Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 231 posts

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#181

Post by LtWorf »

nightski wrote: post #142
notsapiensatall wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that their shares are not publicly offered. Their shareholders much more likely to be people with vested interests in the company's long-term health, rather than retail investors and hedge funds who reliably demand short-term returns.

Retail investors and hedge funds do not always demand short-term results. If that was the case, Tesla and growth companies like it would simply not exist on the stock market. Instead, they are wildly popular.

But they plan to make money from selling the stocks, not from actual dividends.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#182

Post by matheusmoreira »

notsapiensatall wrote: post #99
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #13

Media embedded advertising has already been a thing for years, but companies hate leaving money on the table so they cannot resist the temptation of showing more ads. I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up. You're competing with piracy, but you throw ads in my face. I can download any show or movie I wan…

Among other things, Steam is not operated by a publicly-traded company. They don't need to answer to faceless shareholders at the end of every quarter. They can settle for making whatever they consider to be "enough money" without chasing endless growth.

What was the rationale for publicly-traded companies again? Because it sounds like having publicly-traded companies make things worse for the companies themselves and for society in general.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#183

Post by ducharmdev »

ramesh31 wrote: post #9

I finally broke down and paid for YouTube Premium. There is literally no other option to watch YouTube on a TV nowadays. It is absolutely mindblowing the level of nonstop ads they shove down your throat in-between (and during) every single video now. Completely unwatchable otherwise. And it's impossible to buy a dumb TV in 2022, so you're stuck with the official Android/Roku YouTube apps that have no ad-blocking capa…

I feel like I'm about to get to this point myself. It's absolutely insane that any decently popular video will cut to ads so often, without any regard for continuity. Much worse than cable ever was.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#184

Post by matheusmoreira »

bit_savager wrote: post #72

> "I'm not reading your site if you paywall it. There are too many other free resources that are just as good if not better." This really indicates what our economy has become. Everybody talks about the two business models companies employ; ad-supported or fee-based. These are the selling models Occasionally, piracy is discussed. While it may be a business model, piracy obviously isn't a selling model. It is a consum…

Would you read my comment if I paywalled it? Seriously doubt it.

It's not like these little journal articles are the ultimate truth we all need to read. It's just a guy publishing his views on some topic. Views likely biased by his stakeholders at that. Views likely manipulated by PR firms if not government entities. Essentially propaganda advancing some narrative. When governments want people to view propaganda, they pay for an aircraft to airdrop leaflets. Yet we're expected to pay for the privilege of consuming their information?

Truth is on the internet if they want people to read their views they have to actively go out there and post them. They have to pay money and/or time to make it happen. They don't get to demand payment because opinions are infinite. Paid journals are a relic of the old world and its media where they had printing presses that made literal newspapers with columns on them and that was the only way to get a mass audience. That's over now. They need to deal with that fact or go bankrupt.

Hell, I don't even care about the articles posted here most of the time. I come here for the comments. I want to know what the people on this site have to say. The submitted article is just a conversation starter really. Anything notable or important in it will certainly be quoted here.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#185

Post by LtWorf »

nasmorn wrote: post #139
jcranmer wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up. Well, Youtube's ad problem comes from the fact that it is run by the largest internet advertiser. Netflix--video streaming in general--suffers from the fact that there are very few major content producers, and after seeing the monetary success of Netflix, the con…

Origin is so bad that nobody would ever install anything but an exclusive from there. I would rather install a new App Store.

Both origin and epic do not support having a space in your password.

I'm sure the rest of the code is top notch as well :D :D

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#186

Post by carabiner »

honkdaddy wrote: post #155
plonk wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The prices are awful too. It's clearly not targeted at random people wanting to stay informed.

I had to go check - $40/mo for a digital newspaper?! Surely this is aimed at a different demographic than mine, because I can’t imagine anyone I know paying that for news.

Noam Chomsky called the FT "the only newspaper that tells the truth."

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#187

Post by wswope »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #106
wswope wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s economics: much like with car insurance, the market is a zero-sum game because the quality providers all more or less have equivalent levels of service - thus advertising becomes the most effective way to capture revenue, because prospective buyers don’t generally have complete enough information to e.g. assess a firm’s “operational excellence” or technical qualities on their own.

I don't agree that it's zero sum - this is a niche market that, if it could reach a broader audience, would experience an influx of new customers. That could potentially benefit all the players in the market, though of course it would benefit the company driving the popularisation the most. Personally I think that in marketing like this NordVPN are not trying to convince existing VPN users that their service is bette…

> this is a niche market that, if it could reach a broader audience, would experience an influx of new customers.

Honestly curious: what makes you think that?

I'm someone who really likes VPNs, but in all my experience, they have some really rough edges for non-technical people. I would never recommend one to my non-technical friends or family unless they had a very specific need for it.

Using Nord as an example, since it's a popular option:

- The client takes >90 seconds to load and connect on my Win10 Intel Atom craptop.

- Apple often flags some Nord IPs (probably due to legitimate abuse/attacks coming from them) - leading to Apple Maps, Siri, and other services hanging indefinitely on iOS.

- As of a year ago, the Nord CLI client was completely borking the networking on my stock Debian 10 install whenever I went idle for a few hours. (Didn't dig super deep, but the CLI client would go totally unresponsive and I couldn't get network going again by any other means apart from full reboot.)

- Majority of banking/financial service websites block you.

- You're much more likely to get flagged/run into issues when making payments or signing up for any sort of new account.

- Many desktop apps don't gracefully handle the IP change when you connect to VPN.

Some of this is Nord-specific, but my point is that people just looking to dip their toes in the water are going to run into some form of similar issue - and that makes VPNs not very user-friendly to the general public. That's why I think most of the people who'd want a VPN already know about them.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#188

Post by jamiek88 »

aranelsurion wrote: post #87
gsatic wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is HN an example of mindless consumption?

Maybe not. As far as I can tell it doesn't prioritize engagement/hours spent over everything else, first page is a mixture of very niche stuff and very common stuff with very little clickbait either way. To me HN feels like having a conversation with an interesting friend. It's not necessarily the most productive thing to do, nor it has any other major goal inherent to it, still at the end of the day it doesn't feel…

Funny you should say that.

I got into a bit of a twitter rabbit hole and ended up realizing my heart was racing, knuckles white and teeth grinding.

I was furiously pounding on my keyboard to reply to what was probably a bot before I came to my senses and closed the page.

I can see how that shit is addictive.

Rage is a hell of drug.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#189

Post by pdimitar »

brasic wrote: post #32
fein wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironic that a site posting an article critical of the end of consumer convenience is sitting behind a paywall.

Why is it ironic? One reason all these services are introducing ads is consumers’ learned unwillingness to bear the full costs of the services they enjoy. I might argue that the true irony is grumbling about a news provider very reasonably limiting their product to those who have paid them.

It's not my fault that 99% of all internet businesses figured that bait and switch is a sound business plan. It really isn't.

They should have read some basic human psychology: it's extremely hard or impossible to take something away that was given for free for a long time. That's basic knowledge. My history and psychology teacher shared this tidbit with the class when I was in the 9th grade.

Furthermore, me and many others are not closed to the idea of paying for journalism but are not willing to track 20 subs across different services.

Bill me through my ISP. I'll pay it. Make an app tracking how much extra I'd pay the next month because I've read 5 FT, 3 WSJ and 7 NYT articles -- I want to know. Even better, put a banner beforehand: "Reading this article will add $0.05 to your monthly internet bill, press OK if you agree".

The technical and societal solutions are there. But the unfettered greed and everyone's desire to be the one and only still prevail. Hence: yes, I will expect free journalism until things change.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#190

Post by massysett »

orwin wrote: post #162
flyaway123 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your thoughts on targeted ads in general? Setting aside the ease of dismissing - would you be willing to give up some data to allow them to be smarter (having more context)?

Not OP but honestly i am tired of it. If i'm on stackoverflow, i want to see ads for a new course, a job posting or a clickbait tech article on a new stack that makes Java bearable. When i'm researching some obscure history, i don't mind ads about JC Martin latest book available on amazon (and i might even buy it!), and when i'm looking for camping gear, i don't mind ads for other camping gear. That i get ads for cam…

Those ads are why you can crank an obscure topic like the second French restoration into Google and get useful information.

Or you could just go straight to Wikipedia, whose only ads are for Wikipedia fund drives.

Post reply on HN