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…
By far the choice of most marginally savvy and above internet users is an ad-model where they themselves ad-block. Which somehow is spun to be morally righteous.
Given the downright illegal tactics adtech companies like Google and Meta resort to it has become morally righteous.
> When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, the messaging app had a clear focus. No ads, no games and no gimmicks. This sort of analysis is very surface-level I think. My impression is WhatsApp offered that by running on VC money and had no plan to run an actual business. That's not a question of focus. It's an unsustainable, please monetise me later land grab.
It's called bait-and-switch - lure users in away from (possibly FOSS, e.g. Matrix) competitors, and when you have enough network effects that switching becomes hard, spring the trap.
People I know on matrix hardly ever use WhatsCrap or migrated to it. Most of them either stick to Signal or just matrix
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…
When the Apple App store came along it was wild seeing how quickly software went from $10 down to 0.99c in the space of less than a year. And then it was only a matter of time before it dropped to zero. Once it hit zero, the tolerance for payment of any kind went to zero as well for a very large portion of people.
Apps and the internet in general, for most people, is considered almost weightless and zero cost. In the race for market dominance meant dropping the price as low as possible to drive out competition.
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 pay for YT Premium. Not because I care for stupid videos, but because you get YT Music for free with it... Spotify is the hottest of garbage in my opinion, constantly trying to push podcasts at me.
Why more people don't cancel Spotify and just pay for YT Premium - you get ad-free videos and all the music of Spotify.
Plus with YT Music you can upload your own FLAC/MP3s to it, so all that odd werid music you've got that isn't on Spotify you can have anywhere you're logged into your YT Music account.
Sure you should be suspicious. You should always be suspicious. Especially if it's free. And you can do something to calm your suspicions. Like checking out Signlas Open Source code.
>Like checking out Signlas Open Source code. What's preventing them from serving a backdoored version? xz was open source as well, that didn't stop the backdoor. There might be reproducible builds on android, but you can't even inspect the executable on iOS without jailbreaking.
Signal designs their systems from the ground up to deliver verifiable trust mechanisms (via remote attestation) along with data minimization/zero-access encryption techniques.
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 reading that one reason you often can't escape ads by paying for the service is that through the act of choosing to pay for the service, you are self-identifying as someone willing to pay for things, and are thereby ironically putting yourself into the most valuable ad-targeting demographic there is.
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 know lots of people that pay for YT premium. Lots of people pay for Spotify too. I even pay for Kagi.
Kagi has a little over 50k paying users.
Hacker news has 5 million monthly unique users [1].
Given how hacker news constantly complain about google’s decline and the constant virtue signaling on the need to pay for software, you would expect a sizable chunk of the users (the vocal ones, at least) here pay for Kagi. And yet we are here. GP is absolutely right about it being all-talk.
> people would never pay for software. I see this and not see this. See this = friend wants to check out app but it costs $1-$3. I'm like, that's less than a coffee or a candy bar that you consume disposably. Why not just try it and if it's sucks throw it away, the same way you might with a new food item? That argument doesn't work on them for some reason. not see = Steam
I think it is because humans spent thousands, tens of thousands of years not doing much other than searching for food and trading one physical object for another physical object. The idea of trading something valuable for an abstract piece of software or paper is still not really natural to us, and is a learned behavior.
I buy almost everything with a piece of plastic that represents a company who's agreed to lend me money that represents absolutely nothing except the common agreement that it's valuable.
Does anyone know what's the state of the art way for cutting crap out of android apps? In the same way adblock cuts crap out of web pages? I assume one would need a Java disassembler at least. On desktop, something like recaf works and allows changing things in classes without the full recompilation. Is there something like this for android?
I think it is because humans spent thousands, tens of thousands of years not doing much other than searching for food and trading one physical object for another physical object. The idea of trading something valuable for an abstract piece of software or paper is still not really natural to us, and is a learned behavior.
I buy almost everything with a piece of plastic that represents a company who's agreed to lend me money that represents absolutely nothing except the common agreement that it's valuable.
Yes and credit cards are a learned behavior, not an instinctual thing - and I think not buying an app for $1 is largely based on instinct.