Ask HN: Since when is everything a scam? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Since when is everything a scam?

51 pointsthrowmeup123108 comments

It feels like you need to look up if something is a scam or not rather than just the user reviews. I mean it started in the 70s with the prominent make up Pyramide schemes but in the last 2 years it just got mainstream to scam everyone around you. How do you navigate it? I deactivated personalized ads on YouTube and every ad is for a scam now.

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In some areas a "community" culture¹ of "you shall behave - you will behave" has declined into a sort of anarchy of "everything passes"; once you were corrected, and now you are no more; once people would stand and say "wrong behaviour" directly, today such framework is greatly weakened, which causes all kind of deviations.

Such weakening encourages abuse and exploitation.

¹Note that said community culture was not restricted to small communities: it was present in metropolis of millions. And it is related to a vaster area of consequences of the "weakening of the "low-culture" (i.e. "the teacher and neighbour" as opposed to "the professor and professional") presence".

I totally agree with this.

The active removal of any (even semblance) of community in society, to be replaced with radical individualism, has been horribly detrimental. There is no shame, there is no right or wrong, there is no responsibility to others.

And this extends to both sides of the political spectrum. The right glorify this "Don't step on me", "I don't care about others that don't exactly fit into my in-group", "no taxes (contributions to society)" mentality, while the left cultivates "we must take care of everyone and make everyone feel included as they are, no matter what, but we can't ask anyone to be responsible to society in any way in return".

We descended in to madness.

This is a very US centric concept, though. Whereas the original question was far more generic.

Anecdotally, this is something I notice in Europe, too.

I moved to Germany and find they are quite outspoken with enforcing community norms

There is far more division, in Europe too, certainly.

But most European countries have far more plurality in their party systems. Main exception being Britain, with a two party system, but they don't even want to be European.

So in Europe there's certainly a strong left and right. Just also a lot in-between. Not black-white, binary, but a spectrum of colors, analogue.

In America, you don’t need to reach for philosophy to explain the destruction of high-trust communities when history will do:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2056992.Left_Behind_In_R...

Summary of the book by a far-right nutjob:

https://twitter.com/GodCloseMyEyes/status/141461967105629798...

Community culture still exists in some places. Those places generally aren’t trying to solve massively complex racial or mass-migration conflicts at the same time as healthcare, housing, education and so on. Voters and leaders have limited time and attention. Fewer problems to solve means more resources available per problem.

Your painting the right as "no taxes" I think they'd paint as "quit wasting money".

As an example, SF has the highest tax revenue per capita in the USA

https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/slideshows/us-cities-with...

So why is it so dysfunctional? My guess is the right would say because so much is wasted on the wrong things.

Note: I'm not saying the right is correct. I'm only suggesting a different interpretation of their POV.

Everyone thinks that something they don't want to pay for is a "waste of money". When that something that you want to quit spending money on can be characterized as "other people who I don't identify with", you get the right.

SF is a mess because of liberal mismanagement (I say that as someone who identifies as left). Spending money at massive scale without asking the people you're spending money on to fix something in society (whether it's their own actions, or something that they are responsible for). SF went from a 80B surplus to a 15B deficit... and what get it gain from that? How is the city better... It's not.

>When that something that you want to quit spending money on can be characterized as "other people who I don't identify with"

Everyone wants to spend money on something or someone they identify with. It's not like the left has showed any leniency against those it deems unworthy.

Sure they have. They believe in social safety nets for all (livable wages to reduce crime, for example). They also tend to be more socially inclusive (I rarely see a racist gay person for example).

Woah there... there are PLENTY of racist gay people.

Not from a government perspective, but does anyone want to 'quit spending money' on anything anymore? I find that as a society we've become addicted to spending on stuff and we never cut back spending on anything anymore.

I don't know if the majority agrees but we've all become addicted to e-commerce spending. The number of shoes is not counted in number of total shoes owned but number of shoes bought per month. A stock metric vs a flow metric.

Everybody has a vague idea that they're addicted but nobody seems to want to acknowledge it or even track it.

It's almost as if cutting frivolous spending is no longer a virtue.

Sorry if that's a rant.

Meh. That's a straw man based on ignorance.

The left puts effort into responsibility and care for community. Why do you think the right advocates for dismantling social services and the left champions them?

The left champions not working, rather than social care. In the UK it’s common to hear ‘I’m on benefits’ as an excuse in itself, rather than ‘I am disabled’ or ‘I am elderly’ or some other legitimate reason for receiving money.

I wonder what you hear then. To me it sounds like "I'm out of options". It makes me think of this aid program that gave people in really poor countries money instead of food. With money they could of course buy food, but also save to improve their life in general, for example by improving their housing, buying a goat, sending their children to school, etc. Previously, they were just dependent on the food, medicines, and whatever was provided by the system and the situation rarely changed for the better.

I think it's similar, at least where I live. With a better support system, people seem to be less likely to get dependent on it. Seems like a good thing to do in the long run, even if you just think about it economically.

Unless, perhaps, you need a class of people that are in a sort of benefits bondage. I don't really want to think that this is by design though.

My expectation is that healthy adults should work.

Broadly speaking, the community-oriented left in places like the US support bureaucratic government welfare programs, while community-oriented conservatives support more organic, often religious, and non-government charitable organizations. My preference runs toward the latter, for reasons best explained by John Carmack:

https://archive.ph/0tHg4

"more organic, often religious, and non-government charitable organizations"

Or none at all. Or ones for people in a select group.

Most people live in towns, cities, states and nations, not communities. State and national governments cannot rely on the good of the neighbour. Larger, more equitable systems need to be put in place.

> Or none at all. Or ones for people in a select group.

Bureaucrats do this too. See the history of communism in Europe, or present state of communism in China. Centralized welfare is a centralized system of control in the hands of politicians.

If you don’t see the issue with “often religious” then nothing I say can change your mind! Religion as a moral compass is horrible! Religious communities are often the most toxic ones!

I am an atheist ex-Catholic. The big atheist-leftist crowd in my college town are intensely more violent, toxic, and racist than local Catholics or Lutherans. Lack of religious belief is no guarantee of kindness or rationality, nor is the presence of faith a strong signal of evil.

Behavior is a strong signal and I see more Christian harlots and swindlers than people practicing Christ’s philosophy. The left at least don’t pretend to be wholesome and righteous.

> The left at least don’t pretend to be wholesome and righteous

Funny, I use this same line about the right (at least in reference to politicians) in the US.

> I see more Christian harlots and swindlers than people practicing Christ’s philosophy

Perhaps "more people who claim/pretend to be Christian"? You can hardly call someone Christian if they're not following Jesus; it makes as much as calling someone an atheist just because they call themselves an atheist right before talking about how God exists.

I am Italian… raised catholic… my high school was owned and managed by the church… and I am an atheist as well! An I can tell you that in my country the problem are the believers not the atheists! The presence of faith implies you are willing to outsource your moral compass to what a bunch of primitive men belived to be right

When it comes to value systems that have stood the test of time and have well-understood failure modes vs. whatever hot new theory was cooked up on Twitter or Tumblr last week (the main vectors for recent moral changes in my country), I generally prefer the former.

You mean the value system that got us the dark ages, people burned at the stakes for “heresy” (or hanged, or many other form of death), silenced people because what they were saying was against what is written in a non particularly good fantasy novel (aka the Bible), caused all kind of toxic behaviours in families and communities if someone was not following stupid rules in the aforementioned book. And the alternative is not embracing every stupid trend appearing on the internet… ethics is a topic philosophers have been engaging for more than 2 millennia!

I'm not ignorant at all. I live in NYC (the largest "community" in the country) which has the largest, most systematically effective social services system in the country. It's one thing I appreciate most about the city, other than the subway.

There is such a thing as too much of a good thing (or good things used to advance perverse incentives).

Too Much of a Good Thing: Methadone and "clean needle" clinics on 125th and Brooklyn under the guis of "harm reduction". The goal should be to reduce drug usage. Not make a shopping mall for dealers and zombies. Another is the total hands off approach of the mentally ill and aggressive homeless on the subways and on the streets.

Good Things Use To Advance Perverse Incentives: The entire homeless industrial complex in California, which does absolutely nothing but syphon money to these homeless "nonprofits". I lived in both San Jose and LA and frankly the situation was addressed in a maddeningly regressive fashion.

You sometimes have to ask yourself WHY someone is championing something. Very often it's not because of altruism.

The goal should be to reduce harm. The idea that drug use is axiomatically bad is an invention of the War On Drugs.

Criminalizing drug addiction increases harm. Treating it as a disease provably reduces harm. And, in fact, reduces drug use.

Methadone and clean needle clinics are pointed in the right direction, but they're not enough. They just happen to be all the people who got them put in place could manage.

The goal should be to reduce drug use and end addiction. "Harm" is relative. There are functioning heroin addicts(either tar or hillbilly heroin) that some people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Hart) would say aren't "harming" anyone. It's still not something to societally encourage.

I also said nothing of criminalization of addicts. Seller's, sure.

> Methadone and clean needle clinics are pointed in the right direction, but they're not enough. They just happen to be all the people who got them put in place could manage.

This makes no sense. The halfass'd effort is worse than nothing at all.

I am not religious but I do see the general fall of religion as a huge part in this. I've warned people that an individuals moral compass is not a strong as the influence a communities moral compass has on the individual. Currently we are set to just keep legalizing everything because it's good for somebody.

I'll add that the decline of community culture was in part due to the greed of the current leaders, like Google and Facebook.

Think the dislike button or the normalization of exploiting any data that was previously made to reduce storage pressures.

In fact many features like search seem to be performing worse now than a decade ago, because they want to extend user time for ads.

They kill an organic culture that had its own safety checks for slightly more money, and in turn make the internet more dangerous as the vacuum is filled by predators who happily fork pennies to Google to hunt new prey.

This neglects that many scams were perpetuated on these tight communities because it was easy to exploit that existing trust system. This is especially true when the scam was being done by the leadership because then the community had to follow based on authority. See every cult that ever existed.

In fact I think that these communities are in fact the REASON more scams seem to exist today because with the internet all types of communities are possible because you can connect with like-minded people from all over to form one, rather than having to rely on those in your specific geographic area. These communities form trust relationships which are then exploited by scammers (either internally or externally). Crypto bros are a great example.

Though I was not speaking of «/tight/ communities», but of a social method that remained the standard also among strangers (it would be indifferent if the corrigendum is familiar or not - he would receive a lesson of similar tones).

And in such environment, under the "you shall behave - you will behave rule", scams are not tolerated by society and are eliminated as soon as they show up through the force of radical opposition that meets the active intention of Enforcement. On the contrary, in the "anarco-decadent" society, the enforcement itself will be hindered and burdened ("I wish I could", "What can you do about it", etc).

> scams are not tolerated by society and are eliminated as soon as they show up

This is already the case currently. Once scams are identified as such, then they are eliminated. But the problem of course is that scams start off as seeming legitimate. That's the definition of scam, something that appeared legitimate but wasn't.

Even in "anarco-decadent" societies, scams would not flourish once they are revealed as scams because, why would anyone participate in something with a 100% chance of them losing all their money? The scammers may not face punishment from an overseeing authority like the state, but may very well by individual victims of the scam. Either way, scams can't continue as known scams in any arrangement of society. edit An exception to this is a fully corrupted authoritarian society. In this special case there could be 'approved scams' by some officials or people in power that everyone knows to be a scam, but they have to go along with over fear of violent reprisal.

I’m guessing you are relatively young, because what you are seeing isn’t a significant change on society, but rather a change in yourself, or to be more specific a change in how others perceive you.

In fact I’m willing to bet you’re ~27-28 years old, because what you are seeing is your profile getting moved from the 18-25 market segment to the 26-35 segment.

The scams where always there, it’s just that people thought you were too poor to market them to you.

I might argue differently. I am regularly shown how to start day trading and starting my own ecommerce site that makes 30k a month with no effort needed on Youtube regularly. These guys aren't looking for intelligent people.

Youtube profiled me as a pure dumbass, and it might have to do with all the Rogan videos I watch.

Just watch a few minutes of this: https://www.digitalpodcastmillionaire.com/episode13

These are the types of ads I'm seeing 24/7.

> These guys aren't looking for intelligent people.

Never said they were.

They’re likely looking for men, specially young (but old enough to have some savings), middle class (so you have a high enough paying job), preferably single, and even better with low to no financial know how.

Scams and fraud are just a part of human live.

Look at old advertising and all the literal snake oil that used to be sold.

I think it is jus the internets effect to make everything more discoverable and new schemes enabled by new technology.

Navigation is easy:

If it is too good to be true it probably is a lie.

There is no money on the streets and nobody is giving it away for free.

If it is claimed that something works on "everything" (like all the newfangled health food) it probably works on nothing.

Society is visibly decomposing before our eyes. You can tell because trust no longer exists. And those who trust, get burned, because they're taken advantage of. The issue is without trust, society does not exist.

What's coming is frankly scary to me.

I think it depends on the country. I'm from Ireland and live in Vietnam. Both of these countries are doing ok. Of course they are not perfect, some things improve and some get worse just as they ever did.

But visibly decomposing? No. We're doing ok, as is much of the world, especially considering that we're at the tail end of a pandemic that massively disrupted the social order. I think we're doing pretty well when I consider that, in fact.

Some other countries - the US, Brazil, Hungary and of course Russia, are not doing so well right now. But they are not the entire world.

The problem is that we're highly interconnected. Even when global trade suffers, we're connected through the Internet. So the sentiments flow and spread globally. I agree some countries may be doing better, but for them to keep doing better they'd have to be paradoxically culturally isolated, and yet economically open (because production costs would skyrocket otherwise), and the latter almost implies Internet these days, which on its own turn implies cultural exchange.

It's messy.

I think trust still exists among individuals and in social groups. But yeah trusting others on the Internet makes no sense. I think we‘ll look back at the web2 era and say it was naive to trust in a www user‘s good faith actions and assume western morals. The Internet is global, heterogen and trust cannot exist among individuals unless one or more parties have a lot of skin in the game e.g. through identity.

Maybe a big part of the issue is not initially that there's no trust, but the sentiment being spread that you'll get screwed if you trust people. It seems like the cheapest way to really undermine a society if you were so inclined, especially in our age.

Most people I meet are trustworthy but on Facebook I get the message, from my own neighbors, that it's dangerous to even go outside.

Think about how trust is built. If you really believe it's something precious (I do), think about what your part is in creating more or less of it.

I admit, it's often very hard to take the first step, to be willing to look like the naive sucker, or to try to see the humanity in someone who's angry and, I guess, often scared just like me.

It's pretty easy to not say things like "society is falling apart", "you can't trust anyone these days", and things like that though. At least out loud. Then it seems like it's easier to see signs of the opposite being true.

I don't see it. There have always been scams. It seems to me it's a lot better now than 100ish years ago when every other product was some shit someone made up. At least now there are agencies looking after food and drug safety and heaps of information allowing self research.

Trust has always been an issue too. I don't think you could ever blindly trust everyone. I generally trust a random person I meet will be telling truths as they understand the world, but I wouldn't rely on them. However, crime is historically low, the chance of being assaulted, mugged etc is lower than it has been, so it seems you can trust your fellow person more now.

There are community and social issues. But I know my neighbours pretty well, if they needed help I'd be there, they would be there for us and have been.

edit: I don't live in the US but I have done in the past and I generally found Americans as or more helpful and friendly neighbours, friends and colleagues.

Is there any specific examples of “everything”?

Apart from robocalls and junk mails, I don’t think I’ve personally experienced a notable amount of scams. When I buy something, I almost always get what I buy, except a few incidents of lost delivery, where the orders was promptly refunded or reissued.

Amazon is now filled with pseudobrands (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...), commingling legitimate sellers' inventory with counterfeit products, and outright fraudulent products (try searching for 2TB flash drives). AliExpress allows sellers to ship you fraudulent products like a "USB3 1080p 4k capture card" which is only USB2 with a blue cable and drops frames, then when you request a refund, sides with the seller when they insist "you're using it wrong". And Kickstarter campaigns have a reputation of failing to live up to their promises or deliver any product whatsoever.

I remember in the 90s when Walmart was the death of the world because they only sold junk.

Turns out retailers just sell cheap stuff no matter the era and the world is still moving on.

It honestly seems like American only problem though. So many commenters mention it but I have never experienced it here in UK(despite ordering a total of 500 items from Amazon in the last two years) nor do I know anyone who has.

I think one or two orders were late by a day, Amazon just gave me a month of prime as compensation each time.

Oh, I see. I wasn’t thinking of low quality products when I read OP’s question. The mention of pyramid scheme makes me think more of the kind of scam that deals with money directly, for instance, IT support scams, bank scams, etc. I thought that OP was being surrounded by such nefarious actors.

Among the things you mentioned and addressed by the article you linked, I consider counterfeit and fake reviews to be scammy.

Pseudo brands themselves, to me, are just shit products. The fact that they use a unique, random letter combination means they aren’t trying to impersonate anyone else. Huge pain in the ass for real brands, though, having to compete with these flooding cheap goods.

And Amazon has never refused to issue a refund to me if the product is defective or of poor quality.

I’ve never used Aliexpress, so I can’t say anything about that.

Kickstarter I’ve also never used, but I feel like if they legitimately tried but failed, it’s not a scam. If they set out to take the cash and run, that’s certainly a scam.

(To be honest, I just don’t understand the idea of “backing” a kick starter campaign. If I want to back something, I’d want my share of profit when the project succeed, or at least my money back with interest. If there’s no share and no pay back, it’s not really “backing”, it’s just pre-buying something you haven’t seen, possibly at a discount. That feels to me like taking an unnecessary risk without much of a reward.)

In the context of tech, the normalisation of grift happened in the last decade. This is due to 2 factors IMO : cryptocurrency ; and, separately, the "tech is the new Wall Street" situation, with an increased influx of tech workers who, compared with the previous generation, tend to be more motivated by money than by societal impact.

What crypto currency did is that it showed everyone how fragile these internationally scaled algorithms are; and it blatantly exposed how bad they are for society.

Take Google Maps for example: There are now many restaurants that have a rating that is far off from reality. This is because there is no or very little cost associated with leaving a review. So click farms have gotten wind of this and hence a restaurant owner may just buy their way to a 4.5 star rating.

My take is that 10+ years ago, the average Google or Amazon engineer would have been comparatively more offended to see so many fake products, reviews, websites, fake everything on their platforms. Today, they see all this as someone else's problem.

Since house prices started to become unattainable for the average individual without going 40 years into debt.

Remove the problem of earning money to achieve independent housing, remove 75% of the hussle for most people to participate in scams.

I have this pet theory that no matter what goes wrong in the world - whether it's a pandemic, climate change, or the threat of nuclear annihilation, HNers will find a way of blaming it on housing prices.

Do you all live in California?

You don't have to live in California. Housing in major European cities has attained ridiculous prices. Maybe not as high as in California in absolute terms, but surely when you consider the difference in income. And no, the difference isn't made up by social security, not by a long shot.

I don't live in California, I work at a non-IT company in a country of Europe in a non-major city.

It's a global problem, it doesn't matter where you go. People and companies have an absolute fetish with real state that makes young people like me give up with hope. What is work good for if you're just a slave to the system?

Right now, it'd take me 7 years of salary JUST to afford the initial down payment for a house. If we're talking about purchasing it out-right after basic expenses, 40 years. Is this normal? Well, in the fucked up we live in, yes!

Start working in your 20s, own your house in your 60s. Nice.

My sister just bought a house in Manchester(one of the larger UK cities) for £150k - she only needed a 5% deposit(so £7.5k) - she was able to save that within two years, working as a (rather poorly paid) photographer.

I myself bought a house in Newcastle(not major, but not a tiny city) two years ago for £180k, we needed a 10% but me and my wife are in IT so we saved that in a year.

My point is that yes - it's a global problem, but I honestly don't think everyone everywhere needs to save up for 7 years just to get a deposit. Maybe if you live in London you do, but elsewhere? Meh. Basic 3 bed houses are not so crazy expensive in most places, at least here in UK.

>she only needed a 5% deposit(so £7.5k)

LMAO, this is not normal anywhere else in Europe. Also, I bet she either has a lot of money saved up somewhere else, had her mortgage cosigned by someone else with a lot of income, etc. this is not normal at all.

I am not from Germany, but take Germany as an example: https://n26.com/en-eu/blog/cost-of-buying-a-house

"A good rule of thumb is to have at least 35% of the estimated cost. Germany: German residents can generally borrow up to 80% of the assessed property value, but non-residents usually get the short end of the stick. They have to put up 40–45% of the property value as down payment."

>two years ago for £180k

The average UK price house is 256k... https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/640/cpsprodpb/117DF/production...

You lucked out, arguably.

>My point is that yes - it's a global problem, but I honestly don't think everyone everywhere needs to save up for 7 years just to get a deposit. Maybe if you live in London you do, but elsewhere? Meh. Basic 3 bed houses are not so crazy expensive in most places, at least here in UK.

I make 12k after taxes and before other expenses... what are you talking about. And I am lucky not to pay rent with a terrible commute because I live with my parents.

>>LMAO, this is not normal anywhere else in Europe. Also, I bet she either has a lot of money saved up somewhere else, had her mortgage cosigned by someone else with a lot of income, etc. this is not normal at all.

In UK 5% mortgages are readily available to first time buyers. It's a completely normal thing here in UK. And I can assure you she doesn't have a lot of money and the mortgage wasn't cosigned by anyone else lol.

>>A good rule of thumb is to have at least 35% of the estimated cost.

Well now that's absolutely nuts. Here in UK 10% deposit is normal, 15% is high, and I don't know anyone who paid 20% or more - and everyone in my group of friends(we all just turned 30) bought a house recently.

>>The average UK price house is 256k

Yes, because London destroys the averages completely. Like I said, my sister just bought a 3 bed house with a garden and driveway for £150k, and it wasn't particularly cheap, neither for the street nor for the area .

From this map, no:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/dk-graph...

I'm confused - it clearly shows the prices have actually gone down in the North East, but still says 4.8% increase? How?

Rural Germany, where until a few years ago no one except the indigenous would have wanted to live. Now foreign investment firms, mainly chinese, are buying up everything they can get a hold of. Prices for a single family home before the rush about 350k, now 1.5m.

Thanks globalization to make it possible for a chinese billionaire to own property in Schneizlreuth, BY.

And remember, it's gonna be like that forever from now on. The genie is out, people will cling into housing forever and ever. Unless thermonuclear war happens, housing is and will be the number 1 investment forever.

In my country it would take 17 years of minimum wage salaries or 10 years of average national salary to buy an apartment. Mind you, this is a calculation where the assumption is the 100% of the salary for that time goes only into housing and that the house prices stay as these are today.

It is ridiculous.

I sympathize with your concern, but this is off topic.

I try to rely on sources I trust.

But it can be difficult when a new owner buys a good media and transform it to make more profits. LesNumériques (French) was a good source and is not trustworthy anymore. Tek.no (Norwegian) may be alright on average, even though the owner is so-so.

I also stopped to use Google Search. It is a completely useless search engine for this usage. I prefer DuckDuckGo/Bing and I usually append "reddit" to my searches. It’s still a lot of astroturfing on Reddit though. Some is obvious but it’s not perfect.

I never trust online user reviews. For example for restaurants I prefer to look at the guide Michelin than fake reviews. Online reviews can still show when a restaurant is likely bad but it’s not a good indication of a restaurant worth a trip.

I also ask friends.

It will be interesting if those 'trustworthy' sources grow and can make money in a world where trust becomes more valuable.

I suppose as we trust Amazon less we will begin shopping at the curated store more.

As we trust Google less, maybe people who curate links will become valuable again.

As we trust Google ads less (to get our product in front of real people) we will trust specialist advertisers more.

As long as people keep ordering on websites such as Amazon that have an obvious conflict of interest and profit off fraud, the fraud will continue, nothing more. Reputation doesn't even matter anymore, people know how rotten Amazon is yet continue to use it. For me, if I have a single bad experience with a vendor, be it Amazon or anybody else, I will cease making business with them, period, and so much for convenience...

Since there is no scrutiny from the consumer anymore, these vendors don't care about accountability or their own reputation. I absolutely hate that marketplace paradigm where you don't even know who you are buying from anymore and everything is obfuscated.

>How do you navigate it?

I automatically assume any online influencer trying to sell me something is a grifter. I also don't use social media.

The best part is that there's zero downside and you don't have to do anything.

There have always been scammers and charlatans, they just have global reach now, plus there is a disconnect between the creator and the ad system now.

Your average YouTube creator doesn't want scam ads. If the FTC forced YouTube to say "this ad is endorsed by us and we'll pay any legal damages if this is found to be a scam in court", those ads would disappear.

The bigger issue is why this is just a thread on Hacker News and not a major talking point for politicians looking to dunk on Big Tech.

The main question for me is: why are you looking at ads on YouTube?

Since I've been using adblockers forever, I went ten years or so before I even realized YouTube was showing ads...

Tangent - Reviews are basically useless. It's next to impossible to get good information to choosing some a local business / service on the internet.

Consequence of gamifying things (reviews, stars, upvotes, retweets) means everything is gamed.

I'm reminded of a post from a few months ago: a guy had a massager who got annihilated by Chinese competition because they knew how to exploit Amazon's systems.

I find if you read some reviews with cynical eye you can still get quite a good idea. I mean the "great 5*" ones may be fake but the "quite good but terrible service 3*" usually are not.

Unfortunately users reviews are generally pretty useless. And the experts reviews are absent or difficult to find online, because there's not a real incentive for them to share it.

I came from an European country, a not heavy-populated area, where a lot of feedback are shared in the community. Before buying something, is helpful asking friend, relatives or colleagues about their previous experience and what model/brand they advise. I think is a great benefit that I missed when I went to live in other countries. There's less feedback sharing abroad and most of the people rely on: the same brand, the price of the product, the advice for shopping center staff (which are often biased). If I ask to some friend about a car mechanic or a restaurant advice, he would have no preference.

Scams are increasingly common. "Since when" is, say, sometime in the past 10 years.

It's partly due to technology completely removing barriers to entry and providing global and powerful amplification, coupled with sociocultural "bonkers insanity" (a technical term) where almost everything has become an advertise or a performance or etc, which has its own effect of lowering barriers and amplification.

The feedback loops there just accelerate it.

It's not new (watch any set of TV infomercials, or most of what happens on QVC or Home Shopping Network or whatever the equivalents to these things are today) but there really is more of it, and they're getting better at it, as above.

Technology + Humans. IMO.

I mean, it isn't a "scam", but I for one would love to never again have someone invite me out to lunch like they want to hang out as friends, only to discover they're just trying to get me to buy something.

Extremely rare occurrence before the last 10 years of influencer hustle culture. Now, not so much.

> Extremely rare occurrence before the last 10 years of influencer hustle culture. Now, not so much.

You must not have been arount > 10 years ago ... see Amway, tupperware, etc.

https://www.history.com/news/tupperware-parties-brownie-wise

Such an old story it is in the "history" section.

I've been around over 5 decades, sooooo.

"Scams have been around forever" does not really address (nor refute) "Scams have become more far more prevalent".

> I've been around over 5 decades

Not invited to an Amway party back in the day??

But now in your 5th decade being invited to tiktok teen multi level marketing crypto supplement parites?

Respect to you for living your best life in your 50/60s

There's a good chance we'll look back on this as a post-truth era.

I have some guesses about underlying drivers, but they're just guesses. At the top, we have regulatory 'avoidance' masquerading as 'innovation', and enough regulators stood down for it to have consequences. We have the entire journalism industry brought to it's knees financially, and turning to low-quality opinion written predominantly by immature, inexperienced people. We have politics-- international actors leveraging social media to sow disinformation, and domestic actor(s) enthusiastically and successfully denying truths with impunity. And we have official sources of truth corrupted-- the trends above, and others led to ready availability of bad information in sources previously regarded as authoritative.

Unfortunately, the epicenter in many cases can be traced to changes in society and power brought about by the technology industry, which 'disrupted' society and replaced it with substitutes that empowered anti-factual narratives and personalities. The recipes for avoiding being scammed are nice, but this is a structural problem that shouldn't be laid at the feet of individual people unfortunate enough to be conned.

Just like the 1500s was a “post truth era”. The exact same discussions happened back then.

Turns out, eventually it became the exact opposite. With more and better means of communication, it was possible to expose all the lies of the ruling class and build a better and more fair society.

This is one of the most concise and ‘on point’ summaries of our current situation that I have seen. Thanks for laying this out so clearly.

You've hit the nail on the head repeatedly there.

Regulators, and checks and balances of all kinds, have been systematically dismantled and de-fanged. People literally can't fathom the full scale of the power disparities.

Still, trust in authority is at a record low - if not yet low enough! You're 100% right that this is a structural problem. It's too easy for bad actors to not only avoid accountability but to even get the crowd blaming the wrong people.

Don't believe strangers on the internet.

That's a paradox.