Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The web's original sin

quirksmode.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 132 posts

Re: The web's original sin

#51

Post by Touche »

yorik wrote: post #46

One nice thing of the internet is that it forces openness and rewards it. If some site goes behind a paywall, what it really does is to remove itself from the internet, giving more visibility opportunities to people who want primarily to communicate and share ideas, instead of strategically monetizing content (or whatever it is called today). Also, the author is doing some confusion on who feels entitled =)

The author is confused about what is (monetarily) valuable content. The brutal truth is that text articles are plentiful, easy to produce and therefore worth close to nothing to users. If you don't give it away someone else will.

Hollywood movies, on the other hand, are valuable. So they get to change the web (Web DRM) to suit their business model.

Re: The web's original sin

#52

Post by nnq »

Am I the only one who believes app stores should have a minimum mandatory price of like $5 (maybe geographically customizable)?!

And yes, you should also be allowed to publish free apps, but they should be really-free, so if you set your apps price to $0, you are forbidden to have any-kind of in-app purchases (and maybe even forced to be open-source). Want to do have the in-app-purchases: then put a goddam minimum price tag of $5 on you app and over that ask for purchases!

We should just create some thick and solid walls between "true free" and "paid/premium" stuff and destroy this murky area of "freemium" and whatever! Some people would want to shoot me for saying this, but even consumer-SaaS/PaaS-es like, uhm, Facebook, should be forced by law to charge a minimum fee of $1/moth or something if they are not "truly free" (eg. "if they make any kind of profit derived from their free users' data and attention).

Re: The web's original sin

#53

Post by notahacker »

mikeash wrote: post #28
liotier wrote: post #12

When I open my mouth to talk to my neighbor, I am not producing "content" - I am communicating. The Web is a communication medium. The lack of commercial functionality baked in the communication medium is a feature not a bug. Whoever uses the word "content" betray his bias as a commercial publisher.

That seems like a bad analogy. The web wasn't built as a real-time one-to-one communications medium, it was built as a way to publish documents. Later on, enough stuff got added to the system to enable comment forms and chat boxes and whatnot, but the basis of the thing was always document publishing. Take a look at the original web site: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html That's clearly a non-interact…

I don't know about the OP, but I'd say many objections to "content" is less to do with it describing a web composed of documents and more to do with it describing a web composed of documents conceived as a means rather than an end.

"Content" is to a large extend marketing shorthand for "text which improves our conversion funnel or sells CPM slots by being well optimised for search queries and/or social clicks". Which certainly wasn't the intention of the original web either.

Journalists, authors, researchers and people blogging for the joy of blogging generally don't refer to their output as "content", and do think their work is primarily intended to communicate, albeit mostly in one-to-many fashion.

Of course regardless of how idealistic their intentions, most journalists have always produced much of their output for publications whose management teams largely consider it as something to wrap ads around, but that approach is far more pervasive and metrics-driven on the modern web.

Re: The web's original sin

#54

Post by zeveb »

Is it really an original sin if ad-financed free content is, as the article indicates, a mere .275% of the online economy?

> The price difference between desktop apps and tablet/mobile apps does not make any sense, but everybody pretends it does.

I dunno, it makes a lot of sense to me: my phone has a screen which is under 11 sq. inches while my monitor is over 300 sq. inches, for a more than 28-fold difference in viewable area and hence game immersivity. I don't have a tablet handy to measure, but it's still small.

Moreover, when I use my desktop I have a full-featured input control surface, in the form of keyboard and mouse; in contrast, on a phone or tablet all I can do is tap & drag. That means that desktop games are more likely to be complex and engaging while still being usable.

Further, my desktop has many times the processing power and memory of my phone or tablet, which again means that games are more likely to be complex and engaging.

From my perspective, $25 is a steal for a desktop game and $1 is a bit of a rip-off for a phone game.

Re: The web's original sin

#55

Post by codingdave »

I make tools that are free to my audience. I also provide links to items that I know they will be buying anyway, if they are using my tools. They click the links, I get some money, everyone wins.

If someone is feeling like the effort they put into creating content is not returning enough value into their life, perhaps they should re-think creating that content in the first place.

Re: The web's original sin

#56

Post by pussinboots »

nmrm2 wrote: post #40
woah wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever spent any significant amount of time writing something, or making a video, or an image for the web?

Yes. Most people who used the early web spent huge amounts of time making one or more of these. And posted them. Not just for free, but even on shared hosting plans they paid for. People paid money to share their "content" for free . GOML

"get on my level" - for those who dont want to urbandictionary the acronym

Re: The web's original sin

#57

Post by bryanlarsen »

SimonPStevens wrote: post #44
CapitalistCartr wrote: post #8

I would love to have a thoughtful, Civ-like game on my phone. Its a Samsung Galaxy 5 with a 128gig micro-sd card. I know its powerful enough, but if its out there, I haven't found it. I, and many others, happily pay for such games on PC and gaming platforms, but on phones and Web, it seems oddly taboo. P.S. I'm not goving up my blockers on my computer browser. They aren't "ad" blockers; they're malware protection. To…

There are some. Civilization Revolution is available for iOS and Windows Phone. I'm not sure why they never did an Android version. I played the Windows Phone version back when it was released. It was fairly decent. I'm not a civ aficionado though, so I don't know how well it stands up when compared to other editions. The thing is though, if I'm going to play a decent game that takes time and thought, I sit down at m…

Civ Rev 2 is on android.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.t2kgames.c...

Re: The web's original sin

#58

Post by nmrm2 »

pussinboots wrote: post #56
nmrm2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Most people who used the early web spent huge amounts of time making one or more of these. And posted them. Not just for free, but even on shared hosting plans they paid for. People paid money to share their "content" for free . GOML

"get on my level" - for those who dont want to urbandictionary the acronym

Oh, I meant get off my lawn

Re: The web's original sin

#59

Post by ivansavz »

DanielStraight wrote: post #16

I find it strange he didn't mention selling something as a possible way to make money. Free web content that you can buy in other forms (ebook, paper book) or buy extras for (videos, email support, courses) seems like a pretty common model these days. In the board and card game world, you've got games where you can download a PDF board or PDF cards but if you want a professionally produced version, you can buy it. In…

Good point. The "book format" in particular has a lot of future. For example, packaging a series of blog posts into a short ebook on a topic, then investing time to polish the content can turn into an excellent "product" to be sold through the website. Fuck ads for other people's products, advertise your own!

It makes sense for blog posts to be free since they are "draft quality," but once an editor has put some thought into making a coherent and comprehensive guide to subject X, it's totally OK to charge for this extra work. And I mean "OK" not as a moral "is allowed to," but in the market "people will buy"-sense.

The extra work the author invests is called information distillation. The author "processes" a lot of information (primary sources like books, research, other webpages) and produces a comprehensive summary of the topic in question. Blog posts are "best effort" acts of information distillation; books are more thorough and deliberate efforts.

I can attest from personal experience that people are interested in information distillation today (I sell math books). I think this trend will continue into the future—the more information out there, the more people will need secondary sources to help them make sense of it.

Re: The web's original sin

#60

Post by mikeash »

notahacker wrote: post #53
mikeash wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a bad analogy. The web wasn't built as a real-time one-to-one communications medium, it was built as a way to publish documents. Later on, enough stuff got added to the system to enable comment forms and chat boxes and whatnot, but the basis of the thing was always document publishing. Take a look at the original web site: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html That's clearly a non-interact…

I don't know about the OP, but I'd say many objections to "content" is less to do with it describing a web composed of documents and more to do with it describing a web composed of documents conceived as a means rather than an end. "Content" is to a large extend marketing shorthand for "text which improves our conversion funnel or sells CPM slots by being well optimised for search queries and/or social clicks". Which…

"Content" is to a large extend marketing shorthand for "text which improves our conversion funnel or sells CPM slots by being well optimised for search queries and/or social clicks".

I guess that's the disconnect. I see that some people use it that way, but to me it's far more broad than that. I would certainly refer to blogs and other such things as "content" too.

Post reply on HN