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A comment on Brother [printers] have gotten to where they are now, by NOT innovating. Parent comment

Re:Brother [printers] have gotten to where they are now, by ... by xvector on Monday November 27, 2023 @06:14AM (#38430943)
Details like these go through extensive A/B testing. Clearly, Meta has found that gating their content behind a login prompt leads to greater engagement and revenue growth. For what it's worth, I eventually created an Instagram account because of these prompts. The strategy works.
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Re:Brother [printers] have gotten to where they are now, by ... by mlrtime on Monday November 27, 2023 @07:20AM (#38431444)
Additionally the infrastrucutre is not free either. Even without ads (which is fine by me), serving up the full suite of tools to logged out users is very expensive and much harder to control

At our company we're trying to do the same thing now, supporting logged out users is just too expensive and not worth it.

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Re:Brother [printers] have gotten to where they are now, by ... by zeitg3ist on Monday November 27, 2023 @08:17AM (#38431940)
I would argue it’s actually easier to serve content to logged out users as you can cache the whole response and serve it at the edge. Then it “just” becomes a cache expiration problem.
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Re:Brother [printers] have gotten to where they are now, by ... by doubled112 on Monday November 27, 2023 @08:24AM (#38432001)
I have seen right here on HN where my request cannot be processed, but it loads fine in a private browser window.

Logged in users receive more errors.

Thanks, caching, for allowing me to continue procrastinating.

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Re:Brother [printers] have gotten to where they are now, by ... by mlrtime on Monday November 27, 2023 @10:46AM (#38433634)
Correct, we push static assets to the edge. However not all SASS products are the same, there is a spectrum of features that can be pushed to the edge and some cannot. The engineering comes from cost, usability, reliability, etc...

Ultimately we prioritize our logged-in customers.

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Re:Brother [printers] have gotten to where they are now, by ... by lacerrr on Monday November 27, 2023 @06:40AM (#38431129)
it's just artificial growth, though. You're not generating any more engagement than if they'd just show you the content as a guest. Unless you also started using the app as a result of creating an account.
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Re:Brother [printers] have gotten to where they are now, by ... by nine_k on Monday November 27, 2023 @07:24AM (#38431480)
The growth may be artificial and not sustainable, but the money it brings is real, and can be invested (or consumed) sooner than later. Opportunity cost is a real thing :-\
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Re:Brother [printers] have gotten to where they are now, by ... by patmorgan23 on Monday November 27, 2023 @06:51AM (#38431206)
They've covered non-logged in engagement into logged in engagement, which lets them target ads better.
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Re:Brother [printers] have gotten to where they are now, by ... by alluro2 on Monday November 27, 2023 @08:46AM (#38432178)
Or at least immediately fees you presumably more relevant posts from people you follow, so that you can engage more and they can serve more ads.
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