When Ford motors started cars already existed, when Facebook started social networks already existed, when Google started search engines already existed, etc.

In my opinion, getting demotivated for not being the first or being “the one” that came up with the idea prevents way too many people from starting their own thing.

In the end, execution and adoption are what really matters. In general is better to copy something and improve on it than trying to invent something completely new.

Not having a universal-nation-wide identification system only makes it worse for everyone.

Maybe they are trying, but also maybe they are trying to have their cake and eat it too.

What I mean is that very likely the proper way to fix things would financially hurt FB, which seems it’s something they really don’t want to do.

At the same time that these companies don’t do anything about spam calls, they formed a consortium to push something called A2P-10DLC on services like Twilio, to force smaller businesses to pay more money for the privilege of texting their own customers. They say it’s for protecting the end users from spam, but clearly they don’t really care about that, instead they realized they were not getting a big enough piece of the pie of texting services and want to get more.

My number is in the federal do not call list. I used to manually block every single number from spam calls, but now I gave up.

I’ll just never answer a call unless it’s from a known number and I’m expecting it. Otherwise I’ll just return it later if it’s important enough.

My guess is that phone network operators don’t care because they haven’t figured out a way to make money blocking these calls.

At the same time, the same carriers are going out of their way to block text messages from businesses that legitimately use services like Twilio to communicate with their users/customers. Why? Because the alternative for these businesses is to pay about $3k setup fee + $3k/quarter to get a shortcode for the privilege of texting the carriers customers - the same customers the carriers don’t care about protecting from spam phone calls.

About the blacklist, I don’t know exactly how it works, who specifically has access to it or who can add entries to it, but I know it exists, I know people who have been affected by it, know people who have been told explicitly about it and know that at least some partners have access to it.

Not sure what will land you there, but I know they have it and use it.

From what I understand, they put a microphone next to the speaker to measure your ear’s response to sound. Based on that, a companion software builds a personalized sound profile, which then allows the headphones to auto-equalize the sound to the specifics of your ears.

Do they make a big difference? Are they worth it? How do they compare to other headphones?

0: https://www.nuraphone.com/

Of course, or some other mechanism.

> In additon there are thousands of elected officials across the country. If we need everyone to abandon/destroy their non-official form of income, nobody will join politics. It is easy to judge from that sidelines.

So you are saying that politics is inherently corrupt and that if you take away the appeal of corruption then no one will participate?

I was wondering if the person I was replying to had any insights on that, given they were suggesting in app purchases as an alternative to Google/FB ads. Maybe they were suggesting in app purchases as an alternative to Google adsense? Which wouldn’t apply to my use case.

Unfortunately I feel like 90%+ of my target audience uses Google for search and at least one of FBs properties. It’s hard not to want to advertise on those platforms.

What would you recommend as a good alternative to google (and Facebook) ads?

An issue with this line of thought is that you think that they could one day flip a switch and just like that stop expanding or acquiring new customers.

Two problems with that are: 1) most likely if they stop growing, they start shrinking - it’s not like they are the only ones out there doing what they do, and 2) a lot of their marketing and expansion expenses (as corroborated by the sibling comment) don’t go towards acquiring new customers, but rather new drivers, which given their turn over, they can’t stop putting money into.

So basically if they stop spending money on advertising and expansion, they will loose all their drivers and slowly churn customers as well.

Hence, it doesn’t matter if they could technically be profitable without advertising and expansion, because then their business becomes unviable.