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The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)

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Re: The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)

#261

Post by qwerasdf5 »

wpietri wrote: post #103
janandonly wrote: post #70

I feel the same burning hate like a thousand suns for FB/Meta, Google/YT and other platforms that monetize their users. But, let's be frank here: They monetize you and me, us, the users because 1 they can and, 2, they have to. Yes, they have to. Imagine they provided access to their platforms for free. How would the shareholders (your retirement funds included) respond when less profit was made? You see, we view them…

> Yes, they have to. Nope. They chose to. Do some incentives encourage them in this direction? Sure. That's different than them "having to". Actual people are doing this, and they actually made choices toward maximum exploitation of human weakness. They are morally responsible for those choices. I agree that people should leave those platforms and move to open solutions. That would be some good choice-making. But tha…

As I understand it, they have to. Google 'Fiduciary Duty'.

Re: The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)

#262

Post by EA-3167 »

Yujf wrote: post #259
EA-3167 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure you can refuse to use Facebook and Glassdoor and Amazon and Google account authentication, but then you might as well grow a beard, puton some rags and go live in the woods as a hermit. This is a bizarrely extreme form of black and white thinking, and not one I understand. Most of what we do in life isn't about changing the world, it's about managing our experience of it. Few people are deluded enough or so en…

You don't have to change the world, but if no one tries to change things that are bad, they will not change. So don't have a defeatist attitude all the time, but once in a while try to actually have an impact. We will all be much better for it.

There's a difference between being defeatist and going around thinking that your malicious compliance is somehow fixing broken things.

Re: The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)

#263

Post by slg »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #234
slg wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have to be a nonprofit. There is nothing wrong with turning a profit. The problem is when the company's only goal is ever-increasing profit and they are willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of their employees, customers, and community to achieve it.

In the context you are using it, "profit" has a very specific meaning that's a little incongruent with what you're trying to say. In that context, "profit" is the idea that earnings above cost are distributed to shareholders. The stock market mechanism then guarantees that companies unconcerned with that sort of profit will see someone gobble up the shares once they dip low enough (and they will), install a new board…

> The stock market mechanism then guarantees that companies unconcerned with that sort of profit will see someone gobble up the shares once they dip low enough (and they will), install a new board of directors, and dismantle the company for parts or some other endeavor-ending inevitability.

There are all sorts of ways to defend against a hostile takeover like this. I already mentioned Zuckerberg having majority control of the voting shares despite the company being public. There was also the attempted takeover of Netflix a decade ago that was prevented with a poison pill to issue more shares.

Re: The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)

#264

Post by dasyatidprime »

mindslight wrote: post #159
duxup wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And generally users of the web want things to be free / don't want to pay directly for these utilities. I feel like we as internet users are a big part of the math here.

I'm happy paying for a few personal cloud servers, more than I need perhaps. I'm happy paying for a solid Internet connection, electricity, computers, hard drives, UPSs, etc. I'm happy for paying for VOIP PSTN connectivity, mobile connectivity, etc. With very few exceptions (mostly arising out of expedience), I do not pay for software . I honestly do wish the dynamics of the software ecosystem were different, so that…

Do you currently pay for much or any of the libre software you use? Of course many published libre software packages have no workable monetization scheme attached, but many of them have a facility for donations, and then there are major foundations and aggregators (of which I regrettably do not have a good list compiled at the moment).

Re: The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)

#265

Post by Tanoc »

OJFord wrote: post #150
lamontcg wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which every for-profit company seems to wind up doing these days.

Every for-profit public company. And so they should/have to.

This is relatively new behaviour that only showed up around fifteen years ago, during the crash. Before then publicly traded companies such as DuPont or IBM would settle for a very gradual increase if it meant they had a stable market and dependable revenue stream. Especially if they had majority control of that market, since they could already squeeze customers for whatever amount they wanted, as Bell and Microsoft did. It was the smaller volatile companies like Keurig that disregarded five and ten year market projections and went for massive market expansion and quarterly or yearly profit increases because they were competing against giants in their respective or adjacent industries and needed to grow big enough fast enough not to be squashed. Between 2000 and 2008 the DOW and NASDAQ indexes stayed around the same level, then they cratered in 2008, and by 2011 they just started going up and up and up like they had back between 1982 and 1989. Except so far we're twelve years in and it hasn't slowed down, unlike the slowdown that started in 1987.

Companies changed up the way they did things starting in 2008 in order to survive, but sticking to that short term panic survival tactic is coming to a head. They've done almost everything possible in order to ensure growth, but the public just can't handle it and things are starting to collapse under the weight of near maximum monetization.

Re: The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)

#266

Post by DelightOne »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #229
TheAngush wrote: post #186

I had an experience like this today when I tried to use GlassDoor for the first time. As a student making my first ever job applications, I wanted to see what salaries and work environments were like at particular employers. GlassDoor did the same scroll-locking tactic (so an element zapper like Ublock Origin's wouldn't resolve the issue), instructing me to register or sign in to view any information. So I registered…

Dev tools, look at the html and body element, and uncheck overflow:hidden. Plus a strategic delete or two on the DOM tree.

Why can't UBlock Origin do that?

Re: The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)

#267

Post by jclulow »

des1nderlase wrote: post #132
janandonly wrote: post #70

I feel the same burning hate like a thousand suns for FB/Meta, Google/YT and other platforms that monetize their users. But, let's be frank here: They monetize you and me, us, the users because 1 they can and, 2, they have to. Yes, they have to. Imagine they provided access to their platforms for free. How would the shareholders (your retirement funds included) respond when less profit was made? You see, we view them…

So you said it yourself, it's not really a 100% utility as "someone" decides what is a spam and what's not. Try running an email service yourself. Being open protocol still gives leverage to someone to decide who can and cannot use the service, and who can monetize ads.

What _does_ count as a utility, then? I expect anything that is considered (or even legally classified) as a utility is going to have rules and "someone" to decide who to kick out; e.g., the electrical grid, or the water supply, or the telephone system, or council rubbish collection, etc.

Re: The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)

#268

Post by w_for_wumbo »

jitix wrote: post #134
guestbest wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a Trojan Horse pattern, really. They give away the service for free membership with billions of VC until their competitors collapse or fade away, then they start becoming more aggressive with ads and/or charging for premium access which used to be free.

This is not new, Gillette used to give out free razors to get people used to their ecosystem and get recurring revenue. It’s just more “in your face” now.

I think Nestlé wins the most egregious example; where they gave free baby formula in developing countries for just long enough for the mothers to stop producing milk and then started charging them for the right to feed their babies.

Re: The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)

#269

Post by mhuffman »

fwlr wrote: post #244
roughly wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insta definitely uses IP blocks to force login walls, but I don’t think it’s anti-scraping, because the limit seems to be like 3 images before you get redirected to log in - it’s way too low and too much of a pain in the ass to normal users to be intentionally anti-scraping and unintentionally anti-logged-out-users.

The fact that it pushes anonymous viewers to log in or sign up is definitely a positive (for their conversion rate metric, if nothing else), and that might be the main reason the number of images is so low. But the specific mechanism of IP blocking that is used to achieve restriction - that is anti-scraping, pure and simple.

... except, that "pro" scrapers use parallelized calls from rolling ip addresses. It is one of the only ways to scrape things like Youtube... so I hear!
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