Jesse Willms, the Dark Lord of the Internet (2014)
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
There is a ton of incentive for guys like this to scale big, and they can bootstrap it pretty easily once they have a profitable method. On the other hand, it's much tougher for a brand like Consumer Reports to do the same, because the effort is so much greater and the ROI is so much smaller. You simply don't make much money when you're un-selling stuff, and it's an eternal game of whack-a-mole fighting off scams.
So the "good guys" who would rage against these rip-offs end up thinking smaller, perhaps going after just one thing, like why this skin care offer is a scam. You get lost in the noise because you're stuck in a swamp of other evildoer affiliates who are more greatly incentivized to lie. Ultimately, there's very few systematic tools out there that can encompass on the number of niches his network can, and visibly tell the truth about them all.
Further, once a doer of good who's scaling starts to see success, the power begins to corrupt, and aligning with profitable evils becomes difficult to resist.
I see this problem at all levels, especially in corrupt governments. It just feels like we are currently systematically broken as a species. Good people may or may not be outnumbered, but we're most definitely out-powered.
You don't see all the people with NPD who crashed because they burned all the bridges around them, but the ones who do make it last long enough to make reality match their ego's dreams, if even for a short while. To someone with NPD, they don't see themselves as evil, and can be oblivious to how they take advantage of those around them.
It's something I've been thinking more about with the recent elections.
If this guy had dialed back the scam level by about half, he'd probably still be in business. There are lots of people trying to be him. Visit Black Hat World to meet some.
His values aren't that far from those of many startup companies. Grow at any cost. Use "dark patterns" to trick users. Hide things in the EULA. Don't ask too many questions about "affiliates". Make it hard to cancel. Google was fined $500 million when they were caught in the FBI's "sportsdrugs.com" sting. (The FBI had a fake drug lord who was supposedly trying to take over the athletic steroid business. Google actively helped him advertise.)
He is.
There are other considerations both specific to this case, and in general, and I don't say I condone 100% of his actions, but don't be so quick to think that he is just rotten and you are superior.
> Morals are not set in stone. Everybody has different morals.
Indeed. Some people make the personal choice to "evolve" above the dog-eat-dog-world mentality, for example. As another example, while some people stab their prey with their forks, others choose to be vegan.
> One might argue that people who fall for this kind of crap are very, very stupid. Being weak means...
I'm not going to argue with you because we clearly have different morals, as you've pointed out. I don't think ripping people off is okay just because they are "stupid". Would it be even more okay if they were diagnosably mentally challenged?
But if you actually believe that the only people who fall this stuff are "stupid" people, and by that you mean that they are exceptional or abnormal, then you haven't spent very long in the affiliate marketing industry.
Pretty much everyone falls for 'scams'. My sister signed up to a cell phone rebill, her friend bought a diet pill rebill, my grandmother pays her 'financial manager' an obscene amount, and I just bought a book off amazon that claimed to be a "Thai translation" but was actually sold by a seller who has translated everything in the public domain into every language using Google translate and then prints them on-demand (Get your shit together, Bezos).
I know a lot of people like Jesse Wilms, and perhaps the saddest part of it to me is that they are extremely human and very normal. The potential for his moral flexibility exists in all of us, given the right circumstances and surroundings.
>Some people make the personal choice to "evolve" above the dog-eat-dog-world mentality, for example. As another example, while some people stab their prey with their forks, others choose to be vegan.
One might argue that those people simply don't want to face the reality so they pretend.
You and your sister got tricked, but your sister's friend is definitely stupid for believing magic pills will make her fit. Your grandmother can be either way, but if you did a good job explaining to her why a financial manager isn't a good proposition for somebody who is not a multi-millionaire, she is most probably stupid too. And I don't mean that they are abnormal. Plenty of people are stupid. Most even, one might say.
You can choose to pretend, just like the vegans, if that gives you solace.
On another note, do you have any books or readings you'd recommend on moral relativism (?) or whatever your worldview is called? I imagine you came to this conclusion after a lot of thought and life experience, but is there anyone or anything you read or listened to that you'd recommend?
> There’s a fine line between shutting down the Internet and policing it
Straight out of a lobbyists mouth, I'd imagine. It has the classic "true, but only in certain contexts" thing going on - sure, it's a great argument against, say, SOPA, but as an argument against a simple legal requirement that big internet players do their part to reign obviously malicious advertising, it's pretty bogus.
And this is from his site "Jesse is currently involved in a national advertising campaign selling informational products including property and home value reports." Home value reports sound very sketchy.
His major ventures today provide consumers with driving records, criminal records, and vehicle-history reports (just as Carfax does) across dozens of different pages, notably carhistory.us.org, dmv.us.org, vehiclehistory.com, and vehiclehistoryrecord.com. In fact, anyone looking for these services would have a hard time avoiding him: as of November, if you searched vehicle history on Google, Yahoo, or Bing, ads for Willms’s sites were among the first things you would see. By the looks of it, Willms offers a terrific deal—just $1 for a vehicle-history report, compared with $39.99 for one from Carfax. Because of this, Willms’s lawyer claims that the sites have received “several hundred thousand positive comments related to the product.”
So more of the same scams.
For like a decade now, people have been posting fake job ads and then telling applicants to pay for their own "background check" in an identical scam.
LyricFind which licenses lyrics from major publishers to websites is another example. They would license content to for free if you included their ads for "ringtone" subscriptions which were added to monthly phone bills in a process few consumers understood or expected.