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2 years agoI want to avoid enshitification, and enshitification is more or less the ultimate goal of those who own reddit. This isn’t the first time they’ve tried to extract value from the site with utter disregard for users and moderators. If they didn’t get their way this time, they’ll just try again later. Perhaps more politely or more slowly, but the writing is on the wall. Has been for a while.
My first time was a long time ago at CompUSA (RIP). I purchased a joystick (like for flight sims) took it home, and found only the heavy power brick in the box. It took me at least 45 minutes of arguing at the store to get them to give me a replacement. Eventually I had to get a new box from their shelf and show them there was no plastic tape seal thing on new boxes to demonstrate that mine likely didn’t have one when I bought it either.
I’ve also had brand name micro SD cards from Amazon several years ago when things had just started to go down hill there. They had their capacity faked despite the packaging and seller looking legitimate. It may have been when they had “fulfilled by amazon” meant Amazon just treated all stock like Amazon’s general stock. If I sold a widget via Amazon stored in a Chicago warehouse and a fraud sold the same widget stored in a warehouse in NY, a NYC customer could order the widget from my store page and Amazon would just ship the one in NY because it was closer to the buyer and cheaper for Amazon to ship. I’d get a fraud complaint even though it wasn’t my product that was fraudulent.
Maybe 5-10 years ago someone used my credit card number, in a shopping center I frequent, to make a bunch of purchases at stores I’ve never visited (women’s fashion accessories). I reported this to my credit card company and they removed the charges without any complaint. I guess they managed to get the card info and my zip from a data leak and figured purchases in my zip code would be less likely to be flagged.
I’ve sure there may have been a few times where I was none the wiser.