HN user
No, the reason is that to-date there had not been a global platform available. AirBNB benefits from a massive global economy of scale. I can use the same platform in America, Germany, Australia, Bulgaria.
First one to scale wins.
Looks like 1440p gaming at a reasonable budget is finally here. Now we just need some good (non-curved) Nvidia-approved adaptive sync cards at 32" 1440p IPS.
Youtube just needs to increase the barriers before a channel can be monetised. Then, with a smaller pool of channels, they need better human review to prevent exactly things like this from happening.
If they are worried about the costs of a lot of non-monetised videos, just limit non-partner channel quality to 720p30, until the channel is made partner or coughs up something like $100.
Then, they need to allow micro-pledges in addition to likes. I would happily buy a pack of 100 pledges for $10 (ie. one pledge = 10c) and tip that towards the videos that I've really liked. Youtube could take their cut but it would represent a great extra revenue stream for content creators, and the number of pledges made public.
You should be doing this anyway as part of your integration into the culture. East Asians are smart - they name their children Jason Wu, Lucy Wang, Winson Ho from birth.
All of the means to attack Youtube have been centred on questionable video content being supported with ads from mainstream companies.
Youtube should have wisened up and become a lot more selective of which videos were supplied with ads.
And if running slightly fewer ads is too commecially difficult, then save costs by limiting new uploads to 720p.
My mother was there in the 80s (with my father, on a holiday) and complained about being groped and harassed by men, and the poor quality of food and water. No desire to ever visit or to have much to do with the people from there. The Indian men I've met in clubs and bars have been as unwanted as the job applicants.
Overpopulation. Too many people, not enough resources to support them. 600m Indians without proper access to water. Better access to contraception and changing social attitudes needed - the expectation that if you are impoverished you should have no children and save your money to improve your wellbeing, for example.
The problem is not the videos being there, its the advertisments next to them.
Youtube simply needs to move to a proper gatekeeping model around monetisation, requiring human review and biannual review checks. Start it at 10,000 subscribers to avoid being overwhelmed. Prompt once-off approval for 'viral' trending videos from new channels (even if the advertising money goes completely to Youtube).
The internet is maturing and existing gatekeeping models are too lax. Same thing with games allowed onto Steam. Now any idiot with a phone can upload something - previously you needed a computer and decent knowledge to do that.
Limiting new uploads from new accounts to 720p30 max until they hit 1,000 subs or pay a $100 'starter fee' will save on storage and processing fees.
I don't understand why Youtube (and other tech platforms) sets the barriers to entry so low, then inundate themselves with work. Simply raise the barriers until your human-approval processes can handle the volume.
Its not one post. Indians favour other Indians, to the exclusion of Americans and Europeans in general. I've seen it in IT, in retail, in trucking, in America and in other mass-immigration previously European societies (Australia). Even the largest companies (Infosys) engage in Visa fraud and discrimination:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/india...
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/infosys-says-settles-whist...
Indian CEOs and managers are popular with boards because they will often ruthlessly pursue a corporate agenda without a brotherly spirit for (American) coworkers or citizens.
Americans and those descended from Europeans have been living in open, civil societies for thousands of years. Most of the world is not like that - in-group preference and close kinship rules. Outsiders will exploit our societal structure for their benefit, and we need to be at least aware of it, and penalise it as necessary. China's current corporate espionage effort (and the resultant trade war) is another example.
I don't hire Indians as freelancers or employees. Whenever I post a Freelance role, I can be sure that I will get at least 1-2 generic applications from Indians. Usually they are part of some cohort of other IT workers - so even if I accepted their offer, I would have no idea who my information was being exposed to or who the work was actually being done by.
Cheating and dishonesty is part of the culture, sadly - to the extent that parents will even climb school buildings to pass cheat notes to students during exams:
https://www.huffingtonpost.in/2015/03/19/en-masse-cheating-p...
Part of this is the bodyshop-encouraging nature of the H1B and other 'skilled' visas around the world. Limits should be placed to ensure that only 20% of all visa types can be given to any country, to avoid one country completely monopolising the visa type, and creating positive feedback effects (ie. Indians hiring other Indians or helping eachother game the system). Right now 76% of all H1B visas are taken by Indian workers which I think partly represents the scheme's failure.
Death-cycle. Fewer petrol stations, fewer mechanics, fewer sales stores, fewer places where they are allowed to be used.
But, its not happening fast enough. We need to ban fossil-fuel powered non-commercial vehicles starting from 2021. We have the technology, we just need a massive ramp-up of manufacturing and production.
It should be like the visa lottery.
Limit any individual country (India or China for example) to a maximum of 10% of the total visa allocation each.
Right now India gets 76% of all H1B visas, so Indians know the system inside and out, and hire other Indians. Tech companies are calling out for female workers, and most of these Indian migrants are also male.
Take it to 10% from any country max, and heck even require that 51% of the visas must be given out to women, and you will see tech companies scour the globe for talent, rather than all the visas just going to Indian body shops. Under such a change you could even increase the total number of visas issued, since the whole scheme would be less rorted and more socially accepted.
In every large company there are always excess personnel, or departments or individuals who are not performing. I'm sure there are other large companies that semi-regularly fire a single digit % of their workforce, but because they are not games companies it doesn't hit the news.
The redundancies are mostly in 'publishing and esports', by the way.
If this was the case then populations wouldn't be expanding - too many people would be dying before reaching reproductive age.
Its simpler than that. Women in many parts of the world have no agency, and no access to contraception. Change those two things (this should be the REAL battle of feminists) and you will go a long way to solving overpopulation.
The planet is going to be soon full of 9 billion humans, many desperately hungry and thirsty.
Africa and West Asia is the sole source of this increase. We need an urgent program to strip away food aid and replace it completely with education for women, family planning, and incentives for sterilisation and not having any or only one child.
Additionally the West needs to disallow all immigration and refugee settlement from poor countries. We should not provide a pressure release valve for overpopulation, nor harvest the few human resources that would otherwise help develop and modernise these countries.
I would rather have millions of insect, plant and animal species still alive than billions of excess humans clinging to life via destructive subsistence agriculture.
Kenya is a crime hotspot with GDP per capita of $1,500. Average IQ is 80.
I don't think people there care about privacy when they are struggling to avoid being robbed and to put a roof over their heads. If these measures can make Government and policing more efficient, than so be it.
The average person doesn't care about privacy (they have nothing interesting to share anyway), and better-targeted ads makes capitalism more efficient. Plus, the services that ads enable are very widely used and popular.
All that the EU has served to accomplish is to kill tech in Europe, place popups and opt-in buttons onto every website (accept cookies?), and to extort a few billions out of American tech companies.
Europe can't do tech because its taxes on labour are too high and the whole continent speaks 30 different languages. There, I said it.
It is functionally very different because:
-You dont have to drive around and find a park (less congestion and real estate)
-You can pool your trip with another user (Uber Pool)
I wouldn't view it as 'this is what Germany wanted from WW2', instead 'this is how Germany should have carried out WW2'.
You can imagine that if Germany made better use of individual European countries, made some high-profile infrastructure and regulatory improvements in the countries that it occupied (as the EU does now), and dramatically toned down the anti-Pole and anti-Jew activities- it would have been a lot more successful in its aims. Heck, mass conversions to Christianity of the Jewish population would probably have been successful, and been supported by many Christians worldwide, and any staunch Jewish holdouts who refused given the opportunity to fight against the British and create and mass-migrate to Israel as a German sub-territory.
Germany could have created a new European identity, and sought new land and direct expansion of European populations into the Middle East and Africa against easier opponents, instead of against Russia.
Eventually it would have just outgrown and outlasted Britain and Russia. Britain as a democracy would have eventually rotated in a set of politicians willing to make peace.
I say all this as the descendent of a Polish Jew :-)
Because its much better, and so attracts more people to the service.
Uber has a great potential to be used as public transport, with dynamic route pathing based on supply and demand. Something traditional public transport could never do.
This has been the case for all of human history. The solution is that the economically unfavoured do not reproduce, and the favoured do. We are all the children of European tribal leaders, kings and nobles thousands of years ago.
Follow this approach, and the problem disappears in one generation. Enact some kind of wealth redistribution or welfare system and the problem will continue to grind on.
We are also going to need standardisation on reporting of car use to Governments. If we are no longer going to fund roads through fuel taxes, we need some other mechanism to do it. Proper charging of road use would unlock efficiencies for the road network overall.
And here it is from the Chinese perspective:
My thoughts as well. I can almost guarantee this will be used for advertising.
The best theory out there is the 'Cold Winters' theory. But it leads to politically incorrect conclusions, so is not widespread.
Can someone explain how Facebook or Google hiring testers willing to expose 100% of their personal usage via an opt-in, paid program impacts consumers? Why should we 'applaud' Apple for this? Isn't it perfectly reasonable for companies like Google and Facebook to run deep user testing?
And Apple has market share for the only mobile consumers that matter: rich people and whales.
This is what they need to cut if they want to sell phones.
Get people gaming on iOS devices and they will buy the latest and greatest hardware to get the best experience.
But if all you can play are casual games, your experience can get no better.
Take a page out of Epic and Valve's book:
- Cut commissions to 12% for app store purchases
- Find a way to promote full-priced games, and demote free-to-play
- Offer one good free game every fortnight to your entire customer base
- Allow refunds within two weeks and if under 2 hours played
- Sell an official Apple game controller
- Offer centralised Achievements and friends
- Sign up exclusive deals with the best studios
- Discourage games from supporting older versions of iOS. Deprecate the iPhone 5S in iOS 13 so that developers no longer have to support that unique screen.
- Focus more on battery life (including bigger batteries) to allow longer content sessions
0.01% of customers care about that and less than 1% could even decipher those acronyms.
We need to evolve the terminology. The games on Itch.io are not Indie games - they are sub-Indie. Mostly amateur, hobbyist and school projects.
People who are making games as a serious side-gig or full-time job (ie. the typical definition of Indie) are all on Steam, and the best Indies are on console and Epic Games Store.
People want curation and less junk on Steam. Itch.io is exclusively... uncurated junk.
I think Itch.io would thrive if Steam increased their listing fee (Steam Direct) to $2,000 and required $100 annually if the game generated below $2,000 of gross revenue. This would be great for Indie games and consumers on Steam, but would give Itch.io an opening on the low end, so its probably why Valve isn't doing it. Ironically they are pushing their own top customers (and suppliers) to Epic with this strategy though!
I think Itch.io would be better with some kind of very cheap subscription, or being supported by advertising or sponsorship (integrated into game distributables). It could be like the Newgrounds of the next generation. It should be the place where you can try out low-end games for very little costs, secure in the knowledge that the executable has at least been verified for malware.