“The biggest scam in YouTube history”

  • bizarroland
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    576 days ago

    I can see how it happens though.

    No one was doing any oversight on their practices. If you were running a referral affiliate link system, it must have seemed like honey was doing a really good job bringing customers to you.

    I’m just kind of disappointed that nobody inside the company ever spoke up or blew any whistles and said “Hey, this is at best unethical if not entirely illegal and either way exposes us to the risk of a massive lawsuit, maybe we should just actually do our jobs instead of stealing the work of other people.”

    • @[email protected]
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      696 days ago

      I dunno man, whistleblowers aren’t getting good treatment from what I see. Two got “suicided” last year from Boeing and OpenAI. The two Theranos whistleblowers were treated really poorly. I felt so bad for them. They’re doing talks on ethics and stuff and I only wish them the best. They stood their ground on what they believed in.

      • @[email protected]
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        446 days ago

        Whistleblowers are always treated poorly because the people in charge never like being called out for their crimes. That’s why you’ve got to have an exit strategy, like Snowden.

        • @[email protected]
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          296 days ago

          I can see how nobody blew the whistle, leave his cushy job, prepare for 3-5 years of juristical drama exposing your name and image only to spend the rest of your live living in check notes… Russia.

          • @[email protected]
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            266 days ago

            Obligatory reminder that Snowden intended to go to Ecuador and only got stuck in Russia because that’s where he was when the US revoked his passport.

            • @[email protected]
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              216 days ago

              Another reminder that France, Spain, and Italy forced the Bolivian president’s plane to land in Austria because they thought Snowden was on it.

            • @[email protected]
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              66 days ago

              I knew a guy–Ola Bini–that fled the US, and emigrated to Ecuador, because he was afraid that he was going to be targeted by the US gov’t. I think he made it less than two years in Ecuador before he was arrested for ‘hacking’ Ecuador gov’t computers; he was jailed during the entire judicial process, almost a decade, before all the charges were dropped, and he was released and deported to Sweden. Best guess is that despite not having a extradition treaty with the US, the US still put a ton of pressure on Ecuador to detain him. (Maybe he actually committed crimes? IDK, it’s possible, but all charges being dropped after all that time in jail without a trial seems iffy. )

              Point is, there aren’t a lot of places you can go if the US wants to fuck your life. Russia and China are the best options, and both are not great.

    • @[email protected]
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      396 days ago

      I’m not. What do you get as a reward for blowing the whistle? Genuinely?

      1. There’s no bounty, even if there was you wouldn’t get it for at least a year after you blow the whistle.

      2. Once it’s discovered it’s you, you’re fired. There goes your paycheck, your health insurance. Now your home is in jeopardy and you have no decent income verification to get a new one.

      3. Good luck working in any job even remotely related to what you know. You now have a stigma in any background check and while a privately owned mom & pop might look at you favorably, there ain’t a single corporation who will take pride in hiring you. You’re risky.

      The most ethical person, is one with no debt, who owns their home, and has 8 months expenses saved up. That’s not most Americans right now.

      • @[email protected]
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        116 days ago

        This is also why there was such coordinated effort to shut down wikileaks, or to at least stall out the cultural movement that was building behind it.

        If you give people a methodology to whistleblow that at least on paper allows them to stay anonymous and avoid putting their life/livelyhood/survival in jeapordy, that removes one of the biggest disincentives.

      • @[email protected]
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        66 days ago

        What do ethics have to do with saving money and owning property? Do poor people not have ethics?

          • @[email protected]
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            56 days ago

            And I’m saying it’s a point based on no evidence. History is riddled with people making sacrifices for the greater good. It’s also riddled with the people that own things doing nothing. Financial comfort does not increase the likelihood that someone will rock the boat and become a whistleblower. There is no factual basis for that statement.

            • @[email protected]
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              86 days ago

              So what, then bribes and intimidation just… aren’t actually effective ways of bending morals?

              I gotta say I have 0 papers backing me, but I feel like the fact that the very concepts are words in the English language carries some weight.

        • @[email protected]
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          6 days ago

          I think the phrasing they wanted was “The person with the least disincentive to do the ethical thing”.

          These people aren’t inherently more ethical. They simply have the fewest barriers standing in the way of turning it into action.

        • @[email protected]
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          126 days ago

          … How much are you willing to overlook to keep yourself from going homeless?

          There just ain’t enough protection for whistleblowers right now.

          • @[email protected]
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            46 days ago

            I’m still stuck on why you think someone with money has more ethics. Do you think someone financially stable is more prone to being altruistic? Being a whistleblower is about doing something beyond yourself. What if the person with a fully paid off house and savings has family? Are they still going to make the same decisions? How did that person obtain wealth?

            I don’t disagree with your list but I very much disagree with your conclusion. Honor and altruism do not correlate with owning property and having money.

            • @[email protected]
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              96 days ago

              You don’t share food if you’re starving. You don’t share time if you work 12 hour days, every day.

              If you spend all your energy on survival, you got no energy to spare on anyone else. I bet our hypothetical starving person would be moral and share, if they had the chance and materials.

              If they don’t… then it’s not a matter of won’t it’s can’t. People are more likely to share food they have excess of, time they have excess of. If they can’t spare it, they won’t.

            • @[email protected]
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              46 days ago

              I believe what dukeofdummies is saying, is that people with a financial cushion have fewer obstacles to acting on ethical principle, whereas your average person living pay check to pay check will be more cautious about whistleblowing because the consequences (loss of employment, vexatious lawsuits, blacklisting) will be felt more severely. Moreso if they have a family to support.

              I consider myself to be ethical, but i live in a wage economy. If i see behaviour which needs to be reported, but i believe that the organisation/society will punish me for speaking out, i will wait until I’ve secured an alternative livelihood or am relatively safer before blowing the whistle.

            • @[email protected]
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              36 days ago

              I’m still stuck on why you think someone with money has more ethics

              That is a misreading/misinterpretation of the original statement.

      • bizarroland
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        35 days ago

        I think Amazon didn’t care, so even if someone inside the company figured it out Amazon was just like, it’s not our problem to deal with.

    • @[email protected]
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      96 days ago

      No one was doing any oversight on their practices.

      So that raises the question: where the fuck was the FTC?

      • @[email protected]
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        86 days ago

        No idea, but I can tell you where they will be after President Elmo is done with them: defanged, and run by a one-man skeleton crew whose only job is to sweep the floor every Friday night.