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Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?

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Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?

#91

Post by compiskey »

boole1854 wrote: post #77
compiskey wrote: post #51

I 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.

It used to cost X to run corp A, now it costs Y, where Y is Z times higher than X.

Millions to billions in this case.

Don’t forget to add in the cost of social programs their employees rely on given the abysmal pay in order to keep your numbers down.

Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?

#92

Post by itronitron »

brk wrote: post #29

(Anonymous)Visitors is not a very useful or valuable metric. Blindly pumping content into the ether isn't going to convert to value, or cashflow. I think we are seeing the advancing erosion of (generic)ad-supported free content and services. Which is not necessarily a Bad Thing. If you can't be bothered to identify yourself with an account, then these services do not get much value from you, and many times see you as…

Failure of imagination, or even just a memory fault. If I have a website that is focused on content relating to heirloom tomatoes during the week and artisanal firewood on weekends then I should be able to sell advertising space on my site during the week to grocers and on the weekends to woodstove manufacturers. It's not that complicated.

Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?

#93

Post by flax »

I work for Indeed, and was surprised to hear your experience. So I brought up the site in a non-logged-in browser, did a search and verified that I can still see multiple pages of results.

There may be an a/b test or something, but as far as I know we're not limiting results to push logins. But I wouldn't know, I'm not on that team.

Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?

#94

Post by Arrath »

anigbrowl wrote: post #80
bombcar wrote: post #74

Earlier 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 specific behavior seems to have gone away when musk culled a whole bunch of microservices a couple weeks back. I know well what you're talking about and it annoyed the hell out of me, but now its gone! For now, on desktop browsers, anyway.

Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?

#95

Post by andirk »

Medium.com

Quora.com

Luckily both of those websites have almost no value to me.

And what happened to BugMeNot [0] ?? Saved a lot of time.

And Mailinator [1] email addresses are now blocked from so many websites.

These types of demands have C-suite loud talkers written all over them.

[0] https://bugmenot.com/

[1] https://www.mailinator.com/

Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?

#96

Post by mynameisvlad »

sentientslug wrote: post #85
mynameisvlad wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://opguides.info/posts/aiartpanic/ was on the front page a few days ago, and you can see from the results that the text is pretty mangled. If it were intentional, I’d expect it to be clean text, even if it didn’t make sense. It seems to genuinely have trouble with characters and combines glyphs a lot of the time.

Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?

#97

Post by andirk »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #31

It does feel like every website is turning into a bad 90's infomercial - instead of "buy now and get 2 for $39.95!" its "like and subscribe!" multiple times per video, even more fluff in the video to lengthen them or ad reads by podcasters that don't care what they are advertising because just 1% is all they need to click/follow the link. Everything on the internet is a metric (likes, subscribers, mins viewed, follow…

Reminds me of people who mark every one of their emails on Microsoft Outlook with the "Urgent" flag. Or people who immediately want to speak to the manager.

There's something psychotic about it all.

Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?

#98

Post by andirk »

anm89 wrote: post #21
amflare wrote: post #6

IMO its because the demand for ever growing growth (not only must we grow on last year (growth up 5%), but our growth must be faster (growth trajectory up 5%)) is running headlong into a shrinking economy. Anonymous users have always represented the best potential growth since they already use the service, so convincing them to convert should be easier than convincing someone who has never heard of the product. Ergo,…

I think this is it. None of this stuff mattered when all of these companies were cool with losing unlimited money. Now they are facing existential risk and they don't really have a choice, if pissing users off is the way they can punt on revenue then they are going to do it. Ultimately I think it signals that a lot of these companies (not ones that have been bought by FAANG) are functionally insolvent and are in a sl…

Worked at the popular [video game news website name redacted]. The Sales Dept head was a genius in their abilities: take last quarter's numbers, and ADD 10%! No forecasting or guidance, just more. That's it.

Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?

#99

Post by aendruk »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #41

(to post again) Imagine if the people designing the Discord, Windows 10+, Telegram UI, and Amazon Prime cancellation UI to manipulate you into paying for services, were in charge of designing airliner cockpits and industrial plants. User interfaces can and should do better in preventing unintentional user error, and people should refuse to implement, use, or accept dark patterns.

In the thought experiment, do you mean me to transplant the designer’s adversarial intent or only their expertise?
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