Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't items usually cost more if broken out individually?
Isn't that what he said?
I posted that as I was making coffee. Let's pretend I put emphasis on "usually", or something.
Who's doing this to my internet?
101–110 of 306 posts
Re: Who's doing this to my internet?
#102I feel old. This article begins by pining for the good, old-fashioned 'net of 2012. I know that I'm not the most attentive person on this topic, but honestly I don't feel like the big picture has changed much in years. Services like Twitter started up, grew wildly, and then looked for some way to make money for pretty much that whole time. Social networks sprout up; some make it, some don't. Big companies do some coo…
It's just a combination of pessimism with a few random anecdotes. Reddit being "ruined" has so little to do with The Verge having a lot of ad tech in its pages they could really only be grouped together in the category of, "Things I don't like."
Re: Who's doing this to my internet?
#103I think the author doesn't realize that what's changed about the Internet isn't the technology. It's the people that changed. Today folks expect to get things for free with adverts. But now people don't want the adverts either so they use uBlock (I know I do). So, what's left for content and technology/service creators to do? I think micropayments would be a viable solution if a platform that's fairly secure and non-…
Except we tried micropayments about a bazillion times and they have universally failed. People don't want yet another monthly bill, which is what micropayments would be. You'd "subscribe" to various sites and services and it would eat at your bitcoin or whatever that you would need to replenish monthly. Ads aren't as terrible as the average INTJ male makes them out to be. They're trivial to block as well. The OP's po…
The problem is the blocking of the adverts. Even if the percentage of users blocking is below a certain percentage like 20% or lower, that's still money lost to the ad firms. They won't just sit idly by while we use uBlock and the like. They'll double down on the whole matter. Probably start with interstitial ads, but it could become as annoying as blocking any browser that runs an adblocker extension.
Re: Who's doing this to my internet?
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm not going to risk $1.50 to an unknown website. $1.50 isn't much of a risk you know, even if you don't know the website. You'd probably even get the song! Also, if a song is on Audio CD, it's probably on iTunes too. > in the current atmosphere, $1.50 seems like it's too much This makes no sense. If you're a true music lover, a great song will give you countless hours of enjoyment and appreciation. Do you serious…
I don't think it's a problem with $1.50 in absolute terms. It's $1.50 compared to $0.99 from other vendors. Artists have set the expectation that songs are worth $0.99 by selling them for that amount elsewhere. FWIW, I don't buy a lot of music - I use free Pandora and put up with the ads.
Music execs set that expectation, and artists just have to live with it. http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/branding/1559631/...
"During those meetings it was Warner executives, not Jobs as is commonly thought, who suggested tracks be sold for 99 cents. At the time, many labels wanted to price tracks at $3.49 each. But not Warner.
“When we told Steve, he looked at us like we just gave him a gift,” Vidich recalls. “We knew we needed to alter consumer behavior in a big way. Below $1 was an emotional threshold for people. It became an acceptable impulse purchase.”
Re: Who's doing this to my internet?
#105I also like free things and don't like it when they are taken away from me. The author had ample opportunity to pay for content but she didn't and now we're here.
So I guess the answer is "she is". Vicki Boykis is doing this to her internet.
Re: Who's doing this to my internet?
#106This article has made me realize that I'm about to start paying for sites to show me ads, and paying a lot. What do I mean?
We just bought a gorgeous 15+ acre property outside of Austin with all kinds of outdoorsy stuff that I like -- horse barn, stocked pond, creek, salt water pool, woods with bike trails, etc. I've convinced my wife, a city girl, that we should all (we have three small kids) move out there and just try it out. The big problem is that there is no wired internet service of any kind at that address.
Luckily, I have clear line of sight to a cluster of cell towers less than a mile away, so we get 5 bars of every carrier out there. I'll be starting out on ATT's ~$375/month plan which is capped at 50GB/month with $10 per GB(!!) overage charges.
This means that for the first time in my life, I'm actually considering installing ad blocking software on our machines, because I just don't want to pay for tons and tons of ads. There are so. many. freaking. ads., and the web is so slow now. Those of us who actually pay for our bandwidth are getting screwed.
I'm happy to pay for your content. I'm not happy to pay for your ads. There has to be a better way.
Re: Who's doing this to my internet?
#107Really enjoyed this post, but I think some of her thoughts point to the root of the problem. > I started by trying to buy each of them separately. > $1.50 is a lot to pay for a song So she wanted to compensate each artist for the songs she loved, but only at an amount of her choosing? I'm assuming she was expecting 99 cents, so we're essentially haggling over $0.50 here. This shows why the advertising model is so pre…
The credit card situation is a completely separate concern, but a very big one. I still don't understand why there's no better international online payment method. There's a great Dutch online payment method, but that's only used by Dutch sites and a few really big ones (like Steam) that can afford to implement national payment systems. Why that system hasn't been implemented on a larger scale, I still don't know.
There is a better and safer online payment method its called Bitcoin
But the existing financial and payment companies realize that this new technology makes them largely redundant hence they lobby and make it hard to acquire bitcoin for the average person with existing payment methods.
The attitude of banks and regulators towards bitcoin is the same of the motor industry and governments towards the electric car, somewhere between dismissive to fearful.
Give it time tho' I suppose, after all the same arguments were made by many industries against the early web and hell computers for that matter.
Re: Who's doing this to my internet?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
The credit card situation is a completely separate concern, but a very big one. I still don't understand why there's no better international online payment method. There's a great Dutch online payment method, but that's only used by Dutch sites and a few really big ones (like Steam) that can afford to implement national payment systems. Why that system hasn't been implemented on a larger scale, I still don't know.
My bank offers free Virtual Credit Cards with a configurable limit. I've heard that some US banks (BofA?) do as well. That limits the exposure to the amount of the payment. And you can still chargeback.
Sounds useful if you can make one credit card for each payment. But you first need to configure that before you can actually pay. What we need (and what Netherland has) is something that just works right away where you really only authorize that one payment without exposing any vulnerable information, using the security of your own bank.
Re: Who's doing this to my internet?
#109" There have to be business models that allow the creativity of sites like XKCD, Reddit, SoundCloud, and Tumblr, to flourish. " There, in the last sentence is the relevant insight. But, sadly, here the post stops. I must admit, for me the most relevant information was google using the computers mike through chrome. I am shocked how far companies can go and do go. I think this finally ends the discussion about google…
The "OK Google" voice feature for Chrome is opt-in, not enabled by default.
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=500922#c...
Re: Who's doing this to my internet?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
The credit card situation is a completely separate concern, but a very big one. I still don't understand why there's no better international online payment method. There's a great Dutch online payment method, but that's only used by Dutch sites and a few really big ones (like Steam) that can afford to implement national payment systems. Why that system hasn't been implemented on a larger scale, I still don't know.
My bank offers free Virtual Credit Cards with a configurable limit. I've heard that some US banks (BofA?) do as well. That limits the exposure to the amount of the payment. And you can still chargeback.
Citi offers this.