sus

Well-known member
It's such a great service, and such a shame. I cough up my $4 a month, but they could never onboard people. Unless you're enterprise software, as soon as you make the sales pitch, people click out. The distaste for big data evaporates over the price of a cup of coffee... very weird. I wonder why this is.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
If a site asks me to turn off my ad blocker, I just don't use the site.
Same. I generally just bounce right back and continue searching for a site that doesn't ask for anything.

Probably just because I don't understand how it works, data collection, etc. Playing it conservatively until I understand it enough to know what kind of risks are even being taken.
 

sus

Well-known member
I think it'd be great if ten years out, we've all switched over to paying for services, and people just accept they'll pay $100 a month for all their online software they use all day and all night long. No corporate data surveillance, no ads at all. but if people are unwilling to pay, I mean.... running servers, paying engineers, it costs money, software isn't free to develop.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Do you think its because people have a keener, more refined sense of money-cost then they do of data-cost?

That is, the data market hasn;t been around long enough for the average consumer to really have a sense of what their data "says" about them, what it enables producers to do.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Yeah I just got a $200 laptop called a Pinebook Pro, running some operating system called Manjaro. Pretty sure its open source, the company says they hardly make any profit at all. Might even be a build-per-order operation.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Never gonna happen. They'll start splitting up the packages, raising prices, sticking ads in everything.
But isn't there always a market for meta-services (like, say, a streaming service manager? Roku?) that bundle things at the convenience of the consumer?

edit: If you can set up some kind of cartel or conglomerate that synthesizes competition with bundling, perhaps that would come out on top. Not sure.
 

Leo

Well-known member
the thing with ads on the web is they are usually really easy to ignore. I'm on various media sites all day for work and couldn't tell you one ad I saw, I just tune them out. remember the days of intrusive pop-ups, or worse, pop-unders?

I totally get what you're saying though, there's a real hurdle in paying for online content. I do it when I have to, and occasionally feel guilty when I don't. we take for granted that media will always be there, but so many great sites have disappeared, or newspapers/magazines been reduced to a skeleton staff of junior people because they can afford to do any more than that.
 
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constant escape

winter withered, warm
Do they last, or do the services being bundled by them eventually take issue?
I guess it depends on how effectively they are bundled. If the meta-service does a good job at bundling them, the streaming service becomes more easily accessible, thus benefiting both the streaming service and bundling service and the consumer/viewer.
 

sus

Well-known member
I think the issue with paying for stuff online is also that it's all so frivolous. You only read the articles because they're there and it's immediate. Once you think "Am I willing to pay to read this?", you realise how unnecessary the majority of it is.

I think microtransactions would be great. Ya click on an essay, $0.10 gets wired from your bank account
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Goldmine. Could it live up the philosophic/utopic hype? That is, all the talk about it replacing human institutions of trust (centralized banks, if I am getting that right)?

I'm afraid I don't yet understand Nick Lands points about it solving issues of space and time, and other profound philosophic issues.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Why do you think it hasn't entered the public conversations? People have heard of Bitcoin, and seemingly conflate it with cryptocurrency more broadly, but blockchain is left in the dark.
 

Leo

Well-known member
I think the issue with paying for stuff online is also that it's all so frivolous. You only read the articles because they're there and it's immediate. Once you think "Am I willing to pay to read this?", you realise how unnecessary the majority of it is.

you often mention how read Reuters for its news reporting. would you fork over $5-10/month to do that? you obviously value the content.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Could it effectively become a decentralized trust mechanism? How would this effect central banks? Totally out of my element here, if it isn't obvious.
 
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