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The 'Fuck You' Pattern

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Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#471

Post by fny »

6502nerdface wrote: post #445
XorNot wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how does this explain why Windows 10, which I have paid like $150 for per license, is now infested with ads, tracking and online presence - and close to impossible to buy without that. They aren't even trying to put a $ figure on what they think it's worth - because they can't be stopped from doing it. There is no implied agreement, it's exactly as stated.

I guess someone could argue that it only costs $150 because of the ads. Windows 95 cost well over twice that when it was launched (inflation adjusted). Maybe in the same way that airfares are way cheaper than they were in the 90s, but with much crappier included service.

They're = being leaches. Sure Windows 95 is expensive, but so were PCs. If you look at inflation adjusted OS prices, you'll see significant declines that reflect a lot of competition:

- Windows 95 was $210 in 1995: $370.94 in today's dollars.

- Windows XP was $199 in 2002: $297.78 in today's dollars.

- Windows 7 was $159.99 in 2009: $200.75 in today's dollars.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#472

Post by fl0wenol »

runnerup wrote: post #465
jokethrowaway wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The single killer feature of windows, unrivaled by Mac or Linux, is playing video-games. Expensive professional software is often available on Mac. Probably the target market for windows evolved to become people who tolerate advertising (or at least that's what PMs at M$ think). Half the price is paid in the license fee. The other half is a lifetime of ads exposure.

I would pay twice as much upfront but that's not an option. So instead I pirate Windows 10 Enterprise which is an absolute dream OS for a prosumer. I'd buy it but I haven't been able to figure out how to.

That's exactly what you do. Find a guide on buying LTSC through a Microsoft partner. It's expensive but you can effectively install it many times.

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2167558-explicit-inst...

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#473

Post by privacythrow1 »

6502nerdface wrote: post #445
XorNot wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how does this explain why Windows 10, which I have paid like $150 for per license, is now infested with ads, tracking and online presence - and close to impossible to buy without that. They aren't even trying to put a $ figure on what they think it's worth - because they can't be stopped from doing it. There is no implied agreement, it's exactly as stated.

I guess someone could argue that it only costs $150 because of the ads. Windows 95 cost well over twice that when it was launched (inflation adjusted). Maybe in the same way that airfares are way cheaper than they were in the 90s, but with much crappier included service.

Certainly the costs in the 90s were tied directly to physical distribution and comparatively lesser market demand. Whereas nowadays digital distribution is king and market demand is ubiquitous. I'd consider those factors to be responsible for driving prices down before I'd give a multinational corporation credit for allowing me to use their product (that I paid for) in return for pervasive advertising.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#474

Post by dylanwenzlau »

nine_k wrote: post #369
e12e wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You thought it was fair that a company spends millions in technical infrastructure and staffing so you can sit at home and spend your time looking at cats for free? No, they have your attention and they're going to connect you to organizations who will pay for it. "The infrastructure" to share cat pictures cost peanuts. It's the addictive dark patterns and montezation/tracking that costs millions. That's the irony.

Go an and run a site that serves massive amounts of cat pictures for peanuts! Well, yes, serving static HTML is easy. Serving images is kind of not hard either, because you have free unlimited traffic, don't you? Some hosting plans offer it. They just limit the egress bandwidth. So maybe you need a few more servers to cope with it, just like $50 a pop. You're not gonna need any CDN, people further away from your DC w…

Hi. I run imgflip.com, a fine purveyor of cat pictures, among others. It serves ~100TB of bandwidth and hundreds of millions of image views per month with total infrastructure cost below 5k per month. I believe Imgflip completely avoids dark patterns because I abhor them and strive to provide positive value to humanity, although I would love for you to share your opinions to the contrary. Imgflip is also 80% profit. It employs several of the techniques you mention, but efficiently, rather than bloated and inefficient like many companies. Curious to hear your take

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#475

Post by mtnGoat »

greedo wrote: post #420
user123456780 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The infrastructure" to share cat pictures cost peanuts lol at this. Go setup that infrastructure and see how far you get for peanuts.

Considering that pof.com used to run on a single server and handled more dating traffic than all of its competitors combined, you can go pretty damn far for peanuts.

Folks that come from over funded and over engineered companies don’t know this. Because they haven’t experienced it, it’s simply not possible to them. If you have money to burn, you do so.

My company has grown 15x in the last few years and our total infra costs continue to go down, because we pay attention to them.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#476

Post by mtnGoat »

nico_h wrote: post #370
xfalcox wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Discourse (open source forum software) we default new install to downloading hotlinked images so we can prevent this very specific problem.

But isn’t that copyright infringement?

No. It’s called hot linking.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#477

Post by mtnGoat »

tmearnest wrote: post #345
maccam94 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahhh, I remember the good old days of forums where people would "hotlink" an image into a thread, and after enough people started viewing/forwarding that link around it would break because the image hoster's account would get suspended by their host for going over their bandwidth limit, or the original hoster would panic at their bandwidth costs and delete it and/or try to block hotlinking going forward. Maybe someth…

I always loved it when someone hotlinked to an image on someone else’s server and instead of taking the image down, they’d replace it with something funny (or more frequently, horrible).

Something something about goats. ;)

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#478

Post by mtnGoat »

afc wrote: post #332
andai wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda offtopic but Instagram's ads changed my attitude towards ads, and my attitude towards Facebook's creepy level of insight into my life and personality. If they have that data anyway -- and hundreds of companies do -- I might as well benefit from it, and Instagram's ads were the first ones that I actually found interesting. First of all, it was obvious when something was an ad. Second, they weren't intrusive or o…

Anecdotal evidence, but my experience with IG ads was very different. I ordered stuff (mostly clothing) a few times (4 or 5) from IG ads and was very disappointed with the quality and service every single time. I now refuse to fall for IG ads ever again.

IG certainly doesn’t vet their advertisers very well. But what do they care if it’s a scam, they got paid.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#479

Post by jonathankoren »

chrisweekly wrote: post #460
jonathankoren wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s be honest though. Windows is supported through OEM licenses. M$ (yeah, I’m dusting this off here, due to the context) isn’t strapped for cash.

scrapped -> strapped

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I’m on mobile. Whatever

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#480

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

dylanwenzlau wrote: post #474
nine_k wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go an and run a site that serves massive amounts of cat pictures for peanuts! Well, yes, serving static HTML is easy. Serving images is kind of not hard either, because you have free unlimited traffic, don't you? Some hosting plans offer it. They just limit the egress bandwidth. So maybe you need a few more servers to cope with it, just like $50 a pop. You're not gonna need any CDN, people further away from your DC w…

Hi. I run imgflip.com, a fine purveyor of cat pictures, among others. It serves ~100TB of bandwidth and hundreds of millions of image views per month with total infrastructure cost below 5k per month. I believe Imgflip completely avoids dark patterns because I abhor them and strive to provide positive value to humanity, although I would love for you to share your opinions to the contrary. Imgflip is also 80% profit.…

What’s the business-model for image-hosting like thesedays?

Years ago everyone had to use an image-host (Photobucket, lol…) because all those phpBB instances on shared hosting accounts didn’t support direct image uploads or greatly limited attachments and most people didn’t have their own web hosting account to use instead.

With the rise of Web 2.0, it became important for sites to control their content - I remember the days of hotlinked images being swapped-out with obscene or vomit-inducing content as an act of revenge on bandwidth leeches - and cheap storage meant it wasn’t a problem to host hundreds of gigabytes of content by oneself. Can you image if Facebook and Instagram didn’t host the images posted to them?

It’s 2021 now, web-forums are dead - if people want to share photos to a small circle they’ll likely use Dropbox or OneDrive - or just copy+paste between Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp…

Do guide question: who uses your service and where’s the opportunity for profit? Serving images directly means people can’t see any ads, and browsers now block more and more third-party cookies (until all of them by 2023, I understand) so using image-hosting as a way to track users across the web is gone - is your frontpage traffic enough? Savvy users who use image hosts also tend to the ones to adblock too, even on mobile.

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