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You Are the Product (2017)
- Lammy 6y ago(2017) Also, paywall: https://archive.is/TCa90 https://archive.is/TCa90
- blfr 6y ago2017 and a complete cliché by now.
- anonytrary 6y agoDoes that not make it even more relevant?
- drewcoo 6y agoOnly if repetition makes it more true. Message frequency and relevance are orthogonal.
- dghughes 6y agoIt's tiring having a finger waved at you for blocking advertisements. When we all know that our data of who we are and our actions is just as valuable as the ads we are forced to watch. The Internet has become an ad machine that throws a tantrum if anyone dares to block advertising or tracking (of yourself). YouTube was meant for sharing videos but now "influencers", many channel owners, and YouTube itself balk at any attempt to block ads. The actual content of videos is now secondary to the ads which were heavily ramped-up recently with mid-roll ads. YouTube should create 100% advertisement videos and see how popular that is.
- reader_mode 6y agoYou can pay for YouTube premium and get rid of ads. If you spend a non trivial amount of time on YouTube it's well worth it, especially the family account. Don't want to be the product ? Pay for your services then - the money has to come from somewhere.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoWord. People won't pay so ads happen.
- kmnc 6y agoBullshit. I pay to go to the movies, I am advertised to. Why do you think online services will maintain this “pay is for ad fee”?
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoSo specifically, how should sites support themselves if such as you won't pay?
- mdifrgechd 6y agoIf they cant support themselves, they should find something people do want to pay for. The universe doesnt owe the website creators a revenue stream.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoThe people who are happy to read it do owe them a revenue stream if they want a website to continue. To be perfectly clear I have no desire to see any ads, and I don't cos I block pretty much every last one (squid) but if there are sites that are worth reading, like from here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25157722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25157722 well, author's got to make money for the time they put in. Advertisers can die in rotting heaps, but they exist because people make them exist. They exist because you want free stuff.
- freeone3000 6y agoI read articles online before the advertisements came. I'll read them again after the advertisements are gone.
- renewiltord 6y agoI can't read this as anything but a persecution complex. Relax, install unlock origin, pay for premium services. No one is going out and making adblock users feel bad.
- kmnc 6y agoThe most disturbing thing is how many people have become ad apologists now. We gave up the fight, we lost. Massively successful channels now bait people into watching in video ads and people actually defend this practice. Many people I know actually find these things smart and clever. Most people actually defend ads now.
- sergeykish 6y agoAre you talking about ads in video stream? They are static and usually have some connection to content, like instruments advertisement on music channel. And they would be easy to skip as long as youtube-dl works. https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/edl-mpv.rst https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/edl-mpv.r...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- an_opabinia 6y ago> When we all know that our data of who we are and our actions is just as valuable as the ads we are forced to watch. In a world where Facebook just makes up video impressions and neither they nor Google let you really audit their inventory, it is basically impossible to tell the difference between (1) seasonal effects, (2) data-enabled ad targeting, and (3) income-related effects. In other words, if you show an ad at the right time to a rich person, say by only targeting iPad users shortly after a new Apple product release, which is known from the user agent and does not require behavioral tracking at all, your ad will perform as well as a typical interest-targeted ad but with lower cost. Which is to say, your data is valuable in the marketing sense that it gets people to spend more on targeted ads, but not necessarily in some secular sense that it actually increases returns. After fundamentals (like what you are selling) and the creative, most of the evidence points to trends in how rich (and poor) people use technology, like iPad users versus entry-level Android users, as being the greatest predictor of an ad's returns. Ads customers don't really know if user profile information like their browsing behavior improves ROI because it is secularly important for the ad or because it is also correlated with greater income. It is unmeasurable for ad customers, so people claiming that they know are just lying. At least among the ad tech companies I know, I'm told the user profile data gathering story is very valuable for ad buyers and investors, but fundamentally they do not use any behavioral data in ad targeting because they did not observe an increase in clicks - for their guaranteeably low income user channels.
- bobthepanda 6y agoIIRC isn’t a very standard way of measuring campaign success just using some type of discount code (e.g. use X at mywebsite.com for 10pc off)
- travisporter 6y agoI agree. I used to watch CGP Greys videos, until he had a podcast lamenting ublock and how even though it’s open source, should be blocked. I get it, it’s how you make your crust but there are other revenue sources when you make it big. Nebula seems promising for the science-y youtubers
- tomjen3 6y agoYou can subscribe to RSS feeds for any channel you care about. To watch the videos, you can copy paste the url into VLC. No ads and very little tracking. Best of all no related videos so you won't waste tons of time there.
- agumonkey 6y agoInternet main issue is the fallacy of free access which is quite incompatible with the old economy. Good old society was a little less duplicit about how it operates. We live in a i-passive-aggresive land.
- 4cao 6y agoYou are not even the product, you are a resource that is being harvested, processed, and packaged as a product. Another way to think about it, a product is an output from the system, and you are just one of the inputs.
- Kuinox 6y ago"No human enterprise, no new technology or utility or service, has ever been adopted so widely so quickly. " Smartphones, Android, Google, and well, I don't know about services/product used in China, all of them disagree with this statement.
- z3ncyberpunk 6y agoand with all of those systems you mentioned, you are the product.
- soneca 6y agoI like the update to this from the “Social Dilemma”: ”Your manipulation is the product”. Ad blockers do not protect you from the algorithms that make you more extreme to your side of social or political topic. People are paying and using social media to manipulate your opinion and that do not come just from ads.
- offtop5 6y agoI know I've found myself much happier going social media/online dating free. Social media is very good at making us angry. A debate on starter pokemon can quickly turn into slurs being thrown around. I have a few social circles I remain engaged in via zoom, and pre Covid I was meeting people at alumni events, etc , left and right. It's not particularly easy to re engage with the real world if your way deep in the rabbit whole of social media. Another way to look at it. Online you become the worst thing you've ever posted , once you identify with that negativity it feeds upon itself. You end up in a death spiral of your own self-hatred. Why give others the right to rip you apart. Why rip yourself a part on a daily basis. I don't think I've ever convinced anyone to my point of view on social media. I have been left feeling distraught over some of the toxic things said to me though. I'll even say people are outright meaner online. In real life your friends will just distance themselves if you aren't adding to them. Online it's not uncommon to see users creating various accounts just to attack each other. The only way to win is not to play. I also suggest reading Lost Connections, it goes more into detail on the need for real community.
- joe_the_user 6y agoAnything that moves us from away from the over-used "you are the product" metaphor. Especially good to back-up from the idea that just paying for media means you'll less likely to be manipulated. That said, once we start to talk about "manipulation", things get very relative. Human beings are social animals. I want to have contact with other people and so be influenced by them? At some point we can call some influence manipulation but there's a lot of gray areas. "Make my feed better" is a key grey area. Filtering crap from the Internet is one of the biggest jobs of both Facebook and Google. At some points that filtering becomes self-serving censorship but there are lots of gray areas. The biggest thing is that isn't a static problem - creators of viral manipulation products and ideologies get more and more sophisticated as methods evolve (articles on QAnon as gamification are worth reading). Not that Facebook and Google are blameless but it seems a ultra-networked worked, there's going to be multiple powerful forces and filters competing for influence and which one is "evil" is a difficult call.
- 11thEarlOfMar 6y agoI've been contemplating performing an experiment where I use a new device without creating any accounts, then, seeing how useful the Internet is. (Rhetorically...) Can I use maps to navigate? Can I browse the Twitter feeds of a few favorite accounts? Can I consume free video content on YouTube, or any free movies? Can I make a reservation at a restaurant? Then, for those activities that I cannot do, is there still a real-world analog method? I used to look up stock prices in the newspaper and buy and sell stocks by phoning by brokerage. Is that still possible? As the activities of daily life have moved online, our ability to participate in society has attenuated. Has that attenuation yet reached a pathological state? If so, policy needs to provide a way any such activities that cannot be performed without paying with privacy still have a non-Internet method.
- buffet_overflow 6y agoI think this would be an interesting experiment, and I'd happily follow it. However, a complication here is that some sites/services still track you/modify their offerings without the need for an account. I wonder if you did this across multiple devices, you could start noticing differences based on what you used for what. A/B test them back.
- donclark 6y agoI like your thoughts on this. This would be an interesting experiment to document what you are and are not successful at. And try to push it further...
- alexh1 6y agoSocial media is a tricky one because it's got such a bus factor wrt. usage, however I'm pleasantly surprised at the abundance of products coming out where you (your data, that is) are _not_ the product. Analytics - Fathom (https://usefathom.com https://usefathom.com), Plausible (https://plausible.io https://plausible.io) Project Management - Portabella (https://portabella.io https://portabella.io) (disclaimer: I'm behind this one) Chat - Signal (https://signal.org/en/ https://signal.org/en/), Matrix (https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/) I could absolutely go on and on, because I see new privacy focused products popping up in all sorts of industries every day. The key is that these services are usually paid, which offsets the need for your data becoming the product. More and more these days I have less trust in free lunches
- nwienert 6y agoBus factor related to usage? Am I thinking of the wrong bus factor?
- omgwtfbyobbq 6y agoI think business factor (eg collecting day for advertising), but that's just a guess.
- alex_portabella 6y agoMy bad, what I meant was "so reliant on others using it"
- muskox2 6y agoYou're thinking of "network effect"
- nathias 6y agoI'm sure you can pay and still be the product.
- CivBase 6y ago
- baxtr 6y agoThere is a big sentiment in the comments that ads are per se a bad thing. I want to make a counter argument: ads drive innovation because they make expensive services possible for the masses. I have watched endless YouTube videos and learned a great many things. I haven’t paid a dime for it yet. Newspaper adoption in mass was achieved by the same mechanism. Ads drove the price for newspaper significantly down so the general could afford buying them. Ads are not evil. People are.
- qwertox 6y agoSure, ads are good and not a problem. But you need to differentiate them from the personal data mining industry, which not only gathers the data for targeted advertising, but also to sell it to hedge funds and whoever is willing to pay enough for it. You don't need personal data in order to provide targeted advertising. The proper context of where the ad will be embedded is mostly enough for good targeting.
- freediver 6y agoAds are not evil per se, overdoing them is. Do you think youtube algorithms optimize for you learning and becoming a better human or to maximize ad revenue? Based on the answer the knowledge you gained is on average either deep and meaningful or shallow, bordering entertainment value. That is not to say you can’t find deep structured knowledge on youtube, but the proper way to support its creation is to directly pay for it. Next best thing is paying for youtube premium. Imagine two youtubes, one ran by ads only and one exclusively for paid subscribers. Which one of these is more likely to have funny cat videos and which one deep, meaningful knowledge and why? In which case the interest of the platform is aligned with the interest of the user? When overdone, ad business models incentivize mass creation of low quality entertainment which is what most of internet including news has become. In no way ads help democratize the access to valuable information.
- didericis 6y agoWhat is the root cause of those incentives? Is it the platform, or the predominate audience on the platform? I’d argue the only reason subscription based platforms have a higher probability of offering quality is that the pay barrier creates a more filtered user base that prefers quality. If a platform dependent on ad revenue had some other barrier to entry, like content only accessible to an audience that preferred that type of high quality content to low quality content, I don’t see ads having a negative effect.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dang 6y agoDiscussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15029960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15029960
- thesz 6y agoQuote: "Plenty of companies, indeed entire industries, base their business model on being evil. The insurance business, for instance, depends on the fact that insurers charge customers more than their insurance is worth." No, it is not. The insurance business depends on getting money mass to hedge risks and invest into something else. Basically, this is what any semi good government does with taxes - hedges risks (healthcare, unemployment benefits, etc) and invests in projects that would boost the economy. Insurance business model is evil if good government modus operandi is evil. Now I will continue reading and will thoroughly watch my Gell-Mann amnesia.
- Glanford 6y agoFull quote for context: >Plenty of companies, indeed entire industries, base their business model on being evil. The insurance business, for instance, depends on the fact that insurers charge customers more than their insurance is worth; that’s fair enough, since if they didn’t do that they wouldn’t be viable as businesses. What isn’t fair is the panoply of cynical techniques that many insurers use to avoid, as far as possible, paying out when the insured-against event happens. Just ask anyone who has had a property suffer a major mishap. The article isn't saying that insurance companies are 'evil' for making a profit but instead for doing everything they can to withhold payment, not every insurance company does this of course but many of them know that customers are more likely to accept 50% blame in a 0% blame car accident or accept a reduced payout over minor technicalities because the alternative is going months without a car and spending a significant amount of time and money in court. This analogy is entirely applicable to governments too where an 'evil' government might, at great cost, make benefit programs difficult or humiliating to obtain to discourage legitimate claimants from doing so, never mind straight up corruption or cronyism when it comes to allocating public funds.
- tehjoker 6y agoTheir service may depend on hedging risk, but they would have no profit if they didn't ask for more than they give. That's the simplest balance equation you could ask for.
- kgin 6y agoThe key thrust of this is that at Facebook specifically, the company is agnostic and amoral about the uses or effects of facebook, and the only goal is maximizing attention to be sold by any means necessary. I don't know anyone who works at Facebook at high enough of a level to know if this checks out, but I'm curious if it does.