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Comment by wpietri

2 years ago

> Don't take them personally

No. They are meant to manipulate me personally, as well as other persons I care about. I will take them personally.

More broadly, I don't have to excuse bad behavior just because somebody's making money off it or because it makes some too-narrow metric go up. Yes, it's a complex and imperfect world. But to me that's a reason to work harder to make things better, not a reason for people to say, "fuck it" and make the world worse.

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wpietri

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charles_f  2 years ago

> They are meant to manipulate me personally, as well as other persons I care about. I will take them personally.

This, absolutely! they play on people's psyche and mental cabling by trying to guilt you in the same way your parent would ; it's manipulative, and I have an absolute hatred for these tactics.

  • dheera  2 years ago

    I'm good at detecting manipulation now, and the more someone tries to manipulate me the less I will give in.

    I just put my money toward people who don't do that crap, and I want the manipulators to see that I'm giving money to their non-manipulating competitors.

  • deanCommie  2 years ago

    They're not your parent, and if you treat them as such, that's a problem you need to work on addressing.

    Parental manipulation works because it's completely reasonable given the relationship for it to be effective. It's a betrayal of trust.

    If a company tries that tactic and it "works" too well, that's an opportunity to evaluate your psyche, not get mad at them.

    • idle_zealot  2 years ago

      Companies do it because it works. You're blaming bad behavior on the people that are being manipulated because, according to you, they have psychological problems. As if the people being manipulated being disabled somehow excuses the company taking advantage of them.

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GabeIsko  2 years ago

I'm not saying they are not wrong - it's unfortunate that there is a second hand market for fundraising consulting. It doesn't accomplish anything productive, yet here we are. The key point is to understand that this is caused by Wikipedia having too much funding, not too little. As internet denizens, we can be proud that an open source store of knowledge has money to blow on wasteful consulting, and then proceed to create our ublock filters worry free.

This is different than what is currently going on with venture backed services like reddit and youtube. I would argue that we should block ads there too, but there it is an arms race where we have to consider ways to protect ourselves from encroaching privacy violations. It's much ruder, and that is something we should actually be mad at.