306400+ entries in 0.196s
phf: i actually briefly worked for a guy who bought a bugati from facebook ads, and while i was
there, was doing primarily "skin your facebook" internet explorer plugin,
that would replace all ads with own versions. if be$$al$$
the goal...
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform alone in
the sense of fitting, how shall we put
this... my shoes are made for my foot.
their shoes are copied from my shoe.
mircea_popescu: wtf was it called, back in
the day reddit was ~child porn and digg ruled
the same space.
mircea_popescu: phf hey,
there was a one quarter back years ago when
this one guy made an absolute killing from some sort of "new up and coming"
thing
that did a social media skin over blind clicking.
phf: could go "girls, sorority, 17-22, dc area, blah blah" and literally send
them bulk message
there and
then
phf: there was a period when facebook ads were fantastic for event promotion in
the same literotica/okcupid way, but without hacking
mircea_popescu: i dun
think i ever clicked an ad either. nowadays we have
the
terminology
to properly formalize
this : people who are so low on
the wot scale of
things
they're used
to being forever alone can not by
that very fact possibly have
the sort of social clout
that'd allow
them
to control enough resources
that'd make anything we care about relevant
to
them.
mircea_popescu: there i sat and wondered, much like you do above, who's in
the
target for
this.
mircea_popescu: i dunno if you recall
that facebook gimmick where some derp supposedly
trolled his roommate by controlling his ad flux ?
mircea_popescu: by now facebook is running
the same scam for a new generation of idiots, with ~
the same results.
mircea_popescu: supposedly google ads perfect for
this purpose. in
theory, of course. practice....
mircea_popescu: nobody ever went broke overestimating
the idiocy of
the consumer. kinda why
the whole charaqde has
to end, idle, disinterested, ignorant stupidity on such scale can scarcely be maintained.
mircea_popescu: "what's
the bargain, i lube up and you fuck me raw ?" "ayup" "where's my pen!"
phf: i emailed spammers in
the 90s :D
phf: "we put an ad up, got much money. year later we put an ad up got low money. he's a graph. much money here, low money here.
tribe move, many starve"
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i know for a fact people do. and yes it is exactly spam, and people clikc
that,
too.
mircea_popescu: ha! it should be exact equivalent : you know what
the site sells (or it should).
phf: cept
there's no concrete knowledge of fish, or behaviors, it's all reading
tea leaves
phf: what you're saying correlates
to what i heard, i don't have an opinion because it always seemed like dark magic
to me. i've never clicked on ads, and have hard
time groking a person who would. but
there's also a disconnect of sorts. i understand literotica hack, it is in some ways similar
to okcupid hack, it's a cold call, where you have some idea who's
the person on
the other side, and you just do it in bulk. online ads seem more like fishing, ex
mircea_popescu: try
to match
the results with ~any sort of online advertising approach and
then we can compare what writing
ten lines of bash costs vs whatever "online campaign management" set you back. lel.
mircea_popescu: and
to
top
the irony cake - exploit
traffic beats
the socks off anything anyone can buy.
take
the very openly public literotica
thing as an example, it got clicked in
the 1.5% range! like it's 1996 all over again! and people comment and whatnot.
mircea_popescu: unthinkable back in
the enchanted 2000, when ~any paysite had 10k pageviews and 10k revenue or 100k pageviews and 100k revenue, scaling 1:1 like glued
together.
mircea_popescu: by now google is pushing for 10-25 cent clicks as a minimum, but not only are clickthroughs way down
there under 0.1%, cpa/ctr relation is entirely broken. get
ten million clicks and sell
two garden gnomes.
mircea_popescu: part of it, of course, being
that
they're caught in
the
trap "online media" sites were caught a decade prior. back in 2005 google ads were sought out because
the yahoo wannabe yahoos had ridoinculous shit like "80 bux cpm" in
their "sheets", while ctrs were dropping
through
the 1% floor.
mircea_popescu: i was like "hey, show me some stats" "uh... i
think i have some from like 2013..." "wtf"
mircea_popescu: back in 2005 everyone i knew bought google, and getting banned was like suicide.
then in 2010
the lazier / older bought and
the younger wolves were moving on. last year [when i was doing eulora marketing] i couldn't find anyone i knew who bought google ads.
mircea_popescu: it's one
thing
to have low margins, where you can barely justify
the equipment and workforce. it's another
to have no market.
phf: i
thought for a while,
that google makes most of its income (including
things like
tax breaks and protectorate)
through bulk data sale and access, and ads is just a quaint misdirection. anecdotally from people in
the affiliate marketing and such circles,
the margins on google ads and
the profits are so low and have been for about
two years now
to suspect whole
thing of a lie
mircea_popescu: why
the fuck would an advertiser pay for
this i have no idea, but
teh google is mining it
to
the hilt. and i suspect
they're either going
to get usg payola or start reporting ever-worsening quarters because
they moneyz just isn't
there anymore.)
mircea_popescu: (they're in
total lulzy overdrive, by
the way. system with nothing but a certain webhost cookie got shown adds for
THAT webhost 975
times / 1000 and 25
times
to other webhosts ;
then with consumer interest single cookie (waldorf astoria) got shown 1000/1000 waldorf astoria ads.
phf: in other news of interest probably only
to ben_vulpes, homebrew is now reporting any command you run or package you install
to google analytics unless you opt-out by setting HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS.
this useful feature was brought
to you by
this fuck
https://github.com/mikemcquaid, Mike McQuaid, who looks exactly like you'd imagine
this kind of fuck
to look.
mircea_popescu: 2008
to 2016 is 8 years, ie, more
than
the "cumulative experience" of pretty much every "online
team"
mircea_popescu: anyway,
this anecdote certainly gives a good
trashing
to
the whole "gotta upgrade" blabla. why, for "security" ? glhf,
the log's chock full of lolz @wp blogs. for what, "looks" ? yarly, i've yet
to see
that many better looking blogs.
mircea_popescu: come
to
think of it,
trilema prolly
takes
the cake for longevity - it's running "You are using WordPress 2.7. Please Update." bolted shut back in 2008. notwithstanding ~numerous~ attempts, never been owned, either.
phf: flask is not standalone
though, it's a wsgi service, which in
turn is a python standard for doing "web application".
there are competing servers for wsgi, uwsgi being most popular. i actually had
to patch it for my work production, and it's not a fits in head by any means
mircea_popescu: yeah me either. jus' a stray
thought, fully argued i'd say.
phf: i'm just being a silly, i don't have a strong opinion until i see further direction
taken
mircea_popescu: anyway,
the other point being
that
there's no requirement for any actual heavy lifting work be done -
take flask, read
through it once, snip idiocies, put it in v and voila, official
tmsr boost.
mircea_popescu: poorly designed, impredictable random
tools actually induces similarity of behavior. it is
technically speaking a free fuzzer for
teh enemy.
mircea_popescu: different
topics here
tho. standard of behaviour is one
thing ; standard of
tools is another. a good set of standard
tools is what allows variance of behaviour.
a111: Logged on 2016-04-25 21:18 mircea_popescu: recall
that
the strength of
the wot comes specifically from
there not being a standard of behaviour.
mircea_popescu: actually, it's not even
trivial
to do a count - i left out
trinque and jurov for instance.
that makes it 7. it's prolly more like 80%
than any specific number.
mircea_popescu: anyway.
tis
true
the web is not
terribruy high priority. it's also
true we use it lots.
phf: flask is definitely live, is considered "alternative
to bloated blahs like django"
mircea_popescu: no but by now
this jus' keeps growing, and
the solutions are exactly
that.
trilema runs on an ancient
thing called "wordpress". etc.
mircea_popescu: if i make alf spend an hour fucking around with python,
that's an hour.
mircea_popescu: well
the other
thing is
that a guy who can do a spiffy web framework couldn't necessarily do gpg arcana or c++ nonsense in bitcoind.
mircea_popescu: so far it's you, phf , ben_vulpes , mod6 , asciilifeform running sites not
to mention
teh bloggers.
mike_c: yeah, but,
this upgrade I'm doing is bumping it up 3 major versions because I haven't
touched it in years
mircea_popescu: it may be cheaper
to have a coupla make a package and
that's
that.
mircea_popescu: course, at some point if 12 people bring up and
then maintain sites,
mike_c: I don't
think so. our
time would be better spent on gpg
than yet another web framework
mircea_popescu: incidentally, do we want
to make a standard web framework ? so people can put up sites a la boost except not retarded ?
mike_c: yeah. it's in progress. I started doing it but had
to deal with a couple other
things. I de-crufted btcalpha and killed half
the site (bitbet gone, etc). now i'm halfway
through a web framework upgrade which is going
to make adding
the new wot browser easier.
mike_c: I don't have my keys on me.. so btcalpha will be dead for
the next 10 hours.
There goes my uptime stats.
mircea_popescu: notably enough,
this does not mean
the converse (ie,
that 44% are seen for over 5 seconds). it just means
that we know for a fact 56% of online advertising budgets are wasted ;
the remainder are also wasted but
that fact not so easily known.
mircea_popescu: in entirely unrelated news from 2012 : "By measuring
the statistics of more
than 1.5 billion ad impressions per day, it was possible
to understand deeply how different websites perform. Some of
the high level results: 38% of
the ads are never in view
to a user 50% of
the ads are in view for less
than 0.5 seconds 56% of
the ads are in view for less
than 5 seconds"
mike_c: oh,
the whole
thing is down
shinohai: I see vexual has been indulging in
the Foster's again.
mircea_popescu: who
the fuck would EVER want a cache for passwd calls omfg.
mircea_popescu: 0 actuallyt crashes and burns
tho ; 1 just carries on meaninglessly.