9 ms·

The deeper problem is advertising. It is sort of a prisoner's dilemma: all commercial entities have a shouting contest to attract customer attention. It's expen

The deeper problem is advertising. It is sort of a prisoner's dilemma: all commercial entities have a shouting contest to attract customer attention. It's expensive for everybody. If we could kill advertisement permanently, we can have an internet as described in the question. This will almost be like an emergent feature of the internet.

marknadal 7y ago
I wrote up a proposal on this, changing the economics to adapt to and account for post-scarce resources like information: https://hackernoon.com/wealth-a-new-era-of-economics-ce8acd785441 https://hackernoon.com/wealth-a-new-era-of-economics-ce8acd7...
worldsayshi 7y ago
We could supercharge word of mouth. I've been thinking about an alternative upvote model where content is ranked not primarily based on aggregate voting but by: - ranking content that users you have upvoted higher - ranking content that users with similar upvote behaviour higher While there is a risk of upvote bubbles, it should potentially make it easier for niche content to spread to interested people and make it possible for products and services to spread using peer trust rather than cold shouting.
- endymi0n 7y ago
  As long as there are big companies making money off their products, you can be sure they'll find a way to advertise them to you.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- fifnir 7y ago
  > ranking content that users with similar upvote behaviour higher That's how you make echochambers
  - worldsayshi 7y ago
    All social media have echo chamber characteristics. You have to counteract it with transparency and opt-in/out.
- eterps 7y ago
  I've had similar ideas recently. Especially niche content (or shared research) would probably be notoriously hard (WRT false positives) for machine learning to decide whether it is relevant to you, people with similar interests know that much better. I was also wondering what would be good options to store votes/upvotes in a decentralized way.
  - worldsayshi 7y ago
    > people with similar interests know that much better Yeah, I wonder if there is a cheap way to test this. Actually! There could be! Like using favorite's here on hacker news. That could be mined and visualized in various ways. (Although a quick sample shows me that it's a rarely used feature) > I was also wondering what would be good options to store votes/upvotes in a decentralized way. Yeah there are a lot of interesting optimization challenges if you really want to utilize upvote graphs for ranking.
- loxs 7y ago
  So, basically Facebook?
- scrollaway 7y ago
  Not to echo a R&M quote on purpose but that just sounds like targeted advertising with extra steps.
- Fjolsvith 7y ago
  This sounds so much like Facebook.
  - worldsayshi 7y ago
    Any "social" ranking algorithm is going to sound at least superficially similar to what's already out there.
- thekyle 7y ago
  > ranking content that users with similar upvote behaviour higher This is what Reddit originally tried to do before they pivoted. https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/11fiab/are_memes_making_the_internet_boring/c6m9sy8/ https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/11fiab/are_memes_maki...
  - worldsayshi 7y ago
    Oh, interesting! Makes me think that their original plan could still work if they just put a bit more effort into crafting that algorithm. For example, the main criticism brought up is that things that you dislike that your peers like keep getting recommended. Why not add a de-ranking aspect into it and try adding downvote-peers in addition to upvote peers. I imagine you could create this interesting query language that could answer questions like: what things do you like if you like X and Y but not Z? (I kind of remember that something akin to this have been hacked together using subreddit overlap.)
olegious 7y ago
If we kill advertisement, you can say goodbye to the vast majority of content on the internet. The better approach is to make advertising a better experience and to create incentives for advertisers to spend ad dollars on quality content.
- rglullis 7y ago
  There will always be bottom-feeders as long as there is a market where people are not forced to choose with their wallets. Killing the "vast majority of content on the internet" seems like a good thing to me, honestly.
  - Fjolsvith 7y ago
    > Killing the "vast majority of content on the internet" seems like a good thing to me, honestly. I sure hope my content of preference beats out yours for not getting killed.
    - rglullis 7y ago
      I am reasonably sure that even if our preferences are complete opposite and we eliminate 99% of content in general, you would still have enough quality content for what your interests are. But just to be extra sure, please vote with your wallet and actively support the things you like and don't let advertisers do the choosing for you.
- _nalply 7y ago
  Advertisement just should not be the central means of income of content producers. I really hope this point of view gets killed together with advertisement.
  - pif 7y ago
    > Advertisement just should not be the central means of income of content producers. Can you propose any viable alternative?
BjoernKW 7y ago
Other than a completely new approach for producing value such as the 'Freeism' one described in the article suggested in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20282851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20282851 (which I hadn't time to read yet and hence I'm neither in favour of or against) this simply boils down to the questions of who will pay for relevant content and what the business model will be. By and large, people don't seem to be willing to pay for content on the web. Hence, advertising became the dominant business model for content on the web. Find another way for someone to pay for relevant content and you can do away with advertising. It's as simple as that.
- Fjolsvith 7y ago
  > Find another way for someone to pay for relevant content and you can do away with advertising. It's as simple as that. Not so simple. What is relevant for me may be irrelevant for you.
  - BjoernKW 7y ago
    You pay for content that's relevant to you. I pay for what's relevant to me.
    - Fjolsvith 7y ago
      Oh, okay. I was assuming we had someone like the government pay for content.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > By and large, people don't seem to be willing to pay for content on the web. Hence, advertising became the dominant business model for content on the web. I don't think the causality is right here. People might not be willing to pay for content on the web because advertising enables competitors to offer content for free. If you removed that option, if people had no choice but to pay, it might just turn out that people would pay.
  - 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
vfinn 7y ago
Maybe if IPFS (~web 3.0) succeeds in the future, you could solve the advertising problem by inventing a meta network, where all the sites involved would agree to follow certain standardized criteria of site purity. You'd tag the nodes (or sites), and then have an option to search only sites from the pure network. Just a thought. edit: Maybe this would lead to a growing interest in the site purity, and as the network's popularity would grow, you could monetize the difference to its advance.
- ativzzz 7y ago
  Be careful what you wish for, as you might get AMP or some propriety Facebook format as a standard instead.
  - vfinn 7y ago
    Well, I was thinking we could have endless number of (meta) networks / network configurations / standards. I mean each node could have as many tags as needed, e.g. #safe_for_children_v1.1 #pure_web_v2.0. Then you could configure your search engine / browser according to these tags. You could also stack tags to simplify things, e.g. pure_stack would include both #safe_for_children and #pure_web, etc. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems doable.
wolco 7y ago
To kill advertising would mean the web would live behind many walled gardens where each site requires membership. For the remaining free sites you will see advertising in different forms (self promotion blog, the upsell, t-shirt stores on everysite, spam-bait). Advertising saved the internet. Now tracking.. for advertising or other purposes is the real problem.
bduerst 7y ago
The only way to kill advertising is to have perfectly efficient markets. Until then, you're going to have demand for ferrying information between sellers and buyers, and vice versa, because of information asymmetry. You may disagree with some of the mediums currently used, finding them annoying, but advertising is always evolving to solve this problem, as is evident in the last three decades.
jppope 7y ago
Promotion is a need, and a very important need for ideas to spread. We all know that the concept of "if you build it they will come" doesn't work". Google's adaptation for this was to make advertising relevant... which is actually a considerable improvement over historical media models... There's a saying in sales: "people hate to be sold, but they love to buy"... which is akin to what you are saying here. Advertising isn't the problem... the problem is that the reasons why people are promoting aren't novel enough... (rent seeking... which creates noise)

marknadal 7y ago

I wrote up a proposal on this, changing the economics to adapt to and account for post-scarce resources like information: https://hackernoon.com/wealth-a-new-era-of-economics-ce8acd785441 https://hackernoon.com/wealth-a-new-era-of-economics-ce8acd7...

worldsayshi 7y ago

We could supercharge word of mouth. I've been thinking about an alternative upvote model where content is ranked not primarily based on aggregate voting but by: - ranking content that users you have upvoted higher - ranking content that users with similar upvote behaviour higher While there is a risk of upvote bubbles, it should potentially make it easier for niche content to spread to interested people and make it possible for products and services to spread using peer trust rather than cold shouting.

endymi0n 7y ago
As long as there are big companies making money off their products, you can be sure they'll find a way to advertise them to you.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
fifnir 7y ago
> ranking content that users with similar upvote behaviour higher That's how you make echochambers
- worldsayshi 7y ago
  All social media have echo chamber characteristics. You have to counteract it with transparency and opt-in/out.
eterps 7y ago
I've had similar ideas recently. Especially niche content (or shared research) would probably be notoriously hard (WRT false positives) for machine learning to decide whether it is relevant to you, people with similar interests know that much better. I was also wondering what would be good options to store votes/upvotes in a decentralized way.
- worldsayshi 7y ago
  > people with similar interests know that much better Yeah, I wonder if there is a cheap way to test this. Actually! There could be! Like using favorite's here on hacker news. That could be mined and visualized in various ways. (Although a quick sample shows me that it's a rarely used feature) > I was also wondering what would be good options to store votes/upvotes in a decentralized way. Yeah there are a lot of interesting optimization challenges if you really want to utilize upvote graphs for ranking.
loxs 7y ago
So, basically Facebook?
scrollaway 7y ago
Not to echo a R&M quote on purpose but that just sounds like targeted advertising with extra steps.
Fjolsvith 7y ago
This sounds so much like Facebook.
- worldsayshi 7y ago
  Any "social" ranking algorithm is going to sound at least superficially similar to what's already out there.
thekyle 7y ago
> ranking content that users with similar upvote behaviour higher This is what Reddit originally tried to do before they pivoted. https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/11fiab/are_memes_making_the_internet_boring/c6m9sy8/ https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/11fiab/are_memes_maki...
- worldsayshi 7y ago
  Oh, interesting! Makes me think that their original plan could still work if they just put a bit more effort into crafting that algorithm. For example, the main criticism brought up is that things that you dislike that your peers like keep getting recommended. Why not add a de-ranking aspect into it and try adding downvote-peers in addition to upvote peers. I imagine you could create this interesting query language that could answer questions like: what things do you like if you like X and Y but not Z? (I kind of remember that something akin to this have been hacked together using subreddit overlap.)

olegious 7y ago

If we kill advertisement, you can say goodbye to the vast majority of content on the internet. The better approach is to make advertising a better experience and to create incentives for advertisers to spend ad dollars on quality content.

rglullis 7y ago
There will always be bottom-feeders as long as there is a market where people are not forced to choose with their wallets. Killing the "vast majority of content on the internet" seems like a good thing to me, honestly.
- Fjolsvith 7y ago
  > Killing the "vast majority of content on the internet" seems like a good thing to me, honestly. I sure hope my content of preference beats out yours for not getting killed.
  - rglullis 7y ago
    I am reasonably sure that even if our preferences are complete opposite and we eliminate 99% of content in general, you would still have enough quality content for what your interests are. But just to be extra sure, please vote with your wallet and actively support the things you like and don't let advertisers do the choosing for you.
_nalply 7y ago
Advertisement just should not be the central means of income of content producers. I really hope this point of view gets killed together with advertisement.
- pif 7y ago
  > Advertisement just should not be the central means of income of content producers. Can you propose any viable alternative?

BjoernKW 7y ago

Other than a completely new approach for producing value such as the 'Freeism' one described in the article suggested in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20282851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20282851 (which I hadn't time to read yet and hence I'm neither in favour of or against) this simply boils down to the questions of who will pay for relevant content and what the business model will be. By and large, people don't seem to be willing to pay for content on the web. Hence, advertising became the dominant business model for content on the web. Find another way for someone to pay for relevant content and you can do away with advertising. It's as simple as that.

Fjolsvith 7y ago
> Find another way for someone to pay for relevant content and you can do away with advertising. It's as simple as that. Not so simple. What is relevant for me may be irrelevant for you.
- BjoernKW 7y ago
  You pay for content that's relevant to you. I pay for what's relevant to me.
  - Fjolsvith 7y ago
    Oh, okay. I was assuming we had someone like the government pay for content.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> By and large, people don't seem to be willing to pay for content on the web. Hence, advertising became the dominant business model for content on the web. I don't think the causality is right here. People might not be willing to pay for content on the web because advertising enables competitors to offer content for free. If you removed that option, if people had no choice but to pay, it might just turn out that people would pay.
- 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

vfinn 7y ago

Maybe if IPFS (~web 3.0) succeeds in the future, you could solve the advertising problem by inventing a meta network, where all the sites involved would agree to follow certain standardized criteria of site purity. You'd tag the nodes (or sites), and then have an option to search only sites from the pure network. Just a thought. edit: Maybe this would lead to a growing interest in the site purity, and as the network's popularity would grow, you could monetize the difference to its advance.

ativzzz 7y ago
Be careful what you wish for, as you might get AMP or some propriety Facebook format as a standard instead.
- vfinn 7y ago
  Well, I was thinking we could have endless number of (meta) networks / network configurations / standards. I mean each node could have as many tags as needed, e.g. #safe_for_children_v1.1 #pure_web_v2.0. Then you could configure your search engine / browser according to these tags. You could also stack tags to simplify things, e.g. pure_stack would include both #safe_for_children and #pure_web, etc. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems doable.

wolco 7y ago

To kill advertising would mean the web would live behind many walled gardens where each site requires membership. For the remaining free sites you will see advertising in different forms (self promotion blog, the upsell, t-shirt stores on everysite, spam-bait). Advertising saved the internet. Now tracking.. for advertising or other purposes is the real problem.

bduerst 7y ago

The only way to kill advertising is to have perfectly efficient markets. Until then, you're going to have demand for ferrying information between sellers and buyers, and vice versa, because of information asymmetry. You may disagree with some of the mediums currently used, finding them annoying, but advertising is always evolving to solve this problem, as is evident in the last three decades.

jppope 7y ago

Promotion is a need, and a very important need for ideas to spread. We all know that the concept of "if you build it they will come" doesn't work". Google's adaptation for this was to make advertising relevant... which is actually a considerable improvement over historical media models... There's a saying in sales: "people hate to be sold, but they love to buy"... which is akin to what you are saying here. Advertising isn't the problem... the problem is that the reasons why people are promoting aren't novel enough... (rent seeking... which creates noise)