<story><title>The &apos;Fuck You&apos; Pattern</title><url>https://cedwards.xyz/the-fuck-you-pattern/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nine_k</author><text>Go an and run a site that serves massive amounts of cat pictures for peanuts!&lt;p&gt;Well, yes, serving static HTML is easy. Serving images is kind of not hard either, because you have free unlimited traffic, don&amp;#x27;t you? Some hosting plans offer it. They just limit the egress bandwidth. So maybe you need a few more servers to cope with it, just like $50 a pop. You&amp;#x27;re not gonna need any CDN, people further away from your DC will just wait longer. Or run your servers from two regions, it just takes duplicating your collection of cat pictures, should be peanuts.&lt;p&gt;Then, you need to store these terabytes of cats. On rather fast disks because else the disks will be the bottleneck, and cats will load very slowly for some users. It would be terrible were something to happen to the collection, so you need some backup for peanuts, like some Backblaze, and maybe a second copy because Backblaze has no^W limited redundancy.&lt;p&gt;Then, well, you need to monitor all that and sometimes fix issues, because cloud infra is highly available but not highly reliable.&lt;p&gt;Then, where do the cat pictures come from? Allow anonymous uploads! Or register users and allow uploads.&lt;p&gt;Now analyze each picture so that it&amp;#x27;s an actual cat picture and not child porn or a warez archive. Resize them to match your standards. Yes, this is simple, just run a RNN that detects cats.&lt;p&gt;Then, curate the incoming pictures so that they are actually reasonably interesting. Just maybe hire a few people to do that for peanuts somewhere in Africa.&lt;p&gt;Ah yes, you want to also deduplicate images; run some image hashing algorithms; use maybe just one or two GPU instances to do that efficiently. And you gonna need a DB, a simple one, that will never need any administering or fixing, won&amp;#x27;t it?&lt;p&gt;Well, yes, now you can run that site for just several grand a month, making it your day job, because you&amp;#x27;re well-qualified to maintain every part of it. Enjoy the peanuts.</text></item><item><author>e12e</author><text>&amp;gt; You thought it was fair that a company spends millions in technical infrastructure and staffing so you can sit at home and spend your time looking at cats for free? No, they have your attention and they&amp;#x27;re going to connect you to organizations who will pay for it.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The infrastructure&amp;quot; to share cat pictures cost peanuts. It&amp;#x27;s the addictive dark patterns and montezation&amp;#x2F;tracking that costs millions. That&amp;#x27;s the irony.</text></item><item><author>andrewmcwatters</author><text>&amp;quot;Wow, fuck you. I just wanted to look at cats.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Well, fuck you, too. We&amp;#x27;re here to sell ads.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not about dark patterns, that&amp;#x27;s just a second-order effect. It was never about dark patterns.&lt;p&gt;This is the implied agreement. You understand it, or you don&amp;#x27;t. And if you don&amp;#x27;t, I guess you haven&amp;#x27;t been on the web in the past decade or something.&lt;p&gt;What? You thought it was fair that a company spends millions in technical infrastructure and staffing so you can sit at home and spend your time looking at cats for free? No, they have your attention and they&amp;#x27;re going to connect you to organizations who will pay for it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dylanwenzlau</author><text>Hi. I run imgflip.com, a fine purveyor of cat pictures, among others. It serves ~100TB of bandwidth and hundreds of millions of image views per month with total infrastructure cost below 5k per month. I believe Imgflip completely avoids dark patterns because I abhor them and strive to provide positive value to humanity, although I would love for you to share your opinions to the contrary. Imgflip is also 80% profit. It employs several of the techniques you mention, but efficiently, rather than bloated and inefficient like many companies. Curious to hear your take</text></comment>
<story><title>The &apos;Fuck You&apos; Pattern</title><url>https://cedwards.xyz/the-fuck-you-pattern/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nine_k</author><text>Go an and run a site that serves massive amounts of cat pictures for peanuts!&lt;p&gt;Well, yes, serving static HTML is easy. Serving images is kind of not hard either, because you have free unlimited traffic, don&amp;#x27;t you? Some hosting plans offer it. They just limit the egress bandwidth. So maybe you need a few more servers to cope with it, just like $50 a pop. You&amp;#x27;re not gonna need any CDN, people further away from your DC will just wait longer. Or run your servers from two regions, it just takes duplicating your collection of cat pictures, should be peanuts.&lt;p&gt;Then, you need to store these terabytes of cats. On rather fast disks because else the disks will be the bottleneck, and cats will load very slowly for some users. It would be terrible were something to happen to the collection, so you need some backup for peanuts, like some Backblaze, and maybe a second copy because Backblaze has no^W limited redundancy.&lt;p&gt;Then, well, you need to monitor all that and sometimes fix issues, because cloud infra is highly available but not highly reliable.&lt;p&gt;Then, where do the cat pictures come from? Allow anonymous uploads! Or register users and allow uploads.&lt;p&gt;Now analyze each picture so that it&amp;#x27;s an actual cat picture and not child porn or a warez archive. Resize them to match your standards. Yes, this is simple, just run a RNN that detects cats.&lt;p&gt;Then, curate the incoming pictures so that they are actually reasonably interesting. Just maybe hire a few people to do that for peanuts somewhere in Africa.&lt;p&gt;Ah yes, you want to also deduplicate images; run some image hashing algorithms; use maybe just one or two GPU instances to do that efficiently. And you gonna need a DB, a simple one, that will never need any administering or fixing, won&amp;#x27;t it?&lt;p&gt;Well, yes, now you can run that site for just several grand a month, making it your day job, because you&amp;#x27;re well-qualified to maintain every part of it. Enjoy the peanuts.</text></item><item><author>e12e</author><text>&amp;gt; You thought it was fair that a company spends millions in technical infrastructure and staffing so you can sit at home and spend your time looking at cats for free? No, they have your attention and they&amp;#x27;re going to connect you to organizations who will pay for it.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The infrastructure&amp;quot; to share cat pictures cost peanuts. It&amp;#x27;s the addictive dark patterns and montezation&amp;#x2F;tracking that costs millions. That&amp;#x27;s the irony.</text></item><item><author>andrewmcwatters</author><text>&amp;quot;Wow, fuck you. I just wanted to look at cats.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Well, fuck you, too. We&amp;#x27;re here to sell ads.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not about dark patterns, that&amp;#x27;s just a second-order effect. It was never about dark patterns.&lt;p&gt;This is the implied agreement. You understand it, or you don&amp;#x27;t. And if you don&amp;#x27;t, I guess you haven&amp;#x27;t been on the web in the past decade or something.&lt;p&gt;What? You thought it was fair that a company spends millions in technical infrastructure and staffing so you can sit at home and spend your time looking at cats for free? No, they have your attention and they&amp;#x27;re going to connect you to organizations who will pay for it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jehb</author><text>This sounds like a great case for a decentralized web infrastructure like Mastodon uses. Each cat server can be exactly as reliable as the owner feels like making it, and each user can choose a cat server based on their needs, and the whole thing is federated because it&amp;#x27;s based on open source and open standards.&lt;p&gt;p2p cats for teh win</text></comment>