211–220 of 280 posts
Airline travel has certainly become a lot shittier since I first began flying in the 1970s. In fact, it used to be comfortable, cool, fun, and glamorous, and the stewardesses used to be beautiful and polite.
Anyway first class is still pretty comfortable IMO. And airports are much nicer than before.
Isn't this just a function of a lot of these business models don't actually work? Ie a lot of these are the equivalent of giving away free ( investor funded ) banana fritters, getting decent uptake and using it to declare that the market in banana fritters is huge, but when you start to charge for them it turns our the market is quite small. Another way the business models don't work is the companies start off assumi…
Oh, wait, it's not just that. It's also greed. Greedy customers wanting things without paying what they're worth, greedy entrepreneurs not wanting to grow a business steady, healthy and organically, greedy investors, greedy software engineers, etc, etc.
A perfect example with the recent changes at Twitter: > Most Twitter users barely tweet and don't care about followers - a "heavy user" tweets on average less than three times a week. So if someone is posting regularly enough to be willing to pay $8 a month for a blue tick, but has not built up a sizeable following organically, this is a very strong signal that the posts they are producing are no good. > It is exactl…
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Sure that's an option. In essence that's a user ( indirectly through taxes ) supported model. In the UK, the BBC follows that model ( the license fee is in effect a tax in all but name ) - and it's model is constantly under attack from certain quarters. Indeed the BBC has being doing pilots in the social space - with SOLID and data pods. See https://www.bbc.co.uk/taster/pilots/together-pod The key question here is an…
I’m curious - have you used SOLID? Either as a developer or a consumer? I found myself struggling with Linked Data for quite some time now, and I have struggled with the idea that perhaps part of the problem with adoption of Linked Data is existing mental interia of RMDBS or other systems.
I like the idea - kinda back to a decentralised web of peers like it was in the early days.
However the complexity of the technology is certainty off-putting - I'm not enough of an expert to tell how much of that complexity is adherence to a tech stack ( like RDF, SPARQL ) and how much is simply the complexity of the underlying problem.
I would say the guys behind it seem fairly pragmatic. As an example while the technology allows you to self host, they acknowledge that most people won't be able/want to - and are looking to enable providers as well.
I think one of the problems with the LD/RDF community is it can attract the type of person that things 'we just need a single well defined data model for the universe'.
I think trying to get one schema to rule them all is doomed to failure - for two reasons
- for ontologies to be effective all the users of that ontology have to have a shared understanding of the ontology - simple a written down definition isn't enough.
- the world can be viewed from multiple angles - even if you could agree one view, it's not going to be optimal for all use cases.
However as I said, the SOLID project doesn't appear to be falling into that trap - it appears very focused and pragmatic.
The internet is so lame and boring now days, its become so predictable and routine. I remember the internet back in the 90s and 00s, it was a completely different place, it felt massive and mysterious like each door you opened led to a another universe with all kinds of stuff going on, discussions on any topic you could fathom were taking place 24/7 all the time. Now we have discord servers with hundreds of users but…
I have also noticed this is as well. The discussion online has been double-stratified - it's either really low quality or really bland. Most people are afraid to say anything interesting or different from the popular things/status quo, because social media conditions people to not rock the boat too much because they'll get downvoted/banned. Niche or interesting things just die. The remainder of places have become inc…
What is it that you want? Intelligent discussion, but not too strange, but interesting, not too toxic, but you wanna say what you think and you feel like you can't say what you think, because then "the others" come with their toxic bullshit?!
I've been thinking about how enshittification, venture capital, shareholders and the life cycle of a company are in some ways related. Any company that has external investors is bound to go through this cycle of - building a great product - taking in external funding money - growing and then either being acquired or going public (or more commonly shutting down) - then all the head scratching decision making starts It…
IMO: Consumers will adapt to the reality, as humans always do. Once people adjust to the fact that popular brands are generally strip-mined for profit, brand loyalty will drop and keep dropping, consumers will become warier of lock-in, and the enshittification playbook will be less and less effective.
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I think the issue could be rooted in recent monetary policy rather than an inhrenent feature of the market itself. Artificially low interest rate environments lead to a lot of money in the hands of investors, which due to inflation slowly loses purchasing power over time. However, with large reserves, they can easily afford to prop up a business model which persistantly spends more money on bringing "free" features t…
I remain infuriated that we had the confluence of: - huge amount of very cheap money - widespread availability of highly educated technologists - knowledge of the climate model .. and instead "collectively" ended up funding giveaway services to users and inflating the SF housing market rather than doing the climate Manhattan project. (High interest rates are bad for renewables, because buying a solar panel is effecti…
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I’m curious - do you see a path forward for “public” social media? I had half an idea yesterday on this from HN: https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/
One of the questions I don't see answered here (and is, IMO, the greatest obstacle, and the reason I've backed out of discussions to set up a similar geographically-oriented node) is who moderates, say, your city's ActivityPub node? If a corporation, we're right back to corporations moderating public speech. But even having governments moderating speech in a public forum feels weird to me since it provides an easy le…
You know how community meetings and town halls are awful and fruitless because they're filled to the brim with the noisiest cranks and they can't be kicked out because they're still members of the public after all, and nobody else participates because it's maddening to be around all those noisy cranks? Like that, but web scale.
I'm sure the noisy cranks would love this, but I'm not interested in it.
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We have an evil cabal of enshitification enforcers in the form of the entire advertising and marketing industry. They enforce the group think impressed on society, and will not put any energy into anything not following the current zeitgeist of shitty exploitation and only the legally required (reluctant) fair treatment of their consumer and their employees. Our society voices, both journalism and advertising/marketi…
>advertising and marketing industry Which today is primarily Google, Amazon, Meta, and yes, even Apple (0) (0) https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-privacy-analytics-class-act...
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The government can afford to do this. In every single other way, this is a terrible idea.
Why? At least in the case of democratic governmwnts, there is more control and oversight than there is in case of Meta, Twitter or Google.