joepinetree

This episode conclusively proves the two timelines theory is wrong.

Maeve has been madam for less than a year. William and Logan interacted with Maeve as madam.

Edit: see my post below where I retract this.

I don't know, the only reason anyone has anything to complain about now is because Jim and A.Ron were willing to offer such a low price point to begin with.  It was too low.  Don't look at it as "charging me four times as much", look at it as "it was nice I was able to pay 1/5th of what I should be paying for so long, now its finally time to pay market value (if even that).
The foundation of your complaints rests on the bedrock of Bald Move's altruism.

I disagree. You cannot claim the market value is 50 or 60 bucks if the vast majority of the market is getting it for free.

This is either an academic point out something you haven't thought through. It reminds me of the old joke that an economist is someone who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. But instead of rehashing the same points again, i will just point out that it you think that is not how much bald move is worth to you, you can just donate how much you think it's worth. And if you think it's nothing, then you can always free ride and take a risk bald move fails.

See, the thing is.... my personal choice in that matter really won't have enough impact on baldmove's chances of survival. I'm just one average-income individual.

Hence the question (and the real topic of this thread): what would pursuade a larger percentage of listeners to convert to paying customers?

For that vast majority of listeners who haven't converted yet, the current offering they get af the price of zero is apparently all the value they need. Because even at the low hurdle of 12 dollar per year, they were not pursuaded to become club members.

Something needs to happen to sweeten the deal.

My point is that you fundamentally misunderstand the market landscape for media companies. Very few companies can successfully cater to the "cater to me or I'll free ride consumer."

Let's start out with the basics. Bald move provides a ton of content, and I would posit that the only way they could produce more hours of content is if they dedicated less time to each podcast. So the only way they could offer more content to subscribers is by offering less content to non subscribers. But in media no one is going to spend money on something without having tried it first.

Now, maybe you disagree with that, but let's go to the facts. Every single newspaper that tried to go paywall only for their articles has failed. The most common model for newspapers right now is the NY Times, where if you want to free ride you can essentially read all their articles by deleting cookies, but there are enough people who care about it to support it financially.

In radio, if you listen to NPR you can essentially free ride forever. They still survive due to donations, and if they were to say, move to sirius XM to avoid free riders they would probably fail.

And it is like that throughout the media landscape. Restricting access to your current content is the fastest way to become irrelevant. Don't believe me, find a podcast that is financially viable that follows your idea for a pay wall. What bald move is doing is what most grassroots podcasts are doing, except bald move cuts the patreon middle man.

Now, you may claim that it it not a matter of free riding, but a matter of the cost. At which point I go back to what I said: if you don't want to spend $48, you can donate the $12 and have access to most things. And people who won't even donate the $12 are people who would likely free ride anyways.

I am thinking, as has been said, we're seeing Dolores retracing the journey she originally took with William. That's why she's suddenly alone in the train with the nitro-coffin. Or maybe she's just "reliving" it as she remembers it?

I came here to post something like this. I haven't been convinced of the two timelines theory because of a bunch of inconsistencies that would appear. But if the William timeline is mostly a Dolores flashback (i.e., we are not seeing the william timeline as it actually happened, but as Dolores "remembers" it), that would make a lot of the problems go away. We know for a fact that the hosts are programmed to ignore a bunch of things, so that would explain the hosts looking like current ones and some of the other timeline issues.

He specifically said like Bill? Because yes that would obviously contradict that statement, but in that case the Ford/Bernard conversations and flashbacks contradict that statement as well, because they showed us far more advanced androids than Bill while Arnold was still around.

"Old bill here was always a good listener. He was the second host we ever built. Were you with us in those days, bernard, Or was that before your time?"

"Most were decommissioned before i was brought on, i'm afraid."

"They repeated themselves, broke down constantly. A simple handshake would give them away."


They are clearly talking about hosts like Bill.





 

I guess I assumed the "Old Bill" generation were pre-opening prototypes. I took Bernard's statement only to mean there were a few of these kicking around when he came on (not necesarily in-use in the park).

There are still some kicking around not in use, like Bill. That is not what they meant by decommissioned. Old Bill has been decommissioned.


Again, multiple characters at multiple points have commented on how unlike current hosts the original hosts were. Ford, man in black, etc. It could be that none of them are talking about the plain reading of what they said. But it would be ridiculous. There is nothing on the screen to suggest that when they are talking about old hosts being different and less lifelike they were talking about hosts that were used prior to release or away from the park.

Congrats on the 20m mark. Also, since you mentioned the wire plans on the podcast, if you ever decide to do it I am a sociology professor and frequently talk about the wire in my social problems class (even use a scene from it), and would be glad to talk about it.