31–40 of 183 posts
I implemented this functionality for a certain SaaS with many large customers. I made sure to have a scalable way to measure unique viewers across different time frames. Only after we launched it, we realized all our competitors just put a random number that looked nice.
Bit of a meta comment but: I love the author's rewriting of javascript into "human-readable" code[1], while retaining the same visual style as code written in an editor. It feels like an excellent way of representing what is inside the programmer's mind when writing the code, and I will probably try to replicate it next time I coach a new student. [1] https://miro.medium.com/max/700/1*aXnY3j41mO3AShqSGiYgBA.png
Not sure if I'm the only one, but I start writing code like this quite often. At first it's "comment only" to describe what I'm trying to achieve and then I'm adding functional code in/around it. I find that really helpful, although some might say there's some "comment bloat" in the end, as I often keep the comments, too.
As shop owner that switches to Woo I dig into many plugins the last year and only find a very few of those attention and countdown plugins that are kinda honest. - The majority of 'users currently see this project' are looking a few hours back instead of being 100% fake. All of them allow faking the numbers somehow tho. There are plenty of 100% fake ones out there too tho. - 'xxx just bought' things are usually real…
> In the end I wrote many of that stuff my own with real data If you implemented the "looking at" functionality, are you keeping a connection open to the client (say, via WS) to determine if they are still looking as in keeping the tab open (or opencv with camera access to see that they are "actually" looking hehe), or are you just looking a few minutes back instead of hours? How would one honestly implement this fea…
There's no need to put any more thought in than that. It's a single design element, and you're not doing a scientific study or collecting marketing data here. This is fine.
Is the idea that multiple people are looking at a product supposed to inspire me to purchase it? I really struggle to understand the logic.
The first time we booked a place on Booking.com, we were anxious the entire afternoon. Not sure if things have changed, but at that time they made it feel like a racing game, flashy countdowns, everything but THAT place sold out in the area, OTHER PEOPLE WERE LOOKING AT IT, several email notifications in the span of hours because we haven't decided yet, and now it might be TOO LATE if we refresh the page. I wouldn't…
Also, their support is abysmal. Often when hotels fail to provide rooms as advertised, they play a "not my fault" game with the hotels, where the hotels claim they can't refund because the money is stuck with Booking.com while Booking.com claim the money is in the hotels account. Then they give you a "20% refund" that you can use on your next purchase there.
It also happened twice to me that they "double charges" me, with a pre-charge (that is deleted in a few weeks) and then with a real pay, which might leave you without money in your credit card if you have a small credit limit.
It is like all those ".io" games (ex: https://agar.io/ ). You are supposed to play online against other players, but many of these games put you against bots instead. This is evident when you lose internet and the game still runs. The original idea was to first populate the game with bots and progressively replace them with real players as the game become more popular, then developers realized that if they could get…
It is like all those ".io" games (ex: https://agar.io/ ). You are supposed to play online against other players, but many of these games put you against bots instead. This is evident when you lose internet and the game still runs. The original idea was to first populate the game with bots and progressively replace them with real players as the game become more popular, then developers realized that if they could get…
Eh, maybe just have the bots be part of the server software. They're not that expensive. But cool idea.
The first time we booked a place on Booking.com, we were anxious the entire afternoon. Not sure if things have changed, but at that time they made it feel like a racing game, flashy countdowns, everything but THAT place sold out in the area, OTHER PEOPLE WERE LOOKING AT IT, several email notifications in the span of hours because we haven't decided yet, and now it might be TOO LATE if we refresh the page. I wouldn't…
This is super ballpark estimates, could be order of magnitude different, but the idea is that there is enormous incentive to push people to book, its the same as the example in the article, pushing people to buy. Purely because the pay-per-click is so expensive, you need ROI > 1 to survive.
Those companies are in survivor mode, and anything that is even remotely legal, or can be defended in court, is allowed and encouraged.
Thing like 70% off on pair of shoes, that just had their price increased by 90% for 1 minute, just so there was a record in the database that they actually had higher price, nobody cares that they never sold at the high price.
Companies constantly push the legal boundary.
It is like all those ".io" games (ex: https://agar.io/ ). You are supposed to play online against other players, but many of these games put you against bots instead. This is evident when you lose internet and the game still runs. The original idea was to first populate the game with bots and progressively replace them with real players as the game become more popular, then developers realized that if they could get…
You know what strikes me as a cheap way to run a bunch of bots to populate servers? Send users a wasm binary for running a bot and run several bots on a user's computer in the bg while they're playing themselves. Maybe check for resource usage and such, though. You can populate enough servers to keep a constant rate of growth up to some reasonable plateau because the amount of bots scales neatly with the amount of pl…
I implemented this functionality for a certain SaaS with many large customers. I made sure to have a scalable way to measure unique viewers across different time frames. Only after we launched it, we realized all our competitors just put a random number that looked nice.
How did that turn out in the end? I presume having a real number is long-term optimal in terms of keeping customers compared to showing a fake number.