I'm not convinced that the Feedly option is as much of a dark pattern as you might think. There are a few ways this could be addressed which would come with their own tradeoffs:
1) Remove the "x" close button since you're not a Pro user therefore setting clear expectations that you have no ability to dismiss an ad. This is clean but then the user wouldn't have known that they COULD pay to close the ad.
2) Change the "x" close button to something like "How do I remove ads?" or "Upgrade to Pro to close" - this would set expectations clearly upfront but for many users who don't mind seeing the ads this is additional information/noise.
The current experience optimizes for delivering information only when there's strong intent. The intent is derived when the behavior has been expressed by the user in the form of "I dont' want to see this ad" and then the information is delivered to explain "Here's how you can complete this action".
MSFT just announced custom Azure chips too which likely also played into the "synergy" with Sam's desire to reduce reliance on Nvidia as computing capacity and demand scales with AI advancement.
I’ve been lucky to have caught a flight back to SF after cancellations and can wait at home while figuring out how to get to my original destination.
What I don’t understand is how come SW couldn’t enlist help to get customers rebooked on other airlines - their phone lines were slammed (I waited 3 hours) just to get a refund since their app wouldn’t allow me to choose to rebook/cancel.
If I was as customer focused as they say they are - I would’ve contacted AMEX global travel and gotten their entire network of booking agents to backfill and rebook customers on other flights.
I’ll believe it when I see it, I am out of pocket $500 so far in chaining my own flights on other airlines to get to my destination after my SW flight on Christmas Eve was cancelled. They offered a rebooking only on their own routes on the 27th which would have been cancelled again in hindsight. I am finally headed to my final destination today 4 days later on another airline as I didn’t expect SW to pay for any of the extra costs.
Nope it was moist and delicious! Separated the skin from the meat and rubbed with salt and sugar. 450 for an hour then 325 until the internal temp was at 157+. Breast was foiled to prevent overcooking.
I think we should explain this more clearly to the original author; it’s probably true that maybe 5% work on ads but that is literally the ads system like Adwords and Adsense. The only reason those are valuable is that Google has tons of traffic and that traffic is driven by the work of the other 95% working on sub-verticals, core search, Youtube, etc.
If you take away the people working on those these services would stagnate and people will start going to another search engine and then you lose revenue.
What about a physical front page that gets printed daily using something like an HP Designjet T210?
You can mount it (it's wireless) and it can print 2' wide from a roll of paper. You feed the paper into a custom frame (add margins to the PDF -> JPG script) and then add a slightly sharp cutting edge at the bottom of the frame so that every day the previous day's frontpage will come out from the bottom of the frame and you can tear it off (reuse as needed).
You would need to pay for something like a 700' roll of 24" butcher paper for $18 and ink (yes I know HP is a terrible company on ink) but it might be even more realistic!
I think Rhinehart’s perspective may be that a generation of people are focused on solving the wrong problems (ones that don’t have real impact on human lives) and we (collective) are fetishsizing that singular focus on making the best of something that is largely inconsequential in the real of real problems. For example, should anyone be making the best flatware and why do we care about buying the best flatware when there’s plenty of good enough.
There’s so many points in his article that it’s hard to start in one place but I got the sense that his overarching thesis is this:
There’s a bunch of real human problems today (hunger, climate change, disease etc) and people can either be working on 1) solving these problems or 2) distracting people from thinking about their own mortality and these crises. In the bucket of the distraction-economy is probably anything entertainment related, social networking, consumerism, etc which is not innovative. There are people who are trying to change the system because it’s broken not just simply extract more value from it.
There’s a range of flexibility offered including many homes that have free cancellation until 5 or 1 day before check-in. Some are on Stricter policies that are more strict than what you would find with hotels but homeowners also have different risk profiles and the policies help balance that risk out.
Yes, it's most likely that the ad that's matching is the generic one for "Lansing, MI BBQ" or something to that effect and therefore it's not pointing to a specific landing page. It may also be that Doordash has found that individual restaurant keywords that point to specific restaurant pages are just not profitable.
This is either dynamic keyword insertion in the ad copy or they did target a specific restaurant name but decided to use a more generic landing page. In my previous life doing more marketing oriented activities in the travel space, we found that even if someone was looking for a very specific hotel, if you dropped them on that page, it converted at a lower rate than dropping them into a search page for hotels in that location and "pinning" that hotel to the top of the page. The reason is that people may be more open to other similar options than you think. So in the case of Doordash, perhaps they have found a similar thing which is that you might have said McDonald's but net net more people will buy if you show them McDonalds, Wendy's, Burger King, Jack-in-Box, etc.
Also, showing all of the options may actually create more net value for Doordash since you're letting the customer know you have a wide breadth of options and this may create more long term loyalty.
I was wondering if there was a way to increase the transparency in this process and find a way for donors to support but also get something in return:
1) Can businesses be open about operating expenses and costs? How much do they need to survive the next 1/3/6 months?
2) Can businesses sell futures or pre-sell services? For example, in the examples you provided, could I pre-buy yoga classes for the future or let's say 10 garments for dry cleaning?
I’m sure someone has suggested this at some point but why not physical keys with an lcd underneath each key? This would allow those keys to be fully customizable and be worthy of the “Pro” designation.
Their 1st gen service offered quite a bit of luggage and equipment transport for free (bike or surfboard) so it was super interesting to me. You could get on Friday night and go to sleep wake up refreshed in Santa Monica, surf, get a hotel or what not. Party until Sunday night and then sleep and be in the office by 8am. No Uber rides needed necessarily and less wasted time getting to the airport on time etc.