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Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?
81–90 of 131 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?
#82Things I've noticed: 1. Obtrusive messaging / sign up modals / exit intent modals work. I hate them. But they convert. 2. There is a large group of people who don't blink at the 'account required' messages. They just sign up. 3. If you don't have an account, you're not a useful customer. There is no reason for the company to cater to you.
We now also have sign-in modal appearing after clicking on a button labelled "Generate 4 images". There are clear contextual clues that images will appear on the side after clicking on the button.
Where do designers learn to be so pushy when they are not acceptable in real life? Is there a reference guide for designers that teach these patterns?
Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was just able to doom scroll Elon's feed back into October, so maybe it's only enabled on some accounts?
Try it and see, I suppose. My experience of it is that you can read an individual conversation but if you just look at some random person's timeline it will only show you a few tweets before asking you to log in.
That's what I did (I think, I don't know how to use twitter) - went to https://twitter.com/elonmusk and kept spinning my mouse wheel down.
Maybe it's only on desktop or because I have never logged in?
Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?
#84I mean it’s the Walmart model; be cheap early, get less cheap over time. My 5,000 foot philosophical take is because they were never making money in a day to day business way and relying on low interest rates to inflate values through money shuffling schemes to game attention. Over time models made it apparent they would never make long term business sense as software improved and automation took over, so it’s a medi…
Is that the "Walmart model"? Out of curiosity, I just checked their financial statements. For FY 2022, they had a gross profit margin of 25.1%. In comparison, for FY 1986 (the oldest year I have easy access to), they had a gross profit margin of 25.9%. That hardly seems to fit the pattern.
WalMart wasn’t doing it globally, they were doing it regionally or even city by city.
So, a store would open in a new city with very cheap prices. That individual store might be running at break even, or even at a loss. Once the various other local competitors have been driven out of business, they start to raise the prices, and become more profitable.
When competitors start coming back to town, they lower their prices and repeat.
Different individual stores would be in different stages of this at any time, so you wouldn’t really see the strategy by comparing various profit margins from different years, unless they were changing the rate at which they were in the expand phase.
Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like an interesting stable diffusion prompt.
Text is still a big challenge, I don't think I've seen any that have properly rendered the text you want. I wonder if handwritten text would be easier or harder since there's more variation.
I thought this was typically done on purpose to prevent exactly the types of situations described, I didn't think it was actually a technical limitation of the model.
Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try it and see, I suppose. My experience of it is that you can read an individual conversation but if you just look at some random person's timeline it will only show you a few tweets before asking you to log in.
That's what I did (I think, I don't know how to use twitter) - went to https://twitter.com/elonmusk and kept spinning my mouse wheel down. Maybe it's only on desktop or because I have never logged in?
Could be desktop. Mobile browsing still seems to trigger demands for the app to be installed followed by login requests, though I just picked a few tweets at random rather than checking systematically.
Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?
#87The reason is simple: These companies are ad-supported. When you create an account and log in, the ads they show can be better tailored to your interests. This is especially true for companies like Pinterest, where users catalog their interests on the site. I think this is surprising to people for two reasons: 1 - We've been told the "companies sell your data" narrative for so long that many people don't realize that…
> mega companies don't actually profit from selling your data Does anyone on HN actually believe big tech companies are selling data as opposed to using it to target ads? I thought we were over that long ago.
What do you mean by 'actually profit' and 'your data' ?
For sure companies are still selling data from their platforms. Does that include what the company would consider to be a user's data? I doubt they are selling private contact data associated with their users but any user activity on their platform is likely being sold off in bulk. Whether they 'actually profit' from those deals is an accounting game.
Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?
#88User and business priorities are aligned during the growth phase, when user acquisition is the most important thing for the business. Once there is a self-sustaining level of user activity and new signups, revenue per engagement becomes an increasingly important metric. At that point the user's priorities and those of the business are no longer aligned, and the company starts asking more of its users. A third phase o…
I felt like this was a really solid explanation of some dynamics at play I've been seeing a lot of. Thanks for putting such succinct thoughts to it.
Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?
#89Isn't that just a result of public companies having to chase forever growth to keep their valuation?
A company starts with a product, sees growth and investors pour in with the expectation of accelerated growth (and hence profits), at some point their product can't really attract many more customers, it grows until the market it is in starts to saturate and growth slows down. They need to chase other verticals to validate to their shareholders they are still aa valuable and so it begins the slow downfall of the product, not necessarily of profits.
I really don't see another way given the incentives of the current crop of capitalism, a public company that stops chasing growth will see their valuation drop and with that the board might decide it's time for a new CEO. If the board sticks to their guns and stop chasing growth, a mutiny of shareholders will ensue to replace the board.
The incentives are wrong if what you expect is the best product ever, they're aligned to chase growth as the only metric and everything goes to Goodhart's Law from there.
Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?
#90Most of the web and apps feel hostile these days On Playstation starting the YouTube app now gets you a full screen unskippable ad before even reaching the app Prime video show you ads even if you're a paying customer Every now and then I listen to a podcast to fall asleep, 50% chance I'll be jump scared by a 0.1kbps ad in German that has the volume 4x louder than the podcast itself Google removing video previews for…
I've purchased more DVDs in the past year than the previous ten years combined.