12 ms·

What have we got to lose? (1998)

184 points by colinprince 5y ago

nabla9 5y ago
Douglas Adams tells how the internet commerce should work. No subscription to online magazines or content streaming services. When you notice something you like, you pay for it: one article, one TV-show at at time. Artificially bundling stuff together is unnatural in the Internet.
- baq 5y ago
  How it worked out: if you notice something interesting and there’s a paywall, you forget about it and go back to whatever cat pictures you were browsing.
  - Fissionary 5y ago
    Well... yeah. Why would I pay for something on the Internet? We've all been conditioned that text content (at least, and also music and videos to some extent) should be available for free, and ads can be blocked. I'm vaguely for the idea of micropayments, as long they're actually micro (10⁻⁶). Even 10 cents for a piece of content seems somehow too much, because it all adds up. If we do the napkin math, large newspapers like the NYT might not be able to sustain themselves in that new world: > 4500 (staff size) * 50000 (average yearly salary) / ~10M (audience) = $23 (required revenue per subscriber) And this doesn't even account for office rent, travel expenses etc.
    - amelius 5y ago
      > Why would I pay for something on the Internet? This is how most people think about software too, since FOSS started.
      - tremon 5y ago
        They have always thought that way about software. All my early-childhood games (even on the Commodore 64) came from copied floppy disks. In my teens I bought my own games, but those were always group-buys: I had copies of all the games my friends bought too, and they had copies of mine.
        amelius 5y ago
        I don't know. I remember paying for the Borland C compiler, which was quite a lot of money for a teen (like $600 IIRC). Then I discovered Unix/Linux and so it was the last piece of software I bought.
  - chasd00 5y ago
    that describes my experiences. If my interest is high enough then i'll go through the various settings to disable the paywall. Once, and only once so far, I bought a pdf about a particular type of rocket engine that i couldn't get out of my head.
drewcoo 5y ago
There seem to be a lot of references to irreverent iconoclasts lately here, Adams and (always) Feynman and some Hamming and Hawking all the rest. In my personal life I've heard people mention Magritte much more often than usual. Is that part of the zeitgeist? Is silly the hat we wear because someone tells us we must wear somber hats? Or else? Under the harshest, most doctrinaire leadership, the outliers thrive most and gain an audience. Not to call out Biden or dems here, but to say that both of those power parties seem awfully authoritarian, so . . .
qrybam 5y ago
Always a pleasure to read Douglas Adams. As usual an engaging and insightful read. I’d be curious to know what his thoughts would have been on the current state of online ads, social networks (engineering?), and NTFs. I suppose they all pop out as derivatives of the main point of the article, that new things often come from realising old limitations no longer apply.
- Hard_Space 5y ago
  'Let us now bow our heads in payment'. And that was 1980! He was decades ahead.
- jpm_sd 5y ago
  NFTs are clearly the Zaphod Beeblebrox of economics.
  - floodle 5y ago
    There must be a metaphor here for NFTs getting dropped into the total perspective vortex and coming out smiling
caaqil 5y ago
> The advertisers pay the magazine for the opportunity to put links to their ads on popular pages of the magazine and - well, you see the way it works. It is, I am told by people with seriously raised eyebrows, astonishingly effective. The thing which drops out of the problem is the notion that advertising need be irritating and intrusive. Unfortunately, the notion "that advertising need be irritating and intrusive" didn't drop out, which is why browsing the web without uBlock is a horrible experience.
- jjbinx007 5y ago
  I tried browsing without an ad blocker recently and I wasn't prepared for how horrendous it is. The web is borderline unusable without an ad blocker. Here's the thing: I'm not against ads. I used to quite enjoy ads in newspapers and magazines.
JohnBooty 5y ago
Furthermore, the [online] advertiser gets astonishingly precise feedback. They will know exactly how many people have chosen to look at their ad and for how long, with the result that an unwelcome ad for something no one's interested in will quickly wither away, whereas one which catches people's attention will thrive. He talks about this as a good thing - a meritocracy of "unwelcome" ads and ideas vs. "interesting" ones, with selection favoring the interesting ones, cutting out all of the "dead wood", and so on. In a literal sense, that is indeed how it turned out. "Interesting" won. Unfortunately the version of "interesting" that many people chose was simply toxic dreck: conspiracy theories, social media feeds literally designed to make us feel negative emotions, scammy ads that have been engineered to trick the maximum number of people, and so on. So yeah, "interesting" won, but I'm not sure this is the future Adams was excited about.
- cyborgx7 5y ago
  This stood out to me as well. There an impulse to think that once we have perfected something, it will be good. But then, we noticed that the "perfect" version of this thing is actually pretty bad. Which then makes you question the entire thing, fundamentally. Like here in advertising. I'm coming to the conclusion that there is no good form of advertising. It is a fundamentally bad thing. There are just different degrees of badness. And since it's a fundamentally bad thing, perfecting it makes it worse.
  - iamacyborg 5y ago
    > Like here in advertising. I'm coming to the conclusion that there is no good form of advertising. I don’t know, I don’t think there’s anything inherently bad in a person or business wanting to facilitate the discovery of something they’ve created.
    - cyborgx7 5y ago
      That is a disingenuous definition of advertising.
colechristensen 5y ago
The thing I miss the most about the 90s is the attitude of hope about the future.
- CalRobert 5y ago
  I think when I miss the old internet I miss the promise of a new way of living. The whole "information wants to be free" thing. Of course, we _have_ a new way of living, and it's amazing how much great information is freely available, but the downsides are pretty substantial.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    There are plenty of worthwhile efforts on the Internet focused on making information "free(r)", and they're humongously larger nowadays compared to the late 1990s. Get away from the commercialized Web and social media sites, and you might enjoy them too.
- HeckFeck 5y ago
  I caught the tail end of this wind of optimism when I was first connected in 2001. In my head, the Internet will always be that hectic, eclectic place it was then. Even the design of this website fits that paradigm. Watching it taper off with the rise of "social media" was a sad thing indeed, but I don't think the old spirit is fully lost.
  - chasd00 5y ago
    How could it be lost? You chose to ignore it. Get an IP, bind to a port, and tell your friends. It's all still there.
    - HeckFeck 5y ago
      I already said that I haven't ignored it: > I don't think the old spirit is fully lost. And I'm already running my own self managed website on a VPS. What I meant was the rise of "social media" to supplant what "the internet" means in the popular imagination. I've quite a collection of bookmarks that proves that Internet still lives.
tveyben 5y ago
> Since you're currently holding a magazine, let's think about what might happen when magazine publishing is no longer a river in its own right, but is just a current in the digital ocean. … Once we drop the idea of discretely bound and sold sheaves of glossily processed wood pulp from the model, what do we have left? Anything useful? That phrase was fun to read on my iPhone today ;-)
grgbrn 5y ago
Title seems very incorrect. First issue of Wired was 1993, not 1998. The URL makes it look like this is from 1998, so definitely not from the first issue.
- tomstuart 5y ago
  It’s from the first issue of Wired UK, a spinoff: https://archive.gyford.com/1997/wired-uk/1.01/adams.html https://archive.gyford.com/1997/wired-uk/1.01/adams.html
jillesvangurp 5y ago
The payment mechanism he talks about that would enable micropayments to individuals rather than corporations, never happened. It technically happened of course in the form of various companies trying to build systems that do this (using e.g. crypto currencies) and put themselves in the middle to try to "own" and control the lucrative revenue streams. But that's the reason it never happens because as soon as you do that, you end up with a fragmented mess of different companies all failing to get a critical mass of actual micropayments happening. So, the money exchanged adds up to not much at all. Most artists keep on dealing with agents and big media corporations. And most consumers keep on handing over chunks of their income to those same corporations. I've not actually bought a newspaper or a magazine in over ten years and very little in the ten before that. I regularly did this in the nineties though. There no longer is a need. I can read a lot online for free. And I do. But I do feel sort of bad for the hard working journalists producing all the content I read every day not really getting anything from me. Authors struggle not in finding their audience but in monetizing it. Ads are not the way. I'd love to have a sane way to reward them without having to micromanage the expense. If somebody builds a way for me to fairly distribute 20$/month among the authors of all the content I enjoy every month, I'd be happy to. That doesn't exist. That's money I've not been spending for decades. I spent that on Spotify and Netflix though. IMHO such a system should exist. Douglas Adams predicted it because it so obviously needs to exist. Instead we've got this endless amount of greed and stupidity preventing people from making a living from creating content because middle men peddling shitty ads for shitty products need to be payed off. The content creation is the bit I want to pay for. Everything else is redundant or can be payed for by authors as needed once they have revenue (e.g. editing is a useful service). Maybe I read a few hundred articles per month. Lets call it 200 (nice round number). That's ten cents per article. Now imagine that a journalist produces something that is read by 1 million people and that 1 percent of those actually pay that 10 cent. That's a thousand dollar. It's not a lot. But if they write maybe a few articles per month, that's a nice income. And those articles stay online for a long time. It would actually stimulate the creation of content that has a long shelf life. Passive income basically. Exactly what I want as a reader: quality content.
- baq 5y ago
  Anecdotally I’ve just started buying magazines last year to drop on the table for my kids to pick up and read, something I remember doing myself when I was a child. It is impossible with personalized devices to just casually stumble onto something interesting without trying to.
nottorp 5y ago
What have we got to lose, ad wise? Both privacy and the chance to expand our horizons. The privacy issues are talked about daily. Getting ads for just things you're interested in means you don't get ads for anything you haven't seen before. And what's worse, the same goes on for content selection wherever you're being given a custom selection of content. You end up in a bubble plus some things sprinkled in to outrage you and make you stay.
- svilen_dobrev 5y ago
  how about Not getting ads you expicitly said you did Not want to get? if one day that means All ads, well, fine.. someone's fantasy has been too limited. "ifndef NOCATS" is much more powerful than "ifdef CATS" ..
- avgcorrection 5y ago
  To think that people could go a lifetime and only hear about Pepsi and never about Coke…
  - musingsole 5y ago
    There are countless small soda companies no one hears about, because advertising is such that "coke" is a synonym for "soda".
    - avgcorrection 5y ago
      Yeah exactly.
fguerraz 5y ago
To get working hyperlinks: https://web.archive.org/web/19991005013034/douglasadams.com/dna/980707-05-a.html https://web.archive.org/web/19991005013034/douglasadams.com/...
jb1991 5y ago
To hear Douglas Adams write about the RISC chip is kinda surreal.
nonrandomstring 5y ago
The problem with Douglas Adams is the beauty of the writing distracts from the the real message. I barely noticed this was about _advertising_ as most commentators here have picked up. To better understand a piece like this, remember that Adams is working as a professional writer and has to give his employer - a magazine here - something they want. In this case the vehicle is a story about magazines and how they are dysfunctional with respect to advertising. The real writing, as is always the case with Adams, is at a higher level, and is about how we stupidly build complexity, obfuscation, indirection and side effects into technological life, failing (or forgetting) to see the value of simpler and more humane configurations.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
Define: Irony > The thing which drops out of the problem is the notion that advertising need be irritating and intrusive.
- noduerme 5y ago
  This just shows how incredibly hard it was in 1998 to see what would happen when 4 billion illiterate assholes got online. The assumption at the time was that anyone able to see the ads (on Hotwired!) were totally immune to any kind of serious manipulation.
streamofdigits 5y ago
For a long time advertising was the art of creating "wants". For a century it worked "like a charm". We are now living in a world that (at least in so called developed world) is overconsuming by a very large factor. The proliferation of the incredibly regressive practice of building and selling behavioral profiles of unsuspecting "consumers" may in part be due to the cannibalistic arms race of an exhausted economic paradigm. Somehow we need to find sane digital ways to connect people who have to say, sell, announce something with people who want to hear, buy, be informed about something. It doesn't sound that complicated if we lose our unsustainable ways of thinking and acting
amelius 5y ago
> All that mucking about they do developing high-tech copying and printing machines is just creating a commodity market in toner cartridges, which is where their profit lies. Isn't that the exact opposite of what they are doing? I.e. creating specialized cartridges which only work on one brand of machine, rather than a commodity that is interchangeable with other brands?
- kbutler 5y ago
  He meant commodity 'something that can be traded, or any useful thing' rather than commodity 'when customers perceive little or no value difference between brands or versions.'
arthurkarell 5y ago
Good reminder of how digital assets will impact banking
sylware 5y ago
Click farms (via vpns), bot swarms, etc. I wonder who would still trust such 'clicks' metrics. Wild guess, in the context of selling "something" and using ads on the web, the only reliable metric is the correlation between the sales amount and the ad campaign.
katzgrau 5y ago
> The thing which drops out of the problem is the notion that advertising need be irritating and intrusive. Doug Adams is funny even when he's not trying to be. He ignored that the "river rules" no longer apply.
antiterra 5y ago
For context, this was a naive era in the first dot com bubble. The money was flowing freely from highly funded advertisers for relatively unobtrusive banner ads. That changed drastically in the early 2000s.
hackerlytest 5y ago
Nothing. So, I'm testing multi-line text reply for my next HN app. Here goes nothing.

184 points by colinprince 5y ago

Douglas Adams tells how the internet commerce should work. No subscription to online magazines or content streaming services. When you notice something you like, you pay for it: one article, one TV-show at at time. Artificially bundling stuff together is unnatural in the Internet.

baq 5y ago
How it worked out: if you notice something interesting and there’s a paywall, you forget about it and go back to whatever cat pictures you were browsing.
- Fissionary 5y ago
  Well... yeah. Why would I pay for something on the Internet? We've all been conditioned that text content (at least, and also music and videos to some extent) should be available for free, and ads can be blocked. I'm vaguely for the idea of micropayments, as long they're actually micro (10⁻⁶). Even 10 cents for a piece of content seems somehow too much, because it all adds up. If we do the napkin math, large newspapers like the NYT might not be able to sustain themselves in that new world: > 4500 (staff size) * 50000 (average yearly salary) / ~10M (audience) = $23 (required revenue per subscriber) And this doesn't even account for office rent, travel expenses etc.
  - amelius 5y ago
    > Why would I pay for something on the Internet? This is how most people think about software too, since FOSS started.
    - tremon 5y ago
      They have always thought that way about software. All my early-childhood games (even on the Commodore 64) came from copied floppy disks. In my teens I bought my own games, but those were always group-buys: I had copies of all the games my friends bought too, and they had copies of mine.
      - amelius 5y ago
        I don't know. I remember paying for the Borland C compiler, which was quite a lot of money for a teen (like $600 IIRC). Then I discovered Unix/Linux and so it was the last piece of software I bought.
- chasd00 5y ago
  that describes my experiences. If my interest is high enough then i'll go through the various settings to disable the paywall. Once, and only once so far, I bought a pdf about a particular type of rocket engine that i couldn't get out of my head.

drewcoo 5y ago

There seem to be a lot of references to irreverent iconoclasts lately here, Adams and (always) Feynman and some Hamming and Hawking all the rest. In my personal life I've heard people mention Magritte much more often than usual. Is that part of the zeitgeist? Is silly the hat we wear because someone tells us we must wear somber hats? Or else? Under the harshest, most doctrinaire leadership, the outliers thrive most and gain an audience. Not to call out Biden or dems here, but to say that both of those power parties seem awfully authoritarian, so . . .

qrybam 5y ago

Always a pleasure to read Douglas Adams. As usual an engaging and insightful read. I’d be curious to know what his thoughts would have been on the current state of online ads, social networks (engineering?), and NTFs. I suppose they all pop out as derivatives of the main point of the article, that new things often come from realising old limitations no longer apply.

Hard_Space 5y ago
'Let us now bow our heads in payment'. And that was 1980! He was decades ahead.
jpm_sd 5y ago
NFTs are clearly the Zaphod Beeblebrox of economics.
- floodle 5y ago
  There must be a metaphor here for NFTs getting dropped into the total perspective vortex and coming out smiling

caaqil 5y ago

> The advertisers pay the magazine for the opportunity to put links to their ads on popular pages of the magazine and - well, you see the way it works. It is, I am told by people with seriously raised eyebrows, astonishingly effective. The thing which drops out of the problem is the notion that advertising need be irritating and intrusive. Unfortunately, the notion "that advertising need be irritating and intrusive" didn't drop out, which is why browsing the web without uBlock is a horrible experience.

jjbinx007 5y ago
I tried browsing without an ad blocker recently and I wasn't prepared for how horrendous it is. The web is borderline unusable without an ad blocker. Here's the thing: I'm not against ads. I used to quite enjoy ads in newspapers and magazines.

JohnBooty 5y ago

Furthermore, the [online] advertiser gets astonishingly precise feedback. They will know exactly how many people have chosen to look at their ad and for how long, with the result that an unwelcome ad for something no one's interested in will quickly wither away, whereas one which catches people's attention will thrive. He talks about this as a good thing - a meritocracy of "unwelcome" ads and ideas vs. "interesting" ones, with selection favoring the interesting ones, cutting out all of the "dead wood", and so on. In a literal sense, that is indeed how it turned out. "Interesting" won. Unfortunately the version of "interesting" that many people chose was simply toxic dreck: conspiracy theories, social media feeds literally designed to make us feel negative emotions, scammy ads that have been engineered to trick the maximum number of people, and so on. So yeah, "interesting" won, but I'm not sure this is the future Adams was excited about.

cyborgx7 5y ago
This stood out to me as well. There an impulse to think that once we have perfected something, it will be good. But then, we noticed that the "perfect" version of this thing is actually pretty bad. Which then makes you question the entire thing, fundamentally. Like here in advertising. I'm coming to the conclusion that there is no good form of advertising. It is a fundamentally bad thing. There are just different degrees of badness. And since it's a fundamentally bad thing, perfecting it makes it worse.
- iamacyborg 5y ago
  > Like here in advertising. I'm coming to the conclusion that there is no good form of advertising. I don’t know, I don’t think there’s anything inherently bad in a person or business wanting to facilitate the discovery of something they’ve created.
  - cyborgx7 5y ago
    That is a disingenuous definition of advertising.

colechristensen 5y ago

The thing I miss the most about the 90s is the attitude of hope about the future.

CalRobert 5y ago
I think when I miss the old internet I miss the promise of a new way of living. The whole "information wants to be free" thing. Of course, we _have_ a new way of living, and it's amazing how much great information is freely available, but the downsides are pretty substantial.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  There are plenty of worthwhile efforts on the Internet focused on making information "free(r)", and they're humongously larger nowadays compared to the late 1990s. Get away from the commercialized Web and social media sites, and you might enjoy them too.
HeckFeck 5y ago
I caught the tail end of this wind of optimism when I was first connected in 2001. In my head, the Internet will always be that hectic, eclectic place it was then. Even the design of this website fits that paradigm. Watching it taper off with the rise of "social media" was a sad thing indeed, but I don't think the old spirit is fully lost.
- chasd00 5y ago
  How could it be lost? You chose to ignore it. Get an IP, bind to a port, and tell your friends. It's all still there.
  - HeckFeck 5y ago
    I already said that I haven't ignored it: > I don't think the old spirit is fully lost. And I'm already running my own self managed website on a VPS. What I meant was the rise of "social media" to supplant what "the internet" means in the popular imagination. I've quite a collection of bookmarks that proves that Internet still lives.

tveyben 5y ago

> Since you're currently holding a magazine, let's think about what might happen when magazine publishing is no longer a river in its own right, but is just a current in the digital ocean. … Once we drop the idea of discretely bound and sold sheaves of glossily processed wood pulp from the model, what do we have left? Anything useful? That phrase was fun to read on my iPhone today ;-)

grgbrn 5y ago

Title seems very incorrect. First issue of Wired was 1993, not 1998. The URL makes it look like this is from 1998, so definitely not from the first issue.

tomstuart 5y ago
It’s from the first issue of Wired UK, a spinoff: https://archive.gyford.com/1997/wired-uk/1.01/adams.html https://archive.gyford.com/1997/wired-uk/1.01/adams.html

jillesvangurp 5y ago

The payment mechanism he talks about that would enable micropayments to individuals rather than corporations, never happened. It technically happened of course in the form of various companies trying to build systems that do this (using e.g. crypto currencies) and put themselves in the middle to try to "own" and control the lucrative revenue streams. But that's the reason it never happens because as soon as you do that, you end up with a fragmented mess of different companies all failing to get a critical mass of actual micropayments happening. So, the money exchanged adds up to not much at all. Most artists keep on dealing with agents and big media corporations. And most consumers keep on handing over chunks of their income to those same corporations. I've not actually bought a newspaper or a magazine in over ten years and very little in the ten before that. I regularly did this in the nineties though. There no longer is a need. I can read a lot online for free. And I do. But I do feel sort of bad for the hard working journalists producing all the content I read every day not really getting anything from me. Authors struggle not in finding their audience but in monetizing it. Ads are not the way. I'd love to have a sane way to reward them without having to micromanage the expense. If somebody builds a way for me to fairly distribute 20$/month among the authors of all the content I enjoy every month, I'd be happy to. That doesn't exist. That's money I've not been spending for decades. I spent that on Spotify and Netflix though. IMHO such a system should exist. Douglas Adams predicted it because it so obviously needs to exist. Instead we've got this endless amount of greed and stupidity preventing people from making a living from creating content because middle men peddling shitty ads for shitty products need to be payed off. The content creation is the bit I want to pay for. Everything else is redundant or can be payed for by authors as needed once they have revenue (e.g. editing is a useful service). Maybe I read a few hundred articles per month. Lets call it 200 (nice round number). That's ten cents per article. Now imagine that a journalist produces something that is read by 1 million people and that 1 percent of those actually pay that 10 cent. That's a thousand dollar. It's not a lot. But if they write maybe a few articles per month, that's a nice income. And those articles stay online for a long time. It would actually stimulate the creation of content that has a long shelf life. Passive income basically. Exactly what I want as a reader: quality content.

baq 5y ago
Anecdotally I’ve just started buying magazines last year to drop on the table for my kids to pick up and read, something I remember doing myself when I was a child. It is impossible with personalized devices to just casually stumble onto something interesting without trying to.

nottorp 5y ago

What have we got to lose, ad wise? Both privacy and the chance to expand our horizons. The privacy issues are talked about daily. Getting ads for just things you're interested in means you don't get ads for anything you haven't seen before. And what's worse, the same goes on for content selection wherever you're being given a custom selection of content. You end up in a bubble plus some things sprinkled in to outrage you and make you stay.

svilen_dobrev 5y ago
how about Not getting ads you expicitly said you did Not want to get? if one day that means All ads, well, fine.. someone's fantasy has been too limited. "ifndef NOCATS" is much more powerful than "ifdef CATS" ..
avgcorrection 5y ago
To think that people could go a lifetime and only hear about Pepsi and never about Coke…
- musingsole 5y ago
  There are countless small soda companies no one hears about, because advertising is such that "coke" is a synonym for "soda".
  - avgcorrection 5y ago
    Yeah exactly.

fguerraz 5y ago

To get working hyperlinks: https://web.archive.org/web/19991005013034/douglasadams.com/dna/980707-05-a.html https://web.archive.org/web/19991005013034/douglasadams.com/...

jb1991 5y ago

To hear Douglas Adams write about the RISC chip is kinda surreal.

nonrandomstring 5y ago

The problem with Douglas Adams is the beauty of the writing distracts from the the real message. I barely noticed this was about _advertising_ as most commentators here have picked up. To better understand a piece like this, remember that Adams is working as a professional writer and has to give his employer - a magazine here - something they want. In this case the vehicle is a story about magazines and how they are dysfunctional with respect to advertising. The real writing, as is always the case with Adams, is at a higher level, and is about how we stupidly build complexity, obfuscation, indirection and side effects into technological life, failing (or forgetting) to see the value of simpler and more humane configurations.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

Define: Irony > The thing which drops out of the problem is the notion that advertising need be irritating and intrusive.

noduerme 5y ago
This just shows how incredibly hard it was in 1998 to see what would happen when 4 billion illiterate assholes got online. The assumption at the time was that anyone able to see the ads (on Hotwired!) were totally immune to any kind of serious manipulation.

streamofdigits 5y ago

For a long time advertising was the art of creating "wants". For a century it worked "like a charm". We are now living in a world that (at least in so called developed world) is overconsuming by a very large factor. The proliferation of the incredibly regressive practice of building and selling behavioral profiles of unsuspecting "consumers" may in part be due to the cannibalistic arms race of an exhausted economic paradigm. Somehow we need to find sane digital ways to connect people who have to say, sell, announce something with people who want to hear, buy, be informed about something. It doesn't sound that complicated if we lose our unsustainable ways of thinking and acting

amelius 5y ago

> All that mucking about they do developing high-tech copying and printing machines is just creating a commodity market in toner cartridges, which is where their profit lies. Isn't that the exact opposite of what they are doing? I.e. creating specialized cartridges which only work on one brand of machine, rather than a commodity that is interchangeable with other brands?

kbutler 5y ago
He meant commodity 'something that can be traded, or any useful thing' rather than commodity 'when customers perceive little or no value difference between brands or versions.'

arthurkarell 5y ago

Good reminder of how digital assets will impact banking

sylware 5y ago

Click farms (via vpns), bot swarms, etc. I wonder who would still trust such 'clicks' metrics. Wild guess, in the context of selling "something" and using ads on the web, the only reliable metric is the correlation between the sales amount and the ad campaign.

katzgrau 5y ago

> The thing which drops out of the problem is the notion that advertising need be irritating and intrusive. Doug Adams is funny even when he's not trying to be. He ignored that the "river rules" no longer apply.

antiterra 5y ago

For context, this was a naive era in the first dot com bubble. The money was flowing freely from highly funded advertisers for relatively unobtrusive banner ads. That changed drastically in the early 2000s.

hackerlytest 5y ago

Nothing. So, I'm testing multi-line text reply for my next HN app. Here goes nothing.