• Pantherina@feddit.de
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    8 months ago

    This was always my idea, abuse “free money” apps where you watch ads for money en masse with automated swipes using apps like Smart Autoclicker and tadaaa! Free money.

    Would be worse for the environment than mining Bitcoin though.

    • isles@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      This story won’t make your life better: As a broke twenty something, there was an app called SwagBucks (I just looked, it still exists). And you’d get paid for leaving the app up displaying ads. I don’t know the state of Android emulators back then, so I bought ~12 cheap phones and left them on 24/7. Eventually, SwagBucks added an inactivity timer, so every 2 hours, I’d walk by the board of phones and tap them to keep going.

      This all sounds incredibly stupid, but it was enough to pay for a fun Christmas. I think it was ~$500 in profit, after the cost of phones and electricity were accounted for. Payouts were Amazon giftcards.

      • Pantherina@feddit.de
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        7 months ago

        I mean it is basically profit on the back of cheap smartphone labor and a lot of wasted electricity, but it works. The stupid amazon giftcards are a problem, you could sell them for anonymous paying though.