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The 'Fuck You' Pattern

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Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#511

Post by nine_k »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #483
nine_k wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. They have redundancy within a DC, like you would expect from a NAS or SAN. They don't have the cross-DC redundancy like S3 does. If a DC goes offline, so does your data. I'm updating my comment.

How often do entire DCs suffer catastrophic loss? Not just an hour or two of connectivity outage, but “meteor-strike”-type scenarios - or more likely: a fire that takes out an entire rack or row of racks? How often does it happen in developed countries (where fire fighting infrastructure is in-place and building fire-codes are enforced) vs worldwide average? Has it ever happened to a brand-name cloud provider (AWS, A…

A power or connectivity loss may happen. A DC does not need to be destroyed or something, just a backhoe acting up somewhere.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#513

Post by tpetry »

dylanwenzlau wrote: post #474
nine_k wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go an and run a site that serves massive amounts of cat pictures for peanuts! Well, yes, serving static HTML is easy. Serving images is kind of not hard either, because you have free unlimited traffic, don't you? Some hosting plans offer it. They just limit the egress bandwidth. So maybe you need a few more servers to cope with it, just like $50 a pop. You're not gonna need any CDN, people further away from your DC w…

Hi. I run imgflip.com, a fine purveyor of cat pictures, among others. It serves ~100TB of bandwidth and hundreds of millions of image views per month with total infrastructure cost below 5k per month. I believe Imgflip completely avoids dark patterns because I abhor them and strive to provide positive value to humanity, although I would love for you to share your opinions to the contrary. Imgflip is also 80% profit.…

It would be really interesting reading an article on what you do different on what each part costs. Effectively how image hosting services work nowadays or if nothing changed in the past 15 years.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#514

Post by novok »

dylanwenzlau wrote: post #474
nine_k wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go an and run a site that serves massive amounts of cat pictures for peanuts! Well, yes, serving static HTML is easy. Serving images is kind of not hard either, because you have free unlimited traffic, don't you? Some hosting plans offer it. They just limit the egress bandwidth. So maybe you need a few more servers to cope with it, just like $50 a pop. You're not gonna need any CDN, people further away from your DC w…

Hi. I run imgflip.com, a fine purveyor of cat pictures, among others. It serves ~100TB of bandwidth and hundreds of millions of image views per month with total infrastructure cost below 5k per month. I believe Imgflip completely avoids dark patterns because I abhor them and strive to provide positive value to humanity, although I would love for you to share your opinions to the contrary. Imgflip is also 80% profit.…

So I turned off adblock, but I see no ads, even though you have some ad domains. Is imgflip pro the way you make money only? I tried again and all I saw is one banner ad, sometimes. Do you have more ads more frequently, or is it just a relatively minimal amount in general? What is the revenue split between pro & ads? For linus for example, it's about %26 youtube ads, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zt57TWkTF4

How do you deal with moderation? Is it automated, I see you even have comments? Or is it just report buttons and your takedown form? How is the support load?

What is your tech stack? PHP? Python? C#? Java? Golang?

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#516

Post by Thorrez »

privacythrow1 wrote: post #473
6502nerdface wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess someone could argue that it only costs $150 because of the ads. Windows 95 cost well over twice that when it was launched (inflation adjusted). Maybe in the same way that airfares are way cheaper than they were in the 90s, but with much crappier included service.

Certainly the costs in the 90s were tied directly to physical distribution and comparatively lesser market demand. Whereas nowadays digital distribution is king and market demand is ubiquitous. I'd consider those factors to be responsible for driving prices down before I'd give a multinational corporation credit for allowing me to use their product (that I paid for) in return for pervasive advertising.

Windows 95 had a suggested retail price of $209.95

https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19950607&slug...

This magazine from 1995 had a CD full of stock images for sale for $18.98

https://the-avocado.org/2018/03/16/lets-read-pc-magazine-jul...

So I don't think the physical distribution was a large percent of the price.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#517

Post by oblib »

Well I'm late to getting in on this but that blog post made me laugh.

I've done the same thing with my browser and had sites figure out ways to keep me out. I just quit going there.

Didn't really give it much thought though, aside from asking myself "why am I such a tightass?".

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#518

Post by 29athrowaway »

XorNot wrote: post #428
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #57

"Wow, fuck you. I just wanted to look at cats." "Well, fuck you, too. We're here to sell ads." It's not about dark patterns, that's just a second-order effect. It was never about dark patterns. This is the implied agreement. You understand it, or you don't. And if you don't, I guess you haven't been on the web in the past decade or something. What? You thought it was fair that a company spends millions in technical i…

So how does this explain why Windows 10, which I have paid like $150 for per license, is now infested with ads, tracking and online presence - and close to impossible to buy without that. They aren't even trying to put a $ figure on what they think it's worth - because they can't be stopped from doing it. There is no implied agreement, it's exactly as stated.

Windows 11 is more invasive than 10. Why? Because all the anti-privacy bullshit on Windows 10 worked and nobody complained...

We can call this situation the "Fuck yourself" pattern, where you give money to companies so they can innovate in new ways of fucking you.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#519

Post by mojuba »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #207
andai wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda offtopic but Instagram's ads changed my attitude towards ads, and my attitude towards Facebook's creepy level of insight into my life and personality. If they have that data anyway -- and hundreds of companies do -- I might as well benefit from it, and Instagram's ads were the first ones that I actually found interesting. First of all, it was obvious when something was an ad. Second, they weren't intrusive or o…

Personally, I don't particularly care if companies have my data. However, I vehemently don't want them to use it for algorithmic recommendations—including ads—because it puts me in a filter bubble. All these technology companies are making assumptions about the type of person I am, and then molding me into that person. I can't learn about topics I don't see, so if the tech giants are convinced I like technology and c…

Precisely why I tend to look for inspiration in real life rather than social media. Facebook keeps showing me ads for synths and other electronic music related stuff, while in real life I have already moved on to classical music.

I think life in a big city can be your "social feed" without any bias. A big city can offer so many things and ideas if you just go out, meet random people and listen to what they say.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#520

Post by errantmind »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #57

"Wow, fuck you. I just wanted to look at cats." "Well, fuck you, too. We're here to sell ads." It's not about dark patterns, that's just a second-order effect. It was never about dark patterns. This is the implied agreement. You understand it, or you don't. And if you don't, I guess you haven't been on the web in the past decade or something. What? You thought it was fair that a company spends millions in technical i…

Same thing happened with cable TV back in the day. It is about extracting as Mich value as most people will tolerate. There is no escaping ads if a company isn't principally opposed to them and charges directly for their product
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