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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2051 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 31, 2025

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Anyone know some ways for a person — one without any particular skills at either coding or handicrafts — to make a few extra bucks online?

Answers for this is question can be, unironically, best found on Reddit.

Average mottizen is card carrying member of elite human capital with little experience of poor life (not that there is anything wrong with it), but folks from all stations of life could be found on the infamous orange website.

If you're in the US, you could grind the casinos for 'showing up' bonuses. Apparently you can make 50-100 dollars an hour for one hour per day. :

https://www.themotte.org/post/2068/friday-fun-thread-for-june-6/333425?context=8#context

Hi, I actually tried this and I'll warn against it. I got really excited by the same ACX review and here was my experience:

  1. Difficulty of finding expectation

The entire scheme revolves around using high expectation, low variance ("return to player" as the games call it). It is basically impossible to get an accurate take on which slot games are like this.

Even the ones that have this buried somewhere don't quite add up. For example there was a game that apparently had a 96% return to player over "thousands of spins". I did maybe 2k spins with the minimum possible bet of 10 cents to kill variance. For every 120 stakescoins I had, I was lucky to get back 98 and cash out without too much of a loss. Remember that according to the promised expectation I was supposed to get 117.6 which, given the $100 real money that this cost me I should have gotten $17.60 of profit.

  1. Counterparty risk

This was mentioned in the original ACX review which led me down this rabbit hole, but it's kind of serious. You will be risking $100 to make at best $20 in profit. The ACX guy was nonchalant about it, saying you could tell your credit card to cancel the payment but I've never tried it in practice. Be ready to wait for a week to get your money back.

  1. Time

Still takes a hell of a lot of time. The ACX reviewer had some bot system and also had been doing this for a while. I felt like he was heavily discounting the time it takes initially to set things up and find the right casinos and games and so on. Lists and "advice" online are fake and looking to cash in on referral fees.

  1. Savvy

This is the entire damn problem. The ACX guy made it sound so easy. He even began to muse "what if you had UBI and nobody came?". He made it sound like literally anybody with no skills could do this.

This actually requires a lot of savvy and isn't quite as foolproof as he made it out to be. Finding the right casinos, games, etc.

It's what I realized with sports betting arbitrage. Or thinking about getting good at poker. There's no free lunch. No money lying on the sidewalk.

In the end I cut all my losses and closed my positions and got a part-time retail job.

Interesting. I really want to argue with your points, but since I don’t have any experience doing this (not in the US), I’ll cede the field.

Yeah, possibly the biggest barrier is the need for some seed capital and the willingness to take some counterparty risk on it. The guy seemed like he was juggling/transferring thousands of dollars per day to take advantage of the credit card bonuses and the cheap tokens. You’d probably need like 20-50k starting capital you’re ready to lose (although I think the risk is not that big), and, like you say, a considerable time investment, before you can earn his full one hour a day salary.

Anyway, if it's a hassle, or less lucrative than advertised, it's probably better to do something less zero sum.

We are on the same side. If you have any way or maybe even specific online casinos to recommend please go ahead. Who would not want to sit at home and make $50/hr?

This game isn't really zero-sum either. The company wins because they have to do this by regulation. The gamblers whose losses you gain win because the online sweepstakes casinos continue existing because they can maintain the legal fiction.

Even though you're abroad just use a VPN. You might even be better off because the IRS won't get after you for your winnings

A few ideas I've had over the years:

  1. Operate a small machine shop that makes replacement parts for mining equipment
  2. Develop improved release agents, emulsifiers, and icing stabilizers used in the commercial baking industry
  3. Open a shop that does custom letterpress printing, which uses old-fashioned metal type. Every major city can support a few of these, most of the business coming from wedding invitations and the like.
  4. Get an M.D. and buy the kind of machine that's expensive enough and used infrequently enough that it makes more sense for doctors to have someone else come in than to do the work themselves. I neurologist I used to know made a nice living going to various offices to do EMG and nerve conduction tests, with the added bonus that he didn't have to deal with patients calling him or operating his own office.
  5. Find an application where a Wankel rotary engine makes the most sense, and corner the market on them
  6. Develop some kind of get-rich-quick scheme and sell books about how to implement it in late-night infomercials hosted by Richard Karn or some other washed-up B-celebrity.

These are all good ideas for someone with a fair chunk of startup capital, not someone who's trying to figure out how to afford food.

  1. remote, call center jobs and data entry jobs exist and are widely available. If you're trying to avoid a 'job' job this isn't an option.

  2. you can get paid for writing fake reviews, filling out surveys, etc. Pays Indian wages.

  3. you can monetize X by engagement farming. Pays a middle class income by the standards of the subcontinent or the nicer parts of Africa if you're good at it.

  4. secondary market in online gaming stuff. WoW gold farming is legendary; this option is sufficiently common that you can find guides online, including the economics of it.

  5. you can sell reddit accounts with sufficient amounts of karma to spambots/advertisers. I assume this pays Kenyan-middle-class wages when done successfully, but I don't know that much about it.

The problem with "online" is that you are competing against every third-worlder with a cellphone on the planet, most of whom are willing to work for pennies, plus AI. Add in the lack of skills and that makes it hopeless.

Well, almost. Some creative endeavors are still on the table. You could try your hand at writing an online serial (see previous discussion), or you could make an adult visual novel (sex sells).

you could make an adult visual novel (sex sells).

Requires coding skills and art skills.

No? Ren'Py is easy to use; if you can get a degree in physics from Caltech, you should have no problem learning it. Or, if you absolutely can't manage that, you can use Twine, which is so easy, a purple-haired Tumblrina can do it.

As for art skills, come on, it's The Year of Our Lord 2025; that's what AI is for. Try Fooocus, locally if you have a GPU, or on Colab if you don't. Or farm free credits from Civitai and use that.

or you could make an adult visual novel (sex sells).

Does it? Then why are like 90% of “adult” mangas male on male?

I don't know how things are in the US, but in Europe companies pay premium for non-third-worlders. Now, the "premium" might still add up to chump change, but it might still be worth it depending on your situation.

How many bucks exactly? There are paid surveys, but the rewards are extremely low. I heard of games where you could grind and farm characters or artifacts and then sell them. Probably also not very lucrative. In general, if you seek something that can be done with any person with a computer, you have over a billion people to compete with, so the expected revenue stream would not be very good.

How many bucks exactly?

Looking at something like $50-$80/mo. range? (Much more than that, and the "welfare cliff" benefit reductions start to really bite.) I just had a change in landlords, along with a $120/month rent increase (when I'm already dirt poor). Basically, rent, utilities, phone, and internet now take up over half my income, with my usual monthly food budget very close to what's left.

And I asked about online, because I doubt many here would have much knowledge about the IRL circumstances, here in Anchorage, AK, for making a bit of extra money.

Do you have unusually feminine-looking feet?

Do you have photoshop and a can-do attitude?

You bet your bottom dollar.

Could try having a look at the pinned threads and top scoring posts from the last year in /r/beermoney. Seems like people are claiming anything from $50 to $1000 per month, and I imagine it all entails grinding your way through endless hoops.

Call centers? A bit of an assembly line, but they do pay, and give zero fucks if it's online.

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