Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

There was a reply here, now dead, that I wanted to discuss:

"Hey man, I'm just trying to feed my family. I have kids so that means I can behave however I want so long as it benefits my kids. And rather than trust some reviews on a platform anyone can sign up for, how about you do some reading on the app developer and their ToS and Privacy Policy."

I'm adamantly opposed to spam, and back in the early days of the web (say, 1996 or so) I'd call up spammers and politely ask them to stop. Quite a number of people were just confused or oblivious; they would often take my suggestions to heart. But a lot of them were in some sort of scarcity panic like this guy is. They had bills to pay, mouths to feed! If what they did harmed other people, well, they weren't going to think too hard about that.

One of the real tragedies of this is how circular it is, how self-sustaining. Why is this person so desperate? Often it's because a) other desperate people are doing shitty things to them, or b) entirely non-desperate people have rigged things so that there are enough desperate people harnessed to make sure those on top get and stay rich.

We can divide all economic activity into value creation and wealth extraction. Things like click farming do extract wealth, but they increase systemic waste, meaning less value can be produced. That in turn increases the amount of desperation, making people more likely to join them in doing something exploitative just to survive.

It all seems so pathological. I wish we were better at breaking these cycles.

View on HN

> There was a reply here, now dead, that I wanted to discuss

If there's a comment that's [dead] that shouldn't be, you should vouch for it by clicking on its timestamp and then clicking 'vouch' at the top of its page. When enough users vouch for a comment, it is restored to visibility. That's why the comment you're talking about is now visible (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20495142), albeit also downvoted.

Noted, thanks! I thought maybe it was dead for some other reason, but in the future I'll just try to resurrect it.

Users have more power to do that than they think they do! It's really a feature for community moderation, and probably the single most salutary thing we've added to the site in the last five years.

I live in a certain east European country, where the excuse for petty and serious crime is always: "Hey man, I'm just trying to feed my family.". People doing this, and those tolerating it, don't realise that this type of behaviour leads to a bad reputation for that country, and in turn to loss of business. Believing that poverty is a valid justification for continuous shady / criminal work is a fallacy.

Specifically, in the same country, fake reviews are a real issue. I ended up in way too many shady restaurants and dealt with way too many dodgy businesses with 5 star reviews thanks to click / review farms to know that this type of business is actually criminal. I am now at a stage where I simply don't trust reviews anymore.

If you speak a small language reviews might still be valuable for everything but restaurants. I have not noticed any systematic spam reviews in neither swedish nor danish.

The problem with restaurants, being an overall shady business, is probably that way too many customers are too easy to please or hard to please, so the reviews doesn't say much.

I don't speak any languages with less than a couple hundred million speakers, so I find salvation in some of the smaller, more niche communities, preferably with invite-only registration process, or simply less well known.

Increasing popularity never made anything better.

Just before my son was born, I was struggling to find a stable job.

So I worked on online web dev jobs for some seriously shady characters.

I made between 10 and 15 sites that they would buy databases and mass mail users in various industries to try and get them to sign up for really shitty programs. (One for example was a roofing company promising 100's of clients).

The amount of work I did on the back end to track everything about the users, fingerprint them and send a report about where in the multipage process they were up to and what they had filled in (but not submitted!) was crazy.

My point being, I hated every single moment of that. But I needed to get money for my family.

If I had it had a good offer that required spamming forums and bypassing bot catchers, I would have done that too.

Sometimes you are in a position where you have to weigh your family's needs vs the general good.

One last point, or reiteration. I hated every. Single. Moment. And I am ashamed that I was in that position by my own fault (not picking a more secure job). I won't blame anyone else for it and I agree I did a bad thing. But if I was in that situtation again, I would do it again.

I'm curious, how deeply did you investigate social services (food banks, shelters, etc.) available in your area?

This is not an accusation — I don't claim to know your individual situation. Yet I suspect that in many cases where people say "I'm doing this to feed my family", there is actually a larger component of preserving pride and reluctance to ask for help.

The irony is that this is part of what dehumanizes the system and perpetuates the cycle.

If you are not in the first world, those services are nonexistent.

I'm in a country where I'm not a citizen due to my wife's country of birth. I would have had to leave her pregnant here to return to my country of birth.

It is understandable to be willing to do anything for ones family. I also think it is equally understandable if society put people in jail who do cross the line.

If you had ended up being charged for spamming, hacking into bot catchers, breaking data protection laws (like GDPR if you live in EU), would you accept that as a acceptable consequence and still have done it to get money for the family? Or would you think that is unfair?

This crossroad is for me the line where social support networks should exist. If people find crime to be the only solution in a situation and the legal repercussions to be a fair trade then it is cheaper and more humane to fix the original situation. Your wife's country of birth should support her while she is unable to work because of the pregnancy, and the child should be supported similarly as long they are a child.

"If you had ended up being charged for spamming, hacking into bot catchers".

I would have setup a way not to be caught.

It would be criminal, (this was pre-gdpr it definitely would be now), but I would have done it still.

She was supported to an extent, but we knew once she had our son, we wouldn't be able to keep up with necessities. We needed to start buying things then and there.

I think my question is not if you thought you would get caught, but if you think it would be fair trade even in the case you got caught.

Sorry I was tired and I misread the question.

Well yes there was some risk involved. but gamblers fallacy and all that.

> But if I was in that situtation again, I would do it again.

OK, I'm just going to come out and say it: I'd do it as well. And I cound my blessings often (not every day, though I should) that I don't need to, and unless the world changes massively and high-level experienced software devs are no longer needed, I'll never need to.

So how different is this from CRO, form abandonment, tracking, and advanced user analytics?

I get the sense that if it pays really well and is for a large company it’s not often judged, in fact it’s amazing, but if it’s for a smaller company with a less clear business model then it seems shady?

How do we sure that up? In our technical morality brains?

I really appreciate this question. Illuminated my cognitive dissonance.

My mind didn't even think to ask it as I was reading the GPs comment and thinking about that small company as scummy.

A big corporation is usually seen as an inanimate monolith that you can't "blame". It's not a person and it has no morals. Just like a soldier's morality is mostly obscured by the "morality" of the whole army. But in small companies you can "see" the people behind them. You can suddenly directly assign blame for what they do. It's no longer a giant doing what giants do, it's no longer a blame split between 10.000 anonymous employees, it's a handful of people being scummy.

It's easier to assign blame and judge morals the smaller the group is, all the way down to an individual. You can put a face to the crime.

Great example! Reading your comment and politics immediately jumped to mind. Specifically taxes, and paying local (a handful of people) vs. federal (the monolith).

E.g. paying property taxes for schools vs. federal tax dollars allocated to defense spending. School levies can get particularly heated and draw lots of activism on both sides while the same doesn't seem to hold for defense spending. [this is USA specific]

I tried replying to your comment previously, but it seems you're unaware of it. Your e-mail address posted in another one of your comments isn't working, as well as the official "Contact us" e-mail address on the same website.

If you can afford buying a thousand used iPhones to start such a business, you aren't exactly living in poverty. Spam operations back in the day probably cost even more given what hardware and bandwidth used to cost.

Even if they weren't trying to BS you, people committing crimes often come up with some sort of story to justify the whole thing. People like to be the hero of their story.

If you can afford buying a thousand used iPhones to start such a business, you aren't exactly living in poverty.

Or you start small and grow.

Or you borrow money to start.

Or you find an angel investor who is rich.

Etc.

Kind of like any other start up really.

There's a minimum scale below which no one would bother to hire you. No one is going to hire someone with 4 phones set up.

If you can get business loans and financing, that's just another version of not exactlty being poor.

There are grey and black market equivalents of those that someone on this end of the scale is more likely to use. No one's walking into a bank to ask for a loan to start a click farm.

There is no minimum scale, because those who start are working for companies which organize it. Try searching on youtube: beermoney phone farm

They run 3rd party apps on their phones which automate whole process and they get some percent of profit. I imagine that when they grow they can start working for themselves.

I'm a marketer and spam is a massive problem in the internet marketing space.

The people who are good at spam - the folks topping Google search results for lucrative phrases or spamming social media on an industrial scale - all tend to have a lot of money.

A business built on spam (or illegal tactics) is, by nature, unstable. You're one bust away from losing all your income.

So the people who enter this space either tend to have so much money that they don't mind losing an income source. Or they have so little money that they spam in desperation

So realize that its indeed unstable, you then extract the money as much as you can while you still can. When it goes bust, you move on and do something else.

> Things like click farming do extract wealth, but they increase systemic waste, meaning less value can be produced. That in turn increases the amount of desperation, making people more likely to join them in doing something exploitative just to survive.

Perhaps these click farms are just an evolving reaction to the PITA that is online advertising. It's the advertising industry that gets harmed by it and not some other poor people and it should eventually lead to more transparency for their customers, who would like to compare their traffic with what the adtech provider logged and isolate the fraudulent clicks.

People (advertisers) are surprised that the internet is beginning (continuing?) to be reshaped around their business and a whole ecosystem emerged to take advantage of this, no matter how unfairly.

Advertisers pass their costs onto their customers. Everyone is hurt by fraud.

> Everyone is hurt by fraud.

No, the users aren't. The advertisers are, they evaluate the performance of their advertising and find it less worthwhile as fraud increases.

Parasites show up in just about every complex ecosystem. Often they eventually establish some kind of symbiosis with their host.

Life is chaotic and messy and that is often hard thing for us to accept. Ecosystems that endure find a way to balance these competing forces.

That can be a useful analogy, but it's important to realize that this is only metaphorically an ecosystem. Human society is created by conscious agents with specific intent. It's a designed system.

Talking about parasites can explain what is happening, and point us in the direction of solutions. But is must never be used to justify.

There will always be people willing to break the rules. As much as we’d like to design systems around more optimistic expectations of human behavior reality is always more complex. It’s pragmatism, not justification.

I'm saying the opposite of "we’d like to design systems around more optimistic expectations".

Given that people are what they are, I want us to get better at breaking these cycles. But very often, statements like "there will always be people willing to break the rules" are used to act as if things like the number of people willing to break the rules and the amount of harm done when rules are broken are beyond our control.

What mechanisms would you propose to control bad faith actors?

Why are the powerless people the parasites? Google (and also others) is not a morally neutral entity here. They created this problem. They could stem the flow of malvertising or click-farming or spamming by hiring more and more review staff as their company has scaled, but its simply not in their DNA. I mean literally they are the richest of the richest of companies in the richest country and their owners are amongst the richest people on earth.. and the tired out cliche is still "it doesn't scale". Yeah..I'm pretty sure you can hire a few more folks to your team.. :-)

They’re not powerless. They’ve simply made the economic decision that it’s more profitable for them to cheat the system then work within it. I’m not making a value judgement here.

And so far Google etc have decided it’s better to tolerate this to some extent than spend the money to eradicate it, which is often the pragmatic choice.

>They’ve simply made the economic decision that it’s more profitable for them to cheat the system then work within it.

Well, a private company created an arbitrary system with arbitrary rules to make them gobs of cash, and now the entire world should "work within it"? Why? Personally I don't run an ad-blocker out of principle, so maybe I'm a bit more sensitive than the average person here since I get exposed to this garbage everyday.

Google also wants to "cheat" the system by not hiring any actual humans to actually make sure that people aren't tricked with ads for dick pills with heavy metals or protein power that is toxic or ads about payday loans or whatever other crazy scam-ads people run. Google wants to automate everything and leave the rest of us wading in this garbage. How about hiring people to fix the mess they created instead of stuffing their pockets? I'm only mentioning Google here, but I don't want to necessarily single them out, all of the web advertising platforms are responsible in someway or another. Its just that Google is an easy target since they are the largest ...

>I’m not making a value judgement here.

Um.. I believe the use of word parasite precludes you from making any such claim :)

Most of those people are just lying about their circumstances to elicit sympathy. They're no different than any other con artist.

Most people are suffering needlessly and asking for help. What comes if we critique the artfulness of their ask and do not help?

What comes if we help those who ask (artfully or not) rather than those most in need?

How do we find out who is most in need, by subjecting them to invasive tests and forcing them to jump through increasingly complicated hoops just to prove they are truly in need?

By looking around us -- making the effort to understand the lives of ordinary acquaintances. People worse off than ourselves are never hard to find.

Lying about having bills to pay?

People lie about having kids, for compassion.

I don’t have kids, neither do I participate in fraud activities, but it always depresses me when someone thinks that they can dismiss someones requirements for not having a family. Of course that will be abused, because most people don’t give a single fuck about our life. If a family guy needs X to feed a family, it doesn’t mean that I’m okay with X/2 and should just shut up and work harder to achieve the same amount. It is yet another wrong cycle, of which our root comment talks.

And yet we praise the engineers and architects of mass digital surveillance under the guise of social media as the elite of the tech industry

No, they are traitors.

It's the Game of Life. People play it according to whatever rules and penalties they perceive to be in place using whatever strategies and tactics they think will succeed.

And they have the wrong tactic and strategy? That they do it becouse they think it benefits them is obvoius.

These schemes to make money without doing ordinary boring dull work are ofent a waste of time if you compare your hourly wage to whatever you would get carrying bags of seed up the hill to the sawmill.

A programmer that is competent enough to write spamscripts is competent enough to work as a programmer.

> A programmer that is competent enough to write spamscripts is competent enough to work as a programmer.

Only if competence were the only measure you'd need to get a job. In reality, there are various other factors like: Where one lives, how good one is at interviewing and so on.

Sure, I'm not really faulting the individuals here. But we collectively set the rules for the game of life. Maybe we should pick ones with better outcomes for both individuals and society as a whole.

You had me until the part you suggested there was some subset of the upper class conspiring to keep an underclass of poor people... in order to make/keep themselves rich?Wouldn't rich people get much richer if there was more economically healthy middle class people buying their products and real estate or w/e they are making money off of?

What could they possibly gain from ruining the economy and keeping others poor. This seems to be based on a very poor understanding of how economics works, or the idea that there are secret nation-wide power systems plotting evil things like a rich villain in a Disney movie.

If everyone was rich, how much do you think you'd have to pay your lawn guy?

Maybe enough that you’d have to mow your own damn lawn.

Sign me up.

Maybe you want to make your own clothes as well?

Are you suggesting that people should be kept poor so you can get cheap clothes?

Hilarious, because that is is some ways an effective description of capitalism working as intended.

I believe the usual answer to this is that you need a certain percentage of working poor to do the types of menial tasks we haven't been able to automate yet. If they could make more money elsewhere who would do those jobs? If those jobs suddenly paid more, than the price of food would go up and then we would have other problems. I think a key example is the current shortage of farm hands in California [1]. It's causing the price of some produce to go up, and also leading to some wasted crops.

Now, I'm not arguing that it _should_ or has to be this way. I'm just highlighting the usual arguments made when discussing why the rich may conspire to keep some people poor.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2018/05/03/607996811/worker-shortage-hur...

I think this is true in agggregate and over the longer term - but can run into collective action problems where the narrow interest of some is to get richer quick or who can perversely help themselves in the short term by ruining others.

Equally there’s the possibility of some of the rich not really understanding this or not buying into this philosophy- look at some of the countries with increasing inequality and a disappearing middle class and you’ll always find some lobbying against spending money on services - including things like education which serve as an economic common good and which drive the economy over the long term.

Wealth is relative to others in society. If the pie grows, I maybe better off in absolute dollars. But if the percentage of the pie I control decreases, I am relatively poorer. Comparing how much wealthier/happier/successful/beautiful I am to my previous self is niether as satisfying nor as real as comparing to those immediately around me.

I also wouldn't think a conspiracy is necessary. Just lobby to write tax, tariff, and property laws out in the open that benefit one class of people/industry more than another.

That is a self-defeatist view that encourages and amplifies the "hate the rich" sentiments in the society.

1 of 5 children of John D Rockefeller (richest man in history) died at 13 months. In the past 130 years, child mortality has decreased massively in the developed world. If that's not "real" or "satisfying" and the only achievement that truly fulfils you is beating other people, that's a fairly sad life to live.

I believe that's what humanity should strive for, but looking at a labourer making $5 a day, it would be easier for him to 'hate the rich' neighbour who makes $10 a day and can afford an Air Conditioner than appreciate the fact that he is well off compared to his grandfather or people in neighbouring villages making $1 a day in terms of health, etc.

Also the experiment of being given the choice of either getting nothing or getting $X and giving their worst enemy 2*$X. Small groups often compete against each other, "keeping up with the Joneses", and while it is a sort of hedonistic treadmill, it's an easy way to gain satiety.

I don't think you need a conspiracy to get to a place where in aggregate the decisions of people in control create or perpetuate a poor underclass.

Just like some companies make decisions for the benefit of the next quarter, rather than the next 5 years. If you are able to make a decision that increases near term metrics, at the expense of some other metric you aren't even paying attention to (like making poor people poorer) I can see that happening independently thousands of times a day.

Take payday loans, more commonly used by people with a lower socio-economic standing. They aren't there to create an underclass, they are there to provide a service (loans) at a cost that matches the risk (ignoring the conversation about the cost not matching the risk due to predatory loans). But if decisions are made to increase profit from payday loans, a natural consequence is that the underclass is going to be made more of an underclass.

This is just one example, and it's clearly got some issues. I have no problem imagining many other decisions that will help create an underclass. Maybe the impact is 2 or 5 steps removed, but each one makes a difference, and leads to in aggregate "the rich work to keep the poor, poor".

But what do I know. I'm a developer who took one econ course.

The extremely rich do in fact conspire to keep wages low and economic security precarious, for both political and economic reasons.

There's plenty of historical evidence for this. For example: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/aug/28/commen...

The counterargument is that the massive increases in wealth inequality since the 50s - a time when the average single wage earner could afford a relatively secure lifestyle - "just happened", which is obviously rather implausible.

"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."

Warren Buffet

make total sense, I mean who has the time and money to organize for a class war. What is surprising is that a lot of the stupid poor are fighting on side of the rich people who are keeping them poor. Sad!

> The counterargument is that the massive increases in wealth inequality since the 50s - a time when the average single wage earner could afford a relatively secure lifestyle - "just happened", which is obviously rather implausible.

It's not that implausible. It's the effect of technology - not just automation / computers (only since 90s or something) but also before, we had information technology - ever since the telegraph was invented. In simple terms, it enables ever-increasing scale of human cooperation, bigger countries, bigger companies etc. so the "winners" (smartest, most experienced, most educated, most corrupt, most sociopathic, most networked, or simply those with a better starting point) win ever more, at a bigger scale.

It couldn't be tax cuts, low interest rates, or forcing the proles to capitalize the market with their 401Ks.

And the leadership in china is terrified of the now quite large middle class losing out in an economic down turn - they don't want to end up hanging from the lampposts.

Remember revolutions ae carried out by the middle class.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Labourers_1351

Parliament and nobility literally got together to a) ban unionisation b) fix wages at an unfairly low level c) punish anyone who refused to work at the wages that were fixed below market d) refused to work for an employer who treated him unfairly.

And that cycle has repeated itself all the way through to the 21st Century (Bay View Massacre, etc)

IF you don't think the wealthy actively work to suppress the working classes indirectly or directly, you are truly naive.

[citation from this century needed]

There are two ways people measure wealth: absolute and relative. You can also score it individually or societally.

If rich people are trying to maximize absolute societal wealth, you'd be right.

However, if they're trying to maximize absolute individual wealth, then they have plenty of incentive to exploit people. Labor history is full of this. If my workers aren't my customers and the choice is between putting a dollar in my pocket or a dollar in theirs, then a wealth-maximizer is going to take the dollar every time. Does that mean less global wealth? Very often. Does an individual absolute wealth maximizer care? Not at all.

People, though, are primates. Dominance hierarchies are part of our evolutionary history. We don't just care about absolute wealth. We care about social status. For many, power is its own end. Power and its signifiers. E.g., positional goods are hugely appealing to some people. (As a great historical example, consider the Shakespeare-style lace ruff collar. It was the height of fashion when it was handmade. As soon as machine-made lace became possible, they went out of fashion because they no longer reliably indicated wealth.) For these people, what matters is individual relative wealth.

For some people, yes, the exact desired outcome is them being on top and everybody else well down below. Does that mean they are less absolutely wealthy? Sure. Do they care? No. For evidence, just look at the historically enormous number of kings, dukes, warlords, etc, etc. Most of the world for most of history has been run with approaches that are miles off "greatest (economic) good for the greatest number". Conspiracy is entirely unnecessary to explain that, just individuals seeking social dominance by any means that come to hand.

I can remember asking my mail delivery person if they could stop delivering all the junk mail as it was truly unwanted. They looked at me like I had lost my mind and told me that was what paid their salary. I asked if they could return the junk mail to the sender they said not possible. You'd think they would gladly send it back because it paid their salary twice in that instance!

To your (b) - Its nerds like us that enable those companies. To blame the "companies" also means to blame the individuals who work at those companies. Its easy to blame Google, but we celebrate their engineers at tech conferences when they talk about technically challenging stuff. Sure, thats cool, but then they go back from the conference and check in some code to mine someones inbox or track their online activity. The buck stops everywhere on the way to the top.

Like.. these are the richest of the richest companies in the richest country by far whose owners are also amongst the richest people on earth, and they won't hire people to do real reviews or checks of inventory or speak to customers or review advertising campaigns for shady or misleading ads, and tons of other things that people complain about. "It doesn't scale" == "I'll take the hit when someone eventually games the system".

> Moloch is introduced as the answer to a question [...] - what does it? Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination?

> And Ginsberg answers: Moloch does it.

> There’s a passage in the Principia Discordia where Malaclypse complains to the Goddess about the evils of human society. “Everyone is hurting each other, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war.”

> The Goddess answers: “What is the matter with that, if it’s what you want to do?”

> Malaclypse: “But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!”

> Goddess: “Oh. Well, then stop.”

> The implicit question is – if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. It’s powerful not because it’s correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything – but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent.

From the slatestarcodex classic: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

The 3rd verse in this song articulates your perception of what a spammer is: http://ytcracker.com/music/spamtec%20-%20what%20is%20spam.mp...

“I wish we were better at breaking these cycles.”

It could be better if...

Or maybe that is the way we are, those who extract, those who survive, and those who complain about living in a first-world experiencing a little inconvenience in apple app store.

Or maybe free creation of value is unlocked only after enough wealth is extracted by some big group somewhere else and injected into the market.

If these cycles exist, to break them “we” need to open much better possibilities than subj for everyone. But borders are closed, and when one opens them, they hear yet another complaint.

I like the article of the Swedish lady who went to Nigeria to help her 419 scammer.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-37632259

Well, how would you classify streaming audio or video services of pre-recorded content?

That is quite wasteful and only exists to solve a legal, not technological problem.

TLDR; This is how our system works

Good analysis - it's all just about money (which means existence).

Too bad many people don't want to see that and still believe in "the american dream" and other fairy tales so they can keep up serving for these few parasites until they die.

That's why I totally understand a lot of criminals (doing stuff that doesn't really harm others like shoplifting or selling drugs that aren't killing people) - they just try to survive.

> I have kids so that means I can behave however I want so long as it benefits my kids.

This is so full of awesome I am at a loss for words to describe it.

Then you haven't heard of the scammer logic: I made money coz I'm capable/I made it by my ability, you have an issue with it/are jealous? Go make your own then.

It doesn't matter how, it matters whether you made it.

I could not disagree with you more. You have extrapolated a lack of morality in well off human beings in such black and white totality. What a fking trite and naive generalization you have made.

There are bad shitty people and bad intentions across all populations. Rich or poor. Men or Women. Old or Young.

I'm definitely not suggesting something black and white. Maybe don't take a short paragraph as indicative of my entire thought on a topic.

I agree that there are bad people everywhere. But practicing many kinds of badness requires power over others. So it's entirely unsurprising that people who like those kinds of badness will disproportionately seek power.

And I'm hardly the first to observe this. As Douglas Adams wrote: "It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it..."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com