It’s very easy to opine about the ethics others should have. Different when it’s you and your family and a comparatively easy effort will make a material difference in quality of life. And especially when you know ghe market need will be met by someone else anyway.
So you get a bit richer for less effort... but how do you think moderating legions of spam posts affects the lives of independent website owners, who just want to create communities around the things they love?
Or indeed the users, who have to wade through trash invading their threads?
Or other legitimate users, who now have to answer captchas from CloudFlare just to access their favourite websites?
Ultimately this is a parasitical element, choking the internet. It will kill the things it profits from. Many will give up running these sites, you walk away with your $100k, and no one can ever do it again... you've not created anything of value, but destroyed it.
A lot of people on this website are directly responsible for making botting and scamming easier to pull off. It's kind of necessary for them to find justifications for them so they can sleep soundly.
Hn is like that sometimes. You read a thread and think "well I guess I'm alone on what I think is a perfectly reasonable position"
The other one that comes to mind is anacap, which I view as fringe. I read the comment threads sometimes and it leaves me with the impression that I'm the only one that thinks Von Mises and Rothbard are a bit out there.
Yes, people often do unsavory things for money. Is the point you're making that they shouldn't do bad things. Like, what are we even talking about here?
The lesson here is that systems that rely on humans to do the 'moral' thing and fail otherwise are bad systems.
Captchas are not only for stopping people with disabilities anymore. They also stop people using non-approved browsers, people trying to stay anonymous, people coming from the wrong geographic areas...
If the AI has access to a credit card, but Mgulu from Nigeria doesn't, then the system doing the filtering might evolve to filter out the 'undesirable' rather than the non human.
If someone is making a brazen statement of being "a bad guy because 80K is not enough, and could not find anything decent for those extra $30K" what kind of treatment would they expect?
To be fair, there's a huge amount of people around here that work on the universal surveillance industry, and for many of them the alternative is way higher than 80k.
I’d argue that someone cracking CAPTCHAs has a lot less dirty hands than someone who works in an actually scummy industry like US health insurance. Those companies literally kill people by denying them care to pinch pennies. This guy might cause a little more spam on the already useless mess that is YouTube comments. Who cares. I’d take the money, too.
