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.
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.<p>Such weakening encourages abuse and exploitation.<p>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’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 <i>perceive</i> you.<p>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.<p>The scams where always there, it’s just that people thought you were too poor to market them to you.
Scams and fraud are just a part of human live.<p>Look at old advertising and all the literal snake oil that used to be sold.<p>I think it is jus the internets effect to make everything more discoverable and new schemes enabled by new technology.<p>Navigation is easy:<p>If it is too good to be true it probably is a lie.<p>There is no money on the streets and nobody is giving it away for free.<p>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.<p>What's coming is frankly scary to me.
Is there any specific examples of “everything”?<p>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.
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.
Since house prices started to become unattainable for the average individual without going 40 years into debt.<p>Remove the problem of earning money to achieve independent housing, remove 75% of the hussle for most people to participate in scams.
I try to rely on sources I trust.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I also ask friends.
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...<p>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?<p>I automatically assume any online influencer trying to sell me something is a grifter. I also don't use social media.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The feedback loops there just accelerate it.<p>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.<p>Technology + Humans. IMO.
There's a good chance we'll look back on this as a post-truth era.<p>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.<p>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.
Its a product of education. To hack, gamble any system is the most productive of works,and thus self-optimization of intelligentsia always must end in a scam orgy. (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma</a>) Basically there is a point, at which to not scam is stupid.<p>Which results in a "rodeo" uprising against the parasitic scam culture by the lower tiers of society, against the useless elites which has taken over the institutions and societyorgans.
In these purges usually violent antisemitism is involved and a "anti"-education stance expressed. Society eats itself. Democracy was a attempt to pacify these purges, but its in the nature of elites to hack the process, which would get rid of them or force them back into productivity.<p>After the "purge" usually a large war or famine starts and the state reconstitutes itself, promising to do better, and the whole cycle begins again.<p>The usual useful "progress" happen in the war/reconstitution phase, when the elites are still productive, instead of engaging in the gambling/hacking competition and the memory of the purges is still fresh.
my 2c..<p>When the economy is pushing you to compete for financial resources and the Neo-liberal narrative for market ethics is pushing the line of each person is responsible for his own actions, or in other words, if you found yourself in a scam that is your fault..
As a business, it's just a question of finding the most legal way to scam people to get more resources..<p>Cases in point - planned/perceived obsolescence..
It's an artefact of the "hustle culture" we live in now. An indication of distilled, late-stage capitalism. Where everything is about the money and honesty is optional.
This is web2 peaking. The cost to scam everyone and earn a few bucks in the process has become a tenable business opportunity. It‘s not by accident that Elon Musk is now charging an 8 dollar fee on monthly Twitter usage: This is no different than the staking mechanisms invented in the Ethereum community. Since Sybilattacks are virtually unpreventable since no scalable and user friendly identity solution exists, primarily in the web3 space we‘ve started combining submitting information along with stake to fight grifters and spammers who are manipulating the algorithms.
Because everything has to be a product nowadays, and keep on generating revenue.<p>You don't want to make things that people will buy anymore. You need to maximize engagament, please investors, sell your user's telemetry to the highest bidder.<p>I blame capitalism and especially America for this.