8 ms·
Free Is Too High a Price for Facebook and Google
- mastrsushi 7y agoDoes anyone know how to read this article for free? Ironically relative.
- dsr12 7y agoLink without paywall: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-free-is-too-high-a-price-for-facebook-and-google-11559966411?mod=rsswn https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-free-is-too-high-a-price-fo...
- eisa01 7y agoBlendle link if you want to pay 49 cents: https://blendle.com/i/the-wall-street-journal/when-free-is-too-high-a-price/bnl-wallstreetjournal840-20190608-17_2 https://blendle.com/i/the-wall-street-journal/when-free-is-t...
- Nextgrid 7y agoThanks for this, been looking to sign up to Blendle for ages!
- johnmarcus 7y agoThe irony that it's behind a pay wall and I immediately lose interest. I wonder if the WSJ talks about that?
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoAnd probably has Google ad/tracking, and presumably Facebook social links too ...
- ducttape12 7y agoAt least on mobile, Brave is reporting blocking 32 ads and trackers.
- scarface74 7y agoWhat irony? Either you accept ad supported content or you pay for it.
- majkinetor 7y agoProblem: why people share links to payed content ? In my world, payed content = no sharing. It would be great if sites like this would just prevent that. I don't have a problem with payed stuff. I have a problem when people hijack my time by providing a link that turns out to be pay walled, whats the point of that ? No... I am not going to bounce register, does it anybody ?
- pixelrevision 7y agoThe newspaper (sites) really need to work together to come up with an alternative payment system that’s straightforward. What would I be worth in this article were I to be served an ad I didn’t click on? 3 cents maybe? I’d be happy to pay that to read quality content, not see ads and have trackers turned off. Unfortunately most of the paywalls are pushing you towards a sub. I can afford that for 1 or maybe 2 news sources but after that it starts getting hard to maintain.
- Angostura 7y agoThey are saying that ‘free’ has consequences- and their content isn’t free. The irony being?
- dillonmckay 7y agoWell, if you are trying to express your opinion to me, forcing me to pay to have access to it, I am not going to hear your opinion expressed, and will find others that will express it.
- eisa01 7y agoYou can actually read WSJ content on Blendle, they charge 49 cents for each article. Worth it for most stuff posted here IMO, while other shorter articles are not - just get the one-click refund if you encounter that. Blendle link for this article: https://blendle.com/i/the-wall-street-journal/when-free-is-too-high-a-price/bnl-wallstreetjournal840-20190608-17_2 https://blendle.com/i/the-wall-street-journal/when-free-is-t...
- eitland 7y agoThanks! Feels good to buy an article on Blendle again. Last I checked I found little interesting and I so want that project to succeed.
- dsr12 7y agoLink without paywall: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-free-is-too-high-a-price-for-facebook-and-google-11559966411?mod=rsswn https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-free-is-too-high-a-price-fo...
- jessaustin 7y agoWhat dollar value do you assign to misinformation that undermined the national discourse around the 2016 U.S. election... It has been priceless for "both" the "major" parties, that such a baseless falsehood as RussiaRussiaRussia has allowed them to avoid any scrutiny of how their chosen candidates could have been beaten by a reality-TV buffoon. After enough arm-twisting, FB finally allowed that, sure, whatever, Russia bought a couple thousand dollars worth of ads. Thanks Facebook!
- dd36 7y agoBaseless falsehood? I take it you haven’t read the Mueller Report or seen the indictments of Russian Nationals. Willful ignorance or intentional misinformation?
- Consultant32452 7y agoSome people commit crimes and go to jail, including Russian nationals who interfere with our elections. But let's be clear, a few thousand dollars of Facebook ads that read like they were created by high schoolers is not why a clown was elected. That's the lie, not that foreign actors tried to influence our election. Foreign actors trying to influence elections is the standard operating procedure for all the big players in the world.
- thrower123 7y agoThe danger is that if people keep inflating this imaginary foreign bugaboo as the root cause for their perceived catastrophe, they will ignore the real reasons they lost the next time. Perhaps the second time around can break through their cognitive dissonance, but I fear it will just break sanity.
- Consultant32452 7y agoI'm confident he'll win again and worry there'll be riots in major cities. The front runner for the Democrats, Biden, doesn't even seem to be really campaigning. I think their strategy is "The less people see Biden the more they like him" so he has carefully been timid enough to stay out of the news. And Biden is definitely a back to former status quo candidate.
- dalbasal 7y agoOne key point about the free and/or zero marginal cost "products" that I think economists haven't yet dealt with is: massive imbalances between revenue generated by a product and the cost of producing it. Facebook is the cleanest example. Compare to BMW. If we cut BMW's annual budget by 50%, we'd get about 50% fewer cars. If we do the same to FB, we'd get approximately the same FB. FB's revenue happens to be about $65bn per annum. But, the cost of making Facebook available to all its users is basically arbitrary. If Facebook had happened to produce just $6.5bn, I expect that the value/features users get would have been about the same. A lot of the investment (eg uber) in such products goes towards pure (kinda zero-sum) competition. IE, a big chunk of the investment in Uber wasn't needed (or beneficial) for consumers to get the benefit of Uber. It was just needed to ensure Uber captured market share. This has potentially worrying implications for economic efficiency.
- dillonmckay 7y agoThis has been the case since at least the 1990s, maybe earlier. That strategy has always emphasized market-share over profitability. It seems to work out better for software than physical produced goods.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 7y agoFocusing on Uber will give a particularly uncharitable view IMO. I work in tech and the majority of work we do is to either explore new products or increase the efficiency of the core business by a percentage. Neither of these are inherently aimed at competition.
- wayoutthere 7y agoWhat is the cost of privacy? How much would you pay to have total control of your data? Because that’s the price of Facebook / Google. At least with Google, you can get some modicum if privacy and improved security by paying for G-Suite on a private domain (you have way more control of your data policy that way). But it doesn’t change the fact that >90% of their revenue and nearly all their profit comes from advertising. Facebook is pure cancer, and should die in a fire.
- throwaway7363 7y agoYou get privacy with Google ? Root your phone and check how often your Android phones home 1e100.net . Even the stupidest of things like opening the phone settings will make Android to call up big brother. I can only imagine what they do when you login to the phone.
- StavrosK 7y agoI wonder if ROMs like LineageOS remove this telemetry.
- oil25 7y agoThe telemetry mostly comes from Google Play Services, which are optional on LineageOS. I've been using my phone without it and side-loading open source programs - no issues so far and no telemetry collected as far as I can see.
- StavrosK 7y agoAh, in that case I wonder if MicroG has the same sort of telemetry, as that's what I've installed in my LOS ROM...
- hiram112 7y agoWhat are the biggest issues for you with removing Play Services? Wouldn't this remove the ability to use almost all commercial / Play Store apps and leave you with what's available on F-Droid or similar?I At that point - with 90% of apps gone - I might as well get an old BlackBerry or something and get by with just basic IMap mail, calendar, contacts, and SMS.
- bgravinz 7y agoFree is too expensive ... and other such excuses from people who are really just clamouring for power to be shifted back to old media. Honestly that’s all I hear. A disrupted and outdated locus of power arguing for circumstances that would (lo and behold) return them to a position of power and prominence as a more effective political power broker between politicians and the public. The media doesn’t ever argue that the media needs a check and balance against its power. That’s fine, nobody ever does, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t need one, or that they never abused their power. > What dollar value do you assign to misinformation that undermined the national discourse around the 2016 U.S. election, and how do you count that versus the convenience of sharing with friends and family, or watching fun videos? CNN fixed the Democratic primaries against Sanders, and old-media barely made any noise about that . Come on, pretending that the old media is the defender of democracy is a self-serving sales pitch, not a self-evident truth. > What’s more, their success has given them the power to block upstarts that might have competed against them with different approaches. The same could have been said of old media. The barriers to entry in broadcast or print are massive, compared to internet based news. Spectrum auctions, capital costs, news boxes. Can’t it be argued that Facebook has eliminated all of those for a new upstart trying to reach an audience? Sorry I can’t hear their “concern for society’s health” over the echoing ring of decades of media monopolies.
- your-nanny 7y agowhat stops a company that charges for it's services from also making even more money by selling your data and showing you ads? even traditional magazines and newspapers had ads.
- dragonwriter 7y agoTraditional magazines and newspapers were generally primarily ad-supported; paid circulation was important as a signal that the as ads were getting viewed, drive there was no way to measure impressions delivered to actual readers directly; there's less reason for an ad-funded online service to charge users directly, since they don't need the indirect proxy measure of reach.
- your-nanny 7y agoyeah, but "less reason to" is not "more reason not to"
- chongli 7y agowhat stops a company that charges for it's services from also making even more money by selling your data Their reputation. If a company develops the reputation for not doing that, then changing their minds will alienate people. Notably, Apple has begun to develop a reputation for caring about privacy. It fits their hardware-driven business model. It has a nice side effect of creating a moat that would be difficult for ad driven businesses to cross.
- Nextgrid 7y agoA paid service has to serve my interests for me to pay for it. A paid tool with ads will not succeed unless it’s absolutely necessary to the user and there’s no way around. People tolerate Facebook & their ads, dark patterns to get users addicted, etc when it’s free, but very few people would pay for that. Also, traditional magazines’ ads is something I personally value. It’s a safe way to discover new trends/products that have been somewhat vetted by the magazine (you won’t find any malware or scams on a full-page ad in a magazine, and if you did the reputation of that magazine would be severely damaged) without being stalked and seeing the same product everywhere for months just because you happened to check one out.