You appear to have eaten an Onion OP.

The Civilian is a satire site.

Social/Mobile games. So an already predatory industry. Let’s get people addicted to a game, and then suck as much money from them as possible.

In the industry, we definitely weren’t the only ones doing it. And really we were only doing basic stuff (it was all in house developed middleware, so effort vs reward didn’t make much sense to go hard) I wouldn’t be surprised if others were going deep.

• the hardest part is getting someone to part with their money. But once they’ve done it once, even for the smallest amount, the second purchase will be easier.
• conversions that stopped playing got emails with discounts.
• whales got freebies when they lost to keep them happy.
• everything else was just finding the customers perfect price.
• ultimately we were selling noting. So any sale is better than no sale. You can’t make a loss on a number in a database.

Everything was broken down into campaigns (we’d have multiple running at any one time) targeting different segments. Then we’d track the conversion, sale, and retention numbers of those campaigns against each other. Sometimes one campaign might flop for one segment but not another, so we’d retarget with a new one.

I don’t think it’s used much in other markets. I know Twilio has Segment, that could be used to do segmented pricing but I’ve never really seen it done in other industries.

I wouldn’t say it’s jaded me. It has made me conscious of my data footprint. I don’t play mobile or f2p games. But I am weary. The COVID greed-flation showed the mindset of businesses. It might not be long until targeted pricing becomes worthwhile to make number go up (still), and hidden under the guise of “lowering prices”.

You don’t need a monopoly for this to be a problem.

Databrokers can offer data sets of “customer price elasticity”. Tables of “how much we think X would spend on these generic item categories”. Eg “booly would pay $15 for a burger, vs $10 average”

Point of Sale systems could start offering integrations to these data sets.

All shops have to do now is set a list price, a minimum price, a category, and leave it up to the PoS to (not) give discounts.

You want a burger, you’re fed a single-use short lived discount “$5 off a $20 burger. Today only” While someone else gets “buy one get one free”.

It’s then a ‘fair’ market. Shops have and ‘compete’ with their (high) list prices, data brokers compete with “excess profit” statistics (ie, how much more money above the minimum price they made). Nobody is colluding, they’re just basing discounts off external arbitrary signals.

It slowly becomes the norm to get just-in-time discounts, and the consumer gets shafted. If you’re not in the system, you’re paying more than everyone else.

(And all of this has been happening in some markets for over a decade)

In a past life I wrote the software that did this.

It’s not just about charging more when you’re desperate. It’s also things like charging you less to keep you addicted, or getting you hooked. Exploiting your emotions and behaviour to make it effective. A small loss on you now could be a long time gain for them.

Some more scenarios:

• you’ve decided to quit alcohol. Your social media accounts are used to identify you’re looking for advice. They advertise more, and send you heavy, heavy discounts a few days in to keep you on the wagon.
• Your cars insurance tracker has picked up your erratic driving. Your phone has tracked more forceful interactions, your works email provider has revealed you’ve been in a minimum of three meetings all day; You’re having a shit, stressful, day. They can’t give you discounts on your cigarettes but they do know they can get you to buy two packs instead of one by serving you ads that suggest stock levels are low. You buy two and chain smoke all day, your daily average goes from 0.5 to 0.7 packs a day.
• You go to a chain restaurant often. They know they can get you to buy more in the long run if they increase the volume you eat gradually. Every visit they goad you into buying more. Didn’t do it last time? Steeper discounts next time. Until one day you buy the extra side. That’s now your new baseline. A few weeks of that and back onto the stair climb. A little by little. You’re spending more and more.
• you’re on holiday. everyone knows you’re not coming back anytime soon so they charge full price. But move to a new city? Everyone has discounts for you to get you in the door.

The data available back then was pretty minimal, effectively only the data we generated. But it was still enough to prey on your lizard brain. With data brokerage I’ve got no idea what level of evils we could have done.

Imo, the term “buy” for all goods should pass some sort of litmus test. Eg:

does the product being sold have the same properties as a brick?

• can the product be resold privately?
• can the product be lent to another user temporarily?
• would the product still perform its function when the manufacturer stops supporting it?
• would the product still perform its function if the manufacturer ceased to exist.

if the product does not pass all these tests, the customer is not buying. Consider using terms such as ‘rent’ or ‘lease’ or ‘subscription’

Explain what you want. It’s that easy.

I did many years of “I want something simple that I can maintain easily, and will still look ok when I drag my ass out of bed at 10am, an hour late for work. Anything but a buzz cut”

Eventually I found something that I can touch up at home myself, and can explain to even the shittiest of barbers.

It’s hair. Nobody really gives a shit. You’ll get some shit ones, some good ones, a buzz cut you explicitly didn’t want. Nobody got hurt, and it grows back.

If 2000 out of 5,000,000,000 images can be found, why couldn’t they be found before the dataset was published.

Why would it result in zero women playing? I’m not suggesting you merge the women’s teams with the open team.

But have it so your women’s teams performance counts just as much as the men’s.

Two teams (men’s and women’s), each playing against their own gender, scoring points in one league.

No point paying your dudes millions per season to get the best players if your women’s team sucks and loses every game.

Get teams and fans an incentive to invest and in both genders by playing for the same trophy.

Why does nobody watch the women’s leagues? Is it because nobody else does? can’t have all the social aspects of sports if nobody else is doing it.

Imo, they need to stop the segregation. Ditch the women’s leagues, but keep the games and teams. Have both teams play in one league, and contribute to the overall score of the team.

It’ll add new strategy to the seasons. Spend all of your budget on the dudes and hope they keep winning despite the ladies; build a strong women’s team to carry your b-tier men’s team; or something in between.

Because that’s the way the legal system works.

“Oops, had some harmful/illegal content on there? Nobody was /really/ hurt, or at least, we weren’t directly causing harm. I’ll take it down and eat a small fine.

Vs

“Oh I’m sorry, I’ll take down the 30s clip of your 90s movie. it has caused you 3million in damages? I’m so sorry, here’s some tools that will automate detection and removal of your property. I’m so sorry”

Is there any evidence of it? The Wikipedia page says “which may include unclothed or partially clothed photos” but doesn’t necessarily mean there is any.

Take what HR says with a grain of salt.

If they’re gaming H1B, They’re not gonna say “yeah we’re faking it to get cheap indentured immigrants to work for us”.

And now everywhere we have cell towers sticking out of the ground with little consideration for where it is.

I just want to go ride my motorcycle, and not have to fit shit around everyone else’s shit and the mountain of jobs that need doing around the house (ie, never)

Recently discovered Moscow Death Brigade in the last 2 months and became a top 0.5% listener in that time.

It has absolutely ruined my Wrapped.

You guys are getting cubicles? Living the dream.

They added it to baby formula too in 2008.

Melamine, what won’t kill?

There’s no way to sync contacts and calendars between an iPhone (and other mail clients) and protonmail. The app does one way sync from the phone to protonmail, but not the other way round.

8 years ago a feature request was made to add support for CardDAV and CalDAV, but even with the release of bridge it’s not there.

So iOS users have to resort to using other calendar services, or 3rd party bridges to enable it.

I’ll use it once they’ve sorted out CalDAV and CardDAV… it’s only been an open issue for eight fucking years.

Exactly. The AIs job is to generate humanness. The things that don’t look human get discarded, the things that have strong human indicators get kept. Oh look, the AI did its job. Shocked pikachu.

The white thing is probably just a case of biased training data. Which is going to be a problem across all AIs. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 5-10 years (if the fad lasts longer than NFTs lmao) we find out the ‘AIs’ have all been fed biased data as yet another means of large corporations controlling the narrative of the population.