No. By the time you get hired and you are appointed a set of things to automate, it's usually followed by a long line of deliberation and resource management and prioritizing that's determined on the higher up.
There is a thing called "process debt", in the same way as technical debt, that some things are done manually. This can be mundane routine work, that might be up to 80% easy to automate, but allows for oversight and flexibility and often works with systems that are not trivial to work with. Other times the manual process is just cheaper to maintain than it is to invest in a "good enough" automation. You can also follow this by looking at the practice of offshoring and the amount of automation invested into offshored service centers (who benefit most from these solutions via specialization and scaling).
So even if the company hires a goddamn genius, if you want to automate stuff without breaking existing flows, you need quite a few months of understanding of the environment and the real needs of the process (business wise as well), etc.
And that's why managers think it's a joke idea.
(And it also comes off as extremely arrogant, because it's essentially calling your coworkers stupid by saying "I'll see something that you haven't noticed in years!")
A lecture was supposed to be held on this study but was cancelled at the last minute by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences citing "connotations with gender studies".
Exactly this. Adult and high risk in general are an absolute quagmire, and all actors are trying to "outcompete" with one another, making the situation worse and worse.
Risk from transactions: stolen credit cards get default checked on adult sites (digital good delivery instantly verifies if the card is still useable).
Bad faith merchants. This goes from outright scams to the still widely used practice of "card banging", when they tack on added services or hit you with a huge fee after your free trial ends (which is not presented to the customer).
I mean, it's kind of a half-truth, isn't it? We know that this sort of manipulation is going on in an organized way: Sybil attacks are pretty common in politics.
But it's insidious precisely because of this Patomkin-effect: it makes it unclear how many real supporters the issue has, and it gives an easy cop-out for people who would be otherwise responsible for their own defeat.
In a way, it becomes a scapegoat that can unite friend and foe.
(Although I think Doctorow is steering clear from the very stupid interpretation of this effect)
That's not the real reason (source: used to work in adult).
High chargebacks in high-risk industries are related to three things:
1) The goods are digital and delivered immediately. This means that if I just got a hold of a 100 stolen CC numbers and want to test whether or not they're legit before moving on to physical goods, I'm going to test them out at one such service - which shoots up the CB/refund rate.
2) This also creates a secondary market for illicitly opened accounts / access, which is easy money (and anything else you can imagine down the lane on piracy etc.)
3) Because the margins are so low due to high marketing costs + competition, many sites (especially in the past) would sign the user up to endless recurring billing schemes which are nigh impossible (or costly) to cancel, also driving up the chargeback rate.
There is a thing called "process debt", in the same way as technical debt, that some things are done manually. This can be mundane routine work, that might be up to 80% easy to automate, but allows for oversight and flexibility and often works with systems that are not trivial to work with. Other times the manual process is just cheaper to maintain than it is to invest in a "good enough" automation. You can also follow this by looking at the practice of offshoring and the amount of automation invested into offshored service centers (who benefit most from these solutions via specialization and scaling).
So even if the company hires a goddamn genius, if you want to automate stuff without breaking existing flows, you need quite a few months of understanding of the environment and the real needs of the process (business wise as well), etc.
And that's why managers think it's a joke idea.
(And it also comes off as extremely arrogant, because it's essentially calling your coworkers stupid by saying "I'll see something that you haven't noticed in years!")