There is a comment somewhere on HN where a person described implementing ads for a small, hobby website.
Users complaied about the price to go ad-free (something like $25 per year).
The commenter revealed that the actual revenue from ads was much more than $25 per year. Every person who purchased the ad-free option actually cost them money.
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The lesson I took away is that ads pay more than we expect, though i didn't know the specifics of YouTube.
By providing an ad-free option, they are really allowing the user to out-bid the advertiser.
I think for most people, they would not be willing to pay more to avoid the ad than the ad seller is willing to pay to show it. It's a weird conundrum--but people are very cheap.
I think that's the angle I'm going for. If Youtube was $25 per year or even $50 per year, it would be a no-brainer for me to pay that. Even if 50 does NOT outbid the advertiser, wouldn't YT rather have guaranteed income rather than trying to constantly find high bidders.
Youtube claims "we’ve reached 125 million YouTube Music and Premium subscribers globally, including trials"
And I bet most of that is trials and it's probably cumulative rather than right now. I bet that 500m people paying $50 /year would actually make them real money that is dependable - since most people would pay for it again next year to avoid ads. And the lower price would skyrocket subscriptions.
Malware is just software too, but we still have the CFAA.
Sure it doesn't prevent malware, far from it. But, it does relegate to basically only bad actors that we want in jail. Who are, usually, smaller and less organized.
Walmart, Amazon, the US government... these are big, big, big and very organized. If they use facial recognition tech, it's 1000x worse than some criminal. But if that's made illegal, they won't. Probably.
I used to use all sorts of small websites in 2005. But by 2015 I used only about 10 large ones.
Like many changes, I cannot pinpoint exactly when this happened. It just occurred to me someday that I do not run into many unusual websites any longer.
It's unfortunate that so much of our behavior is dictated by Google. I dint think it's malicious or even intentional--but at some point they stopped directing traffic to small websites.
And like a highway closeure ripples through small town economies, it was barely noticed by travellers but devestating to recipients. What were once quaint sites became abandoned.
The second force seems to be video. Because video is difficult and expensive to host, we moved away from websites. Travel blogs were replaced with travel vlogs. Tutorials became videos.
The experience of the internet would be so much more interesting if the search engines unearthed rare blogs or writing from small creators and bloggers that thought things through or shared original ideas.
It did seem we had that for a while and now everything funnels back to a handful of big platforms.
Maybe as AI swallows the data of the entire web, it would start to look for these small sites, small creators, and rare personal content to keep itself interesting and we'll see more of them?
Google gets money for showing ads and sponsored content on the search page. If you click on a site with Google ads or Google scripts, it gets more money and monetarizable PII. So its in their interest to prioritize sites with Google ads or Google services, but only Google staffers know exactly how the search algorithm works.
A few years ago they upranked all results on a few trusted domains, so many of those domains filled up with advertising and cheap copywritten content. They framed this as 'fighting misinformation.'
>I dint think it's malicious or even intentional...
it's indirectly intentional in that Google isn't wringing it's hands trying to destroy tiny blogs but they (Google) have deliberately chosen to ignore anything that doesn't play the SEO game, whatever the driver of that game is.
I am not sure about the legal implications. But, I do see the concern.
Someone else mentioned the analogy of patients preferring physicians of a given sex.
I would not be surprised if they find a way around this by just having riders 'select which driver you want'. Effectively putting the onus on the customer to do the discrimination.
> Add to this fatuous criminal charge the sad reality that the process is often the punishment. Even after Mr. Left's innocence gets determined by a jury, there's the strong possibility that he'll depart the courtroom to go home to the Poor House.
> See: Wall Street Journal 8 November 2015
> I Was an Oil Spill Scapegoat -- I helped cap the Deepwater Horizon well, The Justice Department then turned my life into a legal nightmare
> -- Kurt Mix, BP drilling engineer, who published a blistering commentary about the US Justice Department immediately following a major revision to the case. After two years of expensive, life-upending dealings, all of the felony charges got dropped, and, "I would plead guilty to a minor misdemeanor for deleting a set of text messages without BP’s permission—something I had acknowledged doing from the very beginning."
> Good luck Mr. Left...
I thought this was interesting on went down the BP prosecution rabbit hole.
There have been _3_ rabies transmissions in the IS in 50 years?
The writer suggests this likes it is rare. But organ donation is rare. And rabies is even rarer. That it has happened _three times_ seems surprising to me.
It makes sense to me. Donors are hard to come by -- you need someone healthy right up to the point that they died. People who die of rabies can apparently appear to have suffered a heart attack, which would make them prime candidates for organ donation.
Hmm, having read that, I am starting to sympathize with Google if they are going to be punished for being open.
No one seems to care that Apple has never allowed freedom on their devices. Even the comments here don't seem to mention it. Google was at least open for a while.
Or maybe no one mentions it just because the closed iPhone is a fait accompli at this point.
Perhaps because Apple never “promised” to be open, Google instead built itself by playing the good guy and started to switch when money called so those who chose them for that reason feel betrayed.
This is going to be controversial because it steps into the shutdown blame game.
I think I am more interested in the mechanics of how this happens. Why do we need to attach riders / sneak in legislation? What changes could we make to the constitution to avoid this?
Single subject bill amendment. Several states require single subject bills in State legislature. The same must be required at the federal level. The pushback has always been "then nothing will get done". From where I am standing that would be a good thing. No more sneaking shit in at the last minute. Vote on every single issue. People will still try to sneak stuff in. I remember seeing a video of a Minnesota legislator admonishing his colleges for trying to do omnibus bills after they passed a single subject amendment.
To get such an amendment passed it would have to come from the States. Nobody that is already in congress is going to vote for this. It is a huge restriction on their power to spend our money.
Here is Alaska's single bill requirement:
The Alaska Constitution Art II, Section 13. Form of Bills reads:
Every bill shall be confined to one subject unless it is an appropriation bill or
one codifying, revising, or rearranging existing laws. Bills for appropriations
shall be confined to appropriations. The subject of each bill shall be
expressed in the title. The enacting clause shall be: “Be it enacted by the
Legislature of the State of Alaska.”
Hmm, I've never heard of this. My initial gut reaction is that this sounds good but the definition of 'single subject' is dubious. With enough leeway and creativity, anything can be a single subject.
Frankly, there are a ton of laws that seem dubious and underspecified to a person with an engineering mindset. This is by design, and it is the reason we have so many judges - because writing laws that clearly specify how they apply to every possible situation is often impossible. The law tries to make its intent clear, tries to lay out reasonably specific outlines, but necessarily must rely on the interpretation of those who judge the application of laws to cases.
Alaska is effectively a one-party state. At the federal level, you almost always need compromise to clear a filibuster, and it's easier to find compromise if you can draw on more subjects. Maybe the Democrats get cheaper health care while the Republicans get a giant bust of Trump installed on the former site of the Lincoln memorial. Neither measure would pass in isolation, but together they might.
So they could agree to pass two bills. This would require the two "sides" to trust each other, but it could (ideally would) also function to build trust, which would be a good thing.
Assuming there was enough trust to "guarantee" that one bill would pass right after the other, then what's the point of having the single subject rule in the first place? Sounds like you still have riders but with extra steps (and an opportunity to betray trust).
Because it becomes harder to "hide" things - like, the provisions being bargained for, or politicians' actual convictions about particular measures. There are items which now get passed in omnibus bills, bargained for behind closed doors by leadership, which couldn't (whip votes as ye may) be passed in up-or-down votes on their own merits. Those are, in my opinion, corrupt bargains, and shouldn't happen. I like legislative horse-trading - it's an important part of the democratic process - but I'd like it to be open and above board.
You say that like everybody that is in one party agrees on everything. That is absolutely false.
It is also an inaccurate portrayal of Alaska state politics. While historically the State Legislature has been majority republican it has been more even since 2015ish. Which is coincidentally when weed was made legal.
Of course you don't have to agree on everything, but the whole point of joining a party is to coordinate action to maximize power. Whether you agree with the party policies doesn't matter if you vote for them anyway to gain political currency with your party that you can hopefully spend later on your own priorities.
That said, I guess the Alaska legislature is a lot more balanced than I assumed. If the single subject rule works there, bravo. Congress is a different beast, though.
The biggest benefit of single subject bills is that it is infinitely easier for citizens to understand what is being passed and hold legislators to account on the next election if necessary.
It makes things like the Patriot Act and Inflation Reduction Act impossible.
This can have interesting consequences, because politicians are going to be politicians.
> The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus sued, arguing that the omnibus bill, whose original title is over 300 words before it keels over in repetition of the word “subdivision,” violated the single-subject rule.
It works just fine for the vast majority of US states, including all the largest ones (California, New York, Texas). I don't think the federal government is special here.
The federal government has grown immensely since the early 20th century due to the interpretations of the commerce clause allowing more and more federal legislation and rules to broadly be applied to essentially override state legislation.
The 10th amendment exists for a reason. The system wasn't intended for congress to even control something like this in the first place.
We definitely are straining the rules. I think we actually want a federal government like this. The reality on the ground is that most people want things like FDA and FCC at the federal level.
Maybe we just need to change the constitution--which I know is technically possible but im practically it's frozen. It's like a legacy API no one wants to touch.
Playing devil's advocate, the positive of allowing legislation to include unrelated riders is that it promotes compromise. And compromise is how a healthy democracy should operate.
The compromise should be on the content of the bill specific to the subject. It is not a compromise to allow a rider that funnels money to some pet project. That is buying votes.
Oftentimes there can be no compromise on the specific subject. So the bill is either DOA or just immediately passed without any debate.
Allowing several issues to be passed as a singular unit provides opportunity for an agreement to be made about several issues at once. Think of it like a Collective Bargaining Agreement.
You don't need to have a bunch of unrelated riders to compromise. If the bill is healthcare funding, the compromise could be something like who receives the assistance, whether there are any cutoffs, how to implement it, etc.
Or if that's really impossible, you could compromise on separate bills. If people ever break promises, that's a reason not to trust them in the future and it's a lot more clear to the public about who voted which way rather than having a rider which no one really understands where it came from.
Yes! And the closer you look, the more you notice that "both sides" have their pet things that are obviously worth complicating the tax code to do. What most of us want is just for the other half of the people to give up all their favorite complications, so that our "worth it" half would be manageable. Which is why the complexity only grows.
A car sale is an activity that is already registered with the government. It doesn't seem impossible for the data about an electric vehicle sale and it's purchase price to make its way to the IRS. The IRS could create an API to share this type of data with tax preparation software.
> their pet things that are obviously worth complicating the tax code to do
I agree that this is at the root of the problem but I think that can be addressed by making it easier to file taxes or by reducing the complexity of the tax code. The child tax credit is a relatively common type of benefit across rich countries. The tax code could be simplified by administering this benefit via direct cash transfers through a different government agency. I think from this perspective, the IRS is _extremely_ efficient at benefit administration.
My personal opinion is that the tax code is not always a bad way to administer benefits but the paperwork burden is the problem and the experience of filing taxes needs to be made easier.
Car sales are not registered with the US government. They’re registered with the state government. The two do not share physical infrastructure, data, policies, or even common goals, unless a specific agreement has been worked out between an individual state and the feds.
To me this feels a little like saying "the federal government doesn't know when people are born because births are registered with local governments". In practice this is all a matter of state capacity to keep track of this information. Given political will to make it happen, I don't see a reason why information about car sales couldn't make its way to the federal government in order to make tax filing simpler.
Users complaied about the price to go ad-free (something like $25 per year).
The commenter revealed that the actual revenue from ads was much more than $25 per year. Every person who purchased the ad-free option actually cost them money.
----- The lesson I took away is that ads pay more than we expect, though i didn't know the specifics of YouTube.
By providing an ad-free option, they are really allowing the user to out-bid the advertiser.
I think for most people, they would not be willing to pay more to avoid the ad than the ad seller is willing to pay to show it. It's a weird conundrum--but people are very cheap.
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