It's been 10 years since I lived in Argentina, but at that point having a credit card (not a debit card) was still reserved mostly for the folks in Barrio Norte. Has that changed now, or is it still mostly debit?
I did something similar a few months, launched it on HN, no traction. It's really difficult. No one wants to host their blog / posts on a platform that will dissapear when the owner gets bored or can't maintain it anymore.
Added this to other comments: old web had ads (iframes, banners, popups!), and also was completely self-hosted, which gave you more freedom than any other cloud platform. If you want to resurect old web, just give a free hosting with FTP.
> If you want to resurect old web, just give a free hosting with FTP.
Also know as: How to get a visit from the FBI or a state agency equivalent once someone discovers you're a viable conduit of unsavory content.
The old web is dead, it will never come back because it relied on ignorance, naivety, charity, and good faith. Those are mostly all gone. You can still stand up one of these hosts and pages for yourself but you must still be incredibly vigilant because automated attacks on your host will be happening non-stop. Jumping into hosting for others is no longer a hobby and it never will be again.
Even on the old web, most people hosted their sites on a service like Geocities or on their ISP's servers, school, etc. Very few people actually self-hosted.
I think the "old web" is also heavily nostalgia-infested, it wasn't nearly as good as most people here remember.
Blatantly false information? Internet Explorer required for everything? Adobe Flash and Java all over the place? Websites that frequently actually could hack your computer? Geocities and AOL being the meeting places, reincarnated as Discord? Terribly slow, low-resolution imagery that our brains filled in the details for? The worst font and font color choices known to man? Shock content being absolutely rampant? Constant pop-ups? Every company wanting a toolbar?
That's what I remember. It's the same phenomenon where people think their Nintendo 64 or PlayStation 2 was a masterpiece never paralleled, revisit it in 2025, and realize: "wow... this... sucks actually." It's the same phenomenon where people think cars were better in the 80s, but they sit in an 80s car, and realize we've come a long, long way.
There are amazing retro games that are still awesome to play to this day. To say they all suck, and it's just nostalgia is not true at all.
Sure, a lot of them suck, especially on Nintendo 64, because of the 3d transition, but from the NES onward there are timeless classics.
My kid beat super Metroid several times, he decided to play it on his own on his switch, and he loved it. He plays the old pokemon games too. In other words, that's a terrible analogy.
You're choosing the top 10 games on the Nintendo 64 and NES to make your analogy; out of the thousands and thousands of games produced for those systems. Give your kid game #50 (Waialae Country Club: True Golf Classics on N64) and see if she would prefer it over literally any modern game that ranks on Steam. My analogy holds.
Why would you compare "any modern game that ranks on Steam" with random games from the era?
You said
> It's the same phenomenon where people think their Nintendo 64 or PlayStation 2 was a masterpiece never paralleled, revisit it in 2025, and realize: "wow... this... sucks actually."
I actually tried re-playing PS games I remember enjoying, and I still enjoy them.
I see what you mean about the fact that people look at old stuff with rose-tinted glasses, but really some things did age well (including parts of the early web).
Any reason why when I upload a set of books to NotebookLM and have an interesting conversation about them with NotebookLM, the conversation is not stored? I can't revisit it later, I can't continue from there. I don't understand why they changed the UX/UI from the other AI solutions (Gemini or GPT).
I also don't get why NotebookLM refuses to write things either, I can't make it write an essay based on the information I fed through PDFs or other files.
Somewhat related, I also find it bizarre that they all but prevent you from getting information out of the app. Export to/Open in Google Docs seems like a no-brainer, but copy-paste is the only option.
I love going to concerts and love going to sport events. Ticketmaster is awful, but most of the ticketing platforms are. I always talked with fellow friends how we would love to start a new startup for this, for selling tickets, a fair one, etc. But of course people in the industry wouldn't want it. Really a shame, because it would be one of those cases where I'd be working on somethign that excites me so I would give it all.
Selling tickets is a really tough really low margin business with a ton of gatekeepers and risk.
First up you need to convince promoters to give you the tickets. Not artists. When an artist signs a deal with a promoter the promoter owns the tickets and can pretty much do what they want.
Problem is, a lot of good promoters in the US particularly are owned by Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster.
That’s fine though - just work with promoters who aren’t owned by Live Nation! Only problem is the venues those promoters are hiring are owned by Live Nation.
Also, a bunch of artist management companies are owned by Live Nation too.
So if you want to sell tickets for shows in non-Live Nation affiliated venues for non-Live Nation affiliated artists that’s fine.
But those are going to be small shows with relatively unknown artists. The risk increases in inverse proportion to the size of the show and profile of the artist. The promoter you’re dealing with is going to want cash up front, so as the ticketing company you’re going to have to loan them the money. If they run or the show flops or whatever else you are left holding the can.
And because you’re tiny and dealing with unknown shows you’re never going to get allocation for big name shows, so you’re not going to be able to build a valuable list of consumers that you can cross sell shows to.
And for the shows you’re selling you’re going to be left with remnant inventory and so you need someone with good lists who can shift that for you. So you’ll probably end up giving Ticketmaster 30-40% of your allocation from the promoters you are working with.
eTix is good. The quoted price for a show was $20. I wound up paying $21.65 after fees. The fees were obvious at checkout. I didn't have to sign up for anything or download an app, either (which I don't like about Dice, but they are similarly good otherwise).
The problem is mostly vertical integration & abusing a monopoly over venues of a certain size. I understand I live in a place where there are more independent venues than other places and I'm glad I happen to be into the acts that play them...
This startup already exists and is called Ticket Tailor. Although they have their faults, I think it will be very difficult for you to compete with them in that niche.
Crime fiction is not just alive and well, it's at the top of bestseller. Robert Galbraith's new book (The Hallmarked Man) was #1 in the bset seller list, with almost 50k copies sold (one of the most sold books of the year). And it's #8 in the Cormoran Strike series.
If it was trash, I doubt that it would still be a best-seller on its book #8 on the series, twelve years in.
Furthermore, given what's surrounding its author, there's a non-negligible part of the readers community that won't read it, just because of its author.
And it can be seen as _risky_ to read anything she publishes.
During a party, someone decided to stop talking to me once I told I was currently reading a book in the series (we were discussing our current reading, so I wasn't trying to do anything smart here).
On the other hand, I doubt there's people still buying her books just to _own the libs_.
Sure, it helped launching the series, but if there's still thousands people reading it after more than a decade, maybe it's because those people like it. Maybe.
1) In the grand scheme of world literature, JKR’s books are comparative trash. It’s also well-established that the first book was not successful until the real identity of the author was shared.
2) Harry Potter (and all of the related activity) is still hugely popular, despite JKR’s unpleasant views and behaviour related to trans people. Most people in the world aren’t locked into the online zeitgeist.
I want to create something that every X hours (could be 6 hours, 8 hours, 12 hours) check if there are news about a certain topic, and if there are and are interesting enough, generate an image, a text, and post it to Instagram.
The second part is done (generating it and posting it), but finding the news is the hardest part, even if I share some RSS feed. Would this help me with my use case or is something completely different?
This is great, and exactly the type of thing we would love folks to build on Rowboat!
Rowboat has tools to search the web, find HN posts, browse Reddit etc, and you can ask the copilot to build an agent to filter posts based on topics - at the granularity that you want. We have time based triggers, so you can have the agent invoked every x hours.
I tried using your cloud solution to test this and I couldnt pass the connect to Instagram through Composio. I got a 400 error. I checked Reddit and it never worked. Got tired after trying for a while :(
If the final Claude goal is to remove human from the process (IA can do everything), what's the point of having these files? If they are going to be feed again to a model to interpret them, wouldn't be better to use something simpler/easier to parse?
