtlety I don't get why you're missing is I now have very much reduced ad exposure and the rest I do have is entirely controllable.
Had a few of those too.
Mostly, I'm getting things like German ads for my local German supermarket (that I would've gone to anyway without the ad) dubbed badly into English with an AI that can't tell how to pronounce the "." in a price, plus a Berlin-specific "pay less rent" company that I couldn't use even if I wanted to because I don't rent.
But when I get 30 seconds of ads a minute into a video that had 30 seconds of ads before I could start watching… I don't care what the rest of the video was going to be about, I don't want to waste my life with a 30:60:30:… pattern of adverts and "content" whose sole real purpose is now to keep me engaged with the adverts. (This is also half of why I don't bother going to Facebook, every third post is an ad, although those ads can't even tell if I'm a boy or a girl, which language I speak, nor what my nationality is, and the first-party suggested groups are just as bad but grosser as they recently suggested I join groups for granny dating, zit popping, and Elon Musk).
Haha it goes both ways!
Same. About half of Youtube ads that I get on my AppleTV (no adblock there sadly) are now AI generated scam products.
It’s crazy how bad it has gotten and some channels have like 10 ads if it’s a long enough video
YouTube premium lite has been a game changer. Otherwise I would have given up on watching on Apple TV
Signs of collapse
For some reason all the YouTube ads on my TV are very very normal ads for well known companies and products.
As soon as I disable my adblocker on my PC though I only get fake scam ads.
And sadly I have to compete with them trying to sell physical products on YouTube. Just no way
My TV has ad block for youtube. I pay 20 minutes salary per month and see no adverts at all, on TV, on phone, on computer.
I never understand why well-paid HN commentators refuse to pay for their entertainment.
On the web at large, sure use an ad blocker, there's no choice there. There is on youtube though.
Paying Google to not attempt to scam me is... not something I plan to do.
> I never understand why well-paid HN commentators refuse to pay for their entertainment.
People don't want to pay (help) people they don't like. YouTube ads do not feel fair, they feel manipulative and unethical. It's expected that most people wouldn't want to willingly engage with that kind of asshattery.
Contrast that with platforms like twitch. I'd say the average twitch viewer (that interacts with streams/chats) has a slightly negative view of Twitch. But many will still willingly donate dozens of subs to streamers they like. This removes ads for other people, not themselves.
People think YouTube is greedy and untrustworthy. Why would you willingly feed that machine?
I don't pay because it feels like paying protection money to the mafia. "Here's an annoyance/danger we created for you. If you pay us, we'll stop doing it."
on the other hand, it's how their business model is able to work? People get wayyyy more views on YouTube than they do on Patreon or federated platforms or Nebula or Floatplane or or or or or or or
I think it really depends on how much you use it. For example, there is no way that I would pay for Facebook. It annoys me greatly that I’m forced to use it a few times per year, and I have to sell all of my data for it, but unfortunately I don’t pay just to avoid data gathering about me, because it happens anyway, no matter what I do.
But I pay happily for YouTube, because I use it daily, and my home country’s propaganda was annoying enough to make it worth.
Most FAANG executive and engineers use premium plans or AdBlockers, they probably don't care or even notice how dangerous their products are getting.
The recent YouTube updates made me disabled my adblocker for a bit. Almost every ad I got was a scam. I reported one to YouTube, a deepfake investment scam. They actually got back to me and said they had removed the ad.
2 days later, I got the same ad again.
Why do you provide free labor to Google by reporting those ads? Just block the adds...
Even better, block them and click them all with the Adnauseam extension.
Same for me, and the worst thing is that they always take 3 days to review my report and delete the scam.
Ironically, one of the potentially greatest uses of AI, and it doesn't seem to be getting applied at all.
YouTube on Apple TV was one of the last places I saw ads. Ad blockers on browser and iPhone and all other streaming providers I pay for have no ads
Paying for YouTube premium lite (I think it’s new) has been the best thing in ages! The toxic ads are finally gone!
YouTube Premium Lite used to exist years ago, then they discontinued it in 2024 (I know because I used to be a very happy subscriber), now they brought it back but only in a few selected markets[0].
Google products' bullshit as usual, I never needed/wanted YouTube Music and the other bloat they wanted to force me to pay for, I was happily paying to not have ads...
[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6307365?sjid=93860...
What if you take YouTube to court
Ideally this but Section 230 guarantees that you will lose.
The laws need to be changed.
I don't know if ads count as content posted by users.
It does. Advertisers are also users and ads are generated by them.
Then yeah it's a stupid law.
Changed to what? Should dang become legally responsible for any of the bad legal advice I've been giving people on this forum? Should Murdoch go to prison for the lies in the paid advertising that Fox anchors and opinion wonks are doing every day?
Let me take things back a step - it's nearly impossible to hold people who are lying accountable. Surely the platform bears less responsibility than the liars on it?
I don't know but I think there is a room for compromise. If you post illegal things online and the site cannot identify you so that you can be held accountable then the site should be held accountable. As it stands people are harmed and nobody is liable so we end up in this situation.
There's a simple way to do that. Legislate a requirement for ID, the users will provide it to the platform, the platform will provide it to law enforcement when requested.
Kind of like how South Korea (where you need a national ID to access digital services) is doing, or the UK is trying to do with their ID push.
(And then who wants this could go have a fight with the people who don't want this.)
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 the law. People who are too young to know what it was like before that protection set the internet free to create and collaborate.
I despise social media. But demonizing 230 just shows a basic lack of knowledge of history, economics, and the reasons it was created.
Well, give us the argument, then, instead of the mere allegation that history is frowning at us. Why is it not possible to change the law to permit platforms to not be liable for speech of their users, particularly when users are engaging in a platform in the capacity of communicating and exchanging information, (i.e., 230 as it is today) but not permit advertisers from displaying ads which contain blatant fraud, for which the advertising platform is profiting off that fraud?
> 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...
> Without 230, there would be no YouTube. No Facebook. No Instagram. No social media.
Sounds like a good thing to me?
> Half of the tech industry and a good chunk of the jobs that people on HN do would never have happened.
And it would be good. It's not like we do any real work. I know I don't.
protip, install uBlock Origin - no more ads in Youtube
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’m buying his new heater that will heat my house in minutes with virtually no electricity usage!
Home Depot doesn’t want me to know about it, but I saw the ad!
For what it's worth, I see no crypto videos. YouTube recommends stuff I find enjoyable (lots of sketch comedy, TTRPG videos, interesting documentary style stuff, BTS on video game development, etc). I really have to wonder if your tastes align with crypto currency scams.
That being said, I am paying for Premium, so I wonder if you are, and if you are blocking ads.
We are talking about ads and promoted videos. Nothing to do with what it is recommending unless I am entirely conflating the root of this subject. If that is true, then of course you would never have seen these as a premium user.
Scam videos are the chum box ads of the video world. Usually the lowest cost ads and so if you block tracking or are viewing a video in a private session you will have the highest chance of hitting these ads.
Only see ads when watching youtube via chromecast, but they're all from real brands, holiday companies, cars, google pixel, etc
And? YouTube web absolutely has ads and if they have not built a model on your user you will absolutely get the chum ads like scams. I am not sure what you’re trying to tell us.
> I am not sure what you’re trying to tell us
Gotcha. So you are ignorant of why people are commenting.
The OP was talking about seeing 50% scam crypto ads. Our responses were to provide a comparison. Not to say that it doesn't happen, but that 50% scam crypto ads are not the norm for everyone. It's helpful to have that comparison when providing anecdotal information.
No one is saying those ads don't happen, only that it's probably not normal.
Next time, instead of being unnecessarily antagonistic, admit to being ignorant and ask.
Please don’t start drama where nothing exists. You were confused and I pointed out that 1) I believe we are talking about promoted, which is paid, videos not the recommendation engine. These of course are not purely ads but are paid for. And 2) that these chum style ads and promoted videos have a much higher prevalence with folks that block tracker where user profiles have not been built. It’s the chum ads of the video world.
I am simply asking what is the point of the response to my comment. Ads of all degree exist but these scams do exist in a pretty large % of the ads shown but perhaps much lower dollar value since they get shown to profiles without a tangible viewer model.
Next time, instead of using inflammatory language please just slow down and reread or have a more thoughtful discussion. Thanks.
> Please don’t start drama where nothing exists.
You were ignorant (fact) and unecessarily antagonistic (fact).
I corrected you.
> You were confused and I pointed out that
I wasn't, and claiming I was is a lie.
> I am simply asking what is the point of the response to my comment.
Yes, you were ignorant. You didn't know somehting. Ignorance isn't an insult. It's a lack of knowledge.
> instead of using inflammatory language
Take our own advice.
> We are talking about ads and promoted videos.
Ad and "promoted" videos are different in this context. And the OP was mentioning promoted videos, not ads.
> At least 50% of the YouTube promoted videos
I've never seen a "promoted video" (whatever that is specfically) that deals with crypto. Note: Premium users can still see promoted videos. I imagine these are more targetted to people who would want to watch these sorts of videos.
> Nothing to do with what it is recommending unless I am entirely conflating the root of this subject.
I was referring to recommended not in a strictly technical sense, but in a way any normal person would use the term. e.g. Recommended videos meaning: All the videos youtube shows me that it thinks I might want to watch. Whether these are officially "Recommended" or "Subscribed" or "Promoted" or whatever, I don't know.
What I do know is that I don't see any crypto scam videos or ads.
> If that is true, then of course you would never have seen these as a premium user.
Apparently, that's not the case.
tl;dr: We are talking about videos like normal people. You are wrong.
No... these are "paid promoted" videos that show up in your feed[0]. They are different from ads that roll when a video is playing. Example screenshot I found on reddit [1].
- video from screenshot[2]
- coe from video[3]
I'm guessing I get served these because I typically interact with them because I'm curious to read the code they link to see how obvious the scam is. It's also fun to reverse face search the actors and find them on fiverr.
[0](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/141808?hl=en) [1](https://imgur.com/ckAxmuk) [2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvsGCvw9AFM) [3](https://pastecode.io/s/pcp4ao4q)
As I originally stated I am happy to be corrected but I don’t think you understand it either. Promoted videos are ads. Premium removes in-stream ads, not in-feed ones. They’re paid placements, not recommendations.
And again as a premium user you won’t see chum style feed or promoted videos because premium removed the feed style and promoted will be more tailored to your preferences.
Which coming full circle leads us back to my original statement. If they don’t have a good user profile for you, you will get lower cost ads (promoted videos) which generally are going to be the chum box of ads, crypto, magic formula powders, get rich quick.
It's because google has no profile on you, likely because you block all tracking. Which is fine, but at least understand that it's not the norm.
Normal non-tech users (from watching youtube at friends houses or at my parents), mostly get ads for fabric softener and cat litter.
If Google doesn't know what ad to show me, why not show no ad, instead of a scam?
Does trillion-dollar Google desperately need the 3½¢ of revenue the scam ad generates?
It's not that Google doesn't know what to show you, it's that no advertiser outbids the scam ad for your 30 seconds of attention.
To put it another way, you have next to no value, and it's only by the goodwill of Google that they even let you on the platform.
Goodwill doesn't explain why Google Ads will show scam ads on other people's web sites.
Yeah, it's wild how poorly the hackernewses understand this. If the ad platform has few signals for targeting, but it does have the available signals of you're using a weird VPN or tor, and a weird user agent on an uncommon platform, then it's just going to assume you're a crypto loser like the other people sharing those traits.
… I'll bite, then. I not only accept cookies in this case, I'm logged in. I get these same cryptocurrency scam ads.
The metadata for ads comes from external sources, such as Google AdWords embedded in millions of websites.
I've gave up reporting scams on FB, they don't care. It always an automated response "we've reviewed the content and it doesn't break our community guidelines" or similar.
These are for obvious scams, account in different country to items they are trying to purchase/sell, haven't been used in a long time and suddenly active. When selling vehicles the account tries to make you go to malicious websites to pay for vehicle checks falsely insisting the seller is legally required to do so.
When 10% of their revenue is from scams, without government policy there's no incentive for FB to fix. Scams feels like a feature they silently tolerate while doing the bare minimum by providing a button and automated responses to look like they are trying to prevent it.
This is why, despite being a huge fan of their engineering, I'm leery of Facebook and Google and any advertising-based tech company in the long run. The incentives to block fraudulent, malicious and even simply ineffective ads are just not there.
Anybody remember this? https://consumerwatchdog.org/uncategorized/google-shells-out...
Google stopped that practice then... or it might not have! We'll never know since, apparently unlike silly little Meta, it has been much more careful about not having any kind of incriminating internal documents or correspondence being preserved for discovery.
And in any case, it could fall back to the much more lucrative business of anti-competitive manipulation of the ads market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...
I've had a hint that the ad industry was rotten for a decade+ when in a prior life I saw our regional head of marketing casually throw stats on the whiteboard showing something insane like 30 - 50% of ad clicks on all major platforms being fraudulent. She was cynical but also jaded to the fact that, despite being widely known and accepted in the industry, it wasn't clear if things would ever improve. Shocked, I followed the ad industry and such reports for a while, anticipating a crash. Glad I didn't bet on it, because the crash never came.
Unfortunately, there is so much money in this that it seems nothing will happen.
I deal with domain impersonation and fraudulent ad takedowns nearly every day. A year ago, Meta would remove fake ads falsely using my company’s branding within a day or two. Now these same ads run for over a month with no action taken. This isn’t just an inconvenience these scams cause real harm. The money fraudsters extract fuels their expansion into larger operations. Meta has become completely negligent in its enforcement responsibilities and shows no empathy for the victims it enables. Meta is the single largest enabler of this fraud ecosystem the operations fund human trafficking, force, labor, and systematic financial fraud, targeting vulnerable populations, particularly elderly victims, who lose their life savings at a point in time where they have no time to earn it back. Every dollars these criminals make through Meta platform goes to some of the most depraved actors on the planet.
"...scammers obtain sexual images of a user, often a teenager, under false pretenses and then blackmail them – ... was becoming commonplace on Meta’s platforms"
There you go U.K. OFCOM. Here's child endangerment propagated knowingly by Facebook. Don't worry, I know you won't do anything to Facebook because you "protecting" kids is pretext.
Listen throw7, Meta paid almost £30 million in tax in 2023, an effective tax rate of 12%. I'm unsure why numbers for 2024 aren't available but you'll need to speak to legal about that.
If you want to throw7 that all away over some media speculation be my guest. I'll tell the NHS to fund themselves for 11 minutes next year to make up the shortfall.
Original Reuters article: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
Certainly puts the £3m lawsuit settlement with Martin Lewis (UK consumer financial advice guru who sued because he's the go-to fake endorsement of any scam product targeting Britons using Facebook ads) into perspective.
No wonder scammers are still spamming his likeness all over Facebook paid ads even though it's technically trivial for them to algorithmically flag it
The news here per https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/bombshell-report... is that Meta set an internal policy that scammers above 0.15% of Meta’s revenue must be protected from any flagging. It’s not a technical challenge. It’s something they desire to maintain and have codified.
> Despite those efforts, this spring, Meta’s safety team “estimated that the company’s platforms were involved in a third of all successful scams in the US,”
1 third of all scams, crazy.
This just came out yesterday but what the hell man! its like only keeping your top cocaine sellers in hope less of your people on the streets, less possibility to get caught. Everyone else out.
How the heck are they not being raided and at least temporarily shut down at this exact moment? No wonder Trump is best friend of Mark as of recently... it really does scream "guilty".
Once I got an Instagram ad for buying ketamine that just linked to a telegram channel. They didn't even bother being coy or using mispelling or slang. A simple keyword search to flag for more review would have caught it. I can't even wrap my head around what internal controls exist when something like that makes it out to users.
The bad actor serves a benign ad to the ad review system, and only serves the scam to real users. It's called "cloaking" - an interesting (but a bit depressing) topic to explore.
That's called a broken system and implies either incompetence or malicious intent by the ad platform.
The fact the ad platforms are multi-billion dollar companies leans my opinion towards malicious intent.
You can change the link target, but you cannot change the media afterwards without a new check.
So the ad review system is just requesting the ad from the advertiser, and not ever bothering to disguise itself? Didn't we have this shit figured out for brick-and-mortar restaurant reviews decades ago?
As far as I understood, the problem happens when the ad has a link to a website. I can't imagine that happening with static images or videos that don't link a website (that could be solved quite trivially...)
There are Facebook groups devoted to selling stolen cars (strikers).
There’s zero to none manual review. The people who run these type of ads probably burn 100 facebook ad accounts per day
Oh definitely. I have zero expectation of high level of manual reviews. You can run limited runs of adds for next to a couple dollars. The math could never work out. I understand a lot with make it through the system, this was just so blatant. It should be so easy to catch with an automated system. It was nothing but red flags. The automated systems could reject outright or maybe escalate to manual review if it met enough criteria (account reputation, spend floor, etc)
Meta wants to have big scammers. It's hugely profitable. That's why they codified internal policy that if the scam generates at least 0.15% of Meta's revenue, they must be protected and never moderated.
There was a big "bombshell" report on this yesterday (it didn't hit HN frontpage though).
Meta knowingly gets a lot of its funding from scams. They love it! They don't care about technical solutions for it: they've banned any solutions from being implemented because it would impact revenue.
>The math could never work out.
Horseshit. Running an ad in a local publication was also pretty damn cheap and was always human reviewed.
Zuck and Meta are playing the role of Robinhood. They take the money from scammers and advance their philanthrophy.
https://x.com/a16z/status/1986486508355002584
Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg on Curing All Disease
We sat down with Dr. Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, co-founders of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to discuss their ambitious plan to cure, prevent, and manage all disease by the end of the century.
Did Facebook's LLM write this comment?
I’m assuming this is satire but in case it’s not- He’s PROVIDING A SERVICE for the scammers. Not stealing from them lol
Zuck has donated something like 2% of his net worth. Not really “ambitious”. For a normal American that’s like donating to “cars for kids” every 8 years when you upgrade your Mercedes and claiming you’re a philanthropist
That probably depends on your definition of a scam, but it seems fairly low. Many products and services advertised online just skirts the border of being scams or fraud.
i came to say that, even outdoor advertising probably gets 10 or 20% revenue from snake oil
And what percentage of infomericals and other off-peek TV advertising is in the grey area around scams?
Agreed. At best most of the stuff I ended up buying from an Instagram ad turned out to be oversold or overpromised and underdelivered. While not a scam outright, it's sort of training me to avoid buying anything from ads...
There is an entire network of "get rick quick just by my pdf" intagramers, who peddle a pdf teaching you how to find a chinese product, make a website, and then drop ship that chinese product for 3x the cost to unsuspecting buyers.
Probably 75% of products you see on instagram ads, you can go find on temu for their actual cost, usually at 80% discount.
> Probably 75% of products you see on instagram ads, you can go find on temu for their actual cost, usually at 80% discount.
But when you do buy it on Temu, is it even a legitimate product?
It's the same product.
I understand that. Doesn't answer the question.
There's lots of legit stuff on temu
One of my theories is that there isn't actually enough honest companies buying ad space to satisfy the shareholders in companies like Alphabet or Meta. If they actually care to also filter out the ads for junk products and services, there would probably be a minor collapse in the industry.
Honest companies are priced out by scammy companies, and as long as these companies share the profits they are totally fine profiting off scams. They make more money off the scams, simply put.
It got so bad that even non-tech savvy people around me learnt to do a lot of research about any product shown on Instagram ads.
To me any product advertised on Instagram, or through YouTubers sponsorships, have become synonymous with overpromised bullshit if not outright scams. Every single time I see a sponsorship deal on a YouTube video I do some research just to validate it, and the vast majority of it are outright shitty products.
It's been working great as a signal of what products not to buy.
Those are the other 90% of Meta revenue. Pure criminal fraud is 10%.
> That probably depends on your definition of a scam, but it seems fairly low.
That probably depends on your definition of a scam but I'd argue we need to resynchronize that definition. They are scams, because the people behind them know what they're saying is plainly false, and they exploit the explosion of digital networks (like ads) to spread those lies. In the 20th century, the channels for scams were far narrower and easier to pinpoint.
I wonder how much of Meta the corporation is a scam waiting to crumble. Hundreds of billions of dollars can make people do questionable things. -their revenue is 99% ads with more than 80% coming from FB and IG -they can only sell ads if they have a large and active user base -DAP (daily active people) is reported publicly but calculated internally -ad spending, views, and engagement are calculated by Meta's own platform
Anecdote (why I think it is a scam)- I had a FB account, I needed it for a previous job but didn't want it. I set up a random email address at a host I had never used, had a made-up FB name, and used a password generator for both the email address and FB accounts. My FB account had almost no activity besides viewing company posts. FB was only used from a single desktop computer. Passwords were stored in my (local only desktop) password manager.
After a couple years, FB emailed me and claimed my account was hacked. The "hacker" changed my profile picture (was a blank avatar icon) to an AI photo of a random guy. Facebook says it is hacked but they keep it visible, my two friends are still friends with the old account (they know it was hacked). FYI - I didn't care enough to send them a copy of my ID, nor did my ID match my user name, so I couldn't reclaim my account.
How would a hacker combine a random username, with a random email (has not been pwnd) only used for FB, guess a ~20 character random password, etc? And why, to steal an account with no followers and to do nothing with the account? That is a lot of work and criminal charges for nothing.
I am fine with FB saying the account was hacked and closing it. It has been years and the account is still live. Is it "active" and counted towards their users? They have a HUGE financial incentive to keep and count all accounts, and they have no oversite to verify accounts since it is all calculated internally with opaque algorithms.
> I wonder how much of Meta the corporation is a scam waiting to crumble.
I imagine almost none of it. Social networks solve connectivity problems that people want solved. Talk to some "casuals" who aren't in tech about how they find out about new restaurants, social trends, arts and crafts, places to go visit, etc. and the answer is Instagram or TikTok. And FB does the same but for older generations.
Ads are also a fundamental revenue pillar in this world. You can layer in relevance ads for a product to anyone, at any time, for any topic. If something exists and people pay attention to it, there's a way to make money advertising around it.
There's ... certainly deeper questions to be had about if this stuff is actually good for us, but in the mean time, it's very real and worth a lot of money.
Your desktop was hacked or your email was hacked?
Did they take control of the email account?
I tried to get Kickstarter to take down an obvious scam a while back. Best I could do was post on Reddit to warn folks though.
Checked on it recently, so many comments of folks asking for shipping details / anything. Hundreds of thousands of dollars just scammed from folks. And they're still raising / stringing folks along.
It's wild.
That sounds tantalizing! Link please?
As a former Meta employee (also dealt with Shopping and Ads), I am quite shocked at the percentage of "commerce" scams in my Instagram feed now. Easily 9 out of 10 promoted "buy" posts use AI videos of non-existent products leading to scammy sites. Any current employees willing to chime in?
I actually got suckered by the 3d printer scam. My bank helped while PayPal figured it out (2 months). Facebook is still showing the fake Bambu labs ads. There’s no FBI to enforce online fraud so why would they care?
There is. It's known as the Internet Crimes Complaint Center (IC3).
I got scammed on Instagram when I was in the hospital getting chemotherapy.
It was christmas time, and I got an ad for a cool looking steam punk keyboard. I ordered it for my kid who had recently got into PC gaming. It was only $60, and when it didn't come I checked my bank and credit card and didn't see any charges, so I assumed that I didn't actually finish the order. Until almost a year later when I realized I paid with paypal, and they used funds I had sitting in there for some reason. By then it was too late to challenge.
In my country there are obvious clones of known portals with clickbaity titles, visually hard to distinguish from real. Always with some random url. Sometimes just fake news and propaganda, sometimes selling fake things. Under paid sponsorship. Reported them multiple times. Always the response is as follows: we looked at it and found nothing wrong. All the disputes are also killed. So its done on purpose
If you include speculation and gambling I'd bet 10% of all economic activity is heavily dependent on either outright scams or scam-adjacent behavior.
Sad, because I know first hand of legitimate businesses who struggle to run Instagram ads due to unexplained blocks or payment gateway issues
A new car built by my company leaves somewhere travelling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
I don't think the analogy applies the same way. Meta simply choose to be evil not because it costs less overall but because they're unable to provide/filter actually useful ads to consumers. The rear diff is instead a filthy window but consumers don't sue for better quality because everything else works good enough and those that do crash could have cleaned the windows themselves.
Ohh, so naïve. They choose inaction because it's profitable, that's it. They can claim they were unaware and they are out either scot-free or with a slap on their gigantic wrist.
ability "to provide/filter actually useful ads" is a function of moderation budget and not much else
To them it's all an algorithm. Human moderation is completely infeasible at their massive scale.
And if the algorithm can't moderate then what? We should all suffer because doing it right isn't feasible?
Yes. You can choose to drive a broken car, not drive it, or fix with aftermarket parts and then drive it. The company that made it cannot deliver solution.
I think there needs to be some moderation here because Meta clearly does offer useful ads to consumers, otherwise it wouldn’t have so much insane revenue from ads. If people don’t find the ads useful then they won’t click on them or give the company money.
I think the average user on HN (who blocks ads constantly, uses things like AdNauseam, pihole, etc.) is not going to be your typical purchaser. If you look at your typical American, they buy a lot of shit through those ads and a lot of people actually like the ads.
My only complaint with the ads has been the targeting has always been crap. If you allow personalization, they do get more relevant. But, that complaint of mine is my own personal one. I’m like a typical HN user, ads don’t typically read me well due to my blocking on all kinds of platforms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Fuel_system_fires,_...
Recalls happen because they are required by regulators...
Google should have to make this disclosure as well. I'd guess >50% of their AdX revenue is from click-trick, fake button, scam ads. Across the board I'd expect Google's ad revenue to be at least 10% from scams, if not more.
Source: a decade of running a website monetized with adx and having to hire people to manually monitor and block scam display ads multiple times a day.
NextDNS or a similar solution is absolutely essential these days. You can't always configure every device your loved ones use. And Chrome on mobile will always be a problem. NextDNS solves this for me to a large extent.
As my children become old enough to have more unfettered internet access, I plan to tell them the lessons of my experience: that all online ads are for products that range from disappointing to fraudulent, so do your best to completely ignore them. I would hope that every parent does the same and we end up with a generation that dries up the revenue for this sick racket.
I suppose the next move by advertisers will be corrupting all the other metrics of quality that I rely on. At that point, paywalled services like Consumer Reports (which has its own massive limitations) may be the only relatively authentic signals of quality left in the digital world.
A convergence to that equilibrium can be predicted based on it having already happened in the financial advice industry. The dictum that "if it's free, you're the product" is just as true of old-school in-person finance as it is of the digital world, except in finance the exploitative free system has been carefully carved out by decades of industry-honed regulation.
I think even more general lessons are appropriate: "Anyone approaching you trying to sell you something, is selling garbage." which includes ads but also other forms of unsolicited commercial communication. Or "Anyone approaching you, when you can't figure out what it is they want, is likely trying to sell you garbage." You need to have your shields way up these days.
I have never forgotten this since the day I naively sat through a meandering two hour pitch from hell for James Hardie siding.
Honestly, in every area of my life where I have to rely on others, someone has tried to grift me at least once. And that's only the cases where I have definitive evidence.
Do you think your kids are old enough to internalize that? I assume they are somewhere around pre-teen.
I don't have any kids, so asking because I don't know and am curious.
Snakeoil 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?
They’re talking about all the other types of supplements with questionable benefits like turkesterone.
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.
I do weightlifting so taking 1.5-2 grams * bodyweight of protein makes sense. I am not American but a lot of it just looks like sodium, carbs, sugar and fat rather than lean meat.
i think they're talking about Hims-type businesses and the type of stuff that makes low/mid-level right-wing grifters their money: colloidal silver, methylene blue, anything else Alex Jones is hawking. maybe you could group Tucker Carlson's Nicotine Pouches For Christian Nationalists in there too, idk.
Guys they are putting chemicals in the water that make frogs gay!!!!
Anyway you should buy my bottle of research chemicals that will make your balls bigger. Evidence? What are you, the Illuminati?
Also check out this hat purported to protect your head from electromagnetic radiation even though it is shaped exactly like a lens pointed directly at your brain.
Don't forget to harass random telecom repairman about how dangerous 5G is! We will be talking all about it on our app you can buy so you can watch us anywhere!
I just... I just don't understand. There are people who seem to have near infinite credulity, at least for the "right" people.
At least something like "Miracle Mineral Solution" had a partially fake "study" where they actually gave people a harmful thing to drink just to say they did.
That guy from FoldingIdeas had a comment that resonates with me: There are people who trust something implicitly entirely because an actual authority told them not to trust it. "They believe the fake facebook story because facebook told them it was fake". But even those people are still demonstrably unable to connect past actions to current results to a point that I'm not sure how they trust that breathing is required for being alive.
Like there's so much about reality that is so simple and clear and demonstrable, and they just don't seem to be at all capable of squaring even those simple facts... No, crystals can't do shit. No "vibrations" just aren't a thing. These people live in a different reality than I do, but I don't understand how they can look around them and match that to the reality they have been sold. Those pills haven't made you any fucking smarter! Haven't you noticed?!
Like even Joe Rogan told Matt Walsh "Hey, you are wrong, there's really only a few thousand sex change operations a year" instead of the millions Walsh claimed and he just said "I don't believe that" and I'm like what the hell buddy do some basic math how many people do you know that got a sex change operation last year?
X's scam originated revenue is probably a bigger percent, but 10% is too much... Shame on Meta.
edit: wow, some people REALLY don't like getting told they are knowingly contributing negatively to society.
https://jesse.id/blog/posts/im-telling-yall-its-adbotage
I wrote a blog about turning advertising against advertisers, and as I see more and more stuff like this, I wonder how the ad-based Internet survives this era of unfettered and unpunished scamming.
I wonder what their definition of scammy is? I bet it’s pretty narrow.
It catches abouth 10% of scams ;)
Probably limited to strictly criminal scams so as to avoid liability.
If 10% of my income came from scams, I’d be thrown in prison…
To me this basically says roughly 10% of all internet advertising revenue is from scams. I’d bet Google has a much higher number than 10%, since they do more volume.
Google and Meta are kinda like cattle ranches --- they're not being run to benefit the cattle.
Users of these platforms are being farmed like cattle.
I've been seeing legitimate pornography on Facebook while scrolling through reels. I thought it was "just my algorithm", but co-workers brought it up during lunch. Quite a few of them are seeing the exact same ads.
I've reported them a few times, but surprisingly (or maybe not), Facebook responds back with "we didn't find anything that goes against our community standards".
These ads usually link to a website where you can download an application (a chat app, or some AI generation). Of course, they're not in the play store. It's frustrating when I think of the times I was flat out rejected for my legitimate ads related to programming, or a job board, or real estate, but they approve PORNOGRAPHY. What in the world do those posters of pornography know that I don't? How could they get that approved? There has to be some cleverness going on.
> What in the world do those posters of pornography know that I don't?
The power of persistence. I'm not being glib: these people probably get most of their ads/accounts blocked or banned, and have a dismal success rate baked into their business model, but they keep submitting until one goes through.
Misrepresentation is another key ingredient, but I hope you're not willing to buy a network of bot or havked accounts just so you can get an ad approved.
Yea, I have got ads for hardcore porn starting a month or two ago on Facebook. I only use marketplace, have no friends on the platform and have only used it to buy and sell as marketplace is unfortunately the only platform which is used for private transactions where I live.
the obvious question to you is "have you tried adding pornography to your ads"?
I've once seen an ad for escorts (literal word they used) in my area on fb. But that one did get removed.
That would explain why they never do anything against obvious financial scams.
Let's hope they don't let a paperclip-maximizing AI decide how to maximize revenue!
If i Look at all the finfluences and "get thin in 30h with my cale diet eBook"-influencer, i though it was substantially more than 10%.
If my company inadvertently made money from scams, I would try to make the victims whole or donate that money. It's so scummy that they sit around waiting to be fined. It's just plain stupid management to document this in emails and not also document a good faith attempt to make it right. I always assume my emails could be made public after my entire mailbox was subpoenaed in a lawsuit my employer was involved in and I was deposed to answer questions about email threads and source code comments from years ago. (I didn't do anything wrong personally, but my employer most likely did.) If I'm going to discuss something that could make me or the company look bad, I'm sure as hell going to write it in a way that's defensible when it gets out.
ban digital advertisement
I'd add billboards and other physical ads too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
https://dkdc.dev/posts/ban-advertisement/ (not as much content I admit)
It's very clear that social media is dead. My mom sometimes tells me to go look at a picture on Facebook. I'm astonished that there is literally nothing on there to see but ads.
I and anyone I know only post stories on Instagram at best. My feed is JAM packed with ads and cringe people still trying to be influencers.
Threads is a rounding error.
X is blah
Meta is desperate to move to AI because they know this. They see the data and are not dumb. They want to squeeze every last dime out while they still can.
Meta doesn't know anything, the last successful "product" that they built (as opposed to buying) was splitting off Messenger into a separate app.
Since then, they invested heavily in providing free internet that failed (Free Basics), wasted a bunch of money on some sort of a global cryptocurrency that never even launched (Libra/Diem), tried to invent a whole new market with VR and it went nowhere, and now they're going all in on "AI" but the only thing they have to show for it are some sort of celebrity-impersonating Instagram bot accounts and some glasses whose selling point is that they're branded as Ray-Bans.
FB is an extractive institution. The business model is to get people addicted and profit from it. It’s little different in my eyes from drug dealing. Well, I guess there’s a lot more harm done by FB
Seems like the word for this is "complicit"
That's a quarter to a third of its entire margin. And that's what it admits to.
What a business/ethical dilemma ~not~ to solve
Imagine going in the streets as a normal human being and advertising these companies (the scammers, I mean).
You would never see the light again, after fighting countless battles with lawyers (rightly so!), ending up in prison.
But these guys just can exploit it, because that's what they do, and literally never be accountable for it.
Meta is cooked. It's not just scam portion - their entire strategy is in trouble
FB - nobody I know actively uses it anymore.
Insta - is being overrun with AI slop and given meta's stated goal of adding more AI interactions on their platforms I doubt they'll even try to get a grip on it let alone succeed
Whatsapp & FB messenger - some use but has zero moat over other messengers. It's a completely fungible service in a space that has fractured across many providers.
VR/meta/AI/etc - they keep trying. Maybe one day
...that leaves their adtech which only works due to their invasive tracking...that is directly dependent on their other properties succeeding: Their targeting edge comes directly from front row seats tracking users behaviour on their platforms. No users, no insights.
Disagree on WhatsApp, it’s the de facto standard messaging app outside the US.
> it’s the de facto standard messaging app outside the US.
Agreed and in combination with FB messenger they've got most of the market...but what of it?
They're literally competing against a donation supported app. Pause for a second and think about what that says about how little direct money there is in the space.
Plus it's E2E encrypted & has significant user privacy expectations so significant limitations on how you can leverage it for their adtech biz
I'm not saying whatsapp is dead or a failure as a messenger. It's a great addition to round out an ecosystem but don't think it's any good as the primary load bearing pillar of a 1.5 trillion company in the same way search is for google
Yeah, Whatsapp is probably the largest moat in the world atm.
I hear this on almost every bad post about Meta. No they are not cooked. They still generate tons of profit and their user base is one of the biggest in the world. They're not going anywhere any time soon.
A current big user base is not enough on a „line must go up“ world
Just because they generate tons of profit doesn’t mean they are not vulnerable. Tiktok has shown that their position is not as solid like some here tend to believe.
Blackberry made their best profits in 2008, a year after the iPhone was released, with a stock price of around $140 in May of 2008, their all time high. By December of 2008, their stock price was $30, by 2012 -- $7. That FB are making a ton of profit right now is nothing but inertia.
Is anyone actually buying and using their glasses? I've tried to find actual sales figures but they keep it very opaque. I am so curious if despite how hard they are pushing them they will just be another flash-in-the-pan. I just can't see wide-market adoptability, maybe some niche users, but maybe I am just a hater/cynic.
I was thinking that for the last 7 years and every year they grow revenue massively. I don’t get it.
my aunt/uncle etc., who must certainly still use FB, just discovered Reels. I know this because they now send me 10 a day. and last year was the first time i heard them talking about finding christmas gifts advertised on FB, so i don’t think they are cooked yet.
The will just buy their next move. You're not cooked when you're a trillionaire; you never are or will be.*
*Unless you steal from other wealthy folks.
FB and google are both basically doomed, IMO.
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.
Facebook appeared cooked after the parents of the original user base started using it (boomers). But it seems like that’s profitable because they are so dumb
Can we fix the title to be "scams and banned items"?
It seems like the banned items bit is misleadingly left out, and this title falsely implies it is 10% from scams alone.
It's also full of people selling counterfeit money as well. I am shocked how they allow it, there's a guy with a profile that shows him printing and testing his "bills" along with a link to buy them. Not trying to hide it, no code words, nothing.
The same on Tiktok. I have reported it multiple times but every time they say "no violation".
(facebook wouldn't copy a URL, but here he is on Tiktok): https://www.tiktok.com/@blastedbills
I would posit that nearly 100% of their revenue comes from scams of one sort or another.
you must work in adtech!
Well, they need to be fined 10% then
Imagine if a bank admitted 10% of it's revenue came from criminals or money laundering. A staggering proportion with no government action.
10% seems very conservative as estimates go.
[dupe] Earlier on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45834840
I wonder if the government and lawmakers would care if 10% of my income came from selling heroin...
That's not the right comparison. The question should rather be, would they care if 10% of their tax revenue came from heroin sales?
And the answer would depend on where the externalities from all that heroin sale happened (e.g. if it was abroad), whether the government would be expected to carry the cost of them (e.g. by having a public healthcare system), and probably also on how actually democratic they are.
Seems low, they need to pump those numbers up if they want to compete with the trp administration, russia or twittee.
Scams seem like the norm in 2020s. Crypto, Quantum Computing startups, "AI" (LLMs), Amazon delivering fakes, electric vehicles (what happened to all electric by 2030?). Yesterday I saw that the Playstation Store started doing "personalised discounts" where they will now discount the same game at different rates for different people within the same country without explicitly telling people.
Someone recently even tried to attempt scamming me when buying a burger by telling me if I want certain toppings without telling me it will cost more. Apparently now have to play mind games when buying a burger.
Hungarian ruling party is or was at some point the largest advertiser on Google in EU so yes, the refined recommendation machine has become the perfect polarization machine especially against demographics which tend to believe what they read and watch.
10% scams is bush league rookie stats. They gotta pump that up to play in the same league as Nextdoor.
Scam ads and the sale of banned goods. They don't do anything about it because they aren't liable.
Repeal section 230
If you place these ads you should be held accountable. Meta has a duty to know who they're taking money from.
> Repeal section 230
§230 protects Meta from liability for user-generated content. Ads are not user-generated content. So repealing it would do absolutely nothing in this case.
Advertisers are business users and the ads are generated by them.
Not sure why you got downvoted so hard!
Banks can’t take money from drug cartels. Why can meta and google take money from crypto scams ripping people off
Repealing section 230 scares the users here but a lot of these problems stem from a lack of liability.
They say the people placing ads should be liable. This sounds reasonable but in practice they're anon overseas and can't be held accountable but Meta will still take their money!
Naah, I'd rather not go back to the days of noted penny-stock scammer Jordan Belfort suing every online forum to hide evidence of his crimes as "defamation", thank you very much.
Furthermore, the precedent that CDA 230 was intended to overturn would not help much. Fraud isn't defamation, and there's all sorts of lying you can do in advertising that doesn't rise to the level of fraud in the eyes of the law. So the courts might just decline to extend the Belfort precedent to the advertising business altogether.
What you want is a law that explicitly says "CDA 230 does not apply to fraudulent advertising", explicitly defining advertising as any speech that the speaker is paying to publish on the platform. This neatly exempts all the same speech that CDA 230 was intended to protect while still allowing you to sue the shit out of Facebook[0] for taking money from scammers.
tl;dr Free Speech should only apply to free speech. Money speech is not Free Speech.
[0] It is always ethical to deadname corporations.
> “We aggressively fight fraud and scams because people on our platforms don’t want this content, legitimate advertisers don’t want it, and we don’t want it either.”
I wonder if those who market illegal Israeli settlements counts as "legitimate advertisers": https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/3/31/meta-profits-as... I have a hunch that "legitimacy" is directly proportional to the dollar amount of the ad bid...
Their entire business model is corrupt and a significant driver of the degraded state of our society, civility, and politics.
What is the core of their business? Maximizing and totalizing surveillance, in service whoever has money in hand, including those interested not (just) in selling you shit, but steering your behavior, mood, and beliefs.
There's a reason for the constant drumbeat of stories about whistleblowing, lawsuits, suppressed research, literal criminality, and contempt for the wellbeing of their "users."
It's not "polite" to talk about this on HN, but if you work there or do business with them, you better be at peace with your moral complicity.
There's also a reason they pay so well. It's to make people hold their noses.
100% of all revenue, of all companies came from scams because everything is a scam.
They should remove the marketplace, i know so many people who got scammed
So Meta made billions of dollars so that your mom could lose her entire life savings?
Meta makes hundreds of billions on people collectively spending trillions of hours doom scrolling and you're worried about scams?
Why aren't we (society) fining Meta et cetera for collaborating in scams again? Or at least having the fines actually be equal to the money they're earning so the fines aren't just cost of business?
Because there is no "we". It's currently just who has the money and they all seem to be pal somehow.
Forget fines, they should be liable for any losses incurred by people scammed.