Responding to someone actively expressing interest in your product by offering them a demo definitely doesn't qualify as "turning it into a greasy sales pitch". They've clearly built the product to be a low touch experience so offering to run through it with someone is actually very pro-active of them.
> Responding to someone actively expressing interest in your product by offering them a demo definitely doesn't qualify as "turning it into a greasy sales pitch"
Direct contact introduces social pressure into what was previously a hands off window-shopping/product evaluation experience. If a person is expressly looking for a sales contact for 1-to-1 demos (e.g. after filling out a contact form), then that may be ok, but outside of that it certainly comes across pretty greasy.
The original comment was product & marketing feedback in general (suggestion to improve onboarding for all visitors), not a direct request for info solely for themselves. Replying with an offer of solving for them individually isn't in line with the intent of the original comment: it comes across as ignoring product feedback.
Fair enough the second reply stated the 1-to-1 demo would be quicker than creating a video, but the first reply gave no indication they'd take on board the video suggestion at all.
> They've clearly built the product to be a low touch experience
What makes you say that? If it was as clearly low touch as you say this thread would not exist.
There is a lot of watermarked content that you can't buy as a digital file, content on redbubble comes to mind for example (stickers. clothing designs, &c.), harvest watermarked art, clean it up, put it for sale somewhere else.
I don't think this tool targets well intentioned law abiding, copyright respecting people
I’m not sure I understand what you mean… isn’t harvesting watermarked art from redbubble and selling it somewhere else illegal under copyright law, if you don’t own the product or the image? Did I misunderstand your suggestion? How and when is taking a watermark off something you didn’t create well intentioned and law abiding?
It is a much different problem to pay for a license for every single image you have scraped from an arbitrary variety of sources and watermarks than to pay for software that removes any watermark.
Seems like a post-scarcity race to the bottom. The question is whether we can encumber post-scarce resources with IP in a meaningful way for much longer.
Same with my dentist that I started going to 2 years ago. I live in a differtnt country now and literally book appointments 3 months in advance with them just so I don't have a bad experience with someone else.
Saying a river of whiskey sounds interesting but it was more likely that they drank pure alcohol or it was simply contaminated from the journey through the city.
On the off chance that you're staying for more than a few days I'd recommend dropping into a Salt or Sunrise store and buying a pre-pay e-sim. They're reasonably priced and should give you 5g everywhere you go.
In the UK you have the advantage of easy access to 3 phase electricity, most houses can simply pull 2 more wires from the mains and have it. Whereas in the likes of Ireland you need a special setup and massive extra cost to get 3 phase.
Having a 22kw charger at home is amazing especially for only £1300!
Hmm, fair enough, maybe it's only in large towns and cities. The pricing you got seems a bit suspect in that case because you would need 3 phase to run a 22kw charger and if you don't have easy access to 3 phase then the cost would be quite a bit higher as new wires would need to be added.
The charger alone would cost around 1000 (if not slightly more) so I can't imagine them doing the amount of required work for 300 pounds.
It's actually usually the other way around. In a rural location you are much more likely to have access to a 3-phase supply. Farms for example almost always have a 3 phase supply for running pumps, motors and heaters etc.
Yes we do. Well, theoretically anyway - you know those electricity poles with 4 cables above each other? That's 3 phase. Usually each house just gets one phase but I guess theoretically having 3 phase would just be a matter of connecting up the other wires too.
I'd be surprised if you could actually convince suppliers to do that for a house though, and definitely not for £1300.
This is the same the world over. Power is generated and distributed as 3 phase because it is better for the generators and it makes better use of the power cable since you don't require a neutral for a balanced 3 phase load.
I have found straight up bidding to be a much slower process. You don't have to immediately respond, if an estate agent is applying pressure you should just ignore them and respond with your bid when you're ready.
On the other side if the sellers aren't happy with the highest bid they can just keep waiting for more people to turn up.
I don't have kids yet but it is something that has been discussed about my nieces and nephews. As you say, you don't want your kids to become social pariahs but you also don't want to give them smart phones, in this day and age it looks like the two are intrinsically linked, which is disappointing.
I would like to say that we can teach kids to have a healthy relationship with the internet and social media but sites like TicTok are engineered to be as addictive as possible so that would be naïve of me to say.
In saying that, if you outright ban these sites in your house it just means that when it comes time for your kids to be more independent they could possibly have no knowledge of how to healthily use social media and then be worse off than if they had access early.
There is no easy answer here, at the end of the day it will be their decision, all you can do is teach them to navigate the digital world and then be there to help when they make mistakes.
I used to lead policy on digital school education for an important organization advising governments on education policy. This was my driving concern: to fight against all the old grumpy people that don't understand and absolutely fear the digital world and think that all would be well if we ban 0s and 1s from school and force kids to go into the woods (not at all exaggerating on the latter part). There were also others that think all problems are solved when you just get everyone to learn coding, which is a starting point but nearly equally wrong and naive as you need societal context and other understanding to make sense of the digital.
It is a basic but at system level not obvious insight that you cannot ignore reality in how you educate your or anyone else's children. It is easy to be careful and conservative but for education to be useful you have to teach them about difficult topics early and thoroughly and both the substance and the methodology have to actually fit the reality these children can and do encounter every day and WILL eventually encounter once they leave the protected environment of school and parents.
You simply cannot teach a child to be a mature, employable, self-confident, independent, informed and sensible adult without the tools of the normal world. By all means, keep them away from tech completely and there are exactly two scenarios: 1) they sneak their way into getting access 2) they fall into an adult life they are not prepared for and will suffer for it.
You, as a parent or educator, mist face reality and discomfort yourself and engage with the world your children encounter. Teach them understanding and insight, not shame or fear.
Well put, I agree with you and I'm happy to hear someone with a more informed opinion was giving input at a level that mattered.
As with most things in life, too far to either extreme and you will have problems. How can we expect our kids to cope if we ourselves are totally addicted ourselves or totally isolated from it all.
It's interesting, of all the points being made in this thread, "making kids be more resilient with (and even enjoying) time alone" feels like an area of opportunity that hasn't been mentioned, not something to shut down and banish.
My circumstances were a little unusual (only child with physical disabilities) but not once did I feel like a social pariah what with books, games, books again, one or two loyal friends, pets, exploring the accessible parts of the backyard and digging up insects ...
There's a happy middle as far as giving into Big Tech vs not, basically.
I think the lack of real social interaction is the problem right now, not lack of alone time. These are kids who essentially spent a year and a half by themselves..
ah yes the whole "Coca Cola corp. says you can't just ban your kids from drinking and eating sugar !!! then when they turn 18 they'll fall off the wagon and eat nothing but sugar ! better to have them eat it throughout their childhood so they KNOW how to avoid it"
do you people ever try to have an independent thought outside of the propaganda of big business ? what kind of nonsense of this, that children should be expected to compete for their attention span against literal city sized teams working to maximize the size of their algorithm
Seems to be the same for alcahol, staying up late, being self motivated for studying, and just about anything else.
If you don't introduce something to your children and give examples of how to use it safely as an authoritative parent, then who will? Of course it can be safer to avoid some things, so I see TFA's point, but it seems extreme to avoid the whole ecosystem completely.
It's kinda of funny but it was also my exact experience, I started buying sugary drinks like there was no tomorrow as soon as I had the freedom to do so, and was no longer living at my mothers's place. Put on quite a bit of weight and damaged health quite a bit in the process. This might not have happened if there was more of a conversation about healthy habits and limiting oneself. Maybe not.
The key reason I'm okay with no-soda households is that there's few if any social contexts where you're expected to have a soda. You mention eating sugar, but I think banning that really would risk falling off the wagon - you're not gonna keep your kid from noticing that ice cream is tasty for 18 years.
Your argument is about as well formed as your sentences. I can only assume you're a troll account given how new your account is and that you clearly didn't read the comment you're replying to.
>I would like to say that we can teach kids to have a healthy relationship with the internet and social media but sites like TicTok are engineered to be as addictive as possible so that would be naïve of me to say.
I don't think so. Don't underestimate the intelligence of kids. If your kid actually understands the way dopamine works (on a sufficient level), they will cultivate their own way of attention-management. That's perfectly doable, kids just soak up knowledge. They have to learn it anyway, so the later you start, the worse the consequences of both social isolation and bad usage-culture will be.
/edit:
to add to my original point, when your kids decide for themselves that they want something, and they feel that you are unfairly restricting their access to it, the consequence will be that they demonize you. Where that leads, for them, for their relationship with you, for the other points you're trying to get across, is never a good place. Be very careful about it.
Why do you think children will be more successful at outwitting nefarious companies' behavioural scientists than adults are? It is widely acknowledged that companies are successfully applying methods of grabbing and retaining our attention in order to sell us things, so I'm a bit cynical that children, already not renowned for impulse control, will be any better than adults in ignoring that.
The earlier they make their experiences, the earlier they can develop a mature response to abusive stimuli - if taught about the nature of those stimuli. I'm not advocating for giving developing brains blind access to predatory products. I'm advocating to teach them a healthy-as-possible relation with them.
And the reasons adults suck at this is just that: because we were never taught to deal with it, because our schools curriculae are in complete disconnect of the world we've built within the last 40 years. The mechanisms of attention are by no means rocket science, and kids are not braindead. Those who are generally able to understand and then recognize the dangers will have the ability to do so from young age, and the ones who don't have that skillset early on will never develop it anyway.
> And the reasons adults suck at this is just that: because we were never taught to deal with it, because our schools curriculae are in complete disconnect of the world we've built within the last 40 years.
Some companies see this as “innovation”: coming up with new ways to advertise, target, and stick to consumers. The problem with the “schools are behind” argument is that this is how the system is designed and it will always be this way.
Computer Science is a good example of this. It takes years for newer technologies to get into CS curriculum. By the time curriculum is updated to educate kids on phone addiction, there will already be a newer and more insidious method to target kids that didn’t make it into the curriculum.
> It takes years for newer technologies to get into CS curriculum.
The problem is not the technology. The problem is how they are used, and ethics is something that does not change - or at least changes at a much lower pace.
If there's a profit incentive to misuse a particular technology, it will be misused. Ethics is always secondary to profit in a market system. If ethics superseded profit, capitalism never would've taken off.
Ethical violations happen no matter the economic system, and capitalism (market dynamics) at least provide a mechanism for self-correction.
Your response may help you jerk off to your righteousness, but it does not give anything actionable and it does not provide any type of solution to solve the problem. Can you try again, please?
There are other methods of self-correction (e.g. social pressure) that have been much more effective over the long run. Now you might say, "there's nothing interfering with social pressure in capitalism, you can have competitive markets with social pressure". But often, companies must either accept ethical violations or be out-competed in a competitive marketplace.
I don't know why you would expect schools to do a better job than parents for something like this ?
This is fundamentally a parenting question - and from my limited knowledge of it, pre-teens need a radically different approach than teenagers : for the first (whom we are talking about) you need to be a model, for the second you need to walk a fine line of not antagonizing the likes and values of the tribe they ended in, lest you completely lose any influence you might have too early on.
It's the transition between the two that seems to be particularly hard to pull off here...
>because our schools curriculae are in complete disconnect of the world we've built within the last 40 years
I'd be very curious to know if any of the tech-based education programs being rolled out at a rapid rate include any material on the dangers of technology and social media addiction.
I truly do not have a settled opinion on the correct course here.
But the idea that mere education can disarm these tools is incredibly naive. It's not powerless against it but not sufficient alone.
Intelligent people who are deeply knowledgeable about the physiology and psychology of addiction still get addicted to drugs, for example. Or. We all know how advertising works, and yet it still works. Do you think it doesn't work on you?
Intelligence and knowledge can be part of a defensive strategy but they're not a complete one. And even the best strategies executed flawlessly will fail sometimes or against some opponents.
This is not a matter of intelligence, and I find that framing chilling. It carries an implicit judgement that those who find themselves captive to these powers were merely too weak, undisciplined, or unintelligent to prevent that through their own agency. It's not the agency of individuals that is the problem here though.
