There’s an entire ecosystem of Facebook-tier repetitive browser games that are designed to keep you tapping for hours as you chase tokens you can exchange for AE coins or coupons. Actually, the main point is to get you to make impulse buys from within the games themselves
The games all use different tokens and naturally run on slowly regenerating energy. If you run out energy, you can get more by exchanging some of your coins or tokens, browsing products on AE, opening another game, or by ordering something for a large energy boost
Simply buying stuff normally on AliExpress doesn’t give you game tokens or energy, you need to directly buy an item from a listing the game shows you for it to count
Every single game also has a battlepass type deal with dailies and weeklies to complete for even more tokens
All of this started when Halo 2 introduced XP into online shooters 
Worst part is I go on there find what I’m looking for and then this shit loads and hijacks the page with a dozen popups. Why are you slapping the product out of my hands at the checkout, I’m trying to give you money! Have they not heard never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake?
boomers have very low immunity to shit like this, look at slot machines. no wonder these gamified apps have taken over their brains
Your average casino in Vegas on a random Wednesday night is a very depressing place to be.
What never console gaming does to a person.
Me: this AliExpress game has gambling mechanics that are inherently flawed from a player agency perspective and unfair systems. Also the graphics are bad.
Boomer: oooooh, a little game while I shop, how fun this is.
look at slot machines
ugh I’d rather not
What the actual hell. Looking at that image is giving me brain damage
you will sit in the chair. you will press the lever. you will consume the slop.
oh god this is worse than Temu. Temu just has fake games that try to trick you into “taking advantage of this great deal!!” I told my parents they’re not allowed to use it because they’ll definitely fall for the bs.
As far as I can tell, the discount coupons do actually work but holy shit would you need to spend a lot of time (or money!) for the bigger ones
the coupons work, but they’re limited time. so it encourages you to impulse buy something so the coupon doesn’t expire. usually has a minimum purchase cost to use it too, so you have to spend more than you save
I didn’t know that but I’m not surprised. I haven’t really delved too deeply into the minigames but I do use the coin system since they can actually come in handy and getting them doesn’t require grinding shitty minigames (The coins also expire on a six month timer)
no they work for sure. but outside of a deal they gave me when I first started using Temu (go figure), it’s always like “spend $X and you get cheap stuff!” but then you have to scroll under a 10 min timer because they won’t let you search for things you actually want to put towards the deal.
There’s no countdown on the AE minigames, but yeah, most of the times you have to buy something from a selection of random crap they show you
Also, when the games ask you to browse items for 30 seconds for more energy or whatever, the app will often just stop you when you’re scrolling and tell you to click on a specific random item, which you don’t want to do because it fucks your recommendations and personalised deals elsewhere if it’s something you have no interest in
No I won’t install your app
Yes I will disable your annoying JavaScript
I will not be disabling my adblocker actually
Yes, but china!
Therefore based
I was under the impression this was just for the non-china markets
its more open to the public yes. if you want a china only storefront, use taobao or tmall.
its why taobao and tmall require agents to buy internationally on, as they dont do the paperwork for you on those platforms.
I did recently manage to get 9€ off a 29€ item using coins I’d collected from daily app logins (which is a separate layer of gamification) so it’s not all bad I guess
Shops like Aliexpress and Temu often use really gross tactics to get you to buy shit but honestly I don’t really think the Chinese government should be doing anything about it except protect their own population against it, which I think they are for the most part. Nobody is stopping western countries from banning this kind of shit, they just don’t want to.
Nobody is stopping western countries from banning this kind of shit, they just don’t want to.
I don’t want them to ban AliExpress, it’s a great place to get certain stuff if you know how to avoid the obvious scams.
I just think the gameification is taken to absurd levels and can imagine people getting addicted to this shit
They could probably tighten the rules around this kind of gamification and AliExpress would have to comply or lose the market to a competitor.
The competitor being
I more mean that if it’s still profitable to sell Chinese goods to the U.S. without gamification, some Chinese company will jump at the chance.
Wow, I opened this picture on purpose and still barely perceived it
I saw one with a login spin the wheel bonus and I have never felt so disconnected from my fellow man
Unretiring my most used reply…
Grim.
good. let dipshit americans give money to a chinese corporation. whatever is bad for americans is good for the world
I think Trump’s made that pretty difficult. I don’t imagine many Americans are buying stuff on AE, Temu or the others currently
I just received an aliexpress package the other day and paid no tariff. Idk when it will finally kick in but it isn’t clear to me to what extent it has yet
I believe they’ll kick in on anything that arrives after May 2nd
That’s what I’ve been hearing but nobody seems sure which is bizarre/hilarious. Curious if it’ll actually be rolled out and effective. I feel like a lot of little packages can just get misclassified as electronics or something exempted and slip through
