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Comment by guhcampos | Hacker News Reader

I have another weak correlation to TEMU to add.

I have never, ever, bought anything on TEMU, because anytime I open the website it gives me a gambling roulette for some supposed discount thing. I hate gambling, so everytime I see the roulette I just close the webpage and go do something else.

Well, the whole cheap-generated content craze feels basically like gambling to me to this point, too. Folks are just randomly generating content: books, videos, articles, even applications, and gambling that something will pay for itself.

So now we have Enshitification, Eemufication and Gamblification of the Human Society. Damn I might write something on Substack about that.

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The gambling roulette is triply annoying because it will inevitably start walking you through some flow where you're supposedly ending up with a big discount or free items or whatever-the-fuck. And if you're encountering it for the first time, you'll think "ah cool, i can get some cheap chinese gewgaws for free with the thing I actually wanted to buy." And then 10 minutes has gone by and 5 roulette spins and there's $400 worth of bullshit in your cart.

And the thing is, Temu - I was going to buy something from you. I saw an ad or whatever and thought "sure, I'll pay $13 for that keyboard." But then you get pulled into the dopamine labyrinth hell-realm and by the time you're out they've wasted 15 minutes of your time and you don't even remember what you came in for.

For sure, the ridiculous promo games are best skipped (when even possible to skip!!) as 99% of the time they're just that you win the right to get a discount on a future order based on this next order. And those discounts are always described as like "a $400 credit" ... when it's really the sum of "50 cents off of $5, $1.50 off of $10... $30 off $250" and so on, so you will have to place like 8 orders of increasingly hilarious value to "use" all of your "$400."

All that said, there have been a decent number of things that I bought from them which I've found incredibly useful. Just like, phone stands, ODBII reader, sticky notepads that look like Windows 95 Notepad windows, teeny tiny wireless earbuds I use while sleeping, etc.

They appear to be targeting users with underdeveloped prefrontal cortex. I wonder what the intention behind that might be.

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