First, this is a reactionary action. If someone wanted to supplant Facebook during the height of social unrest about it, they would have needed to start several the development years ago.
Second, what makes Facebook attractive to most is the critical mass of users. It's the ubiquity that if you use it, it's the most likely venue to find your friends also on it. I can shift and try any number of new social networks, but if the people i want to reach are not there, it's a non-starter.
Third, social site success is achieved via a mixture of timing, fantastical luck and hitting the sweet spot of user interest. Creating a Facebook alternative is comparatively easy. Achieving success is surprisingly difficult.
Forth, balkanization of the social media market won't help anyone achieve critical mass. Launching 7 efforts at supplanting Facebook seems like a good idea. "Surely one of them will be successful". But in reality the more there are, the more fragmented the audience becomes, making it even more difficult for one of them to achieve dominant success.
You can see it in the tweets. You can hear it at tech conferences. Hell, you can hear it at most cafes in San Francisco on any given day. People -- like M.G. Siegler -- saying some of the most vacuous things. Words that if he were able to take a step outside of his own head and hear, he'd be embarrassed by. Or, at least, these are stances, thoughts, and ideas that he should be embarrassed by. But he's clearly not because he keeps saying them. This isn't only about Facebook -- far from it. That's just the most high profile and timely example of a company suffering from some of this. And in that case, it's really more in his responses to the Cambridge Analytica situation, rather than the situation itself (which is another matter, though undoubtedly related). He doesn't know the right things to say because he doesn't know what to say, period. Because he's slipped out of touch.
I'm not seeing a scenario where I'd pay $10 a month for access to magazines, be they news or otherwise.
If we could get unbiased fact reporting, then sure, I'd be willing to pay for that service. But just collecting 200 magazines? Why?
And why call it news? Just because there are a few magazines like Time and Forbes? But the majority of their list seems to be in the conventional magazine space like Cosmo, Better Homes and Gardens, Working Mother type of stuff.
And if I did have some interest, maybe for scientific mags or a couple of foodie mags, I have trouble seeing how I fit this into the workflow of my day. If I want a recipe today I look one up online. If I need food inspiration I have sites for that. If I want to read scientific articles there are sites I can visit. When do I set aside time to curl up with my pad and read magazines for a few hours? I'd rather read a book.
I'm thinking through people I know, and I'm not able to pinpoint any one person and think "Hey, they would love this!"
This product is fatally flawed. While it may have good sound, that alone will not carry it over the finish line.
It lacks native spotify/pandora/amazon music support. If you want the entire speaker market to buy the most expensive speaker on the market, you need to have a total potential audience as large as you can get. Currently the target audience is only Applephiles due to the walled garden.
It's too expensive. If you want to capture the largest segment of Applephiles and get them onto the music subscription service, then the speaker needs to be much less expensive, subsidized by the ongoing subscription costs. If your total audience is only a fraction of the market, then you need to be able to sell into as much of that smaller audience as possible.
It lacks a solid "smart" for the speaker. In a time where everyone either has, or is starting to get curious/envious of smart devices, offering the most expensive yet least smart speaker available misses the mark.
While perhaps being the best sounding speaker on the SmartSpeaker shelf, it improperly targeted and could have been easily saved by even a basic review of the product's capabilities versus the available markets.
I never said what she did was justified or equivalent. So no points for AC trying to point that finger.
I was looking at the culture that people are caught up in where being part of the masses of youtube posters hoping to make a living at it is a fantasy, but the repercussions to people's self image and mental well being can be impacted. It's like the old stereotypical "I want to quit school and be a rock star" fantasy, but made to seem far more tangible. Combine that with the immense pressure of social media that portrays a false happiness and success, and it's not difficult to see where the pressures can effect someone negatively.
Is that we have launched into attacks and defenses of Gun Control, Vegans, Muslims, and Women.
But there's no discussion about the way that social media has created a belief system that if you just upload some videos, you'll be a star. It's an unrealistic belief that every person can post some videos and make a living. Who knows whether her videos were being censored? Maybe, maybe not. But it's the environment in which people construct their sense of self around social media fantasies that seems more of a root cause here.
I do find that free to play games provide a greater openness to trying games out and engaging in them without fear of either making a heavy purchase up front or being nickle and dimed to death, and generally speaking do not engage in in-game purchases outside of what my wife and I deem "paying for what we got out of it".
In other words, we tend to play a lot of F2P games and while many are so=so or even poor games to us, if we really engage in the game, we hit a point where we way "these devs did a great job" and we decide how much we'd have paid for the game for the amount of time we've spent playing it. Then we set ourselves a commensurate budget and buy in game items, generally just cosmetic items, to support the devs. A few exceptions do occur. Warframe is a great example, where we chose to pick up a few frames from the store versus grinding for them as our way of supporting the game.
Over the past 20 years we've spent an awful lot of money buying two copies of up-front AAA games to find out that it was an awful lot of money for an awful game(in our opinion). But that does not stop us from still doing it, just we're more cautious these days and wait for 30, 60 or 90 days of feedback before we do it anymore. We like the ease of being able to test out a lot of games to see if they suit us. And as long as the F2P games are not selling WIN buttons, we're ok with it.
Facts start to come out after the investigation has had time, and now it's "I'm tired of this".
Shame to let facts start intruding onto our personal bubbles, isn't it?
The reality is that we're on the verge of a new cold war based on information and social media. This isn't about one election, it's about how states are choosing to behave with meddling. And I'm not suggesting we're not guilty of doing some of the same things. But it's all escalating and it'll get worse before it gets better.
Wow, I admire your ability to take a statement and twist it into something else entirely.
I clearly indicated that what I think it would be helpful helpful to encourage people to fact check, and be presented with news that was legitimately sourced. How that spiraled in your head to become that I want to control all news to twist it to my desires is truly awe inspiring.
I'll leave you to whatever twisted reality you have going here as rational discussion clearly isn't happening.
This index score is only relevant is it can only be achieved by skilled, proper sweeping. Otherwise you are just having people train to get a high score, not to sweep properly to win. Someone with an alternative method might score very poorly on the index but do well for rock control.
I disagree. If the current situation has taught us anything, it's that people will select facts by confirmation bias rather than truth. Allowing the proliferation of false facts to create turmoil is not a desirable outcome.
Is to start placing bounties on sites that run fake news.
In today's news market, it's a series of programs deciding what to put on your pages. Highly tailored to fit into your bubble of chosen topics and viewpoints.
So place a bounty on fake news like a bug bounty. For the sake of discussion, let's call it a $5,000 penalty for running a fake story. The bounty goes to whomever first proves it's fake with checkable facts and sources. The bounty is paid by the site that displayed the story.
Now you have incentivised folks to think about the news, and to dig into the correctness of stories. At the same time you have incentivised sites to stop posting fake news. This will also spawn a cottage industry of folks who become very good at fact checking and maybe we'll find a few companies we can trust.
Start off with a bounty value, and keep raising it until the desired results are met,
Our phones and tablets are all Apple. I'm not a raging fanboi, but I prefer the vastly larger base of apps that Apple has to offer. We've been generally happy with them outside of some performance issues which we now know were batterygate. I like being able to treat my phone like an appliance and not be thinking about it much since Apple does a seemingly better job of keeping out the abusive apps than Android has.
That said, there's a definite feel of decay going on. For the first time, I no longer am willing to apply Apple updates until after they are in the wind for a good while. The latest IOS has a number of what I feel are poor decisions.
I would find it difficult to believe that Jobs would have allowed the iPhone X's indented top of screen. I disapprove of the "we'll just turn your buletooth back on when we feel like it" feature. Apple maps is still significantly inferior to Google maps. High contrast/vision impaired features are poor I get momentary lockups/pauses where it's unresponsive, particularly when a call comes in. iTunes on windows is a masterpiece of bloat and slowness.
I'm not saying that Jobs was a saint or anything, but I think that if he was around and ran into these or any of dozens of other oddities, he'd have gone straight to the source and when he was done it would be fixed.
My confidence continues to dwindle under Cook. He may be a fine CEO, but he's not running the product focused shop that made Apple what it is/was.
We just got new 8s. When these are at the end of their lifecycle, unless things have turned around at Apple, we may be getting Androids next. It'll hurt to cut the cord on the many existing apps we have, but I need to get a sense of focus on quality from them to keep my business.
I'm not sure that would work unless the camera itself had a firmware update to write out the image files encrypted and read them in as needed for previews. Can they build that into a standard SD card? Where would the encrypt/decrypt step occur? There's no processor on an SD card capable of handling giant RAW file encryption in a timely fashion that I'm aware of.
I know there's a firmware mod for a Nikon that provides encryption and there's a magic lantern project that I think targets Canons, but I'm not familiar with how reliable they are.
I I were trying to make a product for this, I'd think a potential route would be something like the wireless SD cards paired to a smartphone app in your pocket to transmit images to the phone as quickly as is reasonable, removing images from the SD card as they are completed. Smartphones offer all the encryption options necessary.
Agreed. The number of folks who are interested in using encryption on a camera is a very very small slice of the consumer base.
I've worked as a photographer in a news organization. Even with my time there, never was there any case for encryption. Having the entire camera industry switch to encryption would be having the 1% of actual use cases drive the cost and performance factors for the 99%.
Lets see one company make a single camera that has encryption. If it sells like hotcakes to news organizations, fine. but I'll be willing to bet that it the sales will be minuscule because it's not a feature that needs to exist for realistic situations.
At first they came for the loot boxes, and I said nothing because I don't play that game. Then they came for the Hatchibles, and I said nothing because I don't have kids. Then they came for the Magic The Gathering booster packs and there was no one left to speak for me.
I've used an iPad as my primary reader since they first came out. Never had any issues with it. I just set the brightness in the reader controls so it's not a spotlight in my face.
My wife uses an iPad mini as her primary cause it'll fit in her purse.
Between us we read as many as 10 books a week, particularly in the winter when it's cold outside and a nice fireplace inside.
Recently I moved up to the iPad Pro, largest size due to a vision defect and it's a great reader for those of us who need more page space for vision issues and there's no corresponding kindle for that size.
The "big thing" would be if they spent some effort getting menu info. If i could ask google maps where the closest place is that has fish and chips, or massaman curry and get a list of places that had the dish and with ratings at the dish level, it would totally change how we pick restaurants.
Slashdot Mirror
First, this is a reactionary action. If someone wanted to supplant Facebook during the height of social unrest about it, they would have needed to start several the development years ago.
Second, what makes Facebook attractive to most is the critical mass of users. It's the ubiquity that if you use it, it's the most likely venue to find your friends also on it. I can shift and try any number of new social networks, but if the people i want to reach are not there, it's a non-starter.
Third, social site success is achieved via a mixture of timing, fantastical luck and hitting the sweet spot of user interest. Creating a Facebook alternative is comparatively easy. Achieving success is surprisingly difficult.
Forth, balkanization of the social media market won't help anyone achieve critical mass. Launching 7 efforts at supplanting Facebook seems like a good idea. "Surely one of them will be successful". But in reality the more there are, the more fragmented the audience becomes, making it even more difficult for one of them to achieve dominant success.
This bubble is also on planet Earth... all human populated worlds, really.
This bubble is also in America and all first world countries.
You can see it in the tweets. You can hear it at tech conferences. Hell, you can hear it at most cafes in San Francisco on any given day. People -- like M.G. Siegler -- saying some of the most vacuous things. Words that if he were able to take a step outside of his own head and hear, he'd be embarrassed by. Or, at least, these are stances, thoughts, and ideas that he should be embarrassed by. But he's clearly not because he keeps saying them. This isn't only about Facebook -- far from it. That's just the most high profile and timely example of a company suffering from some of this. And in that case, it's really more in his responses to the Cambridge Analytica situation, rather than the situation itself (which is another matter, though undoubtedly related). He doesn't know the right things to say because he doesn't know what to say, period. Because he's slipped out of touch.
/golfclap
I'm not seeing a scenario where I'd pay $10 a month for access to magazines, be they news or otherwise.
If we could get unbiased fact reporting, then sure, I'd be willing to pay for that service. But just collecting 200 magazines? Why?
And why call it news? Just because there are a few magazines like Time and Forbes? But the majority of their list seems to be in the conventional magazine space like Cosmo, Better Homes and Gardens, Working Mother type of stuff.
And if I did have some interest, maybe for scientific mags or a couple of foodie mags, I have trouble seeing how I fit this into the workflow of my day. If I want a recipe today I look one up online. If I need food inspiration I have sites for that. If I want to read scientific articles there are sites I can visit. When do I set aside time to curl up with my pad and read magazines for a few hours? I'd rather read a book.
I'm thinking through people I know, and I'm not able to pinpoint any one person and think "Hey, they would love this!"
Thanks for the reply. been looking for a decent speaker dock and will take an actual recommendation over 25 anonymous reviews online.
Hey, out of curiosity, which speaker dock and you using and how do you like it?
This product is fatally flawed. While it may have good sound, that alone will not carry it over the finish line.
It lacks native spotify/pandora/amazon music support. If you want the entire speaker market to buy the most expensive speaker on the market, you need to have a total potential audience as large as you can get. Currently the target audience is only Applephiles due to the walled garden.
It's too expensive. If you want to capture the largest segment of Applephiles and get them onto the music subscription service, then the speaker needs to be much less expensive, subsidized by the ongoing subscription costs. If your total audience is only a fraction of the market, then you need to be able to sell into as much of that smaller audience as possible.
It lacks a solid "smart" for the speaker. In a time where everyone either has, or is starting to get curious/envious of smart devices, offering the most expensive yet least smart speaker available misses the mark.
While perhaps being the best sounding speaker on the SmartSpeaker shelf, it improperly targeted and could have been easily saved by even a basic review of the product's capabilities versus the available markets.
I never said what she did was justified or equivalent. So no points for AC trying to point that finger.
I was looking at the culture that people are caught up in where being part of the masses of youtube posters hoping to make a living at it is a fantasy, but the repercussions to people's self image and mental well being can be impacted. It's like the old stereotypical "I want to quit school and be a rock star" fantasy, but made to seem far more tangible. Combine that with the immense pressure of social media that portrays a false happiness and success, and it's not difficult to see where the pressures can effect someone negatively.
Is that we have launched into attacks and defenses of Gun Control, Vegans, Muslims, and Women.
But there's no discussion about the way that social media has created a belief system that if you just upload some videos, you'll be a star. It's an unrealistic belief that every person can post some videos and make a living. Who knows whether her videos were being censored? Maybe, maybe not. But it's the environment in which people construct their sense of self around social media fantasies that seems more of a root cause here.
Drat, didn't notice I'd been logged out and posted this as AC
I do find that free to play games provide a greater openness to trying games out and engaging in them without fear of either making a heavy purchase up front or being nickle and dimed to death, and generally speaking do not engage in in-game purchases outside of what my wife and I deem "paying for what we got out of it".
In other words, we tend to play a lot of F2P games and while many are so=so or even poor games to us, if we really engage in the game, we hit a point where we way "these devs did a great job" and we decide how much we'd have paid for the game for the amount of time we've spent playing it. Then we set ourselves a commensurate budget and buy in game items, generally just cosmetic items, to support the devs. A few exceptions do occur. Warframe is a great example, where we chose to pick up a few frames from the store versus grinding for them as our way of supporting the game.
Over the past 20 years we've spent an awful lot of money buying two copies of up-front AAA games to find out that it was an awful lot of money for an awful game(in our opinion). But that does not stop us from still doing it, just we're more cautious these days and wait for 30, 60 or 90 days of feedback before we do it anymore. We like the ease of being able to test out a lot of games to see if they suit us. And as long as the F2P games are not selling WIN buttons, we're ok with it.
That's the trap now isn't it.
Facts start to come out after the investigation has had time, and now it's "I'm tired of this".
Shame to let facts start intruding onto our personal bubbles, isn't it?
The reality is that we're on the verge of a new cold war based on information and social media. This isn't about one election, it's about how states are choosing to behave with meddling. And I'm not suggesting we're not guilty of doing some of the same things. But it's all escalating and it'll get worse before it gets better.
The fact that our elections are free and open enough AND THEY KNOW they can influence them through social media meddling,.
Fixed that for ya
Wow, I admire your ability to take a statement and twist it into something else entirely.
I clearly indicated that what I think it would be helpful helpful to encourage people to fact check, and be presented with news that was legitimately sourced. How that spiraled in your head to become that I want to control all news to twist it to my desires is truly awe inspiring.
I'll leave you to whatever twisted reality you have going here as rational discussion clearly isn't happening.
You get what you measure.
This index score is only relevant is it can only be achieved by skilled, proper sweeping. Otherwise you are just having people train to get a high score, not to sweep properly to win. Someone with an alternative method might score very poorly on the index but do well for rock control.
I disagree. If the current situation has taught us anything, it's that people will select facts by confirmation bias rather than truth. Allowing the proliferation of false facts to create turmoil is not a desirable outcome.
Is to start placing bounties on sites that run fake news.
In today's news market, it's a series of programs deciding what to put on your pages. Highly tailored to fit into your bubble of chosen topics and viewpoints.
So place a bounty on fake news like a bug bounty. For the sake of discussion, let's call it a $5,000 penalty for running a fake story. The bounty goes to whomever first proves it's fake with checkable facts and sources. The bounty is paid by the site that displayed the story.
Now you have incentivised folks to think about the news, and to dig into the correctness of stories. At the same time you have incentivised sites to stop posting fake news. This will also spawn a cottage industry of folks who become very good at fact checking and maybe we'll find a few companies we can trust.
Start off with a bounty value, and keep raising it until the desired results are met,
Our phones and tablets are all Apple. I'm not a raging fanboi, but I prefer the vastly larger base of apps that Apple has to offer. We've been generally happy with them outside of some performance issues which we now know were batterygate. I like being able to treat my phone like an appliance and not be thinking about it much since Apple does a seemingly better job of keeping out the abusive apps than Android has.
That said, there's a definite feel of decay going on. For the first time, I no longer am willing to apply Apple updates until after they are in the wind for a good while. The latest IOS has a number of what I feel are poor decisions.
I would find it difficult to believe that Jobs would have allowed the iPhone X's indented top of screen.
I disapprove of the "we'll just turn your buletooth back on when we feel like it" feature.
Apple maps is still significantly inferior to Google maps.
High contrast/vision impaired features are poor
I get momentary lockups/pauses where it's unresponsive, particularly when a call comes in.
iTunes on windows is a masterpiece of bloat and slowness.
I'm not saying that Jobs was a saint or anything, but I think that if he was around and ran into these or any of dozens of other oddities, he'd have gone straight to the source and when he was done it would be fixed.
My confidence continues to dwindle under Cook. He may be a fine CEO, but he's not running the product focused shop that made Apple what it is/was.
We just got new 8s. When these are at the end of their lifecycle, unless things have turned around at Apple, we may be getting Androids next. It'll hurt to cut the cord on the many existing apps we have, but I need to get a sense of focus on quality from them to keep my business.
I'm not sure that would work unless the camera itself had a firmware update to write out the image files encrypted and read them in as needed for previews. Can they build that into a standard SD card? Where would the encrypt/decrypt step occur? There's no processor on an SD card capable of handling giant RAW file encryption in a timely fashion that I'm aware of.
I know there's a firmware mod for a Nikon that provides encryption and there's a magic lantern project that I think targets Canons, but I'm not familiar with how reliable they are.
I I were trying to make a product for this, I'd think a potential route would be something like the wireless SD cards paired to a smartphone app in your pocket to transmit images to the phone as quickly as is reasonable, removing images from the SD card as they are completed. Smartphones offer all the encryption options necessary.
Agreed. The number of folks who are interested in using encryption on a camera is a very very small slice of the consumer base.
I've worked as a photographer in a news organization. Even with my time there, never was there any case for encryption. Having the entire camera industry switch to encryption would be having the 1% of actual use cases drive the cost and performance factors for the 99%.
Lets see one company make a single camera that has encryption. If it sells like hotcakes to news organizations, fine. but I'll be willing to bet that it the sales will be minuscule because it's not a feature that needs to exist for realistic situations.
At first they came for the loot boxes, and I said nothing because I don't play that game.
Then they came for the Hatchibles, and I said nothing because I don't have kids.
Then they came for the Magic The Gathering booster packs and there was no one left to speak for me.
I've used an iPad as my primary reader since they first came out. Never had any issues with it. I just set the brightness in the reader controls so it's not a spotlight in my face.
My wife uses an iPad mini as her primary cause it'll fit in her purse.
Between us we read as many as 10 books a week, particularly in the winter when it's cold outside and a nice fireplace inside.
Recently I moved up to the iPad Pro, largest size due to a vision defect and it's a great reader for those of us who need more page space for vision issues and there's no corresponding kindle for that size.
The "big thing" would be if they spent some effort getting menu info. If i could ask google maps where the closest place is that has fish and chips, or massaman curry and get a list of places that had the dish and with ratings at the dish level, it would totally change how we pick restaurants.