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American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

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Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#151

Post by peterangular »

enos_feedler wrote: post #69
lowercased wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"agents" and "bots" were proposed as a thing of the future back in the 90s. "you'll have all these agents that can buy stuff for you and book travel and ..." but not if you write it yourself, apparently.

And they are still a growing thing in business with RPA. I guess consumers aren't allowed to access the technology afforded to enterprise employees.

> I guess consumers aren't allowed to access the technology afforded to enterprise employees.

Lots of us built our own stacks and attempt to fly under the radar - things have gotten legally gray over the last two years and corporations have no problem sending their legal team to kick your door down for trivial stuff.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#152

Post by ruined »

arcticbull wrote: post #121
matheusmoreira wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Advertising ruins everything. Everything. They are directly and indirectly responsible for the poor state of consumer technology today. Privacy violations? Advertising. Borderline unusable websites? Advertising. Deliberately addictive social media? Advertising. Almost everything that's wrong with computing today is fueled by this industry's entitlement to our attention. > Imagine how more efficient things could…

Well first you're going to have to convince people to pay for the things they use. History has shown us they have practically zero interest in doing so. People would rather trade their attention for free stuff than their money for priced goods and services. The industry has grown out of this human behavior, not vv. [edit] Humans have a limited capacity for making purchasing decisions. This is why in 20+ years nobody…

people keep saying things like this but really it's a question of what's available

music piracy is basically over thanks to spotify, apple music, youtube, bandcamp, etc

hardly anyone i know torrents movies anymore due to netflix, hbo, hulu

everyone has a phone plan instead of hopping around on free wifi constantly

people pay for lyft/uber instead of just skipping fare on the train

there exist social networks and communities that are effectively fee-supported. somethingawful and metafilter are some siloed examples, but there's the fediverse and stuff like mastodon where essentially people either join a specific community/clique that's funded by members or host their own instance.

i'm convinced what keeps most people on the main advertiser-controlled networks is they are run by huge corporations with service monopolies and network effect. remember, whatsapp got big on a dollar per year subscription

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#153

Post by learc83 »

alexpotato wrote: post #134
Nextgrid wrote: post #35

> The interest was monetization of customer eyeballs, an American Airlines source shared that they wanted customers checking accounts at AA.com where they could be marketed to. It seems like so many problems, annoyances and inconvenience in modern society are artificially created/maintained just to enable this disgusting industry. Imagine how more efficient things could be if this cancer was eradicated once and for a…

Or at least offer an option to pay to remove the annoyances. HBO was a great example of this in the pre-streaming days. "Want to see great shows and movies with no commercials, pay the extra for cable + HBO and you won't have to seem them again.!" This default, "it's all free BUT you have to see ads and there are no alternatives" seems to be the problem. The apps described in the article are effectively recognizing t…

The problem is that once you segment your customers into paying and non paying. The non paying customers become much less valuable to advertisers and the paying customers become much more valuable.

So the service needs to charge even more, which makes paying customers even more valuable in a feedback loop. The usual result is that eventually the service can’t help themselves and starts showing paying customers “a few” ads. Then the definition of a few gets larger and larger.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#154

Post by Fwirt »

alexpotato wrote: post #135
arcticbull wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well first you're going to have to convince people to pay for the things they use. History has shown us they have practically zero interest in doing so. People would rather trade their attention for free stuff than their money for priced goods and services. The industry has grown out of this human behavior, not vv. [edit] Humans have a limited capacity for making purchasing decisions. This is why in 20+ years nobody…

> People would rather trade their attention for free stuff than their money for priced goods and services. How would you explain the fact that people paid for cable and premium cable channels (e.g. HBO) in the past when free network TV has always been an option?

Cable channels were also subsidized by advertising. You pay a decent amount of money per month to get access to exclusive content, but that cost still doesn't cover the costs of producing the media. If cable bills were double or triple the price, even without ads, many people probably would have been pushed to "free" TV.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#156

Post by matheusmoreira »

alexpotato wrote: post #134
Nextgrid wrote: post #35

> The interest was monetization of customer eyeballs, an American Airlines source shared that they wanted customers checking accounts at AA.com where they could be marketed to. It seems like so many problems, annoyances and inconvenience in modern society are artificially created/maintained just to enable this disgusting industry. Imagine how more efficient things could be if this cancer was eradicated once and for a…

Or at least offer an option to pay to remove the annoyances. HBO was a great example of this in the pre-streaming days. "Want to see great shows and movies with no commercials, pay the extra for cable + HBO and you won't have to seem them again.!" This default, "it's all free BUT you have to see ads and there are no alternatives" seems to be the problem. The apps described in the article are effectively recognizing t…

It doesn't work. Paying to avoid ads makes you more valuable to advertisers. They will offer more money for your attention and some executives will eventually think they're leaving money on the table by not doing it.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#157

Post by Manuel_D »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #109
Nextgrid wrote: post #35

> The interest was monetization of customer eyeballs, an American Airlines source shared that they wanted customers checking accounts at AA.com where they could be marketed to. It seems like so many problems, annoyances and inconvenience in modern society are artificially created/maintained just to enable this disgusting industry. Imagine how more efficient things could be if this cancer was eradicated once and for a…

Yeah. Advertising ruins everything. Everything. They are directly and indirectly responsible for the poor state of consumer technology today. Privacy violations? Advertising. Borderline unusable websites? Advertising. Deliberately addictive social media? Advertising. Almost everything that's wrong with computing today is fueled by this industry's entitlement to our attention. > Imagine how more efficient things could…

Devil's advocate: Advertising allows people to invest large amounts of money into products that don't charge end users. It allows largely equitable access to hugely powerful and complex information systems like Google search at no direct monetary cost to users.

Most people put the value of Google search on the order of thousands of dollars per year [1]. Imagine Google was a paid service: think of the academic disparity between the children of wealthy students who had access to Google and poorer students who do not.

1. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/04/25/how-much...

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#158

Post by [deleted] »

Nextgrid wrote: post #35

> The interest was monetization of customer eyeballs, an American Airlines source shared that they wanted customers checking accounts at AA.com where they could be marketed to. It seems like so many problems, annoyances and inconvenience in modern society are artificially created/maintained just to enable this disgusting industry. Imagine how more efficient things could be if this cancer was eradicated once and for a…

[deleted]

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#159

Post by zo1 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #109
Nextgrid wrote: post #35

> The interest was monetization of customer eyeballs, an American Airlines source shared that they wanted customers checking accounts at AA.com where they could be marketed to. It seems like so many problems, annoyances and inconvenience in modern society are artificially created/maintained just to enable this disgusting industry. Imagine how more efficient things could be if this cancer was eradicated once and for a…

Yeah. Advertising ruins everything. Everything. They are directly and indirectly responsible for the poor state of consumer technology today. Privacy violations? Advertising. Borderline unusable websites? Advertising. Deliberately addictive social media? Advertising. Almost everything that's wrong with computing today is fueled by this industry's entitlement to our attention. > Imagine how more efficient things could…

Advertising is to your eyeballs like spam is to your inbox.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#160

Post by stronglikedan »

alexpotato wrote: post #135
arcticbull wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well first you're going to have to convince people to pay for the things they use. History has shown us they have practically zero interest in doing so. People would rather trade their attention for free stuff than their money for priced goods and services. The industry has grown out of this human behavior, not vv. [edit] Humans have a limited capacity for making purchasing decisions. This is why in 20+ years nobody…

> People would rather trade their attention for free stuff than their money for priced goods and services. How would you explain the fact that people paid for cable and premium cable channels (e.g. HBO) in the past when free network TV has always been an option?

Easy - they paid for cable because it was an orange to OTA's apples. You'd only get a few OTA channels, and even then, not all of them would come in clearly. People paid for cable because it offered more channels. Most channels would still show commercials. Relatively few paid for premium channels, but it wasn't because they were commercial free (they were), it was because they offered better content (newest movies), in a time when piracy wasn't nearly as accessible.
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