They aren't selling anything. They are simply feeding idle brains with content in exchange for shotgunning topics for ad revenue.

Today it is clear that these are businesses that are there to make profit, and the "content" is only there to spread the advertisements apart.

I was catching-up to the Coffeezilla's videos, and it looks like the scammers-be-scamming. And some people will try their 'luck' with anything fringe-y (forex, NFTs, crypto, AI, etc.)

Off the top of my head: There was recently a fairly famous instance of an academic at Harvard who was suspended for falsifying data.

I guess the question becomes how do recognize grift or deception unless you establish people like the academics who exposed people like Gino. Do we just need more of that?

If I were to modify your initial statement to indicate the involvement of a group of reasonably intelligent attorneys, would that possess the same level of persuasiveness for you?

It’s similarly persuasive to me no matter which group you use in your original statement (attorneys or academics). Which is to say - not very.

It would, but that's because I am assuming that physical, natural or societal constraints are likely to bound behavior and so deviation from ethical norms despite any number of agents acting purely on self-interest, regardless of their group. You can't grift someone to believe you created improved semiconductor node technology because of the physical constraints of the universe, or you can't grift someone to believe that gun ownership will inherently lead to violence because of decades of data that proves otherwise, or you can't grift someone to believe that X drug will cause X effect it doesn't because of natural constraints imposed by the body.

My point is that grifting has its limits, and reasonable self-interested agents understand they operate under the constraints of those limits regardless of their group membership. So the question I was trying to ask was what is that people are hoping to achieve in the long-term by associating with a particular grift after they've made a quick buck and the thing in exposed as a lie. So as someone said the nature of the grift has to keep changing. I guess I can reason about the behavior of people who hang on (like people who work in MetaGov) as possibly people who are dreamers or hopefuls, or maybe have sunk costs.

Even portraying oneself as an 'expert' in a domain despite having limited expertise can be considered a form of grifting: It is, in fact, the focus of the article's opening paragraph.

To draw a more specific connection to the present example, even if Metagov were to falter and fail entirely for whatever reason, these academics now have the opportunity to assert their involvement in a 'groundbreaking web3 governance model.' Consequently, they are likely to generate a substantial volume of academic papers stemming from this involvement, a key metric used to evaluate academics. There is certainly motive for academic grifters to be involved.

Particularly considering the historical context of web3, there are many valid reasons to suspect that certain individuals with grifting tendencies might be engaged in such a project.

I think academics have a weird susceptibly to grifting because they feel morally reassured that other people should listen to them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine

Choice quotes:

> a medical researcher at the University of Texas, found that only 11% of 53 pre-clinical cancer studies had replications that could confirm conclusions from the original studies

> A survey of cancer researchers found that half of them had been unable to reproduce a published result

> A 2016 survey by Nature on 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility found that more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiment results (including 87% of chemists, 77% of biologists, 69% of physicists and engineers, 67% of medical researchers, 64% of earth and environmental scientists, and 62% of all others

How many of those papers were retracted, you think?

It's actually not at all hard to 'turn down' the decision to simply start defrauding people on an industrial scale.

Meanwhile, Central Banks all around the world are rolling blockchain-based systems to use as the future infrastructure of all their transactions, bypassing external middlemen like Visa and Mastercard. There is real tech coming from web3 and P2P computing will take over cloud computing sooner or later.

https://cryptoslate.com/brazil-to-launch-cbdc-drex-in-2024-s...

It's like how libertarians are constantly surprised in the rare instances that they get what they supposedly want that it turns out they didn't want it at all, but rather their idealized version.

Cryptobros don't have any concrete idea of how putting stuff behind a cryptographic proof makes it ""decentralized"". Which is why it does end up being centralized, just around the management of a handful of resource collectives.

I call this "Knocking down Chesterton's fence to be gored by a bull moments later"

> Cryptobros don't have any concrete idea of how putting stuff behind a cryptographic proof makes it ""decentralized"".

Let the cryptobros be wrong. Decentralized computing isn't about crypto, it is about reusing idle resource to create something bigger than big tech. BitTorrent is real, fediverse is real, IPFS...

"I am good at numbers, money is just numbers" https://xkcd.com/1570/

I have a lot of examples, including myself, of people reading a financial thing very badly wrong.

Sometimes it's a little thing, switching digits as you read £2.49 becoming £4.29.

Sometimes it's medium-sized mistakes like not understanding compound interest.

Sometimes it's big things like someone mistaking an example interest rate for a guarantee and getting a loan they can't afford to repay, or in the other direction assuming the high dividend rate on their share holdings will last forever and has no risk of becoming worthless.

Sometimes it's catastrophic things like a large cohort of people who ought to know better all reading the paper that just won the Nobel prize for economics, not realising that it doesn't work so well if all the risks are correlated with each other, and systematically mis-pricing the assets they sell to each other causing a major global crisis when too many bad debts get called in at the same time.

If my bank goes under, my government guarantees the return of my money — up to a certain threshold, but that guarantee is much more than the "lol" you get if your DIY "bank" lets out all the magic smoke.

well done, you just did it again.

> Sometimes it's catastrophic things like a large cohort of people who ought to know better all reading the paper that just won the Nobel prize for economics

What a great way to defend the status quo as if every possible alternative is naive, a scam or faded to fail. The despair of a conformist that thinks everything is too big to fail or impossible to go against.

That's not even close to what I was saying and I have no idea how you've misapprehended me so badly.

I will however offer this aphorism:

Who is the bigger fool, the one who messes up, or the one who upon seeing the first one fail says "what an idiot, this is easy, I will do it myself"?

> “Wait, wait, wait, but why are we doing it this way?” Barroso said on the podcast. “And it just turns out that the people who had been living in that area hadn't really thought about questioning that. And sometimes it's something that was based on a good reason three years ago, and that reason had a sell-by date, and it's time to do something else.”

Good thing for the world, guys with the mindset like you doesn't prevent guys like Barroso great work.

"Luiz André Barroso had never designed a data center before Google asked him to do it in the early 2000s. By the time he finished his first, he had overturned many conventions of the computing industry, laying the foundations for Silicon Valley’s development of cloud computing."

You're reading non-existent intent between the lines.

Look at what I quoted in my original comment:

> At some point it becomes so easy that people start to wonder why they pay a middleman for no benefit.

Criticising this point doesn't require me to deny the possibility that smart people can't come up with new things; to use your own example here, I'm saying normal people won't run their own cloud computing infrastructure.

Not even because it immediately stops being "the cloud" if they did — most people don't have the time nor inclination to understand RAID numbers, let alone cron jobs or keeping TLS libraries up to date.

Can you name the equivalent of those in finance? I can't, but I have tried reading the T&Cs of bank accounts so I do recognise the patterns that tell me they exist.

That's what we pay the middleman for, and why we still would even if there was a cryptocurrency that actually did what it's biggest fans all say it does.

I would rather have fast and cheap online payments than a chat bot I have to twist around until I can talk to customer service.

but proof of work / crypto isn't fast, and nothing makes it particularly cheap.

If we are talking fast and cheap online payments, micropayments instead of subscriptions, let's go. Too much of crypto is a solution looking for a problem (and finding ones that don't fit).

PoW only addresses a single problematic aspect of this stuff (and only reduces it, doesn't actually resolve it). It does nothing about all the other problematic aspects.

Sure, but we had that with SETI@home, and then Folding@home, and they were doing something useful with their work rather than just finding which random numbers hashed a certain way in order to get a token whose primary economic value was the assumption that "remove trust" is a useful thing in economics.

We also had a blockchain of sorts before bitcoin, and still regularly use it: it's called "git".

And we already have fast and cheap online payments. In my case this was initially in the form of paypal, then my banks got good at it more directly; in Kenya since 2005, and now more countries in the region, there's a thing called M-PESA which does much the same but works with pre-feature-phones: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M-Pesa_on_Nokia_1100...

I mean.. it’s a site associated with a notable VC organization.

Even though there is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of grifters and rentiers, it's unreasonable to say that "this is how pretty much every business works".

If you buy a car the mfr is hardly inserting themselves between something you could have without them. Same for a haircut, a restaurant, or the food the restaurant used, for that matter.

There is even a small segment of the banking industry that does more than just insert itself and charge a toll!

That's a particularly amusing example to pick considering that dealers are the dominant distribution channel from which to acquire a car, at least in the U.S.

Not unlike how writers/artists created a bunch of value and ClosedAI and similar are grifts built on top of them. except unlike car mfgs authors don't have much pull to stop it

Some of those employees jumped ship to the Honda dealer after the Toyota dealer was bought by the guy who owned all the other car dealerships in town. For a long time the Honda dealer was the only competitor to Maguire, but then Maguire bought the Honda dealer.

Those employees don't speak ill of Maguire but they certainly don't speak about in him in glowing terms.

Ford, Honda, Chevrolet-4x

Jeep, Nissan, Hyundai, Kia, Ram, Subaru-3x

These are many more multiples of Tesla’s sales.

Teslas sales make up a minuscule portion of the market. Tesla cannot sell directly to users in any of the continental US, they must sell through a website and ship the vehicle.

Federal Dealership laws preclude direct to customer sales.

Tesla may be valuable but its effects on the market are negligible.

The other day I purchased some particle board and had them cut it to size. I do not believe that hardware store is on the same level of grift as the companies being described in this article.

>That's a particularly amusing example to pick considering that _dealers_

Fyi... The gp you replied to specifically wrote about manufacturer as the example and not dealers when he wrote: "If you buy a car the _mfr_ is hardly inserting themselves"

I just meant that they see a costly thing that people do, and they do something to reduce that cost. That basically is what all companies do.

I believe that's what GP meant as well, but apparently everyone else interpreted it differently.

No one in their right mind would want to walk to any business in the US due to its urban planning and transport infrastructure.

Even biking is an absurd risk that only rare people dare to make.

In the US it's not abnormal to express the length of even mundane car trips in how many hours you spend driving. That's definitely not a halmark of a walkable region.

> Even biking is an absurd risk that only rare people dare to make.

Neither of these things are true everywhere in the US. There are many cities where walking and biking are common forms of transportation. But there are certainly many places where the infrastructure appears to be actively designed to kill pedestrians and bicyclist as well.

I'm really tired of people acting like it's just a free market where everyone is an equal, rational actor. There was a concerted effort to redesign Americana around cars that was not replicated globally, and you see the consequences of it play out in real time.

It's never been a free market. There was no golden age where everybody had access to public transit. There were zero public services at all, you were on your own. And often had to contend with bandits and worse.

I'm really tired of people acting like the only thing standing in the way of utopia, is capitalism.

I think you're thinking of Skyrim and not the actual world, but there are certainly historical periods that were famously bandit-free even in antiquity like the Mongol Empire.

I know this story and for a long time believed it. But it appears that developers building new towns (urban expansion) in the mid 20th century put in streetcars to get people to move in (connected to city networks etc) and ran them at a loss. As the new town filled up and the developers went on to the next one, the streetcars became the uneconomic responsibility of the town.

Funny enough, this is being repeated in modern times because a lot of transit activists want to force all transit to be free and instead be funded by theoretical rich peoples' taxes.

They start to, though. What was that about BMW and having telemetry on car radio I heard about the other day? Or attempts by manufacturers to turn pieces of car into services, which has an effect of them inserting themselves into car resales?

i don't mean it in a totally negative sense. maybe it came across that way in the context.

a business is still a facilitator between you and something you need. they have an advantage be it money, resources, technology, connections...something that allows them to act as that middle man and in many case monopolise it.

on social media its much easier for anyone to do that. you dont really need any resource aside from "hustle" as they call it.

Sure this might be true. Also true that changing topic every three months is a sure way to ruin your reputation

That's how bad businesses work. Good businesses provide a solution to a real problem, instead.

> Good businesses create a solution to your problem and then "insert themselves" between you and that solution.

I cannot wrap my head around this framing at all. Businesses that provide a solution aren't inserting themselves between anything. They're offering a solution directly.

That's just an incredibly jaded way to look at things. The solution is developed by people who specialize in developing solutions. The communication of the existence of the solution to people who need it is handled by people who specialize in communication and customer outreach, i.e. sales.

You may think that without a sales team the solution would be cheaper; the reality is that without a sales team the solution would either not exist or be substantially less refined as _someone_ has to handle the customer interactions, and if that's the dev than that's taking them away from working on the product.

We view a business as problematic when it's only inserting itself between you and the solution, without actually creating the solution, i.e. rent-seeking. So, it's the relationship between the business and the solution that causes an issue, not the action of putting the business between the solution and the problem. The latter is a given, always.

None of that opinion was conveyed in what you wrote earlier.

I disagree. They’re not the same thing. Most businesses will provide solutions to a need, or at least facilitate getting you to the solution for a fee.

The social media grifters are doing something else. They’re finding people with a need (or tricking people into thinking they have a need) and then trying to capture that person as a follower and, eventually, a revenue stream while delivering little real value in exchange.

The prototypical social media grifter like this has a lot to say and a lot of strongly worded opinions, but the end game usually involves something like hiding the “real” answers inside of a paid course or paid community. They spend years building a following on social media and then suddenly they’re selling a course for $1000 per seat. They only need a few hundred of their million followers to convert to make a decent amount of money. The content is usually so-so or recycled from other books and courses. Often purchasers are so embarrassed about having paid $1000 for it that they won’t complain online. If they do complain, they get dunked on by other social media users who were smart enough to see the grift, so they delete their complaints.

I’ve followed many people on Twitter who started out doing good work on indie projects or small startups, built up a following, and then pivoted into selling courses and educational material to their followers.

An alternative grift is to build up a following and then carefully walk the line on “offering the opportunity” to invest in their newest business. A handful of their star-struck followers will be knocking down their door to hand over their cash. You see it a lot with real estate and self storage business influencers.

Can you provide some examples?

As with Jeff Kramer and other business talking heads who will gladly tell you how you can make money by just following their advice, if somebody really had the secrets to "get rich quick" they wouldn't go around selling that to you.

In the age of "web3" (and now AI) hype, there's no longer one Jeff Kramer - there are thousands, millions of them, inserting themselves in peoples' feeds instead of into their TVs. Now countless grifters are out there, selling themselves as arcane wizards who can lead the gullible masses to financial success.

Unlike Kramer (who is bound by a legal framework that at least tries to protect public from outright grifts in traditional media), though, this new generation is basically free to outright lie with complete impunity.

"Dreams are a wish fulfilled." Freud might have been on to something. Or even his nephew Bernays.

This might be the rentiers scheme, but that's hardly how any economy works.

A bakery hardly inserts itself between the very bread it makes and the client who wants to buy it. Even logistics companies, the epitome of a middleman, delivers critical value.

> social media made it possible for anyone(?) to gain a following and so put themselves as a kind of authoritative middle man and act as a conduit for advertisers between people and thing they want

I don't think this is true. Marketing is not a middleman. Raising awareness of a product and/or service is not the same thing as making impossible deals possible.

Likewise, newspapers from a couple of decades ago were not middlemen in any of the adverts they printed, or is YouTube a middleman in any of the adverts it shoves between videos.