> I literally never need ads. I just search for the solution to the problem I’m having. No push needed (or wanted).
I want to agree with you, but you only think you're not seeing ads. Obviously, the SEO corruption has made everything you search for distorted by irresistible economic incentives of tilting the search results and search engine in favor of promoters.
Yes, and if you ban ads then you can expect a lot more underhand marketing as the companies peddling their goods will try and find another way to reach you.
Magazines, phone books, friends, stores. You know you could go to a store (or call them on the phone!) and talk to a person. "Hello, I am trying to find a thing to help me with X."
Turns out that products that work well tend to get remembered, and ones that don't get forgotten.
Call what store? How do I know a store even exists to call it? How do I find out the store’s name and phone number? How do I find out where the store is located?
You say products that work tend to get remembered, and sure, for existing products with a market you might be right… people would continue buying those things even with no advertising.
But how did the FIRST person who bought the product find out about it? Someone has to try it once before you can even know the product works. How would a new product enter the market?
> Call what store? How do I know a store even exists to call it? How do I find out the store’s name and phone number? How do I find out where the store is located?
Maps exist. Search engines exist. Have you been stuck in a cave the last 50 years?
Go to any bookstore and open practically any paid magazine. Count how many pages are ads. It's far from a small percentage. Some I've looked at recently were practically 1/3 to 1/2 ads. This isn't far from how things were decades ago.
Yellow pages (phone books) were essentially entirely advertising. They didn't just list businesses out of the goodness of their heart, they took listing fees. This is a form of advertising!
> If anything the big businesses use advertising as a protection moat. As a small business, I would def prefer to be in a world that allows me to advertise, even if I have to compete for things like my own name
These two sentences are contradictory. Big business uses it as a defensive measure, yet you think a small business can use it as an offensive measure. It's an absurd outcome of the SEO of the last two decades that people think it's fine to pay for get traffic using your own keywords. Stockholm syndrome.
I can see how it's contradictory on its face, but the reality is pretty nuanced.
Large brands continue to run ads to enforce brand loyalty and keep their image fresh. For a lot of companies, dropping advertising will lead to reduced sales.
However, as a new entrant to a consumer facing market, how is one supposed to drive new customers to try their product? Just being a bit better or a little cheaper isn't necessarily going to win over a lot of people if they never bother trying it due to existing brand loyalties. So you've got to do some amount of advertising to build some kind of awareness to the product and get people to try it.
That doesn't necessarily mean unskippable video advertisements or whatever, but one should try and do some kind of marketing push to get awareness of your product up other than hoping presence on some store shelves will result in enough sales fast enough to keep your company alive.
If you have to advertise - shove your product in people's faces - to keep sales, your product is not supplying enough real value, does not have staying power, and you should lose.
"Just being a bit better or a little cheaper isn't necessarily going to win over a lot of people if they never bother trying it due to existing brand loyalties"
This is a feature, not a bug. Brand loyalties are built when products are reliable and good. Your product should be enough of an improvement to make people move of their own accord.
If your new product solves frustrations present in an incumbent, on a long enough timescale, your product will come out on top.
If both products are presented equally in a marketplace, the better one will win. If your company does not survive because you can't shove it in people's faces, this is a good thing.
> If your new product solves frustrations present in an incumbent, on a long enough timescale, your product will come out on top.
I've got numerous examples where this didn't happen because of other brand awareness. Neato had a very competitive and better bot vacuum to iRobot for years and yet they failed to gain traction. A large part of that would be because everyone knew about iRobot's offerings and yet ask any random person if they've ever heard of Neato Botvac and you'll get crickets. You're imagining an ideal world where clear better performers always win. This doesn't often happen in practice.
First mover advantage, brand awareness, word of mouth, early reviewers, etc. People then build a brand connection of "robot vacuum" == "roomba", everything else is just a fake imitation.
Imagine you're a normal random consumer and not an electronics nerd. You've heard people on the morning TV news show talk about these robot vacuums and showed a Roomba. You have a friend that got one last Christmas and said their Roomba was pretty cool. You go to the store, and you see a few Roombas and some other brands you've never heard of. You're probably only going to spend a few minutes looking at the shelf. Which one are you likely to get?
And in the end iRobot managed to coast on that brand connection of "robot vacuum" == "roomba" for a lot of people for nearly 20 years. It really only took until competitors were way cheaper and way better that got people to really start to switch. Their products have not been competitive for over a decade and yet they've only finally died. That power of linking a brand to a specific item or service is powerful, and its not purely push advertising and forced video ads that build it.
Its somewhat the same thing for Google. Sure, they do some amount of advertising especially at top of line events, but overall it seems their direct outbound marketing is kind of low overall. They spend a bunch of defaults and continue to build the connection that to search the internet is to Google, even as they continue to inject more paid results and the quality declines. Other competitors are out there which are comparable or better, but even with them heavily advertising they fail to unseat that brand connection.
> I have fallen asleep watching youtube many times.
Interesting new opportunity for YouTube here. Detect your usage patterns and near bed time show you increasingly boring content until you fall asleep, then fill your head with subliminal messages in these long ads.
I fall asleep to YT sometimes watching speed runs when I have a hard time sleeping. When I wake up it is mostly running live streams of religious chants going in a loop. Hindu, muslim, orthodox christian. Or some strange genre of a Japanese anime girl making sounds.
One of the smarter product decisions they made was to tweak the algorithm to show different types of content based on time (and device). If it’s past 9:30pm and it’s the bedroom tv it suggests vastly different stuff than 6:30am on the living room tv. And for good reason! I’m not watching some slow “adventures through the milky way at light speed” video when I’m waking up!
I'm a heavy YouTube watcher (My rewind said I watched 4500 different channels last year) and agree too. The content I get recommended is different day vs night. It's also device dependent (even when logged into same account) - my TV and phone definitely have a slightly different algo.
C was my first language, more than thirty years ago. I've heard (and probably myself made) the same arguments over and over and over. But those arguments are lame and wrong.
C cannot be made safe (at scale). It's like asbestos. In fact, C is a hazardous material in exactly the same way as asbestos. Naturally occurring, but over industrialized and deployed far too widely before its dangers were known. Still has its uses but it will fuck you up if you do not use industrial-grade PPE.
Stop using C if you can. Stop arguing other people should use it. There have always been alternatives and the opportunity cost of ecosystems continuing to invest in C has massive externalized costs for the entire industry and society as a whole.
> When C code is run in machines capable of failing with gruesome death, its unsafeness may indeed result in gruesome death.
And yet, it never does. It's been powering those types of machines likely longer than you have been alive, and the one exception I can think of where lives were lost, the experts found that the development process was at fault, not the language.
If it was as bad as you make out, we'd have many many many occurrences of this starting in the 80s. We don't.
As it happens I updated to Tahoe a couple days back.
This entire UI refresh strikes me as completely unnecessary. I didn't even notice the menu icons. Thanks for that. Just another thing to be annoyed about.
But really, the glaringly obvious ones are already in your face.
1. There is no setting to get rid of the ridiculously over-rounded corners.
2. The dock, which I put on the left, now has about 10 extra pixels between it and the edge of the screen. 10 pixels that now will never, ever, be usable again.
3. All the icons have been forced into a rounded corner box. As it turns out, the human brain is really good at recognizing silhouettes. This just made that part of my brain useless. It retroactively restyled applications' icons that I've used for over a decade.
I'm sure I'll find others, but it's clear that Apple does not care about users. This all about power. They didn't even include settings to turn any of this off...just "take it like we wanna give it to you, plebes".
Infuriating.
And none of these things matter. Literally none of them are core to how an operating system works, just how it looks. I just don't understand UX people, and at this point I'm starting to hate them.
> 3. Bias towards action. Ship. You can edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank one.
> First do it, then do it right, then do it better. Get the ugly prototype in front of users. Write the messy first draft of the design doc. Ship the MVP that embarrasses you slightly. You’ll learn more from one week of real feedback than a month of theoretical debate.
I've met Addy and I'll be generous, but strong disagree here, and this really shows a huge blind spot in how software is being developed today that hurts everyone.
There aren't two extremes between "theoretical debate" and just shipping the first crap you can slap together. Software engineering will never become a real discipline when industry keeps ignoring the lessons of every other field of engineering: gather some requirements first.
Want to know what users want? How about asking them? What about doing some research on what tools they are using now (or not) and finding out what's wrong with them. What about doing a user study? What about analyzing competing and previous products?
How about then drawing up a list of things that say what the thing will do? You can keep the list short, sure. Build a prototype (maybe for internal use)? Sure. No need to have every piece of functionality there.
But there's an enormous blind spot here I'd be remiss to point out. Back in the shrink-wrapped software days, back when products took months and sometimes years to develop, man, people really planned out what they were going to build! And I'm not just romanticizing that era--there was a lot that could go wrong, and many misses--but tons of software developed in that manner sticks with us today, not just the designs and usage patterns, but big chunks of the code too. It's not all legacy cruft; people actually thought about what they wanted to build, and then laboriously built and tested it--with crappier tools, longer build times, and many disadvantages like huge teams, crappier communication, and a whole lot less computational power.
There are other things in this list that are good advice, but I felt like this cannot possibly be the whole truth to 14 years of experience. In other words, please don't just ship your crap to us the first time it functions.
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