171–180 of 1001 posts
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Any man who must say, "I am the King", is no true king. Any tech company who must say, "we don't harvest your information", is a tech company that harvests your information.
Signal also claims the same: > We can't read your messages or listen to your calls, and no one else can either. Should we be suspicious of Signal as well?
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Any man who must say, "I am the King", is no true king. Any tech company who must say, "we don't harvest your information", is a tech company that harvests your information.
Signal also claims the same: > We can't read your messages or listen to your calls, and no one else can either. Should we be suspicious of Signal as well?
Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services, i.e. how many people pay for paid personal e-mail services? I just don't want to believe that our services have to be paid for through proxy by giving huge cut to 3rd parties. The quality goes down both as UX and as core content, our attention span is destroyed, our privacy is violated and our political power is being stolen as conten…
I remember when Whatsapp became a paid app, I can’t remember the details as I believe they varied by platform (iOS vs Android) but it was either €0.79 or €0.99, I’m not sure if one off or yearly payment, but it doesn’t matter. I, as the “computer guy”, had friends and family asking how to pirate it. This is coming from SMS costing €0.25 per message (text only!) and also coming from people who would gladly pay €3 for…
Now the credit card company knows what service I am buying; I would get endless marketing emails from the service for buying additional things; my info as a person willing to pay for such a service would get sold to other companies; my credit card info would get leaked/stolen, ...
If the whole experience was literally as simple as handing someone a $1 bill, I promise I would pay for many many internet services.
WhatsApp has S-tier status here in Germany. If I had access to a proper API I would pay them per message, without them needing to make their UX worse. If anything, if I had to pay per message, I'd be incentivized not to send too many messages, keeping the distractions for the user at a minimum.
> S-tier status here in Germany What does this mean exactly?
See the image here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_list
Popular format on Youtube, reddit, etc.
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In the Netherlands, was trying to promote Signal. I switched phones and lost all my history. Now I’m fairly careful with these things, and make backups, but even I wasn’t able to get it back. Couldn’t recommend it to anyone since. There’s a line between being secure and being useful, and they’re slightly unbalanced in Signal.
You should've made sure of how Signal works with regards to chat history before you removed the app from the old phone.
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I remember when Whatsapp became a paid app, I can’t remember the details as I believe they varied by platform (iOS vs Android) but it was either €0.79 or €0.99, I’m not sure if one off or yearly payment, but it doesn’t matter. I, as the “computer guy”, had friends and family asking how to pirate it. This is coming from SMS costing €0.25 per message (text only!) and also coming from people who would gladly pay €3 for…
The problem with paying a small fee for a service is not the fee itself. It is the friction for paying for the service and the hassle that comes after the payment. Now the credit card company knows what service I am buying; I would get endless marketing emails from the service for buying additional things; my info as a person willing to pay for such a service would get sold to other companies; my credit card info wou…
I don't know. Paying for streaming services seems very natural nowadays.
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Respectfully, clearly you aren't familiar with Jan and Brian's history of public statements. Even for years after they were acquired by Meta, Jan refused to allow advertising and kept pushing the $1 dollar per user subscription fee. Sheryl nixed it b/c it was "not scalable." VC's may have the mindset that the founders will eventually acquiesce to ads, but also they didn't really care b/c all they wanted was an exit,…
> The founders, however, were never interested in an ad business and hold that POV to this day. Fair enough, but the founders don't necessarily make these decisions. I wasn't particularly referring to them. If they got VC money (I don't know if they did or not) then the VCs must've had something in mind to get a decent return on their risk.
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I remember when Whatsapp became a paid app, I can’t remember the details as I believe they varied by platform (iOS vs Android) but it was either €0.79 or €0.99, I’m not sure if one off or yearly payment, but it doesn’t matter. I, as the “computer guy”, had friends and family asking how to pirate it. This is coming from SMS costing €0.25 per message (text only!) and also coming from people who would gladly pay €3 for…
>> I, as the “computer guy”, had friends and family asking how to pirate it. To be fair, that was in era when pirating was such a normal thing. Everybody at least knew about it. Cheap pirated DVD's were super common (I received them as gifts even) and everyone knew someone selling them. With people accustomed to paying for Netflix, music streaming, Office 365, etc. maybe a subscription version of WhatsApp would be mo…
I cannot overstate how unexpected this was and is to me, we talk about people in their mid-twenties with jobs - maybe (video) streaming / subscriptions services actually overplayed their hand in the current economic climate.
Doesn't make me super optimistic in this regard.
[1] even if most of it is void in my jurisdiction anyway
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Taking the YouTube example, and many others like it, I only use it because it is free. If YouTube was subscription only, hypothetically, I would just not use it , and my life would be same as it is now. There are a great many services that are nice to have, but very few I would bother paying for out of my wallet. Given the choice of paying for them or not using them, I would just walk away from most of them.
What would you replace YouTube with? To my its educational value is unmatched. I owe so much of my learning to it.
But for the most part - probably nothing. For everything else, it'd just be either some other free option, or like going back to the internet of the early 2000s, which would be good and bad in its own ways.
Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services, i.e. how many people pay for paid personal e-mail services? I just don't want to believe that our services have to be paid for through proxy by giving huge cut to 3rd parties. The quality goes down both as UX and as core content, our attention span is destroyed, our privacy is violated and our political power is being stolen as conten…
I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads” crowd is mostly all-talk. And I am saying this as someone who genuinely believes in the “small fee instead of paying with ad exposure” approach. The one specific example of this that made me think so is the Youtube Premium situation. So many…
I would rather pay a fee than watch ads, but as long as “do neither of those” is an option I’ll be picking that. If they remove that as an option I’ll either pay or not watch YouTube.
Probably not watch.
I pay for email, and was paying for search until something about the way kagi integrates with safari annoyed me. I’ve been paying more for a seedbox than Netflix costs for longer than Netflix has existed. That’s part for ad avoidance as in it initially replaced free to air tv but ad avoidance is just one factor in the best experience for my time and money trade off I’m trying to make. So i know I’m willing to both pay for things i can get ad supported from Google and also pay for a better media experience.
When it comes to that best experience for my time and money trade off though, even with money being set at zero, the vast majority of the YouTube i watch is already in the negative. Most things i watch on there, i regret the cost of just the time it took to watch the content before ads or money even gets in to it.
Which i think is a big part of the issue with ad supported internet going fee based. YouTube and so many ad supported sites and games are already just super low value and derive most of their consumption not from people making intentional lifestyle choices of “i want to be the kind of person who watches garbage all day while playing crap” but rather people making bad short term vs long term trade offs and falling in to holes of recommendations and fun looking thumbnails.
Paying for something leads to asking yourself “is this worth $x?” And i know that for at least myself $x is a large negative number. I’d pay more than the current cost of YouTube premium to definitely NOT be able to watch YouTube.