I can't speak for anyone else, but the offer of a free trial made me bounce right off, despite my curiosity and the value such a product could potentially offer me. I want to know up front whether this is going to be useful to me before I sign up for anything. To that end, offering even a single no-strings-attached identification, even if the details are redacted, would go a long way towards conversion.
Creating features and fixing bugs based on Support feedback (Community Support or otherwise) may result in an amazing experience for the free tier, but not-as-good-as-it could be for your paid subscribers.
Wow, this really opened my eyes! I hadn’t thought about it from that perspective. hank you so much for helping me see that! I will completely remove subscription, change pricing model to credits, pay as you go.
Some startup business models and development processes don't work well if they collect massive amounts of free ephemeral users instead of a dedicated base when starting out.
Competition is important for maintaining a healthy marketplace. Any behavior that makes it harder for others to compete, reducing the amount of competition, is therefore bad. That's what anticompetitive means.
I don't think protecting trade secrets is sabotaging the competition though.
It's not nit-picking. A layman presented with this explanation might get the impression that a "problem" is being "solved", which implies there is some utility to the PoW algorithm, rather than energy being wasted for the sole purpose of proving that energy has been wasted. In fact, even the word "Work" in "Proof of Work" implies the same. Proof of Waste would be a much more apt description of what is actually happening.
Oh, get off it. He's not "pretending to disagree", merely providing further context for the anti-utility of the PoW algorithm. The point is that the colloquial understanding of "solving a problem" implies more utility than what is actually happening, which is equivalent to guessing a random number. The mere statement that a problem is being solved at all implies that useful work is being done, which is not the case and the parent comment is right to point that out.
> Oh, get off it. He's not "pretending to disagree", merely providing further context for the anti-utility of the PoW algorithm. The point is that the colloquial understanding of "solving a problem" implies more utility than what is actually happening, which is equivalent to guessing a random number. The mere statement that a problem is being solved at all implies that useful work is being done, which is not the case and the parent comment is right to point that out.
You're either trying to confuse others intentionally, or if I'm interpreting charitably, you are merely confused yourself. In neither case is this attitude warranted. You just re-explained that the crux of the issue is useful work vs non-useful work. This is exactly the same point that Josde explained. This point was contested by lottin. I don't understand why they would contest it, as they very clearly agree with that point (based on reading other messages they wrote in this thread). According to you, lottin is not "pretending to disagree", they are "merely providing further context". This is very obviously not true. Either you are lying on purpose or you are confused, maybe you didn't read their message properly. Here it is again for you to read:
> It's worse than that, they're aren't solving anything at all. They're taking part in a lottery, in which participants have to guess a number, and the winner gets to update the ledger. Nobody is solving complex mathematical problems.
Does that sound to you like "yes, I agree, and here is some further context"? Obviously not. That message is expressing strong disagreement, not further agreement.
> Obviously not. That message is expressing strong disagreement, not further agreement.
Not obvious to me. But sure, I'm confused all right. Confused at how lottin's comment could be interpreted as contesting Josde's, when it reads as a reinforcing restatement to me. Confused at your hostility and accusations of misinformation.
Perhaps you're confused about how online conversations work? Sometimes people reply with a restatement when they feel the original doesn't go quite far enough. I mean, lottin's comment was arguably ineloquent, but he wasn't "muddying the waters". Do you perhaps have some expectation that the act of replying implies disagreement? Is it the strongly negative tone that gave you that impression? It certainly isn't the content, since you correctly interpreted my own restatement of lottin's comment as agreement.
I'm not trying to confuse others, I'm trying to enlighten you, specifically, about what happened here so that you might reconsider next time before jumping on someone for something they didn't say.
Ok, you and one other person said that lottin's comment doesn't read as disagreement, so maybe you're right and I'm the one reading it incorrectly. I'll take your feedback. Seems like I might be in the wrong here.
Why are none of the examples you mention remotely close to being indie games? Those are clearly not what a Long Tail business model looks like in video games. That Infinity Blade novella was written by Brandon Sanderson.
My goal was to illustrate the arc, from indie bootstrap to AAA success. I don’t recall Chair as a AAA studio in 2010. The development of PUBG, which began as a mod of another game, might be a better example.
I did messed up here by mixing concepts from “Free” in with the concepts from “Long Tail”. I went back and re-read the Long Tail article from WIRED and edited my patent comment above to correct that error.
Bit late to the party, but I can shed some light on this. Since a real camera has the shutter open for some duration, any moving light will smear across the sensor. If you similarly "smear" a path traced object by stochastically randomizing the position of the object while the path tracer is gathering samples for the frame, you get exact physically plausible motion blur without having discrete "ghosts" corresponding to sampled subframes.
