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I don't believe the problem lies in any technology. We don't need blockchain, it's not JavaScript minification, it isn't the centralisation of services that are

I don't believe the problem lies in any technology. We don't need blockchain, it's not JavaScript minification, it isn't the centralisation of services that are the problem. It's the business model. No amount of tech is going to change that. If you want to change the situation, start social media businesses with a different business model.

JBReefer 9y ago
Totally agree. It's ads and the attention economy. They thrive on controversy - it's the psychological version of the banner ads in the 90s, but 10,000x more effective.
- gkya 9y ago
  Is there a study on the (in)effectiveness of online ad campaigns? Is it or is it not a bubble that drives all this ad publisher to the ad platforms instead of buying ads more directly? I don't know the prices but I can bet buying an ad directly from a vlogger is cheaper and more effective than any ad platform out there. Is it really the dumbness of ad publishers that keep this system alive or is it me that I'm really ignorant when it comes to the economy of internet?
  - reaperducer 9y ago
    Just watch what the big advertisers do. Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Procter & Gable, etc... When your company spends millions on advertising, you have teams of people to figure out if your strategy is effective. Follow the leaders.
    - gkya 9y ago
      I haven't seen one of them advertise online. Online adverts are way different than TV adverts. For one the latter costs way more, if I'm not mistaken. And even if that's not the case, still, those companies have so much money that running ads is like a hobby for them. So I'd rather not follow them. Just like Google can get away with killing Reader, they can get away with many things which if a smaller company did would be suicide.
      - reaperducer 9y ago
        Remember that if you're not in an advertiser's target demographic online, you won't see their ads. I've seen plenty of McDonald's ads online. Coca-Cola, usually around Christmas and the Super Bowl. P&G? Occasionally, but probably more often than I realize because it has so many brands.
        gkya 9y ago
        > Remember that if you're not in an advertiser's target demographic online, you won't see their ads. That's one statement I can not believe. But it might be the case that I have not indeed seen the ads from those companies, maybe because of where I am.
  - ilkan 9y ago
    It's scale. Finding individual vloggers, making deals and tracking results would be to time consuming to scale up to $1M/day per company. An ad platform is a centralized management and spend system for large groups of individual sites, bloggers, vloggers and apps. Some medium sized companies will test with an ad platform, find the best performing sites and make deals with them directly.
snarf21 9y ago
Agreed 1000%. Everyone wants unlimited high quality content that is also free but no ads and conditional privacy and "true" information and ... and ... and ...
- johnfactorial 9y ago
  ... and Wikipedia and NPR are excellent if imperfect versions of that model.
  - philangist 9y ago
    Both of which are constantly asking for donations
    - monetus 9y ago
      The idea that something in the commons should be funded by the majority isn't a new one. At this point the debate turns into an argument on tax policy and its peripherals... I don't think that debate will end until we all create some sort of hive mind AI by networking our brains together.
    - notriddle 9y ago
      In case you were curious, the Wikimedia Foundation has plenty of money to keep their sites running. Most of their funds are going to other projects, like conferences and "Wikipedia-in-a-box" type stuff. [1] [2] [1]: http://mywikibiz.com/Top_10_Reasons_Not_to_Donate_to_Wikipedia http://mywikibiz.com/Top_10_Reasons_Not_to_Donate_to_Wikiped... [2]: Despite linking to "reasons not to donate to Wikipedia," I'd still prefer more sites run like Wikipedia and less sites run like YouTube, and I think you should donate to the Wikimedia Foundation if you're a power user. Do not donate to the Wikimedia Foundation unless you're heavily involved in their wikis, but if you are heavily involved and have the money, you should. Their donors need to hold them accountable, and that's not possible if they're getting tons of money from people who have no idea what's going on behind the scenes.
- Tannic 9y ago
  We as a society actually have the means to provide that, strictly speaking. It is, in the end, the original aspiration of the internet to provide these things in the name of bettering humanity. The problem is that having the tech doesn’t change the antequated and oppresive socio-political and economic system in which we currently bathe. Without a more forceful revolution—of whatever type—the promise of the internet revolution will be perpetually subsumed by the underlying impossibility of the systems it requires to flourish. Go figure, free flow of information requires all sorts of other human freedoms.
realpeopleio 9y ago
agreed. The incentives of the business model need to align with the goals of protecting privacy and keeping fake accounts to a minimum.
cslarson 9y ago
Blockchain may be a tool to experiment with different business models.
- alpos 9y ago
  Salon.com's new experiment is a great example. https://www.tweaktown.com/news/60862/salon-offers-users-crypto-mining-instead-online-ads/index.html https://www.tweaktown.com/news/60862/salon-offers-users-cryp... It's brilliant, most people probably won't care about the extra workload as long as it doesn't make their computer "slow down" or get too noisy and it realigns the content providers incentives from "collect more/better data and pack in as many ads as possible" to just "keep people on the site as long as possible". The cost is also just the price of electricity which, while not totally trivial, is cheap enough for this to work and something people are already paying for. I found it intriguing enough that I actually let them have a go at it rather than disabling Javascript (my usual response to ad-blocker-blockers). So far it works "as advertised", the only way I notice is through the system monitoring I have on my desktop.
whamlastxmas 9y ago
Ads are only so prolific because they can be tracked. If we eliminate avenues for sites to track us their popularity will drop tremendously.
- vezycash 9y ago
  TV, Newspaper ads exists with its limited trackability. Banner ads existed long before tracking. So your point is mute. In fact, I think tracking has reduced ads. If not, ads would be a throw at the wall regardless of what works affair.
- gmueckl 9y ago
  There will always be ways to track and identify people. If all else fails, you build your profiles from the stream of keyboard and mouse events the user generates on your website. Okay, it's maybe a bit cynic, but stuff like this will happen if the web browsers are twisted further to provide the appearance of privacy and security to the user.
hsribei 9y ago
I think the Brave Browser and associated Basic Attention Token (BAT) are a step in the right direction. It's hard to escape ad revenue if you want to avoid paywalls, but Brave at least gives users privacy, control, and revenue share.
WhiteNoiz3 9y ago
I've always felt that we need some kind of ubiquitous and low friction micro transactions for small time websites to succeed and to move away from the ad driven model. A niche blog could be successful with a small audience if each of them donates a penny or two to read new stories. That way people are directly supporting content that they find useful, rather than having to create controversy to drive ads and clicks.
- cgoughnour 9y ago
  Coase's transaction cost theory of the firm seems to imply that low cost, ubiquitous transactions would lead to a reduction in the size of corporations generally, which might do something to redress the imbalance of power between individuals and corporations as well.
- hodgesrm 9y ago
  The problem with metered schemes is that they inhibit users who feel they are burning money every time they touch a page. It's kind of like having to pay by the megabyte every time you use your phone on the Internet. What about a general subscription model that gets you access to a wide range of websites? The point is to have a fixed price for consumers so they can read as much as you want. Distributing the money to sites you visit is a backend problem.
  - felipeccastro 9y ago
    That's what the Brave browser is doing: "Set up automatic micro-donations. Brave will automatically divide a monthly donation among the top sites you visit." (brave.com) The downside is the high entry bar of installing a new browser and setting up a cryptocurrency wallet (payments are made with Basic Attention Tokens).
    - hodgesrm 9y ago
      I would look at implementing this using some sort of SSO (single sign-on) scheme. That gets around the problem of having to install new client software. One obvious problem with all such schemes is how to prevent actors from gaming the system, e.g., to get free logins for self + a bunch of friends. I
erikb 9y ago
People want to give away responsibility. That's imo the core problem. So even another business model will either fail (it's not like there aren't hundreds of other social networks out there) or will turn centralized as well.
- js8 9y ago
  > People want to give away responsibility. What do you mean by that? What is the point of technology, if you don't save time or effort by using it? Can you explain what should people do?
  - erikb 9y ago
    No, I will not take responsibility for your decisions from you. But thanks for the example and evidence.
    - Daucuscarota 9y ago
      Such a fallacy!
TeMPOraL 9y ago
It's not just social media, and it's not just ads, about which other people responded to you. The root of the problem - or at least the trunk very close to the root - is Software as a Service. It's the trend of turning software into services. Sure, it's nice for the vendors, and it's nice for corporate clients who can write off responsibility to a third party. But it also makes you no longer in control of your data, and the code that runs on it. The availability of your work becomes completely dependent on business decisions of third parties, which can - and frequently do - disappear suddenly. It's what leads to proliferation of ads, surveillance and growth strategies like dumbing down software to the point of almost complete uselessness. If technology is meant to be - or at least is capable of being - empowering to individuals, then turning everything into a service is an exact opposite of that.
- snug 9y ago
  > If technology is meant to be - or at least is capable of being - empowering to individuals, then turning everything into a service is an exact opposite of that. What? No. Plenty of new companies are being built off these SaaS providers. Why should a company just starting out build their own infrastructure, host their own CRM, build their own AI models. Companies would move much more slowely if they couldn't rely on these services.
  - talmand 9y ago
    I imagine the point being made might be more along the lines of owning software versus renting it. If you purchase software that your company relies on, it belongs to you. Regardless if that third-party disappears. You still have use of the software until you can determine if you need to replace it or if it'll still work out for your needs. Now renting the software as a service is a different matter. If the third-party goes under, well then you have problems. Problems you may have to solve immediately. As an individual who is trying to build something, a disappearing third-party may not be detrimental if you still have the software at hand. You would not be locked down by that third-party's SaaS.
    - kristianc 9y ago
mozumder 9y ago
Disagree completely. The business model doesn't need to be profitable. Almost every website is unprofitable in itself, and only exist to serve as a person's or company's marketing interface. Websites ARE the ads, because that's their point. The web is a giant marketing device to sell stuff, like your resume or your local plumber or your open-source software project. The problem is the tech, and in particular, how a person can create a website from scratch, without going through any other gateway company. Facebook/Twitter/Instagram makes it super easy to post your content online. Ebay makes it easy to sell. You don't need to write any HTML or any other piece of code, or build a server and find hosting or configure AWS. You just post content from an app, and that's it. Any elderly person can do that now. There really is a huge technological barrier in making the usable - in particular, the entire UX ecosystem of creating content on the web. This difficult UX problem will be a hard limit to expanding creation of the web by the public, and should be a focus on anyone that wants to make the web open. I would recommend that groups like W3C or WHATWG or hardware vendors like Apple or Cisco develop standards that not only display content, but also entry, storage, and distribution. Why isn't there a default app, like SMS/MMS messages, on an iPhone that lets you post your own website? Think of all the infrastructure that had to be built to get SMS/MMS messages working... the web needs the same thing. Can you imagine if sending an MMS, you had to write your own software? Or build your own hardware interface? This is the level the web is at right now.
- zodiac 9y ago
  > Websites ARE the ads, because that's their point. Sounds like that's a perfectly profitable business model, broadly defined
- magduf 9y ago
  >Almost every website is unprofitable in itself, and only exist to serve as a person's or company's marketing interface. Websites ARE the ads, because that's their point. The web is a giant marketing device to sell stuff, like your resume or your local plumber or your open-source software project. This works fine for a business that sells direct on the internet, or a company that advertises themselves there (like my BigCo that has a website so people can learn about it, find people to contact, etc.), etc. It doesn't work so well for a company whose product is intangible, most notably news companies. How is NY Times going to stay in business if they don't make a profit on their website? In this age, people don't really want dead-tree newspapers any more. Also, sites that don't really have a product can't survive by selling stuff. Reddit, HN, etc. are good examples here; how is HN making enough money to operate itself? Basically, it isn't, it's run through goodwill by a VC company (though it might also be a form of advertising in and of itself). Smaller, more specialized discussion forum sites are also like this, probably to a greater extent: unless they're being financed by some sponsor (which is then likely going to advertise on it directly), they need a way to pay for themselves, and that usually means ads.
thevardanian 9y ago
Technology was supposed to leverage human capacity, and not centralize it. The problem is a technology one in the sense that the paradigm for a different business model have been co-opted, and usurped by authoritarian corporations. What in fact should have been a "protocol" based system has become a dictated, and law based one. That is to say the internet should have emerged as a means to distribute data by means of certain forms of etiquette, and agreements to communicate, but instead has emerged as means to centralize data where the protocol is obscured and dictated by a third party. To this day it is hilariously obscure, especially for the average person, for p2p communication, and so the driver for the "business model" is in fact the convenience that centralization brings, and the headaches/unreliability of decentralized systems. The problem is a technology one.
- 2trill2spill 9y ago
  > Technology was supposed to leverage human capacity, and not centralize it. Where can one find that definition of technology? > What in fact should have been a "protocol" bases system has become a dictated, and law based one. Do you think laws should not be applied to the Internet?
  - thevardanian 9y ago
    The lever is a primitive technology but also an apt descriptor of it. I'm not describing technology, but rather describing the application of it. >Do you think laws should not be applied to the Internet? Depends. For now I think it depends on what your opinion on communication between people is. Are the laws to regulate, monitor, enforce, and use coercion to prevent or hinder people from communicating with each other, or to allow the freedom of expression with each other? In long term, since we are in the infancy of such a tool, I think computers/internet will eventually rein supreme over the old laws.
jamesrcole 9y ago
> If you want to change the situation, start social media businesses with a different business model. There's a question of what kinds of business models are feasible in the current environment. There's all sorts of business models that would be nice, if they were feasible, but which aren't currently feasible. So actually, if certain types of business models are desirable, but aren't currently feasible, there's a deeper question of: are there ways we can change the environment the business models need to exist within?
zodiac 9y ago
It's more nuanced than that, of course. For example the technological barrier of "our payments infra suck, so credit cards charge a minimum fee" rule out some kinds of micropayment business models (other barriers like UX or cultural attidudes do too), but not models like Spotify's. I would consider a different business model necessary but not sufficient.
hueving 9y ago
>it isn't the centralisation of services that are the problem. I strongly disagree. These giant monopolies on different corners of tech caused by centralization are the very reason we end up having to have these stupid discussions about how everything should work. All of this crap tied up in walled gardens means we just have to cry on the outside with #DeleteFacebook hash tags and hope stuff changes. You claim we need to change the business model. I claim the business model is irrelevant if we instead focus on open source and distributed platforms.
- supernovae 9y ago
  I agree... With centralization so pervasive in technology today its harder to carve out sustainable business models. Google is largely pay to play for search, content creators are having to leverage twitter, instagram, facebook and pinterest to try and deliver traffic so 90% of our business is derrived from creating value for thse social networks and search engines in hopes of return. It really blows when the majority of your day isn't adding value to the web but trying to play in the perpetual game of fighting for morsels of traffic from the giants. and as we've seen, those with money can manipulate...
  - ShabbosGoy 9y ago
    The alternative monetization schemes like Steemit are interesting. Overall, it will lead content that is, on average, better because of monetary rewards/incentives.
  - Just_Smith 9y ago
    The reason why it's so hard to build a different type of business model within the web is because the business model precedes the web - and I'm surprised that this hasn't been mentioned already. The original post blamed the business model over centralization, but the whole reason the internet was built to be centralized was to protect profits in the already existing business model for media distribution.
- brandon272 9y ago
  > You claim we need to change the business model. I claim the business model is irrelevant if we instead focus on open source and distributed platforms. I think the organizational model is relevant. Would we be having the discussions around the most popular social network selling our data and completely disrespecting user privacy if the most popular social network were a non-profit organization? I have to think there is some middle ground between publicly traded megacorp and complete decentralization.
jefurii 9y ago
I can see small services like SDF.org and Eskimo.com making a comeback. People who want to #deleteFacebook and who have woken up to the problems with FB's business model, but who don't have the tech skills to do it themselves might pay a subscription fee to get access to webmail, Diaspora, Mastodon, Riot, and other services.
j45 9y ago
Ad revenue needs replacing with a viable alternative.
bartread 9y ago
> It's the business model. Absolutely nailed it. Although I'd go further, and say this cuts to the core of human nature, and perhaps speaks to how fundamentally bad actors can lead to a general degradation of behaviour and standards across the board. So much behaviour in business is driven by the feeling that you have to do something because everybody else is, especially in industries that are in a downward spiral already (publishing!).
gcb0 9y ago
technically, browsers can break the monetization incentives. For example, Google found it a wise investment to sponsor an entire browser just to keep referrer header and 3rd party cookie enabled. If all browsers disabled this (apple already got rid of 3rd party cookies) then the cost to monetize the web as it is being monetized today, would be too high to be effective.
misrab 9y ago
One could argue the business model was tailored to prevalent tech when many of the giants emerged. Ads were perhaps a lot easier than data encryption, distribution, and secure payments back then.
ace_of_spades 9y ago
To repost an older comment of mine suggesting a new business model: Mhh, why not go with a kickstarter style payment scheme? Have a campaign to fund the operating budget, another one to fund feature a and another one to fund feature b. You get user aligned prioritization for free while users are happy to be able to choose their level of support. Can’t believe I haven’t seen this model in action, yet!
mitchdoogle 9y ago
I think Solid (https://solid.mit.edu/ https://solid.mit.edu/) is a tech that could change that (if only partly). Instead of the social media business holding all of your data and locking you in, you would hold your data and the social media site would serve as a platform to view that data. If you dislike what a particular company is doing, you could easily switch to someone else and not lose out on any of your social connections.
jsutton 9y ago
I argue that blockchain technology enables the development of such a distributed network to succeed with much better odds, as monetary value and network effects are intertwined. Traditional software products whose success relies on network effects often require enormous sums of money to get up and running, with the promise to somehow extract profit from the users at some point in the future. Blockchain tech allows those kinds of products to succeed without the implicit agreement that your (as a user) data will be siphoned and monetized however the company sees fit. In fact, the owners of valuable content/contributions can be rewarded fairly.

JBReefer 9y ago

Totally agree. It's ads and the attention economy. They thrive on controversy - it's the psychological version of the banner ads in the 90s, but 10,000x more effective.

gkya 9y ago
Is there a study on the (in)effectiveness of online ad campaigns? Is it or is it not a bubble that drives all this ad publisher to the ad platforms instead of buying ads more directly? I don't know the prices but I can bet buying an ad directly from a vlogger is cheaper and more effective than any ad platform out there. Is it really the dumbness of ad publishers that keep this system alive or is it me that I'm really ignorant when it comes to the economy of internet?
- reaperducer 9y ago
  Just watch what the big advertisers do. Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Procter & Gable, etc... When your company spends millions on advertising, you have teams of people to figure out if your strategy is effective. Follow the leaders.
  - gkya 9y ago
    I haven't seen one of them advertise online. Online adverts are way different than TV adverts. For one the latter costs way more, if I'm not mistaken. And even if that's not the case, still, those companies have so much money that running ads is like a hobby for them. So I'd rather not follow them. Just like Google can get away with killing Reader, they can get away with many things which if a smaller company did would be suicide.
    - reaperducer 9y ago
      Remember that if you're not in an advertiser's target demographic online, you won't see their ads. I've seen plenty of McDonald's ads online. Coca-Cola, usually around Christmas and the Super Bowl. P&G? Occasionally, but probably more often than I realize because it has so many brands.
      - gkya 9y ago
        > Remember that if you're not in an advertiser's target demographic online, you won't see their ads. That's one statement I can not believe. But it might be the case that I have not indeed seen the ads from those companies, maybe because of where I am.
- ilkan 9y ago
  It's scale. Finding individual vloggers, making deals and tracking results would be to time consuming to scale up to $1M/day per company. An ad platform is a centralized management and spend system for large groups of individual sites, bloggers, vloggers and apps. Some medium sized companies will test with an ad platform, find the best performing sites and make deals with them directly.

snarf21 9y ago

Agreed 1000%. Everyone wants unlimited high quality content that is also free but no ads and conditional privacy and "true" information and ... and ... and ...

johnfactorial 9y ago
... and Wikipedia and NPR are excellent if imperfect versions of that model.
- philangist 9y ago
  Both of which are constantly asking for donations
  - monetus 9y ago
    The idea that something in the commons should be funded by the majority isn't a new one. At this point the debate turns into an argument on tax policy and its peripherals... I don't think that debate will end until we all create some sort of hive mind AI by networking our brains together.
  - notriddle 9y ago
    In case you were curious, the Wikimedia Foundation has plenty of money to keep their sites running. Most of their funds are going to other projects, like conferences and "Wikipedia-in-a-box" type stuff. [1] [2] [1]: http://mywikibiz.com/Top_10_Reasons_Not_to_Donate_to_Wikipedia http://mywikibiz.com/Top_10_Reasons_Not_to_Donate_to_Wikiped... [2]: Despite linking to "reasons not to donate to Wikipedia," I'd still prefer more sites run like Wikipedia and less sites run like YouTube, and I think you should donate to the Wikimedia Foundation if you're a power user. Do not donate to the Wikimedia Foundation unless you're heavily involved in their wikis, but if you are heavily involved and have the money, you should. Their donors need to hold them accountable, and that's not possible if they're getting tons of money from people who have no idea what's going on behind the scenes.
Tannic 9y ago
We as a society actually have the means to provide that, strictly speaking. It is, in the end, the original aspiration of the internet to provide these things in the name of bettering humanity. The problem is that having the tech doesn’t change the antequated and oppresive socio-political and economic system in which we currently bathe. Without a more forceful revolution—of whatever type—the promise of the internet revolution will be perpetually subsumed by the underlying impossibility of the systems it requires to flourish. Go figure, free flow of information requires all sorts of other human freedoms.

realpeopleio 9y ago

agreed. The incentives of the business model need to align with the goals of protecting privacy and keeping fake accounts to a minimum.

cslarson 9y ago

Blockchain may be a tool to experiment with different business models.

alpos 9y ago
Salon.com's new experiment is a great example. https://www.tweaktown.com/news/60862/salon-offers-users-crypto-mining-instead-online-ads/index.html https://www.tweaktown.com/news/60862/salon-offers-users-cryp... It's brilliant, most people probably won't care about the extra workload as long as it doesn't make their computer "slow down" or get too noisy and it realigns the content providers incentives from "collect more/better data and pack in as many ads as possible" to just "keep people on the site as long as possible". The cost is also just the price of electricity which, while not totally trivial, is cheap enough for this to work and something people are already paying for. I found it intriguing enough that I actually let them have a go at it rather than disabling Javascript (my usual response to ad-blocker-blockers). So far it works "as advertised", the only way I notice is through the system monitoring I have on my desktop.

whamlastxmas 9y ago

Ads are only so prolific because they can be tracked. If we eliminate avenues for sites to track us their popularity will drop tremendously.

vezycash 9y ago
TV, Newspaper ads exists with its limited trackability. Banner ads existed long before tracking. So your point is mute. In fact, I think tracking has reduced ads. If not, ads would be a throw at the wall regardless of what works affair.
gmueckl 9y ago
There will always be ways to track and identify people. If all else fails, you build your profiles from the stream of keyboard and mouse events the user generates on your website. Okay, it's maybe a bit cynic, but stuff like this will happen if the web browsers are twisted further to provide the appearance of privacy and security to the user.

hsribei 9y ago

I think the Brave Browser and associated Basic Attention Token (BAT) are a step in the right direction. It's hard to escape ad revenue if you want to avoid paywalls, but Brave at least gives users privacy, control, and revenue share.

WhiteNoiz3 9y ago

I've always felt that we need some kind of ubiquitous and low friction micro transactions for small time websites to succeed and to move away from the ad driven model. A niche blog could be successful with a small audience if each of them donates a penny or two to read new stories. That way people are directly supporting content that they find useful, rather than having to create controversy to drive ads and clicks.

cgoughnour 9y ago
Coase's transaction cost theory of the firm seems to imply that low cost, ubiquitous transactions would lead to a reduction in the size of corporations generally, which might do something to redress the imbalance of power between individuals and corporations as well.
hodgesrm 9y ago
The problem with metered schemes is that they inhibit users who feel they are burning money every time they touch a page. It's kind of like having to pay by the megabyte every time you use your phone on the Internet. What about a general subscription model that gets you access to a wide range of websites? The point is to have a fixed price for consumers so they can read as much as you want. Distributing the money to sites you visit is a backend problem.
- felipeccastro 9y ago
  That's what the Brave browser is doing: "Set up automatic micro-donations. Brave will automatically divide a monthly donation among the top sites you visit." (brave.com) The downside is the high entry bar of installing a new browser and setting up a cryptocurrency wallet (payments are made with Basic Attention Tokens).
  - hodgesrm 9y ago
    I would look at implementing this using some sort of SSO (single sign-on) scheme. That gets around the problem of having to install new client software. One obvious problem with all such schemes is how to prevent actors from gaming the system, e.g., to get free logins for self + a bunch of friends. I

erikb 9y ago

People want to give away responsibility. That's imo the core problem. So even another business model will either fail (it's not like there aren't hundreds of other social networks out there) or will turn centralized as well.

js8 9y ago
> People want to give away responsibility. What do you mean by that? What is the point of technology, if you don't save time or effort by using it? Can you explain what should people do?
- erikb 9y ago
  No, I will not take responsibility for your decisions from you. But thanks for the example and evidence.
  - Daucuscarota 9y ago
    Such a fallacy!

TeMPOraL 9y ago

It's not just social media, and it's not just ads, about which other people responded to you. The root of the problem - or at least the trunk very close to the root - is Software as a Service. It's the trend of turning software into services. Sure, it's nice for the vendors, and it's nice for corporate clients who can write off responsibility to a third party. But it also makes you no longer in control of your data, and the code that runs on it. The availability of your work becomes completely dependent on business decisions of third parties, which can - and frequently do - disappear suddenly. It's what leads to proliferation of ads, surveillance and growth strategies like dumbing down software to the point of almost complete uselessness. If technology is meant to be - or at least is capable of being - empowering to individuals, then turning everything into a service is an exact opposite of that.

snug 9y ago
> If technology is meant to be - or at least is capable of being - empowering to individuals, then turning everything into a service is an exact opposite of that. What? No. Plenty of new companies are being built off these SaaS providers. Why should a company just starting out build their own infrastructure, host their own CRM, build their own AI models. Companies would move much more slowely if they couldn't rely on these services.
- talmand 9y ago
  I imagine the point being made might be more along the lines of owning software versus renting it. If you purchase software that your company relies on, it belongs to you. Regardless if that third-party disappears. You still have use of the software until you can determine if you need to replace it or if it'll still work out for your needs. Now renting the software as a service is a different matter. If the third-party goes under, well then you have problems. Problems you may have to solve immediately. As an individual who is trying to build something, a disappearing third-party may not be detrimental if you still have the software at hand. You would not be locked down by that third-party's SaaS.
  - kristianc 9y ago

mozumder 9y ago

Disagree completely. The business model doesn't need to be profitable. Almost every website is unprofitable in itself, and only exist to serve as a person's or company's marketing interface. Websites ARE the ads, because that's their point. The web is a giant marketing device to sell stuff, like your resume or your local plumber or your open-source software project. The problem is the tech, and in particular, how a person can create a website from scratch, without going through any other gateway company. Facebook/Twitter/Instagram makes it super easy to post your content online. Ebay makes it easy to sell. You don't need to write any HTML or any other piece of code, or build a server and find hosting or configure AWS. You just post content from an app, and that's it. Any elderly person can do that now. There really is a huge technological barrier in making the usable - in particular, the entire UX ecosystem of creating content on the web. This difficult UX problem will be a hard limit to expanding creation of the web by the public, and should be a focus on anyone that wants to make the web open. I would recommend that groups like W3C or WHATWG or hardware vendors like Apple or Cisco develop standards that not only display content, but also entry, storage, and distribution. Why isn't there a default app, like SMS/MMS messages, on an iPhone that lets you post your own website? Think of all the infrastructure that had to be built to get SMS/MMS messages working... the web needs the same thing. Can you imagine if sending an MMS, you had to write your own software? Or build your own hardware interface? This is the level the web is at right now.

zodiac 9y ago
> Websites ARE the ads, because that's their point. Sounds like that's a perfectly profitable business model, broadly defined
magduf 9y ago
>Almost every website is unprofitable in itself, and only exist to serve as a person's or company's marketing interface. Websites ARE the ads, because that's their point. The web is a giant marketing device to sell stuff, like your resume or your local plumber or your open-source software project. This works fine for a business that sells direct on the internet, or a company that advertises themselves there (like my BigCo that has a website so people can learn about it, find people to contact, etc.), etc. It doesn't work so well for a company whose product is intangible, most notably news companies. How is NY Times going to stay in business if they don't make a profit on their website? In this age, people don't really want dead-tree newspapers any more. Also, sites that don't really have a product can't survive by selling stuff. Reddit, HN, etc. are good examples here; how is HN making enough money to operate itself? Basically, it isn't, it's run through goodwill by a VC company (though it might also be a form of advertising in and of itself). Smaller, more specialized discussion forum sites are also like this, probably to a greater extent: unless they're being financed by some sponsor (which is then likely going to advertise on it directly), they need a way to pay for themselves, and that usually means ads.

thevardanian 9y ago

Technology was supposed to leverage human capacity, and not centralize it. The problem is a technology one in the sense that the paradigm for a different business model have been co-opted, and usurped by authoritarian corporations. What in fact should have been a "protocol" based system has become a dictated, and law based one. That is to say the internet should have emerged as a means to distribute data by means of certain forms of etiquette, and agreements to communicate, but instead has emerged as means to centralize data where the protocol is obscured and dictated by a third party. To this day it is hilariously obscure, especially for the average person, for p2p communication, and so the driver for the "business model" is in fact the convenience that centralization brings, and the headaches/unreliability of decentralized systems. The problem is a technology one.

2trill2spill 9y ago
> Technology was supposed to leverage human capacity, and not centralize it. Where can one find that definition of technology? > What in fact should have been a "protocol" bases system has become a dictated, and law based one. Do you think laws should not be applied to the Internet?
- thevardanian 9y ago
  The lever is a primitive technology but also an apt descriptor of it. I'm not describing technology, but rather describing the application of it. >Do you think laws should not be applied to the Internet? Depends. For now I think it depends on what your opinion on communication between people is. Are the laws to regulate, monitor, enforce, and use coercion to prevent or hinder people from communicating with each other, or to allow the freedom of expression with each other? In long term, since we are in the infancy of such a tool, I think computers/internet will eventually rein supreme over the old laws.

jamesrcole 9y ago

> If you want to change the situation, start social media businesses with a different business model. There's a question of what kinds of business models are feasible in the current environment. There's all sorts of business models that would be nice, if they were feasible, but which aren't currently feasible. So actually, if certain types of business models are desirable, but aren't currently feasible, there's a deeper question of: are there ways we can change the environment the business models need to exist within?

zodiac 9y ago

It's more nuanced than that, of course. For example the technological barrier of "our payments infra suck, so credit cards charge a minimum fee" rule out some kinds of micropayment business models (other barriers like UX or cultural attidudes do too), but not models like Spotify's. I would consider a different business model necessary but not sufficient.

hueving 9y ago

>it isn't the centralisation of services that are the problem. I strongly disagree. These giant monopolies on different corners of tech caused by centralization are the very reason we end up having to have these stupid discussions about how everything should work. All of this crap tied up in walled gardens means we just have to cry on the outside with #DeleteFacebook hash tags and hope stuff changes. You claim we need to change the business model. I claim the business model is irrelevant if we instead focus on open source and distributed platforms.

supernovae 9y ago
I agree... With centralization so pervasive in technology today its harder to carve out sustainable business models. Google is largely pay to play for search, content creators are having to leverage twitter, instagram, facebook and pinterest to try and deliver traffic so 90% of our business is derrived from creating value for thse social networks and search engines in hopes of return. It really blows when the majority of your day isn't adding value to the web but trying to play in the perpetual game of fighting for morsels of traffic from the giants. and as we've seen, those with money can manipulate...
- ShabbosGoy 9y ago
  The alternative monetization schemes like Steemit are interesting. Overall, it will lead content that is, on average, better because of monetary rewards/incentives.
- Just_Smith 9y ago
  The reason why it's so hard to build a different type of business model within the web is because the business model precedes the web - and I'm surprised that this hasn't been mentioned already. The original post blamed the business model over centralization, but the whole reason the internet was built to be centralized was to protect profits in the already existing business model for media distribution.
brandon272 9y ago
> You claim we need to change the business model. I claim the business model is irrelevant if we instead focus on open source and distributed platforms. I think the organizational model is relevant. Would we be having the discussions around the most popular social network selling our data and completely disrespecting user privacy if the most popular social network were a non-profit organization? I have to think there is some middle ground between publicly traded megacorp and complete decentralization.

jefurii 9y ago

I can see small services like SDF.org and Eskimo.com making a comeback. People who want to #deleteFacebook and who have woken up to the problems with FB's business model, but who don't have the tech skills to do it themselves might pay a subscription fee to get access to webmail, Diaspora, Mastodon, Riot, and other services.

j45 9y ago

Ad revenue needs replacing with a viable alternative.

bartread 9y ago

> It's the business model. Absolutely nailed it. Although I'd go further, and say this cuts to the core of human nature, and perhaps speaks to how fundamentally bad actors can lead to a general degradation of behaviour and standards across the board. So much behaviour in business is driven by the feeling that you have to do something because everybody else is, especially in industries that are in a downward spiral already (publishing!).

gcb0 9y ago

technically, browsers can break the monetization incentives. For example, Google found it a wise investment to sponsor an entire browser just to keep referrer header and 3rd party cookie enabled. If all browsers disabled this (apple already got rid of 3rd party cookies) then the cost to monetize the web as it is being monetized today, would be too high to be effective.

misrab 9y ago

One could argue the business model was tailored to prevalent tech when many of the giants emerged. Ads were perhaps a lot easier than data encryption, distribution, and secure payments back then.

ace_of_spades 9y ago

To repost an older comment of mine suggesting a new business model: Mhh, why not go with a kickstarter style payment scheme? Have a campaign to fund the operating budget, another one to fund feature a and another one to fund feature b. You get user aligned prioritization for free while users are happy to be able to choose their level of support. Can’t believe I haven’t seen this model in action, yet!

mitchdoogle 9y ago

I think Solid (https://solid.mit.edu/ https://solid.mit.edu/) is a tech that could change that (if only partly). Instead of the social media business holding all of your data and locking you in, you would hold your data and the social media site would serve as a platform to view that data. If you dislike what a particular company is doing, you could easily switch to someone else and not lose out on any of your social connections.

jsutton 9y ago

I argue that blockchain technology enables the development of such a distributed network to succeed with much better odds, as monetary value and network effects are intertwined. Traditional software products whose success relies on network effects often require enormous sums of money to get up and running, with the promise to somehow extract profit from the users at some point in the future. Blockchain tech allows those kinds of products to succeed without the implicit agreement that your (as a user) data will be siphoned and monetized however the company sees fit. In fact, the owners of valuable content/contributions can be rewarded fairly.