web/UI dev/design?
game dev/design?
this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2025
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There are! Problem is that most of them seem to be either "jobs" that companies don't want to pay a full-time employee for, or require lots of entrepreneurship skills that I don't think fits most people... I don't see how someone living in a developed country would benefit more from an online gig than getting a shitty minimum-wage job at the local grocery store, but there definitely are options
A few non-scummy ones (at least by my standard) I could think of:
- Most practical one I could think of is to teach English/foreign languages. The East Asian countries (especially China) have a huge demand for these types of roles, and I'd presume they have platforms where you can do it as a freelance tutor (at least that's what my parents told me lol)
- If you have any in-demand skills, it is possible to become a self-proprietor to do contracts for businesses... ranging from the classic IT consultant to selling art commissions on Twitter/X
- If you are good at crafts, I believe it is possible to make a small but reasonable amount of money by selling crafts online on places like Etsy, some ppl are really into these and I think ppl generally have a very positive view of these type of careers. Bonus is you might even be able to do some in-person events at conventions/markets/etc
- If you have a fun personality (or if you are a complete train-wreck), content creation/streaming. Standard Twitch streaming, YouTube streaming, making edutainment like the funny bike guy, if you are willing to let go of some morals then Kick... Quite fun if you are into it, but competition is fierce and most people don't make it; and a lot of people who "made-it" chose to relocate to low cost-of-living countries where they only need like $500 a month so....
- Extension of previous point, if you have any sex-appeal... lots of places to "sell your body" online and make decent profits. Not doable without good genetics though
Be hot, sell nudes?
For the not hot among us, there's also 'Be sweaty, sell used underwear'
This is the only way!
This guy gets it!
I advise against Amazon Machine Turk.
It's basically a digital sweatshop. Doing all of these menial, logically mundane and borderline crazy tasks. Just to earn a literal nickel.
I don't know how much has changed since I was doing it, but the main trick was to get the tasks associated with academic studies that were typically higher paid, by using a sniping bot to grab it before others could. So that way you get paid around minimum wage instead of a small fraction of that (if you also cheat by doing multiple tasks simultaneously and hiding it). Though tbh the situation is probably worse now since there have been all those funding cuts to academia.
ONLY FANS. WFM is quited limited as far as jobs go, but its out there. stocks but you have to be good at doing that and not gamble your money away.
just learn how the stock market works, and none of this gig shit will ever feel like it's worth the time.
read reminiscences of a stock operator, the stock market is where all these other greed ratfucks put the $ they're yoinking from uncle sam...you can make a shitton of $ off their moves if you have modicum of common sense and self-control
And let me guess you’re selling a course
lol, no. 90% is just confidence in knowing what your trading. the remaining 10% is staying humble and continuing to learn when you think you've figured it all out, because that's when people start blowing up their accounts (don't short anything at a price you don't want to own, at a price you don't mind selling/buying at...and don't enable margin until you have atleast 100k)
there are key rule differences between US and the rest of the world's financial markets, all designed to make things exciting to "facilitate liquidity"...cause it's all one big casino for the largest richest nation of gamblers.
the gist cam be learned from reading Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, a book written over 100 years ago. Wallstreet and Bankstreet never change, they just occasionally rebrand.
Yes there are legitimate ways to make money. Everything from producing videos on YouTube and the other platforms that pay you to things like only fans and porn to learning how to make things with your hands and selling it online. Sometimes they're successful sometimes they're not sometimes you hit a niche product sometimes you show a niche video that makes you go viral. Those types of things can get you known. But for you can do is if you're in any sort of position to be able to do anything like 3D printing printing stickers doing woodworking even going in cutting out foam and building decorations for people. You can make a decent amount of money doing all those types of things but you have to be willing to actually do something. Very few people get paid money to do absolutely nothing.
Feet pics on only fans.
I legit think about doing this sometimes.
How unethical are you ok with being? Dropshipping is an easy way to make money with low effort but it's a pretty shitty thing to do
I know people who have had good success with dropshipping but only within their hobby/interests niche. They freely admit that "This is the cheap chinese one but it gets the job done." And word gets around that they are trustworthy and reliable.
I don't have any problems with cheap chinese stuff, I have problems with the people who make storefronts that, when you order off of them, they go buy the thing from a cheap chinese site and put in your shipping address. They are relying on games SEO to direct people to them and make money by literally doing nothing.
Yeah thats what I meant about "within their niche" They try and buy the shit themselves for their hobby and have a storefront and only rep for products they reasonably stand behind.
Doing the "to the masses" type products dropshipping is usually a losing game because theres always someone more unscrupulous who will do more underhanded shit to be 10c per item cheaper.
What exactly is that a shitty thing to do? It's simply running a business. It's no different than going down to Walmart and purchasing anything.
Unless you have a sign saying "You're paying me to buy this for you from alibaba", I consider it very dishonest. Perfectly legal, but borderline scammy ethically imo.
This is the same thing your local department store does. It sells shit it buys in bulk, much of it manufactured in China.
Dropshipping gets scammy when you start implying you produce the stuff you're selling IMO.
Your local department store has to have a physical location and stock, they're physical goods in a physical location, adding value to you by way of letting not have to travel to a bunch of different people producing the things you need. Dropshippers literally just order something to your address for a marked up price. They are adding cost with literally no value to you.
Well a lot of these bulk sellers don't sell B2C. I could start my own company to buy shit, or use a middle man.
Sellers in the EU also have to give their shit a 2 year warranty, including for dropshipped items. No such requirements for Aliexpress.
I guess I should have been more specific, I'm talking the places that literally just dropship from alibaba, aliexpress, etc. an actual middleman for manufacturer is fine to me. They're actually doing something you can't do yourself, you know, they're actually providing a service. The ones I'm referring to are just setting up online "stores" hoping to grab people from SEO to make a profit doing actually nothing
Even with Alibaba and Aliexpress, there is some marginal value-add from a middle man. Like I said, in the EU, sellers are liable for 2 years of warranty for manufacturing defects.
But any dropshipper worth their salt has other sources for their shit too. Not necessarily direct from manufacturer, but companies that provide better prices than publicly available for B2C. I hear some of them are more or less invite-only. In any case, the Alis aren't considered great dropshipping vendors at all, since goods can take very long to reach customers.
And then as a dropshipping business expands, you can have local stock for some items. Generally, a dropshipping business should fill a specific niche and not have a billion items on sale, but rather be curated. So if you've got like 4 or 5 alternatives in some specific product category and one or two clearly sell better than the rest, on a consistent basis, you can order those in bulk and ship to your customers faster. The downside here is that you have more work to do, but you'll provide more value to your customers. And if your dropshipping business is honest, you can lead times visible on the website... And customers will love seeing "tomorrow" instead of "14-21 days". Brings in more customers!
What do you think just about every person does on apps like Amazon walmart.com etc. Almost all of them are drop shippers or people other than direct manufacturers. Almost every single store you purchase from almost every single website you go to is a form of a drop shipper. If you don't know this and you don't understand how retail works there's always a manufacturer then there is a warehousing then there is somebody that purchases it and then there is the end store that you purchase from whether it's retail brick and mortar or it's online. If you think you're buying directly from the manufacturer and you're buying from other places other than the manufacturer's website you're almost guaranteed to be purchasing from some sort of type of drop shipper.
I don't want to make accounts on lots of sites and search all of them every time I buy something, so I think of it like a convenience fee if the way an ebay package is wrapped implies the seller arbitraged it from elsewhere.
If you do stuff for money, you got yourself a job. It might not be a full time job, but it's still a job.
A lot of that scammy shit or doing stuff like surveys usually amounts to a pittance if not an outright loss and/or serious legal problems.
It sounds like you are looking to be hired into or create for yourself, a job of some kind: Find something you are good at already or go to school for whatever it is you want to learn/get certified for, work on making connections that'll help you get a job, and put in the work.
There are ways, so many ways. I myself make 100,000€/week with the methods which you find in my book named "Rich, rich, rich - Easy, easy, easy". For you it costs just just 40€ (last 11 chapters not included). PM me for becoming rich!
The only way to make money without work is to be part of the owner class that lets others do all the work.
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Little bits of money, sure. Surveys, selling stuff on eBay or Etsy or whatever. I never found it worthwhile, can make so much more money working at a job. Most I ever made was $200, twice. Once for designing logic for a quiz to determine hair porosity, once for an interview when some medical product I got failed.
That is over the entire history of the Internet. Otherwise it's just been a dollar or two once in a while.
You have methods that amount to making yourself an online job, or an offline job with a lot of online communication (independent software contractor, commission artist, author, sex worker, online course teacher, Etsy knit hat manufacturer, etc.).
You also have various flavors of capitalism, which may not count, as you did say "legitimate". But if you already have ten million dollars, you can spend lots of time researching stocks and evaluating pitches for businesses and maybe get a better return than you would otherwise, all online.
And then you have merchanting, wholesaling, or furniture-flipping type approaches: buy stuff online, refurbish it or repackage it in smaller quantities, translate all its documentation correctly, vouch for its quality and fitness for purpose, take nice photos of it, market it, sell it, deliver it, and support it.
I mean I think anything you do that makes enough money to be worth it is just a job at that point right? Like you could start streaming on twitch or something, but once you start making money from it, it becomes a job.
In order to make money you need to sell something for more than its production costs you. You can either sell something at a small margin to a lot of people or something at a big margin to a few. Selling at a small margin to few people doesn't make you a living and selling at a big margin to a lot of people just isn't possible. Selling at a big margin to a few people means you need to find a specific community, become a part of this community and sell something to them they want enough to justify the price. Furry porn would e.g. fall in this category. Alternatively you can sell at a small margin to a lot of people. In this case you need to find a bland and generic product so it appeals to a lot of people, and find a method to produce it so cheaply that other people can't easily undercut your price, and finally find a spin to advertise it to a majority. In this category are all "livestyle products" that sell to underclass white people the idea they'd belong to the middle class. Also selling mainstream books and music would fall under this category.
The boring answer is something like a bond or CD ladder, or treasury bill focused ETF that'll give you 3% a year before taxes.
2 million dollars can safely net you 50,000 a year without working.
And since it's mostly federal bonds, you could be tax exempt up to a certain amount.
Of course this is the US POV.
And there are riskier investments that can hit 8ish% with only $600,000, but you'll be at the whim of high risk high reward.
If you're wanting to hit the tax free limit of $15,750 a year (total income) then 3% APY is $525k.
Or go super risky run options.
never settle for 5-10 point gain in a bull market, if your not pulling in atleast 200% yoy when republicans are in power you likely have a major gap in knowledge on how the markets actually function
Aren't there gig type jobs online? Like I pay you $5 and you create a very shitty website?
Learn how to do something that requires special knowledge then start advertising your expertise. Something involving skill or knowledge or that doesn't have a lot of competition. Otherwise you're competing with labor in poor countries, and that's a race to the bottom.
Mostly gig job type things. If you're in a very low income country something like mturk might not be awful. Lots of demand for AI training data labeling these days - this is work like drawing a box around a dog in a picture so a model can be trained on what dogs are. The pay is very low though because anyone can do it so it attracts lots of people from poor countries.
If you're not in a low income country then you need to be highly skilled so you can get things like programming or art gigs - I've heard of people doing those but I don't know the websites offhand.
The other option is stuff like stock market trading or crypto (ie gambling).
But yes, I'd assume the things people promote are all scams.
No.
If you count having a job as even working for yourself and doing the work. Then if you want the money then you are doing a job. Only thing that changes is who you work for
Only if you already have a ton of money, and it won’t be what you think.
Not really. You can either gamble (which is a terrible idea) or be a criminal (even worse). I have read about some apps/sites where you can do minor tasks for tiny amounts of money, cannot imagine those are worth your time.
Learn to create something meaningful, something people value, and sell it. That is sort of a job, or a hobby turned into a source of income. Depends on how you choose to frame it.
Vote blue no matter who!
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