A golden age of consumer convenience is passing • Hacker News Board

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#91

Post by Theodores » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 5:02 PM UTC

wswope wrote: post #67

rocmcd wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WTF is up with Nord? I always felt that VPNs were a pretty niche tech tool, but I see those ads freaking everywhere. Are there that many people that use VPNs that warrant the ad investment?

It’s economics: much like with car insurance, the market is a zero-sum game because the quality providers all more or less have equivalent levels of service - thus advertising becomes the most effective way to capture revenue, because prospective buyers don’t generally have complete enough information to e.g. assess a firm’s “operational excellence” or technical qualities on their own.

That is a really good point.

Furthermore, it is marginal cost for the content creating peoples. They just have to read the script and roll the supplied graphics. If they get $1 from total sales then it is worthwhile if you are only getting 2K views. Maybe these VPNs offer a minimum fee and then commission on top so that there is always a payday, albeit small.

None of them seem to record bespoke content where they demo the VPN for real or show how it works.

The message has pivoted to getting content from region locked services such as Netflix.

With car insurance (the last time I was watching TV, some years ago) they had rather silly 'meerkats' with Russian stereotype characters selling the insurance, with the people collecting the fluffy toy versions of the 'meerkats'. If you renew your insurance every year you get another 'meerkat' and soon the goal is to collect the set.

Often it is the company that pays the insurance but the employee gets the 'meerkat', maybe to post to eBay...

My niece's inheritance is mostly 'meerkat' toys and a few empty beer bottles.

I am holding out with OpenVPN on a VPS until cuddly toys get given out with VPNs and they are advertised in every YT show with AI generated cuddly toys with AI accents.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#92

Post by NalNezumi » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 5:08 PM UTC

pdimitar wrote: post #38

I have YouTube premium and download everything that I like. A home NAS is extremely handy like that. Mine is not even 10TB and I still have more than a year worth of watching. Also it's not illegal because I don't distribute anything. I use a local website run by volunteers that ask permission of publishing houses before putting every scanned & OCR'd & spell-checked book in their online library. Again, not illegal, t…

> They will keep changing the narrative ad infinitum until everyone is dependent on them at birth.

Welcome to life: https://youtu.be/IFe9wiDfb0E

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#93

Post by Semaphor » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 5:09 PM UTC

pdpi wrote: post #73

AstralStorm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam is successful because its advertising is rather low key, showing a popup with offers, and providing a search, directory plus suggestions. Their gain is from consumer analytics too. (They also take a cut for using their platform from the game developers or publishers. It also provides some added value like achievements, basic social media in forms of forums and chat, some (somewhat broken at times) controller ha…

It’s important to take Steam DRM in context. In a world where DRM was becoming more intrusive by the day, and you had to contend with every game having its own unique way to mess your system up in its fight against piracy, Steam provided one single DRM system that almost everybody agrees to use. For consumers, worse than no DRM, but miles ahead of the status quo it replaced. Also, Steam does have an offline mode. You…

It's also important to remember that SteamWorks DRM is optional. There are many games that will work without steam installed.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#94

Post by shakow » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 5:09 PM UTC

AstralStorm wrote: post #40

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #13

Media embedded advertising has already been a thing for years, but companies hate leaving money on the table so they cannot resist the temptation of showing more ads. I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up. You're competing with piracy, but you throw ads in my face. I can download any show or movie I wan…

Steam is successful because its advertising is rather low key, showing a popup with offers, and providing a search, directory plus suggestions. Their gain is from consumer analytics too. (They also take a cut for using their platform from the game developers or publishers. It also provides some added value like achievements, basic social media in forms of forums and chat, some (somewhat broken at times) controller ha…

> "Steam DRM" - requirement for an online connection to use the downloaded application

It's not a requirement. It's to the discretion of the game developer on whether or not they want to require it to play their game.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#95

Post by polishdude20 » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 5:11 PM UTC

AstralStorm wrote: post #40

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #13

Media embedded advertising has already been a thing for years, but companies hate leaving money on the table so they cannot resist the temptation of showing more ads. I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up. You're competing with piracy, but you throw ads in my face. I can download any show or movie I wan…

Steam is successful because its advertising is rather low key, showing a popup with offers, and providing a search, directory plus suggestions. Their gain is from consumer analytics too. (They also take a cut for using their platform from the game developers or publishers. It also provides some added value like achievements, basic social media in forms of forums and chat, some (somewhat broken at times) controller ha…

What also helps if having a non garbage client. The Xbox windows client? Are you kidding me Microsoft?

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#96

Post by no_time » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 5:14 PM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #28

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #13

Media embedded advertising has already been a thing for years, but companies hate leaving money on the table so they cannot resist the temptation of showing more ads. I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up. You're competing with piracy, but you throw ads in my face. I can download any show or movie I wan…

> “ I can download any show or movie I want and have it playing in minutes without having to deal with multi platform bullshit.” Is this as true as it once was? It seems most of the old trackers are offline or dead now. I’d guess because of the success of streaming services finally meeting the market demand. It’s also possible I’m just old and out of the loop now.

The availability of content is still superior to paid offerings. The problem is discoverability.

10+ years ago you could get a well seeded torrent anything by googling "anything+torrent". Nowadays you can still get anything but you have to be way more tech savvy and have to break out of your comfort zone. This could mean invite only sites,Russian speaking sites,Fiddling with baidu download scripts etc.

Seeing how much activity peak mininova had[0] compared to the public tracker offerings of today makes me a bit sad. There are still great places to leech some warez but "the more the merrier" is always true for p2p based sharing :^)

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090114215808/http://www.minino...

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#97

Post by Jiro » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 5:18 PM UTC

no_time wrote: post #96

gonehome wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “ I can download any show or movie I want and have it playing in minutes without having to deal with multi platform bullshit.” Is this as true as it once was? It seems most of the old trackers are offline or dead now. I’d guess because of the success of streaming services finally meeting the market demand. It’s also possible I’m just old and out of the loop now.

The availability of content is still superior to paid offerings. The problem is discoverability. 10+ years ago you could get a well seeded torrent anything by googling "anything+torrent". Nowadays you can still get anything but you have to be way more tech savvy and have to break out of your comfort zone. This could mean invite only sites,Russian speaking sites,Fiddling with baidu download scripts etc. Seeing how muc…

I've literally looked for things that I could reasonably expect to be on the Internet and couldn't find them on the Internet. The newest hot thing is still available, of course, but an obscure 5 years old show may not always be.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#98

Post by buzer » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 5:20 PM UTC

vladvasiliu wrote: post #43

hotpotamus wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt the media company lawyers would see it that way. And while they're ghouls, they'd have a point too. What counts as paying? I've got a colleague who would never download a movie illegally; he simply has a constant stream of Netflix DVDs (they're still doing that in case you thought that business was totally dead) that he rips and then sends back. He's paying someone for content, right?

I think the difference is that if you buy the cd, even second hand, and keep it , you're fine because you own it. At least in Europe, there's the whole "personal copy tax" that's levied on all storage media as well as a "private copying exception" to copyright law.

In Finland you are not allowed make a copy if you need to bypass a strong copy protection. According to decision from 2008 from appeals court (supreme court did not grant appeal) DVD's CSS is considered to be such. Given that it's not very strong from technical point of view and that pretty much all CDs do contain some form of copy protection it's hard to say if you are allowed to make personal copies of most of the commercial CDs.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#99

Post by notsapiensatall » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 5:21 PM UTC

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #13

Media embedded advertising has already been a thing for years, but companies hate leaving money on the table so they cannot resist the temptation of showing more ads. I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up. You're competing with piracy, but you throw ads in my face. I can download any show or movie I wan…

Among other things, Steam is not operated by a publicly-traded company.

They don't need to answer to faceless shareholders at the end of every quarter. They can settle for making whatever they consider to be "enough money" without chasing endless growth.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#100

Post by wongarsu » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 5:24 PM UTC

AstralStorm wrote: post #40

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #13

Media embedded advertising has already been a thing for years, but companies hate leaving money on the table so they cannot resist the temptation of showing more ads. I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up. You're competing with piracy, but you throw ads in my face. I can download any show or movie I wan…

Steam is successful because its advertising is rather low key, showing a popup with offers, and providing a search, directory plus suggestions. Their gain is from consumer analytics too. (They also take a cut for using their platform from the game developers or publishers. It also provides some added value like achievements, basic social media in forms of forums and chat, some (somewhat broken at times) controller ha…

Steam's most important advertising is actually quite in your face, and used to occupy a good part of the gaming sphere for a couple of weeks each year: their sales with discounts between 50-90% (calculated from the current "regular price" which for older games is often already far below original retail price). They've switched it up in recent years, making the summer sales tamer in exchange for more weekly sales, but the concept stays the same: sell "old" games for prices you can't refuse. And that's why people don't mind: when they tell you it's a great offer it genuinely is.

Everyone else in gaming is fighting for the newest releases. That's the battleground XBox and Playstation use, and that's where newcomers like the Epic Game Store try to beat Steam. Steam meanwhile is pretty toned down on new releases, and is going for long tail sales instead.