AnAngryAlpaca

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

People seem to forget that there was a time before cars, where people had to rely on public transport alone.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Most people live in a city. In Australia and NZ it's around 90%, in China, Europe and Canada for sure over 50%.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Sure, but withg wechat you can link each user to the real person, bank account, phone number and find his friend circle on we chat. This might not work so well on other apps where any user can sign up via vpn and a random email address...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (3 children)

That is a good example, but as the other commenter pointed out I dont think you can compare weChat with Twitter. Twitter is a startup trying to make money from it's service. WeChat is a tool for the chinese goverment to track each persons chats, money transactions and purchases, and as such will pretty much receive all the funding it needs. Being profitable is not the main objective of WeChat.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (8 children)

I dont think an "everything app" will ever work.

You can make one thing that does one thing very well and better than the competition, and you will get users. Or you can do one thing that will try to do 10 things half assed, and it will fail to impress users. This happens because you have to divert your resources (time, money, people) for development, maintenance, new ideas, design etc. across all your "everythings". The more everythings you have, the less resources each one gets, however the costs for maintenance, bugfixes, updates etc. stay the same.

This happened to Yahoo in the early 2000s, where it tried to be Search, News portal, Email, Web directory, Weather, games and whathaveyou, however it failed because none of it's parts was better than the competition.

The better approach for an app would be to do it's own thing it is supposed to do, but support other apps that can enhance your product by allowing it to interact with outside data, and also give his data back out to other apps: use mailto:links/email instead of inventing your own messaging protocoll, support exporting to standard calendar files instead of implementing your own calendar that is oblivious to the schedule on the users phone. Support exporting datasets into common formats the user knows from his everyday tasks (excel, csv) so he can run his own data analysis on it, instead of baking some half-assed "analytics" module that only has 10% of the features the user needs.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Zombie outbreak and owning a jeep? Now you got two problems!

[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago

With dark patterns you can "guide" the user to click a particular button, for example by having "accept" in a large, bright stand out colored button, and the "reject" button in a low contrast, small or disabled looking button.

This will not prevent people from clicking reject, but it shifts the percentage of people clicking accept vs reject in the websites favor.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Big tobacco doesn't really need cigarette sales anymore. They are all in on vape brands, where they can sell the liquid at ink-jet prices to customers for a huge markup at $6500 per liter. That's why you see vape shops on each street corner. The distribution is all streamlined. The website talks to the DHL warehouse about what stock is available, customers can subscribe to weekly delivery plans and the warehouse is filled by some factory in china.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Have you seen that ludicrous display last night?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I get some dodgy casino and gambling ads ... Before a children's program. Reported the ad multiple times, but it keeps coming back under a different name.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

The "allow device to wake up computer" is already set to "off" in mouse, keyboard and other USB devices, together with any bios settings related to wake up. Yet still, at least once a week my computer is on in the morning, after i set it to Hibernate the night before. Sometimes it even power cycles straight away after i tried to turn it of. Same today, when i was was out of the house for a few hours, and it decided to magically turn itself on, run windows update and restart. I have to power it down and turn of the the power on the power-strip each night. My work laptop has the same issue, except it does not care about the power strip switch and discharges the battery overnight instead!

[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

Can someone explain how this website lost millions? Given that this size was not that big, I fail to see how it could cost this much in admin and Server cost. Even some better known commercial shops will hardly hit 5digits in monthly server costs, plus salaries for 1-3 admins and support staff, and maybe advertising costs.

37million sounds like something they pulled out of thin air, maybe for some bookkeeping fraud or tax write off...

view more: ‹ prev next ›