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Comment by peanut-walrus | Hacker News Reader

Turns out you don't actually need top-tier engineering talent if your only business is selling ads to scammers to prey on the elderly?

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Or alternatively, it takes some time to destroy a codebase that was created over decades to a point in that it scares the end-users.

Or they got people so addicted/dependent on their social-media crack that they can't quit, regardless of how bad and dangerous the product becomes.

> selling ads to scammers to prey on the elderly

I thought that was YouTube's business model.

Now if you'll excuse me I need to purchase some phony dick pills and diabetes snake oil to go with my fake NASA-designed air conditioner.

Maybe it was needed until recently and today the scale and monopoly is sufficiently well oiled that a couple 1M$/month programmers with some clankers can ship some new buttons and keep it running?

Maybe.

Facebook is for preying on the elderly. Instagram for the rest of us.

You need a set of good lead engineers in monetisation who can hide the fraud well enough from the rest of the company

Wouldn't you be better served by hiring competent accountants for that? An engineer would screw this up and get the decimal in the wrong place.

> if your only business is selling ads to scammers to prey on the elderly?

Don’t forget failed, mentally ill, manic rebrands that cost billions and go nowhere.

Oh, and enabling human traffickers.

the ceo of a former company I was at demanded a rebrand like 6 months after our internal rebrand. Cost ~500k-800k USD.

Turned out he was schtupping the vp of the design company (his wife told the admin assistant during the divorce)

I wouldn't be surprised if a much larger proportion of big business and politics boiled down to this

Yeah there's lots of ethics rules and stuff about it but we've seen how little the upper class cares about that

Whenever a big business deal goes down, I tend to assume someone's getting sex or money out of the deal

Frankly there's already just so much corruption that we know about and it seems unlikely we know about all of it or even most of it

A friend of mine has actually posited a variation of this as way to predict the outcomes of legal cases

Hey, the VP is driving a new Ferrari... right after a new 8 figure deal.. weird.

> Schtupping

Note that word isn't joint to tupping unless you're from Tasmania.

  Shtupping comes from Yiddish, while tupping comes from an old English/Scots agricultural term relating to rams.

I wonder what "commission" the VP received.

> Oh, and enabling human traffickers.

Also the genocides.

Hey now that was an accident! They created a taskforce to prevent that from happening again, ignored all their recommendations and then laid them all off.

I'm sure meta learned their lesson

Big whoopsies on that one.

How now, that’s not fair. They also make a lot of money giving teenagers depression and selling them beauty products and chatbot companions.

please stop being so mean, they also create echo chambers to kill political discourse (i.e. the foundation of democracy) and show the most inflammatory material to their users to pit them into a shouting match against each other

Truly who could blame them though. They have to trap people in rage bubbles or they might make slightly less money!

I'm so tired of these double standards, nobody ever blames fentanyl manufacturers for making such an addictive product so why is everyone mad at facebook? All they did was poison discourse for a generation and provide material support to an autocrat.

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