u/FlyingJamaicensis

Please go the post where people are freely talking about watching The Boys (and apparently there's a spinoff they watch) and BAN THEM! They think they are cool because they don't like the current season. In reality, they are losers for even talking about it.

Also, God bless all you capeshit watchers who keep it to yourselves while in this sub. We all have dumbshit popular Reddit shit we like. But we can recognize that we don't need to talk about it here.

If you don’t know, there are a bunch of sites where you sign up and basically earn peanuts by filling out market research surveys, occasionally college research studies, and downloading and playing sucky mobile games to get their numbers up. It’s created this whole entire gig economy populated by college students and underscievers (IE the users of /beermoney), the destitute, the disabled, some struggling SAHM moms, and a smaller percentage of working and lower middle class people who usually don't have the time to actually make anything off these sites so go on their way after trying them out once or twice.

I’ve learned about it via living in a trailer park. A few years back, I started doing one recommending to me while literally just being a warm body at my in-laws’ business (a job where you need someone always there, but like there isn’t anything to actually do 80% of the time). It was better than doomscrolling online, and unlike reading a book, it didn’t completely take away my attention from the job. It was fine, for almost 2 years I made 30-50 bucks in Amazon gift cards a month which I would then buy myself presents with. One day, I got kicked off for violating ToS. I emailed them because that was bullshit. I was doing my best to answer honestly about the shampoos I regularly used and whether or not I’d be interested in purchasing ranch burritos from some chain I had never heard of. I got a really bitchy reply back stating my account was indeed banned. I did some research, and it turns out that they pretty much banned every user around the 2-year mark.

Tried some others, including ones that actually paid cash, but they weren’t as good. And this is when I realized how fucking evil this shit is. Now again, I wasn’t poor or desperate. But imagine you have nothing. You can’t find work or can’t work due to physical or mental health issues, but aren’t fucked up enough to get SSI. You join these sites and see all these surveys paying out 50 cents to 3 dollars along with the time it takes to complete each one. Not a lot, but it seems like you could make minimum wage, if not a little more, for each hour of effort. Maybe you could make 40 or even 50 bucks today!

But that’s not what happens. You get kicked from more than you actually finish. If you are lucky, youve only wasted a minute before the survey giver doesn’t like your demo. But all too often, you spend a lot of time answering question after question. This 8-minute 75-cent survey has turned into 20 minutes, and right when you get to the end, it kicks you off. Did you make a mistake? Did you get flagged for speeding? Was the survey creator retarded and put the screening questions at the end instead of the beginning? Or did they actually take and use your data, but just don’t feel like actually paying you? Who knows!? Some of the sites might offer you a token nickel for wasting your time, but that’s rare.

So you don’t make 7.75 an hour. You’ve made 3 dollars if you got lucky. You jump around on the survey sites working while you are able to and come out with 12 bucks after 6 hours staring at a screen. All in all, you get one warning for speeding for clicking the question asking what gender you identify as too quickly. You get to read instructions again and again, reminding you that you MUST pay attention and answer honestly and be on the lookout for confusing attention checks that pop up after filling out the most boring tables of questions asking you 5 different ways if the packaging for Chick-fil-A bbq sauce makes you less likely to most likely to buy it.

Meanwhile, somebody did make money. The survey provider you signed up for makes money. The various websites they take you to make money. The marketing research company probably makes millions from its clients for making these dumb surveys and analyzing the data.

And that’s the most stupifying part. What even is the usefulness of this research they collect? 80% of their respondents are either college students or the downtrodden. Is that the demographic you really wanna target when learning what customers think about your product? Is 12.99 to much for a Red Robin pretzel burger? For the people barely scraping by, yes. Do you really have any great data about what realtor sites should offer when half of your respondents are couch surfing? Meanwhile, actual surveys pop up time and time again only looking for people who are CEOs and even medical doctors who somehow are fine to spend time going through surveys hoping to make one dollar. It is the weirdest fucking financial ecosystem of our time, and I can’t truly put into words how mystifying (and evil) I find it.

while also swearing that a normal-looking with no work done, 35-year-old woman looks 50. Will then point out an older woman who got just the perfect amount of expensive work done while wearing professionally applied make-up that altogether costs what an average person makes in a week as being perfect, and therefore you mustn't criticize them for just hating on middle-aged women having the audacity to not magically look like they are under 30 anymore.