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Don't be so quick to judge that as a job or not. If the market didn't favor spam, there wouldn't be any. Those two sentences don't add up. Spam is a free rider

Don't be so quick to judge that as a job or not. If the market didn't favor spam, there wouldn't be any. Those two sentences don't add up. Spam is a free rider: it offloads most of its cost onto its audience. 'The market' might favor that, but I don't, so I'm going to continue to judge it.

InclinedPlane 16y ago
The purveyors of spam do not have to pay its full costs. If various companies and email providers were able to charge spammers for the cost of maintaining spam filters, for example, spam would be extremely unprofitable.
jshen 16y ago
also, a lot of spam is fraud. It's a tad dishonest to say that the market favors it if the spammers are tricking people into buying by making apps that are 1 edit different than a popular app or some such.
nopassrecover 16y ago
"Spam is a free rider: it offloads most of its cost onto its audience" makes no sense as you acknowledge by agreeing with the (presumably downvoted, now deleted) parent in your next sentence "'The market' might favor that". If people didn't make money spamming then they would not spam. People buy spam, therefore people "sell" spam.
- gabrielroth 16y ago
  The chief costs of spam are the time and attention of people who don't want it but get it anyway. Those costs are borne neither by the buyers nor by the sellers but by third parties. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
  - nopassrecover 16y ago
    Labelling externalities costs in the traditional sense is misleading. By the same logic one could argue that the "real cost" of meat-production isn't borne by the buyers or sellers of meat, but by the moral-vegetarians whose conscience the process bothers. Similarly, just because Pepsi has billboards and I prefer Coke, doesn't mean I would say Pepsi existing delivers a cost to my time. Misleading products on the other hand are different, (when the offer isn't genuine), but spam does not necessarily mean fraud.

InclinedPlane 16y ago

The purveyors of spam do not have to pay its full costs. If various companies and email providers were able to charge spammers for the cost of maintaining spam filters, for example, spam would be extremely unprofitable.

jshen 16y ago

also, a lot of spam is fraud. It's a tad dishonest to say that the market favors it if the spammers are tricking people into buying by making apps that are 1 edit different than a popular app or some such.

nopassrecover 16y ago

"Spam is a free rider: it offloads most of its cost onto its audience" makes no sense as you acknowledge by agreeing with the (presumably downvoted, now deleted) parent in your next sentence "'The market' might favor that". If people didn't make money spamming then they would not spam. People buy spam, therefore people "sell" spam.

gabrielroth 16y ago
The chief costs of spam are the time and attention of people who don't want it but get it anyway. Those costs are borne neither by the buyers nor by the sellers but by third parties. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
- nopassrecover 16y ago
  Labelling externalities costs in the traditional sense is misleading. By the same logic one could argue that the "real cost" of meat-production isn't borne by the buyers or sellers of meat, but by the moral-vegetarians whose conscience the process bothers. Similarly, just because Pepsi has billboards and I prefer Coke, doesn't mean I would say Pepsi existing delivers a cost to my time. Misleading products on the other hand are different, (when the offer isn't genuine), but spam does not necessarily mean fraud.