The irony is that the platforms are still flooded with crypto scams, I know on twitter and youtube at least they don't even respond to reports on them 99% of the time-- even when it's the same obvious scam messaged reposed twenty times in a short interval--, but then they'll capriciously ban legitimate material because it mentioned bitcoin.
It's not hard to imagine that a lot of these companies are now using outsourced 'moderation' where the moderators themselves are the scammers, intentionally permitting scams and intentionally flagging legit stuff. But sadly the truth is probably more boring, indifference instead of intrigue.
It's interesting how prone the major social networks seem to be to outright scams. You can find plenty of cult leaders and fake cancer treatments on YouTube, Holocaust denial material on Reddit, etc.
Of course those companies have every right to keep that material up, but it's strange how those scams are tolerated when other stuff is taken down. The pure scale of it all probably makes those scams more effective than they used to be as well. You don't gotta sell your miracle water from town to town anymore, you just make a YouTube video and send it out to a million people. Cryptocurrency scams really take advantage of this.
Not sure why those companies don't care about users getting taken advantage of, but they don't. Sometimes it feels like our economy is based on scams all the way down.
if twitter were very strongly moderated it might have helped, but as it stands now it's a $8 fee for scammers to push their scams to the top of any thread. Even if they get banned every so often it's a great value proposition. Can't tell you the number of verified ?? crypto scams I've seen since the rebrand, most of which seem to still be up.
Not all cryptocurrency content is a scam, but there's a ton of scams in the cryptocurrency space, so it's not surprising that places in the cryptocurrency space might be heavily moderated to try to counter that and have some false positives.
It's also starting to get really weasel-wordy. There's a billion crypto scams going on these days. It's not the only thing going on, but there's a hell of a lot of old-school cons and then there's a hell of a lot of softer, less malicious scamming that is just based on over-confidence in a very buzzy trend.
Join anything related to crypto. Openly scamming kids is very very common, not even counting the abysmal spam/scam protection for PMs. 100% echo chambers, all negativity is an instant ban.
You have a point there. Most crypto scams are blatantly obvious Ponzi schemes or pump and dumps being openly discussed in some discord channel. This stuff should be pretty trivial for investigators, but maybe the sheer volume is just too much.
Cryptocurrency is absolutely overrun with scams. It's hard to find anything with actual merit in the vast ocean of spam that is the digital currency world.
It won't stop until the bubble crashes or enough people wise up that the scammers no longer make money. As it stands low effort shitcoin token scams using digital variants of the "big store" and Ponzi schemes are still cashing out pretty good.
That's at the higher effort end of the scam spectrum. For every one of those there are 50 search and replace coin forks and fake tokens for things that don't even pretend to exist.
1. Tons of Twitter impersonation scams asking to send BTC/ETH for money in return (aka Nigerian Prince scam).
2. A project that straight up plagiarized and then used a picture of Ryan Gosling as one of their "founding members", along with an Asian guy named "Tyrone Fountain".
I'm pretty much of this point of view as well. Guess my point is that BTC/ETH/XRP etc... weren't started with scamming in mind. They were genuine projects in their own right. Of course the market and investment in crypto is now 99% scam territory. Chains like Ethereum and the Binance one are now just platforms for scams enitrely.
Scientology, herbalife, and other obvious scams have persisted. I think crypto people love getting defrauded, and as long as they enjoy it there won't be much pressure to prosecute.
And most people don't see the other side of the coin, which is that millions of bad actors are trying to break this exact system. When you start doing suspicious things like that, you look exactly like the scammers trying to evade bans.
I sympathise with this, and part of it's down to the glacial pace of regulators (which as a consumer I find frustrating).
At the same time, for a number of years there was a lot of perceived legitimacy to a lot of crypto exchanges. Sure, there were obvious scams, but some of the bigger players were putting on a convincing "this is actually useful and beneficial to consumers" trenchcoat. I also see the perspective from the SEC of "let's not be too hasty", and to wait to see how it shook out.
In hindsight, sure. Obviously scams and they should have been shut down years ago.
It's not hard to imagine that a lot of these companies are now using outsourced 'moderation' where the moderators themselves are the scammers, intentionally permitting scams and intentionally flagging legit stuff. But sadly the truth is probably more boring, indifference instead of intrigue.
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