Forbes Marketplace: The Parasite SEO Company Trying to Devour Its Host

Sending sqlite databases to the users which they can interact with using both sql and a viewer is where it's at.

We are not front-end people, so the app is built with the expectation that people will be doing their filtering, searching and using the intelligence we provide, but in their home turf (excel).

Our app also lets users "track" certain events, and we do not use push notifications, rather we respect our user's attention and email them a short summary, and link to a csv that they can use!

After the digital switchover, there was now a set-top box, and electronic program guide and three-figure channel numbers thrown into the mix, as well as stateful aspect such as whether the TV was set to AV or still trying to use its now-obsolete tuner.

For someone with poor eyesight, limited feeling in his fingers and limited ability (and admittedly willingness, too) to build a mental model of how the menus worked and how they can be navigated, it spelled the end of his unsupervised access to TV.

The big difference for me between database-query-driven and algorithmically-driven is that the latter makes it very hard to know when you've completed an exhaustive search. Indeed for the likes of meta and tiktok that's a feature, not a bug, since their goal is to keep you engaged and plugged into "their" content forever.

A lot of change is for the better, but quite a lot is a regression.

Look at defunct sites like Nextag that were moderately useful in the space-- they had free and paid placements. They were steadily growing search visibility until Google started pushing their own product (Froogle, free product listings in 2014ish) and Nextag suddenly "violated Google's policies" and lost 90%+ of their traffic rather quickly (probably 1MM daily visits to under 10k basically overnight). Google shopping technically offers "free product listing placement", hidden well below the ads-- likely as a defense to anti-trust on monopolization of that specific space.

Brickseek and CamelCamelCamel are the two most successful/long lived tools in the space-- and they grew their visibility from the now defunct but once huge deal site FatWallet and SlickDeals. Walled garden subreddits frequently disallow posting of specific tools, so it makes organic growth super challenging-- given that pretty much all commercial queries start with Google or Amazon.

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111077882869934997

(freakin’ at night!) I bought this ring flash

https://godox.com/product-d/MF-R76.html

which requires manual metering to save more than $100 off one which has TTL metering as I am using it for studio work where I am going to set it up once and take 20 shots.

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-water-bottle...

This will lead to you getting a product that’s good enough, but there may be a superior quality/value option that you don’t know about

Friendship requires regular contact anyway. We don't need somebody to intermediate that.

1. Colloquial use of "lemon" differs from the legal definition. In the given example, this might include a 15yr old vehicle (far outside any normal "manufacturer's" warranty) with numerous defects both known to the dealer and lied about to the consumer. The dealer would likely lose any civil complaint, but in Texas, and most states, this doesn't count as a "lemon." You're protected, if at all, by the fact that the salesperson warranted a thing, and perhaps any actual written "warranty" (really insurance, not that it necessarily matters) the dealer might have sold you. You usually waive the warrant of merchantability, so the fact that the car is a dud isn't enough by itself for you to have any damages (all state-specific, consult a lawyer in your jurisdiction).

2. Picking on Texas, since you brought it up, if you only bring the car in 3 times for a major defect covered under the lemon law, it's not a lemon yet. If the dealer refuses to deal with you on the 3rd instance then you'll have to sue with some other justification.

3. In the vast majority of states, you don't have an automated (minus filing fees) hearing process pertaining to lemons. Even in those which do, you're much more likely to succeed with the help of an attorney. In either case, in most states, attorney's fees are not part of the damages you can claim, and when squabbling about a $5k used car it can easily cost more in attorney fees (plus incidentals like renting a car and missing work for the actual hearings -- usually not covered even in states granting damages for incidentals (including rentals and missing work in other contexts) arising from the lemon), often making it not even worth pursuing.

...

Usually, even with moderate legal protections, you don't want to enter into an agreement where you expect to have to rely on those protections. Your best-case scenario is that you waste a bunch of time and still have only as many resources as you started with. You'll usually do even worse. Why take a losing gamble?

https://www.londonstockexchange.com/stock/DOCS/dr-martens-pl... https://www.barrons.com/market-data/stocks/docmf

This is of course a massively opinionated subject about price/quality so no one will ever agree but there are plenty brands north of $1000 now that probably are around as big market as doc martin was in the 80s. I'd consider that to be the more accurate comparison.

This isn't well established as the cause and there is reason to expect that it isn't. To start with, the Housing Theory of Everything fits better.

If this was about management practices then in competitive markets things would still be fine, you would only need one company to not do that and everybody would buy from them. But things still kind of suck even there, so what's that about? Housing costs would explain it. People spend more money on rent so they have less money to spend on other things, meanwhile companies have to pay higher rents too, so their customers have less money and simultaneously their business has higher costs. Somehow they have to lower prices while covering higher costs and the somehow is by enshitifying their products, i.e. that is the symptom rather than the cause.

But the Housing Theory of Everything is slightly off, because the real problem is a generalization of the theory. Housing is expensive because supply is artificially constrained, and it's artificial supply constraints -- insufficiently competitive markets -- that are the general underlying cause. Housing is a major example of this, probably the largest and most important, both because it's such a large proportion of personal expenses and because the restrictive zoning that imposes the constraint is so widespread.

But it's the same problem when you need a medical imaging scan and there are Certificate of Need laws that expressly prohibit new competitors from providing the service when the incumbents are charging inflated prices, and then those high costs get incorporated into health insurance premiums and Medicare taxes and reduce real wages by increasing the cost of living.

Regulatory capture has to be undone or it will be our undoing.

You can find smaller brands that have been doing high quality stuff for a while, and they're unlikely to blow up in popularity or to reduce quality.

Docs are not my style so I don't know a good small brand that does boots like that, but I like Buttero, Crown Northhampton and John Elliott for boots/shoes. Beckett Simonon is a good brand for more formal shoes. Morjas is another brand for more formal shoes that looks really good, though I haven't bought anything from them yet.

For example, I like to wear $30 Costco shoes. I can usually get at least a year out of them, but even if not, they’re only $30. I can buy 3 in a year and come out ahead. And I don’t waste time researching shoes.

Both Google and Apple. If you go to the App Store all games are ad ridden to the point where you can't play more than a minute without interruption or constant nagging to buy. Where are the apps where you pay a sum agreed from the start and use the damn app without restrictions? Some games will even trick people into buying $20/week subscriptions. I can only trust Apple Arcade for my kid. What a wasteland, probably no more than 1000 decent apps in millions. And they have the nerve to pretend App Store is some curated collection of software we can trust. It's no better than "shareware" before 2000's.

Chrome is amazingly well engineered and the Chromium team seems to have avoided the worst shittification. Having watched other products dive into the cesspit of advertising I'm not quite sure how the team does it. Somehow Chrome seems to add useful features (while being hated for that). Maybe I'm the fool in the room.

And the code is open source. A gift to humanity yet so strongly hated. So open source that most of the competition uses it! There's some magic going on somehow.

I just don't understand how anyone that calls themselves an engineer could hate Chrome that much. Firefox doesn't feel well engineered, and Mozilla has a strong taint of scuzzy executive vampires. Safari has its good points but when I was developing for it, it consistently had major flaws. Safari certainly has some amazing engineering. But Chromium mostly has better engineering from what I could tell as a JavaScript developer.

Engineers are just as vulnerable to branding and anti-branding as everyone else.

Microsoft, Google, Apple. Try to order them by evilness.

The key thing is the luck to get shown such ads... about 95% IME are utter garbage, and Google should go and not just mandate that game ads show actual gameplay but also that what the ads show must be the main part in the game, not just some irrelevant side quest.

The aforementioned companies in the parent comment have partnerships with Marketplace to replicate the Forbes model. I didn’t mean to imply everyone who does this thing is using Marketplace.