On why greed is bad, and how it's going to lose us net neutrality.

Last week, my bro mentioned a job website for freelancers, said I might want to check it out.

So I did. And I signed up, and I bid on a job for moving a WordPress site and the guy and I exchanged five or six messages. His last message said he’d be getting me my down payment and the server logins so I could begin the work…

That was Sunday. Haven’t heard from him since. Oh well.

Meanwhile, I get about seven messages a day from the freelancer site, telling me of work I might be interested in.

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Okay, so, you know how sometimes you stumble across a website that offers you something for free, and maybe you’re under-caffeinated or you’ve just been lobotomized or you’ve never been on the Internet before or you’re just plain stupid, and you click on the free thing – like a button that says you can watch a movie that you know, if you think about it, isn’t even out on DVD yet – and on the next page it says you have to “click on one of these offers” before you can see your TOTALLY FREE MOVIE and so you choose something like, “Have you ever shopped at Home Depot?” and a new window opens, and you’re supposed to sign up for a Home Depot account, and after you do the movie page comes back up and says “Offer Completed! Click here for your FREE MOVIE!” and when you do about five windows full of ads launch and you end up watching a video about the power company and there’s no way to see the movie online because it was never there in the first place because it’s still in the fucking theatres and you knew that and now you’ve signed up for something you don’t even want and somebody’s going to get paid for tricking you into doing that?

Well, I always wondered where those websites came from. There are thousands of them, maybe millions, and they come from somewhere. Someone had to buy the domain and set up the hosting and install the CMS and design the theme and write the copy and build and place the ads to drive the traffic. These things, ugly and stupid and irritating as they are, don’t grow like weeds: they’re made. And they must be worth it or people wouldn’t do it.

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In the past few days I’ve found out where they come from. Some asshole in the US or the UK, some self-styled “SEO expert,” pays people in India and Thailand to build them. Somebody like this douche, who says his areas of expertise are in “advertising, branding, Facebook, Internet marketing, PHP, SEO, Twitter, and website design,” and whose latest job posting says this:

I have set up a wordpress theme very similar to this one watchmovieonlinefree.com. I just need someone to copy paste the last 35 posts text and pictures from watchmovieonlinefree or other sources, and
add 5 new ones from my choice.

This job can be done in one day, if you focus on it. I would prefer to change the content of each post, or at least add on it from other sources.

Please bid and be ready to start working on the project, give your time frame, that you will need to respect. Payment will be released once the job is done.

Yeah, he says right there that he intends to copy a site verbatim, and then “change” or “add to it a little.” Isn’t that, like, plagiarism? (Not that it matters, since the original site was built by a fucktard just like the guy who intends to steal it.) And he won’t pay until the job’s complete, even though the site’s standard is a percentage up front, a percentage at halfway, and the remainder on completion? Yeah, real honorable, buddy.

The target site itself is a lie; the movies aren’t available. They don’t exist. People fill out the offers and get bored after being bombarded with ads and crap, and they wander off to do something else because they have no recourse. They can’t complain about the fact that they were mislead, because there’s no one to complain to, and THIS IS THE SHIT THAT’S GOING TO LOSE US OUR NET NEUTRALITY. This crap – this confusing, unregulated crap – is going to cause people to think, “Oh, yeah, it would be great if there were some way to stop those guys. We need regulation.”

I literally can’t stand the advertising/marketing/SEO people. They’re making money where there is none, simply because they’re immoral fucktards who are capable of badgering people just to make a little ching. They’re paying overseas workers crap wages to do technical work that is immoral if not illegal, and they do it simply to make money.

Now, I like money, don’t get me wrong. But there’s definitely a limit to what I’ll do to get it.

These people are designing misleading ads to drive traffic to sites that outright lie, and they do it in such a massive way that it’s somehow worth it to them to get a cent or two for each completion. They outsource the grunt work to India and keep the click-thru checks from big advertisers for themselves… NO ONE is getting anything decent out of it. It’s real money for imaginary services rendered. The advertisers are serving ads to badly targeted and/or confused demographics. The survey info is untargeted. The signups are full of errors and lies (I always make up information when presented with a demand for personal information). It’s all crap. It’s all greed.

I opened a ticket with the freelance site to find out what their standards are; I know I’ve seen several job listings disappear so there’s some kind of surveillance. I mean, you can’t just ask people to build you illegal automatic voting programs in public.

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Is it some kind of mental imbalance? What makes the vast majority of people do real work for real pay, but misses a few freakazoids who can somehow manage to sleep at night after doing what is, obviously, total crap all day long?

It’s like self-mutilation: there’s a line, but nobody can say exactly where it is. If an intelligent, competent person gets their ears pierced, nobody blinks, even though piercing one’s body hurts and carries a risk of infection or worse. Tattoos, ritual scarification, forked tongues, implants: we accept these things.

But if someone decided to, say, castrate himself, we’d all think that was going too far… but is it? Really? It’s no more extreme than the body mods you see on your typical tattoo parlor employee, in terms of
pain and risk.

I think there are a subset of salespeople who are crazy like that. They act pretty much like normal people, but they’re psychologically stunted in some way that enables them to do wrong things for money and think it’s not only okay, but that it’s good. Exciting. Challenging. They’re incapable of knowing that some things just Shouldn’t Be Done.

You’re going to say, “But it doesn’t really hurt anybody.”

And I’m going to say, No, of course it’s not life-threatening to corral someone into filling out a form or taking a survey so that you can earn your couple of cents per completion… but it’s still wrong. That you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it. Like cutting off your balls.

It’s lying, plain and simple, and lying is wrong. And making money out of nothing is also wrong. There’s an entire industry now based entirely on lies and greed. Advertiser’s greed, who think they can get real data for a couple of cents per database record. “SEO Experts’” greed, who think it’s okay to build all this crap to entrap people. End users’ greed, who want to see a pirated movie online for free.

And no, “SEO Expert” person, you don’t get to snicker and think to yourself that only the stupid end up in your trap. They’re not stupid; YOU’RE just a DICK.

And because you’re a dick, you’re going to lose the Internet for everyone. You’re going to pester and confuse the unwashed masses, and they’re not going to want a free and open Internet, and then you’re going to have to go back to scamming people in person. You jerk.