notheguyouthink (u/notheguyouthink)

notheguyouthink commented on Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation techcrunch.com/2018/12/21... · Posted by u/sahin

gruez · 7 years ago

>required install

I'd rather install something compared to using the "webapp" version if it used 30 MB of RAM rather than 3000MB.

notheguyouthink · 7 years ago

Good for you, but it's still optional for the right crowd. More specifically, you don't have to. Users can connect to your gaming group with zero friction. Not even signup! (at least, back in the day, i'm unsure what it's like not)

notheguyouthink commented on Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation techcrunch.com/2018/12/21... · Posted by u/sahin

dvt · 7 years ago

> Discord "won" in my view because it simply had to be modern to be vastly superior.

Discord "won" because it's literally burning cash and offering a service for free (for example, I don't have to pay for a t2.micro instance to host a Mumble server). But this is obviously not sustainable.

If you're selling a dollar for fifty cents, it's not hard to find a market.

notheguyouthink · 7 years ago

But even if you gave me a free mumble service, it still wouldn't be comparable to Discord - at least when i was using Discord.

The price wasn't the issue (imo), it was simply the user experience. It had the best, by leagues. Users (ie, non hosts) didn't pay for any of these products, but the UX of Discord was vastly superior in my view.

notheguyouthink commented on Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA wsj.com/articles/deformit... · Posted by u/hodgesrm

Valmar · 7 years ago

GM foods are actually more dangerous, due to how GM works.

Cross-breeding allows nature to combine things that fit together in all of the right places. And we just don't know how that even happens, or why. We don't understand nature's algorithm for DNA. No even the tip of the iceberg.

Sure, nature isn't always correct, but does thing properly 99.999% of the time. And that's good enough.

It is utterly incomparable to GM done by humans ~ genes are inserted, but the results are not equivalent to what is done by nature, because we don't understand DNA enough to know where we should be placing the inserted DNA, so that things don't massively fuck up inexplicably somewhere down the line.

notheguyouthink · 7 years ago

> Cross-breeding allows nature to combine things that fit together in all of the right place

I feel like this is putting too much faith in "natural" methodologies.

Eg, who's to say a cross breeding solution is less dangerous than a GM solution?

If the concern is that it may take 50 years to know the GM is bad, why are we assuming the non-GM is good now? You could say that people have been cross breading for many many generations, but i'm unsure why we'd know that one cross breed being safe means all crossbreeds are safe. I'm not inherently defending GM. I'm attacking the notion that man made tricks like cross breeding are inherently safe.

notheguyouthink commented on Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation techcrunch.com/2018/12/21... · Posted by u/sahin

dvt · 7 years ago

Discord is as valuable to the gaming community as IRC was, or as Ventrilo was, or as Skype was (for a while). In other words, not very (as all those tools were easily replaced). Twitch built a marketplace of creators and consumers (like YouTube) -- that's why it's hard to replace. Discord, on the other hand, is a chat program.

notheguyouthink · 7 years ago

I disagree (to a degree). Everyone i know kicked and screamed about switching from Vent/Teamspeak/Mumble. I feel like it eventually dominated not because it was easy to dump existing solutions, but because existing solutions were poorly designed by comparison. No mobile, horrid chat, required install, poor voip quality. Discord came along with a better offering and it still was a tough switch.

With that said, i agree that no one "cares" about Discord. If a better thing comes along i could easily see people dumping it. But, i imagine it'll be a bit more difficult. Discord "won" in my view because it simply had to be modern to be vastly superior. However, i'm unsure how easy someone can make a next version that is such a superior leap.

Fwiw, as a gaming voip/chat i still find it a pretty great UX. My only complaint is that it is a bit laggy due to the, i assume, web-based interface on "desktop".

notheguyouthink commented on Nobody Trusts Facebook, Twitter Is a Hot Mess, What Is Snapchat Doing? bloomberg.com/news/featur... · Posted by u/pdog

egypturnash · 7 years ago

are you sure this is not actually an advantage

notheguyouthink · 7 years ago

It is and it isn't. I imagine your humor implies that technical people are using Mastadon, ie the same type that would be using HN, but the reality is that while that is true, Twitter "rejects" are also using Mastadon. Sometimes this means communities filled with very.. controversial people.

notheguyouthink commented on The Bullshit Web pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-w... · Posted by u/codesections

DmenshunlAnlsis · 7 years ago

Currently the price is free, and comes bundled with uMatrix, and a cookie flush. I’d like to pay the NYT for their journalism, but only with money, not the ability to track me. As a result they get no money, and no tracking.

notheguyouthink · 7 years ago

> Currently the price is free, and comes bundled with uMatrix, and a cookie flush. I’d like to pay the NYT for their journalism, but only with money, not the ability to track me. As a result they get no money, and no tracking.

You misunderstood me. I mean, what would they like you to pay them, for them to be 100% transparent about what they're doing for tracking, what their advertisers are doing and who they are, and possibly stopping all that entirely. Ie, what is it worth to them.

notheguyouthink commented on The Bullshit Web pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-w... · Posted by u/codesections

throwawaymath · 7 years ago

You're correct of course, but I don't really see how this isn't a vacuous observation. Yes clearly our perceptions are at odds, but that has nothing to do with the reality of whether or not they need to be doing that tracking. Obviously they think they need to, or they wouldn't do it. But I think I've laid out a pretty strong argument that they actually don't need to, which leads me to believe that they actually haven't considered it seriously enough to give it a shot.

Would they be as profitable? Maybe, maybe not. Would they become unprofitable? No, strictly speaking. I'm confident in that because the NYT weathered the decline of traditional news media before the rise or hyper-targeted ads, and because I've maintained a free website in the Alexa top 100,000 on my own, with well over 500,000 unique visitors per day. That doesn't come close to the online audience of a major newspaper, but it's illustrative. There is a phenomenal amount of advertising optimization you can do using basic analytics based on page requests and basic demographic data that still respects privacy and doesn't track individual users. I outlined a few methods, such as Daring Fireball's.

Maybe instead of this being a philosophical issue of perspective between a user and an organization, it's an issue of an organization that hasn't examined how else it can exist. Does the NYT need over 10,000 employees? Is there a long tail of unpopular and generally underperforming content that nevertheless sticks around, sucking up money and forcing ever more privacy-invasive targeting? If the NYT doesn't know its audience well enough to present demographic-targeted ads on particular articles and sections, what the hell is it doing tracking users individually? It's just taking the easy way out and giving advertising partners the enhanced tracking they want. But they don't need to do that, and whether or not they think they need to do it is orthogonal to the problem itself.

notheguyouthink · 7 years ago

> You're correct of course, but I don't really see how this isn't a vacuous observation. Yes clearly our perceptions are at odds, but that has nothing to do with the reality of whether or not they need to be doing that tracking. Obviously they think they need to, or they wouldn't do it. But I think I've laid out a pretty strong argument that they actually don't need to, which leads me to believe that they actually haven't considered it seriously enough to give it a shot.

It most definitely is. But so is the word need, in this context. How would we define what they need to do, and what they don't need to do?

My argument is simply such that, of course they don't need to (by my definition), but nothing will change that unless they see a different, more lucrative offer. Ie, "oh hey, here's 2 million readers who will only read the page in plain html and will pay an extra $20/m". It just seems like a needless argument, as I don't believe there's anything that can change their behavior without us changing ours. Without the market changing.

Rather, I think the solution lies not in them, but in you. In us. To use blockers and filters to such an extreme degree that it's made clear that UX wins here, and they need to provide the UX to retain the customers.

Thus far, we've not done enough to change their "need". If a day comes that they do need to stop tracking us, well, they'll either live or die. But the problem, and solution, lies in us. My 2c.

notheguyouthink commented on The Bullshit Web pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-w... · Posted by u/codesections

wuliwong · 7 years ago

Why is that doubtful? There's all kinds of examples of tiered subscriptions in the world. I think it would be doubtful because the NYT wouldn't want to explicitly admit all the tracking they are doing.

notheguyouthink · 7 years ago

> Why is that doubtful? There's all kinds of examples of tiered subscriptions in the world. I think it would be doubtful because the NYT wouldn't want to explicitly admit all the tracking they are doing.

Many reasons, one of which you said. What would the price tag be for them to admit all they are tracking?

notheguyouthink commented on The Bullshit Web pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-w... · Posted by u/codesections

throwawaymath · 7 years ago

> NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product and you can only achieve that with javascript tracking pixels (Server logs aren't good enough).

No they don't. They really don't need to know any of that. They don't even get a pass on tracking because they're providing a free whatever - I pay for a subscription to the NYT. The business, or a meaningfully substantial core of it, is viable without tracking.

It would be nice if the things I pay for didn't start stuffing their content with bullshit. What and who do I have to pay to get single second page loads? It's not a given that advertising has to be so bloated and privacy-invasive. Various podcasts and blogs (like Daring Fireball) plug the same ad to their entire audience each post/episode for set periods of time. If you're going to cry about needing advertising then take your geographic and demographic based targeting. But no war of attrition will get me to concede you need user-by-user tracking.

You want me to pay for your content? Fine, I like it well enough. You want to present ads as well? Okay sure, the writing and perspectives are worth that too I suppose. But in addition to all of this you want to track my behavior and correlate it to my online activity that has nothing to do with your content? No, that's ridiculous.

notheguyouthink · 7 years ago

> No they don't. They really don't need to know any of that. They don't even get a pass on tracking because they're providing a free whatever - I pay for a subscription to the NYT. The business, or a meaningfully substantial core of it, is viable without tracking.

Clearly they disagree. Or maybe you should let them know that they don't need that.

To say it without sarcasm, what you feel you are entitled as a paying customer and what they feel they need/want to understand their customers are clearly at odds. Ultimately, what you think matters nothing in isolation and what they think matters nothing in isolation. What you two agree upon, is the only thing that matters. That is to say, if you think they shouldn't track you but you use their tracking product anyway, you've compromised and agreed to new terms.

I imagine you could come up with a subscription that would adequately compensate them for a truly no tracking experience. But I doubt you two would agree on a price to pay for said UX.

notheguyouthink commented on Ask HN: When will preventative healthcare become a reality? · Posted by u/hsikka

PaulHoule · 7 years ago

Quite a few people take pills for high blood pressure or high cholesterol or inhalers for asthma, etc.

notheguyouthink · 7 years ago

Is that really preventative care though? Why would I take pills for high blood pressure, if I don't have high blood pressure already? I thought preventative care was care that is, well, in prevention of the problem. Ie, checkups and recipes to exercise more.. or eat less carbs, or do more cardio. or w/e.

I know nothing on the subject, so please take this as a question.