I've seen this same method used on multiples apps I've requested an account deletion on. It's super frustrating. Most companies either don't respond back, say they deleted it when they merely disabled it, or they updated the account name to something else.
Disabling is understandable, because as a company you need a record of transactions or interactions such as TOS agreements for legal purposes. This requires keeping the records.
Changing object name data though is a terrible practice to implement this.
It's a bit more complicated than that. You have a period of time to delete the data. And you can keep enough info to know what data you've deleted, so that if you restore from backups you are able to re-delete without having to go through your backups and delete everything. Probably more that I'm forgetting.
You can keep contact info even after a GDPR deletion request, so long as you're not using it for business purposes.
Otherwise imagine how easy it would be to violate the deletion request if you're running a business and can't remember the names of the people you had deletion requests for. Their data could come up again through normal channels and you'd treat them no differently than another sales contact, thus violating GDPR.
Depends on type of data and other laws. If you are a paying customer you can assume your data will be stay in database, until it is no longer required for audits. GDPR allows for anything that is 'absolutely totally required for providing service'.
In most countries you are required to keep payment records for tax purposes for 5 years or more. As this is a business necessity this trumps the GDPR. And since most business involves some kind of payment it's likely most businesses will not actually fully delete the information they have on file for you.
The crazy thing is, for me, Facebook was actually useful for following news ever since Google Reader died. I spent quite a bit of time following many pages (people and businesses) in order to stay up to date on news, and I was incredibly happy at the results. I even went the extra effort to unfollow "Friends" that I didn't want to offend by unfriending.
Facebook simply screwed up everything. They removed custom lists a few months ago, so instead of chronological posts that I could navigate with lists, it's now back to a single algorithm-based feed. Many of the people I spent time unfollowing continue to blast me with notifications for literal shit posts that I can't disable. Did you notice that when you swipe a notification in the feed, there's no way to "Hide all notifications like this" or "Hide notifications for Events from xxxx"? It's unbelievable what Facebook is doing to ruin the experience. It's now impossible to disable specific categories of notifications or from people, without just unfriending them.
I moved back to Twitter and barely touch Facebook now. The product decisions are just plain frustrating. It's now no longer an app for following news.
Exactly. It feels very much like giant company syndrome. Some directors picked metrics like "frequency of fresh content on top of newsfeed," then that metric become a goal for some manager a few levels down, and when metrics become goals, they stop being good metrics. Nobody with the power to stop it would have been focused on "average value of content item," and everybody else had a motivation to get whatever content their group was in charge of some visibility, so it's more or less inevitable that it'd all go to shit.
I still use it as a news feed: even with no sorted posts and all the weakness you pointed out, i found no other aggregator like FB. Notifications send no warning on my smartphone (i disabled them all), except the red dot inside the app: i click once in a while, just to "cleanse" it.
I believe they know that social media are subjected to fashion just like everything else: the best way to keep on riding the way is peraphs be the one who kill the old (fb) while nurturing the new (Instagram/whatsapp). In this manner, the numbers are always growing - and that's the only metric they care about.
Does anyone know how the “premium” renewal prices are set and governed? I’m going through this right now with .app domains (also owned by Google). Apparently domains categorized as “premium” have a much higher yearly pricing, and how it’s priced is not specified anywhere on the registry website. I called a few registrars and they said that the premium pricing is set by the registry. What’s concerning is that the registrars admitted that there really isn’t anything stopping the registry from increasing the premium pricing at will.
Anyone have anymore info about this? Seems concerning that a registry has no restrictions on what they can do with pricing after an individual has invested into an expensive domain.
AFAIU, the ICANN New gTLD registry agreement means you can't have "premium" prices for renewals:
"Registry Operator must have uniform pricing for renewals of domain name registrations (“Renewal Pricing”). For the purposes of determining Renewal Pricing, the price for each domain registration renewal must be identical to the price of all other domain name registration renewals in place at the time of such renewal, and such price must take into account universal application of any refunds, rebates, discounts, product tying or other programs in place at the time of renewal."
Hmm, this definitely isn't the case for .app. There are numerous tiers of pricing as of right now. Google categorized specific names as "Premium", which you can see when searching for a lot of .app domains. These Premium domains vary in both initial purchase price AND the yearly renewal. One of my examples is in this thread. Purchase price was around $1000, yearly renewal is $280. Other names are even higher...
Ah, yes, the (c) clause says they can charge you more if you agreed to it "at the time of the initial registration", but not after you have invested in the domain.
But I suggest people read the whole article themselves, I have no industry expertise.
Premium names are common across the domain industry. Different registries handle them differently (some have an up-front cost whereas others like us use annually recurring), but the registrar you're using should be making it very clear what costs you're signing up for during the registration flow.
Are you saying the registry can arbitrarily change the .app domain renewal price without control, or that they can charge a different renewal price for different .app domains?
I've experienced weird price fluctuations with .io domain renewals in the past, but haven't owned one in a few years.
According to registrars, yes. So for example, let's say I paid $1000 for a premium .app last year when they were released. Renewal price is marked for something like $280/yr, which I didn't expect, because I thought the premium pricing was an initial purchase price only. I thought the renewal price was standard .app renewal rates.
When I called to clarify with a few registrars, they said that this premium price ($280) is specified by the registry (Google), and that there's no guarantee that pricing will stay at $280. I used a hypothetical, and asked them if it were possible for Google to raise the price to something like $1000/yr or $10k/yr, and they confirmed that there is technically nothing stopping the registry from doing so.
What registrar did you use? They should have made it very clear during the checkout flow what the annually recurring charge was. Can you try it again now with persona.app (another premium) and post a screenshot of what exactly they're displaying?
Yikes! My one was and still is $63.70/year. I wonder what makes a domain "premium" anyway, and what makes it more or less premium? Never even seen a live .app domain anyway so that sort of makes them not premium at all.
One criteria I've seen used to price domains as "premium" is shorter names and popular dictionary words. Not sure if this is consistent across registrars, but I would think "premium-ness" is established at the registry level.
It's unclear to me if premium-ness is a function of time, and/or if there's an objective formulaic criteria here.
I'm unsure how it is determined but when I asked my .app registrar they said it should be $120/year for each renewal, which was less than I paid to register it. Guess I'll find out.
I believe in the original .app launch thread on HN they stated that premium domain pricing was based on machine learning. So...who knows.
Similar experience, I hate to say it. Instacart's support has been pretty poor as well. If your delivery person gets an item wrong or delivers expired goods, good luck trying to get a refund because you'll be presented with a "you can return it yourself". Something go wrong with an alcoholic order? It's even worse because alcohol sales are non-refundable. I've had orders where the delivery person brought the wrong item and Instacart just ghosted me on my support emails and tweets until eventually they said my order was done too long ago to resolve.
So I love CSS Grid very much, but have found myself still wanting/needing masonry-style "Pinterest" layouts, which I haven't been able to do without JavaScript. I've seen many of the CSS column and flexbox hacks, but nothing quite nails it.
'Muuri' [0] is a masonry style library that looks promising (I haven't had time to dig deep though). It does however build on some js libraries but claims backward compability to IE9+. Maybe something for your needs (if js is unavoidable anyway)
CSS grid can do this! Sure not as freedom as a JS implementation but its good enough in 95% of scenarios in my experience! https://codepen.io/balazs_sziklai/pen/mOwoLg (not my code - just one of the examples on codepen)
Sorry I just linked to the first one that looked right as I was on the move. Flexible height is definitely possible as we're using it that in prod. Here's another examplei found with working flexible height :)
Until Houdini is available everywhere so that you can hook into the CSS engine and provide your own custom layout managers, I think masonry layouts will always require some JS. Using CSS grids might make the code simpler though.
PS I think Smashing Magazine have an overview of Houdini with a masonry layout as an example...
Would love to hear from others who run groups/events on Meetup and/or Eventbrite. I used to love Meetup, but the interest has been dwindling and the pricing for Meetup is very odd. You can't run a multi-city Meetup from a single account, which makes it very difficult to expand your Meetup without greatly increasing your costs. Meetup then came out with https://www.meetup.com/pro in order to help you wrangle your cluster of fragmented accounts all over the world. Between Eventbrite, Facebook Events, and Facebook's direct integration to Eventbrite ticketing, I'm not sure I see the point in using Meetup at all anymore.
> I'm not sure I see the point in using Meetup at all anymore.
Just like any social platform, I think the advantage of using Meetup is that you'll get to a different audience than Facebook. In my case I've found the audience for Meetup to be smaller (i.e. far fewer RSVPs) but much more engaged, perhaps as a byproduct of the sheer volume of things on Facebook making it harder for yours to stand out. The breakdown of where attendees come from is roughly 30/50/20 Meetup/FB/Email, and the incremental time for me to post in all these places is very small.
The pricing is, as you say, odd, and I too have run into the frustration of expanding a single group to a neighboring city without wanting to drastically increase costs.
Meetup for me is 2 things. Professional development (programming groups) and social events (for me board gaming, science talks, and history walks). Its a way of learning things and meeting people you might not normally.
I think interest has been declining a bit, more "flakes" (sign up don't show) . The photo meets-ups I used to go to have shuttered, some of the programming ones are meeting more infrequently. The Social and board game meets-ups seem to be going ok. My partner is an organizer of a social group just pays the yearly fee to keep the group free.
Though in the past 10 years honestly participation ebs and flows. One organizer of "nerd fun boston" ran an event a couple events a week for a couple of years. He got a good group of regulars going to science lectures and history talks/walks around boston (he met his wife though the group). That group still hangs out occasionally, though more "virtually" through a Facebook group now, meet up doesn't do the social network as well I guess...
The site update recently looks nice, but seems not to have made it more functional.
I encourage people to go to meets-ups. Its nice to meet new people and get out of your social bubble. We meet mostly really nice people people going to these events.
Bingo. I also run a small Meetup with ~50/Meetup. WeWork (among other coworking spaces) have welcomed my Meetup, for free. Meetups commonly bring in new customers and free drinks/pizza that are then promoted to customers as in-house food, entertainment, and learning. It's a win-win-win.
But they are for economies of scale. Product like UberPool, LyftLine, and UberEats were born from it. The business gets more efficient, and as the network keeps evolving it’ll open up new business opportunities that’ll drive prices down.
It's still a grab for market share before the race to the bottom is finished and hopefully they've iterated to autonomous drivers, until then both companies are loss leaders with no profit visible on the horizon.
