rubergly

Came here to ask the same question. Really hope there are some good recommendations!

Which is your favorite? This is a great list, but hard to pick out the best from just reading all of these sites.

"Play Station"?

I assume they're aggregating similar terms, so is this just a case of choosing the wrong aggregate name? Google Trends reports "playstation" is MUCH more common than "play station" (looks like at least 10:1).

Looks great. I can only imagine that this is the first step towards allowing users to store their credit card information securely with Stripe and not have to pass it through every merchant site. I can't wait until the day that Stripe's ease of use for developers meets (and exceeds) Paypal's ease of use for customers.

Spending more time doing X is correlated with spending more time talking about X?

Spending more time talking about X is correlated with spending more time arguing about X?

Spending more time arguing is correlated with higher relationship conflict?

All completely obvious results, strung together with logical fallacies to conclude that video games are correlated with relationship conflict. Although I do have to give the article credit for not implying causation—wait, they do, never mind.

For example, I can assure you that: 1) men who cook more also talk about cooking more, 2) men who talk about cooking more (all other things, including amount talked about in other areas, equal) argue about cooking more, and 3) men who argue about cooking more (all other things, including levels of argument in other areas, equal) exhibit more physical aggression towards their partners. Using the exact same logic, I can conclude that cooking causes relationship abuse.

...how have they been granted a monopoly?

Stripe gets a lot of love here on HN, and it's almost universally praised as having no faults and being better than Paypal in every single way. And yet I never see anyone discuss the experience for users. I actually really like the ability to use Paypal on a site to pay without entering my credit card information to yet another source of potential hacking. If a site that allowed Paypal payments moved to Stripe, I would actually find that frustrating and inconvenient. Developers seem quick to praise Stripe as perfect because it does seem to be close to that in the facet they deal with (on the development and merchant end); I understand that developers save a ton more time by switching to Stripe than users lose by having to enter their payment information, but your users really shouldn't have to be concerned with that detail. That being said, I do really like Stripe, but I worry that they'll grow complacent and never expand into the user-facing features because the huge success they've had in other aspects means no one is really pushing them to grow into those areas.

> Baskerville seems to be the king of fonts. What I did is I pushed and pulled at the data and threw nasty criteria at it. But it is clear in the data that Baskerville is different from the other fonts in terms of the response it is soliciting.

No amount of 'pushing' and 'pulling' at data can compensate for a poorly designed experiment. Georgia can't be used as both the control and a measure of how effective Georgia is—clearly fonts that stood out from the rest of the page would have a different effect than the one that looks exactly like the rest of the page. To give any of this credence, the sample should have stood alone, or the typeface of the surrounding page should have been randomized as well. What we're looking at here is "Are there certain typefaces that compel a belief that the sentences they are written in are true when contrasted with Georgia?".

More realistically, Visa was probably hoping that many consumers would, like the author, already have the option of and be forced into using their Visa card.

I agree that this seems, in addition to being extremely frustrating to almost all consumers, a silly marketing move, but I'm sure that Visa has run the numbers and has a sound business reason for doing this. Since, judging by mthoms's post, this seems to be a tradition at Olympics, my reasoning may be off, but I imagine that forcing all vendors to only accept Visa must cost a lot more than a sponsorship without that condition—and I really think that they wouldn't blindly jump into that without a sound reason.

There's the obvious trade-off of how much extra money Visa makes from users who have multiple cards and are forced into using Visa where they wouldn't have otherwise vs. money lost from Visa-owners who who are pissed off. But there are probably much more subtle, long-term effects. Maybe 75% of consumers present have a Visa, and 50% of those Visa-owners feel entitled and empowered by having the ability to use their card while others are frustrated; and then there's the trade-off of the 'entitled' Visa-owning 37.5% of consumers spending more with their Visa cards over the following months/years vs. the money lost due to the 25% of consumers who didn't have a Visa at the olympics and possibly hold a grudge and never own a Visa card because of the experience. Not to mention the fact that a similar sponsorship would likely be arranged if Visa decided not to do it; for all we know, MasterCard had a clear business incentive to do this but refrained because of moral reasons, but are we (consumers as a whole) discussing how valiant MasterCard is and how much they respect us as consumers or have we all forgotten a little bit about MasterCard because everyone's talking about Visa?

Again, I don't agree with this idea; I think it's bad and annoying. But I think it's silly and a bit ignorant for all of us (many of whom have no marketing experience, and most of whom don't on this scale) to assume we know more than the marketers making these decisions because we're annoyed.