this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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I know they allow scam adverts because it's easy money, but why aren't they held responsible for facilitating obvious scams? You open Edge, there's 3 "Earn money quick" adverts. On Instagram, every 5 ads, one is a scam.

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[–] Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 105 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I've always hated advertising, but I hated it even more once I worked in advertising.

That being said, it's unfair to advertisers. (ugh, I hate saying that, because it's a slimy business, but this is the reality) Nobody has the time to thoroughly research EVERY business that wants to buy advertising. Also, there's a fine line between scams and completely legal yet manipulative business.

Bill might be starting a legitimate small business and wants to advertise to get his first clients. There's very little information available online and no reviews because he's just starting out, but that could look like a fly by night scammer.

Joe owns a similar small business. He charges too much and he doesn't do very good work. That's not illegal, but people who use his services might feel like they got scammed.

Bob's a piece of shit. He wants to take your money and give you nothing in return. He knows what an advertiser would look for to verify his legitimacy, and he makes a fake website full of fake reviews.

In this instance, the advertiser might refuse to sell to Bill, get sued for selling to Joe and spend money and time proving that he's technically legit, and perhaps not even know that Bob's a scammer until months after he's taken the money and run.

[–] ante@lemmy.world 66 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Uhhh maybe they should find the time to do that then? How is "we don't have the time" a valid excuse? Either hire more staff to do so, or sell fewer ads.

[–] GiantRobotTRex@lemmy.sdf.org 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unfortunately that would disproportionately impact small local businesses far more than large corporations.

[–] blazera@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)
[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Because you know who General Electric is and it’s easy to verify they’re actually advertising with you and that they’re a legitimate company, Jim-Bob’s Auto Repair, not so much.

[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

“Knowing who General Electric is” is not how verification is done. Small businesses can authorize a credit card, provide an official ID, submit their LLC info… these aren’t rocket science and scammers won’t do any of them. Do you know how many fields operate with licensing in place? Do you think inly GE-sized companies do plumbing, for example?

[–] blazera@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh yeah i see auto repair scam adverts all the time...?

Wait no, im seeing goddamn miracle cures for aging on youtube. Old guy literally saying itll make you 20 years old again.

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That’s… not how due diligence works.

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[–] Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's not just time and resources, they too are being lied to. If the scam is good enough that people will fall for it, some advertisers will as well.

Right now there are no regulations, so many don't care at all. That sucks, but the scammers are the problem here. They are the ones trying to rip you off. The ad companies might not care if you get screwed or not, but it's unrealistic for us to expect them to know EXACTLY what every client's intentions are. A business could run legitimately for years and then start running a scam. How long would we give the advertisers to realize that the client has started scamming people? Do they get in trouble because they ran ads for someone who would LATER start scamming people?

I'm all for discussing other ways to control advertising, but shooting the messenger isn't it.

[–] ante@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I haven't and likely can't think of a good solution to handling the scenarios you're talking about. They are good questions that someone smarter than me should address. However, to use those scenarios to completely admonish advertising platforms for blatantly obvious scams is asinine. "Well, what if a legitimate business starts scamming people?" should have little relevancy to the question of "Should we accept this ad from a user advertising that they're going to double your money if you give them access to your financial accounts?"

I'm not saying it's simple or quick to solve, but there is very obvious low-hanging fruit that could be dealt with but is somehow not because these platforms aren't held accountable whatsoever. It has to start somewhere.

[–] Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

I agree completely. I just wanted to point out some of the difficulties in doing what was posted.

[–] jbrains@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Businesses exist to make profit, not to take care of you. Corporations will only care about your welfare to the extent that that creates profit for them or the laws require them to.

[–] blazera@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

or the laws require them to.

I believe thats whats being suggested

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[–] Z3k3@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

While also complaining its not fair when we protect ourselves from the business they won't protect us from e.g. ad blockers.

Google going so far to invent "Web drm" to ensure we have no choice but allow them to serve us malicious ads that the won't filer themselves

[–] dQw4w9WgXcQ@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

Absolutely. There is an exchange of money involved in the advertising services, so it would be natural to expect a small fee for sanity-checking the advertisement. Facebook are mostly able to check for nudity, porn or gore in the advertisement, so with some additional inspection, it should be possible to weed out a lot of scams.

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[–] BolexForSoup@kbin.social 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I really try to caution people from accepting these "it's too much to hold us accountable for" answers. If it's too much, then cut back. Simple as that. If I am a real estate mogul and my building collapses like in Miami, do you think the local/state/federal agencies involved will shrug it off when I go "Now now now, I have far too many properties. I can't possibly be expected to be in compliance all the time. A collapse and some deaths once in a while is inevitable"? Of course not, that would be ridiculous. Yet when youtube goes "we simply have too many uploads to screen it all," we do just that!

Same goes here. If you're juggling too many advertisers, why is that our problem? Hire more people, scale back, or figure out some third option. Instead we all just internalized this concept that "there's nothing that can be done."

Yeah. This is why we have things called regulations.

When seatbelts and crumple zones and airbags and crash safety ratings became a thing, car manufacturers didn’t want to add any of that crap in, because, you know, it would cut into their profit margins. And then the government said “do it or you’re not allowed to sell cars”. And then all the manufacturers did it.

Something similar can theoretically be done for advertising. But it probably won’t, because regulatory capture has been normalized.

[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 21 points 1 year ago

Nobody has the time

This is a dumb excuse for a profitable business. If you’re making money on it you should be able to subsidize controls. If you can’t operate a business safely and still make a profit, you shouldn’t be in business. It’s that simple.

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Nobody has the time to thoroughly research EVERY business that wants to buy advertising.

Wrong. Nobody wants to spend the money to do that, because they know they will not be held responsible for aiding and abetting fraud.

Change the responsibility factor, and the money will be there.

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[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 16 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Makes sense when you're dealing with actual services or products, but I've yet to see a single "earn 200 per hour" ad that isn't a scam or "legal" pyramid, those should be easy enough to block and ban, no?

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[–] GreenMario@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

nobody has time

Maybe be a good JOB CREATOR and create some motherfucking jobs to handle it. Oh no our bottom line... 😭

[–] psud@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It'd be a terrible shame if advertising became more expensive (because they needed to employ content checkers), and companies could no longer afford to advertise as much

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[–] Alcatorda@lemmy.world 59 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I reported a scam ad to YouTube (it said it was a 1000 dollar giveaway to the first I don't know how many people that signed up). When I googled it the top results were all about how it was a scam. Got feedback a few days later: we don't see a problem, the ad is staying up. So they are even knowingly making the choice to show these scams to their users...

[–] octoperson@sh.itjust.works 20 points 1 year ago

They never gave me feedback on any of the scams I reported - they just removed my ability to report ads at all

[–] fiat_lux@kbin.social 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Because citizens of many countries are not pressuring their elected officials to change advertising laws such that there is accountability, but companies are most certainly constantly lobbying for relaxed regulations.

It's not often you can look to Brasil for policy guidance, so São Paulo's ban on billboards/outside advertising is pretty remarkable in a number of ways. If they can rid a city of outdoor advertising, surely the world can get a few advertising oversight laws?

The downside is that you can't just throw up your hands and say "Someone else should fix this! Why haven't they?" and walk off. It's a chore that takes time and energy from an already time and energy poor population, and I respect that there is a lot of broken shit in this world that needs fixing.

[–] driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 9 points 1 year ago

One best side effects of that "clean city" law is that building are clean to be used as canvases for artists to paint giant murals on them and now the city is know for its incredible street art.

[–] olsonexi@lemmy.wtf 29 points 1 year ago

Because they have unfathomably ridiculous amounts of money that they spend on lobbying (read: bribery) so that they stay not responsible.

[–] JokeDeity@lemm.ee 20 points 1 year ago

Because they have tons of money for lobbyists and outright buying politicians.

[–] Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Because to the tech industry, stuff like "basic accountability", "selling things people actually want", and "developing without limitless free capital" are all considered hate crimes.

[–] DrQuint@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Nah, the problem OP poses was also a major issue with TV ads, specially the kind of ads with that whole telemarketing, "buy now get 2 free, but wait there's more, we'll throw in these accessories all for" vibe. And radio, and magazines. A lot of snake oil and re-branded stuff was sold through it.

The real reason why accountability isn't given to the platforms is because then the platforms would be less sustainable. And for the older media, that might have been fine still. But not so much the internet, which arguably, barely sustains itself on a gigantic ad-based bubble. It would be a death-throw for 99% of what we build and consume online. We just simply depend on ads THAT much.

I say they should try anyways. Absolutely. I do think the internet could benefit from having a lot more, smaller website, like before. We're even popularizing the concept of interoperability again, like, man, we're posting on Lemmy, a platform made to spread platforms. I think we're closers to kill the ad dependency now than we ever been after the death of usenet.

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[–] xkforce@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Trillion dollar company, multibillion dollar company, trillion dollar company

And all 3 of them will point to the 1st amendment as prohibiting the government from regulating speech outside of a few very narrow circumstances.

[–] KBTR1066@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago

One of which is fraud. So yeah, this argument holds no water. The only reason this shit is allowed is money. There's money to be made by allowing it. And money to be lost in preventing it. The end.

[–] Seudo@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

Forget ads, Microsofts "free trial" wasn't free or a trial. You'd be charged for a product that would show up on your bank statement as free. Short answer; no one in a position of power gives a fuck.

[–] TheObserver@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 1 year ago (14 children)

Don't know, i have an ad blocker and so should you.

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[–] dependencyInjection@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Bro every day I open edge at work and the home page is just scammy adverts, ad revenue farming top 10 slides, or garbage about which dog are you.

I do think they should be held to account over what they show on there.

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[–] alienanimals@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

People and corporations with money are above the law.

[–] Trollivier@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I know someone who works as a fraud support team of a bank. An incredibly high percentage of people getting scammed come from Facebook. Either they believed an ad about investing in crypto (the bank blocks the first transaction automatically and they have to talk to the client), or they have been contacted by.... Zuckerberg, or Elon Musk, who told them they needed investors for an experiment that will be extremely lucrative.... I can't believe people fall for that one.

[–] Lazylazycat@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

They are in the UK, I reported one to ASA and they made them remove it.

[–] 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The websites (or at least Google & Facebook - not sure about Microsoft, it could just be low value ad space that nobody really wants?) you've described are known as "walled gardens" in advertising, meaning the DSP (demand side platform, where people who run ad campaigns manage those campaigns), SSP (supply-side platform, where websites & apps with available add space list that space) and at times the website itself are all part of the same company.

This creates a conflict of interest - essentially DSPs want to place as few ads as reasonable as they only want to advertise to people the ads will have an impact on. SSPs want to show as many ads as possible so they get paid more. This results in walled gardens, like Google & Facebook, showing ads more than they should be resulting in overcharging as a result compared to an optimally run campaign. Many reputable companies and ad agencies are aware of this and so advertise less with the walled gardens, resulting in proportionally higher scam ads, as no agency would run a campaign for them.

There's also the fact that they have no relationships to maintain. If a DSP is constantly showing scam ads in the ad spaces they buy, then they'll get blacklisted by the SSP. Same the other way around if the SSP keeps selling misrepresented ad spaces that will never be seen or will be resold every 5 seconds to the DSP, or otherwise not being a trustworthy partner to work with. As the walled gardens don't need to maintain this relationship and there's no risk of being blacklisted, they can effectively advertise whatever and put ads wherever on their website - they're generally powerful enough that people will use their product anyway, so there's no downside for them to accepting scam ads if they're paying.

[–] Gabu@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Because they have money...

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