7 ms·

My guess is the already-existing trend towards walled gardens will simply continue. When a public space is dangerous, people retreat into "safe" enclosed spaces

by cj 1y ago

My guess is the already-existing trend towards walled gardens will simply continue. When a public space is dangerous, people retreat into "safe" enclosed spaces. - "Never download anything unless it's from the Apple App Store" - "Never buy anything unless you're on amazon.com" - "Dont use the internet outside of ChatGPT"

deaux 1y ago
A little ironic when Amazon is filled to the brim with scams.
- nxpnsv 1y ago
  Yeah, I'm def having more success using the Never buy anything from Amazon rule...
  - da02 1y ago
    What have been your alternative(s) to Amazon?
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      Local stores, or manufactures' own retail sites, for me. Been burned too many times by Amazon for them to ever regain my trust.
    - nxpnsv 1y ago
      I'm in Austria. There are price aggregator sites likes Geizhals and Idealo that helps you find deals across many stores. More often I just go to a store I know and like. It happens I pay a little more, but not having 15 cheap options with one off brand names is actually more a pro than a con..
- ZiiS 1y ago
  Where the consumer ends up out of pocket? I realise scamming ligament sellers and brands is endemic; but it is still a safe place to buy as far as I can tell?
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    > Where the consumer ends up out of pocket? A lot of consumers have no idea they got a cheap imitation. Counterfeiters have gotten quite good, and in many cases the scam is "falls apart in a year instead of ten", not "it's completely non-functional".
  - aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
    Out of pocket? Perhaps not, especially if it "works" as intended. Putting your life in danger and house burnt down though? More likely than you realize. Could I interest you in some very durable car fuses that don't actually trip? https://youtu.be/B90_SNNbcoU?si=5QUpXUHwSlZj4i4G https://youtu.be/B90_SNNbcoU?si=5QUpXUHwSlZj4i4G Or perhaps radioactive protection pendants are your thing? https://shungite-c60.com/quantum-pendant/ https://shungite-c60.com/quantum-pendant/ Could I interest you in some Amazon choice firecrackers? https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/10/business/amazonbasics-electronics-fire-safety-invs/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/10/business/amazonbasics-ele... Let's not even mention the health and nutrient products that make the FDA shudder. Sure, you can ask for your money back, and flag the seller. But new sellers pop up selling the same crap all over again with a new name and company ID. This is all while real sellers of real (and safety certified products) get pressured by Amazon and dissuaded from taking their business off platform. Avoid Amazon if at all possible. It's not good for consumers nor sellers, and it's keeping a leach on online retail. Most countries have laws around liability of sold products. This is often set up to fall on the importer of said product. Amazon Europe (and perhaps USA) is doing something very funny with these laws; You, the consumer, is the importer. If your house burns out, then it's between you and a random chineese ghost companny that just disappeared into smoke. Amazon is "handling the import paperwork for you", and not taking liability for anything.
- berkes 1y ago
  Not sure how this works on Amazon, but Bol.com (dutch "amazon competitor") sells a lot of crap too. Stuff that sometimes has the images and literal description taken from e.g. aliexpress. People literally re-sell stuff from chinese webshops on there with profit. Technically, on Bol.com, a EU-platform, EU consumer protection is in place. So if a product breaks within guarantee terms, is dangerous, never gets delivered etc. the person re-selling is responsible. They are importing "illegal" goods and could even go to jail for it. So, technically, that premium price brings me me the assurance that I am protected by EU consumer laws. That a TV I buy can be returned, is CE certified, won't explode and isn't a 12" TV pictured in a tiny living-room on the images on unpacking. Except these products often don't meet EU criteria, aren't adhering to (food, safety, chidren protection) EU laws and money-back is often hard because the re-seller just dissapears. In the last case, Bol.com will step up and refund, because they have to. But for the rest, they plead innocence: It wasn't us that sold illegal goods, it was that reseller from which we skim a lot of fees. The incentives are just wrong. And the solution simple: Make platforms by proxy legally responsible for their "users". Resellers in my case. Or advertisers in the case of TLA. If some-guy sells a TV that explodes, and can't be found or held responsible, then make Bol.com responsible. Let their CEO go to jail in the very worst case. Let's see how fast they solve this.
  - dspillett 1y ago
    > Not sure how this works on Amazon, but Bol.com (dutch "amazon competitor") sells a lot of crap too. Stuff that sometimes has the images and literal description taken from e.g. aliexpress. That is bog-standard drop-shipping. Every open online market had a pile of that. It isn't that they've taken the images from AliExpress it is that both sets of sellers are drop-shipping product from the same source or collection of sources (or buying and reselling though that is much less common as it means managing stock) and the images come & other sales material come from there. > So, technically, that premium price brings me me the assurance that I am protected by EU consumer laws. When comparing Amazon (UK) or eBay to the sellers on, for example, Facebook, often there isn't a premium, Amazon (or AliExpress, or similar) are often cheaper than sellers on social media and/or advertising via adverts on YouTube and their ilk. Those sellers will often try to make the product out to be some unique high quality item with a price to match (which of course is heavily discounted if you buy in the next hour or two), and if you check your preferred general marketplace you'll find several people with the same thing, often with the same images, making no such pretence of it being unique or high-value, at a price noticeably cheaper than the seller from SM/etc. I assume this is the same with Amazon in other jurisdictions and other marketplaces like Boi.
- dspillett 1y ago
  Amazon has the advantage over some company I don't have experience with, of that I know returns are pretty easy and generally not questioned at all (at least for me, long-standing account in the UK, with infrequent returns, it might vary for new accounts, those who return more than they keep, or those in countries with worse consumer rights at the legally enforced level). My two most recent examples: a couple of rolls of 3D printer filament that looked nothing like as advertised (bad sales images there I think, rather than a comingled-with-a-cheap-scammy-alternative issue) which was taken back unquestioned for same-day full refund despite one of them being opened, and a couple of years ago a replacement drive for my media RAID array that, while the right drive and not, as far as I could tell, counterfeit, certainly wasn't new/unused which is what I ordered, which again was taken back with no quibble or cost (other than my time of course). There are problems dealing with Amazon sellers, but those can mostly be avoided with care and a healthy dose of cynicism (to avoid ordering crap in the first place). I'd never buy some things from there though: safety equipment, for instance.
  - philistine 1y ago
    Your experience with no questions asked returns is not what everybody is experiencing these days.
    - dspillett 1y ago
      The most recent was recent: about two months ago. Though as mentioned, I find it very easy to believe this will vary by location and account for various reasons.
      - ghaff 1y ago
        I order a lot from Amazon--especially over the past year for house-related reasons. I just haven't had (touch wood) the apparently pervasive problems that some people seem to experience. Maybe I'm more selective about not picking whatever is cheapest regardless of brand that I've never heard of.
        1y ago
- georgemcbay 1y ago
  Yeah there were entire categories of products I'd never buy again on Amazon because of the scams and the list got so large that I cancelled Prime a while ago. The most common one I've run into is third party sellers taking items that come in multiple to a pack from the manufacturer and splitting them up but then also listing the single item for the same price as the multi-pack's MSRP. As an example, pouches of cat food treats that come 10 to a pack. Scam sellers will split the pack and sell each pouch for the same price as the full 10 pack and because Amazon has historically done nothing to guard against this, their scam listing appears fully comingled with the manufacturer's listing in a way where it is very hard to recognize the scam option even if you are aware of the possibility. Amazon has made some noise about fixing these comingling issues this year, but their plans have been vague and for me the well is already poisoned after years of letting it go. Its actually shocking that it took until this year for Amazon to really acknowledge this as an issue. Manufacturer/brands can't have been happy about this considering that for any item that can be scammed like this you'll find lots of bad reviews on Amazon where the review isn't really complaining about the product, but the scam. Some example reviews that I just randomly and easily found on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1KZ41Q9MZL7UX https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1KZ41Q9MZL7UX https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3UUT2K2Q4OROF https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3UUT2K2Q4OROF
1over137 1y ago
That’s a truly horrendous thought.
jerf 1y ago
Yes, but observe how that for all three of the things that immediately came to your mind, you have respectively 1. a thing that still has a lot of scams in it (though it may be the best of the three) [1] 2. A thing so full of scams and fake products that using it is already a minefield (one my mother-in-law is already incapable of navigating successfully, based on the number of shirts my family has gotten with lazy-AI-generated art [2]) and 3. a thing well known for generating false statements and incorrect conclusions. I'm actually somewhat less critical of Apple/Google/Facebook/etc. than probably most readers would be, on the grounds that it simply isn't possible to build a "walled garden" at the scale of the entire internet. It is not possible for Big Tech to exclude scammers. The scammers collectively are firing more brain power at the problem than even Big Tech can afford to, and the game theory analysis is not entirely unlike my efforts to keep my cat off my kitchen counter... it doesn't matter how diligent I am, the 5% of the time the cat gets up there and finds a tasty morsel of shredded cheese or licks some dribble of something tasty barely large enough for me to notice but constitutes a nice snack with a taste explosion for the much-smaller cat means I'm never going to win this fight. The cat has all day. I'm doing dozens of other things. There's no way to build a safe space that retains the current size and structure of the current internet. The scammers will always be able to overpower what the walled garden can bring to bear because they're so many of them and they have at least an order of magnitude more resources... and I'm being very conservative, I think I could safely say 2 and I wouldn't be really all that surprised if the omniscient narrator could tell us it's already over 3. [1]: https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/25/new-study-shows-massive-spike-in-fraudulent-apps-powered-by-ai/ https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/25/new-study-shows-massive-spike... [2]: To forstall any AI debate, let me underline the word "lazy" in the footnote here. Most recently we received a shirt with a very large cobra on it, and the cobra has at least three pupils in each eye (depending on how you count) and some very eye-watering geometry for the sclera between it. Quite unpleasant to look at. What we're getting down the pipeline now is from some now very out-of-date models.
- zahlman 1y ago
  > To forstall any AI debate, let me underline the word "lazy" in the footnote here. Most recently we received a shirt with a very large cobra on it, and the cobra has at least three pupils in each eye (depending on how you count) and some very eye-watering geometry for the sclera between it. Okay, but if it matches the illustration on the storefront, can it really be called a scam?
CuriouslyC 1y ago
That would be one possible dystopia, but I think we actually are going to dodge it. Smart, on device agents that are aligned with a user's interests will be able to act as the "walled garden" the user needs. In fact, this future is anti-dysopian, because the agent will not care about existing walled gardens and digital fiefdoms, and to the extent that it's using them it's going to deprive them of ad revenue, and they'll have to sit and take it because being agent unfriendly will be a death sentence for a business.
- immibis 1y ago
  Why do you think an on-device agent would be aligned with a user's interests, when all other on-device software is not?
tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
> - "Never buy anything unless you're on amazon.com" Might as well do AliExpress, same quality control/misleading descriptions but lower prices. Is there even a trustworthy online shopping site/platform nowadays?
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  I use walmart.com, they have fast local delivery (often next day) but you do have to be careful, as they also have listings for third party sellers and they are just as shady as Amazon. I only buy items sold by Walmart, never a third party. You can filter your searches for that pretty easily. I never buy food, supplements, OTC meds, etc. online from any source. That stuff I always buy in person at a local retailer.
toddmorey 1y ago
The Apple App Store is full of scam apps. It’s all the disadvantages of a walled garden with none of the supposed advantages for users. In that way, the App Store itself is a scam.
- EduardoBautista 1y ago
  I haven't encountered any to be honest. Can you link to one as an example?
  - fsflover 1y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45411915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45411915
  - ben_w 1y ago
    IMO, Duolingo. Makes claims about language learning that I found to substantially exceed what was delivered.
- datavirtue 1y ago
  Well said
- ben_w 1y ago
  Apple's Store is "Swiss cheese" security: full of holes, but still more cheese than hole. It has some of the disadvantages, some of the advantages. It's not (and never was) perfect. That said, at this point I am a disillusioned app developer: I no longer believe that the creation of an app is a good business idea in most cases.
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
> "Never buy anything unless you're on amazon.com" Too late for that one. I have been scammed a few times from Amazon sellers.
- Beijinger 1y ago
  Lucky you. I have been scammed by Amazon.
asadotzler 1y ago
The walled gardens belong to the Big Tech billionaires creating the scams. You're actually safer out on the web than in Facebook, for example.
- razingeden 1y ago
  i was surprised to learn that meta had any ads that weren’t scams.
mensetmanusman 1y ago
We can also fight back and jail people that are ruining lives.

by cj 1y ago

deaux 1y ago

A little ironic when Amazon is filled to the brim with scams.

nxpnsv 1y ago
Yeah, I'm def having more success using the Never buy anything from Amazon rule...
- da02 1y ago
  What have been your alternative(s) to Amazon?
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    Local stores, or manufactures' own retail sites, for me. Been burned too many times by Amazon for them to ever regain my trust.
  - nxpnsv 1y ago
    I'm in Austria. There are price aggregator sites likes Geizhals and Idealo that helps you find deals across many stores. More often I just go to a store I know and like. It happens I pay a little more, but not having 15 cheap options with one off brand names is actually more a pro than a con..
ZiiS 1y ago
Where the consumer ends up out of pocket? I realise scamming ligament sellers and brands is endemic; but it is still a safe place to buy as far as I can tell?
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  > Where the consumer ends up out of pocket? A lot of consumers have no idea they got a cheap imitation. Counterfeiters have gotten quite good, and in many cases the scam is "falls apart in a year instead of ten", not "it's completely non-functional".
- aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
  Out of pocket? Perhaps not, especially if it "works" as intended. Putting your life in danger and house burnt down though? More likely than you realize. Could I interest you in some very durable car fuses that don't actually trip? https://youtu.be/B90_SNNbcoU?si=5QUpXUHwSlZj4i4G https://youtu.be/B90_SNNbcoU?si=5QUpXUHwSlZj4i4G Or perhaps radioactive protection pendants are your thing? https://shungite-c60.com/quantum-pendant/ https://shungite-c60.com/quantum-pendant/ Could I interest you in some Amazon choice firecrackers? https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/10/business/amazonbasics-electronics-fire-safety-invs/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/10/business/amazonbasics-ele... Let's not even mention the health and nutrient products that make the FDA shudder. Sure, you can ask for your money back, and flag the seller. But new sellers pop up selling the same crap all over again with a new name and company ID. This is all while real sellers of real (and safety certified products) get pressured by Amazon and dissuaded from taking their business off platform. Avoid Amazon if at all possible. It's not good for consumers nor sellers, and it's keeping a leach on online retail. Most countries have laws around liability of sold products. This is often set up to fall on the importer of said product. Amazon Europe (and perhaps USA) is doing something very funny with these laws; You, the consumer, is the importer. If your house burns out, then it's between you and a random chineese ghost companny that just disappeared into smoke. Amazon is "handling the import paperwork for you", and not taking liability for anything.
berkes 1y ago
Not sure how this works on Amazon, but Bol.com (dutch "amazon competitor") sells a lot of crap too. Stuff that sometimes has the images and literal description taken from e.g. aliexpress. People literally re-sell stuff from chinese webshops on there with profit. Technically, on Bol.com, a EU-platform, EU consumer protection is in place. So if a product breaks within guarantee terms, is dangerous, never gets delivered etc. the person re-selling is responsible. They are importing "illegal" goods and could even go to jail for it. So, technically, that premium price brings me me the assurance that I am protected by EU consumer laws. That a TV I buy can be returned, is CE certified, won't explode and isn't a 12" TV pictured in a tiny living-room on the images on unpacking. Except these products often don't meet EU criteria, aren't adhering to (food, safety, chidren protection) EU laws and money-back is often hard because the re-seller just dissapears. In the last case, Bol.com will step up and refund, because they have to. But for the rest, they plead innocence: It wasn't us that sold illegal goods, it was that reseller from which we skim a lot of fees. The incentives are just wrong. And the solution simple: Make platforms by proxy legally responsible for their "users". Resellers in my case. Or advertisers in the case of TLA. If some-guy sells a TV that explodes, and can't be found or held responsible, then make Bol.com responsible. Let their CEO go to jail in the very worst case. Let's see how fast they solve this.
- dspillett 1y ago
  > Not sure how this works on Amazon, but Bol.com (dutch "amazon competitor") sells a lot of crap too. Stuff that sometimes has the images and literal description taken from e.g. aliexpress. That is bog-standard drop-shipping. Every open online market had a pile of that. It isn't that they've taken the images from AliExpress it is that both sets of sellers are drop-shipping product from the same source or collection of sources (or buying and reselling though that is much less common as it means managing stock) and the images come & other sales material come from there. > So, technically, that premium price brings me me the assurance that I am protected by EU consumer laws. When comparing Amazon (UK) or eBay to the sellers on, for example, Facebook, often there isn't a premium, Amazon (or AliExpress, or similar) are often cheaper than sellers on social media and/or advertising via adverts on YouTube and their ilk. Those sellers will often try to make the product out to be some unique high quality item with a price to match (which of course is heavily discounted if you buy in the next hour or two), and if you check your preferred general marketplace you'll find several people with the same thing, often with the same images, making no such pretence of it being unique or high-value, at a price noticeably cheaper than the seller from SM/etc. I assume this is the same with Amazon in other jurisdictions and other marketplaces like Boi.
dspillett 1y ago
Amazon has the advantage over some company I don't have experience with, of that I know returns are pretty easy and generally not questioned at all (at least for me, long-standing account in the UK, with infrequent returns, it might vary for new accounts, those who return more than they keep, or those in countries with worse consumer rights at the legally enforced level). My two most recent examples: a couple of rolls of 3D printer filament that looked nothing like as advertised (bad sales images there I think, rather than a comingled-with-a-cheap-scammy-alternative issue) which was taken back unquestioned for same-day full refund despite one of them being opened, and a couple of years ago a replacement drive for my media RAID array that, while the right drive and not, as far as I could tell, counterfeit, certainly wasn't new/unused which is what I ordered, which again was taken back with no quibble or cost (other than my time of course). There are problems dealing with Amazon sellers, but those can mostly be avoided with care and a healthy dose of cynicism (to avoid ordering crap in the first place). I'd never buy some things from there though: safety equipment, for instance.
- philistine 1y ago
  Your experience with no questions asked returns is not what everybody is experiencing these days.
  - dspillett 1y ago
    The most recent was recent: about two months ago. Though as mentioned, I find it very easy to believe this will vary by location and account for various reasons.
    - ghaff 1y ago
      I order a lot from Amazon--especially over the past year for house-related reasons. I just haven't had (touch wood) the apparently pervasive problems that some people seem to experience. Maybe I'm more selective about not picking whatever is cheapest regardless of brand that I've never heard of.
      - 1y ago
georgemcbay 1y ago
Yeah there were entire categories of products I'd never buy again on Amazon because of the scams and the list got so large that I cancelled Prime a while ago. The most common one I've run into is third party sellers taking items that come in multiple to a pack from the manufacturer and splitting them up but then also listing the single item for the same price as the multi-pack's MSRP. As an example, pouches of cat food treats that come 10 to a pack. Scam sellers will split the pack and sell each pouch for the same price as the full 10 pack and because Amazon has historically done nothing to guard against this, their scam listing appears fully comingled with the manufacturer's listing in a way where it is very hard to recognize the scam option even if you are aware of the possibility. Amazon has made some noise about fixing these comingling issues this year, but their plans have been vague and for me the well is already poisoned after years of letting it go. Its actually shocking that it took until this year for Amazon to really acknowledge this as an issue. Manufacturer/brands can't have been happy about this considering that for any item that can be scammed like this you'll find lots of bad reviews on Amazon where the review isn't really complaining about the product, but the scam. Some example reviews that I just randomly and easily found on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1KZ41Q9MZL7UX https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1KZ41Q9MZL7UX https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3UUT2K2Q4OROF https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3UUT2K2Q4OROF

1over137 1y ago

That’s a truly horrendous thought.

jerf 1y ago

Yes, but observe how that for all three of the things that immediately came to your mind, you have respectively 1. a thing that still has a lot of scams in it (though it may be the best of the three) [1] 2. A thing so full of scams and fake products that using it is already a minefield (one my mother-in-law is already incapable of navigating successfully, based on the number of shirts my family has gotten with lazy-AI-generated art [2]) and 3. a thing well known for generating false statements and incorrect conclusions. I'm actually somewhat less critical of Apple/Google/Facebook/etc. than probably most readers would be, on the grounds that it simply isn't possible to build a "walled garden" at the scale of the entire internet. It is not possible for Big Tech to exclude scammers. The scammers collectively are firing more brain power at the problem than even Big Tech can afford to, and the game theory analysis is not entirely unlike my efforts to keep my cat off my kitchen counter... it doesn't matter how diligent I am, the 5% of the time the cat gets up there and finds a tasty morsel of shredded cheese or licks some dribble of something tasty barely large enough for me to notice but constitutes a nice snack with a taste explosion for the much-smaller cat means I'm never going to win this fight. The cat has all day. I'm doing dozens of other things. There's no way to build a safe space that retains the current size and structure of the current internet. The scammers will always be able to overpower what the walled garden can bring to bear because they're so many of them and they have at least an order of magnitude more resources... and I'm being very conservative, I think I could safely say 2 and I wouldn't be really all that surprised if the omniscient narrator could tell us it's already over 3. [1]: https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/25/new-study-shows-massive-spike-in-fraudulent-apps-powered-by-ai/ https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/25/new-study-shows-massive-spike... [2]: To forstall any AI debate, let me underline the word "lazy" in the footnote here. Most recently we received a shirt with a very large cobra on it, and the cobra has at least three pupils in each eye (depending on how you count) and some very eye-watering geometry for the sclera between it. Quite unpleasant to look at. What we're getting down the pipeline now is from some now very out-of-date models.

zahlman 1y ago
> To forstall any AI debate, let me underline the word "lazy" in the footnote here. Most recently we received a shirt with a very large cobra on it, and the cobra has at least three pupils in each eye (depending on how you count) and some very eye-watering geometry for the sclera between it. Okay, but if it matches the illustration on the storefront, can it really be called a scam?

CuriouslyC 1y ago

That would be one possible dystopia, but I think we actually are going to dodge it. Smart, on device agents that are aligned with a user's interests will be able to act as the "walled garden" the user needs. In fact, this future is anti-dysopian, because the agent will not care about existing walled gardens and digital fiefdoms, and to the extent that it's using them it's going to deprive them of ad revenue, and they'll have to sit and take it because being agent unfriendly will be a death sentence for a business.

immibis 1y ago
Why do you think an on-device agent would be aligned with a user's interests, when all other on-device software is not?

tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago

> - "Never buy anything unless you're on amazon.com" Might as well do AliExpress, same quality control/misleading descriptions but lower prices. Is there even a trustworthy online shopping site/platform nowadays?

SoftTalker 1y ago
I use walmart.com, they have fast local delivery (often next day) but you do have to be careful, as they also have listings for third party sellers and they are just as shady as Amazon. I only buy items sold by Walmart, never a third party. You can filter your searches for that pretty easily. I never buy food, supplements, OTC meds, etc. online from any source. That stuff I always buy in person at a local retailer.

toddmorey 1y ago

The Apple App Store is full of scam apps. It’s all the disadvantages of a walled garden with none of the supposed advantages for users. In that way, the App Store itself is a scam.

EduardoBautista 1y ago
I haven't encountered any to be honest. Can you link to one as an example?
- fsflover 1y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45411915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45411915
- ben_w 1y ago
  IMO, Duolingo. Makes claims about language learning that I found to substantially exceed what was delivered.
datavirtue 1y ago
Well said
ben_w 1y ago
Apple's Store is "Swiss cheese" security: full of holes, but still more cheese than hole. It has some of the disadvantages, some of the advantages. It's not (and never was) perfect. That said, at this point I am a disillusioned app developer: I no longer believe that the creation of an app is a good business idea in most cases.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

> "Never buy anything unless you're on amazon.com" Too late for that one. I have been scammed a few times from Amazon sellers.

Beijinger 1y ago
Lucky you. I have been scammed by Amazon.

asadotzler 1y ago

The walled gardens belong to the Big Tech billionaires creating the scams. You're actually safer out on the web than in Facebook, for example.

razingeden 1y ago
i was surprised to learn that meta had any ads that weren’t scams.

mensetmanusman 1y ago

We can also fight back and jail people that are ruining lives.