Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 96

@LWFlouisa nope. It started with #DotComBubble in the 90s, and the winners of each round of the Survivor Startup have become the next generation of #VultureCapitalists. Eg. take #AndreesonHorowitz. Andreeson co-founded #Netscape and Horowitz worked there too, before #AOL acquired it. Then they co-founded #LoudCloud, made it to #IPO, then sold its customers to #EDS, and pivoted to #Opsware, which was acquired by #HP in 2007 for US$1.6 billion.
@z428 @pootz

@kensanata Shirky has written about micropayments a few times over the years. Scott's project was one of those that inspired those critiques:
http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/fame_vs_fortune.html

@noorul also, as with the fediverse, not everyone wants to self-host (although they have the option), and having community-hosted instances allows people to pool their knowledge, skills, and reputation to get more convenient payments systems set up, and so on.
@fitheach

@noorul also, as I said, in a P2P marketplace the only rule is #CaveatEmptor, or "let the buyer (and the seller) beware". The black market in illegal drugs is a good example of what this looks like in practice. A federated marketplace is more like a shopping centre, where each seller puts their products in a particular shop, and buyers can get to know which shops can be relied on to have good quality products, reliable after-sales service etc.
@fitheach

@noorul can you go into some more detail on this? What is the nature of the business you are trying to run? What are you selling? Have you tried OpenBazaar or any of the other P2P marketplace apps?

> I dont find federation has any value added to Ecommerce as far I can think.

Just as an example, the #SilkRoad would have been much harder to shut down if it was a federation of sites, rather than single point-of-failure. For the same reasons, it would be more resilient in general.

@fitheach

@noorul @fitheach it's a good deal for the seller, they can make sure the money is in their account before they send the goods. But how do buyers protect themselves from dodgy sellers?

Look at all the money the that #Phamac, the #NZ government drug buying cartel, spends on drugs every year. Drug companies use the vast majority of that on manipulative marketing, and obscene profits. Only a tiny fraction covers the cost of manufacturing and distributing drugs, and researching new ones. In theory, that money could be spent directly on #OpenScience research, creating a knowledge #commons about patent-free, or "generic" medical treatment options.
https://cos.io/about/mission/

@RandomDamage according to the linked article, #SiouxsieWiles managed to raise $350,000 for her antibiotic research in little 'ol Aotearoa (NZ). But this isn't really the point. A number of studies have reported that companies with #DrugPatents spend the majority of their budget on marketing, not research. Yet those patents allow them to fleece millions of $ from public health budgets that could go directly to patent-free medical research.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/25/high-drug-prices-caused-by-us-patent-system.html

#OpenScience has a lot of the same challenges as #OpenHardware, a lot of the materials required are not purely digital and can't be costlessly copied. But imagine if you had to spend almost two months of working days writing an application to set up a new #FreeCode project on GH, and only about 20% of applicants were accepted! Surely we can do better than wasting 550 years of specialist time per funding round?

@noorul @fitheach I'm biased towards a federated model, where I can buy or sell on a trustworthy marketplace site that vets their members to make sure they're not scammers etc, and only federates with other trustworthy marketplaces.

@noorul @fitheach
#OpenBazaar is one #P2P marketplace app. Haven't tried it myself:
https://github.com/openbazaar

"A recent study of medical researchers in Australia found that it took them 38 working days on average to prepare an application to the National Health and Medical Research Council. For just one funding round, that was the equivalent of 550 working years of researchers’ time, costing 66 million Australian dollars in salary. The year of the study, only 21% of proposals were successful" - Siouxsie Wiles
https://thespinoff.co.nz/science/20-05-2017/why-is-an-antibiotic-chasing-scientist-going-cap-in-hand-to-the-crowd/

"The charges are not so much to pay for the hardware as to pay for the human time needed to develop a comprehensive website" - Jakob Nielsen
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/readers-comments-on-micropayments/

The same is true for developing software, and this is the most fundamental conceptual flaw of micropayments. Paying people a regular wage or salary for their work on developing digital resources requires regular, predictable income streams. Even if they worked, micropayment revenues would be inherently unpredictable and chaotic.

"Even as the Web grows in importance in the future, most people will probably access less than 100 non-free pages per day" - Jakob Neilsen
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/

This reminds me of the legendary (and maybe apocryphal) quote by #BillGates about nobody ever needing more than 64KB of RAM ;)

Totally agree with him about size limits for web pages though:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/size-limits-for-web-pages/

A lot of people in web development are starting to raise the alarm about web page bloat, in the same way people were about bloatware a decade or so ago. The move back to offering static websites where possible, and even user-friendly CMS that generate static sites, is very welcome IMHO.

"... security requirements are much smaller when handling payments on the order of one cent per transaction ..."
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/readers-comments-on-micropayments/

Jakob Neilson doesn't seem to have considered that you can take $1000 out of someone's account, by taking 100,000 lots of one cent. If anything, security becomes *more* important when dealing with small, automated payments.

Back in the late 90s, Jakob Neilson really drank the automated #micropayments kool-aid:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/

Like most proponents, he was bang on about the problems with a web funded by advertising, but failed to understand the reasons #ClayShirky has offered for why automated micropayments are not a viable solution, and never will be. Although low-friction *voluntary* payments (#BuskWare) or cross-site subscriptions (eg #Flattr 2.0) could be.
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/02/why-small-payments-wont-save-publishers/

Does anyone know anything about the Jin Hua Foundation? They describe themselves as:
"a network of innovative, multi-cultural professionals, and an organization that serves the communities of China with hope and love."
https://www.jhf-china.org/

Some useful advice on linking practice, and avoiding #LinkRot:
https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/internet/website-linking-best-practices-media-online-publishers/

It's aimed at journalists, but also useful for bloggers and anyone else who wants the text they put on the web to remain well-referenced as time passes.

Imagine a comms #UX, where I could choose a contact, choose a rough message length (say, short, medium, or long), and the software would give me an appropriate compose UI for that length of message, and poll the receiver's comms app to determine what protocol they prefer to receive each length of message on. Eg. I could set my app to tell senders I want to receive short messages by SMS, medium ones by #ActivityPub, and long ones by email.