It does, doesn't it? I think about it a lot. The Internet is full of ads and scams that we all learn to ignore. And they only exist because some small percent of people will make up for it by...
It does, doesn't it? I think about it a lot. The Internet is full of ads and scams that we all learn to ignore. And they only exist because some small percent of people will make up for it by spending enough to make it worthwhile for them to always do this. Have millions of people watch millions of hours of ads so that a small percentage of them will respond to those ads. For the rest, just waste and noise and waste and noise.
The internet has amazing things buried under so much waste and noise.
Just seeing the absolute amount of actual slop that is on the platforms that make up the vast majority of internet traffic these days (TikTok, YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, etc) completely...
Just seeing the absolute amount of actual slop that is on the platforms that make up the vast majority of internet traffic these days (TikTok, YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, etc) completely black-pills me on any sort of optimism for the future of the internet.
I get a hyper concentrated dose of it from my job, having to see the absolute trash that children are consuming hours and hours and hours of every day, so it's probably not quite as bad as it seems to me, but damn it's depressing.
I now 100% understand how every previous generation has felt on how "TV will rot your brain" and of course like every previous generation I feel like this is different and has crossed the line. So hopefully I'm wrong just like every previous generation was... (Or were they?)
I don't know if the content is the biggest problem. There's plenty of evidence that phones are making people waste hours upon hours and spend less time socialising or enjoying real company. Sure,...
I don't know if the content is the biggest problem. There's plenty of evidence that phones are making people waste hours upon hours and spend less time socialising or enjoying real company.
Sure, death of third places and all that, but mountains of evidence say people are wasting away on their phones instead of touching grass or real humans...
It's a bit about how we use the internet on personal level. I keep buying my wife nice underwear and the ads I see the most are young beautiful women posing in nice underwear. And I click on those...
It's a bit about how we use the internet on personal level.
I keep buying my wife nice underwear and the ads I see the most are young beautiful women posing in nice underwear. And I click on those and I list through all the underwear and occassionally buy some (not from clickthrough, though).
I don't visit Youtube.com anymore. Ads there are not "a little bit too much", they already went "full on, we don't care about user experience unless the user pays us". I use Grayjay on mobile and also on desktop (the desktop one is a bit behind current Youtube defemse against it, so it doesn't work sometimes for a day or two). Sure, creators are not paid by ads if I watch their content this way, but as Linus Sebastian once said in one of their videos (paraphrasing here) "Buy one merch item from us and you will give us more money than you ever would from ads". What I want to say is there are other and more direct ways to support them.
I have my own policy on ads - if there are to many of them, I stop visiting the site. If the site is somewhat reasonable, I'm ok with ads. Meta osn't reasonable at all...
Starting to feel a bit like Omelas (from the short story). Easy to pretend everything is good even when you know the very core is rotten with corruption and suffering... well, easy for some...
Starting to feel a bit like Omelas (from the short story). Easy to pretend everything is good even when you know the very core is rotten with corruption and suffering... well, easy for some people, I guess. I am increasingly tempted to walk away.
Having read Careless People a couple months ago, this is not surprising. It is disappointing. Tech companies regulating themselves nowadays is working about as well as oil companies regulating...
the documents indicate that Meta’s own research suggests its products have become a pillar of the global fraud economy. A May 2025 presentation by its safety staff estimated that the company’s platforms were involved in a third of all successful scams in the U.S.
Having read Careless People a couple months ago, this is not surprising. It is disappointing.
Tech companies regulating themselves nowadays is working about as well as oil companies regulating themselves in the 80s, and tobacco companies regulating themselves in the 50s. Working as well as a screen door on a submarine!
Utterly ridiculous state of affairs Nobody is holding them accountable, and they're raking it in. Imagine if user reports went to a regulatory body that meta has to pay for, and each instance was...
Utterly ridiculous state of affairs
If regulators wouldn’t tolerate banks profiting from fraud, they shouldn’t tolerate it in tech,” he told Reuters.
Meta also was ignoring the vast majority of user reports of scams, a document from 2023 indicates. By that year, safety staffers estimated that Facebook and Instagram users each week were filing about 100,000 valid reports of fraudsters messaging them, the document says. But Meta ignored or incorrectly rejected 96% of them.
Nobody is holding them accountable, and they're raking it in. Imagine if user reports went to a regulatory body that meta has to pay for, and each instance was a sizable fine, they would stop within the year and pay employees to vet ads before allowing them to go live.
I have no evidence for this, but I feel Discord is much more aggressive about spam detection and removal? I don't understand the incentives for Facebook to ignore scam DMs...
I have no evidence for this, but I feel Discord is much more aggressive about spam detection and removal? I don't understand the incentives for Facebook to ignore scam DMs...
on the contrary, I don't see any disincentives for FB to ignore scams: they're actively making a ton of money not targetting scams, precisely because by now the only people left are fully captured...
on the contrary, I don't see any disincentives for FB to ignore scams: they're actively making a ton of money courting not targetting scams, precisely because by now the only people left are fully captured due to age or geographical regions or jobs or whatever. People who are tech or privacy savvy have all left: their users are hostage'd primed marks.
But how does Facebook earn anything from scam DMs? I understand Facebook gets paid for ads, so they're incentivized to set low standards. Even if their audience is totally captured, what do they...
But how does Facebook earn anything from scam DMs? I understand Facebook gets paid for ads, so they're incentivized to set low standards.
Even if their audience is totally captured, what do they gain from increasing the number of scammers using Facebook Messenger? Inflated user numbers is the only thing I can think of.
Oh my apologies I missed the DM part. My guess is that they're just plain not interested in providing a good user experience, and their cultivation of a barrel of easy to shoot fish +...
Oh my apologies I missed the DM part. My guess is that they're just plain not interested in providing a good user experience, and their cultivation of a barrel of easy to shoot fish + encouragement of public facing scamers naturally attract DM scammers as well.
They probably still benefit from forcing people to download their stupid app so that can harvest more data to sell. On their mobile version of the site they don't allow you to see private messages, it makes you download the app. Imagine if you're a lonely older man and you got a DM! From a sexy lady! But you need to download the app to see it. Oh it turns out she was a scammer, you're too smart for that. But oh well let's keep the app in case you get another DM. Bam, harvest! To be fair to them they're probably trying to replace scammer DMs with their sexy lady chat bot armies to keep those lonely people engaged over app for longer
Discord makes their money through subscriptions, so they at least somewhat care about user experience. Facebook makes its money by selling ads, and thus cares about engagement more than user...
Discord makes their money through subscriptions, so they at least somewhat care about user experience. Facebook makes its money by selling ads, and thus cares about engagement more than user experience. A scam DM won't make someone stop using Facebook.
Maybe users that receive more DMs use the platform more or have higher engagement metrics, encouraging advertisers? I'm really not sure what the calculus is.
Maybe users that receive more DMs use the platform more or have higher engagement metrics, encouraging advertisers? I'm really not sure what the calculus is.
What a despicable company all around. I believe absolutely 0 % of what these snakes are saying they’ve doing to combat this. The only solution is to not use metas products and find alternatives.
What a despicable company all around. I believe absolutely 0 % of what these snakes are saying they’ve doing to combat this. The only solution is to not use metas products and find alternatives.
Exactly. They're freaking murderers, after what they've done to Rohingya, to US elections and many, many more. There's no single reason to believe them
Exactly. They're freaking murderers, after what they've done to Rohingya, to US elections and many, many more. There's no single reason to believe them
I'm using just Facebook because my employment needs me to. I report absolutely clear scam ads every day and Facebook always tells me it will let me know how it resolved it. I never heard back from...
I'm using just Facebook because my employment needs me to. I report absolutely clear scam ads every day and Facebook always tells me it will let me know how it resolved it. I never heard back from them. And the ads keep coming back, many times the same ads with the same picture and just a little bit changed web addrress. They try to look like news websites copying their logos, styles and trying to have somewhat similar web address. Sometimea not even trying. And I guess people click the scam because the picture seems legit.
This wouldn't happen if there was ONE person (EDIT: for my country) involved who would look over the ads and accept them manually, like QA process for taking ads.
All of those ads are made by AI, reviewed by AI, and moderated by AI. It would be a neverending job moderating slop to do it, and it's by design that they don't bother. I wonder if there will be a...
All of those ads are made by AI, reviewed by AI, and moderated by AI. It would be a neverending job moderating slop to do it, and it's by design that they don't bother. I wonder if there will be a global advertising industry collapse eventually because of how absolutely terrible ads have gotten.
I reckon there are automatic processes behind that. And they suck ass, clearly. As I said, every half-decent person see it through - it is blatant scam. Yet there is no person who would sit there...
I reckon there are automatic processes behind that. And they suck ass, clearly. As I said, every half-decent person see it through - it is blatant scam. Yet there is no person who would sit there and review it and remove the scam from ad-roller. I understand why there is no such peraon employed by Meta - this person's job costs them money and this person in quiestion would remove ads which would lose them money, for Meta this is defeat-defeat scwnario, they would lose money twice in one way. This practically means that they absolutely shit down on their users and do it publicly by allowing these scam ada to exist.
And I'm nit even talking about all the AI gwnerated shitposts which many times contain just wrong information (ie. how to connect mains in you socjet where it generated unrealistic insides of the socket with wires connected anywhere including live on earth...). It's strange no one sued Facebook for such thing in the US (where some people tend to sue anyone for anything). It is also strange EU didn't take some stance on it already.
Off topic While the US has this reputation, Germany is actually the most litigious country on Earth:...
Off topic
It's strange no one sued Facebook for such thing in the US (where some people tend to sue anyone for anything).
While the US has this reputation, Germany is actually the most litigious country on Earth:
In his book, “Exploring Global Landscapes of Litigation,” Christian Wollschlager notes that the litigation rates per 1,000 people shows that European nations top the list of the world’s most litigious countries. Here is a list of the top 5 most litigious countries by capita: 1. Germany: 123.2/1,000 2. Sweden: 111.2/1,000 3. Israel: 96.8/1,000 4. Austria: 95.9/1,000 5. U.S.: 74.5/1,000. The Top 10 also includes the UK (64.4); Denmark (62.5); Hungary (52.4); Portugal (40.7); and France (40.3).
That book is from 1998, which is unfortunately quite some time ago, so the numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. I tried finding more up-to-date figures, but it's more research than I'm...
That book is from 1998, which is unfortunately quite some time ago, so the numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. I tried finding more up-to-date figures, but it's more research than I'm willing to do due to all the different categories. At least for the US, it appears the amount of cases at the moment is ~195/1000 (~66M/Year). The civil case numbers in Germany on the other hand seem to have dropped from 2002-2014 by ~20%, so it's possible that the per capita number for all categories dropped too.
As long as they keep making more money than it costs them in fines, it's still profitable to allow scams and bullshit on their products. I think it's telling that only concerned about it in...
The documents make clear that Meta aims to reduce its illicit revenue stream in the future. But the company is concerned that abrupt reductions of scam advertising revenue could affect its business projections, according to a 2025 document that discusses the impact of “violating revenue” – income from ads that violate Meta’s standards, such as scams, illegal gambling, sexual services or dubious health products.
The documents note that Meta plans to try to cut the share of Facebook and Instagram revenue derived from scam ads. In the meantime, Meta has internally acknowledged that regulatory fines for scam ads are certain, and anticipates penalties of up to $1 billion, according to one internal document.
But those fines would be much smaller than Meta’s revenue from scam ads, a separate document from November 2024 states. Every six months, Meta earns $3.5 billion from just the portion of scam ads that “present higher legal risk,” the document says, such as those falsely claiming to represent a consumer brand or public figure or demonstrating other signs of deceit. That figure almost certainly exceeds “the cost of any regulatory settlement involving scam ads.”
As long as they keep making more money than it costs them in fines, it's still profitable to allow scams and bullshit on their products. I think it's telling that only concerned about it in markets where they fear regulation.
On a slightly related note, I thought this bit was rather hilarious:
Internal documents show that Meta directed staffers then to focus mainly on fraudsters masquerading as celebrities and usurping major brands. Such “impersonation scams” risked upsetting advertisers and public figures, one 2022 document notes, and thus threatened to reduce user engagement and revenue.
But ongoing layoffs at Meta were hindering enforcement. A planning document for the first half of 2023 notes that everyone who worked on the team handling advertiser concerns about brand-rights issues had been laid off. The company was also devoting resources so heavily to virtual reality and AI that safety staffers were ordered to restrict their use of Meta’s computing resources. They were instructed merely to “keep the lights on.”
Remember when Zuckerberg wanted to bet the farm that VR was the future? What a joke.
A natural way to deal with stress. Lol light your whole family's life on fire wouldn't cause any stress. But then again they're drug dealers. Which then begs the question, how can we reinvent...
A natural way to deal with stress. Lol light your whole family's life on fire wouldn't cause any stress. But then again they're drug dealers.
Which then begs the question, how can we reinvent policing to catch these cyber criminals
Considering they're talking about stress relief I suspect it's either cannabis or shrooms with a provocative picture. But it also seems like one of those fake companies either way. I just get fake...
Considering they're talking about stress relief I suspect it's either cannabis or shrooms with a provocative picture. But it also seems like one of those fake companies either way.
I just get fake "hand crafted" drop shipped merch ads from companies "closing down" in my scammy ones.
It honestly feels like 90% of the internet is propped up on total crap these days
It does, doesn't it? I think about it a lot. The Internet is full of ads and scams that we all learn to ignore. And they only exist because some small percent of people will make up for it by spending enough to make it worthwhile for them to always do this. Have millions of people watch millions of hours of ads so that a small percentage of them will respond to those ads. For the rest, just waste and noise and waste and noise.
The internet has amazing things buried under so much waste and noise.
Just seeing the absolute amount of actual slop that is on the platforms that make up the vast majority of internet traffic these days (TikTok, YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, etc) completely black-pills me on any sort of optimism for the future of the internet.
I get a hyper concentrated dose of it from my job, having to see the absolute trash that children are consuming hours and hours and hours of every day, so it's probably not quite as bad as it seems to me, but damn it's depressing.
I now 100% understand how every previous generation has felt on how "TV will rot your brain" and of course like every previous generation I feel like this is different and has crossed the line. So hopefully I'm wrong just like every previous generation was... (Or were they?)
I don't know if the content is the biggest problem. There's plenty of evidence that phones are making people waste hours upon hours and spend less time socialising or enjoying real company.
Sure, death of third places and all that, but mountains of evidence say people are wasting away on their phones instead of touching grass or real humans...
One is probably a symptom of the other, a spiral of human misery
It's a bit about how we use the internet on personal level.
I keep buying my wife nice underwear and the ads I see the most are young beautiful women posing in nice underwear. And I click on those and I list through all the underwear and occassionally buy some (not from clickthrough, though).
I don't visit Youtube.com anymore. Ads there are not "a little bit too much", they already went "full on, we don't care about user experience unless the user pays us". I use Grayjay on mobile and also on desktop (the desktop one is a bit behind current Youtube defemse against it, so it doesn't work sometimes for a day or two). Sure, creators are not paid by ads if I watch their content this way, but as Linus Sebastian once said in one of their videos (paraphrasing here) "Buy one merch item from us and you will give us more money than you ever would from ads". What I want to say is there are other and more direct ways to support them.
I have my own policy on ads - if there are to many of them, I stop visiting the site. If the site is somewhat reasonable, I'm ok with ads. Meta osn't reasonable at all...
Starting to feel a bit like Omelas (from the short story). Easy to pretend everything is good even when you know the very core is rotten with corruption and suffering... well, easy for some people, I guess. I am increasingly tempted to walk away.
Having read Careless People a couple months ago, this is not surprising. It is disappointing.
Tech companies regulating themselves nowadays is working about as well as oil companies regulating themselves in the 80s, and tobacco companies regulating themselves in the 50s. Working as well as a screen door on a submarine!
Utterly ridiculous state of affairs
Nobody is holding them accountable, and they're raking it in. Imagine if user reports went to a regulatory body that meta has to pay for, and each instance was a sizable fine, they would stop within the year and pay employees to vet ads before allowing them to go live.
Completely resolvable and preventable
I have no evidence for this, but I feel Discord is much more aggressive about spam detection and removal? I don't understand the incentives for Facebook to ignore scam DMs...
on the contrary, I don't see any disincentives for FB to ignore scams: they're actively making a ton of money
courtingnot targetting scams, precisely because by now the only people left are fully captured due to age or geographical regions or jobs or whatever. People who are tech or privacy savvy have all left: their users are hostage'd primed marks.But how does Facebook earn anything from scam DMs? I understand Facebook gets paid for ads, so they're incentivized to set low standards.
Even if their audience is totally captured, what do they gain from increasing the number of scammers using Facebook Messenger? Inflated user numbers is the only thing I can think of.
Oh my apologies I missed the DM part. My guess is that they're just plain not interested in providing a good user experience, and their cultivation of a barrel of easy to shoot fish + encouragement of public facing scamers naturally attract DM scammers as well.
They probably still benefit from forcing people to download their stupid app so that can harvest more data to sell. On their mobile version of the site they don't allow you to see private messages, it makes you download the app. Imagine if you're a lonely older man and you got a DM! From a sexy lady! But you need to download the app to see it. Oh it turns out she was a scammer, you're too smart for that. But oh well let's keep the app in case you get another DM. Bam, harvest! To be fair to them they're probably trying to replace scammer DMs with their sexy lady chat bot armies to keep those lonely people engaged over app for longer
Discord makes their money through subscriptions, so they at least somewhat care about user experience. Facebook makes its money by selling ads, and thus cares about engagement more than user experience. A scam DM won't make someone stop using Facebook.
Maybe users that receive more DMs use the platform more or have higher engagement metrics, encouraging advertisers? I'm really not sure what the calculus is.
What a despicable company all around. I believe absolutely 0 % of what these snakes are saying they’ve doing to combat this. The only solution is to not use metas products and find alternatives.
Exactly. They're freaking murderers, after what they've done to Rohingya, to US elections and many, many more. There's no single reason to believe them
I'm using just Facebook because my employment needs me to. I report absolutely clear scam ads every day and Facebook always tells me it will let me know how it resolved it. I never heard back from them. And the ads keep coming back, many times the same ads with the same picture and just a little bit changed web addrress. They try to look like news websites copying their logos, styles and trying to have somewhat similar web address. Sometimea not even trying. And I guess people click the scam because the picture seems legit.
This wouldn't happen if there was ONE person (EDIT: for my country) involved who would look over the ads and accept them manually, like QA process for taking ads.
All of those ads are made by AI, reviewed by AI, and moderated by AI. It would be a neverending job moderating slop to do it, and it's by design that they don't bother. I wonder if there will be a global advertising industry collapse eventually because of how absolutely terrible ads have gotten.
I reckon there are automatic processes behind that. And they suck ass, clearly. As I said, every half-decent person see it through - it is blatant scam. Yet there is no person who would sit there and review it and remove the scam from ad-roller. I understand why there is no such peraon employed by Meta - this person's job costs them money and this person in quiestion would remove ads which would lose them money, for Meta this is defeat-defeat scwnario, they would lose money twice in one way. This practically means that they absolutely shit down on their users and do it publicly by allowing these scam ada to exist.
And I'm nit even talking about all the AI gwnerated shitposts which many times contain just wrong information (ie. how to connect mains in you socjet where it generated unrealistic insides of the socket with wires connected anywhere including live on earth...). It's strange no one sued Facebook for such thing in the US (where some people tend to sue anyone for anything). It is also strange EU didn't take some stance on it already.
Off topic
While the US has this reputation, Germany is actually the most litigious country on Earth:
https://eaccny.com/news/member-news/dont-let-these-10-legal-myths-stop-your-doing-business-in-the-u-s-myths-6-and-7-the-u-s-is-very-litigious-and-that-is-too-threatening-to-a-small-company-like-ours-as-a-result-the-risk/
That book is from 1998, which is unfortunately quite some time ago, so the numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. I tried finding more up-to-date figures, but it's more research than I'm willing to do due to all the different categories. At least for the US, it appears the amount of cases at the moment is ~195/1000 (~66M/Year). The civil case numbers in Germany on the other hand seem to have dropped from 2002-2014 by ~20%, so it's possible that the per capita number for all categories dropped too.
PS, this is probably the most German study possible:
"Evaluation of the efficiency of court proceedings in Germany"
TIL more, thanks!
TIL, thanks!
As long as they keep making more money than it costs them in fines, it's still profitable to allow scams and bullshit on their products. I think it's telling that only concerned about it in markets where they fear regulation.
On a slightly related note, I thought this bit was rather hilarious:
Remember when Zuckerberg wanted to bet the farm that VR was the future? What a joke.
I literally get ads for Cocaine on Facebook, what the hell? EXAMPLE
A natural way to deal with stress. Lol light your whole family's life on fire wouldn't cause any stress. But then again they're drug dealers.
Which then begs the question, how can we reinvent policing to catch these cyber criminals
Considering they're talking about stress relief I suspect it's either cannabis or shrooms with a provocative picture. But it also seems like one of those fake companies either way.
I just get fake "
hand crafted" drop shipped merch ads from companies "closing down" in my scammy ones.People need to be talking about this way more