Guest9081239812 (u/Guest9081239812)

Guest9081239812 commented on WhatsApp introduces ads in its app nytimes.com/2025/06/16/te... · Posted by u/greenburger

account42 · 8 months ago

So you are overcharging paid users by over 500% and complaining that not many take that deal? See that's the problem with all these "people won't pay for ad-free services" arguments. It almost always boils down this kind of abusive pricing.

And honestly, what you could make from users through ads is not what I care about. You are making zero from me through ads because I block them everywhere and that is not negotiable. A reasonable price would be costs + modest margin not how much you could grab out of my pocket.

Guest9081239812 · 8 months ago

I'm a little confused where you're trying to go with this comment. I develop and maintain a service that has been used by millions of people. I make less net profit than a part-time McDonald's employee. Is this not "costs + modest margin"? Where is the abusive pricing?

Guest9081239812 commented on WhatsApp introduces ads in its app nytimes.com/2025/06/16/te... · Posted by u/greenburger

stavros · 8 months ago

How much do you make per user on ads, and how much is the subscription?

Guest9081239812 · 8 months ago

It only generates about 15k a year in ad revenue. It's fairly low revenue because:

1. Users are spread around the world. This isn't a site with 70% US visitors.

2. The majority of users run ad block, and this continues to rise.

3. Ad rates plummet each year. I earn about 5x less on the site now, than in the past, with the same number of active users, and 3x as many advertisements.

I've tried all the major advertising networks. I setup header bidding and signed direct deals with large networks, such as AppNexus, Amazon, Yahoo, AOL, etc. At the end of the day, ads do not pay well for my audience.

Users can pay $3/mo to remove advertising. Yes, I'm aware that's $36/yr, when the average registered user is generating less than $0.50/yr in ad revenue. About 30% of paying users choose to pay higher than $3/mo for no additional benefit (they can pay any amount they wish). I also have some individuals that have paid thousands of dollars.

What would happen if I offered a $1/yr plan for an ad free experience, so it's more inline with ad revenues? I honestly don't know, but I would guess I would lose a few of the $3/mo paying users, and gain less than 100 users paying $1/yr, so it would likely be net negative.

Guest9081239812 commented on WhatsApp introduces ads in its app nytimes.com/2025/06/16/te... · Posted by u/greenburger

filoleg · 8 months ago

I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads” crowd is mostly all-talk. And I am saying this as someone who genuinely believes in the “small fee instead of paying with ad exposure” approach.

The one specific example of this that made me think so is the Youtube Premium situation. So many people in the “a fee instead of ads” crowd consumes YT for hours a day, but so far I’ve only met one person (not counting myself) who actually pays for YT Premium.

And yes, a major chunk of the people I talked about this with were FAANG engineers, so it isn’t like they cannot afford it. But it felt like they were more interested in complaining about the ad-funded-services landscape and muse on their stances around it, as opposed to actually putting their money where their mouth is.

All I can say is, I am not paying for YT Premium out of some ideological standpoint or love for Google (not even close). It has genuinely been just worth it for me many times over in the exact practical ways I was expecting it to.

Guest9081239812 · 8 months ago

My site has about 30k active registered users a day. The vast majority are long term members that have been on the site for years, so they're quite dedicated to the service. Even so, only about 50 of them pay to remove advertising.

Guest9081239812 commented on Fake Nintendo lawyer is scaring YouTubers, and its not clear YouTube can stop it theverge.com/2024/12/27/2... · Posted by u/tombot

asddubs · a year ago

does your forum have download or something in the name that could lead them/a scanning tool to think it's piracy download links? Not saying that would make the situation any more justified, I'm just kind of curious

Guest9081239812 · a year ago

Nope, it doesn't offer any downloads, or questionable content. The site has strict guidelines against any comments even mentioning piracy.

The DMCA notices from Google direct me to the complaint in the Lumen Database. In those notices it lists my domain along with hundreds of others for each complaint, so I'm not alone here.

I'm assuming a third party company is being paid to look after sending DMCA complaints for businesses. If they remove 100,000 URLs by sending DMCA notices, they can charge higher fees or get more contracts compared to other companies that only take down 10,000 URLs. There are no repercussions, so might as well automate the process and aim for big numbers.

Guest9081239812 commented on Fake Nintendo lawyer is scaring YouTubers, and its not clear YouTube can stop it theverge.com/2024/12/27/2... · Posted by u/tombot

Guest9081239812 · a year ago

I have a forum that receives a high number of DMCA claims. They link to pages on my forum where they claim I'm violating their copyright. However, when I review the pages, the content only mentions the name of a product or service. Imagine I write something here, like how I watched the movie "Inception" last week. A third party then sends me a DMCA request on behalf of Warner Bros, and Google removes this page from their search results. That's what I get, but thousands of them.

It's fairly clear no human is reviewing the content any step of the way, otherwise they would see the only content on the page is a paragraph of plain text with the name of a movie. I feel like I have no recourse though. I don't have the time to make thousands of counter claims for some random forum pages that receive an insignificant amount of search traffic a year.

It feels like a broken system. How can someone pull thousands of my pages from Google, and I'm either forced to spend weeks of my time trying to recover them, or I need to leave them removed? Where is the penalty or punishment for the false claims? Who is going to compensate me for my time?

Guest9081239812 commented on Show HN: HN Update – Hourly news broadcast of top HN stories hnup.date/... · Posted by u/yunusabd

highwaylights · a year ago

I think it’s a case of this not fitting your use case.

It wouldn’t replace reading the front page for me but I could really see it replacing a podcast on my morning walk. Especially given the absence of news spin or adverts. I’ll definitely be giving it a try tomorrow.

Guest9081239812 · a year ago

I think you're right here. I'm forgetting about "entertainment".

This will never replace my visits to HN because it's not efficient. Unless it uses neurolink to beam the information into my mind, that's always going to be the case. It fails in that way.

However, let's consider a podcast. You get 5 people that are entertaining, knowledgeable about technology, well spoken, and have differing opinions, and get them to spend 30 minutes talking about the top HN posts. It's slow, they would most likely not even discuss my favourite posts, but yet, I would consider listening. Is it possible to replicate that with AI? Could AI digest the content and all of the comments, and turn it into an entertaining and educational discussion and debate between a few different AI voices?

I think it's possible, and it changes the idea from being an inefficient method of summarizing content, to a form of entertainment. That could be the right direction to go with this kind of project. However, even if AI perfectly replicates a great podcast, how would I feel listening to it? I think this question applies to most AI content. How important is the human process in the content we consume? Do people only care about the end result, or do they want read a book written by a person, view photos taken by a person, listen to songs performed by a person, and listen to a podcast by real people?

Guest9081239812 commented on Show HN: HN Update – Hourly news broadcast of top HN stories hnup.date/... · Posted by u/yunusabd

Guest9081239812 · a year ago

Lots of positive feedback here, but after a quick listen, I'm not a fan. To summarize my thoughts...

1. The experience just feels too sluggish. For example, I opened the HN homepage, skimmed all of the headlines, read the comments on the top post, and it probably took about 30 seconds. I was done, feeling like I got all the information from HN that I needed, with the intention of checking for new posts later in the day. This tool took an entire minute to brief me about a single post.

2. It's not very practical. Usually 1 or 2 posts catch my attention on the HN homepage each day. This tool is most likely going to give me information about the wrong posts. You could improve this with some type of algorithm that learns what information I listen to and what I skip, but it's not ideal. Or, perhaps I could click the headlines I'm interested in, and a custom audio summary is generated.

3. Lastly, I think it removes the human experience of HN. I like to read exactly what people are posting. Everyone is unique, and it's interesting to see how people interact, along with their choice of words and tone. Erasing all of that and listening to a robotic summary just sucks the soul straight out of the community. It reduces the connection to the people here, which I think is the best aspect of the site.

Thanks for sharing though, it's interesting to see this idea brought to fruition.

Guest9081239812 commented on Show HN: I hate online Lorem Ipsum Generator so I made my own · Posted by u/alanpham

alanpham · 2 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! It's true that I plugged my own studio cause I think it would not cause any harm. I just think if Shopify can plug their name on their side products like "Business Name Generator", we all can do it too.

For the "Slow" and "Clunky", I was talking more about the UX rather than the performance of such sites. The fastest way to quickly grab a "lorem ipsum".

For the 1mb logo, that's on me haha. Did it during the weekend. Thank you for letting me know.

Guest9081239812 · 2 years ago

I have no problem with anyone plugging their business. I assume the entire purpose of a small project like this one is to generate leads. I just find it disappointing that it's one of the most unnecessarily bloated websites I've seen in my life, and you plug so many people involved in the project that should know better. If you're trying to make "The fastest way to quickly grab a lorem ipsum", then you need to consider the performance and the time it takes for the site to load, not just the UX. You should be able to get this down to 100ms load times, and closer to 50ms once cached. It shouldn't be seconds.

Guest9081239812 commented on Show HN: I hate online Lorem Ipsum Generator so I made my own · Posted by u/alanpham

Guest9081239812 · 2 years ago

Why does a one page static site that is a few paragraphs of text use 9.3MB of resources (4MB compressed)? Why is the tiny logo in the corner 1MB? It's absurd, especially when you say your pain point with competitors is them being slow and clunky. This could be a 5KB website with internal analytics.

It's not a great look, especially when you're plugging the design studio, collab partner, and founder for such a basic project. If it takes this much resources to make a box of text with a copy button, I would hate to see the efficiency of your larger projects.

Aside from that, congrats on making something. It's simple, looks relatively polished, and works decent. I think you could maintain the simplicity and add a few features to allow generating alternate text, and a variable number of paragraphs that can be copied at once.

Guest9081239812 commented on Live NASA telescope feed for today's solar eclipse [video] youtube.com/watch?v=J5j95... · Posted by u/revicon

function_seven · 2 years ago

Not only that, but the light source that's creating the shadow gets smaller (in terms of arc length), so the shadow becomes more crisp.

Guest9081239812 · 2 years ago

When it's a crescent shape, it's also more crisp in one direction. So if you hold up a square and make a shadow on the ground, two sides are sharp, two sides are blurry. Or if you look at your own shadow, it's a mix of sharp and blurry edges, which looks unusual.