







A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator
I Will Never Respect A Website
If you like this piece and want to support my independent reporting and analysis, why not subscribe to my premium newsletter? It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, including

Consumer Reports unveils 'Consumer Finance AI Standard' a first-of-its-kind framework defining what consumers are owed from AI-powered financial products
Washington, DC – Consumer Reports today published the Consumer Finance AI Standard, a first-of-its-kind framework defining the rights, protections, and design practices consumers are owed…
Substack Writers Concerned as Subscriptions ‘Plummet’ Due to Follow Feature
Substack writers are expressing their concerns about the platform’s following feature on social media, which some argue is suppressing their subscription growth.

Introduction to the Journal of Marketing Research Special Interdisciplinary Issue on Consumer Financial Decision Making
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Consumer Rights Wiki — Anti-Consumer Practices Database
The community-built wiki documenting anti-ownership, anti-consumer practices ranging from right-to-repair restrictions, planned obsolescence, subscription traps, & digital rights issues.
Datamethods Discussion Forum
This is a place for discussions and Q&A about data-related issues and quantitative methods including study design, data analysis, and interpretation.

Has Substack’s subscription model really “maxed out?”
Scott Carney and Taylor Lorenz posted on Substack about downward subscriber trends they’re seeing. Carney pins it on subscription fatigue and feeling like “The only way to grow is to pillage the paid subscribers from other creators.” Lorenz questions Substack’s direction, saying “more and more like this app is becoming another social media feed.” When we recently wrote about writers who are leaving Substack, they mentioned control, pricing, and the social feature creep among their reasons for choosing competitors like Ghost and Behiiv. [Link: Writers are fleeing the Substack Tax | https://www.theverge.com/tech/927294/substack-tax-ghost-beehiiv | The Verge]

Tread carefully, because you tread on my fucks.
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Restoring Consumer Sovereignty: How Markets Manipulate Us and What the Law Can Do About It
Abstract. For decades, there has been broad consensus within antitrust, intellectual property, and consumer law scholarship that consumers make decisions i

The Consumer in Physical Pain: Implications for the Pain-of-Paying and Pricing
AbstractOver one in five Americans suffer from chronic pain—a figure that does not include other, milder, transient types of pain. Thus, there is abundant work exploring the influence of physical pain on physical and psychological welfare. However, there is no work regarding how physical pain influences consumption decisions, which is important because people in physical pain still buy products and make purchases. Give that physical pain “demands” attention, we suggest that consumers in physical pain (vs. those who are not) feel the pain-of-paying less, thereby increasing their purchase intentions and willingness-to-pay for products. We find evidence for our hypothesis in four studies with field and lab assessments of physical pain. We discuss the contributions and limitations of our work. We also highlight several implications that concern pricing decisions for marketers.

I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit
Anthropic are strongly rumored to be about to have their first profitable quarter. Stories are circulating of companies surprised at how expensive their LLM bills are becoming from usage by …
I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit
Anthropic are strongly rumored to be about to have their first profitable quarter. Stories are circulating of companies surprised at how expensive their LLM bills are becoming from usage by …
Search, Discovery, Pills, and Portals
Solving the distribution crisis in marketing

Widely Viewed Content Report: What People See on Facebook | Transparency Center
Facebook regularly publishes reports to give our community visibility into community standards enforcement, government requests and internet disruptions
Consumer Financial Decision Making: Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going
When making purchasing decisions, consumers consider their available budget and determine what payment method they will use as well as how they will finance the purchase. Consumers must also plan for long-term consumption by considering short- and long-term savings objectives, taking into account how they will invest money saved, as well as how they will borrow needed money and repay outstanding loans. This issue of the Journal of Association of Consumer Research explores financial decision making, which we define as the accumulation and use of resources across time, as reflected by consumers’ behavior and choices.
