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Jesse Willms, the Dark Lord of the Internet (2014)

53 点作者 bond将近 9 年前

8 条评论

MicroBerto将近 9 年前
I&#x27;ve been dabbling with a theory, and it goes something along the lines of &quot;Evil thinks big, but Good thinks small&quot;.<p>There is a <i>ton</i> of incentive for guys like this to scale big, and they can bootstrap it pretty easily once they have a profitable method. On the other hand, it&#x27;s much tougher for a brand like Consumer Reports to do the same, because the effort is so much greater and the ROI is so much smaller. You simply don&#x27;t make much money when you&#x27;re un-selling stuff, and it&#x27;s an eternal game of whack-a-mole fighting off scams.<p>So the &quot;good guys&quot; who would rage against these rip-offs end up thinking smaller, perhaps going after just one thing, like why this skin care offer is a scam. You get lost in the noise because you&#x27;re stuck in a swamp of other evildoer affiliates who are more greatly incentivized to lie. Ultimately, there&#x27;s very few <i>systematic</i> tools out there that can encompass on the number of niches his network can, and visibly tell the truth about them all.<p>Further, once a doer of good who&#x27;s scaling starts to see success, the power begins to corrupt, and aligning with profitable evils becomes difficult to resist.<p>I see this problem at all levels, especially in corrupt governments. It just feels like we are currently systematically broken as a species. Good people may or may not be outnumbered, but we&#x27;re most definitely out-<i>powered</i>.
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Animats将近 9 年前
Oh, that guy.<p>If this guy had dialed back the scam level by about half, he&#x27;d probably still be in business. There are lots of people trying to be him. Visit Black Hat World to meet some.<p>His values aren&#x27;t that far from those of many startup companies. Grow at any cost. Use &quot;dark patterns&quot; to trick users. Hide things in the EULA. Don&#x27;t ask too many questions about &quot;affiliates&quot;. Make it hard to cancel. Google was fined $500 million when they were caught in the FBI&#x27;s &quot;sportsdrugs.com&quot; sting. (The FBI had a fake drug lord who was supposedly trying to take over the athletic steroid business. Google actively helped him advertise.)
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overcast将近 9 年前
What a piece of trash this guy is. Not only is he behind a lot of those garbage ads everywhere, but once they suckered someone in, he managed to scam them by signing them up for reoccurring billing on their credit cards.
55555将近 9 年前
I often consider how much easier my life would be if I only had more &#x27;flexible&#x27; morals.
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nxzero将近 9 年前
Reminds me of a guy that made millions selling from spammy looking single-page websites that would scroll on forever; aka long form sales letters. Believe the guy died racing a super car on a track; can&#x27;t recall his name.
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onetwotree将近 9 年前
Here&#x27;s a real gem, from an FTC official:<p>&gt; There’s a fine line between shutting down the Internet and policing it<p>Straight out of a lobbyists mouth, I&#x27;d imagine. It has the classic &quot;true, but only in certain contexts&quot; thing going on - sure, it&#x27;s a great argument against, say, SOPA, but as an argument against a simple legal requirement that big internet players do their part to reign obviously malicious advertising, it&#x27;s pretty bogus.
rw2将近 9 年前
This was written in 2014, I wonder what scheme he is doing today.
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krrrh将近 9 年前
It&#x27;s horrible to understand how much of the content we consume for free online is paid for by these scams. His açai ads were all over fairly major publishers&#x27; websites. The content industry relies on hugely regressive exploitation of the gullible and unsophisticated, and adblockers are only making it more regressive in the short term.<p>LyricFind which licenses lyrics from major publishers to websites is another example. They would license content to for free if you included their ads for &quot;ringtone&quot; subscriptions which were added to monthly phone bills in a process few consumers understood or expected.