Taking off the pedals and training wheels of bikes and selling them to kids.
Wish I thought of that
Getting people to pay for digital media in the era of mass piracy (Spotify, Deezer, Netflix)
Starting a taxi company by
ignoringfrauding all the regulation related to taxi operation, ( Uber)Tons of pseudo science like energy therapy which are not much different from straight up witchcraft.
A thought also for real estate developer who buy land in high-flood-risk area, and still manage to sell the houses, these ones also should be in jail
The first one is pretty much down to, as Gabe Newell puts it, “piracy is a service problem”. Spotify came along and (initially) provided a much better service compared to pirating your music at the time. Once they created the market segment, competitors started their own streaming subscriptions. I’d also say the Google music “upload 50,000 tracks for free” got a lot of former pirates to jump.
Now the services are going through the same enshittification that most popular online services seem to be going through, we can see piracy increasing again. Someone will notice and fill the gap in providing a good service again at some point and the pendulum will swing once more
Linktree. It’s just links on a page. How do you get people to pay a monthly subscription for that?
Folks literally have no conept anymore that you can just slap HTML on a page. & with the advent of needing TLS, it starts to become more technical than a lot of folks want to bother learning & maintain versus the days of raw FTP uploads.
Yeah but a basic Wordpress.com site could do exactly the same thing for free. Or for super cheap if you want your own domain.
There’s also a jillion places to host static sites with less complexity of the code albeit more complexity to get started for many non-developers. The thing is there was a time when high schools everywhere were teaching basic HTML so you could be a part of this new internet thing, but now folks don’t think they can have their own chunk anymore separate from the corporations. You still can but the knowledge seems lost & certain technically hurdles like TLS which I mentioned make it just one step more difficult.
The original SMS version of Twitter.
Later, the name hashtags, in American English this symbol #️⃣ was
alwaysbest known as the pound key. It was also known as an Octothorpe.Actually I still don’t understand why anyone wants to use Twitter.
I don’t get why people use Twitter as a social media platform, but the format is/was useful when you just want to see what a certain person or organization has said recently. Ex. Local DOT updates or a game studio during a server outage.
That said, twitter has never figured out how to be self-sustaining, even before Musk implemented his air-tight nose dive strategy. And I’m not a fan of public orgs relying on a for-profit platform to communicate with the community. Especially when that platform retroactively decides you need to make an account and log in to view anything on it.
So it’s kinda the inverse of OP’s question: I get why it’s a useful idea even though it’s not actually working out.
Later, the name hashtags, in American English this symbol #️⃣ was
alwaysbest known as the pound key. It was also known as an Octothorpe.The first time I learned of its American naming was the classic “pound quake 3 arena” audio clip from the #quake3arena IRC channel.
“Uhhhhhh pound quake 3 arena”
“… What the hell was that?”
The software company I work for is killing all legacy on-prem software in 2025 and replacing it with a modular AWS based system of single-page websites. Many customers are old-school and hesitant about anything cloud-related, but it worked out beautifully so far. The shutdown hasn’t happened yet tho, so we’ll see how many lawsuits roll in when it does lol
Someone once made a mountain of cash selling pet rocks.
I have an official USB pet rock I got from a thinkgeek back in the day. Has a little box with air holes and everything.
Exactly as functional as the original pet rock, but has a short USB cable attached.
Roblox. If you were there in the beginning then you know how empty it was. Now, that’s mostly what my son plays to what just make the most money/things? I don’t get it myself (I’m old, lol).
They knew what they were doing. They knew that Minecraft needed a strong competitor in the video game market, and bet big on the ‘long game.’
Noticing that you are a parent of a person who plays Roblox, I feel obligated to share two investigative videos about Roblox Corporation practices or lack thereof, the exploitive practices they have to paying third-party in-game content “developers” (that are often kids/tweens/teens), and the issues Roblox have had with pedophiles/adults grooming young people/kidnappings.
The following videos are from People Make Games on Youtube.
Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers
Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper.
[Just so we are clear, I am not telling you how to parent your son or person. I am just informing you to the best of my ability, about the issues that have arisen on and off Roblox.]
Making a social network where people can send pictures to each other, then selling it to a big corporation for billions.
Business Model is data mining… But back then it was poorly understood or believed not possible by the mainstream…
Joke is on us 🤡
Netflix killing password sharing despite how easy piracy is. Massive increase in subscriptions
Piracy is not as nice for average people. It requires effort many won’t want to put in to discover what they want (and not in a shitty quality), and then managing and accessing that which you found takes a lot of effort as well to set up in a manner as easily accessed as a Netflix app.
Most people can’t/won’t bother wasting their time and effort. They’ll just pay for a service for the convenience. And before people interject with their anecdotes, convenience is subjective.
