Claims by an unidentified author(s) replying to comments with a 4-hour old HN account.. How did this make it to the front page other than the catchy name?
Totally agree - I don't find "stunningly thin and light design" to be a selling point any more. I want to hold a durable device without feeling like it might break or slip out of my hands, without needing a chunky case.
Yes, agree that like any other technology, the artists typically get the short end of the stick regardless of the delivery platform. Even for the megastars, more money is raked in from sources other than streaming. (With notable exceptions, like megastars owning their own masters instead of a label, or blockbuster established songwriters.)
Yes, the rates vary by platform. In the US, there's a combo of statutory (or CRB-approved) rates on the publisher side, and negotiations on the label side.
On the publisher/songwriter side, streams are not "public performances" under the Copyright Act (in the US), so royalties are not handled by the court-sanctioned monopolies that have been in place since the early 20th century (ASCAP, BMI).
And if publishers and/or labels were able to obtain better rates - via direct negotiations, the CRB, or otherwise - presumably some of those fractional cents per stream would trickle down to the artists and songwriters who are already in notoriously oppressive contracts with the major label and publisher oligopoly.
Lost in all coverage of this battle of the middlemen is the effect on the artists actually making the product. How would lower prices make any difference in Spotify’s royalty rate bullying in a market saturated with alternatives that they already dominate? Are there really that many more consumers who want but aren’t already paying for a streaming service or using free alternatives? There are legit discussions to be had about app store policies, but I can’t see how the music streaming context is the place to have them.
It’s beyond laughable that the company didn’t better address these concerns beyond performative press releases without the need for regulatory intervention before rolling out in any jurisdiction, let alone the EU. Whatever one’s opinion on the privacy implications, it’s a simply embarassing business* move given the number of countries with data protection legislation (and/or active regulators).
* or whatever motive one wishes to ascribe to the mix of for- and non-profit entities involved in muddying the waters OpenAI-style
Fueling clickbait conspiracy theories is one probable outcome that comes to mind. For example, even a winning candidate may claim that a "woke" employee sabotaged the site in an effort to subvert the will of the people to have free and open discourse, they won despite the media deck stacked against them, etc.
Xoogler here - Totally agree that the bulging middle management layers and lack of crisp CEO vision have dismantled the company's ability to weather the changes of "growing up". Had a few managers and multiple reorgs in my < two years there, during a time of record profits. Peers said that wasn't an uncommon thing. Who cares about vision or management so long as the ads money printer goes brrr?
Still, there are definitely people trying to do the right thing for users despite frequent bu$iness side overrides, and IMO still some best-of-breed products amongst the sprawling graveyard/zombies. I could even get through to a real person at Nest customer support a few weeks ago!
Great overview, thanks for sharing. Maybe this was unintentional, but I got a good laugh out of, "In 1952, the International Astronomical Union changed the definition of time"!
Release the lobbyists! Hopefully this moves forward without getting too watered down. Its limited scope is more promising than recent attempts at more comprehensive data protection legislation.
Announced in a Friday-before-holiday email. The dollar amount isn't likely to break the bank for many users, but as a percentage it's just taking advantage of a captive user base.
Regardless of the functionality and (IMO) great engineering of the products, it's amazing that the biz side has never seemed to care much for its community of users.
I've heard similar stories from others. My Nest doorbell has issues, too, unless someone is right on the porch. I'm ready to get cameras but waiting for the next Prime Day when I can probably pick up two Rings for the price of one Nest cam (and maybe even a previous gen doorbell?). The multi-app thing, as most others have noted, is also infuriating and pathetic at this point. Not OK, Google.
Me: "How about a printer where I can scan a QR code, like an IoT device, and it 'just works'"?
Tech industry: "How about AR glasses?"
While the complexity of translating screen -> paper across platforms, resolutions, etc. is huge and ever-expanding, can anyone comment on why it isn't a solved problem by now? Are there just too many ancient protocols left to support (for a large enough sales surface) so the drivers are too fragile to properly rewrite? Is it an issue of OS support for the latest protocols? It's not like printer frustration is a new phenomenon...
While privacy policies are increasingly tailored to an app's actual data usage,* there are still FAR too many out there full of the same copypasta allowing a company to do whatever they want with your data. With that in mind, it's hardly a surprise that there's a disconnect between what engineers self-report and what's buried in the policies.
* Based on my own experience over the years actually reading them as someone who both cares about this stuff and works in the space.
The bug tracker, deployment, and testing tools are very mature. It was the task tracking by spreadsheet on my teams that got to me, and lack of unified project management tooling across teams. This made tracking dependencies and planning more difficult (leading to more meetings). There are definitely in-house tools available. It's just another "YMMV considerably" element of things.
A lot of this reflects the "professional executive" MBA-ization others have mentioned. When folks who've never been engineers, or never worked on shipping products are the ones managing engineers, it creates dissonance (and BDUF[1]). I'm pretty biased, having entered the company after a decade on well-oiled scrum and XP teams - the predictability made it SO much easier to focus on the actual work. I've always believed that fewer things 100% complete are better than many things in partial states. That just isn't the case there and caused issues for me.