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While consuming a succulent chinese meal last night, I decided to do a little research into the company who produces the duck sauce packets. Hidden businesses like this are always interesting to me, even if I find the quality of soy sauce in these packets to be so far below par I can't stand to use them. The NY Times had a great little article from 1994 on the same corporation. Interesting to see single serve packaging as a somewhat recent innovation instead of so ubiquitous as to be background noise.
As any article would, the footer was packed with items to read next, which led to an expose on the hustlers "gamifying" the load balancing algorithms for Citi bikes. That's a bit too polite of a way to put it. The TL;DR: is that some folks have figured out the precise algorithm used to pay volunteers, including timing intervals and calculations behind the scenes. Volunteers of a high status get unlimited bike unlocks, and have formed gangs that empty whole racks, move them a trivial distance, then move them back, to pull down up to $6,000 a month.
A small group of people purposefully wiping out whole bike racks for commuters, all day every day for their gain is about what you'd expect in 2024. I respect the reverse-engineering and black-hattery of it in many ways, but it's not what the system needs or what the algo was built for.
The comment section is perhaps even more enlightening than the article. The "journalist" spent quite a bit of time running interference for the gang, with the classic playbook of repeating how much money Lyft makes and bitching about the downsides of the gig economy. To Lyft's credit, they basically said this is a rounding error and they don't care, but I think that has more to do with the pragmatism of any reasonable algorithm being exploitable in some way. How do you stop this without punishing poorly paid volunteers who are already a huge step up over contractors? Not easily, and solving problems for the 1% of troublemakers is often a road to hell.
I think what you're getting out of this is less, they don't care, and more that they make more money off of honest people than they would spend on labor to fix the problem and so they pursue a profitable path. They have no problem paying dishonest people, as long as they keep making money they don't care who is getting paid.
I'm of the schizo opinion that things like self-checkout are a form of psychological warfare against trust in society. Every time I self-checkout, I scan everything correctly, but I'm aware of how easy it would be not to. To tuck a couple small items in the corner of my tote bag and never scan them, to scan the $2 switch five times instead of scanning the four $10 switches, to ring up the organic carrots as ordinary carrots. And in my head I'm aware there is nothing the store will do to stop me, and that their profit margin is such to account out of the money they make on me for the person who doesn't scan it all. And that sense of being a chump grates on me over time, until eventually I start stealing things.
We've already seen this happen with "free" media, where internet commenters will act as if it is a personal affront that Youtube has advertisements, while ignoring that they can pay a pittance each month to remove all ads. Once people get used to free stuff, they can't stand the idea of paying for it.
Most people put media goods in a different mental bin than tangible physical goods I think, even if the physical good is very cheap. That's why "you wouldn't download a car" didn't land with anyone. The to-go rebuttal is "I bloody damn would, if cars could be downloaded".
I can't say your mindset is something I relate to. Even if I didn't have a reptilian aversion to even looking like I'm in position to take something without paying, I imagine I would feel disgusted with myself for contributing to the lowtrustification of my society for the sake of a few dollars of groceries. (I completely lack that aversion when it comes to downloading pirated media from the internet.)
How would you be contributing?
To be clear, I don't steal from self checkout, and doubt I will begin to. But it grates on me, as a citizen, that I know that I am paying Home Depot, and they have decided to allow dishonest people to steal from them rather than pay an honest cashier, counting on me to not steal from them.
Presumably, shops go from "self-checkout" to "hiding shit behind metal bars" because they found out that if they leave things out, they get stolen (more than the shop could absorb through raising prices). Thus, every additional thief contributes to the removal of high-trust features.
(Compare and contrast with media, where several game developers famously endorsed piracy, presumably due to the additional popularity being worth more than the loss on the unsold copies. And music gets uploaded to Youtube by the artists themselves.)
But here the transaction isn't between the developer or the musician, it's between you and the host who builds the platform and pays for it so that you can view the video. Why is youtube obligated not to turn a profit on you?
Youtube's free to choose a profit model that doesn't enshittify my experience of their service, if they find that adblock is making them struggle. They don't seem to be struggling. (Wikipedia famously makes money from donations. I wonder if Youtube could do that, even in theory.)
I find that letting people who watch ads provide Youtube's profit margin instead of me doesn't make me feel guilty. Perhaps it's because I don't believe they're watching ads out of civic duty, but rather out of indifference/ignorance of adblock.
Compare: freemium mobile games where a couple of whales make it profitable, and the rest of the players are just there to bulk the audience up. Should the f2p players feel guilty, or whales feel like chumps? (Whales should feel like chumps in my opinion, but due to vastly overpaying for pixels, not for being taken advantage of by f2p players).
And my point is what right do you have to any experience of their service without paying for it?
Because I can and there is nothing unethical about this?
I can download youtube videos and strip out ads added by creators with sponsorblock, Youtube can try blocking this actions.
And Youtube's free to choose a profit model that doesn't enshittify my experience of their service.
And I am free to not pay for Twitter and Youtube.
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