“The biggest scam in YouTube history”

  • bizarroland@fedia.io
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    9 days ago

    I can see how it happens though.

    No one was doing any oversight on their practices. If you were running a referral affiliate link system, it must have seemed like honey was doing a really good job bringing customers to you.

    I’m just kind of disappointed that nobody inside the company ever spoke up or blew any whistles and said “Hey, this is at best unethical if not entirely illegal and either way exposes us to the risk of a massive lawsuit, maybe we should just actually do our jobs instead of stealing the work of other people.”

    • lobut@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      8 days ago

      I dunno man, whistleblowers aren’t getting good treatment from what I see. Two got “suicided” last year from Boeing and OpenAI. The two Theranos whistleblowers were treated really poorly. I felt so bad for them. They’re doing talks on ethics and stuff and I only wish them the best. They stood their ground on what they believed in.

    • dukeofdummies@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      8 days ago

      I’m not. What do you get as a reward for blowing the whistle? Genuinely?

      1. There’s no bounty, even if there was you wouldn’t get it for at least a year after you blow the whistle.

      2. Once it’s discovered it’s you, you’re fired. There goes your paycheck, your health insurance. Now your home is in jeopardy and you have no decent income verification to get a new one.

      3. Good luck working in any job even remotely related to what you know. You now have a stigma in any background check and while a privately owned mom & pop might look at you favorably, there ain’t a single corporation who will take pride in hiring you. You’re risky.

      The most ethical person, is one with no debt, who owns their home, and has 8 months expenses saved up. That’s not most Americans right now.

      • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        8 days ago

        This is also why there was such coordinated effort to shut down wikileaks, or to at least stall out the cultural movement that was building behind it.

        If you give people a methodology to whistleblow that at least on paper allows them to stay anonymous and avoid putting their life/livelyhood/survival in jeapordy, that removes one of the biggest disincentives.

      • bizarroland@fedia.io
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        8 days ago

        I think Amazon didn’t care, so even if someone inside the company figured it out Amazon was just like, it’s not our problem to deal with.