There is no implied agreement, it's exactly as stated.
Why don't you sell them?
FWIW, I have Linux Mint on all laptops at home, including the ones used by the kids and the elderly, even though I've already paid for the Windows 10 license by virtue of having purchased them default installed.
That's the classical problem with ad-free subscription models: You remove all the people with cash to spare from your advertising pool, thus decreasing its value. At that point you might as well make the product ad-free for the people not paying as well.
https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19950607&slug...
This magazine from 1995 had a CD full of stock images for sale for $18.98
https://the-avocado.org/2018/03/16/lets-read-pc-magazine-jul...
So I don't think the physical distribution was a large percent of the price.
I find it hard to accept the explanation that in-app advertising is the tradeoff I get when buying a tech product at a given price. Either it's free and it serves me ads, or I pay for it and I get to opt-in to ads if I choose.
It's the same argument for Smart TVs. These companies know they can have their cake and eat it too.
..."for 100 stunning photos on each CD-ROM. $18.98 each" [1], just in case anyone else wanted to square the comparison in proper context.
[1] https://i0.wp.com/the-avocado.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03...
- Windows 95 was $210 in 1995: $370.94 in today's dollars.
- Windows XP was $199 in 2002: $297.78 in today's dollars.
- Windows 7 was $159.99 in 2009: $200.75 in today's dollars.
We can call this situation the "Fuck yourself" pattern, where you give money to companies so they can innovate in new ways of fucking you.
- Start Menu showing suggested apps (the infamous Candy Crush)
- Task bar shown weather and news
- Lock screen sometimes showing ads
- Sometimes, with updates, new things are installed that auto-launch and prompt you to, e.g., buy an Office subscription.
- Constantly nagging about using browsers other than Edge
Expensive professional software is often available on Mac.
Probably the target market for windows evolved to become people who tolerate advertising (or at least that's what PMs at M$ think).
Half the price is paid in the license fee. The other half is a lifetime of ads exposure.
The difference being air travel is highly regulated, as should be surveillance marketing.
1. What's wrong with recycled seats? If you live in a city you are drinking recycled water.
2. Comparing a trans-atlantic flight to a short-haul one (which all Ryanair flights are) is not correct. Short-haul Aer Lingus is not discernably different to Ryanair.
3. Michael O'Leary is the king of free publicity. The fact that you heard about his "coin operated toilet" plan says it all. No-one ever seriously entertained standing room on airplanes etc...
And none of this has any bearing on the recent hijacking. I've flown many times with Ryanair and otherairlines, with small kids in tow, and there is little difference, because most of the hassle is down to security theatre at the airports.
2. I've never been on a short Aer Lingus flight so can't comment. But I've been on lots of short Iberia and Air France flights and never dealt with the discomfort of Ryan.
3. Same reason I don't buy a Tesla.
4. I'd hope a pilot of the Irish flag carrier would have phoned in to ask whether diverting several hundred miles to Minsk was the wisest idea. Glassdoor shows the average Ryan Air pilot making €66k/year versus €91k for an Aer Lingus pilot. And no doubt the hours and schedules are hideous. If you choose to entrust your family members' lives to a company that requires defense with all the above caveats to save a few quid - I hope you're spending it on a decent hotel.
I mean, he's got a point here. Surely if we actually wanted plane passengers to survive crashes they'd have something more substantial than lap belts? I'd have thought, as a simple laymen, facing the seats backwards would make any impact far more survivable than crouching in the insane way that the "safety pamphlet" suggests?
Did you miss the GPs bit about facing the seats backwards? Then the whole backrest becomes your restraint. (I mean, most airplane crashes are forwards, right -- they don't get rear-ended all that often?)
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/travel/ryanair-ceo-seat-bel...
I just want my corporate overlords to at least pretend not to have a wanton disregard for human life. Is that so much to ask?
[edit] on the other hand, the best thing for the Spanish about having a standing section on Ryan Air flights would be the passengers would get their brawling out of the way before they make it to the pub.
It's why if you're seated, it's recommended to be buckled in - the difference between one person slamming into the ceiling and 300 is pretty substantial.
I'd buy it but I haven't been able to figure out how to.
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2167558-explicit-inst...
I'm on version 21H1 -- is this offered with the 2019 LTSC license? Or stuck with version 1909? I'm not sure that really matters for me personally - but sometimes it's confusing how this all works compared to the consumer editions. By confusing I just really just mean they don't seem offer this information upfront.
TIL how I'm going to be buying Windows from now on. I had no idea this was actually this accessible.
Pirating can sometimes be the simplest technical solution to some situations, but at the end of the day being able to point at a (set of) legitimately-acquired license key(s) is a bit like having a PhD, it squares everything off in a way that opens doors (or keeps doors open) that would otherwise be shut.
https://www.google.com/search?q=ads+in+windows+10&tbm=isch
Does that answer your question?
From your link, it seems most ads are on live tiles. It's really easy to turn that feature off. (No one likes live tiles anyway)
"The infrastructure" to share cat pictures cost peanuts. It's the addictive dark patterns and montezation/tracking that costs millions. That's the irony.
Well, yes, serving static HTML is easy. Serving images is kind of not hard either, because you have free unlimited traffic, don't you? Some hosting plans offer it. They just limit the egress bandwidth. So maybe you need a few more servers to cope with it, just like $50 a pop. You're not gonna need any CDN, people further away from your DC will just wait longer. Or run your servers from two regions, it just takes duplicating your collection of cat pictures, should be peanuts.
Then, you need to store these terabytes of cats. On rather fast disks because else the disks will be the bottleneck, and cats will load very slowly for some users. It would be terrible were something to happen to the collection, so you need some backup for peanuts, like some Backblaze, and maybe a second copy because Backblaze has no^W limited redundancy.
Then, well, you need to monitor all that and sometimes fix issues, because cloud infra is highly available but not highly reliable.
Then, where do the cat pictures come from? Allow anonymous uploads! Or register users and allow uploads.
Now analyze each picture so that it's an actual cat picture and not child porn or a warez archive. Resize them to match your standards. Yes, this is simple, just run a RNN that detects cats.
Then, curate the incoming pictures so that they are actually reasonably interesting. Just maybe hire a few people to do that for peanuts somewhere in Africa.
Ah yes, you want to also deduplicate images; run some image hashing algorithms; use maybe just one or two GPU instances to do that efficiently. And you gonna need a DB, a simple one, that will never need any administering or fixing, won't it?
Well, yes, now you can run that site for just several grand a month, making it your day job, because you're well-qualified to maintain every part of it. Enjoy the peanuts.
How do you deal with moderation? Is it automated, I see you even have comments? Or is it just report buttons and your takedown form? How is the support load?
What is your tech stack? PHP? Python? C#? Java? Golang?
Years ago everyone had to use an image-host (Photobucket, lol…) because all those phpBB instances on shared hosting accounts didn’t support direct image uploads or greatly limited attachments and most people didn’t have their own web hosting account to use instead.
With the rise of Web 2.0, it became important for sites to control their content - I remember the days of hotlinked images being swapped-out with obscene or vomit-inducing content as an act of revenge on bandwidth leeches - and cheap storage meant it wasn’t a problem to host hundreds of gigabytes of content by oneself. Can you image if Facebook and Instagram didn’t host the images posted to them?
It’s 2021 now, web-forums are dead - if people want to share photos to a small circle they’ll likely use Dropbox or OneDrive - or just copy+paste between Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp…
Do guide question: who uses your service and where’s the opportunity for profit? Serving images directly means people can’t see any ads, and browsers now block more and more third-party cookies (until all of them by 2023, I understand) so using image-hosting as a way to track users across the web is gone - is your frontpage traffic enough? Savvy users who use image hosts also tend to the ones to adblock too, even on mobile.
So, well, my estimate of a few grand a month was not completely off.
But being an asshole about insisting that everyone log in so you can target them individually isn't actually a requirement for the business model to work and be profitable.
At most, you can justify being an asshole about insisting that the user not be using an ad-blocker (with the user having the option of logging in with a paid account for an ad-free experience).
p2p cats for teh win
Then people could easily navigate to cat pictures.
That does not seem to be the case.
https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217667468-B2-Se...
They don't have the cross-DC redundancy like S3 does. If a DC goes offline, so does your data.
I'm updating my comment.
Don't put data you don't want to loose in a single location.
[0] https://www.ovh.com/world/news/press/cpl1787.fire-our-strasb...
Smells like seven figures already.
Well, I was responding to "millions", so maybe "a handful of peanuts" might be more accurate...
I belive there was an open company/OCI post by neocities.org a good while back, detailing their budget - but I can't seem to find it again.
http://web.archive.org/web/20160310015118/https://blog.neoci...
> Our (rough) budget for 2015
(...)
> We have upgraded a lot of our infrastructure to provide for faster, more reliable service with more features, space, and bandwidth capabilities, which has pushed our operating bill to around $300/month (...) To prevent unexpected costs, we have made agreements with our providers to make this a fixed rate, so a sudden flood of traffic shouldn't change this dramatically.
(...)
> In order to become self sustaining with the current system, we will require approximately $3600 in annual recurring revenue. I think this is an achievable goal with our new site (we're almost 1/3 of the way there), and we have plenty of runway incase this takes longer than expected. We also have the ability to scale back on some of our expenses, as I believe I can shave off at least $100-150 from our monthly recurring expenses should we need to without too many problems.
> (...) We can scale a lot (~500k+ sites) with what we have now, and the scaling options we have are simple, predictable and affordable.
Then you can have a local copy and be sure you have every standard cat in existence!
Anyway, you can do anything the hard way, but what’s your point? That serving millions of cats per second requires big investment that must be recouped? I see most of this as rent seeking, and the infrastructure is economy of scale. Maybe you use tensor flow and Kafka inside Kubernetes, I dunno…
I agree that one can expect lame websites to act lame, but it’s out of sheer churlishness rather than necessity
It's the picture intake pipeline that eats most of the resources. If you only want to serve the same collection, or a collection you personally increase by 1-2 cats a day, then it's fine.
How so? Let's say you want to be somewhat competitive with imgur and handle a million images per day, and also that the peak rate is 4x your average. That comes out to 50 images per second. A thumbnail or few shouldn't really take more than a CPU-second, so you can handle that with 2-6 cheap servers. Let alone using spare cores on storage-optimized servers. And it's next to zero database load.
You think they wouldn’t rather have the cash?
It's like rocket fuel! The faster you want to go, the more fuel you need. Which adds weight, so now you go slower, so you need more fuel...
I want to serve a cat picture, which would cost 1/100 of a cent. But at scale, it adds up. So now I show adds that generate 1.2/100 of a cent in revenue but add .5/100 cents in serving cost, which I can optimize with user data to add an additional .7/100 cents in revenue, but which adds .4/100 cents in serving costs....
Don't talk about costs, this crap is self-inflicted
Every one of these companies start with a nice mission and it ends up getting perverted into the hellscape that is tech today. Every damn time.
Relying on people doing the right thing is an unstable equilibrium. IMO the only way to really ensure this is with regulations and compliance controls. Laws like GDPR and CCPA have to be followed by the business.
I know plenty of founders who would be happy with lower constant profits, less employees, in order to have a company which doesn't actively psychologically harm its users, a less stressful working environment.
Gumroad is the perfect example of this.
The problems come from VC money, which force a company to chase 500x returns or die trying. More in general, whenever there is centralisation of resources, problems ensue at some point later on.
Regulations are not the answer - established companies find a way to arginate them (look at Google playing with cookies), smaller companies trying to go live and compete have a slower time to market and die, benefiting the established companies.
On top of this regulations introduce a different set of problems. What if I'm okay being on a website which doesn't respect my privacy? What if I care more about reading a news article and never visit that website again more than I care about them respecting some rules regarding what kind of tracking they do?
Instead of assuming we, the lawmakers, are omniscient and perfect, I think we should just get out of the way of the market and limit governmental influence to reduce the number of monopolies and corruption that gets into the real world - and then bubbles up in various ways, chasing infinte growth being one of them.
To 100 more Gumroads.
Isn’t this ironic? The government is people. I guess this just moves the onus of people doing the right thing, up to government. If you’re right, that destabilizes government. Which I guess is what happens when it stops corps; corps then need to take it over.
lol at this. Go setup that infrastructure and see how far you get for peanuts.
In fact: I'm sure there are many cat image sharing sites out there. A random search landed me here: https://www.funnycatpix.com/_pics/Hmmmmmm890.htm
Seems like a high-quality HN-like website, hehe :)
My company has grown 15x in the last few years and our total infra costs continue to go down, because we pay attention to them.
If it was so simple to host Instagram for peanuts I wonder why no one has done it.
This drives up complexity of the business operation overall, not just the infrastructure.
Is that really fair? Would there be nowhere to see pictures of cats without their millions of dollars in infrastructure and staffing? Or could it be that their millions of dollars in infrastructure and staffing for selling ads is the reason the goto place for pictures of cats is BigTechCo instead of a ton of smaller forums and communities each of which is relatively inexpensive to operate.
Say you're talking to someone who can teleport instantly across the globe. If you tell him where he can see the Mona Lisa, that's OK. If you grab the Mona Lisa and wave it in his face, that is very un-OK.
Before someone replies with the "but digital items can be copied, it's not stealing", that's the argument most piracy enabling forums and websites are able to get away with. If you host, EG, Nintendo ROMs on your website, you'll get shut down quickly. If you just save links (URL or Magnet), you might get a DMCA for a specific item maybe, but won't get shut down entirely, probably.
As always, there are a lots of exceptions and alternative interpretations though.
Why not just charge the 100th visitor per minute or something? Someone will be motivated to pay the cost. And, if people don't want to pay? Well, even those with less motivation will find a way to the content somehow.
This is the equivalent of running a taxi business vs running an airline. Sure, a taxi can fulfill several transportation needs but it could never replace what an airline does.
For a short time, and the overwhelming majority of people would have no idea that content exists. Then some enterprising startup founder would realize that there's a huge market for those exact services, and history would slowly repeat (rhyme with?) itself.
This free content, sans big tech pipedream is just that. Sorry if that makes you sad.
People on this site continually underestimate the ability of users.
My mother is not going to set up a RSS feed for herself of a list of forums that interest her. She does know how to log on to Facebook and look at the feed.
- See interesting page -> click the Facebook follow button to get it added to your FB feed
- See interesting page -> click the RSS button to get it added to your RSS feed
I think the point you are trying to make is that people are demanding free (as in beer) content, a la WinAmp of the 1990's. In the past 20 years, we've come around out of that greedy phase and have come to accept a certain amount of advertising for content. But when the non-free content dominates the free content (e.g. pinterest's SEO), it's a fuck you pattern and not consumer greed.
EDIT: IMHO
Once you get into actual hosting, it's very hard to get past a small number of users without a lot of funding. And since a lot of users don't want to pay, well...
The surveillance part still creeps me the hell out, but if they're gonna do it anyway they might as well use that data to benefit my life.
(On that note, I often find myself wishing I could ask the NSA for a copy of an old message or photo...)
All these technology companies are making assumptions about the type of person I am, and then molding me into that person. I can't learn about topics I don't see, so if the tech giants are convinced I like technology and computers, that's all I will ever learn about.
Maybe I'd be happier if I took up ballet dancing, or basket-weaving, or something else I can't begin to imagine. That seems much less likely to happen when I'm trapped in an algorithmic box, that assumes my past will dictate my future.
On some level the way company's advertise is basically an argument against them having my data being a threat, because they can't manage to come up with anything better then that, in a product space where there's a whole massive ecosystem of technology which might be useful to me.
And thats...really just me complaining about the ads not targeting well. Like, I am quite interested in knowing if my nascent desktop audio management could be better! I don't know what's out there, and I've given you a price range estimate through how long I searched before spending!
Choice is good. I've certainly groaned at my share of ads on traditional television, and so I can understand why someone might find targeted ads preferable. I just don't share that desire!
Amazon in particular irks me because they don't give you a choice, no matter how deep you dig into settings! You can turn off browsing history, but it's stored in a cookie per-device and also seems to randomly come back on sometimes. Even then, they'll still use your purchase history for recommendations. I used to manually go through and mark everything I bought as a gift, and this worked for a while—but then Amazon apparently decided I'd given to many gifts and started ignoring the signal.
I think life in a big city can be your "social feed" without any bias. A big city can offer so many things and ideas if you just go out, meet random people and listen to what they say.
I always feel a little depressed when someone describes being more effectively manipulated as "benefiting."
Joke's on them either way, they somehow haven't figured out I'm broke! But the difference is between "spying + garbage ads" and "spying + a bunch of cool shit I didn't even know existed" I'm gonna go for the latter.
Obviously the correct answer is neither: just use Adblock and/or pay for services you use and enjoy. For example I paid for YouTube premium so I could get an ad-free experience on mobile (because YouTube ads are somehow both horribly intrusive and horribly irrelevant, despite Google's apparent omniscience!).
By all accounts Google should know much more about me than Facebook does, but somehow their ads invoke a response somewhere between mild irritation and outright rage and disgust. Meanwhile on Instagram: "hey, I really like this backpack", "wtf they're selling psilocybin in capsules now? And I can just buy it? Nobody even told me that existed! Thanks Instagram!" Like I said, that was a pretty surreal moment for me.
Google knew everything about it and yet couldn't manage to serve anything but the sleaziest ads.
Instagram got the table scraps and yet convinced me to buy at least one thing that I'm actually happy with.
In the early days of facebook, they sent me an email to join with 20 people I might know. I knew 19 of them. I have no illusions , facebook knows a ton about me. Even without a profile.
I found the ads on instagram quite intrusive and not relivant (they're the same size as a post), but that's just me ( I don't have a facebook so they can't correlate). I also find quite a few news sites almost unreadable with all the ads.
But yeah, joking aside, Instagram was the one of few places I actually saw ads of things I wanted to buy. Sure, the ads tried to rip my eyes out for those products ($50 for a product I found for $5) but still...
Asian artists are an even safer bet: they only post art. How refreshing!
Any artists in particular you'd recommend?
The Remarkable website uses the Facebook tracking javascript. If you had visited the Remarkable website then it would know to advertise to you.
This is such a defeatist narrative, and it isn't even accurate. They in fact don't have your data, that is half why they run these services. Each service you don't use is another piece of you they don't have. It isn't an all or nothing proposition. Throwing up your hands and granting them powers they don't have short circuits the more meaningful deliberation of "is this service worth the cost?"
If I had to guess, I might say that these companies enjoy the strong men we have built them into, because people give in.
This isn't a "fuck you" pattern. They gave you a social media Costco food sample.
Apparently not video games. Not many game companies offer demos anymore because they actually hurt sales.
> Apparently not video games. Not many game companies offer demos anymore because they actually hurt sales.
That's interesting. Is that because the demo cannibalizes sales (ie. people have enough fun just playing the demo they don't feel compelled to buy the game), or because the demo undermines the game's value proposition (ie. people don't buy the crappy game because the demo makes the crappiness evident)?
It’s still an obnoxious thing to do, which is the point of the article.
Letting you glance at it then making it disappear is not a demo.
The bigger the userbase grows, the bigger the fuckyous they can give the rest. It’s no longer “hey join us, we have cool stuff”, it’s “fuck you, we already got your friends, whatcha gonna do”. We can complain about that, right?
I understand how this shitty agreement came to be but that doesn't mean that I like having my experience online be a metaphorical middle finger.
They spent billions in infrastructure and staffing to hijack the free internet where I could look at cat pictures on cat picture websites that had cat pictures as the goal, all so they could show me ads, and they have the nerve to say that I'm in the wrong for not being happy about that?
Now is it fair for a company to track and shape the behavior of millions of people?
I recommend doing this the same time you're spring cleaning or after you prep for winter. Also go through and unsubscribe from emails and update passwords.
Or you're both. Or perhaps none.
I kinda like that we have now such a big, visible and studied echosystem where we'll see any pattern working at a significant scale.
Any kind of dichotomy just doesn't cut it anymore I think.
2/ Well fuck you even further and go to hell for defending such behaviours.
3/ ps. Their infra is ridiculous. A team of 100-120 engineers can do way better. They can’t get their user base though because of 1/
Similarly, it use to be that going to the app showed me "my feed". Sometime in the last 6 month it changed to only show me the newest post of people I'm following and then only posts of random "popular" people of which I have zero interest.
If they want to make money from me, I'd use the app more with the old style of showing me only posts from people I follow with an ad every few posts, like say 1 ad 2 3 ad 4 5 6 ad 7 8 9 ad. As it is now I barely use the app anymore. Of course I'm not the target audience.
The issue is that FB+Insta try very hard to become the first/default go-to place for people to post content, just to lure in others and extract value out of them.
So sometimes it is true, but most of the time it is not and BigCo-s have to push users to do things.
I'm fine with businesses who use that model and make it clear. Those kinds of tactics are galling coming from a company whose literal mission statement is "Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together."
If you want people to make an account, make a more compelling business proposition. Gatekeeping seems like the most vulnerable, monopolistic position to take.
Unfederated and (forced) open systems is the only way out of this.
IANAL so I'm not sure whether such a suit will stand in any court.
Go fuck your self. Internet was never meant to be sell ads for you. Companies found loop hole and now you think you are entitled to it. Snap out of it asshole
It's been bad a long time now, but not like this. You really want to tell me it was this blatant?
So yeah, fuck you, I just wanted to look at cats.
You almost had me, right up to this point. Then I realized you are posting pointed sarcasm about instagram's owners.
That's called bait & switch, and is (if not legally in this case, then morally) rightly considered fraud.
This apologies for any unethical practice by companies in Reddit/HNs are really interesting. They side completely with the authorities. Properly trained.
"Well, fuck you, too. We're here to sell ads."
It's not about dark patterns, that's just a second-order effect. It was never about dark patterns.
This is the implied agreement. You understand it, or you don't. And if you don't, I guess you haven't been on the web in the past decade or something.
What? You thought it was fair that a company spends millions in technical infrastructure and staffing so you can sit at home and spend your time looking at cats for free? No, they have your attention and they're going to connect you to organizations who will pay for it.