This is the worst headline that I ever had the misfortune to lay my eyes on.
I cannot unsee this and it is forever now an additional burden of unwanted knowledge on the existing reality of Japan’s declining population and fertility crisis.
Each time there is a glimmer of hope of a trend reversing or going back to normal, a headline like this just unfortunately confirms in some sense what I already know.
Now this news made this situation even worse.
Happy for them, hoping this is a super strange outlier, But holistically unhappy for the course of humanity.
Is this really a massive problem with humongous 1000x growth potential upside or an IPO?
I hope the VCs and Angels asked the serious questions and not invested because she is the daughter of the Microsoft founder.
I only wonder of the many 99.9999999% of startups were turned down by VCs of funding because "they don't know them", "they didn't go to the same school as me", "too much risk", or the infamous and vague "not now".
Alas, in this brave new world it is great to support our new underdogs.
> Not really understanding the negativity here. We know for a fact that most of the people that master intellectual problems do so via pattern recognition, not by reasoning.
> The lifetime membership + launch discount was a good marketing bait I felt for.
The negativity here with me is because it feels like clickbait and like a scammy ad to manipulate me into purchasing.
It is almost lying. I find it unethical and I don't think there are 17 lifetime access spots, it's just artificial hype that doesn't make sense to me.
Marketing (at least like this) is basically lying.
This is the best model IMO as it supports creators directly and not the advertisers.
If Daring Fireball had this membership subscription model and not selling highly and questionably expensive ad slots I would definitely subscribe, even if the price would be $20 a month or $200 a year. (I would argue he can make more than he charges for ads does already given this model.)
But $11K (a week!) is outrageous to support Daring Fireball.
> Daring Fireball has been doing the one ad a week in RSS with no tracking for over a decade. The sponsors must think they work.
I have no interest for anything sold in ads in their RSS and I assume they are tracking in the links that you click too (otherwise why spend all $11K for no results?)
> He claims to never look at his server logs and got rid of Google Analytics ages ago.
That is a good start, hopefully he should consider switching to a community supported model rather than rely on advertisers.
> AFAIK, Daring Fireball never runs these tracking ad networks with tons of flashing and annoying ads. It does one tiny graphical ad on the web page and has a weekly sponsor post, both of which can be easily ignored. The graphical ad does not even appear in the full RSS feed.
For me an ad is an ad, in graphical or text form and I very much didn't ask for it.
I feel it is psychologically trying to convince me to buy or make me be aware about something I don't want or need and very much not want this ruin my flow of consuming content.
On his links Daring Fireball IS tracking, they all do tracking in the URL of the sponsored post otherwise it doesn't make sense for the sponsor to pay $11K (a week!) for the spot.
> It does one tiny graphical ad on the web page and has a weekly sponsor post, both of which can be easily ignored. The graphical ad does not even appear in the full RSS feed.
I mean, yes I could ignore them, but would massively prefer if these ads didn't exist at all, I have no interest in anything that is being advertised there. Luckily Ublock Origin blocks Daring Fireball ads by default and not sure if his advertisers would be happy about this, but if I spend $11K a week on ads to find most people block them by default, I don't think I would bother wasting another ad slot.
To be fair maybe it is a sign that instead of ads, a membership, patreon or whatever would be much more sustainable, freeing, less scammy and more profitable than running junk ads that people don't want.
> Ads support content creators and free services. If you value specific creators or platforms, consider supporting them directly through memberships or donations rather than relying solely on ad blocking.
Sometimes this isn’t available.
I would like to support Daring Fireball (a publication I read a lot) but the only way is to buy an ad slot for $11K which seems like a scam to both the viewer and the advertiser.
The advertiser isn’t getting any ROAS (since we are blocking the ads) and since the ads are annoying and repetitive, the viewers would just go elsewhere.
I wish more creators would have a “remove ads” tier or an alternative membership tier as a different way to support their content rather than ads.
It is bad enough and distracting that ads show up on the site (thankfully Firefox and ublock origin does the job already) but on RSS blocking ads is impossible.
I cannot unsee this and it is forever now an additional burden of unwanted knowledge on the existing reality of Japan’s declining population and fertility crisis.
Each time there is a glimmer of hope of a trend reversing or going back to normal, a headline like this just unfortunately confirms in some sense what I already know.
Now this news made this situation even worse.
Happy for them, hoping this is a super strange outlier, But holistically unhappy for the course of humanity.
Sad.