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I am an idiot. Someone explain alibaba to me. Everything I read about it is unapproachably dense.
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Feb 18, 2016 21:45
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Discendo Vox posted:I am an idiot. Someone explain alibaba to me. Everything I read about it is unapproachably dense. Alibaba is a platform where businesses can sell products to other businesses. For example, if you need cardboard boxes and packing peanuts to ship your widgets, you can use Alibaba to find Joe's Boxes and Phil's Peanuts and get orders from them (minimum order 10,000 boxes/pounds of peanuts). They also have a consumer version called Aliexpress where you can buy individual customer items. They're usually pretty cheap too.
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Feb 18, 2016 21:50
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Also it's Chinese which remains the new hotness in VC/speculator realms.
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Feb 19, 2016 02:41
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They have the B2B thing and they're basically Chinese Amazon they make megabucks
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Feb 19, 2016 02:58
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Kwyndig posted:Also it's Chinese which remains the new hotness in VC/speculator realms. Yeah, but don't they actually make a profit too?
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Feb 19, 2016 03:20
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if you need 10,000 fake Rolexes, Alibaba is your place
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Feb 19, 2016 05:50
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Who the hell thought that that would be a good idea at all? I get that most marriages end in divorce but unless people are betting over double what they're getting loaned that business is guaranteed to fail right out the gate. I feel like it's probably pretty difficult to collect money from people who are going through a divorce. On top of the business model being nonsensical, targeting people who are financially and emotionally drained is super lovely.
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Feb 19, 2016 06:11
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I dont know posted:I feel like it's probably pretty difficult to collect money from people who are going through a divorce. On top of the business model being nonsensical, targeting people who are financially and emotionally drained is super lovely. I dunno if you feel like you need a 10,000 dollar loan for your wedding I'm alright with you being targeted for debt collection.
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Feb 19, 2016 07:58
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go3 posted:if you need 10,000 fake Rolexes, Alibaba is your place 
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Feb 19, 2016 08:22
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Marissa Mayer closes down another of her signature Yahoo programs. Times headline: "Yahoo Closes Online Magazines, a Costly Experiment by Marissa Mayer". Whoops I've been meaning to check out this new Yahoo stuff since 2014 apparently. I guess I missed it.
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Feb 19, 2016 13:08
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If you guys think migrating scientific equipment is hard, we have waterjet machines that interface through 16 bit ISA cards
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Feb 19, 2016 15:28
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Saw this yesterday and thought of this thread. Courtesy of JP Morgan Asset Management 
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Feb 19, 2016 16:06
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rscott posted:If you guys think migrating scientific equipment is hard, we have waterjet machines that interface through 16 bit ISA cards  
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Feb 19, 2016 16:54
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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rscott posted:If you guys think migrating scientific equipment is hard, we have waterjet machines that interface through 16 bit ISA cards we got our machine shop clients stacks of older machines so they can continue running their poo poo until the earth explodes. 
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Feb 19, 2016 17:57
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Okay, this'll do till blatant comes along. San Francisco Chronicle on Zenefitsquote:So how did Zenefits miss the mark so badly?
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Feb 19, 2016 18:18
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someone should make lawyr, an app to help you disrupt the legal system
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Feb 19, 2016 19:24
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blowfish posted:someone should make lawyr, an app to help you disrupt the legal system Wouldn't that just be whatever app Sovereign Citizens use?
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Feb 19, 2016 20:39
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Why do investors keep believing that social media is somehow profitable? Serious question, because I just can't figure it out. What exactly is it that is preventing these capitalists from realizing that advertising as a business model is utterly and completely doomed? Morroque fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Feb 19, 2016 |
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Feb 19, 2016 21:05
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duz posted:Wouldn't that just be whatever app Sovereign Citizens use? That would be Joindr.
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Feb 19, 2016 21:05
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Morroque posted:Why do investors keep believing that social media is somehow profitable? http://idlewords.com/talks/internet_with_a_human_face.htm
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Feb 19, 2016 21:24
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Morroque posted:Why do investors keep believing that social media is somehow profitable? I feel like this old Lowtax College lecture from like 2005 is somehow relevant here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYrz_1hV0OU He talks about the leadup to the original dotcom bubble bursting IIRC about 15 minutes in or so and you can see a lot of what he's talking about happening again (maybe less so the "be impressed by our chairs" part, but the VC thing still holds up).
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Feb 19, 2016 21:34
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Yup, Yahoo's for salequote:Yahoo announced on Friday it has taken more steps to explore a potential sale, by setting up an independent committee to reach out and consider offers from potential buyers.
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Feb 19, 2016 21:41
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Both, probably; then, nothing.
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Feb 19, 2016 21:47
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Morroque posted:Why do investors keep believing that social media is somehow profitable? Facebook and MySpace made tons of money at one point. People like to talk to each other. Everybody uses social media these days (well, almost everybody). It's way easier to create some new social space than it is to create something that solves an actual problem. It's a bunch of people following the path of least resistance and expecting to be Zuckerberg some day. Social media is profitable if you do it right but the other snag is that it's coming out that internet advertisement isn't as profitable or as effective as people thought it was. It's also absurdly over-saturated.
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Feb 19, 2016 21:57
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Facebook and MySpace made tons of money at one point. People like to talk to each other. Everybody uses social media these days (well, almost everybody). It's way easier to create some new social space than it is to create something that solves an actual problem. It's a bunch of people following the path of least resistance and expecting to be Zuckerberg some day.
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Feb 20, 2016 03:04
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Discendo Vox posted:I am an idiot. Someone explain alibaba to me. Everything I read about it is unapproachably dense. It's Amazon except only the part of Amazon where they list stuff "from other sellers". Although I think they might be moving into selling stuff directly Mr.Radar posted:Uber is burning cash at a rate of $1 billion per year to try to take over the "ride sharing" market in China. I'm sure the board of directors have prison cells waiting with their names on them for dumping and selling below cost, right? lol
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Feb 20, 2016 03:31
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cheese posted:The beating heart of both social media/mobile specifically and, frankly, the internet in general is real world companies that sell real goods and services (Toyota, Coca-Cola, Kleenex, Carnival Cruise, whatever) paying for online advertising. Turns out that a lot of that "traffic" that advertisers generate (by buying/selling clicks and views from a whole host of platforms) is artificially generated and total bullshit. It all comes crashing down if those companies turn their increasing doubt and skepticism about online advertising into smaller and smaller ad buys. A lot of what is making Facebook stupid amounts of money in mobile is that free to play apps have all figured out the profile of a whale user and they have bid up ad space and cost per install on those people to absolutely insane levels.
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Feb 20, 2016 03:40
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Things like YouTube Red show how far advertising has fallen as a revenue source. I'm not in the field, but offering users the chance to pay to opt out of ads seems like it would really reduce the value of your advertising. I think "people who are willing and able to pay for a premium, recurring online service" are a group that almost every advertiser wants to reach, and buying advertising that specifically excludes that group sounds like a bad idea.
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Feb 20, 2016 05:56
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cheese posted:The beating heart of both social media/mobile specifically and, frankly, the internet in general is real world companies that sell real goods and services (Toyota, Coca-Cola, Kleenex, Carnival Cruise, whatever) paying for online advertising. Turns out that a lot of that "traffic" that advertisers generate (by buying/selling clicks and views from a whole host of platforms) is artificially generated and total bullshit. It all comes crashing down if those companies turn their increasing doubt and skepticism about online advertising into smaller and smaller ad buys. This is what I don't understand. This fact is obvious enough to everyone, and yet that specific knowledge seems not present in the minds of investors who should know it the most. I'm aware Investor Storytime is a thing, but even it is premised on the promise of future returns of a thing not known for giving much in the way of returns. Even by what Shifty Pony said, Facebook is only going forward as is because it has found some other source of revenue besides advertising. (If at least around enabling microtransactions, which is a thing said to have value of some kind, I guess...)
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Feb 20, 2016 10:54
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Konstantin posted:Things like YouTube Red show how far advertising has fallen as a revenue source. I'm not in the field, but offering users the chance to pay to opt out of ads seems like it would really reduce the value of your advertising. I think "people who are willing and able to pay for a premium, recurring online service" are a group that almost every advertiser wants to reach, and buying advertising that specifically excludes that group sounds like a bad idea. One of the issues with internet advertising that has existed as long as internet advertising is that it can become obnoxious as hell. This is why stuff like ad blockers exist; there is just this nonstop attempt to cram adverts in your face as often as possible in ways that force you to pay attention to them. Then malware started sneaking in and people got extremely annoyed. Angry, even; so now people are saying "I don't want to deal with this poo poo" but you just can't provide everything for free. Money has to come from somewhere because the people actually making things and maintaining the servers would like to pay their rent and eat this week, thank you very loving much. It also, top to bottom, involves programmers and programmers are not cheap to hire. There is still a ton of inertia behind the "everything should just be provided absolutely free because you should do this because you love it not for the money" idea but that's also kind of dying off; the music industry is especially seeing this. People just plain don't want to become musicians anymore because the musicians don't get paid. It can take many, many years of blood, sweat, toil, and making other people money while you live in crushing, extreme poverty before you have even the slightest chance of Making It. Other areas of the world want it to be like that from the business standpoint. HuffPo just started getting fire because they're not paying writers. Spec work is running rampant and people have been uploading copyrighted stuff to YouTube, Vimeo, and the like for as long as they've existed. Content creators are started to shift toward "no gently caress you, pay me" as it became increasingly apparent that everybody was expecting them to perform and create completely free without even offering to cover their expenses. Advertisements were a kind of, sort of answer to that but that was a house of cards from the get go. This is a fundamental problem of the internet; somebody, somewhere is probably offering whatever you want for free so why bothering to pay for it? Software and the games industry are seeing this too and trying to shift things but there's that question; why pay for a game you can just get off of a torrent? gently caress the game industry, bunch of greedy fuckers that just want to swim in pools full of Benjamins. Ignoring that Codey McCompscigrad programming the games lives in a $2,000 closet and has $50,000 of student loans to pay off. If the company he works for doesn't make any money because nobody is willing to pay for games he doesn't get a paycheck and the company folds. What the internet in general wants is something that it literally can't have. The internet wants everything for free, all the time, forever but that can't keep up. One major issue that web dev unicorns are running into is that they're all ticking time bombs. You can't offer free poo poo or poo poo below cost forever. It's impossible but that seems to be the business model a lot of the time. It becomes worse when you have fat cat investors saying "I want X% return on this investment, guaranteed." Everybody is demanding things from the tech sector that are literally impossible in the long term. Short term these things are being promised but when the piper wants paid there's an empty bag and the question of "well gently caress, now what?" It turns out that there are people willing to pay for premium, no adverts, easy to use services but then you get into issues like the utterly random content available on NetFlix and Hulu. Even if you pay sometimes you end up finding that torrents are the only place to actually get what you want. Even if you're actively trying to give people money sometimes pirating it is, in fact, the best option.
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Feb 20, 2016 11:03
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Konstantin posted:Things like YouTube Red show how far advertising has fallen as a revenue source. I'm not in the field, but offering users the chance to pay to opt out of ads seems like it would really reduce the value of your advertising. I think "people who are willing and able to pay for a premium, recurring online service" are a group that almost every advertiser wants to reach, and buying advertising that specifically excludes that group sounds like a bad idea. The problem is of course that most of the more popular channels on Youtube are being watched by people with no money, pre-teens and teens. These channels are pretty much the modern Saturday morning cartoons. YouTube Red is going to try and be the new Netflix, Hulu, HBO-GO, Amazon Prime and what not and then you gonna have to ask the question: how many subscriber services with fragmented offerings are you gonna need and which one is gonna fold first? At least music doesn't have this inertia, where content is exclusive to a channel/service, that explains why Music services are doing a lot better (even though Spotify is still bleeding money).
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Feb 20, 2016 11:23
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blowfish posted:It's peak capitalism. No historical carried-over labour relations or Way That Things Are Done, and regulation to reign in the worst excesses hes yet to come into being. Well it doesn't hurt any body and there are a ton of well paying jobs. If this is the end game of capitalism then it beats the hell out of socialism (Greece/France/Italy).
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Feb 20, 2016 17:03
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OctaviusBeaver posted:Well it doesn't hurt any body and there are a ton of well paying jobs. If this is the end game of capitalism then it beats the hell out of socialism (Greece/France/Italy). G/I are just massively corrupt, no amount of kkkapitalism could possibly fix that. France is the only proper leftist one.
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Feb 20, 2016 21:21
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The gaming industry can solve it self by keeping most of its poo poo connected to an online database of achievements, being able to play together, etc etc. Look at all of blizzards games. I highly doubt any of their games are pirated because they all have massive online features.
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Feb 20, 2016 23:01
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Feb 20, 2016 23:02
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The fall of unicorns: I can detect an intact hymen at 200 paces.
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Feb 20, 2016 23:34
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As a consumer, all I want is ONE thing that I pay for to get content. So I have Netflix and everything else can suck a duck. Netflix isn't even that good, but whatever, that's what I landed on. I have friends who have red tube, Hulu, and a bunch of other subscriptions and I am as baffled by them as they are by me. They can't believe I haven't seen whatever episode of some show and I can't believe they can afford another monthly subscription. Even software like Adobe and the Microsoft office suite are converting to monthly subscriptions and I can see how that poo poo could easily add up and kick your rear end. I already pay for cell service and Internet, Netflix, and a couple of non profits. I'm done. There really isn't any more money to milk out of me. What money I have left that doesn't go to rent or savings is spent on consumer goods, so hey, if somebody wants a cut of that I guess they could try to manipulate what I spend that money on through advertising. I just don't see how having a million different subscription services is going to be sustainable. I know cable is going out, but I can see the same sort of thing coming back where you can buy packages of content that include a bunch of poo poo you don't want just so you can watch True Blood, but oh poo poo, if I upgrade I can also watch the big game and all the Pawn Stars I can stand.
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Feb 21, 2016 00:28
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Facebook and MySpace made tons of money at one point. People like to talk to each other. Everybody uses social media these days (well, almost everybody). It's way easier to create some new social space than it is to create something that solves an actual problem. It's a bunch of people following the path of least resistance and expecting to be Zuckerberg some day. The secret is that literally everyone user-side hates internet advertising and blocks it if it is at all possible. Advertising your product via the usual internet ad methods is actually a reason for me, personally, to never do business with you because you have chosen to interfere with my daily life to shill for it. ToxicSlurpee posted:One of the issues with internet advertising that has existed as long as internet advertising is that it can become obnoxious as hell. This is why stuff like ad blockers exist; there is just this nonstop attempt to cram adverts in your face as often as possible in ways that force you to pay attention to them. Then malware started sneaking in and people got extremely annoyed. Angry, even; so now people are saying "I don't want to deal with this poo poo" but you just can't provide everything for free. Money has to come from somewhere because the people actually making things and maintaining the servers would like to pay their rent and eat this week, thank you very loving much. It also, top to bottom, involves programmers and programmers are not cheap to hire. See, for me the issue is this. I'll happily pay the content creators for the stuff I want to consume... but generally, they aren't getting much if any of what I pay them, because they are on the far end of a trickle down style set of middle men and investors with their hands out. Holyshoot posted:The gaming industry can solve it self by keeping most of its poo poo connected to an online database of achievements, being able to play together, etc etc. Look at all of blizzards games. I highly doubt any of their games are pirated because they all have massive online features. Steam's already solved the gaming industry. One stop shop for all your needs, easy portability, good distribution network, and somewhat reasonable pricing. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 01:08 on Feb 21, 2016 |
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Feb 21, 2016 01:01
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Bast Relief posted:As a consumer, all I want is ONE thing that I pay for to get content. Liquid Communism posted:The secret is that literally everyone user-side hates internet advertising and blocks it if it is at all possible. quote:Steam's already solved the gaming industry. One stop shop for all your needs, easy portability, good distribution network, and somewhat reasonable pricing. YES. So much, this, as a consumer. I don't care how awesome your idea about disrupting social media/streaming/  sounds, there exist already-good-enough and well-established options and unless you are miles better than anything on the market in every way you need to accept your business is redundant and shouldn't exist.
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Feb 21, 2016 01:34
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Yup like we have all said convenience will make people want to pay and stop being illegal. Netflix has somewhat harnessed this but not all the way nor can it. Until there is a "Netflix" for all current seasons of tv shows that isn't ad riddled like hulu or cost an arm and a leg and setup like cable I'll be sticking to  for what I can't get on netflix.
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Feb 21, 2016 02:11
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