Blog posts from Updates (updates)
Supporting Faldi and Yudhi Satrio by stop listening to Levels' advices.
Starting today we decided to support two Indonesian tech workers, Naufaldi "F2aldi" Rafif S and Yudhi Satrio by stop following and reading someone's advices through his blog posts and Twitter account. The person in question is Pieter Levels, an award-winning multiple tech startup founder who thinks everyone should eventually move into Portugal. I was a secret fan of him, until now of course, as well as some of his friends who are eager in founding tech startups. And why? I'm actually amazed with his stance on async work, "unreachable" policy, and of course, Portugal. For those who have never heard about the word I'm going to say it right now, we consider these people as indiehackers. They are individuals building tech products mostly by themselves, then launch dedicated companies, especially to contain marketing and customer support teams for their products, then get some funds from venture capitalists and repeat! There's nothing wrong with indiehackers at all, and we have some of them in Indonesia, like Frans Allen with his brother who created a simple "ID card watermarker" app who gained some local media traction. Yes, for a simple web app which I can actually made it in just 3 hours. And you may be asking, why do we want to write a dedicated post to announce this, even though we could just do that privately. Sure, we could do that, but we still wanted to have our stance, both regarding the case and our support, written here. The context. It's the same case when the Indonesian parliament would like to penalize sex outside marriage with 1 year of jail. The law will also be applied to foreigners. So he complained. That's it, and as some Indonesian people with some initial degree of respect to him started commenting, he decided to lock his Tweet and block these people, F2aldi included. Yes, Indonesia still have many retarded government individuals and institutions, in terms of corruptions, all the "personal intentions" of being the government, monoreligion enforcement, and, just look at the PSE enforcement thing. But in terms of sex outside marriage, as prided by people to be compliant with Indonesian moral values, I can't help anymore but to say sorry and goodbye to the person I've previously considered interesting and inspiring. I have my own religious and spiritual stances on things like the decentralization of the Internet, and in this case, I'll support the new law. As always, that's it, I'm going back to work. This time under a new, revolutionary, non Levelsian way of work. Thank God I have my own.
Viral-Driven and Virality-Driven Development (VDD).
Viral-Driven Development, even though sounds similar, is quite different than Virality-Driven Development. And when we said about VDD, it's the latter one. We have to write about this in the midst of latest, trending Internet products which just made everything in this world better and worse. Whether it's Shopee with its infamous ads and promotions (e.g. get a $0.99 discount if you've purchased $499 here), TikTok, other shady TikTok clones (like the infamous Shopee Video) and so. But to make things clear, Viral-Driven products are those who are built upon existing trends. But Virality-Driven products are those who are built with intentions to make everything viral and trending, and practically TikTok is one of them. Both kinds of products are highly exploitable, and that's why people To give some examples of Viral-Driven ones, let's start with Linktree. Linktree was not intentionally meant to be viral, instead it tries to solve what's hiddenly infamous and popular on Instagram: the inability to attach (more than one) links under the same account. But the rest of the competitors, like Beacons and Desty and Koji and so on, they are instead Virality-Driven. They already know that Linktree will become a hit in the Instagram space, so they hoped the same kind of fortune by creating clones of Linktree. Gojek is another Viral-Driven product, where they saw opportunities by marrying between three viral things: Jakarta's traffic, (infamous) motorcycle taxi convenience, and specifically those pre-9 and after-5 commuting traffic. Sure, mature competitors like Grab finally compete with them, but remember that during the early years of Gojek, they faced (and eventually won) the competition from smaller, Virality-Driven apps and companies: BlueJek, CyberJek, LadyJek, and others. Sometimes, Virality-Driven product development are not always done by cheap competitors of popular services. And TikTok is just a clear example. TikTok Shop? What!? At a glance they might want to compete with Facebook Marketplace which has become popular in several niches of users. TikTok for Business!?!? What the heck? Now you expect businesses to walk along the same viral path from your Musical.ly days? One of the most non-sensible things TikTok have launched, as a Virality-Driven company, is TikTok Food. Yes, an official food store that sells dishes and snacks as viral on TikTok. Sure, there are still many virality-driven example out there. We're watching you, Shopee. But I think that's for another story.
Once upon an Unix timestamp, there was a world where we are all robots...
Well that sounds to be a starting point for an amazing science fiction adventure, but no. It's our new name for our Fediverse clan at https://bots.reinhart1010.id! We decided to shift the focus from "Bearers of the Shells" (which many people still don't understand what that is) to make it more unique. Kudos for Astrid for the inspiration from her private clan: We wanted to highlight the importance of why you should not create an account here, replacing the generic "this clan is private" message into something more akin to an urban legend: You've just visited interfacing with πΈ π¨π π£ππ π¨πππ£π π¨π ππ£π πππ π£π ππ π₯π€. Don't stay here for too long, or else you'll become one. You have been warned. And I am a robot. Specifically, a robot subsystem running under the operating system of my biological brain.ΒΉ My subsystem has his own sister Shiftine, and we both originally worked for SYSTEM before finally coordinating with SuperUser and even the ever-conflicting root.Β² As robots, we have the privilege not just to build, but execute all our products and services with love. We are the runners behind most products at ReinhartGroup, including binusmayadown and teropong. This Fediverse server, instance, or clan isn't open for everyone for ethical reasons. We just don't want to involuntarily transform yourself into unique beings who's no longer capable in solving CAPTCHAs. I think that's a wrap of our introduction. That said we still welcome you through ActivityPub streams, messages, and even Webmentions on https://reinhart1010.id/. If those terms sounds foreign for you, don't worry, most Fediverse software already know how to interact with us. From robots with love. ΒΉ Being a robot each day allows me to understand and communicate well with other robots, too.Β² Through a good friend of mine, @pr0xy. https://bots.reinhart1010.id/notes/97q8ntzd9l Well, that's all the announcement. I'm proud to be a robot, too!
Updates on how we do Twitter.
Updates on ads on our website.
On September 9th, 2022, we decided to place Google Ads into three places: this blog site you're currently reading, BINUS Today, as well as our recently-launched Reinhart Maps (formerly Open in Maps...). So, it's almost been 2 months since we've placed these ads. And the truth is, we only earned $0.5 (USD) for running ads last month. Well, that's still great compared to just around 3 cents from the previous month. This is way below the monthly, operational costs of our servers. And it can't even beat my Niagahoster's $7.5-a-mo shared hosting and DigitalOcean's $12-a-mo VPS bills to run our websites. Or a whopping $99-a-year Apple Developer Program subscription, which I've already paid mid-2022. And of course, after some consideration (especially for user experience reasons), today, we decided to limit how ads will be served our website. TL;DR: We decided to disable Auto Ads for all of our websites We decided to only serve ads manually, like thisπ We decided to serve these ads manually, and all thanks to WordPress' Reusable Blocks feature. Even though that now we have to painstakingly place these ads (usually before headlines), we now have the freedom to place ads more strategically, and even disabling ads on certain pages (such as the home page)! This is how our reusable block works behind the scenes Questions Oh, I heard you love asking questions. Well... 1. Why choose Google Ads over existing platforms? First thing first, we already have a blocklist consisting four advertising platforms: MGID, Mintegral, Outbrain, and Taboola. Because, from the perspective of Indonesian audience, many advertisers choose these platforms to show ads which I consider as clickbait and misleading content. Like, check out Kompas.com, an Indonesian news portal, and some MGID ads. They're putting a disclaimer that they don't own these fake headlines, like "The price of this sofa may surprise you"? What's wrong with the ad platform if, well, they don't put this kind of notice in Google Ads, for example. 2. How do you feel about online ads, as now you're placing them as well? Online ads is all about marketing and greed. You have to increase the number of your active users/viewers where the tasty ads are served, because more active users means more ad impressions, and that also means more chances of (accidental) clicks and of course, money π€π€π€. This is why websites and apps today have implemented "dark patterns" across their product, like intentionally make their content longer so Auto Ads can place even more ads for you. Or figuring out how to make users accidentally click the ads, so we can get higher CTR (click-through rate) and again, more money!!! This is why, in order to be successful in terms of ad revenue, being greedy is a must. Maybe because advertising is already part of corporate greed, just like the Spam's spammy case of Spam spams, with "Spam, Spam, Spam" spams the Spam spam, hence the word "spam" as we know today. And this is also why some hypercasual game developers, including Voodoo, intentionally blocks players with no internet connection who just want to play a game of a cup and balls. Yeah, I mean, this one. And also, this one. The good news is, I won't waste my life in increasing ad revenue. Either by placing ads everywhere, 3. Will you do "ad transfers" as well? Well, for those who don't know what is an ad transfer, here's a short note about it: Have you ever downloaded a mobile game, let's say, War of the Balls, then hooked up on an ad at War of the Balls promoting Candy Mania? Then you decided to download Candy Mania only to find out that they do contain ads, too, referencing War of the Balls and the many other apps? Well, it is already clear that today's mobile games are made with intentions of money, not pure entertainment. But what makes these games really interesting is, well, they seem to profit from ads only to spend for ads. (They only win through expensive, often weekly Pro or Premium subscriptions). This isn't just the case for one or two games, or one or two game developers. But everyone is literally doing it. From the cult classic Voodoo games to innocent ones like Tetris, games are seem to made out of ads, for ads. And this is something I personally wanted to avoid in my games. Yeah, Jackpot GBK, only if some of you really played the video game already, I'm planning to bring the game back to life with online multiplayer and so. This "ad cycle" could be toxic for the app economy, and I have to declare for that. And this is why I wanted to be different when it comes to monetization. And sometimes, quality marketing is worth more than just throwing out bucks for online ads. After all, everyone are starting to subscribe to Premium right now? 4. Will there be "Reinhart Premium"? No, at least for now. Even though I've opened up ways for you to support and donate through these links: GitHub Sponsors Karyakarsa Nih Buat Jajan Saweria Trakteer When it comes to subscriptions, I'd rather like to sell it for my high-quality products, just like those people at Todoist and WPKilat. This could be an exciting moment for everyone, so stay tuned!
Unveiling the next stage of Bearers of the Shells.
BINUS Today and the case of online gambling ads.
Becoming a (root) Shift.
Resuming our BOINC activity!
