guiambros

Not just randomness, but also time and day of the week, the source (domain), and quality of the writing (enough to make the first few users to upvote before the submission gets dropped from the first page).

> The association was particularly pronounced among people with diabetes.

At least they explicitly admit how flawed this whole study is:

>Importantly, the findings show an association rather than a proven cause-and-effect relationship. Researchers cannot conclude from this study that consuming these sweeteners directly damages the brain or causes memory loss.

What does it have to do with the crime at hand? Spotify is not asking for special protection. Someone defrauded thousands of musicians; it's the justice's job to step in and ensure markets operate fairly. This is working as intended.

Also, this is not (just) about Spotify; all streaming platforms have some sort of subscription and/or ad revshare, and were abused by the same fraudster.

Per the original case: "Music can be streamed through platforms such as Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music... SMITH created thousands of fraudulent accounts on the Streaming Platforms that he could use to stream songs".

> For ad supported users you can still defraud the advertisers of course

Who do you think receives the ad money paid by advertisers?

> Juicing some streaming numbers hurt who? Spotify's margin?

You don't seem to understand how the streaming revenue model works, and why this is an egregious fraud against the public interest. You believe that stream fraud is someone simply stealing from Spotify/YouTube/etc, so who cares.

In reality, all musicians share a pool of revenue across ads + subscriptions on each platform (typically two-thirds of the total, although each platform has a different rev share model).

This fraud only marginally impacts Spotify financials, as their cut is fixed and taken from the topline [1]. But someone abusing the system like this guy breaks the model for everyone. Not only you're stealing money from millions of musicians, but you're undermining the confidence in the whole industry.

I don't have an opinion if this merits jail time or not, but yes, this is pretty bad. Like money counterfeiting-bad.

[1] ps: of course, if this becomes rampant, musicians get screwed and turn against Spotify, so it's in their best interest to do whatever it take down the fraudsters. It's a never-ending cat-and-mouse game.

This is pretty sad. Seeing this a couple of years ago would be mind blowing. An impressive technical feat by someone with grit and resilience to painstakingly build this from scratch.

Today? Meh.

Owner of DK2 here, well before Facebook acquisition. It was for developers, but it was a shipped product nonetheless.

Except when you have multiple participants in the same room -- which happens pretty frequently in many business environments.