What I really want is mandatory opt-in to be able to contact me.
Unknown numbers get to send a single standard length SMS, carrier embeds the full legal name and, for businesses, legally registered mailing address, and I can choose whether to accept. If I don't, no other contact from that number is connected to my phone. Ever.
I can also report the message as unsolicited and every company's unsolicited contact stats are made available to regulators.
This. Americans are too used to owning a personal car and driving it even though short trips can be replaced by public transit.
I agree US is too big to be covered by public transit, but if we want to win the climate war, US has to cover all its states and make public transit seamless. Once this goal is complete, discourage owning of personal vehicle.
Also a picture comparing car vs bus [1]. Now compare the green house emission between two.
Every year at Christmas, I get a card from a family member with a short, personal hand-written note and a 1-page, generic printed update on how their year has been, usually with some pictures.
This is what I want from a social network.
I want to be able to keep up some regular connection with people I don't see on a regular basis. I want us to remember each other, know about major life events, and have a convenient way to reconnect more personally when that makes sense.
For people I see (or want to talk to) regularly, I'll just send messages or group messages.
For more of the topic-centered type of internet community I may want in my life... well HN already does that perfectly.
I think that is what most people want.. However, I don't know how to make that self-sufficient let alone profitable .. People want free and free means ads and ads means click-bait/faux outrage/addiction.
The old model was this (MySpace) but you had to go look at people .. They didn't come to you and it wasn't addictive enough or profitable enough.
Thank you, kgr, for writing and posting this. I find this a much more digestible summary of the topic than the other recent posting on Statistical Process Control.
This article seems like a good reminder to know what your fundamentals are and to be deliberate about picking them.
But I'm not convinced that this advice can be used to pick your fundamentals, your core business model.
Amazon opted for more choices and lower prices.
Barnes & Noble stuck with faster solutions to problems (get your book today not after a week of shipping as was common when Amazon started), deeper human interactions (you can go into the store and ask someone for recommendations, meet authors, etc.), and increased confidence/trust (you know what you're getting because you can hold it in your hand and read it before you buy it).
Low-cost carriers have moved in on traditional airlines because while it's true that people will never stop caring about added comfort, it turns out they care about lower prices much more.
But Apple built a staggering market cap relying on the assumption that while people care about lower price, they care about great control of your time (just works) and higher social status more.
So it seems like this article provides a good framework for thinking about your business, but doesn't give any answers as to the actual strategy you should use.
For me this is a good example of the old adage that you should not confuse vision with strategy.
The vision is you realize the universal truth (in Amazon’s case people want things cheap and fast).
The strategy is how you deliver on making that visions reality. This is what you call (rightly so) your core business model.
Only experience people tend to get all caught up in the big ideas of the vision (especially middle managers) but spend far to little time on making the hard choices that come with deciding in strategy: it’s as much, if not more, about deciding what not to do as it is commitment to what you will do to realize your vision.
I read TFA’s take on fundamentals as neutral on the examples given. There was mention that Amazon survived where Beenz did not because they picked the right mix of changing and unchanging. On the other hand, the juxtaposition of Andreeson and Buffett says that you can find business success with seemingly opposite fundamentals.
That's a good point. I also suspect that companies can manipulate these value preferences a fair amount through marketing, e.g. lower price vs higher status.
Right, this is a values problem, not a technical problem.
Who should get to see Taylor Swift? How much should they pay? How should profits be distributed?
These are philosophical questions. If you assume a particular set of answers to these questions, designing the correct sales process is not difficult. But everyone has a different set of answers.
Judging by the majority opinion in this thread, it seems pretty clear GitHub could have asked and gotten enough people to opt-in to have no problem training their model. They probably would have been thrilled to do it and proud of being included in the training data.
But the preference of the majority does not override the conditions placed by people who prefer not to participate.
We have an even better example of mistaking the numbers for the whole picture. Becoming famous for winning obscene amounts of money greatly increases your chance of being harassed, murdered, or driven to mental breakdown. The expected value of a losing ticket (a chance to fantasize, enjoyment, etc.) is much higher than the expected value of a winning ticket (a lifetime of being hounded for money in increasingly desperate and violent ways).
Definitely this. I have been an Android user since my first smartphone. I've been a Gmail user much longer than that. I still to this day don't have the slightest idea what the distinction between Hangouts, Chat, and Messages (and whatever else I'm forgetting... Wave?) even is. Sometimes my new phone has an app called Chat, sometimes it's Messages, one time it was Hangouts... they all seem to be the same app to me.
I just checked what my pixel 6 has installed. I have something called "Duo", which, when I click it, shows me something called "Meet". Is it different from the other "meet" on my phone? Seems to be but not sure.
Google's communication services are so complex and poorly defined I avoid them like the plague, always have. I just don't understand what app to use and how they all relate.
Meat, Wangouts, Allo, Duo(not duolingo)? Talk, or Chat?
I bet they took the team from Microsoft responsible for ramming the Skype/Lync/Communicator/Skype4Business brands into the ground and brought them over. Remember when Groove used to be Sharepoint but now it's a music player from them?
I have been using Voice since like 2007, it's one of the only services from Google I've latched onto because it's nearly impossible to steal a phone number out of it (nobody to social engineer and need to get access to Google Account and pay a few dollars to unlock the number). For YEARS, like 5+ nobody knew if they were shutting it down. It used to be possible to trunk SIP calls over Google Voice using GChat/Gtalk and XMPP to SIP bridge.
Out of nowhere they started to update it again sometime in the latter part of last decade, it still has 2 panels in the configuration backend because they halfassed implementing the Material interface and didn't include all the features. Despite this I'm ride or die with it because there's nothing else on the market that gives you a fairly un-stealable number for free.
Oh and to continue the fragmentation, Google Voice for Workspace is a totally different product similar to Vonage Cloud. As has often been the case with their paid services for years, the free users generally get a better experience.
EDIT: I honestly think a big part of the reason this has stayed running is Bandwidth.com runs most of the show under the hood and that company knows what they're doing. Another Google service they ran was GOOG-411 when that existed.
What I really want is mandatory opt-in to be able to contact me.
Unknown numbers get to send a single standard length SMS, carrier embeds the full legal name and, for businesses, legally registered mailing address, and I can choose whether to accept. If I don't, no other contact from that number is connected to my phone. Ever.
I can also report the message as unsolicited and every company's unsolicited contact stats are made available to regulators.