this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 19 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

What genuinely confuses me is who they're finding to buy this shit to begin with.

I've seen so many of these failed "Join our club to score points to get tokens to buy virtual dongles that you can use to get into our more-elite clubs with better points and color tokens" schemes over the last ten years. It's like everyone wants to be Chuck-E-Cheese, nevermind that the company went bankrupt five years ago.

Even if all you care about is profit, it seems like this is an abysmal means of generating it.

[–] MysticKetchup@lemmy.world 13 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Oh it's undoubtedly going to fail, but it should milk enough money out of their users to keep them going while their investors cash out

[–] shneancy@lemmy.world 7 points 5 days ago

ah yes, seeing deepweb market-esque exit scams on the surface web is a sign of a healthy system

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago

Microsoft had a check ready for $10B.

I can't imagine how a new flavor of Buttcoin could compete with that.

[–] drislands@lemmy.world 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

It is a bit baffling. I think it's more ethical than the alternative though: pay gating useful functionality. Offering paid pallete swaps doesn't make a lot of sense to me, someone who would never pay for that, but it does at least mean I can just ignore it. If they were to, say, restrict voice calls to a paid subscription, suddenly I'm in a position where either I'm paying for the service or ditching it entirely.

[–] kautau@lemmy.world 8 points 5 days ago

They already do pay-gate useful functionality, this is just an alternative revenue stream