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arcticdementor · 4 years ago

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[This is the fourteenth of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA]

What went wrong in the 1970s? Since then, growth and productivity have slowed, average wages are stagnant, visible progress in the world of "atoms" has practically stopped - the Great Stagnation. About the only thing that has gone well are computers. How is it that we went from the typewriter to the smartphone, but we're still using practically the same cars and airplanes?

"Where is my Flying Car?", by J. Storrs Hall, is an attempt to answer that question. His answer is: the Great Stagnation was caused by energy usage flatlining, which was caused by our failure to switch to nuclear energy, which was caused by excessive regulation, which was caused by "green fundamentalism".

…

Before reading this book, I thought flying cars were just technologically infeasible, because flying takes too much energy. But Hall says we can and have built them ever since the 1930s. They got interrupted by the Great Depression (people were too poor to buy private airplanes), then WWII (airplanes were directed towards the war effort, not the market), then regulation mostly killed the private aviation industry. But technical feasibility was never the problem.

Hall spends a huge fraction of the book on pretty detailed technical discussion of flying cars. For example: the key technical issue is takeoff and landing, and there is a tough tradeoff between convenient takeoff/landing and airspeed (and cost, and ease of operation). It’s interesting reading. But let’s return to the larger issue of nuclear power.

Nuclear power started off well; “the cost of nuclear plants was decreasing by about 25% for each doubling of capacity in the 50s and 60s”. Then, in 1977, Jimmy Carter established the Department of Energy. Costs immediately skyrocketed, and never came back down. It’s hard to briefly convey the regulatory issues because it’s death by a thousand cuts.

…

Why is regulation so crippling? The public is wrongly terrified of nuclear energy, but they shouldn’t be. Radiation killed 0 people at Fukishima; the radiophobic evacuation killed >1000 (“Some 1600 of the evacuees died from causes ranging from privation in refugee camps (notably loss of access to health care) to suicide”), and the tsunami/earthquake killed >10000. Hall quotes an estimate from the Guardian that Chernobyl - by far the most serious nuclear disaster - killed “approximately” 43 people.

Why are people so terrified? Hall says we were a victim of our own success from World War II. Before the War, America was an individualistic nation. Then came the Depression, the New Deal, and most of all the War. America won the war with a “completely centralized bureaucratic government structure” - and it was a huge success. And for a while, that worked: the generation forged in the war had a “cooperative “same boat” spirit” that “[made] the centralized corporate structures work.” But then it didn’t. Hall blames the hippies:

“The Baby Boomers—my generation—split into two cultures which, as far as I can see, not only didn’t agree on values but which fundamentally couldn’t even understand each other. Ask any Boomer what was the greatest, most pivotal event of 1969. Half of us will say the Apollo 11 moon landing. The other half will say Woodstock. Both sets, hearing the other’s opinion, will emit an honestly uncomprehending “Huh!?!?” From the Fifties to the Seventies, the average American followed the lifecycle of Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt from conformity and cooperation to non-conformist rebellion in a search for personal meaning. The corporate state worked with the cooperating, self-sacrificing Greatest Generation. It didn’t work so well with Aquarians.”

His theory, basically, is that the next generation - the Baby Boomers - got spoiled. Automation had come into its own, and people didn’t need to struggle for survival anymore. America was on top of the world, and there weren’t enough real challenges to work on. But people need challenges. So they made some up.

Hall says the most damaging strain, still common today, is “green fundamentalism”, the idea that human agency over nature is fundamentally bad. An early example is Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which got DDT banned on the grounds that it was causing cancer; in reality the cancer increase was from smoking, and from technology improving living conditions (the healthier you are, the more likely you’ll survive long enough to get killed by cancer). “The Green religion has essentially superceded Christianity as the default religion of western civilization, especially in academic circles”. Hall is dismissive of climate change, citing an estimate that it will cost only a few percentage of GDP by 2100 even in the worst case. (This is something that always confused me; there’s such a big gap between quantitative economic estimates of climate change and qualitative ones. My impression is the quantitative ones are way too optimistic. Hall does not agree with me). Anyway, he says, climate change is all the more reason to embrace clean nuclear power and flying cars (highways use a lot of land; if flying cars replaced highways, that land could be returned to nature).

The upshot is there is strong intellectual skepticism about increasing energy usage. As government has taken much more centralized power, “we have let complacent nay-sayers metamorphose from pundits uttering ‘It can’t be done’ predictions a century ago, into bureaucrats uttering ‘It won’t be done’ prescriptions today.” As a result, “a lot of inventiveness and engineering resources got shifted from doing new things, and doing things better, to doing the same old things, usually not as well, but using less energy.” Our machines use less energy, but they don’t work any better. Is single-mindedly improving efficiency really the best use of our time? And anyway, the efficiency gains - while real - are basically on the same trendline as they were before all this regulation. The difference is that we used to have efficiency *and* more energy every year; now all we get is efficiency. The twin tragedies are that so many talented people went into activism instead of engineering, and that the activism was so often opposed to progress.

…

Hall blames public funding for science. Not just for nanotech, but for actually hurting progress in general. (I’ve never heard anyone before say government-funded science was bad for science!) “[The] great innovations that made the major quality-of-life improvements came largely before 1960: refrigerators, freezers, vacuum cleaners, gas and electric stoves, and washing machines; indoor plumbing, detergent, and deodorants; electric lights; cars, trucks, and buses; tractors and combines; fertilizer; air travel, containerized freight, the vacuum tube and the transistor; the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, movies, radio, and television—and they were all developed privately.” “A survey and analysis performed by the OECD in 2005 found, to their surprise, that while private R&D had a positive 0.26 correlation with economic growth, government funded R&D had a negative 0.37 correlation!” “Centralized funding of an intellectual elite makes it easier for cadres, cliques, and the politically skilled to gain control of a field, and they by their nature are resistant to new, outside, non-Ptolemaic ideas.” This is what happened to nanotech; there was a huge amount of buzz, culminating in $500 million dollars of funding under Clinton in 1990. This huge prize kicked off an academic civil war, and the fledgling field of nanotech lost hard to the more established field of material science. Material science rebranded as “nanotech”, trashed the reputation of actual nanotech (to make sure they won the competition for the grant money), and took all the funding for themselves. Nanotech never recovered.

Flying cars didn’t have the same issues; they were being developed privately. But regulation doomed them. Harold Pitcairn was almost successful in developing a flying car, but then in World War II the government nationalized his helicopter patents (they promised to give them back after the war, but reneged) and he spent the rest of his life in court. He won, 17 years after his death. Bruce Hallock had a promising design, but he sold a plane to a missionary group in Peru and was arrested as an “arms trafficker”. Robert Fulton had a successful prototype, “however, Fulton’s financial backers had become discouraged with the seemingly endless expense of meeting government production standards, and they withdrew their support.” Molt Taylor “was actually in serious negotiations with Ford as late as 1975 to have the Aerocar mass-produced. The monkeywrench was thrown into the negotiations by the FAA and the DOT. Taylor already had an airworthiness certificate for the Aerocar, granted by the CAA (predecessor of the FAA) after a delay of 7 years from its first flight. He claims that the agencies turned thumbs down on the Aerocar ‘because everybody would have one, and we couldn’t handle the [air] traffic.’ Airplane regulation has only gotten stricter: “The entire F.A.R. / A.I.M., which every airman is responsible for knowing, is 1085 pages long. At least it was in 2013; a new one comes out every year.” So in the end, we have none of these technologies. No flying cars, even though they were prototyped almost a hundred years ago. Some nuclear energy, but crippled, aged, feared, and hated. 3D printing, but no nanotech. No level 5. Because the state needs legibility, and progress is not legible. The bureaucratic incentives are to calcify. If no one does anything new, no one will do anything wrong.

…

The book is 550 pages long, so there’s a lot I didn’t cover. I thought the political/social analysis was its weakest aspect, basically a strongly worded but conventional version of the libertarian case against regulation, although I appreciated the detailed examples of how regulation harmed flying cars and nanotechnology (And I’ll admit I haven’t heard the libertarian case against funding science before!). I’m more convinced than ever that not embracing nuclear power was one of humanity’s worst mistakes (partially because I’m more afraid of climate change than Hall is). I found the book most valuable as a statement of “definite optimism” - a concrete vision of attainable yet extraordinary technological progress. I recommend it on that basis.

#read the whole thing #book review #where's my flying car?#j storrs hall #substack

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tickle-her-senseless · 5 years ago

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Important

Hey all. Just wanted to respond to questions from members of a couple of Discord servers run by the same person following a chaotic couple of days. I’m putting all the info and screenshots (minus names, pics and locations) here, so I can just direct people to this post if they have questions.

I had been intending to just head back here to Tumblr and let the situation lie, but unfortunately the reason given by the automated bot for my ban mentioned “crossing consent multiple times”. Today, friends have been sending me worried questions relating to this, so I’m concerned that the server owner may have made a similar claim in public. Now I pretty much have to say something as that’s such a serious thing to say about someone, particularly on any kind of kink scene.

The mention of consent actually relates to the server owner. Near the beginning of the lockdown, she and I were speaking a lot, she began to tease me in DMs, I responded with a piece of writing dedicated to her, we exchanged pictures - and eventually confessed a mutual attraction. We made plans for the end of lockdown, she talked about driving through Europe and showing me her favourite places. Although her English is perfect, I began learning her language through an app as I wanted to make the effort (Brits are renowned for being lazy with languages), and kept it up every day for months, amusing her with my clumsy pronunciation on calls. Sometimes she would send me explicit comments/thoughts, although I was always nervous to initiate that kind of thing.

One day she sent a message saying that she was still coming to terms with the end of her last relationship and would need to take things more slowly, as she was finding romantic sentiments (as opposed to kinky ones) hard to deal with. Naturally I replied “Of course, in that case I’ll wait for you to initiate that stuff once you’re ready”. At some point afterwards, she sent me a message out of the blue saying “I want cuddles ❤️” and I thought “oh, this is a level she’s OK with” and responded. I think it was the following day when I tried to pick up where we’d left off (without going any further, just cuddling in bed type stuff). She reciprocated and we continued. I also (in an attempt to consider her feelings) asked her if the idea of me posting an old session video on my blog for an American friend would upset her at all. Intending to reassure her about my intentions, I mentioned ”...not wanting to tickle anyone except you and saying no to all of the other UK people on the servers who are asking about post-lockdown sessions”. I also said “I do feel a commitment to you”, which (with hindsight) was probably a foolish or misleading word to use in a purely ler/lee sense.

A week later she sent a message I didn’t immediately understand along the lines of “I thought you were going to let me initiate romantic stuff, you don’t seem to have understood me at all”. I wasn’t sure what she was referring to - the recent story I’d written for her? Use of the word “commitment”? Something else? I tried to talk with her on the phone as some wires had clearly become crossed via text, but she refused for five weeks (citing not being in the right headspace), before finally calling when I sent a message explaining that anxiously waiting to mend the friendship in lockdown by myself for over a month was having a terrible effect on me mentally, and I was going to have to “throw in the towel”, wishing her luck and every happiness.

During our phone call, she claimed that the main issue had been the fluffy cuddle messages which she took to be a serious and repeated boundary/consent violation (citing her wish to avoid romantic talk). This was the last thing I expected and really shocked me. Of course I apologised frantically, repeatedly and profusely. I also said I hoped she could see how I’d made the mistake innocently and honestly when:

- she initiated it the first time, so I assumed it was something she was happy to talk about.

- when I picked up where we left off, she didn’t say “Actually, d’you mind if we don’t today?” and continued the cuddle talk instead.

She said that because she initiated it one day didn’t mean that she wanted to continue the day after - fair enough. The difficult thing to accept was the idea that she felt so violated by the attempt to carry on the next day that she found herself frozen to the point of not being able to say “actually I’m not in the mood just now” and carried on with it, and that I was at fault regardless. She even used the word “harassing” to describe it, which I found very harsh considering my inability to read minds over hundreds of miles. Especially when I couldn’t see or hear her to pick up on body language, tone of voice etc to guess that she was saying one thing but feeling a different way. She said, word for word, “It’s like when someone’s choking you and you can’t speak, you’re literally choking me!” As someone who, as a teenager, was once choked on the ground by my own father until I blacked out and lost bladder control, I did see that as a stretch at best, but chose not to challenge it as she was upset.

I also suggested that, looking back, we probably should’ve clarified exactly what was meant by “romantic stuff” when we almost certainly had different takes on it eg. I’ve cuddled after every 1:1 session I’ve ever had, even platonic ones, purely from the angle of aftercare and a sense of having shared an experience. I was told that despite our different ages and experiences of romantic love, there was only one objectively correct definition of “romantic” - hers.

We went around in circles for over four hours - I apologised over and over while explaining how I got the wrong idea and asking her to understand and forgive, while she tearfully called me a gaslighter, a consent violator, an excuse-maker, a harasser ... eventually I collapsed into tears myself (I’m ashamed to admit), totally worn down, and she softened a bit. She finally said she didn’t believe I’d done anything intentionally, and she still wanted to spend time together in the real world. We made up, spoke warmly as friends for an hour, and I left the call exhausted but relieved. After a few days’ reflection, though, I decided against ever travelling to meet her for real, as the experience had shaken me considerably - and I figured it’d be risky to meet someone in real life when I didn’t trust her completely not to accuse me over either nothing or an innocent misunderstanding. I was still wondering how to explain this to her when things got wild on the server.

A few days ago, a Tumblr user with a stated age of 18 contacted me to say nice things about my blog, which (I hope this doesn’t sound conceited) isn’t out of the ordinary. When she told me she was English and totally new to the scene, I suggested the Discord server as a place where she might make some friends (given the large UK membership) and sent her an invite link. The rest is set out in the mega screenshot saga below, which begins in the staff chat. I’m “SwiftX”, my real name is in teal, the server owner is in blue and her friend and co-moderator is in purple. All other names and locations are in black:

Before sending the last message, I actually typed out five different versions of a counter-argument before eventually deciding to step back. Being totally dismissed and lectured by two people about British labour laws and pub ID measures by two non-Brits nearly a decade my junior was irritating, yes, but the baseless suggestion that maybe I’d done something in private with the new member and was somehow “arguing against” ensuring she wasn’t a child because of that horrified me. As if I’d allow a child access to explicit content to cover my own discomfort - and anyway, I’d done no more than exchange greetings with the girl and point her towards the server, where she was actually verified and granted access to all channels by the guy in purple, not me! After a couple of hours’ contemplation, I politely asked to be removed from the moderator staff, but a disdainful response to my request prompted me to explain it, and why I was upset. Not all of what I said was necessary to say, but all of it was true:

She immediately muted me for 48 hours - “staff disrespect and degrading comments”. Not a problem, I had work to be getting on with. Late that evening, however, her friend arrived in my DMs:

Him: ...it’s creepy that a 32 year old man is potentially teasing a minor

Me: Well I can prove I haven’t teased her, her profile says she’s 18, and the person who exposed her to explicit content was you when you verified her - despite admitting to having had doubts about her age.

Him: ...I’ll drop that subject

Moderator of the year, ladies and gentlemen 🙄 Anyhoo, later that day I received a ban notification from both servers run by this owner, citing “crossing consent multiple times, guilting and being degrading along with causing several conflicts”. I was surprised to feel a flood of relief, but the consent mention really disturbed and worried me, as I’d been under the impression that the server owner had fully accepted that the earlier stuff had been an innocent misunderstanding. Later that day, good friends of mine began sending me worried DMs questioning my record and asking if I’d been inappropriate with a bunch of people, so I’m concerned that the staff may have said something that (deliberately or not) has encouraged speculation. This post is intended to be a landing page to which I can direct anyone concerned about my character so that they they can form their own opinions.

When my follower count began to take off, I became determined to avoid any kind of rift with another prominent member of the community. It’s so frustrating to watch an already niche subculture splinter into factions over needless disputes. This is why I’ve kept names etc. out of this post. If anyone suspects they might know who the server owner is, or actually knows who she is because they’re here from Discord, I would implore them not to out or target her in any way. There are two reasons:

- I don’t want to start a flaming war, I’m desperate to move on and begin improving my mental health after an awful couple of months ... I just need to protect my reputation first.

- I don’t actually think she wanted drama ... I think her genuine perception is that I’ve said something horrible to her. That’s more upsetting than the idea of her trying to smear me, to be honest. I suspect she feels like crap too, and I don’t want to add to her mental load. I honestly hope she’s OK.

Hopefully this will reassure my friends and anyone else questioning my character because of whatever’s been said in that server. I’d also hope that my history of positive interaction here, including being on great terms with everyone I’ve ever had a session with, supports what I’m saying further. It’s a shame this had to happen, but I’m trying to think positively about what lies ahead and trust in my real friends. I’d also like to thank the other members of the server staff who’ve privately sent me messages of support and sympathy having already seen the entire exchange.

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cindylouwho-2 · 4 years ago

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RECENT NEWS, RESOURCES & STUDIES, May 2, 2021

Welcome to my latest summary of recent ecommerce news, resources & studies including search, analytics, content marketing, social media & Etsy. If you are interested in Etsy news, please read my top story below, as there seem to be a lot of changes afoot. (There is also a section general Etsy news below that.)

If you have any questions or news you would like me to cover, please drop me a line here on Tumblr, reply to this post, email me, or contact me on Twitter.

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES

Something is brewing at Etsy: as of April 26, people in almost all non-Etsy Payments countries “temporarily” cannot open new shops. They hid this development in a Help file, but someone reported it to Ecommerce Bytes, which garnered more attention. Why does this matter? Currently, Etsy Payments (EP) is only available in 44 countries; i.e., most of the world cannot currently open a new shop on Etsy. [Updated May 3 2021] Apparently the only exception is India; see the screenshot below, which someone kindly sent me:

(please click to see it in more detail, or check it out on Twitter)

There was no warning, and no published end date, even though they say it is temporary. Of course, they say it is to protect buyers, but they said that when they removed standalone PayPal too, and we know that was just about making more money. It’s possible they are adding new payment companies to the backend which will be able to operate in most of these countries, greatly expanding their take from EP. The first quarter report is scheduled for May 5, and that is often the time they announce new or expanded income streams. Expect to learn more sometime around then. In the meantime, watch for payment glitches.

It is also possible that the above situation is related to the glut of bad press Etsy has garnered recently. They released a blog post on April 29th, explaining how they plan on spending $40 million extra this year on marketplace enforcement. Turns out, they were just trying to get out in front of an April 30th report from Business Insider [paywall], which describes 800 policy violations in listings on the site. You can get the details in articles from Engadget and Gizmodo. This might get more traction, as both Insider and Gizmodo noted it is very easy to find more prohibited and even illegal items on Etsy.

“After Etsy deleted the listings the outlet identified, Insider reports that it was still able to find several others for ivory products, brass knuckles, mandrake roots, tools for using cannabis concentrates, mass-produced products, and other banned items. We poked around Etsy’s marketplace as well, and within a few minutes found a bunch of prohibited products, including a vintage ivory bracelet put up for sale as recently as March, several weapons that are plainly marketed as such, and a shop with more than 1,000 reviews selling all manner of spells for attracting love, wealth, and what have you.” [from Gizmodo]

Note that Etsy has also changed the wording of its Prohibited Items policy to include new definitions for counterfeit items. See discussion on this Reddit thread. Etsy is also still getting negative attention for allowing fake COVID-19 vaccine cards to be posted for sale. Vice has the most recent article, and Forbes has an overview of this hot new scam area.

So, is all of this linked, and if yes, what does it mean? Etsy hasn't cared about enforcing its listing policies for many years, as long as the media doesn't notice. Heck, you can still buy gift boxes of manufactured candy in thousands of shops, which is expressly prohibited, yet reporting never removes them. Is the media finally noticing enough to make a difference, or is Etsy really embarking on a huge cleanup that includes (at least temporarily) banning people from most countries from opening new shops? We will likely learn more this month, and perhaps even this week.

ETSY NEWS

Etsy says that shoppers are searching for “eco-friendly” items more often this year, and released a trend report on the topic. Insights include “42% YoY increase in searches on Etsy for reusable cotton menstrual pads...100% YoY increase in searches on Etsy for reusable straws...76% YoY increase in searches on Etsy for food covers...54% YoY increase in searches on Etsy for reclaimed wood shelves...176% YoY increase in searches on Etsy for environmentally friendly candles...712% YoY increase in searches on Etsy for eco-friendly tissue paper...285% YoY increase in searches on Etsy for vintage hoodies.” Definitely read the report if you want to know everything that people are looking for.

They also did a UK-based article on trends in outdoor items. Search tips of note: “2,644% YoY increase in UK searches on Etsy for patio furniture...Over 1,000% YoY increase in UK searches on Etsy for spring wreaths...1,266% YoY increase in UK searches on Etsy for garden lights or lanterns” It is hard to say how much these trends can be extrapolated to other countries, as the UK appears to have embraced online shopping much more during the pandemic than some other countries (see story below).

The latest Etsy Success podcast [transcript with podcast links] covers their buyer research, as well as a few questions from sellers. Not much here, except for the fact that they do expect wedding sales to pick up.

Reverb had a really large data breach, exposing the personal information of over 5 million customers.

As mentioned above, Etsy’s first quarter financial results for 2021 will be out on May 5th.

Apparently, Etsy is testing videos in search; here is a forum thread on the topic.

SEO: GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES

Here is an intermediate/semi-advanced article on ecommerce websites and common SEO issues. If you don’t do any of your own coding and don’t have much control over site design and indexing, skip the first 3 points.

Link building: what is a high-quality link? (you know, the type we are always told we need.) Moz’s Whiteboard Friday covers the basics. [video & transcript]

If you are new to blogging or writing instructional articles for your website, this template for writing for both readers and for Google SEO should be very useful.

Google introduced an algorithm update for product reviews starting April 8th. If you review other products on your website or blog, you will want to get the details here and here.

The Google page experience algorithm update has been delayed; it is now going to start in June and be completed by the end of August. That and more is covered in the Google Search News video for April. [YouTube video with highlights and links in the comments]

Yes, you can use SEO to get more attention to your podcasts. Here’s a detailed how-to.

Focussing on YouTube? Here are some tools for YouTube SEO. (Some are free or have free versions.)

There are probably as many Google SEO myths as there are Google algorithm factors, but Google saying something isn’t true isn’t always proof it is a myth. With that in mind, please enjoy this summary of 15 Google ranking factor myths (some of which are in dispute).

[semi-advanced content] The current state of long tail SEO has changed due to both searcher behaviour and Google, and that has led to both more and less opportunity. [Google redirecting results to what it thinks the searcher really wanted, even when the exact words aren’t on the page that they rank first, reminds me of what is happening with Etsy search lately.]

(CONTENT) MARKETING & SOCIAL MEDIA (includes blogging & emails)

Facebook still has the most traffic in the US, compared to all other social networks, but YouTube is even more popular. YouTube and Reddit are the only established major platforms with significant growth since 2019. You can read more details from the actual study here.

Instagram is working on new ways for creators to make money on the platform, not just those with business accounts.

HubSpot put together a summary of how the algorithms work on Facebook, Twitter, And Instagram.

Reddit appears to be testing a group voice chat feature, which would compete with Clubhouse.

TikTok isn’t just for young people; parents and grandparents are now on the platform too.

Twitter’s timeline algorithm (active if you are seeing “Top Tweets” on your feed) tends to ignore a lot of external links, and more than half of the posts can be “suggestions” from people you don’t follow. I’ve noticed lately that Twitter rarely makes suggestions in my chronological timeline anymore, except when I don’t have any activity for over 24 hours.

Twitter obeyed an order from the government of India and removed several dozen tweets which criticized the government’s COVID-19 response. The tweets in question can still be seen outside of India, however.

ONLINE ADVERTISING (SEARCH ENGINES, SOCIAL MEDIA, & OTHERS)

Understanding the definition of “return on ad spend” (ROAS) is the first step to making sure your ROAS is good for your business. “in general, a ROAS of 4:1 ($4 in revenue for every $1 spent) or higher usually suggests a successful campaign. But keep in mind that this is just a benchmark, not something to swear by. Some businesses need a ROAS of 10:1 to stay profitable, while others can do well with just 3:1...A large profit margin means you can continue the campaign with a low ROAS, whereas smaller margins demand a relatively higher ROAS and low advertising costs to maintain profitability. ROAS can also vary by platform. For instance, the average ROAS for Google Ads is 2:1.”

10% of money spent on US online ads last year went to Amazon, but they are still well behind Google. Meanwhile, Facebook’s ad revenue was up 46% in the first quarter of 2021, Google’s was up 32% & Bing's increased by 17%.

eBay launched the ability to automate their Promoted Listings.

ECOMMERCE NEWS, IDEAS, TRENDS

Payment processor Stripe purchased TaxJar, with a plan to integrate it into Stripe. This would provide new options for calculating & filing US taxes to Stripe customers. TaxJar will also have a standalone version for the moment. While TaxJar does do US taxes for business from many countries, it has almost nothing available regarding non-US taxes at this time. (Someone needs to do this for other taxes including UK VAT registration, since they don’t have a minimum threshold for micro businesses, and are no longer in the EU, so won’t be included in the new VAT collection rules come July 1. How many sole proprietors want to be registering for & remitting all of these countries by ourselves?)

In related news, Florida has joined most other US states in requiring online businesses to collect state sales tax even if they have no base in Florida. Missouri is now the only state with sales tax but without such a law, and they are working on it.

eBay has rolled out its new coupon code tool. Also, they released lower than expected projections for the current quarter, which has disappointed the analysts.

Meanwhile, Amazon hugely beat its first quarter expectations, and projects the growth will continue. Prime Day will be in June instead of July this year; date to come.

Also, Amazon is letting its larger brands email customers directly, which was previously not allowed. Customers do have to follow the brand to receive these messages.

Mailchimp will soon be offering ecommerce stores, including a free option that has a 2% transaction fee, or more advanced versions with lower transaction fees for $10 and $29 a month respectively. US and UK customers will be able to start a store as of May 18th.

Shopify probably doesn’t feel that threatened by the new competition, as their first quarter revenue was up more than 100% over the previous year. Note it is estimated they got 8.6% of US ecommerce revenue in the quarter, while some believe that eBay, Apple and Amazon lost market share.

BUSINESS & CONSUMER STUDIES, STATS & REPORTS; SOCIOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY, CUSTOMER SERVICE

Mastercard says that people worldwide spent $900 billion more online last year compared to 2019. They expect the ecommerce trend of grocery shopping and bargain hunting to continue more than other retail areas.

Regions that had stricter lockdowns during the pandemic may have had a greater increase in ecommerce activity; this report compares the US and the UK.

Generation Z is likely to stop shopping with you if your site has issues. “Seventy-one percent of respondents want the experience to be personalized, and 76% said their favorite brands should reward them for their business, the survey found.”

MISCELLANEOUS

Brave browser has disabled FLoC, Google’s new tracking that is supposed to replace cookies in the next year. They explain why here. If you like Chrome but don’t want FLoC, try DuckDuckGo’s FLoC blocking Chrome extension.

#etsysellernews #Etsynews #search engine optimization #social media #ecommerce #smallbiz

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the-bjd-community-confess · 6 years ago

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DoA megapost (22 confessions)

Mod: So https://true-bjd-confessions.tumblr.com/post/189300138511/mod-due-to-excessive-offtopic-arguing-in-the

All you guys’ pending DoA confessions presented in no specific order, before we move into the hold, as announced above.

To be clear: I think this is a feature DoA should have yesterday. It’s completely inappropriate to force people to use deadnames and names which are related to traumatic life experiences, or be banned.

However, *weary sigh, gesturing at the multiple 70+ reply confessions on this topic* people told me they were finding the rapidly escalating discussion to be upsetting and offputting, and that’s not my goal for this blog. ❤️

I am exceptionally weary of all the DoA hate over the person who got banned over making a new account after not being allowed to change their user name. DoA isn’t the only doll forum out there. If you don’t like their rules, don’t join. I for one find their rules about on- and off-topic dolls to be unfair and arbitrary as hell, but in the end it comes down to their house, their rules. Move on.

~Anonymous

Us: Sure would be nice to maybe be able to change your name on DOA.

Some of y’all: Are you asking for anarchy?? If we allow this, what’s next?? A reasonable review of outdated rules??? The rules are there for a reason!!1! The reason may be antiqued because technology has updated and changed since then, meaning there are better solutions available, but it’s still a reason so we DEFINITELY should NEVER change!! Change is too scary for me. :( You’re bullies who want to be special :((( Stop that :(

~Anonymous

I love seeing people get so offended at anon saying “bigots”. How do you know it was about you ? Guilty conscience? DOA could allow name changes if they really wanted to. There are other hobbies where they forbid certain people from entering forums while still allowing name changes. It’s not hard if you really care.

~Anonymous

Honestly the way people fall all over themselves to defend DoA against any sort of criticism (regardless of how you personally feel about the validity of said criticism, reader) makes me glad I never got into the community aspect of this hobby. It's just... stressful.

~Anonymous

The transphobia in the comments on this blog in particular are so gross. Being a bigot makes your dolls instantly hideous. And no, I’m not saying everyone who is defending DOAs decision is transphobic. I’m talking about the one who thinks trans people transitioning is wrong and their friends. You’re gross and so are your dolls.

~Anonymous

scammers can & will get around DOA's no name change policy, it's really not that safe. also, DOA isn't the only website which allows the sale of high-value items.

~Anonymous

First it's "if you want name changes coded in DoA, offer to do it yourself!", then it's "why tf would DoA accept some rando to help code their site?" make up your goddamn mind, your argument is falling apart.

Also when did this issue become "DoA vs trans people"? Like, I like DoA yet I also recognize it should be more accessible and updated for the modern userbase. I want it to become as good as it can be because I like the community and would hate to see it die out like so many other forum sites do. Yes, it has flaws- and believe me, the folks who get extremely upset about the idea of admitting that embarrass me- but I liked the format since I was new to the hobby. I just wish it was more inclusive!

~Anonymous

girlisav3rb: "this isn't about exclusion or leaving anyone out". Also girlisav3rb: "I'm just kicking your punk ass off [obvious metaphor for DoA]" yyyyiiiiikkkees

~Anonymous

The DOA username debate is really starting to feel like 4 people's personal beefs against each other. It isn't really about dolls and I wish it wasn't dominating all the confessions here. I don't really care about watching pomoaples, pupkinspce, aigisthewlve and tellmeifthursday make fools of themselves daily.

~Anonymous

10.

Say it louder for the people in the back: IF YOU INSIST ON NAME CHANGES FOR DOA, THEN VOLUNTEER YOUR CODING EXPERTISE. Don't know how to code and are just squawking about something you can't directly contribute towards? Then shut up or offer up money so the mods can hire a computer programmer to make the changes you're DEMANDING from a FREE service.

~Anonymous

11.

God it's so painfully obvious to see how many of the people defending DoA on the grounds that name changes would destroy the integrity of the website have never ever worked on or even been part of a forum or really any website of any kind in their lives. Seriously arguing that "the database" would break if you changed a name like?? No??? Have you ever seen a server backend before? You can automate this shit, you know, keep a log of former names, just... it's not some big huge challenge???

~Anonymous

12.

I don't have a horse in the trans name change race but calling DoA one of the friendlies communities around is abject bullshit lmao. There's not a more elitist, paranoid, abusive community this side of comic books -- but that kind of goes for this hobby as a whole, let's be honest.

~Anonymous

13.

THE RULES ARE IMPORTANT WE CAN't cHANGE THE RULES IT WILL LEAD TO CHAOS IF WE CHANGE ONE RULE WHERE WILL IT END THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!!!!! In my town it used to be THE RULES that POC have to go to separate schools and use separate bathrooms, but sure, the rules are the most important thing, not the people. And before anyone says cOmPaRiNg DoLlS tO rAciSm, 1) shitting on trans people IS a form of prejudice you smoothbrains, and 2) my ass is POC and I call it like I see it. Check yourselves.

~Anonymous

14.

I personally think DOA should just.. go away? It’s been around for years, most people use it as reference rather than a community anymore. Everything is on FaceBook and Instagram now, DOA is pretty much just a glorified Dolly Dictionary at this point. Besides, if they aren’t going to change an Incredibly simple, easy thing to change just to accommodate transitioning people, it’s not the best place to be.

~Anonymous

15.

I mean about the whole rules is rules is rules thing about doa: the thing is, some rules are there for a reason and obviously do need to be respected whether you agree with them or not, like don’t block fire exits, murder is bad, etc. but some rules eventually become outdated and need to be changed to keep up with society, and that doesn’t make the people pointing out that they need to be changed evil or entitled or spoiled. Imagine if we all still had to drive 10 mph everywhere because when someone pointed out that car technology had improved since 1915 and the speed limit should be increased accordingly everyone had just shouted them down with “BUT TEH RUUULLLEESS!!!” You’d be pretty interested in getting some of this “special treatment” yourself so you could get to work on time, huh?

~Anonymous

16.

Honestly the easiest solution would be let people change their names only once and have it trackable.. as a trans dude its NOT that deep.

~Anonymous

17.

I notice that the unrelenting attacks on DoA are now even using the same phraseology along with the name-calling and implications of sinister motives. These are textbook bullying tactics. Next is the boycott, except that most of these people already say they don’t use the forum because they are just too “21st Century” for it.

Luckily this is just a confession board and no matter how many folks you manage to rile up here, it’s not going to affect DoA. Now, this is why I love DoA–you can’t go on their own site and spew this nonsense. They have Rules. They are Strict. They attempt to avoid drama, especially off-topic drama, and they don’t allow meanness, vulgarity or obscenity. If you’re looking for a pleasant, safe space, it’s your best bet.

~Anonymous

18.

Easy to lay bigotry, laziness, stupidity and worse on DoA mods for not just accepting tales of trauma and pasts to erase. But the internet has always been full of lies by people trying to get their own way or escape consequences. Not just pro scammers. People who cry things like illness, trauma, disaster, family or pet problems over and over to get sympathy for demands or as all-purpose excuses. Recast ownership lies. People who never got a no before, and don't like being turned down no-how.

~Anonymous

19.

I just realized that no one understands the people saying DOA can allow name changes are the people who have actually modded forums before, most forums unless they’re running a totally outdated system use user id numbers that are linked to display names, which can be changed, and you can write a simple string of simple-baby-code to show old display names on a profile, to explain it in simple terms.

~Anonymous

20.

Honestly I think that the anti-name change people are mostly just shilling for DoA because they can't believe that their precious forum with its volunteer mods could be anything but flawless. Or something like that, given how indignantly these people have *always* reacted to confessions criticizing DoA, even before the trans controversy was a thing. There have definitely been some obvious transphobes as well though, whose bile is really more suited to conservative FB pages or something. Go away!

~Anonymous

21.

the DOA mods can obviously change people's usernames because it's 2019 and basically every other site in existence can do it. they might have to change the site slightly to accomplish this. maybe there are reasons for them to choose not to do that, but let's stop pretending it's some technological impossibility.

~Anonymous

22.

How about this: Implement a system on DoA that indentifies users by a unique code and allow users to have a changeable display name. Changing the display name could become a paid feature to pay for the technical changes. Think of a system like discord has. It's a win-win situation. Thoughts?

~Anonymous

#BJD #ABJD #TrueBJDConfessionz #BJD Confessions #DoA #Just let people change their damn usernames

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duhragonball · 5 years ago

Note

I hope they let your episode 147 thing get posted.

They did eventually, but man...

People say a lot of artists fled tumblr when that porn ban went into effect, and after this past year, I can totally understand why. I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to put a lot of work into a piece of art, only to try to post it on here and have to deal with the flagging system on this site.

I say “imagine”, because even though it’s happened to me multiple times last year, it’s not quite the same, because all the images I post that get flagged are screencaps. And that shows me how abritrary Tumblr’s flagging system really is, but it also lowers the stakes for me. When they play keep-away with my posts, it’s not my own work that’s on the line. I could have gone text-only and bypassed the whole issue.

At the same time, I really wanted to have pictures, because it’s dumb to have to describe every single thing, and this is supposed to be a visual medium, dammit. This site has made it its mission to discourage artistic expression. There’s ways to get around it, and ways to work within the system that’s in place, but it’s such an arbitrary and hypocritical system that I don’t blame anyone for noping the hell out of here.

What kills me is that there’s still just as many spambots and pornbots on this site as there were two years ago. That’s because Tumblr’s new flagging system is automated. It’s only designed to frustrate humans, not bots, which will happily continue spamming whether their content gets flagged or not. It’s a glimpse into a future world where the whole internet is a big war between bots that try to break the terms of service, and bots that are programmed to enforce the terms of service. The humans are just stuck on the sidelines, hoping to post a few cat pictures in the middle.

Lately, I’ve been watching videos by Company Man, where he explains, among other things, why certain brands declined and went out of business. This one about Kmart kind of stuck out at me, because when I was a kid, Kmart was kind of a big deal, but now it’s at death’s door. It’s easy to blame these things on the internet or other technology, but Target and Wal Mart are fine. The video goes into greater detail, and discusses how Kmart bought a bunch of other businesses in the 90′s, then declared bankruptcy, and eventually merged with Sears in 2004, which was experiencing a similar malaise.

As the Company Man explains toward the end, the underlying problem is that no one wants to shop at Kmart. The stores look outdated and depressing. I kind of noticed that as far back as 2004, when I used to occasionally check out a Kmart that was part of a mall. If it hadn’t been attached to that mall, I probably never would have gone in the store, and the whole place looked like a low-rent Wal Mart. That was 15 years ago. Now, the stores look exactly the same, because the business is in so much debt that they couldn’t afford to remodel if they wanted to. Their cash registers are the same clunky old machines they would have used 25 years earlier. And stuff like that hurts their relationship with the customer, especially when there’s so many other options for shopping. So maybe their mistake was in wasting all that money in the 90′s on acquiring other businesses, when they should have invested that into improving their stores, where the revenue is actually generated. They got so big that they forgot about the customer, and now they’re probably months away from vanishing from the face of the Earth.

It feels like a lot of businesses make the same mistake, where the leadership is more focused on moving money around than focusing on the core business. Toys R’Us went under because they got purchased in a leveraged buy-out in 2005. That means the buyer used the company itself as colateral for a $6 billlion loan, so from the moment the deal was inked, the company was saddled with a $6 billion debt. The internet and changing markets hurt them, sure, but the huge debt only made things worse, and it too 13 years for it to catch up to them. It makes you wonder why so-and-so was so desperate to buy Toys R’ Us in the first place, if the only way to do it was to cripple the company.

I feel like Tumblr’s kind of on the same path, where they’re more worried about pleasing Apple or their current owners or whoever, and the users are taken for granted. For my part, I can live with that, but I’ve definitely realized that there’s certain types of projects that Tumblr just can’t support. I can’t post long-term, multi-post things on here, where you sort of want to follow them in order, because Tumblr will take down one post and force me to repost it out of sequence. It just isn’t worth the hassle. And that’s not a big deal, I’m just some jerk, but there could be really talented people who could make this website flourish, and they’re more interested in chasing them away than in keeping them happy.

Art will survive, of course. The websites that respect it will survive, and the ones that don’t will suffer. Everyone talks about letting the free market decide, and the free market usually tends toward the the free exchange of ideas, with sensible, responsible moderation. Kick out the Nazis, and don’t piss off the real creators. That’s what people want, and I think somehow, someway, that’s what they’ll get. It remains to be seen if Tumblr will figure that out before it’s too late.

#ask duhragonball #fuck this great website #Anonymous

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thewordreaper · 6 years ago

Text

Transcript of audio file #it52074

Subject: Application for immediate appointment as a stationed hero.

Interviewers transcript and additional documents can be found attached in the file. This is a record of the answers of the candidate only.

Status: Currently under review by the Secondary Council

Please check the end of this transcript for the updated status.

Start of transcript

"..."

"My name is Iclea and I come from the stars."

"..."

"Yes, that's my introduction. When I first arrived, I approached the villain league and it seemed suitably mysterious."

"..."

"What do you mean, 'do I still maintain contact with them?' It was over a hundred years ago."

"..."

"Yes I know some of them are that old but they were infants back then."

"..."

"Yes, a hundred years. Did no one give you my file to read? I demand to be interviewed by a more competent employee."

"..."

"Procedure. Who cares about that anymore."

"..."

"I was under the impression that heroes had more important values to uphold. Or is it imperative to file the appropriate paperwork before you sacrifice yourself for the world?"

"..."

"Leave the details with a trusted individual, is it? Oh, how convenient. And if I had no such individual?"

"..."

"Oh please, show me a single hero team that acts as a family. I don't trust any of them an inch."

"..."

"And how do you handpick these teams? Do you make them fill out those questionnaires with questions like, are you more of a dog or cat person, or can you turn into both?"

"..."

"I am quite aware that you are supposed to be asking the questions. I wouldn't mind if you were asking the appropriate questions. I thought it was villains who were obsessed with such useless prattle. To disarm, delay, and distract. Aren't your heroes supposed to cut right to the centre, to be at the heart of things as they were? I was impressed by the poster outside. 'Heroes of the city and heroes of your heart.' Very catchy."

"..."

"I am quite a fan of the man on the poster as well, very fair and hair that would be blonde I suppose. Couldn't get a local Indian hero to model for it? They must all be so busy nowadays, with the increased villain sightings and everything"

"..."

"Of course I wish to be a hero. The issue here is that we have very different ideas of what a hero is."

"..."

"You know, the usual. Putting everyone else before them. Putting themselves between everyone and the terrible world out there."

"..."

"I have noticed your civilian protection procedures, it genuinely did impress me. Would I be right to assume that the current management has nothing to do with them?"

"..."

(Note: At this point, the interviewer began straying from the automated, approved questions being fed to him. Since this fell under the expected but discouraged 5%, it was ignored.)

"Thought as much. If every one of you had to go through this ridiculous process I can't understand why it still exists."

"..."

"What do you mean you had to write an entrance exam? That's a disgrace."

"..."

"It's for applying non-heroes? Why would anyone not aspire to be a hero work here? Is it some way to make all the rejects feel worthy? A cheap consolation price?"

"..."

"You can't tell me it's for the pay. The rates are terrible. You get ransacked by villains every month. Your salary is practically theirs."

"..."

"Well, you can't go a hundred years as a star person without learning a thing or two. If you haven't got people who think it's worth saving you are you even doing any saving?"

"..."

"Maybe the heroes can get by with charity but that can't possibly extend to your lot."

(Note: At this point, an attempt was made to check-in through the radio line but found it was discontinued and he had not received the automated questions for the past two and a half minutes.)

"Even then, can you see people throwing ten-rupee notes into a hero's hand?"

"..."

"Yes, people have done that. People who are forced to count every rupee, every gram the eat. They're moved to give away their months earnings to the first person who thought they were worth saving. And you're saying there are people who'd accept that?"

(Note: At this point, the applicant's actions turned aggressive enough to raise a low-level alert. The dispatched mediator reported finding the door locked.)

"I don't understand why you would still choose to work here. The working hours must be terrible."

"..."

"Come on, that has to be illegal. When is the last time you were out, the last time you were out, the last time you looked up and saw the stars instead of concrete walls?"

(Note: At this point, the video feed turned to static. A team was sent to open the door as white light had begun pouring out from under the door. It behaved like a liquid and dripped in future cleaning attempts.)

"Hold on a second, I'll just wipe out some of my foundation. You can see it now. Some people claim that the stars on my cheek form what you call Orion.

"..."

"Thank you but I have heavier things obscuring my face. You would not find it as pretty once those are stripped off. I usually try to avoid mirrors."

"..."

"Perhaps. But it is different when I'm outside, when I am just a mirror, the container of a reflection."

"..."

"Would you like to see?"

"..."

"I don't think you'd be content with being within the reflection. I think you would like being the one looking in."

(Note: At this point, the audio was also reduced to static and the next usable recordings take place 59 minutes later.)

"Everyone should be able to look up and see the sky. Even if you can't see it, to just know there is nothing between you and what is above. It is only you between space and the world. Only you between the vastness above and all that makes you. It's more than just a silly blue covering above."

End of transcript

Additional remarks: The video feed is still corrupted but we were able to obtain a glimpse of what it now holds. Despite the white light escaping from it, the interior is black depicting a section of space who's location is still unclear. Entry of the room has been banned as no one sent in to investigate had returned. Plans are in motion to collapse and renovate the concerned block.

Remarks of Tertiary Council: [Redacted]

Remarks of Secondary Council: This council believes that with intense education a sense of unwavering obedience and discipline can be instilled within the candidate. In the council's eyes, this makes her a noteworthy candidate. She has demonstrated powers that would be valuable to this institution.

Status: To be sent to the Primary Council for further consideration.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My 7th story for @short-story-slam . While this does take place in my supervillain universe it’s a far darker and serious piece. If you liked it you can check out the rest of my works in this universe or some of my other writing that’s in a similar style.

------------------------------------------------

Tag list: @velvetlighthouse @madsaialik @purpleshadows1989 @lacklusterswirl @ohlooksheswriting @focusdumbass

Let me know if you want to be added/removed

#short stories #original fiction #creative writing #writeblr #violet vineyard #violent vineyard #short story slam 2019 #thewordreaper #holding out for a hero #hofah

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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 years ago

Text

#1yrago Not in our name: Why European creators must oppose the EU's proposal to limit linking and censor the internet

The European Copyright Directive vote is in three days and it will be a doozy: what was once a largely uncontroversial grab bag of fixes to copyright is now a political firestorm, thanks to the actions of Axel Voss, the German MEP who changed the Directive at the last minute, sneaking in two widely rejected proposals on the same day the GDPR came into effect, forming a perfect distraction (you can contact your MEP about these at Save Your Internet).

These two proposals are:

1. "Censorship Machines": Article 13, which forces online providers to create databases of text, images, videos, code, games, mods, etc that anyone can add anything to -- if a user tries to post something that may match a "copyrighted work," in the database, the system has to censor them

2. "Link Tax": Article 11, which will only allow internet users to post links to news sites if the service they're using has bought a "linking license" from the news-source they're linking to; under a current proposal, links that contain more than two consecutive words from an article's headline will be illegal without a license.

We're all busy and we all rely on trusted experts to give us guidance on what side of an issue to take, and creators often take their cues from professional societies and from the entertainment industry, but in this case, both have proven to be unreliable.

In a recent tweetstorm, Niall from the UK's Society of Authors sets out his group's case for backing these proposals. As a UK author, I was alarmed to see an organisation that nominally represents me taking such misguided positions and I tried to rebut them, albeit within Twitter's limitations.

Here's a less fragmented version.

Niall writes that Article 11 ("link taxes") will not stop you from linking to the news. That's just wrong. If you don't host your own blog on your own server, you'll going to posting your links from one of the platforms, either a multinational, US-based company like Facebook, or a smaller EU competitor. Under Article 11, you can't link to a news-site without a license.

Article 11 doesn't actually define what a "link" or a "news site" is (this is a pretty serious oversight). But Article 11 is an EU-wide version of local laws that were already attempted in Spain and Germany, and under those laws, links that included the headline in "anchor text" (that's the underlined, blue text that goes with a hyperlink) were banned. In the current amendments, Axel Voss has proposed that using more than two consecutive words from a headline would not be allowed without a license.

Niall says that memes and other forms of parody will not be blocked by Article 13's filters, because they are exempted from European copyright. That's doubly wrong.

First, there are no EU-wide copyright exemptions. Under the 2001 Copyright Directive, European countries get to choose zero or more exemptions from a list of permissible ones.

Second, even in countries where parody is legal, Article 13's copyright filters won't be able to detect it. No one has ever written a software tool that can tell parody from mere reproduction, and such a thing is so far away from our current AI tools as to be science fiction (as both a science fiction writer and a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at the UK's Open University, I feel confident in saying this).

Niall says that Wikipedia won't be affected by Article 13 and Article 11. This is so wrong, I published a long article about it. tl;dr: Wikipedia's articles rely on being able to link to analyses of the news, which Article 11 will limit; Wikipedia's projects like Wikimedia Commons are not exempted from Article 13; and commercial Wikipedia offshoots lose what little carveouts are present in Article 13.

Niall says Article 13 will not hurt small businesses, only make them pay their share. This is wrong. Article 13's copyright filters will cost hundreds of millions to build (existing versions of these filters, like Youtube's Content ID, cost $60,000,000 and only filter a tiny slice of the media Article 13 requires), which will simply destroy small competitors to the US-based multinationals.

What's more, these filters are notorious for underblocking (missing copyrighted works -- a frequent complaint made by the big entertainment companies...when they're not demanding more of these filters) and overblocking (blocking copyrighted works that have been uploaded by their own creators because they are similar to something claimed by a giant corporation).

Niall says Article 13 is good for creators' rights. This is wrong. Creators benefit when there is a competitive market for our works. When a few companies monopolise the channels of publication, payment, distribution and promotion, creators can't shop around for better deals, because those few companies will all converge on the same rotten policies that benefit them at our expense.

We've seen this already: once Youtube became the dominant force in online video, they launched a streaming music service and negotiated licenses from all the major labels. Then Youtube told the independent labels and indie musicians that they would have to agree to the terms set by the majors -- or be shut out of Youtube forever. In a market dominated by Youtube, they were forced to take the terms. Without competition, Youtube became just another kind of major label, with the same rotten deals for creators.

Niall says that Article 13 will stop abuses of copyright like when the fast-fashion brand Zara ripped off designers for its clothing. This is wrong (and a bit silly, really). What Zara did was illegal already, and since Zara's clothes are physical objects in shops (and not images on the web), web filters will have no effect on them.

Niall says that Article 13 isn't censorship. This is wrong. Copyright filters always overblock, catching dolphins in their tuna-nets. It's easy to demonstrate that these filters are grossly overblocking. When the government orders private actors to take measures that stop you from posting lawful communications, that's censorship.

Niall says that multinational companies will get a "huge victory" if Article 13 is stopped. That's wrong. While it's true that the Big Tech companies would prefer not to have any rules, they could very happily live with these rules, because they would effectively end any competition from new entrants into the field. Spending a few hundred million to comply with the Copyright Directive is a cheap alternative to having to buy out or crush any new companies that pose a threat.

I sympathise with Niall. As someone's who's volunteered as a regional director for other creators' rights groups, I understand that they're well-intentioned and trying to stand up for their members' interests.

But the Society of Authors and its allies have it wrong here. Articles 11 and 13 are catastrophes for both free expression and artists' livelihoods. They're a bargain in which Europe's big entertainment companies propose to sell Big Tech an Eternal Internet Domination license for a few hundred mil, cementing both Big Content and Big Tech's strangleholds on our ability to earn a living and reach an audience.

Don't take my word for it. David Kaye, the UN's Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, has condemned the proposals in the strongest possible terms.

And Wyclef Jean from the Fugees agrees, seeing Article 13 as a measure that will get between him and his audience by limiting his fans' ability to promote his work and pay his bills.

Meanwhile, Pascal Nègre (who recently stepped down after 20 years as President of Universal Music France) agrees, saying that the deal is "a net negative for artists, for the industry and, ultimately, for the public good."

Link taxes are a bad idea. In an era of fake news, anything that limits the ability of internet users to link to reliable news sources deals a terrible blow to our already weakened public discourse.

Copyright filters are an even worse idea. Not only will these both overblock and underblock, they'll also be ripe for abuse. Because the filters' proponents have rejected any penalties for fraudulently claiming copyright in works in order to censor them, anyone will be able to censor anything. You could claim all of Shakespeare's works on WordPress's filters, and no one would be able to quote Shakespeare until the human staff at the company had hand-deleted those entries -- and you could use bots to re-add those entries more quickly than they could be taken down.

More seriously, corrupt politicians and other public figures have already made a practice of using spurious copyright claims in order to censor unflattering news. Automating the process is a gift to any politician who wants to suppress video of an embarrassing campaign-event remark and any corrupt employer who wants to suppress video of an unsafe and abusive workplace incident.

Creators in the 21st Century struggle to earn a living -- just as we have in all the centuries since the invention of the printing press -- and we will forever be busy making things, and reliant on our professional organisations for guidance on which political currents run in our favour.

But there is a simple rule of thumb we can always follow that will keep us from being led astray: creators should always, always be on the side of free expression and always, always be opposed to censorship. We should always oppose anything that makes it easier to silence legitimate speech, anything that narrows who can control our public discourse by concentrating power into a few hands.

Creators, you have three days to talk to your lawmakers. Save Your Internet is the place to go to call, write and tweet them. This travesty is being undertaken in our name and we have a duty to stop it.

https://boingboing.net/2018/09/10/not-in-our-name.html

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jumana-110887 · 7 years ago

Text

Summary of the academic reading article about: Beyond the hashtag: Circumventing content moderation on social media

Written by: Jumana Alqasmi (110887), Issa Alsubhi (106250)

Date: November 4, 2018

About the article:

Name of the journal: new media & society.

Written by: “Ysabel Gerrard”.

Department of Sociological Studies, The University of Sheffield, Northumberland Road, Sheffield S10 2TU, UK.

First Published: May 28, 2018.

Introduction:

Social media companies encourage their users to share content about themselves. They moderate problematic posts when they face public pressures, like accusations that they host pro-eating disorder pro-ED content.

Pro-ED communities are a long-standing societal concern. Pro-ED is to promote an eating disorder “as a ‘lifestyle choice’ rather than as a ‘disease’, thus challenging medical and psychiatric conceptualizations which position the ‘sufferer’ as passive and helpless”.

The relationship between social media and eating disorders has become more important in recent years. For that, By 2012 Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr announced to minimize the spread of pro-ED content. These platforms enforce their rules in fairly similar ways, all three began to issue public service announcements (PSAs) when users search for troubling hashtags, like #proana (pro-anorexia) and #thinspiration, and Instagram began to block the results of certain hashtag searches.

This article explores how the circumvention of hashtag moderation in online pro-ED communities:

1- Privileging the hashtag in a pro-eating disorder problem.

2- Finding untagged pro-ED content on Instagram and Tumblr:

3- Hiding in plain sight: signaling the pro-ED user base.

4- Trending in anorexia this week: Platforms as recommendation systems.

Privileging the hashtag in a pro-eating disorder problem:

Platforms used hashtags as a mechanism through which to police problematic posts because:

1- Hashtags are perhaps the most visible form of social media communication.

2- Connecting content between users “who have no preexisting follower/followee relationship.

3- Hashtags’ visibility makes them distinct from other forms of social media engagement such as liking and commenting.

All of Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr’s user base is a difficult, perhaps impossible task for both human content moderators and platforms’ automated moderation mechanisms. However, there are tools to algorithmically tag visual imagery on social media, but these methods are notoriously unreliable.

For example, on its Community Guidelines Pinterest states that it will “remove anything that promotes self-harm”. It gives an example of an image that would be acceptable, claiming “It’s okay because the focus is on nutrition and fitness.” The image’s overlaid text “It’s not a diet, it’s a way of life. Therefore, by including hashtags in a post, users are telling platforms—intentionally or otherwise—what the post is about.

In the computer sciences, Chancellor et al. (2016) have identified a range of hashtags that Instagram users coined to work around the platform’s hashtag ban (e.g. #thighgap became #thyghgapp), and Moreno et al. (2016) have found a number of deliberately ambiguous non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) tags on Instagram, like #secretsociety123ness.

Finding untagged pro-ED content on Instagram and Tumblr:

There are two ways to find new content on Instagram and Tumblr (Hashtags and keywords) and this led to over reliance on tagged data. It is hard to find untagged pro-ED content because of ethical considerations for researching data and user’s desire to minimize their visibility in a given topic.

Using search engine on Instagram to search for top posts, people, tags, and places will give you four main ways:

1- Semi-permanent blocks (no tagged content).

2- New posts moderated (top posts).

3- No posts yet (error message).

4- Public Service Announcements (PSAs).

There are other routes to access to pro-ED content by innovative methodological approach.

Instagram does not block access to searches for top posts, it return search result for users whose accounts following pro-ED terms. Over 2 week’s period of manually coded 1612 public accounts, finding that 561 accounts include hashtags and 1051 without. From these result he found that hashtags are not an important communicative tool.

Tumblr is different in content moderation, it return content for all pro-ED searches. The user can scroll the PSA to view, but Tumblr does not issues PSA.

If you follow certain keywords the platform lets users follow certain topics, and it is similar to Instagram Explore Function. He identified and analyzed 1000 Tumblr post and he found that 218 posts include hashtags and 782 without. In addition, it is again the result shows that hashtags not important.

The kind of moderation on Instagram and Tumblr are trying to make such content unsearchable, but pro-ED users are able to navigate platforms on all sorts of ways and know how to break the rules.

Hiding in plain sight: signaling the pro-ED user base:

Users who are conscious about content moderation must go beyond the hashtag to find new ways of being visible to those who they wish to be seen by. Donath’s signaling theory which state that: “people often rely on signals rather than directly observable traits to learn about each other” is useful for exploring how users identify content, but it takes time to learn how it read these subtle signals.

Many users are aware that pro-ED content is a target for moderation, and one of the most obvious ways to deflect attention is using non-hashtags. Biographies, which disavow pro-ED identities to reassure moderators and non-in-group users that their accounts are unproblematic. Because pro-ED hashtags are scrutinized, many people have developed a set of non-tagged signals.

It is difficult to uncover the hidden meanings behind these signals in the absence of hashtags. Pro-ED users understand that this interpretive work takes time for those who are not knowledgeable, which might explain why they do not use hashtags.

Pro-ED users are unwelcome on this programs and society. Therefore, they use phrases such as my dataset was “not-pro-anything” or “not promoting anything,” which means that they do not affiliate with a pro-ED identity.

Trending in anorexia this week: Platforms as recommendation systems:

The hashtag moderation is an ineffective intervention into pro-ED communities, this is because social media users circumvent it and part of the work of platforms is to recommend content to their users. However, users can instead simply enact a pro-ED identity on social media to see this kind of content. While they are often aware of and are not wholly conditioned by algorithms. However, only by liking their posts platforms presented with pro-ED content through algorithmically organized in Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr feeds, and via email. All three platforms have recommendation algorithms, they encourage different forms of communication from their users, affecting how content is seen and experienced.

Pinterest:

When a user finds an image on the Pinterest app, they can scroll down the page to view other recommended content. The platform also suggests alternative yet related phrases that users might want to search for or ideas you might love. It is algorithmically aligning pro-ED imagery with discourses like death, suicide and self-harm. The claims to remove anything that promotes self-harm, this reveals an intimate connection between platforms’ public-facing policies and closed codes. In addition, it recommended content through email updates.

Instagram:

Allows users to save pro-ED content to her saved posts folder, without sending notifications to the poster. After began saving things, Instagram’s Explore tab flooded with other pro-ED content. This form of hashtag moderation appears to be designed to protect new users who are at risk of joining pro-ED and other such networks, rather than those who are already embedded within them. Instagram categorizes the ‘embrace of anorexia, bulimia, or other eating disorders’ as a form of self- harm.

Tumblr:

Aligns blogs that actively promote self-harm with blogs that glorify or promote anorexia, bulimia, and other eating disorders.

Concluding remarks:

Pro-ED users circumvent mediator in putting issues online by using non-hashtags to escape from restrictions. The results tell us that the members of the pro-ED community are savvy, and they have devised a set of signals to indicate their contents and identities without using hashtags.

Instagram put a logic to protect:

1- New users from joining pro-ED.

2- Users who are curious.

3- Users who still use search engines to find new contents.

The analysis reveals the complexities of the “pro-ED” identity who use a set of non-pro speeches and these circumvention techniques that define this community of users. Therefore, perhaps it is not possible to police ED-related content in a systematic way.

The hashtags become the way of seeing socio-technical phenomenon, but not it is the way that people interact with the topic.

Social media can provide us with a rich source of knowledge and it is include unaddressed issues:

1- Analyses of users’ comments on pro-ED posts.

2- A cross-platform analysis to understand any socio-technical variation between different pro-ED cultures.

3- Analyses of pro-ED users’ self-representations, which are often enacted pseudonymously.

Future research on pro-ED should move away from a reliance on tagged datasets and search through analyzing untagged posts.

#mass4025 #squpr #squrtv

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empmoniitor · 4 years ago

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AN IN-DEPTH GUIDE TO EMPLOYEE ONBOARDING SOLUTIONS FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION

The work culture of all organizations is different from one another. So, it is the responsibility of the employers to introduce the working environment to the new employees. This process is called employee onboarding solutions.

Few organizations take one day for this process, where a few take nearly 18 months to complete the onboarding process. This process starts immediately after the employees receive the offer letter.

THE EMPLOYEE ONBOARDING PROCESS SHOULD BE EFFICIENT. WHY?

With this process, the employee has an interaction with the organization after completing a lengthy interview process. The decision of the employees to join the organization depends upon this process. The onboarding solution with the improper process can decrease the reputation of your organization and affect the company.

The good onboarding process of employees makes them familiar with their working environment and goals with clear objectives. Also, the new employees will get a chance to interact with other employees and form a strong relationship with them.

WHAT IS THE IMPORTANCE OF THE EMPLOYEE ONBOARDING SOLUTIONS PROCESS IN AN ORGANIZATION?

The new hires are unknown to the culture and goals of the company. Through employee onboarding solutions, the new joiners get trained for their job responsibilities. They get aware of how to work during their paid hours with increased productivity. This process starts as soon as the employee accepts the offer letter and lasts for 18 months.

Important point: Do you know the difference between onboarding solutions and orientation? Do you think both the processes are the same?. The onboarding process starts after the employees accept the offer letter offered by the company. This letter lasts for 18 months in most places. Orientation is an event conducted for the new joiners during the onboarding process.

IMPORTANCE OF EMPLOYEE ONBOARDING SOLUTIONS PROCESS IN QUICK POINTS:

Boost the morale of the new hires.

Do not take much time to improve with productivity.

The onboarding solutions reduce efforts during the training period.

Also, in an organization, onboarding helps to build a strong relationship with the other employees.

WHAT ARE THE STAGES IN THE ONBOARDING SOLUTIONS PROCESS?

The employee onboarding process includes the following stages:

1. PREPARATION:

In this initial stage, the employee should be aware of the onboarding process to remain prepared for it.

2. ORIENTATION:

Orientation is the event where the new joiners will have a glimpse of the achievements of the organization. Also, the new hires will get to know the work culture, mission, and vision of the company. Also, they will get to know what benefits they will get if they start working with the company.

3. INTEGRATION:

In this stage, the new hires need to get introduced to their departments and the team members with whom they will work. Also, they will get access to the tools which they need during their work process.

4. ENGAGEMENT:

This stage includes working with the company culture, meeting new colleagues, and hard work to achieve company goals.

5. FOLLOW-UP:

In this stage, all your activities during the onboarding process get monitored to know their effect.

NOW, LET US DISCUSS WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF THE EMPLOYEE ONBOARDING PROCESS.

Benefits of the employee onboarding process:

1. ATTRACTING THE TOP TALENT:

When you have a good onboarding process, your foundation will be strong enough to create a good working environment. In this way, you can attract more talents to your organization.

2. THE HIGH RATE OF ENGAGEMENT AT AN EARLY STAGE:

With the best onboarding program, new employees will have a clear idea about the workplace, job to do, what to do, and how to do it. Ultimately, the new employees will work with increased productivity.

3. BOOST THE GROWTH OF THE BUSINESS:

When employees are well trained during the onboarding process, they will automatically work with their full efforts to reach the desired success. Employees with good productivity help in boosting the growth of the business.

4. ALIGNMENT AND TRUST BUILDING:

During the employee onboarding process, the new employees get aware of the company culture and best practices to work with increased productivity. They also get to know what are the company goals to achieve. So, a strong onboarding program can build trust among the employees.

5. ENCOURAGE OPEN COMMUNICATION:

When the new employees have good relations with their seniors, they can communicate directly with them and share problems they face during their working hours. This sense of togetherness allows employees to work with high confidence and achieve desired results.

The onboarding process is not specifically helpful for employers in a company. It also helps deal with your new clients who bought your products or want to buy your products. Let us see how.

HOW CAN WE MANAGE OUR EMPLOYEE OR HR ONBOARDING SOLUTIONS THROUGH EMPLOYEE MONITORING TOOL:

Only guiding your new employees and introducing them to your workplace is not enough. It is the employers who need to monitor whether the new employees are working according to their guidance or not.

Going to each employee’s desk and checking their work is impossible. So, the technology has brought a new invention to make monitoring of employees easy for employers. It is called employee monitoring software.

There are many employee monitoring software available in the market. But you need to choose the right one for your organization. After a lot of searching, I knew that EmpMonitor has all the features that an organization needs to monitor its employees. Let us know about it in detail.

BEST EMPLOYEE ONBOARDING SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS TOOL:

Out of many, there is one best monitoring tool, as per my experience, that is EmpMonitor. EmpMonitor is an employee monitoring software tool with which you can monitor your employee’s work during their working hours. During the employee onboarding process, the employers need to check whether new hires are working or not. EmpMonitor can help them out in many ways.

FEATURES OF EMPMONITOR:

1.PRODUCTIVITY REPORTS:

The effectiveness and productivity of the employees get provided with insightful chats for the organization. You can also monitor the production workflow of your organization.

2. SCREENSHOTS:

Screenshots are captured automatically with quality. The minimum interval to take a screenshot is 15 seconds. You can select your interval as per your needs. You can have screenshot access of 90 days of a customizable employee. In this way, you can keep your company data safe.

3. TRACK BROWSER HISTORY AND TOP APPS USED:

With EmpMonitor, you can track the websites and URLs used by your employees during their working hours. Here you can monitor the malicious website and alert your employees regarding this to avoid further issues.

EmpMonitor tracks the apps used by the employees during their work. Also, you can stop your employees from using malicious apps that are banned to avoid issues.

5. CURRENTLY ACTIVE USERS:

EmpMonitor gives you reports about the employees who are working currently.

6. DASHBOARD:

With the help of EmpMonitor, you can monitor and manage your employees from a single dashboard.

7. DEPARTMENT WISE REPORT:

To avoid confusion, EmpMonitor provides you detailed reports of your employees and their work according to their department.

8. REPORT ON DOWNLOADS:

Employees use the internet and download things required in their work. You can get a detailed report on those downloads so that you can avoid malicious downloads intentionally or unintentionally done by your employees.

9. EMPLOYEE DETAILS:

You can also get employee details and their working locations through EmpMonitor.

10. EMPLOYEE WORK DETAILS WITH THE SCREENSHOT:

How your employees are working and on which tasks your employees are currently working, these all information you can get from EmpMonitor.

11. IDLE USERS:

If your employees are not working and sitting idle at their workplace, you can monitor and take action against them.

12. TIMESHEETS:

With detailed timesheets, you can track the time taken by the employees to complete a single task.

13. AUTO EMAIL REPORTS:

Automate the sharing of user reports with designated staff via emails through EmpMonitor. Send insights without actually sending them.

After having a brief idea about the features of EmpMonitor, let me tell you how you can get EmpMonitor and run it in your employees’ system. Here is a short video for it.

While focusing on employees is crucial for every organization, it is also crucial for employers to deploy similar strategies for getting their customers on board.

Why?

Well, proper customer onboarding can get you high customer retention and better ROI in the long run. As these strategies can build your business, let us focus on customer onboarding solutions, as it is beneficial for the employees to deal with their customers.

BEST PRACTICES FOR CUSTOMER ONBOARDING SOLUTIONS:

We always try to provide the best products to our clients. But sometimes clients churn out for basically two reasons-

They might have felt difficulty in understanding your product.

They might not get the value that they expected from your product.

Through client onboarding solutions, you can resolve both of these problems and make your clients’ experience beautiful. Let us see a few best practices for client onboarding.

1. FIRST OF ALL, KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER:

Knowing your customer well is necessary, as it will help you modify the changes to reach their expectations.

2. MAKE YOUR EXPECTATIONS CLEAR BEFORE YOUR CUSTOMER:

Mention how your products and what benefits your customer can have from your products before they purchase them.

3. SHOW VALUE:

Make clear what value your product will offer before your customer buys it.

4. STRONG COMMUNICATION:

The communication medium between you and your customer should be strong so that you can resolve any issue faced by your customers. After the welcome message, you should send the how-to tutorials for your products.

5. GET THEIR FEEDBACKS:

Feedbacks are important. Through this feedback, you can know how your client is experiencing your products after buying them. In case if any of your clients are unsatisfied with your product or facing some issue, you can immediately work on it to get a smile on the face of your client.

6. MEASURE YOUR ACHIEVEMENT:

After collecting the feedback, you can now calculate your achievements you have received through the products.

Safeguard Your Intellectual Property With These 05 Application Monitoring Software Top 09 HR Analytics Software & Tools Of All Time 7 Best Strategies For Employee Fraud Prevention In your Workplace Getting Employee Time Management On Track And Why It Matters?

CLOSING THOUGHTS:

Onboarding is a tricky task to accomplish, but it can be simply achieved with proper collaboration, transparency, and an interactive environment. You can do so by focusing on your existing work environment.

Using monitoring tools is one helpful shortcut to doing so. These tools can get you the pain points for employees to improve. In this onboarding process, such tools can ensure a transparent and streamlined workplace.

It is not possible to go to each employees’ desk and check what they are doing. So, employee monitoring software can help you watch your employees’ and deploy better onboarding solutions. Employees will be more sincere towards their job, work more productively, and would still feel comfortable with the transparency! For your easy reference, we have discussed one of the best employee monitoring software in this blog.

If you find this article helpful or want to add something to make it more valuable, frame your voice in words and reach me through this comment box below. Please share your experience if you turn to use EmpMonitor as your employee onboarding solution. I would love to hear from you!

Originally Published On: EmpMonitor

#Employee Monitoring #Employee Management #Employee Productivity #Employee Monitoring Software #Onboarding Software

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webpov · 7 years ago

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Does Blizzard abuse the Code of Conduct?

Hello everybody. I enjoy a temporary ban from the U.S. new forums, so I have decided to share my story. Before that, I would like to start with an auto-generated sentence that comes along with any Blizzard Forum Moderation Team response to the appeals:

Please note that Blizzard Entertainment reserves the right to suspend access to these forums at any time for reasons that include, but are not necessarily limited to, repeated failure to abide by the Community Code of Conduct.

- The Forum Moderation Team

The “Code of Conduct” is defined as follows:

Principles, values, standards, or rules of behaviour that guide the decisions, procedures and systems of an organization in a way that (a) contributes to the welfare of its key stakeholders, and (b) respects the rights of all constituents affected by its operations

Source: I.F.A.C. & Wikipedia

In short, Blizzard is not necessarily limited to its code of conduct and so, there is not any defined line that protects the rights of the constituents affected by its operations.

For example, does it makes any sense for the police to be able to hold guns and at the same time it is not to be limited by the law? If this is the case, then who can guarantee that the police officers will not abuse the power they hold?

Hence, there are several ethical considerations that arise in this issue. If the company can exempt cases and people at its convenience, then we are all subjects beyond any form of social contract, and therefore cumulative integrity can be achieved if, and only if, every single employee is tolerant and benevolent enough to endure our presence.

However, when it comes to the appeals, the problem becomes even more complex. As we all know, the current ban system is fully automated, prone to statistical errors, also known as “false positives”. The support team comes to read and evaluate the appeals to decide whether the case was a false or a true positive. Everything seems fine so far.

Although, a major problem arises if the subject of the appeal needs critical thinking from the behalf of the support. At this state, an automated system has already decided upon the fate of the charged, and only a single individual has the power to undo the running charge.

If the support is under a dilemma, then the possible outcomes are in a binary form i.e. remove a ban or not:

Take the risk as an individual, remove the ban and admit that your system is not perfect.

There is no smoke without fire. The chance of a “false positive” is already diminished, so whenever in doubt the easy way is to “trust the process”. After all, the company can exempt any user at any time from the Code of Conduct.

The repercussions of the current process

Sadly, the second outcome contains a crucial fallacy. If the individual does a single mistake, then inherently the user will never trust the process again. Not only the system failed him, but the company itself. Profound emotions, such as over-simplistic generalizations and other biased assumptions come to surface; distrust between the consumer and the company arises along with uncertainty of future behavior.

While there are numerous possible outcomes after this process, I would like to focus more on the two extremes. The first is the appearance of aggressive behaviour and the second is discomfort and distress. While aggression is self explanatory after this misjudgement, discomfort occurs because the user starts to behave with exhaustive to him caution.

Those repressive feelings are included and they are punishable according to the Code of Conduct:

Harassment takes many forms, and is not necessarily limited to the type of language used, but the intent. [...] The idea behind this is to prevent any one player from consistently being uncomfortable in the forums.

Source: https://eu.battle.net/en/community/conduct#harassment

In this case, does the company violate its own code of conduct?

#blizzard #overwatch #forum #code of conduct #violation #point of view #free speech #philosophy #ethics

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techcrunchappcom · 5 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/tiktok-could-be-a-huge-security-riskand-other-small-business-tech-news/

TikTok Could Be A Huge Security Risk…And Other Small Business Tech News

(Photo by NARINDER NANU/AFP via Getty Images)

AFP via Getty Images

Here are five things in technology that happened this past week and how they affect your business. Did you miss them?

1 — Wells Fargo directed employees to remove TikTok from company devices.

This past week Wells Fargo announced that they have told employees that if they have TikTok on any devices that belong to the company they need to remove it immediately due to privacy issues and concerns. Wells Fargo is the most recent company to respond to concerns regarding security regarding employees utilizing the app. It was reported that the Chinese-owned app reached 2 billion downloads this past April, but has been flagged due to several security issues. (Source: The Verge)

Why this is important for your business:

Wells Fargo is not the only organization to show concern with TikTok’s security. Both the U.S. government and the country’s two major political parties have banned its use over privacy concerns and even Amazon warned its employees to stop using the app, although the company later retracted the order. Regardless, the Chinese-owned social service – which has had problems in the past – has caused many technology executives to re-think its use on company owned devices that are used by employees. It may be a consideration for you. Yahoo Finance’s Daniel Howley has a great perspective on the issue here.

2 — This is the cheapest 4K laptop right now.

The cheapest 4K laptop on the market right now comes from a company you might not be familiar with: Chuwi. The AeroBook Plus by Chuwi can be purchased for less than $600. The device’s dual-core processor was rolled out in 2015 and the device runs off of 8GB RAM, contains Bluetooth 5.0, and has a battery that can last up to eight hours. Currently the AeroBook Plus is able to be shipped all over the world. (Source: Tech Radar)

Why this is important for your business:

Chuwi has been selling technologies for more than 15 years on many online platforms, including Amazon. But the company’s finances and operations are a little murky. Does that matter if you’re getting a good price? I think it does. Laptops and devices need support and – for security purposes – should be bought from known brands if you want to minimize any potential headaches in the future. I would avoid these bargain price options and stick with names you know because hey, when something sounds too good to be true….

3 —Amazon has unveiled its own smart grocery cart in a new effort to automate physical retail checkout.

This past week, Amazon announced that they will be rolling out a smart grocery cart, making it the first of its kind. The grocery cart— known as “Dash Cart” —will operate using sensors, cameras, and a scale in order to immediately recognize and log merchandize using a digital screen located behind the cart’s handle. Using the cart will allow shoppers to shop and exit the store while negating the need to stand in a line in order to checkout. Rather than stores having to install sensors on shelves or cameras throughout the building, Dash Cart will be able to operate independently. (Source: GeekWire)

Why this is important for your business:

The Internet of Things (IoT) is alive and well. Variations of smart shopping carts have been around for a few years, but with Amazon’s new entry the market for these rolling devices will certainly become larger and more recognizable. And why not? The shopping cart we’re using at the grocery store today is the same cart our parents used decades ago. If you own a retail store you can bet that customers will soon be demanding – no, expecting – a smarter, more automated cart to help make their shopping experience better and – more importantly – faster.

4 — Twitter gets hacked. Big time.

Many celebrities – from Barack Obama to Elon Musk – found their Twitter accounts hacked last week in a massive effort to promote digital currencies like Bitcoin. (Source: New York Times)

Why this is important for your business:

No one was hurt and no reputations were ruined. But when an enormously popular mainstream service like Twitter – who, we are to believe has all the resources necessary to protect their users’ security and privacy – gets hacked it really does call into question how secure all systems are that maintain our most confidential personal and corporate data. Spoiler alert: not as secure as you may think.

5— This free tool can test how good your security is when you’re working remotely.

With more and more companies having employees work from home due to COVID-19, cybersecurity has become an even bigger issue than before. Thanks to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), individuals working from home can now have access to a free set of tools to help test how secure their systems are from attacks. The new toolkit is aimed at assisting SMBs to prepare for potential cyberattacks through allowing employees to role play real hacking scenarios and providing approaches for how to effectively handle them. (Source: ZDNet)

Why this is important for your business:

If you’re not up for hiring an IT firm to help with security the least you can do is have your remote employees download and run this free tool to check for any vulnerabilities. More work may be needed after that, but at least you’ll have the facts.

My new book, Want More Cash? 100+ Ideas And Strategies For Increasing Your Company’s Cash Flow This Year is now available on Amazon and other leading booksellers.

#Technology

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nadeemhoq · 6 years ago

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New diesel and petrol vehicles to be banned from 2040 in UK

New diesel and petrol cars and vans will be banned in the UK from 2040 in a bid to tackle air pollution, the government has announced.

Ministers have also unveiled a £255m fund to help councils tackle emissions, including the potential for charging zones for the dirtiest vehicles.

But the £3bn clean air strategy does not include a scrappage scheme, calling previous ones "poor value" for money.

Local government leaders welcomed the funding but called for more detail.

Local authorities will be given direct financial support from the government, with £40m of the fund being made immediately.

They can use the funds for a range of measures, such as changing road layouts, implementing new technologies or encouraging residents on to public transport.

If those measures do not cut emissions enough, charging zones could be the next step - but the government says these should only be used for "limited periods".

The timetable for councils to come up with initial plans has been cut from 18 months to eight, with the Department for Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (Defra) wanting to "inject additional urgency" into the process.

It follows the government being given its own deadline of 31 July after High Court judges said it was failing to meet EU pollution limits.

Other points include:

The funding pot will come from changes to tax on diesel vehicles and reprioritising departmental budgets - the exact details will be announced later in the year.

Councils could change road layouts, retrofit public transport, and encourage local people to leave their cars at home.

A Clean Air Fund would allow local authorities to bid for additional money to put in more air quality control measures.

A new Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill will allow the government to require the installation of charge points for electric vehicles at motorway service areas and large fuel retailers.

Local Government Association environment spokesman Martin Tett said the plans to allow councils to switch their focus from monitoring air quality to improving air quality was the right move and welcomed the additional funding.

However, he opposed the view of the government to hold off on a scrappage scheme, arguing "this immediate intervention could help increase the uptake of lower emission vehicles".

Industry interests

Ministers have been wary of being seen to "punish" drivers of diesel cars, who, they argue, bought the vehicles after being encouraged to by the last Labour government because they produced lower carbon emissions.

The industry trade body, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, said it was important to avoid outright bans on diesels, which would hurt the sector.

SMMT chief executive Mike Hawes said demand for alternatively fuelled vehicles was growing but still at a very low level.

"The industry instead wants a positive approach which gives consumers incentives to purchase these cars. We could undermine the UK's successful automotive sector if we don't allow enough time for the industry to adjust."

The whole idea of banning petrol and diesel cars in 2040 in my opinion is a bit ridiculous seen as 2040 really isn’t that far away thinking about it. I can understand the whole reasoning for the ban but there is definitely better alternatives instead of a straight up ban. This whole ban has resulted in a lot of manufacturers making a lot more Electric cars. There have been a couple hybrid cars built too but i think other issues like poverty and concentration camps in china are more important.

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onlinemarketinghelp · 6 years ago

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How to Start a Dropshipping Business in 2019 https://ift.tt/2LJIOhE

Starting a dropshipping business is a great first step into entrepreneurship. You’ll be able to sell products to customers, set your own product prices, and market your very own brand. You don’t even need to pay for inventory until it’s sold to an actual customer. If you’re willing to put in the work, you can build a successful brand.

In this article, you’ll learn how to start a dropshipping business. We’ll explain what a dropshipping business is, how to find the right dropshipping business ideas, and how to start a dropshipping business.

What Is a Dropshipping Business?

Dropshipping is a business model which you can use to run your store without ever holding any inventory. Once you’ve made a sale your supplier will ship your products from their warehouse, straight to your customer’s doorstep. You’ll never need to worry about storing, packaging, or shipping your products.

How Does the Dropshipping Business Model Work?

There are three key players in the dropshipping business model: the manufacturer, the retailer (you) and the customer.

The manufacturer’s role in a dropshipping business model includes creating products, carrying inventory, shipping products to customers on behalf of the retailer, replacing defective products, and restocking them. They sell products to the retailer at wholesale prices assuming the risk of unsold inventory.

In the dropshipping business model, the retailer (you), sell the manufacturer’s products on your website under your own brand. You’ll be responsible for choosing and marketing those products. Plus, you’ll also be responsible for managing customer inquiries and complaints.

Lastly, in the dropshipping business model, the customer buys the products directly from you, the retailer. If questions or issues arise, they contact the retailer they bought the product from.

How Profitable is Dropshipping?

Dropshipping can be the most profitable business model of all, as you are not responsible for the costs of shipping and manufacturing. Because of this profits can quickly be reaped once you have found the right suppliers with Oberlo. You can calculate your profit to ensure you are on the right track to success with our dedicated Profit Margin Tool.

Why Is Starting a Dropshipping Business a Good Idea?

A dropshipping business is a low-risk business model. When it comes to product costs, you only pay for products that you sell to paying customers. You don’t become overburdened with the cost of creating products, carrying inventory, costs of maintaining unsold inventory, and the cost of employees for packaging and shipping products. It’s a great entry into entrepreneurship as you can start your own dropshipping business by yourself during your evenings and weekends. It will require daily work when it comes to processing orders. However, most of the order processing steps are automated and require a click of a button. The dropshipping business opportunities are endless, you just need to take the first step.

Can You Make Money Dropshipping?

Yes, you can make money through dropshipping, like many of our successful merchants continue to do. Dropshipping allows you to find products you are passionate about, and set up a business selling them. When you are motivated to sell products you are more likely to invest more time into promotion and marketing, leading to more profits from your endeavours.

Is Dropshipping Worth It?

Yes and no. Dropshipping is worth the time and money you invest into it. If you don’t invest time into your online business you will never reap the rewards. Dropshipping takes time as you need to set up a store, import products, decide your pricing strategy, and starting selling. Nothing can happen if you don’t put in effort.

Where to Find a Dropshipping Business for Sale

If you don’t want to build a Shopify dropshipping business from scratch, you can easily find a dropshipping business for sale on Exchange. Exchange is a marketplace of Shopify stores for both people looking to invest in a fully-functioning business or those that want to skip the building phase and start directly with marketing. They have a great collection of online stores, including dropshipping ecommerce businesses, of varying price ranges and niches that you can choose from depending on your budget and interests. So, if you’re looking for a dropshipping business for sale, Exchange has got you covered.

When choosing to buy a store take into account the cost, the design, the age of the website, how much money it has made, popularity of niche, penalizations, and the type of business.

The cost: Do you currently have a budget to not only pay for a premade store but also invest funds into growing it? If so, you need to work out what your budget looks like. What price are you willing to pay for a business? Is there room to negotiate a better deal?

The design: Does the store look like it was designed by a professional or by a new entrepreneur who’s looking to make a quick sale? If the store design looks professional, clean and easy to navigate it may be worth pursuing.

Age of website: On Exchange, you can choose a dropshipping business based on its age. An older website will typically have a better chance of ranking online than a newer one.

How much money its made: Sometimes you’ll see that a store made a lot of money. However, a question you need to ask is ‘how much money was it making at its peak and how much is it making now?’ This will help you understand if the dropshipping business is growing or dying.

Popularity of niche: You probably don’t want to be selling fidget spinners anymore or any trending product. However, if a store is within an evergreen niche and has trending products within it, it could work out well. Broad topics (beauty) tend to perform better than stores around a specific type of product (makeup brushes).

Penalizations: Before buying a dropshipping business you need to double check that the website hasn’t been penalized. You can use a tool like Is My Website Penalized to determine if a website has been penalized by Google. If a store has been penalized it may be harder for you to rank in search engines. You also want to ask if any of their Facebook ads were banned?

Type of Business: If you plan on buying a dropshipping business, you need to select dropshipping on Exchange. Other options may require you to buy and hold inventory which can cost more money over the long term, especially in unsold inventory.

How to Start a Dropshipping Business: The 6 Step Dropshipping Business Plan

Step 1: Choosing a Dropshipping Business Idea

Truth is, what you sell matters. You should take some time to find the best dropshipping business ideas. Most people tell you to pick a niche you’re passionate about. But that’s only a half truth. It’s about a combination of profit and passion, skewed towards profit. The reality is the best dropshipping business ideas are usually the profitable ones. It’s a lot easier to be passionate when you’re actually making money.

At Oberlo, we regularly save you time by creating lists of trending products. It’s true that those tend to be the ones people gravitate to but that’s because they’re proven winners. It’s illogical to enter a niche with no competition, I learned that the hard way. Fitness, fashion, jewelry, beauty, tech, purses, and backpacks are some of the evergreen niches that we keep seeing top online stores enter and succeed in. For example, Tim Kock recently created a dropshipping case study where his pineapple business failed but his watch business made nearly $7000 in only 8 weeks, showing that your niche matters. So, spend some time looking into different dropshipping business ideas.

If you’re set on coming up with your own dropshipping business ideas instead of checking out our lists, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Google Trends is great for knowing whether a niche is on an upward or downward trend. However, on its own it’s not enough to determine whether or not a niche is viable. Some niches may be on an upward trend but don’t have enough search volume to warrant its popularity.

Use Google’s Keyword Planner. What’s the search volume for a keyword? If you’re using the free version of the Keyword Planner you’ll notice that you have big ranges which makes it difficult for you to know whether or not the keywords for your niche are worth pursuing. Ask a friend or your boss if they pay for Google Adwords to check out the competitiveness of your niche keywords. Using Google’s Keyword Planner will help you understand the potential of your dropshipping business ideas.

Browse popular websites within your niche. For example, if you check out a fashion retailers website, they’ll often organize their store into trend categories. This helps you understand what trends you should be adding to your store right now. You can also browse a store’s best-selling products to help you find the best products to sell.

Check out the order volume for products. Inside of Oberlo, you can browse products based on their order volume to help you understand how popular a product really is. Don’t rule out dropshipping business ideas if they’re not as high as other products, because those products could be newer.

The most profitable dropshipping business ideas aren’t trends. Instead, they have trends within them. For example, denim apparel is a trend within the fashion niche. Artificial eyelashes is a trend within the beauty niche. Marble phone cases is a trend within the phone case niche. You’ll want to have the trends as products but not as the entire store, especially if you’re building a long-term business. So keep that in mind when you’re working on your dropshipping business plan.

Step 2: Competitor Analysis

Once you have decided what to sell you now need to educate yourself on who your competitors are, what they sell, and how they sell their products. There are many ways to do this.

Enter the name of one of the products you want to sell into Google and do a quick search to see who shows up on top. The top ten results on Google or any other search engine will give you a good indication of your competition in a certain location. If you are selling products in a location different from where you are based you can use third party tools to gather data. Use tools like SEM Rush or Ahref to get information about search results in different locations across the world.

Search through Alexa or SimilarWeb to find niche competitors that might not show up high in general search results. These websites will give a summary of the websites you are searching for including their social media profiles, any advertising they are doing, audience and traffic information for their website, and a list of competitors for that business.

Hunt around on social media. I’ve come up with dropshipping business ideas by doing competitor analysis. I’ll browse Facebook ads within a niche and social media pages for top brands. How many followers do they have? How do they market their brand? How much engagement does their brand get? What can I do differently to stand out against them? What are they doing right that I should copy?

Know your competitors content and what performs better for them through the use of BuzzSumo so you can replicate. This tool will give you insight into what content gets the most social shares so you can find inspiration for new blog ideas. Signing up to a competitor’s newsletters can also keep you on top of their content if they share their blog content this way.

Step 3: Find a Supplier

It can be easy to find a good supplier with Oberlo. Once you are on the platform you can search for products, and choose suppliers from the list of results. On the Oberlo platform you can see reviews, ratings and how long the supplier has been on the platform, for each supplier and this should sway your decision on which supplier to choose.

When you have a list of five or six potential suppliers to choose from you can move onto the next step which is contacting these suppliers to ask important questions like minimum order quantities and shipping times.

By now you probably have reduced possible suppliers from a list of 5 suppliers to 2-3. The best way to make the decision now is to place a sample order with them for a product and compare the results. Compare delivery time, product quality, and packaging while making a decision, keeping your customer in mind and what they will expect from you when placing an order.

Step 4: Building a Dropshipping Business Store

There are a few components to building a dropshipping ecommerce business the right way. Here are a few:

Domain Name – Your domain name matters, especially if building a long-term brand. You can use free business name generators to help you simplify the process. Always get a .com domain, no matter what. If you want your niche as a keyword in the domain make sure it’s broad like beauty, jewelry, fashion rather than very specific so you don’t need to change your domain name down the road. Also, avoid using your name as the domain for your store. If you ever sell your business, you could legally use the rights to your own name.

Sign up for Shopify – Shopify is the most comprehensive ecommerce platform on the market. With new features, tools, resources and apps being added regularly, you’ll find that it’s easy to use and run a business on the platform. Plus, if you get stuck you can reach out to a Shopify guru who will personally walk you through any steps for free.

Shopify Themes – Personally, my go to free theme is Minimal Vintage it’s easy to navigate, clean and overall a great starter theme for those on a tight budget. Themes can be changed overtime. In the beginning while you’re just testing out free themes do get the job done. Once you’ve started making some money, you can invest it into buying a new theme for a better store design.

Install Oberlo – Oberlo allows you to find products online that you can sell the same day. You’ll be able to find products in a number of popular niches. Aim for 10-25 products when starting out as it can be overwhelming to write product descriptions for much more than that. If you ever have questions you can reach out for help via the Oberlo blog, social media pages or via Shopify’s support line. You can also check out 50 Ways to Get Sales with Dropshipping to learn the exact strategies and marketing hacks I’ve used on my own online stores to make money with dropshipping.

Need a step by step guide? Check out this article to learn how Tomas Slimas launched an online store in only 30 minutes.

Step 5: Marketing Your Dropshipping Business with Everything You’ve Got

So at this point, you’ve found your product and built your store, now’s the time to market your dropshipping business like there’s no tomorrow. This is a crucial step in your dropshipping business plan. So don’t keep making tweaks to your store design and pretend like you’re making improvements. You don’t need to be scared of putting yourself out there. Getting your first sale is one of the best feelings!

If you’re just starting out, you’re probably on that super tight budget. Some of my best marketing ideas have come from those super frugal moments. Here’s a few to get you started:

Facebook Advertising: I know it can be tempting to blow $500 on Facebook ads. Many new entrepreneurs think you’ll make it rain money on your first try – you won’t. My first ad I spent $20 and lost all of it to no conversions. I actually cried from a failed ad. But truth is, I didn’t risk much. So I bounced back quickly and created a second ad which converted at five cents a click. You need to keep your budget low at the beginning to be able to afford experimentation. You don’t even know what your best selling product will be at this point. Create several ads to figure out which product sells best. When it comes to targeting, create a World ad but remove Canada, Australia, United States and U.K. this will keep your ad costs lower. As your business grows, or if you have a bigger budget, you can create separate ads for those four countries. So the United States will have its own ad, as will the remaining three.

Retargeting Ads: If you’re really tight on budget, I really like retargeting ads because they keep the cost low. This ad works great if you have a store with tons of traffic. Maybe you’re marketing for free on Pinterest and getting a lot of traffic from there. Maybe you wrote a blog post on your website, featured influencers and now influencers are sharing your blog for free. With a retargeting ad, you take that free traffic and it’s a lot more likely to convert into a paying customer. Even better than a standard Facebook ad. Plus, it’s a lot cheaper. It’s actually how I got my first sale in only two days.

Influencer Marketing: Starting a dropshipping business will require you be a bit scrappy in the beginning. If you can’t afford to pay influencers their rates, trust me this is a good thing, you can offer them an affiliate commission instead. Why is this a good thing? I learned the hard way that sometimes even a niche specific influencer doesn’t actually convert. It’s almost like a shot in the dark. If you pay an affiliate fee for every sale, you lower the risk for your dropshipping business and it’s up to the influencer to convert the sale. Plus, you’ll get some pictures which will help increase your social proof for your brand. If the influencer has real followers, they could potentially make a lot more money as an affiliate than they would’ve if they were paid a flat rate. Thus, giving them a chance to make even more money.

Get free media coverage: Using the free HARO tool you can subscribe to a three times a day email list where reporters reach out to you to get stories for their article. Some may be looking for influencers in a specific niche others may be looking for product recommendations. Either way, if you’ve got that retargeting ad running, that free traffic back to your website could result in some sales. Instead of adding a link to your homepage ‘websitenamehere.com’ send it to a product collection or a specific product to create a more targeted focus. You can still add your brand’s name as the name for the hyperlink.

Step 6: Optimize

Once you have spent time building your website, brand, and marketing you can start to analyze the results of your hard work. You may find that certain marketing activities are hugely successful while others are not so much. Or you can look at your pricing against competitors and see if you could change things up a bit to make things more competitive.

You can use tools like Google Search Console or Analytics to evaluate your online traffic to make sure that traffic is increasing, not decreasing. If you are using third-party tools for email marketing or social media reporting, set up weekly or monthly automatic reports so that you will be reminded to analyze this information regularly. Even a quick snapshot of data from a tool can be enough to decide if a campaign is working or not.

Overall the most important part of a successful online ecommerce store is to test and optimize in order to increase the revenue that you generate online. This makes sure that your website will not fall behind best practices and keeps you ahead of your competitors too.

Conclusion

There you go! We’ve got you covered on how to start a dropshipping business. By applying some of the advice from this article into your own online store, you work towards building an online empire of your own. If you have questions along the way, feel free to leave a comment or reach out to the Oberlo team on social. And remember, the best way to learn how to start a dropshipping business is by taking that first step to build it.

Are you starting a dropshipping store? Feel free to check out our Facebook page if you’d like to get a free store review!

Want to Learn More?

The One-Product Business: This Entrepreneur’s Simple Formula for Success

How Much Money Can You Make With an Ecommerce Store?

Sell Anything Online With Oberlo

50 Ways to Get Sales with Dropshipping [FREE EBOOK]

The post How to Start a Dropshipping Business in 2019 appeared first on Oberlo.

from Oberlo

What Is a Dropshipping Business?

How Does the Dropshipping Business Model Work?

There are three key players in the dropshipping business model: the manufacturer, the retailer (you) and the customer.

Lastly, in the dropshipping business model, the customer buys the products directly from you, the retailer. If questions or issues arise, they contact the retailer they bought the product from.

How Profitable is Dropshipping?

Why Is Starting a Dropshipping Business a Good Idea?

Can You Make Money Dropshipping?

Is Dropshipping Worth It?

Where to Find a Dropshipping Business for Sale

When choosing to buy a store take into account the cost, the design, the age of the website, how much money it has made, popularity of niche, penalizations, and the type of business.

Age of website: On Exchange, you can choose a dropshipping business based on its age. An older website will typically have a better chance of ranking online than a newer one.

How to Start a Dropshipping Business: The 6 Step Dropshipping Business Plan

Step 1: Choosing a Dropshipping Business Idea

If you’re set on coming up with your own dropshipping business ideas instead of checking out our lists, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Step 2: Competitor Analysis

Once you have decided what to sell you now need to educate yourself on who your competitors are, what they sell, and how they sell their products. There are many ways to do this.

Step 3: Find a Supplier

Step 4: Building a Dropshipping Business Store

There are a few components to building a dropshipping ecommerce business the right way. Here are a few:

Need a step by step guide? Check out this article to learn how Tomas Slimas launched an online store in only 30 minutes.

Step 5: Marketing Your Dropshipping Business with Everything You’ve Got

If you’re just starting out, you’re probably on that super tight budget. Some of my best marketing ideas have come from those super frugal moments. Here’s a few to get you started:

Step 6: Optimize

Conclusion

Are you starting a dropshipping store? Feel free to check out our Facebook page if you’d like to get a free store review!

Want to Learn More?

The One-Product Business: This Entrepreneur’s Simple Formula for Success

How Much Money Can You Make With an Ecommerce Store?

Sell Anything Online With Oberlo

50 Ways to Get Sales with Dropshipping [FREE EBOOK]

The post How to Start a Dropshipping Business in 2019 appeared first on Oberlo.

https://ift.tt/2XIc1Mc July 10, 2019 at 04:00AM https://ift.tt/2qhSPGE

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