Companies do marketing because these techniques work, not because they enjoy being evil. If you work in tech, part of your income is likely dependent on marketing, whether you think about it or not.
They work only because they externalise the costs. If companies had to pay the full cost of all the interruption and system degradation their spam causes, then it's unlikely it would be viable.
It's a rare company that does marketing well though.
Just off the top of my head I can only think of one company that I allow to send me marketing e-mails -- I bought a ukulele over 20 years ago and they send out a couple 'newsletters' a year which IMHO is acceptable, doubly so since I haven't picked up a ukulele in over a decade.
Contrast that with my last online order that started sending out at least two a day as soon as they got their dirty paws on my e-mail address and I had to unsubscribe even though I was/am interested in the 'new releases' they were spamming my inbox with.
They _can_ engage in the behavior and the tactics, we can't control that — we can opt out at each turn and I'd argue we should given how invasive it's become.
> Companies do marketing because these techniques work, not because they enjoy being evil
These techniques work... to make them money... which is the part they enjoy. The distinction between evil for money and evil for evil's sake is mostly academic.
But your main point is correct: for most of us here, the screen we view, the ISP subscription, and sure as hell this website, were all paid for in part – perhaps in _large_ part — by fleecing at scale the technically unsophisticated, who lack the faculties to evade the machines we build for companies whose hunger will persist even after it has swallowed every coin from every pocket from every destitute man on earth.
We live in an advertising hellscape now. The biggest crock of crap is being forced to watch an advertisement at the freaking gas station as I pump my gas. I'll never voluntarily use those pumps ever again.
There is a fairly large gas station near me that doesn't have a silence button. It's a big-name, corpo-owned station (Speedway, now owned by 7-11).
No amount of button-mashing will cause it to cease.
It belts out loud advertising noise 24/7, from both sides of each pump (whether in-use or not). And because they're all apparently IP-connected, and no real attempt was made at synchronizing them, they're all free-running and slightly out-of-sync with eachother.
The result is an overwhelming cacophony that resembles a PA system that sounds like it was designed by an inebriated squirrel, and with system-tuning performed by a sadist with a grudge against humanity.
Previously (for decades), I went there frequently because it was convenient.
Today, they don't get any more of my money regardless of convenience.
That one is especially evil because you can't walk away far enough to be out of range of the ridiculously loud speaker. This is a sure-fire way to tell me "never come back to our gas station."
Oh god, yes, I'd like to use, or perhaps make, a service which maintains a list of ad-free pumps. (Preferably a service that didn't show me ads... so, yes, I'll pay for it...)
That and the tablets on the back of the headrest in Ubers that exist just to serve ads. The software even wakes it automatically from sleep so you have to physically power the tablet off if you want them to go away.
I could’ve written this. My goal of 2024 is to remove all emails, alerts, notifications that don’t truly deserve my attention. And as I’ve started doing that, it feels like a never-ending hole.
What can we do about this? With e-mail, we can create temp inboxes and throw them away.
What about phone? Is there an IPV6 for phone where we could have billions of throwaway numbers and use them as we see fit? Introduce a new country code that has 32 digit phone numbers and if you don’t accept those numbers, you don’t get our business?
At this point all of my personal, business emails, and phone numbers have been bought and sold a million times, and there’s no recourse or penalty for people spamming them. What can we do about this? It’s oppressive.
Agreed. I finally just went with the nuclear option and blocked all calls that aren't already in my phone book. This has resulted in some missed connections and other inconvenience but I've decided the benefits are worth the downsides. More and more people I know are doing the same.
Some companies, like my dentist's office, are finally adapting and providing ways for their employees to text if there's no answer. I wish the FCC/phone cos would add some kind of 'return code' to callers who are blocked by this setting which indicates "This number only accepts calls from numbers in its phone book."
I permanently mute my iPhone and then I added "Emergency Bypass On" ringtones on the contacts that I care about so I hear when they call no-matter-what.
I’m having some positive experiences with Firefox Relay and Apple’s Hide My Email services. They are pretty similar but Relay works in any browsers that can use its extensions and HME works on iOS devices which use Safari. Relay also supports phone masking where they give you a single proxy phone number you can use for signing up for online forms.
Negatives so far:
1. Relay costs money for continued use
2. Not every site supports a Relay email with the default domain or phone number (it is a VOIP number I think)
3. I am not sure what will happen to my HME emails if I ever stop using iOS / iCloud
4. My single Relay support request was not responded to in a useful way
5. I still have a ton of accounts that predate my usage of these services
6. Sometimes when a service is really important or I am dealing with a human being I will just give my direct info to try to make sure things work smoothly.
I bet a Relay or HME compromise would be an interesting thing from a hacker’s perspective. But I still like the services.
I love when I have a generated email alias like “wonky.hatmaster069420@icloud.com” to make an appointment and the barber shop cashier is like “is your email address… ummm ‘wonky… harasser?’”
Sometimes I wonder if T&C updates are just made to remind you you're in their system. I don't read them (except for work stuff, of course) so I probably wouldn't ever notice if anything actually changed.
> Is there an IPV6 for phone where we could have billions of throwaway numbers and use them as we see fit? Introduce a new country code that has 32 digit phone numbers and if you don’t accept those numbers, you don’t get our business?
This is my question too. I've always thought something like you describe would be a pretty good, fairly practical approach to phone/text spammers just guessing numbers in valid area codes. Yet I never hear the FCC and other 'powers that be' talking about this kind of approach. They only seem to focus on ways of stopping spam at the source or network edge, which seems like a potentially intractable problem. Conversely, approaches which make it impractical to reach targets seem like they would be nearly impossible to circumvent.
Yes, there are downsides in eventually displacing the 10-digit perma-number space but those could be mitigated by keeping the old number space but allowing users to quarantine inbound 10-digit comms that aren't already in their 10-digit address book (or don't have caller ID).
I think the comprehensive solution is to insert an AI-powered agent 'shim' between us and the current user-interaction layer. Apart from the implementation, which is nontrivial, there are two problems:
1) This will be massively resisted by the current oligopoly of Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook. Eg, you could run a simulated Android phone, but licences prevent you from installing the google play store etc on it. And it's even worse with Apple.
2) how to prevent it from degenerating into another monopoly/oligopoly.
I've found that searching my email for "black friday" throws up lots of candidates for unsubscribing.
As an aside, a few months back I dropped a new email address on the net as a mailto: link and it hasn't received a single spam email yet. I think maybe scraping for emails is dead.
The problem with phone is bad VoIP verification. For a while, I tried to call back unknown numbers who had called me. A lot of them were just not assigned. But a less reputable telco company can still allow their customers to use it as the "from" field for a VoIP call. Otherwise, the solution would be very straightforward: Allow regular people to sue a given phone number for spam/fraud and then the government (who has that info anyway) will disclose the phone number's owner to the judge. But that only works if the "from" phone number cannot be as easily falsified.
The whole issue with spoofing is that the caller has no relation to the number they claim to be calling from, you can't "sue the number" because it's probably done unrelated 3rd party's number. The fcc bad been slow to act but stir/shaken should prevent this going forward.
I have a filter to delete all emails containing the word unsubscribe or donate. May have deleted a few important emails, but I wouldnt say I've missed it, Bob..
HN and old reddit are pretty similar, but HN does seems slightly more useable without JavaScript. I think it is just the default level of folding? I usually use HN with JavaScript enables—I think it is required for comments—but trying it now without it, it seems like everything is defaulting to non-folded, which is good.
> It's insisting that someone engage with you when they would do so if they cared to.
No, they wouldn't. Most people are not like us.
It always baffled me why the ecommerce stores would so easily nuke your entire purchase history, when they changed some software. I would routinely look up what I purchased before to purchase it again, or a version of it, even years later. But most people don't. So it's easier to nuke the old system, and then market again. The lost revenue from those who would reengage when they needed to is minuscule and irrelevant.
This mass of non-discriminating consumers is a larger problem of modern capitalism. There is little incentive to make truly excellent products, and the market for them is usually a small niche. Most people don't care, even if they care, they can't tell the difference, and won't put in the effort.
I moved in with my girlfriend, and I am wanting for us to be very intentional with the furniture/house purchases we make, buying used where possible. So, I tell her to use Facebook Marketplace (RIP CL for the normies). A day later, she’s excited to go pick up a mirror from someone on there, and without looking at the posting, I go accompany her to pick it up from this stranger.
When we get there, it’s someone selling cheap chinese mirrors from out of a shipping container (while dodging taxes and other regulations I am sure!)
She loves the mirror and wants it anyway. Super flimsy, overpriced, bad materials, ecologically damaging, publicly damaging (no taxes!)
This is not what I had in mind when I wanted her to buy high quality pre-owned furniture, but this kind of cheap scheme is winning out over and over again.
I take it one more step: if you step across any of my personal lines, I will stop doing business with you where feasible.
For example:
- I unsubscribe from your mailing list. But you have another, slightly different one, so I must unsubscribe from each
- >1 click to unsubscribe
- physically mail me more than about 4 times a year: your product probably sucks
- make it difficult to cancel my account or subscription
- and many more
At this point I may end up living in the woods with no internet, but that sounds delightful!
I always uncheck the “email me news” checkbox on Stripe checkout screens and without fail end up on their newsletter within a day. It’s gotten to the point I have to attribute it to malice and not incompetence on the part of these awful marketing people.
If I tell you I don’t want to be contacted and you do it anyways it should come with business-destroying fines or jail time.
I find I just sign up for a lot fewer services than I would otherwise, these days. Engaging with a lot of the internet is just exhausting, when you have to constantly be on guard. I’m not sure if it is a local-maximum or some sort of tragedy of the commons thing, or maybe it actually just legitimately works well for lots of companies and I’m a just the weird one, but it seems odd that every interaction online is a game of “what information can I reveal before I get fucked over,” and the answer is usually: very little.
What I want is a Content-Security-Policy approach to my phone calls: block everything by default, and only allow known contacts through.
At this point I'm getting 2-3 spam calls a day, so I'm just not picking up.
The friction comes with the occasional useful contact from a third party that I might not have the number from (eg: contractor using a different mobile number than their main office line).
Both Android and iOS support this. Disabling and re-enabling for when you’re expecting a call that is likely to be blocked/marked as spam is a pain though.
"the cookie banners and compliance cottage industry that grew out of it are a blight on the web"
We got "opt out" because the major tech players wanted it. It would have been just as easy, if not easier, to implement "opt in". The cookie banners are there because adtech people wanted friction for opting out, knowing they could use dark patterns and human nature to get most people to just click "OK" and move on to what they were looking for.
I always click the unsubscribe button at the footer of e-mails if I don't want to be micro-harassed daily in my Inbox. I never want to read newsletters, and there's no anomalous exception to that.
We are all living on borrowed time here on earth and I don't want to spend significant portions of it reading newsletters and promotional material. It's just a gimmicky growth hack your service/product uses to gain leads.
And most of the e-mail I receive is bacn[0] instead of spam.
I usually assume that interacting with spam in any way will only mark my email address as active in their database. It is the worst when legit business is sending reminders about expiring service even after I deleted my account. That tells much about their personal data handling.
What I wish for, is some sort of way to legally be eligible for small amount of money for each spam or GDPR breaking email message. Want to send unsolicited email - pay up.
For particular classes of email (unwelcome recruiters, people soliciting me directly that I know I didn't give permission to, stuff without an obvious "unsubscribe" or unsubscribe that doesn't work) I go to the trouble of reporting to their email providers which I find via the link below. I do get responses from the other end often enough and if enough complaints get in they'll start getting blacklisted.
Sadly, at worst they'll get the boot from that provider and move to another provider who they'll be able to use for years more. Even that is difficult as in most cases providers will accept a "we removed this user" or "no, we never email anyone who hasn't opted in, promise" and come back and tell you they've dealt with it.
The only way to actually get rid of it is to mark it as spam and hope enough other people do too that your provider starts treating it as spam for everyone.
I seriously don't understand who actually falls for this stuff. Like, oh, this company I bought something from a year ago sent me an email, let me go buy something else from them. Oh, this company I've never heard of sent me an email, definitely let me do buy something from them. ???
Oh, here's a good one: Capital One just sent me a newsletter entitled "Can you spot a scam?". First, yes I can, and second, it's a clear advertisement for them and their "partnership with KHAN ACADEMY" (caps theirs).
Guess where the unsubscribe link is? Oh wait, there isn't one. "This email was sent to capitalone@... and contains information directly related to your account with us, other services to which you have subscribed, and/or any application you may have submitted."
The essential problem with spam is that it's so cheap to send it out that it might as well be free. This applies to both "I am a representative of the UN and want to send you $14 million"-type of "scam spam" as well as "you bought something years ago and now we'll spam you" type of "corporate spam".
Paper Karma (there are other similar tools) has been somewhat successful for fighting physical mailers. I just moved in with my girlfriend after having used it extensively at my last residence, and because of this, she is getting tons of junk mail and I am getting almost none.
"A cease and desist letter can be sent to the person who is harassing you to demand that they immediately stop their behavior, which may include unwanted communications, stalking, or threats." and "Harassment is generally defined as unwanted, unwelcome, and uninvited behavior which annoys, threatens, intimidates"
I've always wondered if that would apply to newsletters who ignore/refuse my opt-out request. "unwanted communications" and "uninvited behavior which annoys" is pretty much how I feel when companies keep sending me their newsletter after I told them to stop.
I have been wondering this myself. I am getting repeated email from Firestone and their unsubscribe webpage is completely broken. The 'submit' button doesn't work and the check boxes are actually just text inputs.
It is only a tiny fraction of the population that are able to "opt out" at the level described here: seeking unsubscribe services that aren't scams, modifying the DOM, etc.
If those are the only methods that even partially work, then the majority have no recourse, no choice but to be bombarded, to be drained, to have their attention taken from them without their consent and pierced until nothing remains.
I can only imagine the rage and betrayal I would feel if I felt this being perpetrated against me, with no recourse but to disconnect. I hope that some day the people who don't know what a DOM is will muster the courage to eat us at the same scale we ate them, for a value of "eat" that cares as much for our input as we cared for theirs.
I left the tech industry, but I cannot leave behind the fear and guilt that I have participated in something horrifically ugly.
68 comments
[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadJust off the top of my head I can only think of one company that I allow to send me marketing e-mails -- I bought a ukulele over 20 years ago and they send out a couple 'newsletters' a year which IMHO is acceptable, doubly so since I haven't picked up a ukulele in over a decade.
Contrast that with my last online order that started sending out at least two a day as soon as they got their dirty paws on my e-mail address and I had to unsubscribe even though I was/am interested in the 'new releases' they were spamming my inbox with.
There's a line from Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" that floors me every time.
A devil sick of sin! Wow.As you say. They don't enjoy being evil. But they are. They know it too, and it sickens them as much as all of us.
These techniques work... to make them money... which is the part they enjoy. The distinction between evil for money and evil for evil's sake is mostly academic.
But your main point is correct: for most of us here, the screen we view, the ISP subscription, and sure as hell this website, were all paid for in part – perhaps in _large_ part — by fleecing at scale the technically unsophisticated, who lack the faculties to evade the machines we build for companies whose hunger will persist even after it has swallowed every coin from every pocket from every destitute man on earth.
There is a fairly large gas station near me that doesn't have a silence button. It's a big-name, corpo-owned station (Speedway, now owned by 7-11).
No amount of button-mashing will cause it to cease.
It belts out loud advertising noise 24/7, from both sides of each pump (whether in-use or not). And because they're all apparently IP-connected, and no real attempt was made at synchronizing them, they're all free-running and slightly out-of-sync with eachother.
The result is an overwhelming cacophony that resembles a PA system that sounds like it was designed by an inebriated squirrel, and with system-tuning performed by a sadist with a grudge against humanity.
Previously (for decades), I went there frequently because it was convenient.
Today, they don't get any more of my money regardless of convenience.
But then again, someone will probably make a free adware-supported charging cable if there’s a buck to be made.
What can we do about this? With e-mail, we can create temp inboxes and throw them away.
What about phone? Is there an IPV6 for phone where we could have billions of throwaway numbers and use them as we see fit? Introduce a new country code that has 32 digit phone numbers and if you don’t accept those numbers, you don’t get our business?
At this point all of my personal, business emails, and phone numbers have been bought and sold a million times, and there’s no recourse or penalty for people spamming them. What can we do about this? It’s oppressive.
Some companies, like my dentist's office, are finally adapting and providing ways for their employees to text if there's no answer. I wish the FCC/phone cos would add some kind of 'return code' to callers who are blocked by this setting which indicates "This number only accepts calls from numbers in its phone book."
Otherwise, I call back when I am available.
Negatives so far:
1. Relay costs money for continued use
2. Not every site supports a Relay email with the default domain or phone number (it is a VOIP number I think)
3. I am not sure what will happen to my HME emails if I ever stop using iOS / iCloud
4. My single Relay support request was not responded to in a useful way
5. I still have a ton of accounts that predate my usage of these services
6. Sometimes when a service is really important or I am dealing with a human being I will just give my direct info to try to make sure things work smoothly.
I bet a Relay or HME compromise would be an interesting thing from a hacker’s perspective. But I still like the services.
Me too. Even "We updated our T&Cs" is too many.
I went on an account deleting spree:
* accounts where guest checkouts are an option: eBay, Mouser, bandcamp, booking.com
* accounts of once-used online stores
* old email accounts
* Amazon, Airtasker, Uber, frequent flyer, ...
I'm down to ~100 passwords in my password manager which is still too many, but good enough.
This is my question too. I've always thought something like you describe would be a pretty good, fairly practical approach to phone/text spammers just guessing numbers in valid area codes. Yet I never hear the FCC and other 'powers that be' talking about this kind of approach. They only seem to focus on ways of stopping spam at the source or network edge, which seems like a potentially intractable problem. Conversely, approaches which make it impractical to reach targets seem like they would be nearly impossible to circumvent.
Yes, there are downsides in eventually displacing the 10-digit perma-number space but those could be mitigated by keeping the old number space but allowing users to quarantine inbound 10-digit comms that aren't already in their 10-digit address book (or don't have caller ID).
1) This will be massively resisted by the current oligopoly of Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook. Eg, you could run a simulated Android phone, but licences prevent you from installing the google play store etc on it. And it's even worse with Apple.
2) how to prevent it from degenerating into another monopoly/oligopoly.
As an aside, a few months back I dropped a new email address on the net as a mailto: link and it hasn't received a single spam email yet. I think maybe scraping for emails is dead.
I’ve also had it backfire when my doctors office calls and they don’t use the same number that I called them from.
I wish gmail had a filter for mails sent by a human, but I suspect it would be antithetical to their aims.
Reddit is barely usable, but HN works just fine. I wish more websites tuned for efficiency and simplicity instead of bloat and surveillance capitalism
No, they wouldn't. Most people are not like us.
It always baffled me why the ecommerce stores would so easily nuke your entire purchase history, when they changed some software. I would routinely look up what I purchased before to purchase it again, or a version of it, even years later. But most people don't. So it's easier to nuke the old system, and then market again. The lost revenue from those who would reengage when they needed to is minuscule and irrelevant.
This mass of non-discriminating consumers is a larger problem of modern capitalism. There is little incentive to make truly excellent products, and the market for them is usually a small niche. Most people don't care, even if they care, they can't tell the difference, and won't put in the effort.
I moved in with my girlfriend, and I am wanting for us to be very intentional with the furniture/house purchases we make, buying used where possible. So, I tell her to use Facebook Marketplace (RIP CL for the normies). A day later, she’s excited to go pick up a mirror from someone on there, and without looking at the posting, I go accompany her to pick it up from this stranger.
When we get there, it’s someone selling cheap chinese mirrors from out of a shipping container (while dodging taxes and other regulations I am sure!)
She loves the mirror and wants it anyway. Super flimsy, overpriced, bad materials, ecologically damaging, publicly damaging (no taxes!)
This is not what I had in mind when I wanted her to buy high quality pre-owned furniture, but this kind of cheap scheme is winning out over and over again.
For example:
- I unsubscribe from your mailing list. But you have another, slightly different one, so I must unsubscribe from each - >1 click to unsubscribe - physically mail me more than about 4 times a year: your product probably sucks - make it difficult to cancel my account or subscription - and many more
At this point I may end up living in the woods with no internet, but that sounds delightful!
If I tell you I don’t want to be contacted and you do it anyways it should come with business-destroying fines or jail time.
At this point I'm getting 2-3 spam calls a day, so I'm just not picking up.
The friction comes with the occasional useful contact from a third party that I might not have the number from (eg: contractor using a different mobile number than their main office line).
We got "opt out" because the major tech players wanted it. It would have been just as easy, if not easier, to implement "opt in". The cookie banners are there because adtech people wanted friction for opting out, knowing they could use dark patterns and human nature to get most people to just click "OK" and move on to what they were looking for.
- Every "cookie banner" that does not have a single big "reject all" button that does what it says on the tin fast is not Compliant
- Every time a cookie consent form has "optional" "legitimate interest" or "3rd party legitimate interest" - that's not Compliant.
Send every of those to GDPR enforcers. It might take time, but with enought complaints we can get balls rolling... and hopefully heads.
We are all living on borrowed time here on earth and I don't want to spend significant portions of it reading newsletters and promotional material. It's just a gimmicky growth hack your service/product uses to gain leads.
And most of the e-mail I receive is bacn[0] instead of spam.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21830739
https://acidtool.com/
The only way to actually get rid of it is to mark it as spam and hope enough other people do too that your provider starts treating it as spam for everyone.
Oh, here's a good one: Capital One just sent me a newsletter entitled "Can you spot a scam?". First, yes I can, and second, it's a clear advertisement for them and their "partnership with KHAN ACADEMY" (caps theirs).
Guess where the unsubscribe link is? Oh wait, there isn't one. "This email was sent to capitalone@... and contains information directly related to your account with us, other services to which you have subscribed, and/or any application you may have submitted."
So basically: it doesn't hurt to try.
I've always wondered if that would apply to newsletters who ignore/refuse my opt-out request. "unwanted communications" and "uninvited behavior which annoys" is pretty much how I feel when companies keep sending me their newsletter after I told them to stop.
If those are the only methods that even partially work, then the majority have no recourse, no choice but to be bombarded, to be drained, to have their attention taken from them without their consent and pierced until nothing remains.
I can only imagine the rage and betrayal I would feel if I felt this being perpetrated against me, with no recourse but to disconnect. I hope that some day the people who don't know what a DOM is will muster the courage to eat us at the same scale we ate them, for a value of "eat" that cares as much for our input as we cared for theirs.
I left the tech industry, but I cannot leave behind the fear and guilt that I have participated in something horrifically ugly.