> So what? That was years ago, and that says nothing about the present state of affairs.
You overlooked my second point, about Fortnite leading to the Epic store gaining traction, which is the present state of affairs. Also look at EA Games launches their store in the past by using their AAA games as leverage. All these gaming stores and trying to use games as a way to get their foot in the door, so I think you're wrong by saying it's no longer a valid approach. In fact, it's the only approach that seems to work.
> No it isn't, because you are missing the fact that the gaming market is not a zero-sum game, fix-cake that you can only get a share of. It's constantly growing, and new games create new public the whole time.
It's very much a zero-sum situation when these stores sell the majority of the same games. When you spend your $60 buying Grand Theft Auto on the Epic store, that's a $60 loss for Steam, because you're not going to buy the game twice. When one store wins your sale, the other loses it.
1. Steam became a success because of the games Valve developed.
2. Epic created Fortnite, which you likely know is a popular release. That game is leading to the Epic store getting off the ground and gaining traction. This is causing a rather large loss in revenue for Valve.
That's why games are important. If you control the top games, you control the users, and you control the platform.
> Would it be legal/ethical to allow automated pre-commitment to all terms and conditions that nefarious sites may choose to scatter around their pages, many of which won't have been written until after the user had ticked this "agree to everything" box?
Isn't everyone 'agreeing to everything' outside of the GDPR when they visit sites now, without the option of saying 'no'? Isn't everyone covered by GDPR being tricked into 'agreeing to everything' at the moment? Giving users the ability to disable the tracking aspect across all sites with one simple setting seems like a plus here.
> Any site doing this is breaking the law. Report them please.
Has any action been taken against a site for making their opt-out option more complicated than their opt-in option? Why try to regulate how millions of sites prompt users for consent instead of a few browsers?
> Because sites which track you don't want it. After all, they're the ones who invented "cookie banners"; and they could choose to get rid of them by just, you know, not tracking people. Yet they don't.
They didn't invent cookie banners, they added them because they were required by law. The same law could remove cookie banners and require the sites to respect a browser cookie.
I agree with the browser implementation. Automatically blocking the cookies will likely not work because sites frequently combine tracking and required cookies.
1. When the user starts the browser for the first time, ask if they want to allow tracking cookies on all websites.
2. When the user visits a website, pass that tracking answer as true or false. Firefox and Chrome have buttons beside the URL already for 'Site Settings'. Allow users to override their global tracking setting with a per site settings there.
This would be infinitely better than the mess we have now, where every website gives us a pop-up with an intentionally confusing interface. Why can't I say 'No' to tracking once? Why do I need to do it countless times a day, each time navigating a new and confusing interface?
How is it possible in 2020 a basic search of the start menu doesn't work? For example, I have Spotify installed, it appears in my start menu, but if I search for "Spotify" it's nowhere to be found.
Cups work great for certain things, such as a cup of water, sugar, flour, or peanuts. It gets difficult in other situations though, like trying to measure a cup of spinach, strawberries, or ice, because the measurement greatly varies depending on how the items are packed or arranged in the space.
Wouldn't someone send communication signals to lure or bait other civilizations? For example, spam a friendly hello message on every potential communication channel and encourage new civilizations to reply. When they do, destroy them.
They don't say that, because that's not their goal. Google makes money from consumers being online, searching, browsing the internet, and using Google apps. It doesn't matter if that person is using Windows, Mac, Linux, or some imaginative Google OS to connect to the internet. They profit either way.
They make some where you attach a device to the dog's collar, and it unlocks the door when they approach.
That being said, I grew up in an area completely surrounded by trees and every animal imaginable (squirrels, rabbits, coyotes, raccoons, opossums, deer, etc). We had a dog door (a simple plastic flap) to our barn. I saw raccoons and squirrels with nests literally 10ft from the dog door. Nothing ever came inside. The barn even had food (dog food, plus a fridge and cupboards with snacks). It was even heated during the winter. Nothing came in. I don't know the reasoning, but that little piece of plastic kept everything out.
If you have a SaaS application watch this video by Jason Cohen. It's about reaching 10k/month. In short, he says to charge more, focus on businesses and not consumers, and to find 150 customers willing to pay $70/month. It's a realistic number where you can grind your way to finding 150 people by knocking on doors, sending emails, making calls, etc.
I remember watching Shark Tank (TV series where small businesses pitch to investors), and a lot of people would come on the show asking for 100-300k. When asked what they wanted to do with the money, it wasn't uncommon to hear they wanted to setup/update their website and online presence.
To me, that sounded absurd at the time. I'd be thinking in my head, they could setup a WordPress site in a couple of days, or grab some off-the-shelf shopping cart software and have it done for 1k. If they wanted something more customized, they could probably find a developer to do everything for less than 5k.
Then I realized they're a very small business, they're doing a million a year in sales, and their new site would be one of the most important aspects of their business that would directly impact their sales and how their business is perceived. 100k to set that up suddenly seemed very fair and reasonable. The outcome of that site could make or break their business. Why on earth would they only invest a few thousand into such a thing?
Or think about any small business with a dozen employees. They're spending a million a year on payroll. Is redeveloping their entire online identity and user experience worth a one time 100k expense? I think so.
Also, if you charge enough you can start bringing in outside help. For example, you're a programmer, but they also need a logo refresh on the project. If you're charging 100k, you can easily budget to bring in a designer that focuses on brand identity. You'll end up with higher quality work for your client, a better portfolio for your business, and in the future that'll allow you to quote higher rates. You can step back a bit into management and take on more work since you're not personally doing everything.
In short, recognize the value you're bringing to a business. Working closely with them over 6 months and building out a solution that helps them grow, reduces their headaches, streamlines their existing processes, and increase their revenue is very much worth 100k. If you're trapped in a bubble charging businesses 1k for a site you're never going to grow or produce the caliber of work you're capable of developing because you need to bang out one or two a week.
How would this be different than going to Amazon.com and searching for "bluetooth speaker" or "marble chess site" and seeing offers from different companies for products you can buy? Amazon also makes it convenient since you can order through their site instead of being redirected to a third-party, and they assist in the shipping/return process.
I get emails all the time from Google about DMCA notices and pages from my site being removed from search. They'll just give me a list of 100s of pages that have been removed. The requests make absolutely no sense. For example, it'll be a URL for a comment permalink, which redirects to a comment that says, "Great!". The vast majority of the requests are because someone mentions the name of a TV show or movie. Some company that represents them just issues a DMCA removal for any page that uses their name, claiming it infringes on their copyright. So, I've had thousands of pages removed from Google during the past year. I don't have time to make counterclaims for each of them. Most of them are old pages that receive little to no traffic. Still, it's a shame for anyone trying to search for them.
There's a difference between someone crashing their own Volvo, and someone sitting in the backseat of a Waymo that misinterprets the lane markers and crashes into a barrier. One is not news, one is front page news.
I guarantee the first Waymo death is going to be publicized everywhere. It doesn't need to be a trend, and as I said, it doesn't mean the cars are more dangerous than human drivers. However, it's going to be news. There are going to be all sorts of moral debates when an algorithm decides to drive over a child instead of turning into an oncoming car. People will want answers. How does Waymo rank the value of different lives? I imagine it'll be news for the next decade until there are thousands of deaths and it becomes normal.
It's an industry that's going to be full of "firsts" and that's going to be the news. Waymo drives over dog while auto-piloting to a parking lot. Waymo mistakes grocery cart for stroller and swerves into elderly man. Waymo kills cyclist when poor weather disrupts censors. It doesn't matter if they ship something safe. Get enough cars on the road and these things will happen and people will be talking about it.
People are going to die in Waymo cars, and sometimes we'll wonder if the accident was avoidable and if the car made the wrong choice leading to someone's death.
It'll look bad on the brand when the news is reporting how, "Google self-driving car kills family en route to Disneyland".
I'm not saying self-driving cars are dangerous, but it's just the numbers. People will die and self-driving car deaths will be shocking news and make headlines for a long time. I wouldn't want my brand name anywhere near them.
Yes, they can do whatever they desire. The issue is when people are required to write life stories and superfluous content not because that's the direction they want to go, and not because it's appealing to their target audience, but because it's the only way they can rank well on Google.
On the user side if you only want straightforward recipes, you're out of luck, because they're never going to be near the top of the search results.
If you are one of the people looking to read these recipe background stories, even you get a mediocre experience, because the majority of the content you're reading was written primarily for Google (how many times can I reference salmon, fish, atlantic, norwegian, protein, healthy, omega-3 and smoked in this recipe story to hit all of the important keywords?).
Not quite the same, because right now tracking is suppose to be opt-in. Free cookies are not.
A fair comparison would be a law saying people need to opt-in for paying for a cookie. You can't charge the customer or hide the information, they need to agree to pay for the cookies, and they need an equally clear option to not pay for them.
However, stores bend the rules. They have someone stand at the entrance saying, "Thanks for coming to our store, we have cookies for sale at $0.99. Would you like to come in?" If you say yes, then you're charged for cookies you buy. To get the cookies for free, you need to realize you can say "No" to entering the store, and then through a complex 5 minutes conversation, you can get the person to let you into the store for the free cookies every person is allowed to have according to the law.
Most people don't know about the free cookies. Others can't figure out the correct questions to ask to get permission to enter the store for the free cookies. Some people want the free cookies but they don't have 5 minutes to waste talking to the person, so they just decide to pay.
At the end of the day though, of course everyone wants the free cookies. I want them. You want them. The law says the store is required to give free cookies. Why introduce all the complex interactions and rules that businesses will not follow, and customers will find annoying? Just give everyone the cookies and be done with it.
If you don't want a blanket statement allowing free cookies everywhere, what's the ideal process? 97% of people want free cookies all the time. 2% of people want free cookies "sometimes". 1% of people never want free cookies. Asking people at each store for their preference (similar to a website cookies pop-up) is only beneficial to the 2% "sometimes" crowd. For the other 98%, they're just being annoyed and repetitively giving the same answer to every store. Require the banks to allow a setting on credit cards to toggle free cookies on or off, and have stores respect that setting without needing to ask.
1. Do a study and check how many people want to be tracked. Don't trust the data from websites because everyone is currently being tricked into accepting. Go out on the street, talk to someone for 5 minutes about how tracking works, how it can lead to more relevant advertising and a potential increase in revenues for the service they're using, but in return their browsing history, purchases, and communication will be tracked and associated with them. How many want to be tracked?
2. If 80%+ of people do not want to be tracked, then just create a law saying it's not allowed. That's it, we're done.
3. If less than 80% of people don't want to be tracked, then force browsers to prompt users on install to ask if they want to accept tracking. Websites, analytics, advertisers, etc, then need to respect that setting or risk being fined. No need for every website in the world to invent their own cookie/tracking pop-up system, and no need for people to adjust their settings on a per-site basis.
I think one aspect of Stripe design that I find distracting and bothersome is all of the rotated elements with 3D transforms and the diagonal lines. I find it jarring and unnecessary to see all of these elements and images positioned at strange angles. It just decreases readability and feels tiring on the eyes.
For a website it's almost too beautiful, diverse with different elements, colorful, etc. It's something I want to put on my wall or see in a brochure, not something that's ideal for digesting content. I need something that's 50% Stripe, 50% Craigslist.
Anyway, I certainly look to them for inspiration in my work, but if the entire internet looked like Stripe, I think it would get old very quick.
I just loaded a few Google services I use. AdSense takes 6 seconds to load. DoubleClick takes 10-15 seconds to load. Running a speed test on fast.com I'm getting 200Mbps.
Without question Google makes the slowest and least responsive sites I use. It's like the 600lbs man giving tips for staying in shape and living a healthy lifestyle. When they have a nearly unlimited budget and access to some of the best engineers and infrastructure on the planet, and they can't practice what they preach, it's difficult for me to listen.
They really don't seem to care. I run a site with AdSense. Google makes about 20k a year in commission from my site. I get zero support.
1. My ad clicks went from a steady 500 a day to 1-5 a day and my revenues plummeted. I contacted Google. After one month of of being passed around they tell me they're not allowed to disclose what's wrong, but I can try labeling my ads as "Advertisements" on my site. One month of waiting for that response.
2. Recently Google started clawing back 50% of my monthly earnings at the end of the month. It's typically 0-10%. However, it just jumped to 50% the last couple of months. So they give me daily reports that I'm earning $150 per day, and then at the end of the month they just say nope, we're actually going to only give you half of that revenue. Oh, and we can't tell you why, that's confidential. I searched online and found lots of people recently reporting 30-80% of their revenues are being taken away. No one can get a reply from Google. What's even worse, I use header bidding. So someone opens my site, Google says they'll pay X to show an advertisement to that user, they outbid my other networks, and then a month later they say they can't actually pay that price. Meanwhile, my other ad networks could have shown an ad, but Google outbid them with a price they're not willing to pay.
3. I tried to setup an in house advertisement the other day using Google DoubleClick. The idea is that I create an ad for my Patreon page, and if none of the ad networks I run can pay more than X for that impression, then it shows my Patreon advertisement. Well, Google says Patreon is malvertising, and they won't let me run a display advertisement on my own site, linking to my own Patreon page. What does that notification say in the ad manager? It says they can't disclose any additional information and not to contact them.
This company is a joke. They've collected at least 100k in commission from me, and I get zero support. I'd like to fix that issue resulting in half of my revenue being taken away each month. Nope, no one I can talk with, and if I do talk with anyone, they can't disclose that information or what ad unit is the source of the issue. I need to try making a change, and then cross my fingers that one month later I don't lose most of my revenue. It would probably take a year to understand the issue with monthly experiments. Anyway, I'm in the process of removing Google from my life now. I have zero respect for that company.
You overlooked my second point, about Fortnite leading to the Epic store gaining traction, which is the present state of affairs. Also look at EA Games launches their store in the past by using their AAA games as leverage. All these gaming stores and trying to use games as a way to get their foot in the door, so I think you're wrong by saying it's no longer a valid approach. In fact, it's the only approach that seems to work.
> No it isn't, because you are missing the fact that the gaming market is not a zero-sum game, fix-cake that you can only get a share of. It's constantly growing, and new games create new public the whole time.
It's very much a zero-sum situation when these stores sell the majority of the same games. When you spend your $60 buying Grand Theft Auto on the Epic store, that's a $60 loss for Steam, because you're not going to buy the game twice. When one store wins your sale, the other loses it.