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Comment by mkoubaa | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of a high school fundraiser where students paid for 5 minute pauses to a day of nonstop beiber music

Sounds closer to terrorism than a wholesome fundraiser. I think maybe could do worse with Baby Shark or something.

Playing deliberately obnoxious music to a captive audience? Yeah that's a CIA torture technique. Unironically.

They're doing it (I presume) in the middle of the day, and for a couple of hours maybe. They're not keeping the victims up for 48 hours straight playing the music.

I think it's a fine idea for a fundraiser.

Fundraisers should benefit both people, this is extortion.

Cool. I’ll set up at your work desk to kick off another one.

When you have an audience of people who are forbidden from leaving, you have some level of obligation to use their time wisely. The myth of "yeah you're forced to be here, but it's for your own good!" really breaks down when the "good" use of their time is intentionally annoying them to extort money. I hated things like this when I was in highschool. It made me think (often rightfully) that even from an academic perspective my time would have been better spent at home playing Counterstrike.

Yeah, I was surprised how hated my comment was. I was thinking something like, "pfft, kids these days are too soft." Or something like that.

When I was in middle school, we had an annual fundraiser for the American Heart Assoc. It was one of those "____-a-thon" style events where we all had to jump rope for as long as we could, and we gathered pledges from family members ("only 1¢ per jump, Aunt Sally!"). But this was only for an hour, and it replaced our normal PE period, so it wasn't a diversion from the normal course of schooling. And not everyone participated.

That's the kind of thing I had in mind when writing that comment, but now I'm realizing the parent comment was talking about the entire student body, for the entire school day.

I agree with you. My original take was hot... and bad. :)

When I was in school it was Hanson's mmmbop, but it didn't work so well because everyone where I was from didn't have so much so it was embraced.

Facebook, Twitter, etc. describe the tactics they devise to manipulate computer users as "products". "Products" that sell for zero dollars. In the real world,, one might imagine a product strategy something like

   1. Create a product that solves a problem
   2. Sell the product to those affected by the problem

Under the so-called "tech" company version of reality, the process is more like

   1. Create a "product" that creates a problem
   2. Create a "product" that purports to solve that problem
   3. Conduct surveillance and sell advertising services to someone else

To me, social media companies rarely discuss their "products" (advertising services). They discuss their free bait, calling this "products". The service being sold is not even being sold to the person using the "product" (taking the bait).

They created a product that solves the problem of people not watching ads compulsively, and sold access to that product to people with ads.

This is known as "racketeering".

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