I'll put in a good word for a return to the days of actually running an online service yourself, instead of just using remote services. If you are the one running the software, you have control.
Don't Be A Free User
81–90 of 177 posts
Re: Don't Be A Free User
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does make you a product. Google can take the millions of you searching for that term and say "hey you people related to that term", and sell them based on the fact that you searched for it an a small percentage of you will click that advertisments. I almost feel that we are lucky that advertisements are more profitable when they are more useful to us, god forbid if A/B testing showed that FULL PAGE FLASHING BANNER…
> No one is ignoring advertising revenue, harvesting millions of users in order to bring in said advertising revenue is the problem. Why is it a problem? So they show me a few adverts... big whoop. I can just ignore them. The issue is, the vast majority of people will never pay for access to online websites/apps (Me included). If you restrict yourself to the business model "charge users", then you've just got rid of…
"I can just ignore them."
Only if you block them. Advertising is not informative, it's coaxing you, and just because you don't consciously decide you're going to read an ad now doesn't mean you get to ignore it.
Re: Don't Be A Free User
#83Loved the article. It was exactly to the point, precise. No more reading first paragraph and ok.. gah...
Also the Disclaimer is a pure win
"DISCLAIMER: I run a paid bookmarking site. Every morning I wake up and dive into my vault of golden coins."
Re: Don't Be A Free User
#84So, where do I go to pay for Twitter?
Re: Don't Be A Free User
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Delicious, for all intents and purposes, WAS shut down, and a new, barely related site was put up in its place. I was a Delicious user for years, with thousands of links tagged, and I continued using it for as long as I could stand under Avos, but the features that they cut and/or broke in the transition finally made me throw up my hands, give up, and switch...first to Trunk.ly, which Avos then bought and shut down (…
What exactly do you have against delicious' new interface ? I continue using it as I always did, and except for the design I barely see any difference. Maybe I'm missing some key feature here ?
1. I used the Delicious plug-in for Firefox. It no longer worked with the "social" part of social bookmarking: I got no suggestions when I clicked on a link.
2. The tagging was completely broken in the plug-in; the plug-in, unlike the new interface, still accepted spaces to separate tags. The new site considered EVERY set of tags to be one big unique tag, so several MONTHS of tagging had to be fixed by hand. There are TONS of complaints about this change, and Avos has ignored them all.
3. The secure RSS feeds were limited to 10 items. I use these as feeds for common links (news, comics, what have you) and several of my link folders were truncated by the arbitrary limit. They kept trying to fix this, but seemed to be incapable. When I realized I'd missed nearly a month of one of my favorite comics, I was quite annoyed.
4. Links were just lost several times; I would bookmark something, and two days later look for the bookmark and it would be gone.
I rarely went to the site, so the design changes were irrelevant to me. It looked like they were trying to make it into a Reddit or Digg or equivalent, though, and having the site move further in that direction and away from how I wanted to use it just seemed like a terrible idea.
But the core problem was that they broke their own API and the core functionality that caused me to want to be there to begin with.
Now in Pinboard I don't get to use the Delicious plug-in any more, but everything else Just Works. The site is clean and easy to use. Pinboard also offers an "archive everything" option that's awesome; so many old links eventually go bad, and having an archive of everything you care enough about to link is just cool.
Re: Don't Be A Free User
#86Anti-free software? I don't think free software is antithetical to the movement for charging a leg and an arm. The hard part is figuring out how to charge an arm and a leg for open source software. However, everyone take the easy way out by closing down on mission critical and open source the rest. I thought of a possible solution that allow everyone to charge an arm and leg while still being open source, or even pub…
I don't think he meant to say "anti-free-software" in that case, but rather "anti-free-software-as-a-service". Specifically it's the "service" part that shouldn't be free, primarily because it's an ongoing cost to keep it running, where as the development of the software is a sunk cost.
Re: Don't Be A Free User
#87This article operates under the very incorrect assumption that paid services never shut down and free services are never carried on by their purchasers. See Flickr or YouTube or PayPal or Skype or Picnik or Grand Central or Picasa or Siri or mySpace or FriendFeed or FeedBurner or even pinboard's biggest competitor Delicious for examples of the latter. As for the former, there's an unlimited number of examples (for a…
Delicious, for all intents and purposes, WAS shut down, and a new, barely related site was put up in its place. I was a Delicious user for years, with thousands of links tagged, and I continued using it for as long as I could stand under Avos, but the features that they cut and/or broke in the transition finally made me throw up my hands, give up, and switch...first to Trunk.ly, which Avos then bought and shut down (…
I'm a user of Delicious for 5 years, over 4000 bookmarks. It was restructured, not shut down.
Re: Don't Be A Free User
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Delicious, for all intents and purposes, WAS shut down, and a new, barely related site was put up in its place. I was a Delicious user for years, with thousands of links tagged, and I continued using it for as long as I could stand under Avos, but the features that they cut and/or broke in the transition finally made me throw up my hands, give up, and switch...first to Trunk.ly, which Avos then bought and shut down (…
What exactly do you have against delicious' new interface ? I continue using it as I always did, and except for the design I barely see any difference. Maybe I'm missing some key feature here ?
They killed the 'network' feature, which was the only feature I used really. I didn't really use the bookmarking.
I used it as a kind of lo-fi Hacker News. I was following the bookmarks of a bunch of interesting people. It would aggregate all the bookmarks of the people I follow into one list.
I found that it was a great way to find interesting stuff on a variety of topics. It was a fantastic complement to HN, so I'm really bummed that they killed it. :-(
I'd love to see pinboard implement this (if they haven't already).
Re: Don't Be A Free User
#89See the irony: pinboard is a clone of delicious' initial version. it copied the idea, the visual design and started selling it.
In every success story of pinboard, I'm very surprised to see how people are impressed from a carbon copy.
Let me introduce myself: I'm a guy who bookmarks everyday for 5 years, on delicious. After the Yahoo acquire, it was redesigned.
And I was annoyed. I started looking at the alternatives. Most of them were crappy except Pinboard. It was a good copy of old Delicious.
And I decided to use it just because it was a good copy of Delicious!
Then, I noticed that Pinboard is not free. And what it provides is nothing but keeping some text on a database. Same idea, almost same design but it's not free. Let the owner explain why it's not free: it's unsocial. and it'll be online unless a 90% percent of users keep paying it.
It's not ethical, Pinboard. If I think that it's not a waste of time, I'll code some scripts to store bookmarks in Dropbox for your users. It'll be under WTF PL license so that you can sell it.
Re: Don't Be A Free User
#90Question: what happens when a guy copies pinboard (in other words, the old delicious) and open sources it?
A community evolves. And some of paid pinboard users switch to the free one because it's open source, some people implement some cool stuff periodically, it'll be maintained forever.
Another question: What happens when pinboard makes less money?
These questions were answered 30 years ago by OSS community.