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Microsoft guts Microsoft Rewards points, and its fans are outraged

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2160414/microsoft-guts-microsoft-rewards-points-and-its-fans-are-outraged.html

Microsoft appears to be nickel-and-diming users and fans of its Microsoft Rewards program, which gives "frequent-flyer" points that can be traded in for gift cards.

Microsoft guts Microsoft Rewards points, and its fans are outraged::Microsoft appears to be nickel-and-diming users and fans of its Microsoft Rewards program, which gives "frequent-flyer" points that can be traded in for gift cards.

39 comments

ioslife

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This was the only reason to use Bing for a long time

db2

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It still is, but it was too.

beerclue

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I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too.

gekkonaut

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there are six ducks out there, and they all want sun chips.

ohlaph

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And Voss, those thirsty bastards.

shalafi

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Bing, uh, has it's uses. IYKYK.

Anomalous_Llama

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Don’t think Bing has been good for that for some years no?

winkerjadams

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Pretty sure he's talking about using bing video search for porn.

Evilcoleslaw

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Bing's fine in general. Meanwhile any time I get curious and use Google, if I have to go deeper with anything past the first 2 results, it will be absolute garbage.

9up999

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I prefer qwant. Based in France. EU privacy law.

shalafi

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Works great for me. LOL, tried DuckDuckGo today for giggles, no joy. Even with safe search off, same exact results.

Rai

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DDG does just as good!

shalafi

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Failed for me, even with Safe Search off. Same results.

Rai

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I see a lot of genitalia with DDG’d search

JTskulk

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Let's make a replacement program for Free software. The more points you get, the more Free software you can install.

kurwa

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That makes the software not free though 😥

darelik

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It's not free, it's Free^TM

joyjoy

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That's impossible because my time is worthless.

Natanael

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The points are measured in gigabytes of storage on your hard drive

netchami

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I remember using this (cheating a little bit with VPNs and proxies so I could claim the rewards like 20 times every day, because they are separate in every country) to get some Xbox giftcards

I also had ~15 Microsoft accounts and I put them all in a Microsoft family so I could transfer points from one account to another, it was really fun lol

RagingInside

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This is why we can't have nice things.

helenslunch

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I mean in their defense, fuck Microsoft with a rusty nail, and this system was basically designed for exploitation.

gravitas_deficiency

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No, this is why systems that aren’t rigorously designed to preclude exploitation like this simply shouldn’t be released. If flaws like this exist in the system, they will be exploited. It’s not on the users if they exploited a flaw, even if you say “please don’t exploit the flaw”.

lolcatnip

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There's a continuum between this kind of thing and, say, ransomware attacks. I'm not sure where the line should be drawn.

Welt

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Microsoft Rewards isn't a "nice thing".

DesolateMood

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Idk man I get free game pass every month and people much more patient than me have been able to get entire free consoles. I'd call that pretty nice

just_another_person

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You sound like part of the reason they gutted the thing, then.

grayman

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They're giving out made up points and then letting you trade them for copies of digital files. They're not really losing much.

netchami

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I stopped doing this a few years ago but the system was flawed from the ground up. The fact that they did nothing to this kind of abuse it mind-boggling. No one actually used this the way it was intended to be used.

BallsInTheShredder

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But they did do something eventually lol

stolid_agnostic

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People like you are why normies can’t buy pax tickets. This isn’t simmering to be proud of, you should be ashamed of abusing a system.

Pxtl

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For ones where they give you a code for a non-MS service (eg LoL or Overwatch tokens) couldn't you bot-farm this and then literally just sell the redemption code?

netchami

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If you actually started selling these, they would probably shut that down pretty quickly and maybe even sue you

Pxtl

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Obviously. Don't get caught.

Evilcoleslaw

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Meh. This seems relatively minor, and geared towards people purposely gaming it. Which, yeah, I've done at one time or another. Lately I've just been getting the points from searching. It might take a couple extra days to get enough for each $5 gift card. Oh well.

kbtaco

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I’m most disappointed with the cooldown between searches. The lowering of points was expected as they were cutting back everywhere else.

iegod

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This headline reads like blogTO.

Pxtl

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I mean I've bought 2 Overwatch passes using those points. I couldn't justify paying cash for skins to myself, but MS rewards points I could rationalize. But I basically fire up Edge/Bing to collect the points and then go back to Firefox & DDG. It was obviously not sustainable for them.

FartsWithAnAccent

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Bummer, I was going to check this out too