Looking at StarRocks site (https://www.starrocks.io/), they compare against Clickhouse, Druid and Trino. Don't even compare against Spark/Databricks! Guess Spark is just not competitive.
It does make sense if and if the following apply: (a) you have touched the brand and trust it over other offerings (b) are tech-literate but semi-technical or non-technical or simply don’t want to do anything more than a couple of clicks implementation (c) you are early enough in your journey that sales and revenue matter more than cost of revenue (d) any of the above originally but you solved those problems and now intertia/tech debt somewhere more urgent.
That’s a huge number of aspirational digital product vendors.
5 + 50 vs stripe’s lower direct take (for me 1.5 + 20). I just did a quick calculation on a really basic/modest digital product business. Sell something at €25 and sell €50k - 2000 customers. That’s going to be €7k with LSqz over a year, and with Stripe it’s going to be €1.15k
The difference is €16 a day.
The business makes you €137 a day.
If you spend a day each month sorting out admin and taxes because of stripe direct plus a few days paying a developer (you’re non-technical remember!) then that could easily be a cost of €5500 a year. Total cost including card processing is €6150 and it’s only €850 less than LemonSqueezy.
Why would you move?
And in particular why would you move sooner than 3 years if you are predicting similar revenue each year.
this! im selling a subscription with this pricing model and it’s quite painful to swallow. having that said i really enjoy using lemon as my payment processor
It currently lets you hide all the distracting elements in YouTube - one of the methods the author references. YouTube is my #1 time suck. From personal experience, this alone makes a lot of difference.
Google just yesterday sent out an email cracking down on this. From the email:
To better protect users' browsing experience, the Quality Guideline changes clarify that an extension's purpose is to provide complimentary functionality for the browsing experience and should not seek to hijack a user's browsing or search experience. This update aims to ensure that users have full control over their browsing sessions, without any unwarranted interruptions or manipulations. By enforcing this policy, we strive to foster a safer and more enjoyable environment for all Chrome users, where their trust and satisfaction remain our top priorities. Together, we can create a web ecosystem that respects users' autonomy and offers seamless browsing experiences that truly enhance their lives.
Well, Google has been introducing policy changes meant to restrict abuse of extension privileges for quite a while. It won’t help however as long as they don’t manage to enforce the policies effectively. These extensions have been at it for at least two years. It was already against Google’s policies back then. Users flagged these extensions back then already. Yet they remained in Chrome Web Store.
Note that I found one similar extension that was removed in March this year. I have no idea why Google removed it (it cannot be user complains) or why they didn’t search Chrome Web Store for similar code.
Removing extensions used by 55 million users is weighed against the loss of functionality provided by those extensions. Maybe Google just doesn’t want to piss off 55 million users (actually a lot more since, as you say, your list of compromised extensions is not complete)
Yes, much better to let 55 million users blame the browser for redirecting search queries, excessive ads, erratic behavior and data leaks. :-)
Funny thing is: I can imagine Google being fine with everything on this list but the first point. When it comes to hijacking search, Google is absolutely no fun.
Together, we can create a web ecosystem that respects users' autonomy
Maybe 20 years ago I would've believed that coming from Google, but no, it's clear they're going full authoritarian to get users under their control like the rest of Big Tech and using the classic "security" argument to do it.
It is quizzical, isn't it? "Pervasive tracking of users goes against their autonomy". But what about when you do it? "We need to be able to keep the lights on, don't we? And anyways, users chose to visit our page, so they consented to any tracking" - how does any of that not apply to extensions the user installs?
The cognitive dissonance of being a company that makes all its money spying on users, has a profit motivation to prevent others from spying on users, and needing to pretend to take the moral high ground for PR reasons at the same time.
I wonder what Bing has to do with it and whether or not MS is even aware of any of this or if it is 'at arms length'. For sure a great way to wreck your reputation, and likely you'll be blacklisted for life.
The team at Neeva was A+. It is quite commendable that they managed to build a real search engine (unlike DuckDuckGo which is a shim on Bing) that was comparable to Google with such a small team.
Neeva aimed to solve the problem of ads clogging the entire search results page with an ad-free search experience. My opinion of Neeva was that it solved a problem that doesn't exist. Anyone who is annoyed with ads can install uBlock (or one of the other extensions) and hide them all.
And this is a critical point. Not only has Microsoft raised the pricing for their Bing Search API massively (a cost to Neeva and others) there are rumors that they were starting to enforce some terms of service that prevents the use of the API for many things including training LLMs.
They over estimated the market on the table —- in tech circle people want to end Google and are willing to pay. For the average user, they have no clue how the ad business works or harms society
Maybe for others, but I find them a huge annoyance, to the point that I am willingly paying Neeva, and looking for a new paid search engine.
I did not ask for ads, and I can pay, so why should I suffer them? If I want to buy something, I will search for it. I would not welcome a salesman who interrupted my dinner with a voucher for my next meal; I'd give him a wedgie.
Most people who are annoyed by ads just use an ad blocker. I know there are people with ethical qualms about it, but "hates ads but has ethical aversion to blocking them" isn't a large enough market to support a VC-funded startup.
Ad blocking is a constant, annoying cat and mouse game. Also, it's inconsistent across devices. I can block ads much more easily on a PC than on my Android.
I'll happily subscribe to whatever service I find that's closest to what I've had with Neeva.
It clearly depends on your perspective. I found the quantity of ads on Google to be a genuine impediment and happily switched to being a paying user of Neeva. For the vast majority of searches, Neeva was better for me. Most pointedly, Neeva was even better when I searched for things that I intended to purchase, because the results were not simply paid advertisements.
I can relate to this.
I created SuperFocus (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/superfocus-stop-sc...) with a similar idea. Dopamine loop is a big problem. I have tried site blockers / SuperFocus which is a feed blocker but there was something missing and have been looking for the magic solution. Just signed up for Clearspace and immediately felt this is it.
Planning to rewrite SuperFocus later this week to do the same on desktop as most of my time spent is on the desktop browser.
Hey this is great and something I started on working myself.
Just a note that if you pin the extension on the extension page itself it gives a very, very confusing message of
"SuperFocus works on Youtube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.
SuperFocus is not yet available for
dboceidahklphhjpfbpnicodnbkoiokn."
thought it was a bug before I realised that must be the chrome extension id, but it's quite likely people will first open the extension on this tab as that's where you teach them to pin it
I'm currently speeding up Mypy + Jedi in Rust. I'm pretty far already and it's definitely a lot faster. Tests are currently running 500 times faster than Mypy.
Supposedly even running the trained model for ChatGPT is extremely expensive unlike the image generators which can largely be run on a consumer device.
