[Affric]

Glad you have said it.

And before a developer for these commerce websites jumps up and says “ah but supreme are trying to prevent bots from buying up all of their merch and scalping it”:

Supreme are restricting supply so they can maximise profits.

They are selling on the web rather than through traditional retail outlets using this method not to reach a wider audience for the audience’s sake but to have a larger number of people who are willing to pay an even higher price.

The web, the system that brings free information to the masses requiring no knowledge of the underlying technologies, is too important to compromise for these e-commerce platforms attempting to have their cake and eat it to.

[TechBro8615]

Also note that as far as the sketchiness scale goes, this is basically a 5/10. Now consider the same tools in the hands of malware distributors. For example, I've seen these anti-debugger techniques on NFL piracy websites when I tried to investigate why my CPU was pinned to 100% while I was streaming the game.

[codetrotter]

> I've seen these anti-debugger techniques on NFL piracy websites when I tried to investigate why my CPU was pinned to 100% while I was streaming the game

Probably safe to assume they were mining cryptocurrency with your browser while you were watching the stream.

[TechBro8615]

Probably. I got distracted by the game so I never found out. And I only visit those websites when I'm watching a stream anyway. Really it's quite a clever distribution vector, since it involves long sessions and any experts in the audience will be too distracted to look too deeply, or at least unmotivated to investigate and publish research against a site that helps them watch the games they want to watch. It's a symbiotic relationship in a way...

I did notice the ad serving infrastructure seemed quite sophisticated. There were so many domains and proxies and redirects. Luckily uBlock Origin blocks almost all of them. And usually, I can avoid any of the "bonus" features by opening the video player iframe in its own tab (but sometimes this isn't possible, or the video player tab has some scripts to make it annoying to run in isolation).

One thing I like to do during the commercial breaks is paste the URL of the site into GitHub Code Search. This always leads to interesting results, including blocklists, people's personal media scrapers, or sometimes even the (re-)publishing infrastructure of the sites themselves. It's also a great way to find alternative URLs or other streaming sites.

[charcircuit]

Scalpers only exist because they are not raising the price to reduce demand. If they just wanted a higher price there is still room to go higher.

[thorncorona]

Ah yes, the supply vs. demand argument. My favorite.

[x] only exists because it is underpriced relative to market demand.

A great question to ask after this is "would i be okay subjecting my child/mother/father to this experience?"

For example, there are 2 tennis courts available on a first come, first serve basis at a park in SF. Because they are free to reserve, and there's more demand than supply, people will bot all the courts at all given times during the day and scalp players for the free reservations.

Or, a car is available for [x] msrp price, plus a 25% "market adjustment" fee. Is this ethical for every dealer in the country to do the same?

[charcircuit]

>Is this ethical for every dealer in the country to do the same?

Yes, if it means that a car that I want is in stock as opposed to having to wait for 6 months I would consider it ethical.

[salawat]

It's in stock. You can't afford it though unless we're being charitable by assuming you're richer than the whales that such an economic practice being pervasive creates.

[isleyaardvark]

Modern laissez faire capitalists don't care ethics.

My memory of learning about "Wealth of Nations" style capitalism is there was an idea that people produce goods and services that other people find useful. So when they trade, both buyer and seller benefit. As opposed to scalpers, who interpose themselves between the two to the detriment of both the buyer and seller, and benefit only to the scalper.

Modern capitalist don't care if they make everything worse, only that someone is making money.

[Affric]

There are opportunity costs to decreasing production. There are points where you are achieving economies of scale for your suppliers that allow you to negotiate lower prices. Scalpers could be seen as a perverse source of marketing. I am not going to pretend though that I have a very strong understanding of luxury streetware firms.

I appreciate you attempting to introduce some nuance to a discussion about goods. I would imagine that Supreme’s marketing team would be pretty savvy and know how to hit the mark.

My point is more about their determination to run obsfucated code on their users computers and the intersection between that and google’s vision for the browser.