u/corwinsword

I’ve been thinking about this with KYC. I get why betting platforms need to verify people, but an SSN still feels like a pretty big thing to hand over.

FanDuel says it may ask for the last 4 digits, and sometimes a full SSN or photo ID for verification, fraud prevention and compliance.

That doesn’t automatically mean anything shady, but I’d still want to know how the data is handled and what happens if verification goes wrong. KYC itself isn’t a red flag, but I think it’s fair to ask “is FanDuel legit?” when sensitive personal information is involved.

How much personal info are you comfortable giving a betting platform?

I was cleaning up my browser recently and realised I had extensions installed that I completely forgot about.

What surprised me is how much access some of them can request — reading page content, seeing browsing activity, etc. Most of us probably spend more time checking app permissions than extension permissions.

Do you regularly review your extensions, or do you just install them once and forget about them?

Also curious — do you think extensions are becoming a bigger privacy risk than cookies?

Hi everyone!

I'm thinking about trying some less popular dating platforms. I've mostly used Tinder and Bumble before, but recently BestDates caught my eye quite often. The site looks decent, but the credit-based system and mixed reviews make me a bit skeptical.

Has anyone actually used it? Was it worth it, or did you end up going back to the more popular dating apps?

I'm mainly wondering whether the people you talked to were genuine and if the platform felt trustworthy overall. Did you run into any hidden costs or anything that made you regret signing up?

I'd really appreciate hearing some real experiences before I decide whether it's worth trying. I'm not looking for anything casual… I just don't want to waste time or money if the site isn't trustworthy. 

A few weeks ago I decided to actually start investing instead of just letting cash sit. So I downloaded a pile of apps, joined a couple of "investor" groups, and even talked to two "consultants" who slid into my DMs.

What surprised me wasn't how hard investing is, but how aggressively the scams come at beginners. The moment you signal you're new and have money to move, you get circled.

Here's what I've learned to watch for so far:

1. Guaranteed or "fixed daily" returns. This is the biggest one. BitConnect ran a lending platform promising around 1% per day, it was a Ponzi scheme and collapsed in 2018. The SEC later alleged it defrauded investors of roughly $2.4 billion. Real markets don't do guaranteed.

2. The celebrity/halo trust. FTX wasn't some shady backroom, it had Super Bowl ads, Tom Brady, an arena naming deal. Looked legit to everyone. Then in November 2022 it collapsed after founder Sam Bankman-Fried funneled about $8 billion in customer funds to his own trading firm. He got 25 years. Trust the structure, not the famous face.

3. "Safe high yield". Celsius marketed itself as a safe place to earn interest on crypto. When the market dropped in 2022 it froze withdrawals and filed bankruptcy, trapping around $4.7 billion in user assets. If something promises both high return and low risk, it's lying about one of them.

4. No verifiable proof underneath. OneCoin raised over $4 billion (2014–2017) from an estimated 3.4 million people, and never even had a real blockchain. Its founder, Ruja Ignatova, vanished in 2017 and is still on the FBI's wanted list. People invested on pure trust and vibes.

My personal rules now, as a beginner:

- If I can't independently verify who's holding my money and how they make returns, I walk.

- Before depositing anywhere, I run the site through TrustRacer and ScamAdviser first. I've checker few of the platforms that contacted me, a couple came back looking sketchy enough that I noped out.

I ignore anyone who DMs me first.

Pressure to act fast = exit.

I'm still early in this, so I'd love to hear from people further down the road, what's the red flag that you wish you'd taken seriously the first time?

Think about everything that sits behind a single login: your bank account, brokerage, Apple ID or Google account (which probably unlocks your phone, your email, your cloud backup, and half your other logins). A password manager or critical work tool or a crypto wallet.

Now think about which one would cause the most damage if you lost access right now.

For some people it's their Apple ID, because losing it means losing the phone, the authenticator app, and the email all at once.

For others it's their bank or brokerage, especially if it's an online-only institution with no branch to walk into. For people in crypto, it's obvious. For freelancers and small teams, it might be a project management or billing tool that holds client contracts and payment history.

The scarier question isn't "what would I miss", it's "what have I actually done to make sure I don't lose it?"

So: what's your single most critical account or tool, and what concrete steps have you taken to protect access to it? Recovery codes stored somewhere safe? Backup authenticator? Printed emergency sheet? Hardware key?

Curious whether most people here have actually thought this through or are one stolen phone away from a very bad week.

In my case this is a Gmail. Losing a phone isn't not as critical as Gmail, because I used it for authorization in multiple highly valuable apps.

The Dead Internet Theory is the idea that the internet is increasingly populated by bots, AI-generated content, and fake engagement rather than real humans.

Let's look at the actual numbers.

The content is already mostly not human

eWeek reported that as of November 2024, over 50% of newly published web articles were AI-generated. Before ChatGPT launched, that number was around 5%.

Ahrefs analyzed nearly a million new web pages published in April 2025 and found that 74.2% contained detectable AI-generated content.

And on social media specifically? Over half of all internet traffic in 2024 was non-human, with 37% being bad bots, a 5% increase from 2023, according to Imperva.

After analyzing 1.269 million accounts on X, one AI bot-detection firm estimated that approximately 64% of analyzed accounts are potentially bots.

Europol's projection for end of 2026 is that 90% of all online content could be synthetically generated or manipulated.

Platforms are trying to fight back and mostly struggling. People are still there, but they don't trust what they see.

Here's the paradox: usage hasn't crashed. As of 2025, the average person worldwide spends 141 minutes per day on social media. Gen Z spends around 4 hours daily, and 70% of all users check their feeds within 10 minutes of waking up.

But trust is collapsing. According Statista, as of January 2025, 41% of U.S. adults said they do not trust information on social media very often, and 16% said they don't trust it at all.

So people keep scrolling, they just assume much of what they see is fake. Whether that's a healthy adaptation or a slow cognitive surrender is worth debating.

Where does this go from here?

Two camps are forming. One says the slop singularity is inevitable, because AI trains on AI content, quality degrades, humans abandon public platforms and retreat into closed communities (Discord, private groups, Substack).

The other camp says authenticity becomes a premium product. Sprout Social's Q4 2025 Pulse Survey found that the #1 thing consumers want brands to prioritize in 2026 is human-generated content, with analysts noting that "AI drives a new premium on authenticity."

The honest answer is probably both, in parallel a mass AI-dominated public layer coexisting with smaller, verified human spaces where trust has to be earned differently.

The question for the community

Are you already treating social media like it's mostly fake? Has this changed how you engage, do you trust posts less, verify more, or have you just stopped caring?

You sign up for a free trial, and the cancel button is buried under three menus and a guilt-trip screen ("Are you sure? You'll lose everything!").

Or you try to delete an account only to find the option hidden behind a wall of confusing toggles. Or a countdown timer screams at you that a hotel deal expires in 4 minutes, and it resets the moment you refresh the page.

Dark patterns are everywhere. The question is: does spotting them actually change anything?

What I personally do

When I notice one, I usually:

• Close the app/site and use a competitor
• Occasionally report it, but to whom? That part is always unclear

Can governments force companies to stop? Yes, and it's working, slowly.

Here are real cases where regulatory or public pressure led to consequences:

1. The FTC ordered Epic Games to refund $245 million to customers after finding that the design layout of Fortnite, characterized by counterintuitive, inconsistent, and confusing button placements, facilitated inadvertent charges with a single button press. Epic also strategically relocated and minimized the "cancel purchase" button and designed a lengthy refund process.

2. Ireland's Data Protection Commission fined TikTok €345 million in 2023 for using dark patterns to steer minors toward public account settings, breaching the GDPR's requirements for fairness and transparency. It was one of the first major decisions in which a regulator explicitly labeled UX practices as dark patterns in violation of legal standards.

3. The FTC filed a complaint against Amazon for allegedly misleading consumers into paying for an Amazon Prime subscription, alleging that Amazon had placed significant terms such as auto-renewal at the bottom of the page and made it difficult to cancel the subscription through a long, drawn-out process.

4. When Meta announced plans to use EU user data to train its AI systems in 2024, critics noted the opt-out process was buried behind misleading email notifications, redirects, and hidden forms. Following mounting regulatory and public pressure, the Irish Data Protection Commission intervened, leading Meta to pause its plans for EU/EEA users. Outside the EU? Meta proceeded as planned.

5. The FTC required Credit Karma to pay $3 million after they deployed dark patterns to misrepresent that consumers were "pre-approved" for credit card offers. The damages were sent to over 50,000 consumers who were misled.

The "vote with your wallet" instinct feels right but often pointless when the company has no real competition. What do you actually do?