Why are today's kids so fond of the ephemeral?
Privacy?
The freedom and safety of not having a permanent record?
A culture of taking online the normal unrecorded stream-of-consciousness interaction between friends?
Is this appropriate for companies who deliver news?
Is there a reduction in creating and publishing things worth preserving, or is it just a case of the separate normal ephemera of life being taken online?
Will we, or youth, always share so much online, or is it a fad because the tools are new?
Maybe the hotel figures if someone is going direct, they're not an aggressive shopper and will be more likely to pay whatever they ask.
Yes, that's correct. For the same reason prices are often lower on eBay than on the vendor's webstore. Though it's sometimes the opposite, where the webstore offers a discount similar to the eBay commission.
For hotels to actually be successful in clawing back the business from travel sites, they're going to have to be willing to take that 30% commission that they were giving the travel sites, and give it to the traveler as a discount.
One potential problem with this is that when a sales agent becomes powerful they insist on parity-pricing, meaning that they must always be given the lowest rate available, forcing vendors to cross-subsidise these agents if they wish to offer their own discounts. Amazon is a master at this.
Comparison sites advertise so heavily because their power to get a good commission and discount from their vendors is in direct proportion to the number of people who can be hypnotized into using them without thinking of trying direct.
So I agree that advertising is most heavily relied on by either companies whose main competitive advantage is mind-share rather than product quality or a unique selling point, and on industries like insurance that sell virtual products with a low marginal cost of production, where market share is pure cream.
Nothing in your grocery store is like that; there is lots of supply/demand, seasonal, and loss leader pricing.
Around here, I see a lot of similarly wildly varying grocery store pricing that segments the market into the price-conscious and the price-oblivious. Big discounts every 2-12 weeks so that the canny can stock-up and avoid being driven to cheaper brands, while in-between, big margins are extracted from the wealthy, uninformed, busy, and unorganized.
Such sawtooth pricing is everywhere: Milk those unwilling or unable to time their purchases, but still get the business of thrifty, while playing chicken to scare them away from the bottom.
And the best way for the wealthy to apply their "wellspring that affords you the privilege of helping others" is taxation. Sure, governments often are dumb and wasteful, but taxation usually beats philanthropy, where it's too easy to do too little, to spend on pet projects away from the greatest need, and to smugly lord over those you deign to help. Sort of like high minimum wage vs. tipping culture.
Qualified people will have major incentives to produce contributions and have them accepted and be accredited for that work
Is this because of the prestige (including career benefits) of contributing to "the" textbook for that subject?
I agree wholeheartedly on the benefits of open-source textbooks, just like open-source software. However, if top-quality contributions aren't being commonly donated, I'd have no trouble having the books cost something. That is, while there would be freedom to create and distribute derivative works, both these and the originals wouldn't have the freedom to read without paying. The problem would be enforcing this, as broke students would tend to free-ride if there were no consequences. This is unlike business users of open commercial software, where there's more pressure to obey the licence.
My VIC-20 was also bought with paper run money — several years worth for a computer that was at the time the cheapest ever (except maybe the ZX-80, but I was a 6502 guy). I lusted after the Atari 400 & 800 (and Apple ][), but they were much more expensive here.
And yes, one had a good lesson in impermanence when a program was lost due to the unreliability of cassette storage, or through accidentally knocking the power plug out of the wall. However the Commodore cassette storage may have been better than Atari's because it recorded multiple copies. I still have my tapes, and last year managed to read back some PET programs using an audio-to-data program I found on the Net.
You spoiled brats with your C64s with floppy drives and your VIC-20s... you had it too easy. The original Commodore PET had 8K of RAM, a 40x25 character display, and storage on a cassette tape.
Fun memories:
I started on the PET as well, hired during the school holidays.
My first purchase was a VIC-20, which, with its 22-column display, was no spoiling after the 40-column PET.
No means no in the personal space, but most of the big Internet companies were built on breaking the rules: Google and YouTube were built on copyright infringement, Facebook was built on privacy violations, Uber and Airbnb respectively ignore local transport and accommodation laws, PayPal violated credit card company agreements, Amazon aggressively imposes patents and parity-pricing agreements, and Snapchat has thrived from illicit activity by children, not to mention all those boosted to critical mass through illegal spam.
But once established, it's both feasible and desirable to show a kinder front.
I can understand why a streaming service couldn't make money. Streaming is moving the power away from distributors and towards program creators. Even Netflix has realised their vulnerability by getting so heavily into originals.
Antenna has the advantage of both being free and recordable. Sure, you can't immediately get what you want, but it's easy to build up a never-exhausted queue of good stuff to watch when you're in the mood.
Companies like these know that support is their biggest cost. Their aim is to have their products bought because they are a cheap and readily-available option that promises to do what people want. How well they do this isn't important if they can get customers past a return impetus, and if they can rely on few customers seeing a product review or security alert. They then make it hard to contact and converse with support, like your experience, but also often by not having a website, an English website, or an email address, or even by not listing a manufacturer on their packaging.
There's so much potential for Chinese/Taiwanese companies that can be both reasonably priced and keen on both quality and customer service.
Although Edge supports extensions, and Chrome extensions can be easily ported, Microsoft still hasn't fully opened submissions to their extension gallery. At the moment you have to be invited to submit, and there are currently only 23 listed.
I didn't say it was a good thing. But the government doesn't study how many people are receiving OTA TV out of the goodness of their hearts. They will sell (sorry license) that spectrum just as soon as the viewer numbers are low enough.
The networks are just as eager to dump OTA and move entirely to technologies that give them more control and more data (less freedom and more spying for the viewers).
...OTA TV transmission will be switched off and the spectrum sold to the highest bidder.
That'll be a sad day. Other than the on-screen "bugs", OTA is DRM-free. Nothing's stopping me recording, removing or skipping ads, and privately distributing the recordings. Much harder with streaming.
Direct bank account to bank account transfers are cheaper than cards, and are getting cheaper and quicker.
In Australia these are free, but currently take 12-48 hours (only on business days). Later this year an instant (and still free?) system is coming in.
I don't know whether ACH in the US is developing along the same lines, but it has the potential to kill off debit cards, especially if the card companies can no longer hide their fees from customers by banning vendor surcharges.
I'd say that PayPal's parity clause bans both PayPal surcharges as well as discounts for other payment methods such as cash. Same for the big card companies.
Are PayPal's fees well beyond your cost of handling checks or cash? Are you seeing an increased demand for card payments? I'd guess that card payments would be a much larger fraction of your business if your customers could just tap their card or phone rather than swipe/insert & enter-PIN/sign.
With these new conditions, if you still dissuade your customers from using PayPal, you risk having PayPal cut you off.
In Australia, it's illegal for companies to ban reasonable surcharges, so PayPal can't stop vendors adding a surcharge to recoup the PayPal fees, to prevent PayPal cross-subsidising other payment methods. But elsewhere they can impose this sort of parity clause that Amazon is so famous for, using their muscle to gain immunity from fee hikes, and as a way to make all sellers pay for buyer protection.
They could at least zip up the archives and post them to the torrents for posterity.
IMDB could do that, because according to their Boards Terms and Conditions they own all submissions. Not an exclusive or non-exclusive licence — exclusively own:
You agree that any materials, including but not limited to questions, comments, suggestions, ideas, plans, notes, drawings, original or creative materials or other information, provided by you in the form of e-mail or submissions to IMDb are non-confidential and shall become the sole property of IMDb.
How do they find out about it? Sites like this? And when some start-up pitches a product like that on this site, what do people say? "Slashvertisement". A product placement or startup interview isn't an "ad" in the traditional sense; but it serves the same purpose.
There's a difference between product information published because of its independently-assessed editorial value, and material pushed to you only because they offered to pay the publishers (the most). It's here the form of advertising called "PR" tries to work its magic.
From whom will you "find out about them eventually"? And as for the product or service whose sales pay the wages that keep a roof over your head and pay for the streaming services to which you subscribe, how do people who bought that product or service "find out about them eventually"?
You're right that we're reliant on advertising to tell us about the market.
Even though advertising is spin, even if a time comes when we think advertising is obsolete because we have independent human or AI advisors researching for us, there will always be an incentive for a vendor to get an advantage through advertising (pushing something less than the whole truth), unless that too becomes widely-considered gauche and counter-productive.
However paid media placements are only one type of advertising — an intrusive type that is well over-used. There are better alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are today's kids so fond of the ephemeral?
Privacy?
The freedom and safety of not having a permanent record?
A culture of taking online the normal unrecorded stream-of-consciousness interaction between friends?
Is this appropriate for companies who deliver news?
Is there a reduction in creating and publishing things worth preserving, or is it just a case of the separate normal ephemera of life being taken online?
Will we, or youth, always share so much online, or is it a fad because the tools are new?
Maybe the hotel figures if someone is going direct, they're not an aggressive shopper and will be more likely to pay whatever they ask.
Yes, that's correct. For the same reason prices are often lower on eBay than on the vendor's webstore. Though it's sometimes the opposite, where the webstore offers a discount similar to the eBay commission.
For hotels to actually be successful in clawing back the business from travel sites, they're going to have to be willing to take that 30% commission that they were giving the travel sites, and give it to the traveler as a discount.
One potential problem with this is that when a sales agent becomes powerful they insist on parity-pricing, meaning that they must always be given the lowest rate available, forcing vendors to cross-subsidise these agents if they wish to offer their own discounts. Amazon is a master at this.
Comparison sites advertise so heavily because their power to get a good commission and discount from their vendors is in direct proportion to the number of people who can be hypnotized into using them without thinking of trying direct.
So I agree that advertising is most heavily relied on by either companies whose main competitive advantage is mind-share rather than product quality or a unique selling point, and on industries like insurance that sell virtual products with a low marginal cost of production, where market share is pure cream.
Nothing in your grocery store is like that; there is lots of supply/demand, seasonal, and loss leader pricing.
Around here, I see a lot of similarly wildly varying grocery store pricing that segments the market into the price-conscious and the price-oblivious. Big discounts every 2-12 weeks so that the canny can stock-up and avoid being driven to cheaper brands, while in-between, big margins are extracted from the wealthy, uninformed, busy, and unorganized.
Such sawtooth pricing is everywhere: Milk those unwilling or unable to time their purchases, but still get the business of thrifty, while playing chicken to scare them away from the bottom.
And the best way for the wealthy to apply their "wellspring that affords you the privilege of helping others" is taxation. Sure, governments often are dumb and wasteful, but taxation usually beats philanthropy, where it's too easy to do too little, to spend on pet projects away from the greatest need, and to smugly lord over those you deign to help. Sort of like high minimum wage vs. tipping culture.
Qualified people will have major incentives to produce contributions and have them accepted and be accredited for that work
Is this because of the prestige (including career benefits) of contributing to "the" textbook for that subject?
I agree wholeheartedly on the benefits of open-source textbooks, just like open-source software. However, if top-quality contributions aren't being commonly donated, I'd have no trouble having the books cost something. That is, while there would be freedom to create and distribute derivative works, both these and the originals wouldn't have the freedom to read without paying. The problem would be enforcing this, as broke students would tend to free-ride if there were no consequences. This is unlike business users of open commercial software, where there's more pressure to obey the licence.
My VIC-20 was also bought with paper run money — several years worth for a computer that was at the time the cheapest ever (except maybe the ZX-80, but I was a 6502 guy). I lusted after the Atari 400 & 800 (and Apple ][), but they were much more expensive here.
And yes, one had a good lesson in impermanence when a program was lost due to the unreliability of cassette storage, or through accidentally knocking the power plug out of the wall. However the Commodore cassette storage may have been better than Atari's because it recorded multiple copies. I still have my tapes, and last year managed to read back some PET programs using an audio-to-data program I found on the Net.
No floppy until an Amiga in 1986.
You spoiled brats with your C64s with floppy drives and your VIC-20s... you had it too easy. The original Commodore PET had 8K of RAM, a 40x25 character display, and storage on a cassette tape.
Fun memories:
I started on the PET as well, hired during the school holidays.
My first purchase was a VIC-20, which, with its 22-column display, was no spoiling after the 40-column PET.
No means no in the personal space, but most of the big Internet companies were built on breaking the rules: Google and YouTube were built on copyright infringement, Facebook was built on privacy violations, Uber and Airbnb respectively ignore local transport and accommodation laws, PayPal violated credit card company agreements, Amazon aggressively imposes patents and parity-pricing agreements, and Snapchat has thrived from illicit activity by children, not to mention all those boosted to critical mass through illegal spam.
But once established, it's both feasible and desirable to show a kinder front.
End Cards can be hidden using the following blocker rule:
www.youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element
I can understand why a streaming service couldn't make money. Streaming is moving the power away from distributors and towards program creators. Even Netflix has realised their vulnerability by getting so heavily into originals.
Antenna has the advantage of both being free and recordable. Sure, you can't immediately get what you want, but it's easy to build up a never-exhausted queue of good stuff to watch when you're in the mood.
Companies like these know that support is their biggest cost. Their aim is to have their products bought because they are a cheap and readily-available option that promises to do what people want. How well they do this isn't important if they can get customers past a return impetus, and if they can rely on few customers seeing a product review or security alert. They then make it hard to contact and converse with support, like your experience, but also often by not having a website, an English website, or an email address, or even by not listing a manufacturer on their packaging.
There's so much potential for Chinese/Taiwanese companies that can be both reasonably priced and keen on both quality and customer service.
Although Edge supports extensions, and Chrome extensions can be easily ported, Microsoft still hasn't fully opened submissions to their extension gallery. At the moment you have to be invited to submit, and there are currently only 23 listed.
I didn't say it was a good thing. But the government doesn't study how many people are receiving OTA TV out of the goodness of their hearts. They will sell (sorry license) that spectrum just as soon as the viewer numbers are low enough.
The networks are just as eager to dump OTA and move entirely to technologies that give them more control and more data (less freedom and more spying for the viewers).
...OTA TV transmission will be switched off and the spectrum sold to the highest bidder.
That'll be a sad day. Other than the on-screen "bugs", OTA is DRM-free. Nothing's stopping me recording, removing or skipping ads, and privately distributing the recordings. Much harder with streaming.
Direct bank account to bank account transfers are cheaper than cards, and are getting cheaper and quicker.
In Australia these are free, but currently take 12-48 hours (only on business days). Later this year an instant (and still free?) system is coming in.
I don't know whether ACH in the US is developing along the same lines, but it has the potential to kill off debit cards, especially if the card companies can no longer hide their fees from customers by banning vendor surcharges.
I'd say that PayPal's parity clause bans both PayPal surcharges as well as discounts for other payment methods such as cash. Same for the big card companies.
Are PayPal's fees well beyond your cost of handling checks or cash? Are you seeing an increased demand for card payments? I'd guess that card payments would be a much larger fraction of your business if your customers could just tap their card or phone rather than swipe/insert & enter-PIN/sign.
With these new conditions, if you still dissuade your customers from using PayPal, you risk having PayPal cut you off.
In Australia, it's illegal for companies to ban reasonable surcharges, so PayPal can't stop vendors adding a surcharge to recoup the PayPal fees, to prevent PayPal cross-subsidising other payment methods. But elsewhere they can impose this sort of parity clause that Amazon is so famous for, using their muscle to gain immunity from fee hikes, and as a way to make all sellers pay for buyer protection.
They could at least zip up the archives and post them to the torrents for posterity.
IMDB could do that, because according to their Boards Terms and Conditions they own all submissions. Not an exclusive or non-exclusive licence — exclusively own:
You agree that any materials, including but not limited to questions, comments, suggestions, ideas, plans, notes, drawings, original or creative materials or other information, provided by you in the form of e-mail or submissions to IMDb are non-confidential and shall become the sole property of IMDb.
How do they find out about it? Sites like this? And when some start-up pitches a product like that on this site, what do people say? "Slashvertisement". A product placement or startup interview isn't an "ad" in the traditional sense; but it serves the same purpose.
There's a difference between product information published because of its independently-assessed editorial value, and material pushed to you only because they offered to pay the publishers (the most). It's here the form of advertising called "PR" tries to work its magic.
From whom will you "find out about them eventually"? And as for the product or service whose sales pay the wages that keep a roof over your head and pay for the streaming services to which you subscribe, how do people who bought that product or service "find out about them eventually"?
You're right that we're reliant on advertising to tell us about the market.
Even though advertising is spin, even if a time comes when we think advertising is obsolete because we have independent human or AI advisors researching for us, there will always be an incentive for a vendor to get an advantage through advertising (pushing something less than the whole truth), unless that too becomes widely-considered gauche and counter-productive.
However paid media placements are only one type of advertising — an intrusive type that is well over-used. There are better alternatives.