After over a year of modding r/Deals, I have decided to step down as the only active mod of this subreddit.

I had been a long-time subscriber, but this subreddit was overtaken by misleading Amazon sellers, promoting terrible products at terrible mark-ups with terrible sales. I would report them and nothing would be done. After complaining enough about how this subreddit was being handled, I was offered a position to address my own grievances, so that's what I did.

I believe I made this place substantially less annoying by almost eliminating referrals, drop-shipped Aliexpress junk, and other various spam. I hope you have felt the same way too. However, the cost of doing this is that almost every post needed to be manually reviewed and approved, which takes a lot of effort to stay on top of when you're the only one doing it.

I contacted the head mod last week about stepping down. I did not receive a response.

What you should probably expect going forward:

• Your submissions being removed due to filters

• Your questions going unanswered

Please stay vigilant when shopping online. Here are my tips for avoiding scams:

1. Do a reverse image search of the product image. You will be able to see if the Website just used stock images and what other sites did the same. You can probably find the item cheaper by switching sites as well.

2. Do a Whois search, specifically to see the age of the domain.

3. Do a shipping policy review. Anything that takes 15+ days and has "multiple warehouses" is almost always a drop-ship site, but this site might genuinely buy the item wholesale and then physically ship it themselves.

4. Be suspicious of Shopify sites if denoted in the footer, as they are almost always drop-shippers. Just buy it directly from Aliexpress to pay substantially less.

5. Any give-away that charges shipping is making money via the shipping.

6. Always pay with a credit card (vs. a debit card/cash) as you receive a certain level of purchase protection and an extended warranty. It's to your advantage to know your card benefits.

I do not expect praise or thank you's, so PLEASE do not waste your money on Reddit awards for this post. Donate to a worthy organization such as:

Coalition for Rainforest Nations

Clean Air Task Force

Information Technology and Innovative Foundation

Be excellent to each other.

((🤙))

I spent some time pulling together all of the research I could find on Black Friday sales.

This searchable, master package of information is the result.

You can search for things like:

• Store name

• "Free"

• HDTV

• Fishing

• Hair Dryer

• Fire Pit

• etc...

It has links to other master spreadsheets to do even more sorting.

LMK if you have Q's or recs. I plan to keep this updated as much as I can.

______

Note: I posted this over at r/blackfriday yesterday. It was well received, so I thought others would enjoy it.

https://www.businessinsider.com/burger-king-debuts-mcdonalds-whopper-deal-2018-12

Edit: looks like the deal is over now, was good while it lasted

So spotify has a deal where family plan account holders get a home mini free.

Well they offer 3 months of premium for 99 cents to new users.

If you get 3 months premium you can convert it to 2 months of the family plan for no extra charge by simply going through the account upgrade option in your account settings. It will ask for a payment method but will not charge until your 2 months runs out unless you cancel first. If you do cancel, be sure to claim your mini BEFORE you cancel.

Once you have the family plan you can take the first link and claim your free google home mini.

Edit: Just a clarification for those who asked. There is no actualy option that says you can change your 3 month premium to a 2 month family plan. It says you gotta pay 14.99 and even has you put in payment info but, it will only charge you 1 penny and that seems to be temporary as all my 1 cent charges dropped off after a short while.

The support agent I chatted with said that the coupon works but then is removed by the system. Hopefully this helps someone!