It really lowers my perception of Youtube as a product as just any old site with content, but also scams / creepy stuff. Youtube don't care I suspect, it's money for them, and it re-enforces my desire to not give them money... so yeah they take money form who they can.

Hold the publisher responsible, let them deal with the ad platform. Suddenly, it becomes very attractive to have an ad platform that doesn't allow scams.

If the publisher and the ad platform are the same, even better.

What percent of the global economy is scams? Sure, the investment manager charging 1% a year to put all of your retirement savings in ETFs that also charge 1-1.5% a year funneling money in to companies being raided by executives and employees isn't a scam scam, but it is a massive mis-allocation of resources and probably more damaging than some dumb item purchased from a Meta ad that never showed up. Same for recently legalized (in the US) sports betting.

The startling thing is AI is being applied at scale to make this crap more pervasive. 10% scams? Meta would like advertisers to use their generative AI tools to create image and video ads of non-existent products.

Best thing we can do is delete all phone apps and only access online media from behind firewalls that block all ads and tracking. Windows is dead. Apple is transitioning to an adtech company. Linux is the only option.

I'm not entirely sure that's true. It's equivalent to asking a platform to moderate all "harmful content" off the site. "Scam" is fundamentally subjective, just as "harm" is.

The real solution is to reform the justice system such that a citizen feeling they've been defrauded has a quick and easy process to get satisfaction for themselves and other similarly harmed people. We need a streamlined, totally online court that excels at gathering and interpreting data, and a decision in days not years. The ad networks are themselves the natural allies of such a reform, but such a change can and should start small as a pilot program at the state level. If successful, it removes the considerable legal-cost moat protecting scammers, and so it no longer makes sense to even attempt such a business, and the world becomes a slightly better place.

I cannot wrap my head around how generally intelligent people are completely blind to this. I guess 20 years of ad-block-is-the-norm has left people totally confused about internet monetization. I've never encoutered a problem that has such a clear answer, and that so many intelligent people get totally spun around the axle on.

We need to start paying for ad-free services. Wake up.

2 days later, I got the same ad again.

That probably depends on your definition of a scam but I'd argue we need to resynchronize that definition. They are scams, because the people behind them know what they're saying is plainly false, and they exploit the explosion of digital networks (like ads) to spread those lies. In the 20th century, the channels for scams were far narrower and easier to pinpoint.

It would make running scams unprofitable, or at the very least cut into profit a lot / disincentivize it.

Paying for YouTube premium lite (I think it’s new) has been the best thing in ages! The toxic ads are finally gone!

If you want to throw7 that all away over some media speculation be my guest. I'll tell the NHS to fund themselves for 11 minutes next year to make up the shortfall.

Someone recently even tried to attempt scamming me when buying a burger by telling me if I want certain toppings without telling me it will cost more. Apparently now have to play mind games when buying a burger.

And the answer would depend on where the externalities from all that heroin sale happened (e.g. if it was abroad), whether the government would be expected to carry the cost of them (e.g. by having a public healthcare system), and probably also on how actually democratic they are.

*Unless you steal from other wealthy folks.

Worse, your fake version will be convincingly begging on the call for God knows what while being horribly tortured. Audio versions of this are already a thing.

I know most of that was driven by the tragedy of Adam Walsh, but it was still great OpSec I'll never drop.

Since then, they invested heavily in providing free internet that failed (Free Basics), wasted a bunch of money on some sort of a global cryptocurrency that never even launched (Libra/Diem), tried to invent a whole new market with VR and it went nowhere, and now they're going all in on "AI" but the only thing they have to show for it are some sort of celebrity-impersonating Instagram bot accounts and some glasses whose selling point is that they're branded as Ray-Bans.

- "Never download anything unless it's from the Apple App Store"

- "Never buy anything unless you're on amazon.com"

- "Dont use the internet outside of ChatGPT"

I hate Meta, but their ad business is still doing well and WhatsApp is the core of Indian society.

AOL, Yahoo, and Tumblr still operate. Meta won't be dead in our lifetimes.

So my strategy here has been to start downloading anything that I think I might need from the Internet and keeping a local copy. It's free and abundant now. It could become inaccessible within a matter of minutes if the right powerful person says so. There may be a low probability of that happening, but given the potential disruptions to our life of our always-on connectivity going away, it's worth being prepared.

do that sooner rather than later.

Voice mimicry is so much easier now, that you might not be able to tell from the phone. This is why a verbal password from family is important, esp. in unusual situations.

God help anyone not armed with AI in the future, that's why it cannot be locked up by corporations or government.

I have done this already and convinced a friend to do it after her father fell victim to a scam where he was convinced the sheriffs department wanted him to pay off a fine in gift cards.

I am also concerned that one might steal a trove of texts from someone and plug it into AI which could mimic the writing and tone of someone.

I've never seen anything like this and I see the reverse quite a bit.

Normalize paying for things instead of selling your attention to the highest bidder.

Infomercials for all kinds of scams from buying real estate with zero down, crap products that didn't work...

I imagine almost none of it. Social networks solve connectivity problems that people want solved. Talk to some "casuals" who aren't in tech about how they find out about new restaurants, social trends, arts and crafts, places to go visit, etc. and the answer is Instagram or TikTok. And FB does the same but for older generations.

Ads are also a fundamental revenue pillar in this world. You can layer in relevance ads for a product to anyone, at any time, for any topic. If something exists and people pay attention to it, there's a way to make money advertising around it.

There's ... certainly deeper questions to be had about if this stuff is actually good for us, but in the mean time, it's very real and worth a lot of money.

We spent weeks trying to recover the account, but recovery codes weren't being sent through to her email or phone, the email and phone that has been on the account for 10+ years. The bad actor started making posts that she had cars to sell and to message her if they wanted to buy (also claiming that her sister was sick and she needed the money which is why she was selling the cars, completely untrue) Tens of her friends including her son reported the account as taken over and the posts as fraudulent. All responses from Facebook saying there was no indication of anything violating the guidelines, which is insane because all this behavior taken together screams account takeover.

Eventually, I reached out to a friend who worked at Meta who filed an internal report and we were hopeful that might actually fix it, but nothing ever came of it and when I reached out to the friend a month later he said the report was closed and he couldn't see any more details (for security reasons). If my mom meeting me in person, and me reaching out to my former teammate on a live phone call and proving my identity, and that teammate filing a report with the security team can't get it fixed, what can?

At this point, we think the original account is still up (we can't see, since the bad actor has blocked the entire family) and every new account she makes gets deleted for being a sockpuppet / ban evader.

She's devastated that someone ruined her online life like this, and that she was in Facebook groups for her career that she no longer has access to, she can no longer keep up with her friends and family. So many local businesses post their events and updates on Facebook and she has no ability to see these anymore.

We don't know what to do next. I'm so thoroughly disappointed with how Meta handled the situation. It's clearly an account takeover if someone looked at the account and the indicators. I think our next step is to write a letter to Meta legal alleging gross neglect after being presented with evidence of identity theft. Maybe that finally would get someone's attention. I'm nearly to the point where I would potentially spend thousands of dollars of my own money for a lawyer just to prove a point.

The power of persistence. I'm not being glib: these people probably get most of their ads/accounts blocked or banned, and have a dismal success rate baked into their business model, but they keep submitting until one goes through.

Misrepresentation is another key ingredient, but I hope you're not willing to buy a network of bot or havked accounts just so you can get an ad approved.

I don't have any kids, so asking because I don't know and am curious.

How the heck are they not being raided and at least temporarily shut down at this exact moment? No wonder Trump is best friend of Mark as of recently... it really does scream "guilty".

1 third of all scams, crazy.

I mean, lets face it, no government that makes hard right turns and has intense corruption like the USA just goes back to being a proper liberal democracy. Most likely things will get a lot worse before they even get better and on a timescale thats unpredictable. We may be talking 20+ years before any sort of baby steps towards liberal reforms are even possible on the federal level. The right has the gerrymandering, scotus, the courts, the media machine, etc. Pro-working class regulations are just not going to happen like they did in the 60s and 70s for a very long time if history is any guide.

Its so odd to me people just have a "dont worry we'll got back to normal next election." To get back to what we had during those times of pro-worker regulation will take many, many, years if not decades of work now. At the very least until many in SCOTUS retire or pass away from old age. That just isnt happening anytime soon.

>Windows is dead.

Making the platforms have some liability for facilitating fraud would be good, though. In the meantime I block ads.

If ads worked this way:

- Victim clicks crypto scam ad, loses their savings ($xx,xxx)

- Forensic investigation happens, determines that this happened due to a paid ad on site X. Site X knew that this was an ongoing problem and didn't manage to control it, but was still showing ads.

- Site X is considered complicit and just as liable for the loss as the scammer. Since the scammer is hard to find, the user sues the site and the site has to pay the losses.

- The site is now free to pursue their "business partner" for the damages, the user doesn't have to care.

I bet the ads would suddenly get reviewed a lot more. No sane publisher would allow ads from an ad platform that doesn't provide a guarantee against this issue. If a "good" ad platform started showing scams, the site would drop it once notified (because now they're on notice, and would be liable for any future scams). Thus, the platform would make damn sure that this doesn't happen.

"Scam" might be subjective but the legal system usually has a definition for it and judges to apply any remaining subjective judgement necessary. It's usually also pretty easy to avoid the need for a judge deciding by not trying to max out the we-think-this-is-technically-not-illegal grey area.

This doesn't require huge legal costs for the ad networks - they can simply refuse to do business with entities that are not verified, or allow ads for shady business areas where 40% of the businesses are borderline scams and 50% blatant scams...

Netflix started showing ads on their lower tiers: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/126831

If you pay for Sky/Virgin/insert Cable provider in your country, you still get copious amounts of ads. If you pay to go to the cinema, you have to sit through 15 minutes of adverts before the film starts.

I'm buying off Amazon, they're showing sponsored products (so... ads).

EA were looking at putting ads into games that you bought back in 2024: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ea-are-thinking-about-inser...

Hell, I pay for public transport, they have adverts on.

Amazon Prime Video didn't have ads. Then one day it did.

Maybe you're right that _the masses_ need to start rejection ad-tiers, but so far we've seen that people will accept advertising to get more.

The services (FB etc.) don't want this model, and it's not like the users can force them to switch to a paid model.

Also, a large percentage of users don't care and believe that "free" is better.

https://x.com/a16z/status/1986486508355002584

Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg on Curing All Disease

We sat down with Dr. Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, co-founders of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to discuss their ambitious plan to cure, prevent, and manage all disease by the end of the century.

Probably 75% of products you see on instagram ads, you can go find on temu for their actual cost, usually at 80% discount.

To me any product advertised on Instagram, or through YouTubers sponsorships, have become synonymous with overpromised bullshit if not outright scams. Every single time I see a sponsorship deal on a YouTube video I do some research just to validate it, and the vast majority of it are outright shitty products.

It's been working great as a signal of what products not to buy.

In any sane world we'd regulate big tech far more rigorously than we do (we'd tax them more as well but that's a separate issue).

From the article:

> Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams and banned goods, Reuters reports

I think we can agree that there's no "subjective" situation when a product is banned.

> The ad networks are themselves the natural allies of such a reform

The article (and the person you're replying to) point out that a significant portion of Meta's revenue comes from such scams. I'm really struggling to see how they're "natural allies" and not "antagonists" here. You're going to have to show me some research that backs up your claim because it flies in the face of the available information.

I don't relate with this at all. I get ads for normal insurance companies, uber eats, air bnb, and gacha games to name a few. None of them are scams, so I can't understand understand why so many people on hacker news complain about scams.

Do you live in a region with barely any ad inventory?

Also 'just go to court' is such a naive take. As someone who has been in litigation before I can tell you those $350/hr billings add up quick. How many consumers can afford a 5 or even 6 digit legal bill for being scammed for a few hundred or thousands dollars on a FB ad? Of those who can, how many would see this pricetag as worth it? Sorry but small claims court isn't going to do discovery for you for some company hidden behind who knows how many storefronts and foreign proxies. You're going to have to do real litigation. Its absurd to expect every working class person to sue all scammers constantly. Instead ad providers should be policing their own ad networks and the working class should be using the government to implement proper regulations to protect ourselves.

Where are all these ad-free services everyone keeps talking about? Social media companies don't even find it worth it to offer an ad-free plan last I checked...

You make it sound like there are no people that pay for ad-free services they find valuable. Or that there are no free ad-free services (ex: WhatsApp).

My feeling is that people know some "services" are not that "valuable" (ex: facebook, instagram, etc.), so they would not pay for them, but, like with drugs, they can't reduce their usage.

It could also create "free" platforms, funded by billionaires, to control the speech on the platform.

The answer is a communal, government owned social media platform, that mimics the rules of the town square. in the US, this includes the same 1st amendment rights. This would allow equal access to everyone's voice.

IMHO, social media should not exists at all. It is too huge and too fast for our tiny brains.

This leaves ads as the only form of revenue and because ads don't care about the content, this creates a race to the bottom on generating slop.

Mostly, I'm getting things like German ads for my local German supermarket (that I would've gone to anyway without the ad) dubbed badly into English with an AI that can't tell how to pronounce the "." in a price, plus a Berlin-specific "pay less rent" company that I couldn't use even if I wanted to because I don't rent.

But when I get 30 seconds of ads a minute into a video that had 30 seconds of ads before I could start watching… I don't care what the rest of the video was going to be about, I don't want to waste my life with a 30:60:30:… pattern of adverts and "content" whose sole real purpose is now to keep me engaged with the adverts. (This is also half of why I don't bother going to Facebook, every third post is an ad, although those ads can't even tell if I'm a boy or a girl, which language I speak, nor what my nationality is, and the first-party suggested groups are just as bad but grosser as they recently suggested I join groups for granny dating, zit popping, and Elon Musk).

Google YouTube TV for NFL Sunday ticket Robinhood Some dog tracker thing Detergent Peloton Liberty mutual Some truck brand Foam insulation

Other than how to buy gold ads and sandy hook promise, my ads are very mild. YMMV

As soon as I disable my adblocker on my PC though I only get fake scam ads.

trends point to will be locked up by corporations for the near to medium term

I think the average user on HN (who blocks ads constantly, uses things like AdNauseam, pihole, etc.) is not going to be your typical purchaser. If you look at your typical American, they buy a lot of shit through those ads and a lot of people actually like the ads.

My only complaint with the ads has been the targeting has always been crap. If you allow personalization, they do get more relevant. But, that complaint of mine is my own personal one. I’m like a typical HN user, ads don’t typically read me well due to my blocking on all kinds of platforms.

The pinto wasn't any worse that other cars from that time period. It should come as no shock that older products are worse than newer products.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Retrospective_safet...

Home Depot doesn’t want me to know about it, but I saw the ad!

The fact the ad platforms are multi-billion dollar companies leans my opinion towards malicious intent.

Honestly, in every area of my life where I have to rely on others, someone has tried to grift me at least once. And that's only the cases where I have definitive evidence.

YouTube premium lite has been a game changer. Otherwise I would have given up on watching on Apple TV

Google products' bullshit as usual, I never needed/wanted YouTube Music and the other bloat they wanted to force me to pay for, I was happily paying to not have ads...

[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6307365?sjid=93860...

I never understand why well-paid HN commentators refuse to pay for their entertainment.

On the web at large, sure use an ad blocker, there's no choice there. There is on youtube though.

You’ll be suspicious and ask for the pass phrase. The attacker now knows the nature of the protection you setup between you and your mom.

And then the real attack on your mom, with you describing the system you’d agreed to, and claiming you can’t remember the word/phrase.

Better is the Terminator-style lie to see if it gets detected.

The laws need to be changed.

If you eat an American diet, you do not need protein supplements. You do not need the absurd amount of protein per day that mens health influencers insist, and they usually push you pretty close to the actual danger zone, and it's all just a fucking waste anyway.

The current protein trend is just a fad diet for men. It doesn't help. Bulk whey protein is literally the least bad part of that industry though, so eh.

Everything else about the supplements industry is fully scam though. If any of it worked, they would scientifically prove it so they could get near infinite American healthcare dollars. Most of it not only doesn't do anything, but the batch quality is atrocious, and plenty often you can buy a supplement that does not include the ingredient it claims at all. I feel like the fact that it is sold next to the literal "poison a child" homeopathic pills should be more meaningful to people than it is.

That shelf is for things that don't work.

But when you do buy it on Temu, is it even a legitimate product?

Micro-Targeting is one of the worst mistakes of the entire advertising industry and we'll be probably dealing with its consequences for a while to come.

Gacha games are famously deceptive and exploitative.

Airbnb has a good justification for keeping the location private, but it's typically pretty hard to get an idea of the value you're getting for your dollar until you actually arrive on site and discover just how functional the HVAC/kitchen actually are and how good the location actually is.

While you might not classify any of the three as "scams", they're certainly classic 'low-rent' advertisements for things that take advantage of information asymmetry to convince customers to pay more than they would be necessarily willing to if what their money got them was actually clear.

The paying relationship is not sufficient for these technologies that are required

And yes, I realize they rejected it when it was raised as the alternative to data collection, preferring the regulators’ plan of making it still universally $0 and funding the whole operation on rainbows and wishes.

Agreed and in combination with FB messenger they've got most of the market...but what of it?

They're literally competing against a donation supported app. Pause for a second and think about what that says about how little direct money there is in the space.

Plus it's E2E encrypted & has significant user privacy expectations so significant limitations on how you can leverage it for their adtech biz

I'm not saying whatsapp is dead or a failure as a messenger. It's a great addition to round out an ecosystem but don't think it's any good as the primary load bearing pillar of a 1.5 trillion company in the same way search is for google

Having a copy of your own medical records could be critically important if suddenly your friend who is a doctor is now your doctor because there's nobody else.

Money tends to be worthless is such situations anyway - it's backed by the full faith and credit of a government that best case no longer cares about you and worst case no longer exists. So you aren't going to worry about your bank account, nobody will accept credit or debit anyway.

There is a whole lot of other data on the Internet that can be very, very useful in such situations. Even just having a few hundred hours of collected kids TV shows means you can sit them down in front of Bluey while the adults do stuff that is critical for survival. Knowing how to build a smelter and bellows out of clay that you can find locally means you can restart metal production in a matter of days rather than thousands of years. Knowing what the local plant species are and which are edible might keep you from starving. Knowing how to scavenge parts and wiring, as well as what their datasheets are and how you need to hook them up, means you can fix broken electronics and potentially create new ones, which gives you continuing access to knowledge.

You probably only need just one, for authentication purposes. I doubt grandmother can perform this sort of "spycraft" well if it's more complicated. Better to have something simple and easy, than to forget and panic later.

But I pay happily for YouTube, because I use it daily, and my home country’s propaganda was annoying enough to make it worth.

Arguably weirder, since stuff like this is on sometimes:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15737708/

It's a low-budget horror host show which was made for streaming, and coincidentally ended up on the air late on Friday nights.

As far as moderation costs go, it would be drastically cheaper than it is now since there would be far less scammers on the network.

There was a big "bombshell" report on this yesterday (it didn't hit HN frontpage though).

Meta knowingly gets a lot of its funding from scams. They love it! They don't care about technical solutions for it: they've banned any solutions from being implemented because it would impact revenue.

Anyway you should buy my bottle of research chemicals that will make your balls bigger. Evidence? What are you, the Illuminati?

Also check out this hat purported to protect your head from electromagnetic radiation even though it is shaped exactly like a lens pointed directly at your brain.

Don't forget to harass random telecom repairman about how dangerous 5G is! We will be talking all about it on our app you can buy so you can watch us anywhere!

I just... I just don't understand. There are people who seem to have near infinite credulity, at least for the "right" people.

At least something like "Miracle Mineral Solution" had a partially fake "study" where they actually gave people a harmful thing to drink just to say they did.

That guy from FoldingIdeas had a comment that resonates with me: There are people who trust something implicitly entirely because an actual authority told them not to trust it. "They believe the fake facebook story because facebook told them it was fake". But even those people are still demonstrably unable to connect past actions to current results to a point that I'm not sure how they trust that breathing is required for being alive.

Like there's so much about reality that is so simple and clear and demonstrable, and they just don't seem to be at all capable of squaring even those simple facts... No, crystals can't do shit. No "vibrations" just aren't a thing. These people live in a different reality than I do, but I don't understand how they can look around them and match that to the reality they have been sold. Those pills haven't made you any fucking smarter! Haven't you noticed?!

Like even Joe Rogan told Matt Walsh "Hey, you are wrong, there's really only a few thousand sex change operations a year" instead of the millions Walsh claimed and he just said "I don't believe that" and I'm like what the hell buddy do some basic math how many people do you know that got a sex change operation last year?

Horseshit. Running an ad in a local publication was also pretty damn cheap and was always human reviewed.

> gacha games

How are these not scams?

Nebula is youtube that works for you. But the conversion rate from youtube-ad-viewer to nebula-subscription-payer is <1%.

Ah, sorry. Perhaps I should have spelled it out. Meta desperately wants to avoid being regulated. One way they can avoid it is to help make the out-of-band justice system (much) more efficient such that they avoid messy moderation policies and don't need to be regulated anymore. Victims would be happier too, especially if they get remunerated for their pain, time, and trouble. The message to scammers everywhere (not just on Meta) becomes clear: go ahead and try it, you will get caught and put out of business, and likely sent to jail. Eventually the scammers will realize it's not worth it.

The unintended side-effect, sadly, is that legitimate business will be attacked as scams by profit-seeking or malicious individual malefactors.

In any event, I think reforming the US justice system is way overdue; it is far too expensive and time-consuming for most matters, and that means we live in a place with de facto lack of courts. And I don't like that.

You do realize that we are on a platform without ads where your word is heard, so it still is possible.

And before "social media" there were plenty of free forums (each with a certain main topic, but in which people were discussing occasionally more than that), so it was not that bad. And in fact that continues today (ex: this one), with more relevant discussions in my opinion than what I glimpse from my occasional social media incursions.

Regulation always seems simple, but there are inevitable unintended consequences. Sadly, those who see regulation as the only or best tool to shape behavior are quick to suggest yet more regulation to fix those unintended consequences, either unaware of the positive feedback loop or certain there exists some set of regulation that will finally, perfectly fix the system. I find this way of thinking naive; it is almost always better to make adjustments to the system to shape behavior that way. And in this case, the obvious way to do that is to fix the courts, and make justice affordable again.

Too late for that one. I have been scammed a few times from Amazon sellers.

I'm actually somewhat less critical of Apple/Google/Facebook/etc. than probably most readers would be, on the grounds that it simply isn't possible to build a "walled garden" at the scale of the entire internet. It is not possible for Big Tech to exclude scammers. The scammers collectively are firing more brain power at the problem than even Big Tech can afford to, and the game theory analysis is not entirely unlike my efforts to keep my cat off my kitchen counter... it doesn't matter how diligent I am, the 5% of the time the cat gets up there and finds a tasty morsel of shredded cheese or licks some dribble of something tasty barely large enough for me to notice but constitutes a nice snack with a taste explosion for the much-smaller cat means I'm never going to win this fight. The cat has all day. I'm doing dozens of other things.

There's no way to build a safe space that retains the current size and structure of the current internet. The scammers will always be able to overpower what the walled garden can bring to bear because they're so many of them and they have at least an order of magnitude more resources... and I'm being very conservative, I think I could safely say 2 and I wouldn't be really all that surprised if the omniscient narrator could tell us it's already over 3.

[1]: https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/25/new-study-shows-massive-spike...

[2]: To forstall any AI debate, let me underline the word "lazy" in the footnote here. Most recently we received a shirt with a very large cobra on it, and the cobra has at least three pupils in each eye (depending on how you count) and some very eye-watering geometry for the sclera between it. Quite unpleasant to look at. What we're getting down the pipeline now is from some now very out-of-date models.

Might as well do AliExpress, same quality control/misleading descriptions but lower prices.

Is there even a trustworthy online shopping site/platform nowadays?

As empty shells of what they once were.

I've no doubt there'll be something at Facebook.com in ten years. But if it looks like your three examples, that's not a success.

Smart, on device agents that are aligned with a user's interests will be able to act as the "walled garden" the user needs. In fact, this future is anti-dysopian, because the agent will not care about existing walled gardens and digital fiefdoms, and to the extent that it's using them it's going to deprive them of ad revenue, and they'll have to sit and take it because being agent unfriendly will be a death sentence for a business.

People don't want to pay (help) people they don't like. YouTube ads do not feel fair, they feel manipulative and unethical. It's expected that most people wouldn't want to willingly engage with that kind of asshattery.

Contrast that with platforms like twitch. I'd say the average twitch viewer (that interacts with streams/chats) has a slightly negative view of Twitch. But many will still willingly donate dozens of subs to streamers they like. This removes ads for other people, not themselves.

People think YouTube is greedy and untrustworthy. Why would you willingly feed that machine?

You are making a silly argument here. There's no equivalence at all.

But you just admitted that you pay for YouTube and it shows you creator promotions. You are literally paying to see ads, then telling people not to do the same.

Unless there's some subtlety I'm missing here. I haven't been on YouTube in at least a decade. I see no difference between a blogger pushing a VPN and Google showing an ad for a VPN.

The big draw for cable TV was that you could watch TV without ads. Then ads started appearing on cable and people said it's OK, because the content is higher quality and not available elsewhere. Then that changed, and now there is no difference between broadcast, cable/satellite, and streaming services. Except that you don't have to pay for broadcast. (Yet. It's coming.)

My how the worm turns.

HN users used to herald that law as the best thing since Betty White (who was older than sliced bread).

Without 230, there would be no YouTube. No Facebook. No Instagram. No social media. Forums would likely have gone extinct. Half of the tech industry and a good chunk of the jobs that people on HN do would never have happened.

Now people on HN want to get rid of the law. People who are too young to know what it was like before that protection set the internet free to create and collaborate.

I despise social media. But demonizing 230 just shows a basic lack of knowledge of history, economics, and the reasons it was created.

Let me take things back a step - it's nearly impossible to hold people who are lying accountable. Surely the platform bears less responsibility than the liars on it?

Nebula would be as good if I consistently wanted to watch a particular creator - say, if I consistently listened to LegalEagle on my train ride to work - but I don't. And the channels that are good enough to consistently watch do not upload regularly enough to be spotted on a chronological feed and I'm sure that's no accident. Nor, I suspect, do they upload regularly enough to be eligible for a partnership with Nebula.

I have a subscription to Nebula because I want to support them and the idea and their future competitors other than YouTube, but I don't actually use it.

I might have bought that but a delayed flight spent reading Careless People swiftly disabused me of any such notions.

> In any event, I think reforming the US justice system is way overdue; it is far too expensive and time-consuming for most matters, and that means we live in a place with de facto lack of courts. And I don't like that.

Most countries have regulators that come with teeth, such that the only times they need to go to court are to confirm they have the teeth they're using. After that, companies fall in line. From the outside, it seems the USA does not have this system and has no desire to develop such a system.

I do not use much social media platforms, while I try to stay social, like posting one picture a month and sending a message here and there, watching a cat video sometimes, etc. I think social networks are much more similar to drugs - you can try to regulate to prevent people hurting themselves, but people will find a way if they can't refrain themselves.

Scams existed before social networks, and maybe is a bit easier using them, but I do not feel it is a fundamental shift. Along the ages people were taught/encouraged "to believe (without checking)" into a multitude of subjects (state, church, horoscope, etc.), now seems a bit hypocritical to be amazed that they do just that.

This makes the rest moot, but I will still list why I don’t think it’s like you say at least in case of social media.

If social media was paid only (like any actual product or service intended to benefit the customer) and users were choosing between paying different amounts rather than paying vs. not paying, it would kill the network effect outright; platforms would have to struggle to keep users, and to that end would start implementing features users want and need (rather than exploiting their emotional state and employing dark patterns[0] to boost ad impressions).

The interest of a service provider is aligned with the interest of the customer. The incentive to do bad unethical things to the user may exist either way, but it is when the user is not the customer that it becomes a natural course of things. It is still possible to “double-dip”[1], but the difference between users being customers and users not being customers is that in the former you can be an honest service provider and sustain yourself by doing things in the benefit of the user.

[0] For example, have you noticed how Instagram’s GUI is carefully designed to require you to tap two times, with a teeny tiny chevron as the only indicator, every time you open the app to switch to the timeline of people you actually follow, rather than whatever the algorithm suggests (and how carelessly swiping photo carousel left makes you exist that carousel, and lose the scroll position)?

[1] Additionally, note that the examples you named (cars, IoT, OS[2]) make a lot of money from a single purchase and/or are fairly inflexible to switch away from, compared to social media where interoperability is pretty much solved with open standards.

[2] What is a paid-only streaming service that “dips” into advertisement in some unethical way?

My issue is that in presence of one large player who does it for free competition is already impossible: $2 is twice as much more than $1, but $1 is infinity/NaN times more than $0. It’s one of the many problems with the fact that it is legally allowed.

Technically, it doesn't logically follow that paying means you aren't the product.

It's a place with bait for software engineers (lots of tech stories and discussion), and YC then gets lots of eyes on job postings for their companies. This is explicitly why it exists.

HN is not ad free, it is an ad.

I never buy food, supplements, OTC meds, etc. online from any source. That stuff I always buy in person at a local retailer.

It has some of the disadvantages, some of the advantages. It's not (and never was) perfect.

That said, at this point I am a disillusioned app developer: I no longer believe that the creation of an app is a good business idea in most cases.

The most common one I've run into is third party sellers taking items that come in multiple to a pack from the manufacturer and splitting them up but then also listing the single item for the same price as the multi-pack's MSRP.

As an example, pouches of cat food treats that come 10 to a pack. Scam sellers will split the pack and sell each pouch for the same price as the full 10 pack and because Amazon has historically done nothing to guard against this, their scam listing appears fully comingled with the manufacturer's listing in a way where it is very hard to recognize the scam option even if you are aware of the possibility.

Amazon has made some noise about fixing these comingling issues this year, but their plans have been vague and for me the well is already poisoned after years of letting it go.

Its actually shocking that it took until this year for Amazon to really acknowledge this as an issue. Manufacturer/brands can't have been happy about this considering that for any item that can be scammed like this you'll find lots of bad reviews on Amazon where the review isn't really complaining about the product, but the scam.

Some example reviews that I just randomly and easily found on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1KZ41Q9MZL7UX

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3UUT2K2Q4OROF

Then you had guys like Kevin Trudeau and Don Lapre.

Personally I pay for youtube and I don't mind the sponsor sections. They're easy to fast forward through and income goes directly to the creator. Youtube doesn't take a cut. These are the only kinds of ads that work on me - in the rare case that the product is something I'm interested in, I go out of my way to make sure I use the creator's link.

The long story short is that there are creators I like and I want them to devote all their time to making more content. I'm glad some of them get sponsors. For many I just straight up give them money on Patreon.

That's a pretty good scam.

Sounds like a good thing to me?

> Half of the tech industry and a good chunk of the jobs that people on HN do would never have happened.

And it would be good. It's not like we do any real work. I know I don't.

It's easy to skip creator promotions. You can also choose not to engage with creators that conduct ads.

I'm fine paying YouTube not to force me to watch their ads. I can deal with product placement on my own.

Usenet was a thing. A huge thing. There was zero danger that it would go "extinct" due to the lack of extralegal protections.

> But demonizing 230 just shows a basic lack of knowledge of history, economics, and the reasons it was created.

You're ignoring the context. Section 230 was created when the Internet was nascent and we were trying to encourage broader /business/ investment into the technology.

Now that that investment has occurred and most consumers _prefer_ to do business on the Internet, whereas the opposite was previously true, we no longer need the _additional_ protections for hugely profitable businesses.

Aside from that is there some reason we can't _modify_ the law to bring it more in line with citizen expectations? We're bound to the decisions of the past absolutely? Please...

I've gotten rid of 90% of the ads by paying for YouTube, the rest of the ads I skip by jumping forward in the video which is annoying but only a little OR by being legitimately interested in what the person has to say if they're reviewing a product which has been in some way paid for. I'm also just fine with someone promoting their own merch or patreon which I am sometimes actually interested in.

The subtlety I don't get why you're missing is I now have very much reduced ad exposure and the rest I do have is entirely controllable.

- a substrate for business VPN tunnels (like the leased lines of old),

- regulated, approved, monitored e-commerce walled gardens,

- regulated, approved, monitored streaming walled gardens (like the cable TV of old),

- regulated, approved, monitored social media walled-gardens including chat focused ones like Discord and video focused ones like YouTube (replacing most for-print media, forums, and websites)

Okay, but if it matches the illustration on the storefront, can it really be called a scam?

My two most recent examples: a couple of rolls of 3D printer filament that looked nothing like as advertised (bad sales images there I think, rather than a comingled-with-a-cheap-scammy-alternative issue) which was taken back unquestioned for same-day full refund despite one of them being opened, and a couple of years ago a replacement drive for my media RAID array that, while the right drive and not, as far as I could tell, counterfeit, certainly wasn't new/unused which is what I ordered, which again was taken back with no quibble or cost (other than my time of course).

There are problems dealing with Amazon sellers, but those can mostly be avoided with care and a healthy dose of cynicism (to avoid ordering crap in the first place). I'd never buy some things from there though: safety equipment, for instance.

> Deregulation always seems simple, but there are inevitable unintended consequences. Sadly, those who see deregulation as the only or best tool to shape behavior are quick to suggest yet more deregulation to fix those unintended consequences ...

Which sounds more reasonable: "Deregulation always seems simple" or "Regulation always seems simple" ? Will let the reader decide, because in the end it is a subjective choice.

I personally don't think there is one optimum that we can reach. At certain points in time and for certain subjects deregulation should be applied at other points in time regulation should be applied. I don't see any point in talking "generally", this depends on topic, country, priorities, etc.

Technically, on Bol.com, a EU-platform, EU consumer protection is in place. So if a product breaks within guarantee terms, is dangerous, never gets delivered etc. the person re-selling is responsible. They are importing "illegal" goods and could even go to jail for it.

So, technically, that premium price brings me me the assurance that I am protected by EU consumer laws. That a TV I buy can be returned, is CE certified, won't explode and isn't a 12" TV pictured in a tiny living-room on the images on unpacking.

Except these products often don't meet EU criteria, aren't adhering to (food, safety, chidren protection) EU laws and money-back is often hard because the re-seller just dissapears. In the last case, Bol.com will step up and refund, because they have to. But for the rest, they plead innocence: It wasn't us that sold illegal goods, it was that reseller from which we skim a lot of fees.

The incentives are just wrong. And the solution simple: Make platforms by proxy legally responsible for their "users". Resellers in my case. Or advertisers in the case of TLA.

If some-guy sells a TV that explodes, and can't be found or held responsible, then make Bol.com responsible. Let their CEO go to jail in the very worst case. Let's see how fast they solve this.

It's 100% possible. It might not be profitable

An app store doesn't have the "The optimum amount of fraud is not zero" problem. Preventing fraudulent apps is not a probability problem, you can actually continuously improve your capability without also blocking "good" apps accidentally.

Meanwhile, apple regularly stymies developers trying to release updates to already working and used by many apps for random things.

And despite that, they let through clear and obvious scams like a "Lastpass" app not made by Lastpass. That's just unacceptable. Anything with a trademark should never be possible to get a scam through. There's no excuse.

Youtube Premium is fighting back against the sponsor segments with this "commonly skipped segment" feature. You hit a fast forward button and it automatically skips ahead to the place most people jumped to.

I don't think that's actually true for WhatsApp in a lot of countries - it's the default communication for many, to the point I'm not sure I could get parcel deliveries reliably here in Spain if I didn't have WhatsApp.

Ditto for communicating with the entire generations who moved onto Facebook after we all abandoned it. I could delete Facebook entirely, but then I'd spend every family gathering hearing the chorus "why aren't you on Facebook? Your cousins are all on Facebook. They all know the family drama" (instead I keep Facebook off the homescreen of my phone, and check it about once a month).

Nebula is good in that it properly allows me to pay the people who's content and reporting and art I like and support them without giving the toxic sludge of Youtube a dime.

It also allows them to focus on doing their job: Making the good videos I want and that they want to make, rather than play some absurd algorithm games.

Floatplane is similarly better aligned with what artists and creators want to do. The guy from DankPods is much happier on that platform than something like Twitch which gave him constant problems.

The GunTubers and "Current military events but from former soldiers who act like they know what they are talking about in reference to geopolitics" have created their own platform and I hope that succeeds too. I do not agree with a lot of the politics from some of these people (and believe some others are liars) but diversity is good.

Armchair Historian also created their own platform. That might not have panned out though, they had financial troubles that led to them abandoning another project.

IMO, the best platform is Patreon linking to a bunch of MP4s on S3 (or whatever cheaper medium exists). Nebula started out just using a "Youtube copycat" whitelabling service.

In the same way, speaking with a friend (or anybody) can be seen as "advertising your ideas".

For me, HN is more of an open discussion forum, where you can find lots of critical opinions on the topics, which for me makes it less "advertisement" than lot of other things.

So now every social network charges $0.01 per month and makes all the rest of their revenue through advertising.

Would you set the minimum price for every service and outlaw advertising entirely?

Because the customer eventually decided it was worth paying for. Emphasis on eventually. It took over 30 years from the first car having optional door locks to locks becoming a standard feature.

> MSFT did nothing to stop spyware for at least a decade.

More like half a decade. The first real instance of spyware was recognized in 1999. Microsoft began working on their anti-spyware software in 2004.

Security is about "good enough" though so that's usually sufficient.

Most of the worms of the early 2000s worked by exploiting vulnerabilities that Microsoft had already found, patched, and deployed, but users, including giant businesses just didn't install the patches.

Bonzai Buddy and the days of the toolbar didn't happen because Windows is insecure, it happened because at a fundamental level the only difference between spyware and a perfectly valid and runnable program is intent, and an OS has no insight into the user's mind. When you doubleclick on a desktop icon, Windows cannot know whether you totally intend to send most of your precious data to a sketchy server, or whether you have no idea what you are running.

Microsoft is moving more towards preventing users from running whatever they want.

"The user is god and the OS serves them" and "Never let the user run spyware or malicious code" are mutually exclusive, so be careful what you wish for.

No. You’re not going to regulate out human behavior or scammers or MBA’s looking for every avenue to maximize profit.

Make a better system.

Samsung isn't refunding any of their $3k fridges that now have mandatory ads

You don't even need a human to review these ads but inserting one wouldn't be expensive.

That's in large part why the Internet sucks, it's not made for people who ad-block.

That is bog-standard drop-shipping. Every open online market had a pile of that. It isn't that they've taken the images from AliExpress it is that both sets of sellers are drop-shipping product from the same source or collection of sources (or buying and reselling though that is much less common as it means managing stock) and the images come & other sales material come from there.

> So, technically, that premium price brings me me the assurance that I am protected by EU consumer laws.

When comparing Amazon (UK) or eBay to the sellers on, for example, Facebook, often there isn't a premium, Amazon (or AliExpress, or similar) are often cheaper than sellers on social media and/or advertising via adverts on YouTube and their ilk. Those sellers will often try to make the product out to be some unique high quality item with a price to match (which of course is heavily discounted if you buy in the next hour or two), and if you check your preferred general marketplace you'll find several people with the same thing, often with the same images, making no such pretence of it being unique or high-value, at a price noticeably cheaper than the seller from SM/etc. I assume this is the same with Amazon in other jurisdictions and other marketplaces like Boi.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Israel/comments/1bmdy03/someone_in_...

There were many other similar ones, especially on the smaller digital ad spaces that were basically just TVs on the side of roads. And those ones were more specifically calling for empathy for the deaths occurring to Israeli people during the war on Palestine

A lot of consumers have no idea they got a cheap imitation. Counterfeiters have gotten quite good, and in many cases the scam is "falls apart in a year instead of ten", not "it's completely non-functional".

Could I interest you in some very durable car fuses that don't actually trip? https://youtu.be/B90_SNNbcoU?si=5QUpXUHwSlZj4i4G

Or perhaps radioactive protection pendants are your thing? https://shungite-c60.com/quantum-pendant/

Could I interest you in some Amazon choice firecrackers? https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/10/business/amazonbasics-ele...

Let's not even mention the health and nutrient products that make the FDA shudder.

Sure, you can ask for your money back, and flag the seller. But new sellers pop up selling the same crap all over again with a new name and company ID. This is all while real sellers of real (and safety certified products) get pressured by Amazon and dissuaded from taking their business off platform.

Avoid Amazon if at all possible. It's not good for consumers nor sellers, and it's keeping a leach on online retail.

Most countries have laws around liability of sold products. This is often set up to fall on the importer of said product. Amazon Europe (and perhaps USA) is doing something very funny with these laws; You, the consumer, is the importer. If your house burns out, then it's between you and a random chineese ghost companny that just disappeared into smoke. Amazon is "handling the import paperwork for you", and not taking liability for anything.

We have also received a number of shirts where AI has been used to create unlicensed NFL shirts and other such actual frauds. And whatever your feeling about IP laws, it was definitely low quality stuff... looked good if you just glanced at it but when you went to look at any particular detail of the shirt it was AI garbage. (I say "AI garbage" precisely because not all stuff from AI is necessarily garbage... but this was.)

I agree with this, and the containing paragraph. Everything is trade-offs. It may very well be that Facebook is under-regulated (and it probably is the case). I suppose I'm thinking of ways to use the situation to fix the much bigger and arguably worse problem with the justice system in general. Non-rich people (I don't say "poor" because I include middle-class as well) are totally boxed out of the justice system in the USA. A pox of scammers is just one of the side-effects of the ossification and decay of the system. I'd like to solve a big chunk of problems all at once, including this one.

Unfortunately it is. You've even provided examples of a false positive and a false negative. Every discrimination process is going to have those at some rate. It might become very expensive for developers to go through higher levels of verification.

Shouldn't the manufacturer have some liability?

These are the effectively the same thing. Asking a business to harm its profits is like asking a person to self-harm.

My local cinema charges me to watch a film. Sure I could sneak in through the fire escape.

That's not paying protection money.

If they say "you can watch for free if you attend our timeshare presentation first", then that's still not paying protection money.

If I want a magician to entertain me at a party, it's not paying protection money. If they say "you can watch for free but only if you listen to me drivel on about some cause first" that doesn't either.

People on HN are unwiling to pay people to entertain them. Its astounding.

Kind of like how South Korea (where you need a national ID to access digital services) is doing, or the UK is trying to do with their ID push.

(And then who wants this could go have a fight with the people who don't want this.)

No idea if that's been borne out in practice, though.

For example,

1) disallow double-sided marketplace where primary users are monetised to a third party, or

2) require open API and interoperability, allowing users to switch providers easily, mobile phone style.

This is the actual solution, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269

It's also worth pointing out that the 1998 antitrust case against Microsoft is most known as a Browser fight, but it included a heavy hand from Adobe and all of the major Anti-Virus tools of the time. It was seen by many at the time, including Microsoft, that the delivered court decision forbade Microsoft from including PDF software, anti-virus tools, firewalls, and other such software in Windows (and arguably against building some of them at all).

It's somewhat easy to understand why that decision almost made sense in 1998, but real easy to see why it aged very quickly like spoiled milk (including the wide spread of spyware and malware that soon followed).

This is true if you completely ignore that spyware was impossible to remove without specialized removal apps that were funded by volunteers, not Microsoft.

Telling me that locks are pickable is completely irrelevant and avoids the point I was making.

For this to work for the likes of Meta, it would mean elevating Meta’s services to some sort of country-wide public utility, which I’m sure would create probably an even stronger moat than network effects, hindering any competiton.

However, is there such a constraint in case of social media? There are mechanisms and open standards that could allow interoperability between providers who implement them. It seems that it should be possible to leave it up to market forces and competition, but for that we have to have competition and be able to vote with our wallets.

Sigh. I learned from my pre-boomer parents that if the product were any good it wouldn't need to be advertised.

> looked good if you just glanced at it but when you went to look at any particular detail of the shirt it was AI garbage.

To be fair, that was also all over the place before "AI" as currently understood. (And I don't think that previous iterations of machine learning techniques were involved.)

Me, as an engineer, I always look for most impactful issue to solve at once, but with social system I am constantly reminded that human "powered" systems (like economics, justice, politics, etc.) depend on what human do, think and hope. We can find things to fix, and we should definitely look, but boy I was surprised by how people react to some changes (irrationally, to say the least). Good luck convincing enough people that the system needs fixing (I agree with you that it does need some fixing, but I am not there, so my opinion does not matter much)!

Though as mentioned, I find it very easy to believe this will vary by location and account for various reasons.

But how are you going to enforce that liability? Making and selling knock-off "Lego ™" is already "illegal"¹ yet Ali-express is filled with this. How would this change when this knock-off-lego is also made with poisonous plastics?

Point is that e.g. within the EU the liability is clear and enforcable and the manufacturer has a role there. But with imported products, it doesn't. That liability lies entirely on the importer.

¹ (in legislations that recognize the International Trademark and copyright laws)

It may be unreasonable to demand that a small business tackle a global problem at the expense of its survival. But we are not talking about small or unprofitable business. We are talking about Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon. Companies with more money than they know what to do with. These global companies need to funnel some % of their massive profits into tackling the global problems that their products have to some degree created.

The answer is that it just takes a lot of people. What if no content could appear on Facebook until it passed a human moderation process?

As the above poster said, this is not profitable which is why they don't do it. Instead they complain about how hard it is to do programmatically and keep promising they will get it working soon.

A well functioning society would censure them. We should say that they're not allowed to operate in this broken way until they solve the problem. Fix first.

Big tech knows this which is why they are suddenly so politically active. They reap billions in profit by dumping the negative externalities onto society. They're extracting that value at a cost to all of us. The only hope they have to keep operating this way is to forestall regulation.

Move fast and break things indeed.

The post was submitted by an asset (IP Address). Just send the bill to the registered owner of that asset.

We do the same thing for speeding tickets. This isn't difficult.

Really strong record there, especially internationally.

Make a better system.

Saying it's your (the consumers) fault because you didn't read the crystal ball for what was coming in the future.

The price a product is offered at is the price for the product at that time, you don't get to say well I sold it for $10 but it's worth $20 so I'll just sell your data until I recoup that $10 I "lost".

Certainly not the appliance salesman, they don't know samsung's plans. And good luck calling samsung and asking for the "future plans" department. This is such a dishonest take.

Who exactly was I supposed to ask that? The check out cashier at the store? The CTO of the company that manufactures it? Who even knows the answer to that question, and how are millions of consumers supposed to find that out and contact them directly, and why are they permitted to reveal proprietary plans if they even know?

Your arguments are delusionally detached from reality.

If you purchase a product that doesn't have ads and then they introduce ads - that is a huge change in the value proposition of the product.

While I'd be just fine with Meta, X etc. (even YouTube, LinkedIn, and GitHub!) shutting down because the cost of following the law turned out to be too expensive, what you suggest here also has both false positives and false negatives.

False negatives: Polari (and other cants) existed to sneak past humans.

False positives: humans frequently misunderstand innocent uses of jargon as signs of malfeasance, e.g. vague memories of a screenshot from ages ago where someone accidentally opened the web browser's dev console while on Facebook, saw messages about "child elements" being "killed", freaked out.

The more of those people you hire, the higher the chance that a bad actor will slip through and push malicious things through for a fee. If the scammer has a good enough system, they'll do this one time with one person and then move on to the next one, so now you need to verify that all your verifiers are in fact perfect in their adherence to the rules. Now you need a verification system for your verification system, which will eventually need a verification system^3 for the verification system^2, ad infinitum.

A lot of people = a lot of cost. That would probably settle out lower than the old classified ads, but paying even a dollar per Facebook post would be a radically different use than the present situation.

And of course you'd end up with a ban of some sort on all smaller forums and BBS that couldn't maintain compliance requirements.

I like trailers.

If they aren't willing to stand buy what they are selling, why would you want to buy it from them in the first place? That's what we call a scam.

It is, but one that is already calculated at time of purchase. You'd pay a lot more if there were strict guarantees that it would never display ads.

The Belarus tractor company learned that lesson. Once upon a time they tried to infiltrate western agriculture with, under the backing of the USSR, heavily subsidized products offered on the cheap. But farmers saw through the thin veneer and realized that they wouldn't be able to get parts for the machines down the road. As such, the much cheaper price wasn't a winner. Farmers were willing to pay significantly more to American companies, knowing that they would provide not just on day one but also long into the future. The economic lesson learned was that the marketplace doesn't value just initial purchase price, but the full value proposition over its entire lifetime.

Many people are willing to gamble, of course, especially for "disposable" things.

Do you mean the VPN provider ought to be liable? I think that's an interesting solution. Take money from bad actor anons then the bill is yours.

Exactly. The necessary hardware to enable the tracking was installed at the time of purchase. It is not like 10 years later someone dreamed up the idea and decided to stealthy in the night start bolting on new components to every vehicle they could find. It was a feature that was there at the time of purchase and the sale was priced accordingly.

It is unrealistic, of course, because it is a textbook case of information asymmetry (the enemy of the market)—only a vanishingly small number of people can adequately assess the pricing, having to know enough about hardware and all the various forces that could bring it down, like potential upcoming lineup changes or inventory overflow.

The right move is to fight information asymmetry. Many developed countries, including the US, already do it in countless cases. A mild way could be requiring to disclose things like this in addition to the ToS; a more thorough way could be simply banning this business model.

Again, the newspaper model already solves this. Moderation should be highly localized, from the communities for which they are moderating the content. That maximizes the chance that the moderator's values will align with the community. Small groups are harder to hide bad actors, especially when you can be named and shamed by people that you see every day. Managers and their coworkers and the community itself are the "verifiers."

Again, this model has worked since the beginning of time and it's 1000x better than what FB has now.

Normally F-150s, and fridges for that matter, are sold not by cashiers, but salesmen. I suppose there isn't any meaningful difference in the end — except, unlike a cashier, salesmen are named as such because there is greater expectation of them being intimately familiar with the product so that they can answer such questions.

If they can't, that's a pretty big red flag. Why would you conduct business with someone who has proven to be shady (or at least incompetent)?

At the end of the day, I can't make an ad and put it on a billboard pretending to be JP Morgan and Chase. I just can't.

But I mean yeah, you could theoretically rent a car in the UK and kill somebody then flee to the US and hide. But don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

I mean it's a viewpoint, it's a certifiably bonkers one but of all the viewpoints it definitely is one.

Worldwide and over history, this behaviour has been observed in elections (gerrymandering), police forces (investigating complaints against themselves), regulatory bodies (Boeing staff helping the FAA decide how airworthy Boeing planes are), academia (who decides what gets into prestigious journals), newspapers (who owns them, who funds them with advertisements, who regulates them), and broadcasts (ditto).

> At the end of the day, I can't make an ad and put it on a billboard pretending to be JP Morgan and Chase. I just can't.

JP Morgan and Chase would sue you after the fact if they didn't like it.

Unless the owners of the billboard already had a direct relationship with JP Morgan and Chase, they wouldn't have much of a way to tell in advance. If they do already have a relationship with JP Morgan and Chase, they may deny the use of the billboard for legal adverts that are critical of JP Morgan and Chase and their business interests.

The same applies to web ads, the primary difference being each ad is bid on in the first blink of an eye of the page opening in your browser, and this makes it hard to gather evidence.

Fraudulent terms of service are not above the law, nor are they above basic expectations in society of fair dealing. You can try to litigate this any which way you choose, based on the language contained in the contract/TOS, and it fundamentally does not matter. At some point, something has to give and it ends with burning down buildings and building guillotines. History is full of abundant lessons about the supremacy of social mores and standards that suborn the law, and the supremacy of the law over the specific parties of any given contract.

That's like the people who claim only idiots live in HOAs but neglect the fact that, in some markets, nearly all real estate worth living in is covered by an HOA of some sort so your alternative isn't "buy a different house" it's "live in an apartment forever"

> “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”

>“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

The world is full of custom car builders. Buying a something like the F-150, but without the undesirable computing components, is quite practical and very possible.

It'll be expensive, which I expect is what you were really trying to say when you pretend there is no such thing for sale, but you're just returning us to the heart of discussion: The F-150 is cheap, comparatively, because it has already priced in the tracking subsidy. You're accepting of those undesirable terms because the lower price makes it compelling enough to do so.

But I know you will say that the legal system doesn't act in good faith, so... I guess you're screwed. Such is the pitfall of living under a dictatorship.

Mind to help me out a bit and point me at a few companies doing that? Around Kentucky if you don't mind since that's where I am.

This is like telling someone who doesn't like that they have to wait in traffic they should just take a helicopter to work everyday. Yes, it's technically an option for some people, but for the vast majority it's not.

Same goes for roads. You most definitely can build roads that don't have traffic, but only the rich will be able to afford to use them. Traffic is what enables those of lesser means to also participate.

It's a pretty good tradeoff for those who are poor. And the rich can buy whatever they want anyway.

It won't come cheap like an F-150, but nobody can expect it to be cheap when the value proposition is much higher.

Which is why I'm not providing what you seek. Production goes to he who is paying, and in this case I am the one doing the paying. Thus, you know the content is written for me and me alone.

> What are we supposed to do about the fact that you are not arguing in good faith?

A rational actor acting in good faith would start talking terms to see the sale go through, but as you are also here in bad faith we can continue to write only for respective selves. Nobody was expecting anything else anyway. I don't imagine anyone has ever paid someone else to write a comment on HN and that isn't about to change today.

Must be nice to have the luxury of being able to do nothing. Ford doesn’t have that luxury, though. It has to answer to angry shareholders if it lets a lucrative customer slip through.

Call them. Talk to a real person.