One more: I’ve got a small print shop/publishing business. I’m interested in printing vinyl stickers but searching for “what machines should I be looking for and how should I judge them” has been an awful experience going face first into search engines.
But on TikTok, there are multiple small shops showing the machines they use, and how they use them on the daily. Talking about the problems they run into.
Never thought I’d be stanning for TikTok, but it’s really not just dancing and thirst traps.
There are so many excellent creators on it. Nature focused. Rare book dealers showing their wares. Medievalists. And trades, showing you how things work (herding sheep, thatching roofs, general home repairs). Not to mention all the artists (drawing, painting, sculpting, pottery, stained glass, sewing, etc).
It really excels in the area of photoshop/illustrator tutorials as well. None of the YouTube bloat, just a quick 1 minute video that shows you exactly how to do one cool thing.
Yes the cool stuff is buried under dancing teenagers spitting memes, but there’s exceptional creative stuff on there and an audience that buys that stuff.
Also, the original ability to "circle share" was exceptional (and it's truly sad it was apparently abused into the ground by spammers). It allowed "real people" to curate groups of other real people around a certain topic, and then a new user (assuming they could find the curator) could then mass follow/watch those people.
"Here is a group of people who are creating things and having great conversations with each other. Check it out."
It was like someone opening a hidden door to a very nice party.
Don't know how to make something like that non-abusable or how to mitigate the abuse that killed it, but then I never saw it because I wasn't following spam circle shares.
> Being able to explicitly say "for the next hour I want to be fed thirst traps and rage bait, but then I want that turned off" would be an amazing feature.
Did you use Google Plus? I found the circle system to be so good for this. I like following artists, and sometimes they can be exceedingly political/depressed/self destructive and I can't take them in my "main feed". With G+ I could drop those people into a circle and then "dip into" the madness for a bit and hunt for gems, then leave before becoming overwhelmed.
Being able to "sort people" into groups on social media (using a single account) was just excellent. Here are my programmers, here are my RPG people, here are my RPG people that have a different core belief than the previous group of RPG people, here are my Artists, here are my Writers, here are my Sad But Brilliant people.
Then when they added collections so I could present the different "facets" of my interests and allow my followers to unsubscribe from those facets was excellent. I'll tag this post as gaming, this one as music, this one as bullshit hot takes, and you, my follower can say "I hate his taste in music" and never see it.
As a self publisher who’s used Kickstarter for 4 books now, let me say: the creative side of writing the books, doing the layout, getting it print ready, coordinating with artists etc is a beast.
Then when you add on the publisher side of distribution, fulfillment, lost orders, customer service, marketing etc you have a whole other beast.
It’s manageable in the right circumstances, and pieces can be sort of automated or out sourced, but (at least for me) the other grinds begin to absolutely kill my ability to do the creative work. And meanwhile fans are like “omg when’s the next book coming out?!?!?”
That’s said, I think the publishing “industry” needs to be ripped down and overhauled, but the work a publisher needs to do is very valuable and different than the creative needs.
I don’t understand this stuff. Politicians have directly ordered closures. If your bottom falls out from under you because you were playing fast and loose that seems inherently different than being told from above “you just cease your main method of generating revenue until we tell you otherwise.”
That is really interesting and echoes some of what Camille Paglia has to say about washing in Italian immigrant communities. Do you have the source handy? I’d love to check it out.
I’m in the RPG space myself. Ive basically bootstrapped up a small but profitable publishing company in that scene (http://shop.swordfishislands.com).
I also like how DriveThruRPG gives drm free PDFs. The watermark is up to the creator (I don’t). I wish they took a smaller cut on their market though. :p
There is also the Bundle of Holding, that does bundles of drm free rpg PDFs and content. It’s pretty great as well.
My personal take is that the ebook/pdf/digital book market is replacing the “cheap paperback/trade” market. I use Kickstarter to raise funds for pretty deluxe offset print runs and am then pretty liberal with the digital copies (buy a book get the digital free, charity bundles, bundles, free in person download codes, etc). This seems to have been beneficial because the “infinite digital” product serves as a gateway to the “limited, special, ‘deluxe’” version.
Paperbacks, even big ones are pretty cheap to produce, so I’d imagine there’d be more of a “sales cannibalism” between a paperback and ebook wing (e.g., I have the digital I don’t need the paperback) so downplaying the digital seems like it would make sense long term for books that don’t make sense to exist in some sort of “deluxe, you’ll want this for 50 years” format.
Yes absolutely. It’s destructive to curiosity too imo. If you do go and search for something outside the algorithmic expectation it can break things hard (oh, you looked at a thing about shoes? Let me give you nothing but that). Which makes me hesitant about search terms on some platforms.
Potentially this can be fixable in the long term, but I think humans will almost always(?) be superior curators. Mostly because they’re approaching it from “this is what I like” and not “this is what I know you’re going to like.”
Yes absolutely this imo. I worked at Saks Fifth Avenue around the time Spanx we’re taking off. It was absolutely about the “lifestyle” and the brand. There might have been competitor and there might have been knockoffs, but they were just that: not Spanx. And that was very important.
I remember one of the top sales girls joking with her clients constantly after Christmas one year about how she’d had too much to drink at the Christmas party and she’d fallen and rolled or something and “next thing I knew my Spanx were hanging out”. And they’d all laugh uproariously as they held several pairs to buy.
It’s this magical sweet spot where they were just expensive enough to be special and “the real deal”. Competition didn’t matter. Price didn’t matter. Spanx mattered. I found it insanely interesting.
And not only that, it’s always been my understanding that there was a major motivation of preservation. To record the spoken tales before they were lost.
Which is legit, but at least where I am, those are (normally) not placed directly in walkways, or in a place that "consumes" an asset created and maintained by another business (i.e., a bike rack).
Maybe, and maybe that's part of why it's bothering me. I don't have a frame in which to easily sit it.
I think that's a good analogy, but it's not quite right imo. The important factor for me is that, in this specific case the distributor (or whoever is putting them out) is placing them directly in front of a school.
Potential consumers of the service are socially expected to do work to maintain something they didn't put there or ask for and it's being purposefully placed in more naturally risky location. Or they're being placed in a way that's not very nice to others (blocking sidewalks or bike racks).
In the ball game scenario the consumer has chosen to get popcorn, made a mess (either purposefully or accidentally) and then chosen to leave it for others to take care of. So the consumer is being personally irresponsible.
My interpretation is that the scooter companies are being personally irresponsible, but then sort of making it look/feel like the potential consumers are being irresponsible?
You put your backpack in the main walkway of the airport. I tripped over it. Things spilled out of the backpack. Should I feel bad and try and pick up those things? Does that answer change if I see you doing the same thing every single Wednesday when I fly out?
This is the thing that bothers me. They appear to be getting set out in front of my kid’s school (in sets of 4), and it’s the natural inclination for kids to want to run jump and play on them.
So now there’s this sort of quandary I have as a parent: do I tell my kids and or other kids to not play on these scooters? And to take care of them? Where should I draw the line?
I don’t see them in poor areas of town, so it’s like they exist in large part as an almost “parasite” on the good will of nice communities where they won’t be stolen or chopped up for parts. They’re here to make money for a private company.
In a public park or at the public library it’s easy to say: “this is here for our community, by our community, you need to take care of it because we’re all in this together.”
These scooters (despite their benefit) are ultimately taking money out of the community (if they’re profitable) and they’re budgeting for loss and damage, so why not let the kids play on them and damage them?
I worked for a major gaming company for almost a decade and based on that, I think it should be paid for by its corporate users.
Not from the angle of paying to use the service to tweet, but paying for access to tweetdeck. I know there are some fees associated with that, but from my understanding most of those revolve around "customization" and "reports". I think it should straight up be "if you want to see your mentions, you pay".
We dedicated multiple units of headcount in multiple departments. One department was treating it straight up as an additional contact channel and scheduled almost 24 hour coverage on it. One department devoted a whole TV to tweet deck to watch the various mentions. There were multiple instances where customer services issues were caught and handled before they blew up because we saw them emerge on twitter before we saw it on any of our internal tools.
This was especially true for regional/smaller issues. I was in the department with the TV for tweetdeck, and a phenomenal value came from being able to see the "burst flow" as an issue emerged. Each individual tweet wasn't really important, but flurries = issues that need to be addressed, and specific tweets can be dug into for specifics if needed.
I imagine this would be valuable to almost any "always on" type corporation, and there should be enough of them, doing well enough, that they could foot the bill.
I don't believe so. INAL but if the photograph attempts to exactly replicate an image I'm pretty sure copyright doesn't hold. So like, a high resolution image of a Caravaggio is still usable as public domain.[0]
I'm pretty sure the Vatican's got to "ruin" the images with a watermark or anyone would be able to use them as is for whatever they want. It'd be different if it was sculpture, but these pics seem to me like they'd definitely fall into the "slavish reproduction of a public domain work" category.
But on TikTok, there are multiple small shops showing the machines they use, and how they use them on the daily. Talking about the problems they run into.