"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers." - Richard Feynman
Too bad there is no way to make a blocklist to block all freeloaders from visiting websites.
The person who actually owns anything at all (the website owner) is somehow expected to give everything for free to someone who doesn't own anything at all (the website visitor). Plus I have found that the same people who complain loudly on internet forums about chat widgets (and many similar marketing tools) don't stop using the website itself for the sake of their principles. Hilarious.
I don’t understand what you are saying. There has always existed straightforward methods of preventing “freeloaders” as you call them from accessing your content. If you don’t believe me, go to wsj.com and report back.
TV Broadcasters don’t get to force you to watch their ads, in fact skipping ads on broadcast tv is a big and legal market.
Furthermore, today’s ad blocking detection can be very good at detention, so there you go - you have your script. When sites detect my adblocking and nag me, I am more than happy to leave their shitty website and never come back.
>>I am more than happy to leave their shitty website and never come back.
Unfortunately, if this is actually true, then you are the exception which proves the rule. That's precisely why I call these people "freeloaders". If they actually stopped visiting my website and wasting my site's resources based on such principles, I would be ecstatic to see them leave.
>>TV Broadcasters don’t get to force you to watch their ads, in fact skipping ads on broadcast tv is a big and legal market.
That's because you already paid for it, and the payment was what allowed the content to even get created.
>>I don’t understand what you are saying. There has always existed straightforward methods of preventing “freeloaders” as you call them from accessing your content. If you don’t believe me, go to wsj.com and report back.
That's an interesting example, considering the number of times you see non-paywalled links here on HN.
Freeloaders exist only because they are being subsidized by those who actually pay. That's exactly why paywalled articles also have non-paywalled versions. If you don't believe me (that non-paywalled versions are subsidized by people who pay), just ask someone who produces the content and report back. Or better yet, ask the same person who produced the content how long they will keep producing content if no one paid for access. As the old saying goes, at some point, you run out of other people's money.
> Freeloaders exist only because they are being subsidized by those who actually pay
Freeloaders exist because someone wanted to give something for free.
If someone put something online to be viewed freely and then expects some kind of return on it is hypocritical in my opinion. Just trying to make freeloaders look bad for their own lack of action to put it behind a paywall.
>>TV Broadcasters don’t get to force you to watch their ads, in fact skipping ads on broadcast tv is a big and legal market.
> That's because you already paid for it
Freeloaders already paid for the internet connection.
I don't see how it's freeloading to not want to interact with a stupid popup chat robot. I will never, ever, use your stupid chat popup. Ever. So if I'm blocking it, you are losing nothing. Nothing changes for you when I block all your marketing tools, because I will not engage. In fact I actively disengage if I see any of them, so by blocking them, you actually stand a chance of me sticking around on whatever your service is, and unless your service is providing chat robot popups, you probably then stand a better chance of me actually making you money.
> the same people who complain...don't stop using the website itself
We do stop using the website. Instead of using the website, we use tools like https://archive.is/ and the Wayback Machine to view less user-hostile snapshots of the website.
Governments around the world should demand Facebook either place a permanent ad banner promoting WT:Social front and center on their website for everyone from that country, or they can pay $x00 million in fines per month. If Facebook chooses to pay the fine, half the fine should then be donated to WT:Social to keep their site running and the rest can be distributed back to the taxpayers. :-)
2. More importantly: imagine it happens. Who would actually make a switch?
I mean, really, who chooses to use FB, because he likes FB? I don't think I know a single example. For the last year or so it even (finally!) became trendy among non-techy people to hate FB, but so what? People stay because their social circles stay. In fact, it's been quite a while since I don't actually feel pressured to use FB by induviduals, but rather the stuff like climbing club using FB as a platform to announce events and gather groups to go camping and stuff.
WT:Social might become of use as a very niche social network for news, but no way it can be seriously viewed as FB's rival. And even if they could, they are fighting for the yesterday's market, meanwhile Facebook builds the future, where their helpless users will willingly spend their lives in Oculus helmets socializing with their FB "friends" on VR beaches. Or whatever.
Given how far computer vision has advanced nowadays, I would be interested to know if anyone has done an analysis of the frequency and delta of over-speeding vs the make of the car as a (not so great) proxy for how rich a person is. That might be an additional data point to consider when formulating these laws.
How is this different than every other company doing business in China, including Microsoft?
>Keep your data within datacenters located in China with an Azure China account and stay compliant with international and industry-specific compliance standards. Access to your customer data is controlled by an independent company in China, 21Vianet. Not even Microsoft can access your data without approval and oversight by 21Vianet.
Actions that are legally required of every company doing business in a particular country do not invalidate their actions elsewhere.
Google, for instance, bragged on their blog to their real customers in advertising that they now buy a copy of everyone's credit card transaction history.
Actually I think they do - if they're ever legally required to give up data here they seem to not really put up a fight, or have an incentive to make the data useless for the govt.
What I'm saying is expecting Apple to have your back sounds meh.
According to several passages in the article, that term was used by Facebook. Whether they use it in the same way as the credit card industry, I don't know. But if FB means something different, the error does not seem to be with the article.
You must realize game developers have the majority of the responsibility, since they are the ones making these notorious business models. When I was a kid, you used to buy a game once, and then play it for as long as you would. I still love some of the games released for DOS.
Interestingly enough, even old DOS games are much better than the crap released and mass produced through the Internet. People are stupid for buying into it. I used to be one of them, but I never paid for in-game stuff, and eventually I simply lost interest because it actually ruined the gameplay completely.
The article is clearly blowing things out of proportion, framing it as if Facebook was responsible, when in fact there is much more to the story. It's really unfurtunate, because the credibility of journalism is under attack already, and releasing biased junk like this will not help. Start-ups are never perfect, and if you dig hard enough, especially in big companies, you will find some dirt.
Then again, some things also just happen by accident, not necessarily because it was a conscious decision to do bad things, which is also clearly not the case here, unlike what the article falsely claim.
I have never seen a comment which is so ignorant of Facebook's past behavior.
Are you aware that Facebook at one point unilaterally decided to allow people to see and comment on photos of friends of friends (i.e. 2nd degree connections)?
Just in case you are not clear on what actually happened: this "feature" didn't initially exist, so you behaved in a certain way one day. And the next day, they added this feature and you had no way to opt out of it.
Am I now supposed to also monitor and choose the friends of my friends? And then also study Facebook's API to know what level of access is provided to first degree connections? And then second degree connections? And are you suggesting everyone who uses Facebook is supposed to learn about all this stuff?
>>I don't know what goes into running this site, but personally, if I know I'm guaranteed to get a totally one-sided take, I'd rather have the one from the people who actually know how to code.
In other words, if you don't know how to code, you are probably not intelligent enough to write about a technical topic?
No, there are intelligent people everywhere. But intelligent people are often catastrophically wrong when writing on a topic about which they know nothing.
People who think they always know best are often catastrophically wrong when it comes to writing about the topic they think they know better than anyone else.
At some point, you've got to let people decide for themselves what is true. A single source of information is an unreliable source.
It’s not about knowing the difference; it’s about recognizing the pattern and applying the appropriate measure of skepticism. It happens with complicated topics in other fields as well.
>> "It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster."
Funny, that's exactly what it has looked like till now since the announcement about Microsoft and Facebook ML teams joining forces to go up against Tensorflow. :-)
