21 ms·

The User Always Loses

210 points by musha68k 6y ago

jiofih 6y ago
> blogging take off as a shared response to the US invasion of Iraq Blogging took off because half the worlds population started having access to the internet in the early 2000s. That seems incredibly myopic and US centric.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  I'd say either Blogger or Livejournal was the coming of age for blogging, the Iraq War had nothing to do with that, those things just happened around the same time without any direct connection between the two. The vast majority of blogs had totally different content.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Yeah, large-scale blogging was part of Web 2.0/read-write web which came into being around the time that it became much easier for "ordinary people" to publish on the Web but prior to the real social media wave of Facebook/Twitter/etc. The timing lines up fairly well with Gulf War II but I would personally never have drawn a connection.
- astura 6y ago
  Not only is myopic and US-centered, it's just plain non-factual, LiveJournal really took off pre-9/11. Around 2000-2001 literally everyone in my friend group were on LJ (except me), and not just passively/occasionally - regular active users and always talking about LJ stuff IRL. Even people who didn't have a computer at home! It seemed like it was just as much a social network as it was a publishing platform. According to Wikipedia LiveJournal had to implement an invite-only system for new users because they were growing faster than the server architecture could handle. This was all started pre-9/11. That being said, I didn't hear the word "blog" until the year 2003. Beyond that I don't recall the Iraq War being a major blogging topic. Sure, everyone has an opinion on the Iraq War, but how many blog posts can the average person actually write about their feelings on the Iraq War? Can't be more than a few, not a topic that's going to keep the masses activity blogging. To say blogging was a "shared response" to the invasion of Iraq is just... bizarre.
  - techer 6y ago
    Maybe vaguely referring to Salam Pax. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salam_Pax https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salam_Pax Iraqi blogger.
    - astura 6y ago
      The claim was not "there was several popular blogs that dealt with the topic of the Iraq War." The quote in full >Why did blogging take off as a shared response to the US invasion of Iraq? (When “the Internet became an ideal valve to release opinions,” she writes, “who didn’t have an opinion on the Iraq war?”) Basically claiming that blogging became popular because everyone wanted to share their opinion on the Iraq War. That's just not factual and, quite frankly, ridiculous.
  - MultusSalus 6y ago
    > how many blog posts can the average person write about their feelings on the Iraq War? A books worth: http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/deepdish/ebooks/i-was-wrong/ http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/deepdish/ebooks/i-was-wrong/
    - astura 6y ago
      We are talking about the masses of Average Joes here.
- deleted 6y ago
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excalibur 6y ago
I mean... Users wrote us. A User even wrote you!
- teddyh 6y ago
  No one user wrote me! I’m worth millions of their man-years!
deleted 6y ago
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api 6y ago
The user always loses because the user is not the paying customer. Advertisers, surveillance agencies, and propagandists are the paying customers. Businesses serve the paying customer, not the “user” who in this model is the product. This is not much better than old media really, which was always mostly ad supported. Media has always been a deflationary race to the bottom. When one player offers something cheap or free everyone else must follow suit and the economic model collapses. The cheapest crap and/or content with ulterior motives funded by someone else wins.
- blfr 6y ago
  Advertisers aren't winning either. They're paying more and more for ads with fewer avenues for unpaid traffic. You could maybe say that they're getting more measurable results than back in the day of TV and press dominance but having seen it from the inside, I doubt most are sophisticated enough to make use of that.
  - moksly 6y ago
    I don’t think the metrics or analytics are really giving better results. Mainly because platform access has become a product, that is defined by the seller. You could very easily measure the effects of a 90’ies styled super soaker TV adds in sales. You can’t as easily measure the success of the Facebook advertisement for your board game kickstarter campaign.
superkuh 6y ago
So don't be a user. Self host and federate. The internet of the 90s is still alive if you step outside the walled gardens. And when you use other's services, like, say, reading an article hosted at 'thenation.com', a site which attempts to block you from reading unless you run their javascript and CSS, use a browser with tools that allow you to toggle things like JS and CSS to read it anyway. Then re-share the article as plain text, https://write.as/tg3o7a6dfa5ck.md https://write.as/tg3o7a6dfa5ck.md And always remember: Lurking is good, https://i.imgur.com/7NYQ17y.mp4 https://i.imgur.com/7NYQ17y.mp4
- blfr 6y ago
  The internet of the 90s is still alive if you step outside the walled gardens. It is and it isn't. Sure, you can run a website, forum, blog, whatever and host it yourself much easier than in the 90s. But people look for you and connect on the popular platforms they frequent: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Back in the day even normies would pick up some tech and talk to you on IRC or USENET. Nowadays, it's the opposite, the bias is in the other direction. Even hackers are on Slack and Twitter.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    You're right. Though I'd probably argue that a lot of people may be overly concerned with discoverability, follower counts, monitization, etc. You can blog/podcast/make videos/etc. as easily (or more so) as you could in the early 2000s. And you can always just link from Twitter or whatever. If you don't stress about maximizing your followers all the capabilities are still there. But you're right that the bias has shifted, e.g. long twitter threads (with no real archivability) vs. a blog post.
  - chris-orgmenta 6y ago
    >But people look for you and connect on the popular platforms they frequent: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Back in the day even normies would pick up some tech and talk to you on IRC or USENET Is that true? Peak IRC users appears to be 10 million (2013) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Decline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Decline, Citation needed. Pretending that all IRC users were in the US... That's ~3% of the population. Usenet is arguably going strong (daily volume has exploded but isn't a useful metric here though. Can't find active users from cursory look). ~70% of US population are 'active' users of Facebook. This counts people that have only used it once in the last 30 days. And it's not a dichotomy - I don't think people have an issue stepping outside of facebook, as long as there are no barriers to entry. Just playing devil's advocate, I don't disagree with you in general. I appreciate that my stats are lazy and blunt, but it shows how relatively minuscule the usage of IRC & Usenet were 2 decades ago, and that while direct messaging might be in a more 'walled garden' state, traffic to self-federated content is generally still as attainable. Perhaps 'eternal september' has swung so far to the other side that the old non-internet users of the 90s have funnelled through AOL and out the other side to Facebook (and notably, it's easier to grab traffic from FB users than non-internet users), while the core tech demographic has remained 'in the middle'.
deleted 6y ago
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zwieback 6y ago
For a while old media subsidized online media and that was the short "golden" age of online newspapers, magazines etc., Never to return. For those if us not obsessed with twitter and Facebook the golden age is now, the amount and quality of information available to an engineer is incredible and the online communities are mostly positive.
benjaminjosephw 6y ago
The VC model for funding technology is the root cause of user hostile technology. The pressure of investments that expect high returns is a feature/bug that determines the course these companies are likely to take. It creates the need to occasionally tade end-user freedoms for opportunities to "capture value". Venture Capital also imports theories of scarcity and under-production that our entire open-source ecosystem have shown don't apply in the same way to the digital world. The funding of end-user friendly software development clearly isn't a solved problem but the history of the internet clearly demonstrates that our existing models aren't sufficient. VC is ripe for disruption. I believe that the next leap forward to "make the world a better place" isn't new digital products but a new framework for how we build technology companies in the first place. We needn't accept this as a fundamental foundation that can't change - creative destruction is the name of the game after all.
- nkingsy 6y ago
  Disruption requires inefficiencies/skirtable regulations in the existing system. In this case the system is capitalism itself. As long as software development and user acquisition requires capital, software doesn’t seem all that different from other capital intensive activities. IMO this will change when 1. Regulations and/or cultural norms inhibit user-hostile behavior. Or 2. capitalism itself changes
  - benjaminjosephw 6y ago
    Venture Captital is not the same as capitalism. In fact, you could argue that the hyper-growth pro-monopoly attitudes of VC firms is decidedly anti-capitalist in as much as they are anticompetitive behaviours. Arguing that the current system is the only one that will work, regardless of how broken it is, is a very dangerous position to advocate for and an anti-pattern that would eventually lead us away from a fair and equal marketplace. That's not capitalism.
    - jethro_tell 6y ago
      You're right on the money here. I'm old enough to remember when you could start a business by going down to the bank and borrowing money with a 5 year term. The problem is you can't play in a winner take all market with a slow steady growth model any longer. The multi national monopoly with a stake closest to your business model will just crush you for fun. This results in new ideas being go big or go home. May as well not play unless you're going to over borrow and try to grow so fast that you corner the market over night. Once you get the market cornered though, you gotta pay back that loan. It would be rad if there was enough pie for people to have a good idea and get some customers and pay all their people and go home without needing endless growth.
danielhua 6y ago
"Let’s admit it, we are all in the persuasion business. Technologists build products meant to persuade people to do what we want them to do. We call these people 'users' and even if we don’t say it aloud, we secretly wish every one of them would become fiendishly hooked to whatever we’re making." --"Hooked" (2013) The snappy aphorism off the top of my head is that "only drug dealers and IT call their customers 'users.'" One day perhaps we will indeed look at the apps of today as massive social engineering experiments gone haywire. But the author's categorization of Facebook as an "ant farm of humanity" and a "digital cesspool" is juuuust a bit too misanthropic and bitter for my tastes. The internet has connected humanity to an extent that is literally hard to grasp, and yes, that does come with very human problems, so it's silly imo to pin all of our woes on Facebook et al. I'd love to hear what kinds of creative derogatory phrases the author would come up with to describe the period of dominating telephone networks, or mass media television, or even before we had any wires at all and just had to rely on the post and grapevine in the horrific dark ages before the invention of the telegraph in the 19th century. Plus, for nostalgia's sake, the indie web's still out there if you know where to look (e.g. https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/)
- eesmith 6y ago
  While it's a well-known and indeed snappy aphorism, many years after I heard it, I found out that in the mid-20th century, librarians used the term "users" for what they now call "patrons". For examples: from 1952, "A public library user is defined as an individual twelve years of age or over who used either a branch library or bookmobile during the thirty days preceding the interview." (Quoting "Rural reading habits; a study of county library planning, Prince Georges County, Md.", https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015034569759&view=1up&seq=20&q1=user https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015034569759&vi... ) From 1931, "This was the first complete triple asyndetic dictionary catalog. It became a favorite with town and mercantile libraries, the idea always being that the user was searching for some book he knew about ..." ("Outline of the history of the development of the American public library", https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015019970162&view=1up&seq=73&q1=user https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015019970162&vi...) From 1928, "Consider the User of Bulletins", title of a letter to the editor in Science - https://science.sciencemag.org/content/67/1724/40.2 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/67/1724/40.2 . Maybe it wasn't specific to library science either. I just did a broader search for "user" and found, for example, a 1905 ad for a book of tables for surveyors and engineers: "The computations enable the user to ascertain the sines and cosines for a distance of twelve miles to within half an inch, and this by reference to but One Table, in place of the usual Fifteen minute computations required. This alone is evidence of the assistance which the Tables ensure to every user ... " https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015063579133&view=1up&seq=205&q1=user https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015063579133&vi...
katsume3 6y ago
I find it ironic that this article talks about the user losing out to aggressive (and intrusive) advertising on the web, but presents me with an un-closeable modal window[0] asking me to subscribe to their blog. Note: I have JS disabled by default, and had to temporarily enable JS to view the article, but it's still intrusive and annoying for users. [0] https://imgur.com/a/SQSHh0i https://imgur.com/a/SQSHh0i
- true_religion 6y ago
  Is it an advertisement when it’s the same property that you are in? That’s like HBO advertising the next episode of a show you are watching.
  - njarboe 6y ago
    Yes. And I find it annoying when HBO plays ads for their shows before starting what I have selected to watch. They started doing this a year or two ago.
  - aaronax 6y ago
    Yes, though it does become a fuzzy line. I believe it would not be advertising to display the next episode of a series, or even auto play it. But it would be advertising to display a different series or film. For a fuzzier one, how about a newspaper providing links to their other stories at the bottom of an article that you have read? Typically I gain nothing by ingesting more of a particular publication's writing, so that could be an ad rather than useful functionality. Perhaps not in a special circumstance such as if I am trying to catch up on news local to that publication.
    - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
      I don't really mind links to other articles at the bottom of the article that I'm reading. I mean, yes, it's a kind of advertising, but it's not intrinsically intrusive. If a site brings up a modal popup while I'm scrolling an article saying "OMG ENTER YOUR EMAIL HERE TO GET NOTIFIED WHENEVER WE WRITE ANYTHING ABOUT ANYTHING [or click this tiny text that says "no" in the most passive-aggressive phrasing we could think of]", that's a different issue. (I kind of wonder if internet advertising would be a lot less hated if it had developed with a culture of restraint rather than maximum in-your-faceness, although to be fair, I'm not sure how that could ever have happened.)
cryptica 6y ago
> How did the Internet get so bad? The article misses the point. The problem has its root in monetary policy. The problem is supply-side economics. Money printing and giving control of the money supply to banks has made consumers redundant appendages of the financial system. Imagine that you're the CEO of a unicorn startup or a big corporation and you constantly deal with investors, banks and customers. Which of these 3 groups do you derive most of your wealth from? Banks and investors. Banks print money and loan it out to your investors and your investors use that money to buy your company stock and drive up its price - Also, banks loan your company money directly to buy back its own stock... As an executive, if you want to maximize your bonus, banks and investors are the only two entities you really care about... Your actual customers are merely appendages; they're merely a useful metric which allows you to get more money from investors and banks. So long as all the new fiat money enters the economy through big institutions and big investors via bank loans, the consumer will always be an afterthought in the decision-making process. You're the product because you're not the source of money. Consumers don't have any money. Only institutions have money because they're printing it for free and distributing it among themselves by the trillions. That's why we need UBI (Universal Basic Income) urgently - That's the only safe way to switch to sane demand-side economics.
- afarrell 6y ago
  This problem is most apparent during a recession, when the central bank (rightly) strives to quickly increase the money supply by buying bonds (and apparently equities!). If instead there could be a joint policy by The Fed and the Social Security Administration, then the flow of money (and thereby attention)_could be less lopsided.
  - cryptica 6y ago
    >> when the central bank (rightly) strives to quickly increase the money supply I disagree completely that central banks trying to increase the money supply is righteous in any way. I'm a value producer and this monetary policy has harmed me. I can see exactly how it has harmed me and I can see the kinds of people it has benefited and I don't agree at all. The central bank has stolen value from me and given it to my enemy.
amelius 6y ago
We also have "The customer always loses". I guess it all translates to "The small guy always loses". And VCs piling up money doesn't work in favor of the small guy.
fullshark 6y ago
Nostalgia for the old internet is basically nostalgia for a wild period of market capture that will never come again. People took chances and accepted massive short term losses in an attempt to capture hypothetical market share. Now that we know better what the internet is going to look like you aren't going to see people take big chances and provide user value at massive discounts again (simple example: News papers providing articles in front of paywalls).
- im3w1l 6y ago
  It's not that I miss the bait part of bait-and-switch. I miss what the bait outcompeted.
newyorker2 6y ago
If people openly believe that centralization of the web is bad yet we continue pumping unnecessary money into the tech industry - then surely this must mean we're in a bubble. How wrong am I?
ppod 6y ago
>When users are scapegoated, Silicon Valley is left off the hook Is this really the dominant narrative? Are there lots of thinkpieces going around about how fair and kind Silicon Valley is, if only it weren't for all those mean people using their services? Maybe it is so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but when comparing the early internet to the current internet, we cannot let the users off the hook! The further back you go, the harder it was to get on the internet, both as a user and a publisher. That meant the early internet was full of people who worked at universities, or were so motivated to discuss weird hobbies and interests with others that they struggled through the expense and technical difficulties, maybe even self-hosted, learned weird new languages from scratch. These were interesting, educated, intelligent, thoughtful and passionate people. It's like air travel. If you were flying in the 1970s you probably had an interesting or important job or story. Getting on a plane meant meeting a bunch of interesting people. Now it doesn't. That is not a bad thing and it's not Southwest's fault. And when people complain about it, even though they might target Southwest (or Facebook), there is really an underlying snobbery about it. I can't believe I have to sit next to all these commoners on my internet!
- Orou 6y ago
  > These were interesting, educated, intelligent, thoughtful and passionate people > there is really an underlying snobbery about it These contrast very interestingly, but I think it's missing an important point. The early internet was characterized by complete freedom of association. You could talk about whatever, with whomever. If enough people shared an interest, a community could form. The problem with the modern internet isn't that the filthy plebs are using it - it's that all of the content suggestion algorithms, clickbait articles, and advertising are designed for maximum engagement. It's no longer what groups of "interesting, educated, intelligent, thoughtful and passionate people" collectively put forward, without an ulterior financial incentive, that determines what content people see. I think that's the ultimate issue - it's not that low quality content proliferates, it's that there are few if any ways of finding high-quality content among all the crap. It's one of the main reasons I read Hacker News - it's an excellent content filter.
  - tomc1985 6y ago
hh3k0 6y ago
> […] carpet-bombing campaign to market the still nascent World Wide Web […] ad blitz […] I get it, advertising sucks. Still, save the military terminology for things that are related to the fucking military. I mean, I wonder what a 57-year-old from Cambodia would think when he reads about how much the author suffered under the "carpet-bombing campaign" of AOL and the likes.
pinewurst 6y ago
Nobody seems to mention Product Manager culture e.g. the cult of A/B and their rewards for often dubious engagement metrics. Admittedly this is somewhat of a second order effect of the VC model, but I'll argue it's now the universal standard for success regardless of the initial motivator.
marban 6y ago
I'm currently working on something I would describe as Digg 1.0 for grown-ups and during my recent research cam across https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/m7jwyx/celebrities-ruin-every-platform-bella-thorne-onlyfans-controversy https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/m7jwyx/celebrities-ruin-e... — mostly fluff, but the celebrity factor makes a point.
fmajid 6y ago
The author certainly likes the sound of her voice, doesn't she? Not to mention that AOL CDs are as relevant to today's surveillance-industrial complex and dark patterns as Monteverdi's Vespers.
unabst 6y ago
We also live in a "consumer always loses" economy as well. It could just be "consumer" supercedes "user". I was listening to Richard Wolff describing to Patrick Bet-David how capitalism creates monopolies and in the end the consumers always lose [1]. As companies get bigger, they become worse actors. I can't think of a counter example. Patrick thinks everything has gotten cheaper and the consumer is winning, at least today (since history only backs the thesis). Richard couldn't come up with immediate counter examples regarding how Amazon is abusing their monopoly priviledges but FBA pricing and seller fees came to mind. Someone in the comments mentioned prescription drugs. [1] Heated Debate On Capitalism with America’s Most Prominent Marxist Economist - Richard Wolff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj-zFgxCUnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj-zFgxCUnY
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hinkley 6y ago
This is probably why I’m always attracted to productivity tools. Spending $10 to save $100 is a net positive contribution. Skinner boxing people and spying on them are not.
gumby 6y ago
This transformation of customers to “users” (an otherwise appropriate and even innocuous term when used in context) parallels the commonplace use of “consumer” for “person” (a usage I even see on HN). We all have many roles, in which it may be appropriate to consider us as “user”, “customer”, “consumer”, “driver”, “parent”, “friend”...* preferring the term “person” might remind us that at the end of the day that the user’s interest is not necessarily aligned with ours (usually joystick in face) and that we need them more than they need us. * I had a colleague who refers to parents of teens as “protectors of terrorists”. Yes, he had four teens himself. While the term was unwieldy and the joke rapidly wore thin, it reminded me of the various roles played by parents...and kids, and made me more tolerant of the foibles of teens. When we bundle a person into “user” it’s easy to lose perspective on the actual objective.
lemonlizzie 6y ago
A healthier internet? yeah right
rossdavidh 6y ago
At one time, a minority of people were on the internet, often with their own blogs, but most people were just watching TV. Now, most people are on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other massively high-traffic websites, while a minority of people are on the rest of the internet, often with their own blogs. It's not as different as it looks, it's just that the TV networks got displaced by the few high-traffic websites. It's apocalyptic for for-profit TV, radio, and newspaper companies, who have been mostly circling the drain as FAANG gobbles up their ad revenue. But the impact on "the internet" is not as different as it looks, it's just that "the internet" now needs a new name, like maybe "the low-traffic-website internet" but shorter (tltwi, pronounced "tilt-we"), because the Old Media are now co-hosted on the same infrastructure. Most people didn't get on the internet prior to AOL. Most people don't leave the high-traffic-sites internet now. It's not like there aren't any blogs left. It's not as different as it looks.
nphd 6y ago
>the Internet didn’t have to become what it is today. Part of my last-lecture pep talk to every 300-student CS class I taught.
eximius 6y ago
Someone mentioned federation but the problem is that often there isn't a good group to federate. Google+ wasn't great, but I do miss circles. But the intersection of my circles and the circles of those in my circles were small. I feel like the "correct" model is users hosting their data with apps operating on it in a decentralized (or multi-layer federation ) way. But the economics are just really, really hard without certain restrictions, like always on connections for a primary 'home' device.

210 points by musha68k 6y ago

> blogging take off as a shared response to the US invasion of Iraq Blogging took off because half the worlds population started having access to the internet in the early 2000s. That seems incredibly myopic and US centric.

jacquesm 6y ago
I'd say either Blogger or Livejournal was the coming of age for blogging, the Iraq War had nothing to do with that, those things just happened around the same time without any direct connection between the two. The vast majority of blogs had totally different content.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Yeah, large-scale blogging was part of Web 2.0/read-write web which came into being around the time that it became much easier for "ordinary people" to publish on the Web but prior to the real social media wave of Facebook/Twitter/etc. The timing lines up fairly well with Gulf War II but I would personally never have drawn a connection.
astura 6y ago
Not only is myopic and US-centered, it's just plain non-factual, LiveJournal really took off pre-9/11. Around 2000-2001 literally everyone in my friend group were on LJ (except me), and not just passively/occasionally - regular active users and always talking about LJ stuff IRL. Even people who didn't have a computer at home! It seemed like it was just as much a social network as it was a publishing platform. According to Wikipedia LiveJournal had to implement an invite-only system for new users because they were growing faster than the server architecture could handle. This was all started pre-9/11. That being said, I didn't hear the word "blog" until the year 2003. Beyond that I don't recall the Iraq War being a major blogging topic. Sure, everyone has an opinion on the Iraq War, but how many blog posts can the average person actually write about their feelings on the Iraq War? Can't be more than a few, not a topic that's going to keep the masses activity blogging. To say blogging was a "shared response" to the invasion of Iraq is just... bizarre.
- techer 6y ago
  Maybe vaguely referring to Salam Pax. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salam_Pax https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salam_Pax Iraqi blogger.
  - astura 6y ago
    The claim was not "there was several popular blogs that dealt with the topic of the Iraq War." The quote in full >Why did blogging take off as a shared response to the US invasion of Iraq? (When “the Internet became an ideal valve to release opinions,” she writes, “who didn’t have an opinion on the Iraq war?”) Basically claiming that blogging became popular because everyone wanted to share their opinion on the Iraq War. That's just not factual and, quite frankly, ridiculous.
- MultusSalus 6y ago
  > how many blog posts can the average person write about their feelings on the Iraq War? A books worth: http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/deepdish/ebooks/i-was-wrong/ http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/deepdish/ebooks/i-was-wrong/
  - astura 6y ago
    We are talking about the masses of Average Joes here.
deleted 6y ago
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excalibur 6y ago

I mean... Users wrote us. A User even wrote you!

teddyh 6y ago
No one user wrote me! I’m worth millions of their man-years!

deleted 6y ago

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api 6y ago

The user always loses because the user is not the paying customer. Advertisers, surveillance agencies, and propagandists are the paying customers. Businesses serve the paying customer, not the “user” who in this model is the product. This is not much better than old media really, which was always mostly ad supported. Media has always been a deflationary race to the bottom. When one player offers something cheap or free everyone else must follow suit and the economic model collapses. The cheapest crap and/or content with ulterior motives funded by someone else wins.

blfr 6y ago
Advertisers aren't winning either. They're paying more and more for ads with fewer avenues for unpaid traffic. You could maybe say that they're getting more measurable results than back in the day of TV and press dominance but having seen it from the inside, I doubt most are sophisticated enough to make use of that.
- moksly 6y ago
  I don’t think the metrics or analytics are really giving better results. Mainly because platform access has become a product, that is defined by the seller. You could very easily measure the effects of a 90’ies styled super soaker TV adds in sales. You can’t as easily measure the success of the Facebook advertisement for your board game kickstarter campaign.

superkuh 6y ago

So don't be a user. Self host and federate. The internet of the 90s is still alive if you step outside the walled gardens. And when you use other's services, like, say, reading an article hosted at 'thenation.com', a site which attempts to block you from reading unless you run their javascript and CSS, use a browser with tools that allow you to toggle things like JS and CSS to read it anyway. Then re-share the article as plain text, https://write.as/tg3o7a6dfa5ck.md https://write.as/tg3o7a6dfa5ck.md And always remember: Lurking is good, https://i.imgur.com/7NYQ17y.mp4 https://i.imgur.com/7NYQ17y.mp4

blfr 6y ago
The internet of the 90s is still alive if you step outside the walled gardens. It is and it isn't. Sure, you can run a website, forum, blog, whatever and host it yourself much easier than in the 90s. But people look for you and connect on the popular platforms they frequent: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Back in the day even normies would pick up some tech and talk to you on IRC or USENET. Nowadays, it's the opposite, the bias is in the other direction. Even hackers are on Slack and Twitter.
- ghaff 6y ago
  You're right. Though I'd probably argue that a lot of people may be overly concerned with discoverability, follower counts, monitization, etc. You can blog/podcast/make videos/etc. as easily (or more so) as you could in the early 2000s. And you can always just link from Twitter or whatever. If you don't stress about maximizing your followers all the capabilities are still there. But you're right that the bias has shifted, e.g. long twitter threads (with no real archivability) vs. a blog post.
- chris-orgmenta 6y ago
  >But people look for you and connect on the popular platforms they frequent: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Back in the day even normies would pick up some tech and talk to you on IRC or USENET Is that true? Peak IRC users appears to be 10 million (2013) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Decline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Decline, Citation needed. Pretending that all IRC users were in the US... That's ~3% of the population. Usenet is arguably going strong (daily volume has exploded but isn't a useful metric here though. Can't find active users from cursory look). ~70% of US population are 'active' users of Facebook. This counts people that have only used it once in the last 30 days. And it's not a dichotomy - I don't think people have an issue stepping outside of facebook, as long as there are no barriers to entry. Just playing devil's advocate, I don't disagree with you in general. I appreciate that my stats are lazy and blunt, but it shows how relatively minuscule the usage of IRC & Usenet were 2 decades ago, and that while direct messaging might be in a more 'walled garden' state, traffic to self-federated content is generally still as attainable. Perhaps 'eternal september' has swung so far to the other side that the old non-internet users of the 90s have funnelled through AOL and out the other side to Facebook (and notably, it's easier to grab traffic from FB users than non-internet users), while the core tech demographic has remained 'in the middle'.

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zwieback 6y ago

For a while old media subsidized online media and that was the short "golden" age of online newspapers, magazines etc., Never to return. For those if us not obsessed with twitter and Facebook the golden age is now, the amount and quality of information available to an engineer is incredible and the online communities are mostly positive.

benjaminjosephw 6y ago

The VC model for funding technology is the root cause of user hostile technology. The pressure of investments that expect high returns is a feature/bug that determines the course these companies are likely to take. It creates the need to occasionally tade end-user freedoms for opportunities to "capture value". Venture Capital also imports theories of scarcity and under-production that our entire open-source ecosystem have shown don't apply in the same way to the digital world. The funding of end-user friendly software development clearly isn't a solved problem but the history of the internet clearly demonstrates that our existing models aren't sufficient. VC is ripe for disruption. I believe that the next leap forward to "make the world a better place" isn't new digital products but a new framework for how we build technology companies in the first place. We needn't accept this as a fundamental foundation that can't change - creative destruction is the name of the game after all.

nkingsy 6y ago
Disruption requires inefficiencies/skirtable regulations in the existing system. In this case the system is capitalism itself. As long as software development and user acquisition requires capital, software doesn’t seem all that different from other capital intensive activities. IMO this will change when 1. Regulations and/or cultural norms inhibit user-hostile behavior. Or 2. capitalism itself changes
- benjaminjosephw 6y ago
  Venture Captital is not the same as capitalism. In fact, you could argue that the hyper-growth pro-monopoly attitudes of VC firms is decidedly anti-capitalist in as much as they are anticompetitive behaviours. Arguing that the current system is the only one that will work, regardless of how broken it is, is a very dangerous position to advocate for and an anti-pattern that would eventually lead us away from a fair and equal marketplace. That's not capitalism.
  - jethro_tell 6y ago
    You're right on the money here. I'm old enough to remember when you could start a business by going down to the bank and borrowing money with a 5 year term. The problem is you can't play in a winner take all market with a slow steady growth model any longer. The multi national monopoly with a stake closest to your business model will just crush you for fun. This results in new ideas being go big or go home. May as well not play unless you're going to over borrow and try to grow so fast that you corner the market over night. Once you get the market cornered though, you gotta pay back that loan. It would be rad if there was enough pie for people to have a good idea and get some customers and pay all their people and go home without needing endless growth.

danielhua 6y ago

"Let’s admit it, we are all in the persuasion business. Technologists build products meant to persuade people to do what we want them to do. We call these people 'users' and even if we don’t say it aloud, we secretly wish every one of them would become fiendishly hooked to whatever we’re making." --"Hooked" (2013) The snappy aphorism off the top of my head is that "only drug dealers and IT call their customers 'users.'" One day perhaps we will indeed look at the apps of today as massive social engineering experiments gone haywire. But the author's categorization of Facebook as an "ant farm of humanity" and a "digital cesspool" is juuuust a bit too misanthropic and bitter for my tastes. The internet has connected humanity to an extent that is literally hard to grasp, and yes, that does come with very human problems, so it's silly imo to pin all of our woes on Facebook et al. I'd love to hear what kinds of creative derogatory phrases the author would come up with to describe the period of dominating telephone networks, or mass media television, or even before we had any wires at all and just had to rely on the post and grapevine in the horrific dark ages before the invention of the telegraph in the 19th century. Plus, for nostalgia's sake, the indie web's still out there if you know where to look (e.g. https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/)

eesmith 6y ago
While it's a well-known and indeed snappy aphorism, many years after I heard it, I found out that in the mid-20th century, librarians used the term "users" for what they now call "patrons". For examples: from 1952, "A public library user is defined as an individual twelve years of age or over who used either a branch library or bookmobile during the thirty days preceding the interview." (Quoting "Rural reading habits; a study of county library planning, Prince Georges County, Md.", https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015034569759&view=1up&seq=20&q1=user https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015034569759&vi... ) From 1931, "This was the first complete triple asyndetic dictionary catalog. It became a favorite with town and mercantile libraries, the idea always being that the user was searching for some book he knew about ..." ("Outline of the history of the development of the American public library", https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015019970162&view=1up&seq=73&q1=user https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015019970162&vi...) From 1928, "Consider the User of Bulletins", title of a letter to the editor in Science - https://science.sciencemag.org/content/67/1724/40.2 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/67/1724/40.2 . Maybe it wasn't specific to library science either. I just did a broader search for "user" and found, for example, a 1905 ad for a book of tables for surveyors and engineers: "The computations enable the user to ascertain the sines and cosines for a distance of twelve miles to within half an inch, and this by reference to but One Table, in place of the usual Fifteen minute computations required. This alone is evidence of the assistance which the Tables ensure to every user ... " https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015063579133&view=1up&seq=205&q1=user https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015063579133&vi...

katsume3 6y ago

I find it ironic that this article talks about the user losing out to aggressive (and intrusive) advertising on the web, but presents me with an un-closeable modal window[0] asking me to subscribe to their blog. Note: I have JS disabled by default, and had to temporarily enable JS to view the article, but it's still intrusive and annoying for users. [0] https://imgur.com/a/SQSHh0i https://imgur.com/a/SQSHh0i

true_religion 6y ago
Is it an advertisement when it’s the same property that you are in? That’s like HBO advertising the next episode of a show you are watching.
- njarboe 6y ago
  Yes. And I find it annoying when HBO plays ads for their shows before starting what I have selected to watch. They started doing this a year or two ago.
- aaronax 6y ago
  Yes, though it does become a fuzzy line. I believe it would not be advertising to display the next episode of a series, or even auto play it. But it would be advertising to display a different series or film. For a fuzzier one, how about a newspaper providing links to their other stories at the bottom of an article that you have read? Typically I gain nothing by ingesting more of a particular publication's writing, so that could be an ad rather than useful functionality. Perhaps not in a special circumstance such as if I am trying to catch up on news local to that publication.
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    I don't really mind links to other articles at the bottom of the article that I'm reading. I mean, yes, it's a kind of advertising, but it's not intrinsically intrusive. If a site brings up a modal popup while I'm scrolling an article saying "OMG ENTER YOUR EMAIL HERE TO GET NOTIFIED WHENEVER WE WRITE ANYTHING ABOUT ANYTHING [or click this tiny text that says "no" in the most passive-aggressive phrasing we could think of]", that's a different issue. (I kind of wonder if internet advertising would be a lot less hated if it had developed with a culture of restraint rather than maximum in-your-faceness, although to be fair, I'm not sure how that could ever have happened.)

cryptica 6y ago

> How did the Internet get so bad? The article misses the point. The problem has its root in monetary policy. The problem is supply-side economics. Money printing and giving control of the money supply to banks has made consumers redundant appendages of the financial system. Imagine that you're the CEO of a unicorn startup or a big corporation and you constantly deal with investors, banks and customers. Which of these 3 groups do you derive most of your wealth from? Banks and investors. Banks print money and loan it out to your investors and your investors use that money to buy your company stock and drive up its price - Also, banks loan your company money directly to buy back its own stock... As an executive, if you want to maximize your bonus, banks and investors are the only two entities you really care about... Your actual customers are merely appendages; they're merely a useful metric which allows you to get more money from investors and banks. So long as all the new fiat money enters the economy through big institutions and big investors via bank loans, the consumer will always be an afterthought in the decision-making process. You're the product because you're not the source of money. Consumers don't have any money. Only institutions have money because they're printing it for free and distributing it among themselves by the trillions. That's why we need UBI (Universal Basic Income) urgently - That's the only safe way to switch to sane demand-side economics.

afarrell 6y ago
This problem is most apparent during a recession, when the central bank (rightly) strives to quickly increase the money supply by buying bonds (and apparently equities!). If instead there could be a joint policy by The Fed and the Social Security Administration, then the flow of money (and thereby attention)_could be less lopsided.
- cryptica 6y ago
  >> when the central bank (rightly) strives to quickly increase the money supply I disagree completely that central banks trying to increase the money supply is righteous in any way. I'm a value producer and this monetary policy has harmed me. I can see exactly how it has harmed me and I can see the kinds of people it has benefited and I don't agree at all. The central bank has stolen value from me and given it to my enemy.

amelius 6y ago

We also have "The customer always loses". I guess it all translates to "The small guy always loses". And VCs piling up money doesn't work in favor of the small guy.

fullshark 6y ago

Nostalgia for the old internet is basically nostalgia for a wild period of market capture that will never come again. People took chances and accepted massive short term losses in an attempt to capture hypothetical market share. Now that we know better what the internet is going to look like you aren't going to see people take big chances and provide user value at massive discounts again (simple example: News papers providing articles in front of paywalls).

im3w1l 6y ago
It's not that I miss the bait part of bait-and-switch. I miss what the bait outcompeted.

newyorker2 6y ago

If people openly believe that centralization of the web is bad yet we continue pumping unnecessary money into the tech industry - then surely this must mean we're in a bubble. How wrong am I?

ppod 6y ago

>When users are scapegoated, Silicon Valley is left off the hook Is this really the dominant narrative? Are there lots of thinkpieces going around about how fair and kind Silicon Valley is, if only it weren't for all those mean people using their services? Maybe it is so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but when comparing the early internet to the current internet, we cannot let the users off the hook! The further back you go, the harder it was to get on the internet, both as a user and a publisher. That meant the early internet was full of people who worked at universities, or were so motivated to discuss weird hobbies and interests with others that they struggled through the expense and technical difficulties, maybe even self-hosted, learned weird new languages from scratch. These were interesting, educated, intelligent, thoughtful and passionate people. It's like air travel. If you were flying in the 1970s you probably had an interesting or important job or story. Getting on a plane meant meeting a bunch of interesting people. Now it doesn't. That is not a bad thing and it's not Southwest's fault. And when people complain about it, even though they might target Southwest (or Facebook), there is really an underlying snobbery about it. I can't believe I have to sit next to all these commoners on my internet!

Orou 6y ago
> These were interesting, educated, intelligent, thoughtful and passionate people > there is really an underlying snobbery about it These contrast very interestingly, but I think it's missing an important point. The early internet was characterized by complete freedom of association. You could talk about whatever, with whomever. If enough people shared an interest, a community could form. The problem with the modern internet isn't that the filthy plebs are using it - it's that all of the content suggestion algorithms, clickbait articles, and advertising are designed for maximum engagement. It's no longer what groups of "interesting, educated, intelligent, thoughtful and passionate people" collectively put forward, without an ulterior financial incentive, that determines what content people see. I think that's the ultimate issue - it's not that low quality content proliferates, it's that there are few if any ways of finding high-quality content among all the crap. It's one of the main reasons I read Hacker News - it's an excellent content filter.
- tomc1985 6y ago

hh3k0 6y ago

> […] carpet-bombing campaign to market the still nascent World Wide Web […] ad blitz […] I get it, advertising sucks. Still, save the military terminology for things that are related to the fucking military. I mean, I wonder what a 57-year-old from Cambodia would think when he reads about how much the author suffered under the "carpet-bombing campaign" of AOL and the likes.

pinewurst 6y ago

Nobody seems to mention Product Manager culture e.g. the cult of A/B and their rewards for often dubious engagement metrics. Admittedly this is somewhat of a second order effect of the VC model, but I'll argue it's now the universal standard for success regardless of the initial motivator.

marban 6y ago

I'm currently working on something I would describe as Digg 1.0 for grown-ups and during my recent research cam across https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/m7jwyx/celebrities-ruin-every-platform-bella-thorne-onlyfans-controversy https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/m7jwyx/celebrities-ruin-e... — mostly fluff, but the celebrity factor makes a point.

fmajid 6y ago

The author certainly likes the sound of her voice, doesn't she? Not to mention that AOL CDs are as relevant to today's surveillance-industrial complex and dark patterns as Monteverdi's Vespers.

unabst 6y ago

We also live in a "consumer always loses" economy as well. It could just be "consumer" supercedes "user". I was listening to Richard Wolff describing to Patrick Bet-David how capitalism creates monopolies and in the end the consumers always lose [1]. As companies get bigger, they become worse actors. I can't think of a counter example. Patrick thinks everything has gotten cheaper and the consumer is winning, at least today (since history only backs the thesis). Richard couldn't come up with immediate counter examples regarding how Amazon is abusing their monopoly priviledges but FBA pricing and seller fees came to mind. Someone in the comments mentioned prescription drugs. [1] Heated Debate On Capitalism with America’s Most Prominent Marxist Economist - Richard Wolff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj-zFgxCUnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj-zFgxCUnY

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hinkley 6y ago

This is probably why I’m always attracted to productivity tools. Spending $10 to save $100 is a net positive contribution. Skinner boxing people and spying on them are not.

gumby 6y ago

This transformation of customers to “users” (an otherwise appropriate and even innocuous term when used in context) parallels the commonplace use of “consumer” for “person” (a usage I even see on HN). We all have many roles, in which it may be appropriate to consider us as “user”, “customer”, “consumer”, “driver”, “parent”, “friend”...* preferring the term “person” might remind us that at the end of the day that the user’s interest is not necessarily aligned with ours (usually joystick in face) and that we need them more than they need us. * I had a colleague who refers to parents of teens as “protectors of terrorists”. Yes, he had four teens himself. While the term was unwieldy and the joke rapidly wore thin, it reminded me of the various roles played by parents...and kids, and made me more tolerant of the foibles of teens. When we bundle a person into “user” it’s easy to lose perspective on the actual objective.

lemonlizzie 6y ago

A healthier internet? yeah right

rossdavidh 6y ago

At one time, a minority of people were on the internet, often with their own blogs, but most people were just watching TV. Now, most people are on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other massively high-traffic websites, while a minority of people are on the rest of the internet, often with their own blogs. It's not as different as it looks, it's just that the TV networks got displaced by the few high-traffic websites. It's apocalyptic for for-profit TV, radio, and newspaper companies, who have been mostly circling the drain as FAANG gobbles up their ad revenue. But the impact on "the internet" is not as different as it looks, it's just that "the internet" now needs a new name, like maybe "the low-traffic-website internet" but shorter (tltwi, pronounced "tilt-we"), because the Old Media are now co-hosted on the same infrastructure. Most people didn't get on the internet prior to AOL. Most people don't leave the high-traffic-sites internet now. It's not like there aren't any blogs left. It's not as different as it looks.

nphd 6y ago

>the Internet didn’t have to become what it is today. Part of my last-lecture pep talk to every 300-student CS class I taught.

eximius 6y ago

Someone mentioned federation but the problem is that often there isn't a good group to federate. Google+ wasn't great, but I do miss circles. But the intersection of my circles and the circles of those in my circles were small. I feel like the "correct" model is users hosting their data with apps operating on it in a decentralized (or multi-layer federation ) way. But the economics are just really, really hard without certain restrictions, like always on connections for a primary 'home' device.