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Markets for widgets generally work pretty well. The consumer pays the distributor and the distributor pays the producer. When consumer preferences change, the s

Markets for widgets generally work pretty well. The consumer pays the distributor and the distributor pays the producer. When consumer preferences change, the supply chain produces more or less widgets with higher or lower quality. But markets for information are leaky. Consumers can get information without paying the distributor. Many consumers can't tell the difference between high-quality information and information that's deceptive or manipulative. Most consumers aren't willing to pay for high-quality information. So markets for information don't work as well as markets for widgets. Producers don't get paid, the supply of quality information is diminished, and we are all poorer as a result. Now the producers want to form a cartel to negotiate with distributors as a bloc. But this only increases the cost of content to the distributor. A cartel doesn't fix the root cause. Consumers still don't want to pay. Increasing the cost without changing consumers' willingness to pay will only make a bad situation even worse. At a higher cost, even less high-quality information will be demanded, so even less will be produced. Producers will shrink further into irrelevance, low-quality information will dominate, and we'll all be even poorer. When consumers aren't willing to pay, markets don't work well. It's unlikely consumers will suddenly become willing to pay for information they can get for free, so feeds will fill up with even more low-quality, deceptive and manipulative information. Maybe markets just aren't the right mechanism. Since the public needs high-quality information now more than ever, maybe we need to examine non-market methods to produce it.

diafygi 9y ago
What are examples of situations in other industries where producers were able to change consumers' willingness to pay?
- phreeza 9y ago
  AFAIK Tesla Superchargers used to be free, but are no longer?
- panarky 9y ago
  Television used to be free, supported by 8 minutes of ads per hour. Then cable companies let us pay $12 per month for ad-free TV. Today we pay $60 per month for basic cable plus 16 minutes of ads per hour.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Taxes? Socialized retirement and healthcare? In this case, lots of people generally lack the required foresight to manage these themselves, but they also won't fight hard if you make the thing opt-out.
morley 9y ago
Are there any examples of (good) non-market-produced information? The only such example I can think of is state-owned media, and I can't think of any situation where that has been or would be a good thing.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  The Guardian is owned by a charitable foundation.
- panarky 9y ago
  ProPublica is a non-profit funded by philanthropy. They've won four Pulitzer Prizes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPublica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPublica National Public Radio in the US gets the vast majority of its funding from individual donors along with some corporate sponsorship. Government funding is less than 15%. http://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances http://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances Recently Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales founded WikiTribune, an experiment in crowdfunded professional journalism. https://www.wikitribune.com/ https://www.wikitribune.com/
- CamperBob2 9y ago
  I think a lot of people would cite the BBC in answer to your point. But that sort of media outlet only works as long as the government isn't actively hostile to the interests of the majority of its citizens. Both the US and UK are arguably heading in that direction, or already there, depending on whom you ask.
TheGirondin 9y ago
I would gladly subscribe to an NPR-caliber newspaper that doesn't have pushing liberal narratives as a #1 priority. Just like Fox is #1 because it's the only not-liberal media outlet, a real not-liberal newspaper would have a huge following because of the lack of alternatives.
- dalbasal 9y ago
  This is somewhat of a non sequitur, if you mean to imply that this can be aggregated up into a market for such a publication. People often interject with an "I would pay for xyz" in discussions like this. But in practice, people pay for the kinds of magazines you see on bookshelves. Journalists would love to (in principle) make higher quality stuff, but they get drawn into the click-baity, partisan flamewars because that's what actually sells papers (or eyeballs or whatever).
- bilbo0s 9y ago
  This comment really does point to a couple of fundamental issues that would have to be overcome with any proposed solution. The first is that people often say they are willing to pay for a certain thing, but are generally not willing to do so in fact. The second is that people are not willing to pay for just any content. (TheGirondin, as an example, is willing to pay only for content that he/she construes to be NON-liberal.) The first problem is that people say they are willing to pay for certain things, but are not willing to do so in fact. So even if you spend money producing NON-liberal content, you may, in a content marketplace with Facebook and Google, find few buyers who were ACTUALLY willing to give you money for it. This issue in particular, bedevils many industries. It's not at all unique to content industries, and even so, few people have found consistently workable solutions to address it. The second issue is the fact that you would have to begin to produce content for sub-cultures. TheGirondin will only pay for content he/she construes to be NON-liberal. Others will be willing to pay only for content that they construe to be NON-conservative. Still others will want content they construe to be NON-Christian. And then some will want content they construe to be NON-Islamic. For some the content will need to be NON-Mexican. And some will want the content to be NON-Black. Etc etc etc. We shouldn't underestimate the costs required to produce such content, nor the limited size of the audience of people who would ACTUALLY pay for such content. It is at once extraordinarily expensive for you to produce such content, and at the same time, extraordinarily cheap for Google and Facebook to distribute that expensive content for free anyway. In some of the worst cases, it's almost Quixotic to even try. (Consider... what sports content could you produce without black people? You could certainly create sports leagues that disallow blacks. That would not be the issue. However, assuming you did spend all the money to do so... you run into the second problem... Who would pay you for that content with the regular sports leagues around competing with you?)
dalbasal 9y ago
I'm fairly convinced by the argument that people never really paid for information/content a la (1), they paid for packaging. The problem in the digital age is that paywalls make the product worse. You can't link to it from HN or talk about it on whatsapp. Anyway, news has been funded by advertising since news for a while. What broke that model was when the internet made paper packaging irrelevant. This means that the "market" dynamics have always been weird. The news was a way of selling a stack of paper that had used car inserts hidden in it. Anyway, I don't think there are any obvious fixes. I do think the giant exaggerators need to admit that they're creating markets for information and consciously look to create better ones. For example, Google created a crap marketplace for content on youtube. It's encouraging spam. They should ditch it and start again, with the explicit goal of encouraging good content. That means they need to trust themselves to define good (1) http://www.paulgraham.com/publishing.html http://www.paulgraham.com/publishing.html

diafygi 9y ago

What are examples of situations in other industries where producers were able to change consumers' willingness to pay?

phreeza 9y ago
AFAIK Tesla Superchargers used to be free, but are no longer?
panarky 9y ago
Television used to be free, supported by 8 minutes of ads per hour. Then cable companies let us pay $12 per month for ad-free TV. Today we pay $60 per month for basic cable plus 16 minutes of ads per hour.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
Taxes? Socialized retirement and healthcare? In this case, lots of people generally lack the required foresight to manage these themselves, but they also won't fight hard if you make the thing opt-out.

morley 9y ago

Are there any examples of (good) non-market-produced information? The only such example I can think of is state-owned media, and I can't think of any situation where that has been or would be a good thing.

greglindahl 9y ago
The Guardian is owned by a charitable foundation.
panarky 9y ago
ProPublica is a non-profit funded by philanthropy. They've won four Pulitzer Prizes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPublica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPublica National Public Radio in the US gets the vast majority of its funding from individual donors along with some corporate sponsorship. Government funding is less than 15%. http://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances http://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances Recently Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales founded WikiTribune, an experiment in crowdfunded professional journalism. https://www.wikitribune.com/ https://www.wikitribune.com/
CamperBob2 9y ago
I think a lot of people would cite the BBC in answer to your point. But that sort of media outlet only works as long as the government isn't actively hostile to the interests of the majority of its citizens. Both the US and UK are arguably heading in that direction, or already there, depending on whom you ask.

TheGirondin 9y ago

I would gladly subscribe to an NPR-caliber newspaper that doesn't have pushing liberal narratives as a #1 priority. Just like Fox is #1 because it's the only not-liberal media outlet, a real not-liberal newspaper would have a huge following because of the lack of alternatives.

dalbasal 9y ago
This is somewhat of a non sequitur, if you mean to imply that this can be aggregated up into a market for such a publication. People often interject with an "I would pay for xyz" in discussions like this. But in practice, people pay for the kinds of magazines you see on bookshelves. Journalists would love to (in principle) make higher quality stuff, but they get drawn into the click-baity, partisan flamewars because that's what actually sells papers (or eyeballs or whatever).
bilbo0s 9y ago
This comment really does point to a couple of fundamental issues that would have to be overcome with any proposed solution. The first is that people often say they are willing to pay for a certain thing, but are generally not willing to do so in fact. The second is that people are not willing to pay for just any content. (TheGirondin, as an example, is willing to pay only for content that he/she construes to be NON-liberal.) The first problem is that people say they are willing to pay for certain things, but are not willing to do so in fact. So even if you spend money producing NON-liberal content, you may, in a content marketplace with Facebook and Google, find few buyers who were ACTUALLY willing to give you money for it. This issue in particular, bedevils many industries. It's not at all unique to content industries, and even so, few people have found consistently workable solutions to address it. The second issue is the fact that you would have to begin to produce content for sub-cultures. TheGirondin will only pay for content he/she construes to be NON-liberal. Others will be willing to pay only for content that they construe to be NON-conservative. Still others will want content they construe to be NON-Christian. And then some will want content they construe to be NON-Islamic. For some the content will need to be NON-Mexican. And some will want the content to be NON-Black. Etc etc etc. We shouldn't underestimate the costs required to produce such content, nor the limited size of the audience of people who would ACTUALLY pay for such content. It is at once extraordinarily expensive for you to produce such content, and at the same time, extraordinarily cheap for Google and Facebook to distribute that expensive content for free anyway. In some of the worst cases, it's almost Quixotic to even try. (Consider... what sports content could you produce without black people? You could certainly create sports leagues that disallow blacks. That would not be the issue. However, assuming you did spend all the money to do so... you run into the second problem... Who would pay you for that content with the regular sports leagues around competing with you?)

dalbasal 9y ago

I'm fairly convinced by the argument that people never really paid for information/content a la (1), they paid for packaging. The problem in the digital age is that paywalls make the product worse. You can't link to it from HN or talk about it on whatsapp. Anyway, news has been funded by advertising since news for a while. What broke that model was when the internet made paper packaging irrelevant. This means that the "market" dynamics have always been weird. The news was a way of selling a stack of paper that had used car inserts hidden in it. Anyway, I don't think there are any obvious fixes. I do think the giant exaggerators need to admit that they're creating markets for information and consciously look to create better ones. For example, Google created a crap marketplace for content on youtube. It's encouraging spam. They should ditch it and start again, with the explicit goal of encouraging good content. That means they need to trust themselves to define good (1) http://www.paulgraham.com/publishing.html http://www.paulgraham.com/publishing.html