Fixpoint

TradingView is this market data visualization website single-page crapplication that welcomed the new-money "crypto trader" demographic at the right time; I was seeing it all over by 2020 at the latest and it's evidently still going strong.

jfw: just tried the first 3 pages of google hits for 'btc price chart' in preferred browser, not a one of them worked, unsurprisingly enough. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BTC-USD/history/ at least shows a table of data
jfw: ...with some black magic to make it unselectable
jfw: 'coingecko' looked like an exact clone of coinmarketcap
jfw: how come nobody clones the working sites like bitcoincharts??

dorion: tradingview works for me in my ubuntu firefox.
jfw: well it "works" for me in pale moon w/ scripts, but godawful slow, why am I emulating flash player or something just in order to see a line plot.

dorion: they're not a high traffick site for their line plot, but for the other tools you can use with it.
jfw: good for them I guess?
jfw: but if I wanted advanced tools, poor performance would be even MORE repelling.

dorion: I don't get the poor performance here, dunno.
jfw: probably 'firefox quantum'.

My personal technical objections, significant as they may be within their domain, provide but one data point in the larger picture, so let's see if we can sketch that out a bit further.

The Platform is one of the more popular models of extraction engine going these days, and nicely explains many social phenomena posing as business, be it Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Bitcoin exchanges, dating sites, or your local supermarket chain. In contrast with simpler Ponzi schemes such as the Social Security Administration that pay out yesterday's "investors" with the blood of today's, the Platform brings together different types of participants, allowing it to shift the direction of the pumping over time and fine-tune the pressure levels. From a naive perspective it can appear as a legitimate business: building things, advancing technology, winning market share, creating convenience for customers and value for shareholders, sometimes with massive head counts and sky-high valuations. This comes by means of gobbling up and laying waste to the nice things that were previously around in its particular domain. Eventually it will run out of juice and either blow up or fizzle out, but not to worry, there will be a whole crop of bright new faces vying to be the successor, and the puppetmasters will be more than happy to welcome those into their diversified portfolios, providing the startup fuel for the whole cycle to repeat.

Let's illustrate the model as applied to TradingView and see how the shoe fits.

1. Build, buy, borrow, or steal some quality stuff and give it away, either for free or well below cost, attracting a large herd of greedy-algorithm based consumer sheep.⁽ⁱ⁾ Keep this going long enough to drive independent competitors out of business or deter them from getting started. The "stuff" here would be the data, indicators, charting and analytics software. Keep the access gated through your website; thanks to the last generation of Web 2.0 vermin, you can even offload significant computational costs onto the users, who "have to" buy into all the latest accelerated hardware and software anyway because everyone else is doing the same.

2. Start courting, in the words of Steve Ballmer: "developers, developers, developers, developers." Get them to donate their labor to enhancing your platform, by enticing them with access to your growing audience of increasingly captive users. You might even tease them with interoperability, but in time you'll withdraw this and have them fully dependent on you for their revenues.⁽ⁱⁱ⁾

3. Amp up the data collection efforts on the users. Demand account signup to use the service past a limited preview, require personal information and start building personalized profiles of what they're interested in.

4. Pivot to the true customers of the service: the ones who will pay hard cash for access to the eyeballs you've captured. I can't say how far along TradingView is on this part yet or who exactly they'll go for. But to hazard some guesses, it could be analysts pushing their content, companies pushing their stocks, or altcoins and "crypto projects" pushing their useless tokens. This pivot necessarily comes at the expense of the users, because now instead of showing them what they wanted to see, you show them some proportion of advertisements by whatever name. At first, you have an abundant resource of trusting user attention to hand out, and much like the users and developers before them, the early comers get outsized handouts of the candy and go tell all their friends about how great it is. Once they too are well captured, then you can start charging increasingly more for increasingly less - and less trusting - attention.

In the end, none of your targetted groups are happy, they'll be constantly looking for an escape and the maintenance costs of the cage will continue increasing. But as long as you're the only game in town, or at least the only one that everyone can agree on, most of the inmates won't have what it takes to leave, so you can enjoy the ride while it lasts!

1. I don't begrudge them the greedy algorithm, either; when you have an empty stomach and nothing to put in it, it's about the only choice you have. [^]
2. In 2020 I was at a "crypto world" conference with a Technical Analysis inclined audience. I gave a talk or two about JWRD's stuff, basics of Bitcoin and security, but the interest was more in this hot new technique for reading the tea leaves called "time at mode", which was fertile new ground because TradingView didn't yet have a widget for it. But it had a scripting language and API! I could code, right - couldn't I just code up a code for it? Well sure, after an investment in learning all those platform-specific details; would they like to pay for my time to do so? Of course they wouldn't, but hey, if I did it at my own risk then I'd get exposure through the platform, which I might somehow monetize, as long as I stuck with the platform and all the nonsense it would inevitably foist on me in the future, if it didn't simply steal my work outright. Needless to say, I didn't pursue it, and from what I hear, Time at Mode is out of fashion now too. [^]