Tupperware
Oooh. Wait.
Tupperware
Oooh. Wait.
Buying massive amounts of primetime commercial time to sell useless products by screaming their name over and over in the ad.
HEADON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO YOUR FORHEAD!
Man, those obnoxious TV advertisements can all fuck right on. It was even worse that it was a homeopathic (aka placebo effect) topical product.
But you remember it, and repeat it...
They turned their advertising into a meme before memes were a thing. I'm sure someone has purchased the product based solely on the memeness, so successful ad?
Call JG Wentworth! 877-CASH-NOW!!!
The amount of brain power I have used to memorize stupid advertising is insane... It hits me sometimes like, BOOM! Tough actin' Tinactin!
Netflix killing password sharing despite how easy piracy is. Massive increase in subscriptions
Piracy is not as nice for average people. It requires effort many won't want to put in to discover what they want (and not in a shitty quality), and then managing and accessing that which you found takes a lot of effort as well to set up in a manner as easily accessed as a Netflix app.
Most people can't/won't bother wasting their time and effort. They'll just pay for a service for the convenience. And before people interject with their anecdotes, convenience is subjective.
Honestly in my younger years I had the time to hunt around for the right streams, rips, subtitle files etc, but it does take time and effort. For the price of a few sandwiches or a handful of coffees I don't have to spend the time doing that anymore.
What's annoying is that it's not a single subscription anymore, it's 4-5 subscriptions which really adds up over the month.
Younger people don't know how to use computers...
Keep 'em dumb.
I brought an DSLR to my office which caught the attention of some of my younger peers. They complained that the screen was not working. I was like "What did you guys do in 2 min? How did you mess it up?"
Then they said "no no, the touch screen isn't working". I'm like "this isn't a touch screen device. You have to press buttons". They were mildly annoyed by that. I suspect this is the fault of iPhones and Android.
Dumb down technology as much as possible but make people dependent on your ecosystem. Don't let users repair it. Keep it closed-source. No one-time-fee. Everything should be a subscription.
I suspected Netflix to lose sub counts for two years after they enacted their 'No Account Sharing (outside the household).' policy. But it seems that they have been able to bounce back quite quickly, compared to my guess.
Buying rights to provide telecom service to an area and not actually providing service.
Wait that's a thing? In TV broadcasting?
I've heard of how Comcast Did New York state dirty many years ago. IIRC, they walked away with nearly half a billion dollars, which I believe was about 2/3 of all the money the state had given them to connect small towns and clusters of rural communities to DSL internet.>
Linktree. It's just links on a page. How do you get people to pay a monthly subscription for that?
Folks literally have no conept anymore that you can just slap HTML on a page. & with the advent of needing TLS, it starts to become more technical than a lot of folks want to bother learning & maintain versus the days of raw FTP uploads.
Yeah but a basic Wordpress.com site could do exactly the same thing for free. Or for super cheap if you want your own domain.
There’s also a jillion places to host static sites with less complexity of the code albeit more complexity to get started for many non-developers. The thing is there was a time when high schools everywhere were teaching basic HTML so you could be a part of this new internet thing, but now folks don’t think they can have their own chunk anymore separate from the corporations. You still can but the knowledge seems lost & certain technically hurdles like TLS which I mentioned make it just one step more difficult.
Yeah I learnt static HTML and CSS circa 2007, but even then it felt like what we were being taught was very out of date.
I've never actually used any form of hosting for my own pages. I've run the LAMP stack on my own local server, and I've used services similar to WordPress, but never dealt with static web sites hosted by someone else. Do they not make TLS really easy for you in that circumstance?
Many of these will handle the TLS for you, but that supposes you need a specific service. Then & even now you can still host your own website / services at home without any specialized gear (I do). If IPv6 were more common, it would be even easier.
even now you can still host your own website / services at home without any specialized gear
Yes, as I said, that's the only thing I've done myself—in particular, at times I've run it off of my main desktop, and at other times on a Raspberry Pi with an external hard drive attached—but that's specifically not what I was asking about because the previous comment was specifically talking about non-developers who might have that basic HTML understanding and just want a server where they can throw up an HTML file and have it served up. A goal that's more technically involved than a wordpress.com site, but less involved than self-hosting a LAMP stack and running the Let's Encrypt certbot.
(Plus, of course, the growing prevalence of cgNAT making self-hosting impossible for many people necessitates the use of a hosting company or user-friendly web service.)
Self-hosting & other content producing has been pushed against for ages. Look at the cost to get symmetric internet speeds in many places like it is somehow more expensive to upload the bits. I am pretty sure this is a part of a conspiracy to make sure everyone is a consumer for more $$$ & not expressing their own ideas except on platforms they don’t control.
Most people wouldn't have the slightest idea how to use Wordpress, nor even what a domain is, let alone how to do anything with one.
I'm not talking about WordPress.org, but WordPress.com. The basic blogging service. It's all WYSIWYG.
Getting people to pay for digital media in the era of mass piracy (Spotify, Deezer, Netflix)
Starting a taxi company by ~~ignoring~~ frauding all the regulation related to taxi operation, ( Uber)
Tons of pseudo science like energy therapy which are not much different from straight up witchcraft.
A thought also for real estate developer who buy land in high-flood-risk area, and still manage to sell the houses, these ones also should be in jail
The first one is pretty much down to, as Gabe Newell puts it, "piracy is a service problem". Spotify came along and (initially) provided a much better service compared to pirating your music at the time. Once they created the market segment, competitors started their own streaming subscriptions. I'd also say the Google music "upload 50,000 tracks for free" got a lot of former pirates to jump.
Now the services are going through the same enshittification that most popular online services seem to be going through, we can see piracy increasing again. Someone will notice and fill the gap in providing a good service again at some point and the pendulum will swing once more
With Uber, they started with ride sharing and slowly nudged its way towards being a car-for-hire business. The reason it worked was because no one really liked taxis and didn't want to defend that monopoly.
Today, cities are trying to regulate places like Airbnb to reduce their presence in major cities, but the only real hate towards Uber and Lyft has more to deal with employee pay.
The difference is that Uber's model of using an app to show you the route, give driver feedback, be able to report problems and monitor and track the driver, etc. is actually a huge improvement to both rider safety and experience compared to calling a cab company and then waiting who knows how long for someone to show up and hopefully bring you where you want to go.
Not saying that their model of gig workers, or dodging up front training is good, but they legitimately offered up a fundamentally better taxi experience than anything that came before, which I think encouraged regulators to really drag their feet on looking into them.
Starting a taxi company by ignoring frauding all the regulation related to taxi operation, ( Uber)
TBF people also enjoyed parts of it that aren't regulation related, such as upfront cost calculation. Scamming customers is harder and even in those events, it's possible to get refunds.
Yeah even in countries where Uber only works with normal taxi drivers, it's still much better than getting a cab from the street. It may have started with fraud but these apps actually provide a needed service.
Running a conservative podcast that was more than 90% funded by RT while proclaiming a deep patriotism.
All the ones where the idea was to "just start something, grow grow grow, then figure out monetization later" is wild to me.
E.g. reddit. It worked. CEO is rich, site is still online. Somehow they got investors probably, presumably.
I get not having profit. I get not having income, if it's in some prototype phase. But having no plan or idea whatsoever for how to monetize and still getting VC? Wild.
I get not having profit. I get not having income, if it’s in some prototype phase. But having no plan or idea whatsoever for how to monetize and still getting VC? Wild.
It's called "growth-first" or "growth-at-all-costs" strategy. I don't recall what video I was watching when I learned it, but it's a dying strategy for business now (IIRC). It had its rise in popularity in the late 2000s to about 2018. Think Netflix, WeWork, Uber, etc. These are huge businesses to prop up, so they (literally) bank on the idea that with a huge user base, they can sooner or later, make a profit to make it worth all of the risk.
Someone once made a mountain of cash selling pet rocks.
I have an official USB pet rock I got from a thinkgeek back in the day. Has a little box with air holes and everything.
Exactly as functional as the original pet rock, but has a short USB cable attached.
Taking off the pedals and training wheels of bikes and selling them to kids.
Wish I thought of that
Fwiw these days balance bikes are considered better than training wheels for people learning to ride. Training wheels are ok if you actually need to go somewhere accompanied by an adult on a bike, but they’re terrible for learning. They don’t teach you how to steer or balance properly; a balance bike does. In fact, training wheels can teach bad habits that are difficult to unlearn.
For real. I've seen kids years younger than when I started pedaling scurrying around on these, and it instantly clicked why it's a much better way to learn to stay upright on two wheels.
I wish my first bike had been something like that. Training wheels stop a bike from leaning into turns, so they don't teach you anything about what it is like to ride without them.
When I was learning to ride, my dad bent mt training wheels up so the bike would still turn and the wheels would only touch if you started to fall over a fair way.
Strider wasn't the first to come up with balance bikes for kids specifically, they have been around for decades and balance bikes themselves, for a few hundred years.
The original SMS version of Twitter.
Later, the name hashtags, in American English this symbol #️⃣ was ~~always~~ best known as the pound key. It was also known as an Octothorpe.
Actually I still don't understand why anyone wants to use Twitter.
Roblox. If you were there in the beginning then you know how empty it was. Now, that’s mostly what my son plays to what just make the most money/things? I don’t get it myself (I’m old, lol).
They knew what they were doing. They knew that Minecraft needed a strong competitor in the video game market, and bet big on the 'long game.'
Noticing that you are a parent of a person who plays Roblox, I feel obligated to share two investigative videos about Roblox Corporation practices or lack thereof, the exploitive practices they have to paying third-party in-game content "developers" (that are often kids/tweens/teens), and the issues Roblox have had with pedophiles/adults grooming young people/kidnappings.
The following videos are from People Make Games on Youtube.
Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers
Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper.
[Just so we are clear, I am not telling you how to parent your son or person. I am just informing you to the best of my ability, about the issues that have arisen on and off Roblox.]
The software company I work for is killing all legacy on-prem software in 2025 and replacing it with a modular AWS based system of single-page websites. Many customers are old-school and hesitant about anything cloud-related, but it worked out beautifully so far. The shutdown hasn't happened yet tho, so we'll see how many lawsuits roll in when it does lol
Hey, as the saying goes, nobody was ever fired for running up an astronomical AWS bill.
I’ve seen the exact opposite happen a couple of times: “How the fuck did you not realise you were spending 70 grand in a month?!”
Food delivery.
I never imagined a delivery service for restaurants with drive-thru would take off .
It's kinda good for people who don't have the time or the means to go pick up food, but don't mind paying almost twice as much for lukewarm soggy food
Making a social network where people can send pictures to each other, then selling it to a big corporation for billions.
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