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Inside a viral website

notfunatparties.substack.com

221–230 of 305 posts

Re: Inside a viral website

#221

The main takeaway for me: > In my day job, we use Next.js for almost everything we build. It’s a framework built on top of React that just strips out almost all the complexity of building fairly complicated websites. Obviously, this wasn’t a complicated website, but I went with what I’m most familiar with. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail :D Edit to say that I think it's an amazing little wholesom…

I am an amateur dev and since I more or less learned Vue and the Quasar framework, every web site looks like a Vue&Quasar nail to me. It works - i can pop out sites that work in a mall amount of time. They will never be istheshipstillstuck.com-famous or cnn.com-loaded, or never be used in some countries where loading 10 MB of JS is a problem. they are used by me, on my 1000/400 Mbps connection, or by my children on a…

This is the point. Why do you all think just in damn frameworks!? There’s a thing called HTML5+CSS+JS. You could have built that static page in no time with that, that’s my surprisingly misunderstood point here.

Re: Inside a viral website

#222
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out any privacy policy that says they will never share or sell your data; the two boilerplate exceptions are law enforcement and transfering ownership of the parent entity. Two pretty big loopholes.

Uhh those seem like two really small loopholes. Buying the whole company makes sense. What is the alternative, the purchasing company has to accept that they'll purge all user accounts? Law enforcement.. What do you want them to do? Turn down a legal court order and say "naaa"?

> Uhh those seem like two really small loopholes. Buying the whole company makes sense. What is the alternative, the purchasing company has to accept that they'll purge all user accounts?

Why not? The alternative is to allow a business model, in which you start a company with the sole purpose of vacuuming up data and delivering it to highest bidder by getting acquired.

Re: Inside a viral website

#223
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the last 10 years or so I've been running a free-to-use Morse Code online radio thing. It has cost me about $1000 to host so far, and has a couple of hundred DAUs. The users are not shy about feature requests, and they're not shy about complaining that I haven't implemented their feature requests. So I made a pledge to the userbase that if they collectively donate $1000 to the site, I'll start working on v2. I po…

So, a couple months ago, I started using a site for a game I play that provides maps, info on items in the game, current prices for the global market that players can trade on, etc. You can link it to your Patreon account, and if you're a patron for $5/mo, the site gives you historical data on the market, and a few other useful features for the game. There's also a Discord for updates, features requests, general dev…

I understand your point, but this is just a plain old subscription.

Re: Inside a viral website

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question for someone who is not a web developer: why not use Next.js?

if you need a static site, there are a thousand generators out there much easier to use than React+nextjs. Some of these are easy enough that a non-developer can use and update. Using code to generate static sites is not new or particularly interesting. We have been caching PHP and Perl sites so that they are "static" since the dawn of the web. CDNs are really really old now. It feels like a new batch of developers d…

A lot of developers are also so caught into framework thinking that they seem to forget that writing html5, with CSS and some lightweight JavaScript library if you need any is an absolutely elegant way to build a modern static website. It seems to me that too many web devs can’t conceive anymore that a static website can be WRITTEN easily and fast and does NOT always have to be generated by a generator or a framework.

Re: Inside a viral website

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am an amateur dev and since I more or less learned Vue and the Quasar framework, every web site looks like a Vue&Quasar nail to me. It works - i can pop out sites that work in a mall amount of time. They will never be istheshipstillstuck.com-famous or cnn.com-loaded, or never be used in some countries where loading 10 MB of JS is a problem. they are used by me, on my 1000/400 Mbps connection, or by my children on a…

This is the point. Why do you all think just in damn frameworks!? There’s a thing called HTML5+CSS+JS. You could have built that static page in no time with that, that’s my surprisingly misunderstood point here.

quasar create hello

cd hello

quasar dev

→ I have a page and a dev server

After adding a few lines I have the components all in the right place.

quasar build

→ I have my static page

One line changed, I have a PWA

I will not do a PhD in development, I need to have simple reactive apps quickly.

Of course I could have use HTML/CSS/JS and write everything from scratch (been there, done that). Of course they will load 2 x faster, so I will not have to wait the 200 ms I do now.

Development today is so much easier. When I started 30 years ago it was truly an adventure. Today my children are coding simple stuff after one afternoon of showing them.

So yay to the frameworks, modules and others things that help people who just wish to build something fast.

Have you ever bought furniture or do you start by taking your axe and visiting the nearest forest?

Re: Inside a viral website

#226

One thing I don't understand about monetizing on the Internet. I see the author considered ads, tried an affiliate scheme and even did an NFT. But what about plain old, honest to God payment? Couldn't they just put a paragraph of text on the site, "Hey folks, I'm worried about hosting costs, if you find this page useful, please [Donate]", with a button redirecting to Paypal or Stripe or whatever, collect the money an…

For Bucket Brigade I ask for donations [1] which has covered about 50% of my costs so far [2]. I think how well this works depends a lot on how useful people find your site vs what your costs are?

[1] https://echo.jefftk.com/#About

[2] https://www.jefftk.com/bucket-brigade-payments

Re: Inside a viral website

#227

One thing I don't understand about monetizing on the Internet. I see the author considered ads, tried an affiliate scheme and even did an NFT. But what about plain old, honest to God payment? Couldn't they just put a paragraph of text on the site, "Hey folks, I'm worried about hosting costs, if you find this page useful, please [Donate]", with a button redirecting to Paypal or Stripe or whatever, collect the money an…

Do you think people just haven’t tried this, or something? They didn’t think of it?

People try other things because this doesn’t work, in general.

Re: Inside a viral website

#228

The main takeaway for me: > In my day job, we use Next.js for almost everything we build. It’s a framework built on top of React that just strips out almost all the complexity of building fairly complicated websites. Obviously, this wasn’t a complicated website, but I went with what I’m most familiar with. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail :D Edit to say that I think it's an amazing little wholesom…

Honest question for someone who is not a web developer: why not use Next.js?

From someone who codes for pleasure: there are simpler frameworks (my favorite is Quasar and Vue - I needed an afternoon to learn that coming with a crude HTML/CSS/JS basic knowledge)

Re: Inside a viral website

#229

One thing I don't understand about monetizing on the Internet. I see the author considered ads, tried an affiliate scheme and even did an NFT. But what about plain old, honest to God payment? Couldn't they just put a paragraph of text on the site, "Hey folks, I'm worried about hosting costs, if you find this page useful, please [Donate]", with a button redirecting to Paypal or Stripe or whatever, collect the money an…

> They had 50 million views. If 0.01% of these visitors left a dollar

If it wasn't a simple meme website to spend 5 seconds on and never visit again, it would not have gotten 50 million views. Trying to monetize that is like squeezing blood from a stone.

I imagine that's one reason why he's posting this from a Substack domain.

Re: Inside a viral website

#230
post #86

One thing I don't understand about monetizing on the Internet. I see the author considered ads, tried an affiliate scheme and even did an NFT. But what about plain old, honest to God payment? Couldn't they just put a paragraph of text on the site, "Hey folks, I'm worried about hosting costs, if you find this page useful, please [Donate]", with a button redirecting to Paypal or Stripe or whatever, collect the money an…

For the last 10 years or so I've been running a free-to-use Morse Code online radio thing. It has cost me about $1000 to host so far, and has a couple of hundred DAUs. The users are not shy about feature requests, and they're not shy about complaining that I haven't implemented their feature requests. So I made a pledge to the userbase that if they collectively donate $1000 to the site, I'll start working on v2. I po…

Don't call them donations. Look at what reddit did: people can "give gold" to people for comments that they think were great. All it does is add some icon to a comment and put the person in a "gold club".

In games, people will buy so many visual improvements that add nothing but glam to their character.

Discord does... something, I can't remember what exactly, with their "turbo" and IIRC it costs discord cents, but the user pays dollars.

People will pay for the dumbest things. Give them a reason to sign up, add some kind of paid interaction that changes something visual or makes a dumb sound, add some tier system with context relevant names, and people might really pay.

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