Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
read through some HN comments the other day and felt so intelligent by comparison. I’m kind of a dipshit so don’t get that feeling many places. just there and /r/adviceanimals really
Apparently a well-known event where authors gave away a ton of free ebooks led to people getting their Kindles locked down and reset due to a fraud detector falsely flagging it as suspicious activity.
I have some positive news, someone did the math: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493
Drawing on recent empirical evidence, we show that ending poverty and ensuring decent living standards (DLS) for all, with a full range of necessary goods and services (a standard that approximately 80% of the world population presently does not achieve) can be provisioned for a projected population of 8.5 billion people in 2050 with around 30% of existing productive capacity
Put this up about 20 minutes late, so I’m starting off by saying Honey got exposed
Holy shit. Managed to never run into them due to sponsorblock but the ways mega corps find ways to extract money out of everyone never ceases to amaze
When I was young I knew people who installed those ‘get money for moving your mouse’ things (this was a thing around 2000, prob combined with a ‘get paid to use your computer’ scam. I’m not sure if anybody even remembers this), and they never got a dime. So I always mentally ignore these things as scams. ‘it is just free money’ is quite the red flag.
Minor gripe with the video ‘if they product is free you are likely the product’ isn’t true imho. You are always also the product, unless they explicitly go out of their way to make it clear you are not the product (and even then you cannot be totally sure). You can’t pay your way out of the rot economy. In fact, as you are now a person who spends money, I’d think the value of your data actually goes up. A database filled with data of users who never spend a dime online seems like it would be almost useless to me.
I must have been living under a rock/a different kind of terminally online, because I had only ever heard of Honey through Dan Olson’s riposte to Doug Walker’s The Wall, which describes Doug Walker delivering “an uncomfortably over-acted ad for online data harvesting scam Honey” (35:43).
Well-known YouTuber Markiplier also went off on Honey back in 2019, and needless to say he felt pretty vindicated:
Making money via stealing commissions from affiliate links, tbf, wasn’t the business model I was suspecting from Honey. I always thought they were scamming but I thought it was going to be from selling your browsing data or something similar. Then again, they still might do that.
Wow, I’ve been saying for years that this extension is shady as fuck. Nice to see that it’s getting some attention.
I didn’t expect it to steal affiliate cookies, but that they let you control which codes it “finds” isn’t even a secret, and I thought people know this. But every time I mentioned this on Reddit I was downvoted and called a liar.
I swear to god there was a video I watched about this years ago that already talked about how they don’t give you the best coupons and that they hijack affiliate links. I couldn’t have made that up in my head.
The most surprising thing to me was that they’re owned by PayPal? How can you have any credibility left when you’re owned by PayPal, wtf, that should’ve been the end of them. Oh, no shit, a service owned by PAYPAL is shady and not above-board?? No way man, those paragons of user centrism, PAY-fucking-PAL.
Oh hey we got all the way to Pacific time without anyone wishing a generic Merry Christmas. May your family’s Wi-Fi work for everyone with minimal support required.
