More companies than we know use this as a tactic. Even though many apps have millions of users, many of them create an account and then never log in again. The companies also provide promotional incentives to employees that run accounts to post and make sites look livelier and more communal than they truly are.
App trustworthiness is at an all time low if you ask me. It's like each store you walk in to is a scam operation out to get money for returning the littlest amount of value back. There is no more organic or honest growth, even users on platforms are faking their statistics too... This entire ecosystem will eventually end up eating itself in my opinion.
YouTube famously spent many of their first years turning a blind eye to blatant copyright infringement.
Shady “growth hacking” is more the norm than not for many of these early stage social companies that have chicken/egg Metcalfe’s Law issues for user adoption.
YouTube had to have an informal deal worked something out with the studios. Circa 2004, the internet was awash in streaming video sites with copyrighted Family Guy and Futurama clips, which were often taken down. Then boom, one day those sites themselves go offline, and that content all moves to Youtube, where it stays up.
Please submit it again, as its own post, using "Show HN" -- this deserves more eyeballs!
Personally, I found it striking how similar this looks to the other doomscrolling sites (sure, it's only superficial, but if you don't "dig" you might not catch that it's all simulated).
Yep, cue the "free market" folks celebrating poorly-informed transactions between VCs dumping these companies on construction workers investing to try to fight inflation enough to send their kids to college.
Why should you putting your money in a savings account ensure that you are protected from inflation? The whole point of an economy is for money to move and be invested, not hoarded by a dragon sleeping on a pile of gold coins.
Under fractional reserve banking, savings account deposits are lent out, which hopefully does result in productive investment
As I understand it, western retail banks that take deposits are fractional reserve banks, and have to be if they pay interest on deposits; after all, banks don't generate revenue from just looking after your money (unless they charge you for it, perhaps in the form of a negative interest rate)
They are indeed lent out, but mostly in very safe, boring investments, that don't really generate economic activity (mortgages). This is by design, as we generally don't want banks going pear-shaped, and taking people's savings with them!
If your money is used to generate meaningful economic activity, that means you're investing it into something like stocks (Which anyone can do by opening a Schwab, or a Vanguard, or a whomever account) - which will beat inflation, but on the short-and-medium term, are not a safe investment.
You're substantially right, of course, but to play devil's advocate:
1) the negative real central bank interest rates are a recent anomaly in my country, and above-inflation deposit interest was easy to find before that
2) mortgage lending should indirectly generate meaningful economic activity, in the form of building construction and maintenance
3) buying stocks on the secondary market also only indirectly generates meaningful economic activity - all it does directly is take stocks out of the seller's hands, replacing it with cash - presumably, this causes a chain of trades that lead to the primary market (or possibly to a mortgage)
App trustworthiness is at an all time low if you ask me. It's like each store you walk in to is a scam operation out to get money for returning the littlest amount of value back. There is no more organic or honest growth, even users on platforms are faking their statistics too... This entire ecosystem will eventually end up eating itself in my opinion.