Oh, they know that. It's very lucrative. At this point it's scams all the way up to the US presidential cryptocurrency.

However it's also a tricky business to be the adjudicator of what is and isn't a scam. You're going to have to deal with a lot of complaints from "legitimate businessmen".

I'm waiting for the non-tech world to wake up and hold companies that act as willing accomplices liable for the crimes they tolerate on their platforms.

The tech world knows this. They are raking in money off of these scams. People with a rudimentary moral compass leave, those without stay, which makes it even less likely that industry will self-sanitize. The rest of society, out of survival instinct if nothing else, will have to force it to stop anti-social and fraudulent practices. Same as many other industries.

It would help to stop saying "brightest minds of our generation", like we stopped saying "smartest guys in the room".

They are not the brightest, just the ones who sold out others and grabbed the money, with ethics and morals not being sufficient personal barriers.

Calling them the brightest just feeds their belief that they merit the money, and they don't have to ask the real reason they have so much money.

They already know. Meta estimates around 10% of its ad revenue comes from ads for scams or banned goods. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

I'm waiting for the tech world to realize that "the brightest minds of our generation" don't actually work at google, because if you are that enormously bright you don't want to work for ads or in an opaque megacorp.

Why does anyone think a brilliant mind would enjoy that? So they could make a little bit more money?

Do you honestly think brilliant people, the smartest of our generation, care about money?

IME, Google software devs aren't even the brightest minds in the parking lot.

Completing large engineering projects says nothing about individual capability, and nothing about how Google deploys shitty AI moderation and about how Google employees insist it's great and perfect and never does anything wrong gives me any reason to believe they are even competent.

It's literally a meme that people started repeating in earnest without a second thought.

Don't you think a brilliant person would work somewhere, like, interesting?

In economies where you aren't rewarded for individual competency (because software management couldn't pick out individual competency if it screamed at them), highly competent people aren't going to play the game, they are just going to find something to pay the bills and work on hobbies.

The smart people are often where the money isn't, because they are rarely driven by monetary pursuits.

I think being a “Techie” is now something that is splitting.

- People who want to work in tech because it was a stable and/or lucrative career

- People who just want/love to code

- People who loved tech / think tech is cool

There’s also a degree of counter-culture that used to be part of the mix, which got jettisoned as tech became mainstream and mapped out.

The current state of Tech is unpleasant and alarming.

Does clicking on the ad cost the spammer a lot of money

see Meta, which is operating like a crime syndicate, leveraging higher fees on scammers "to discourage" them, retaining their impact on supply side auction prices and well knowing many don't pay with their own credit cards.

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-tolerates-rampan...

That's so Meta.