4 ms·

> I want them to be able to see what doesn't work in terms of user experience. That's not what they're doing, at all. They want to be able to see what doesn't

by janpot 5y ago

> I want them to be able to see what doesn't work in terms of user experience. That's not what they're doing, at all. They want to be able to see what doesn't work in terms of maximising profits. That may correlate with good user experience sometimes, but more often it results in the opposite.

franga2000 5y ago
Exactly! A company's goal is profit and most of the time, that does not align with the customer's goals. Amazon's goal is to sell me the highest margin item, I want the best value or highest quality. I have very limited information about which items are a good value or high quality, so why should amazon have the tools to most effectively steer me towards high-margin items? They exist to provide us a service and we grant them the right to make a small % of profit while doing it. Not the other way around!
- airstrike 5y ago
  > I have very limited information about which items are a good value or high quality, so why should amazon have the tools to most effectively steer me towards high-margin items? They exist to provide us a service and we grant them the right to make a small % of profit while doing it. Not the other way around! As a small aside, The capitalist's answer is that regulating companies to prevent them from steering to the most profitable items is both impossible to be adequately done and prohibitively costly. Even assuming cost isn't an issue, it's hard to imagine such regulation to be equally applied to all market participants (or to be equally effective). So we would be left with companies that cooperate and others that defect, and the defectors would be favored (more profitable) and outcompete the cooperators in the long run. So instead we start from the assumption that companies are greedy and let them compete to offer customers the best value -- and if that value comes (at least in part) from not being tracked, companies that do not track will attract more customers. We probably just haven't made enough of a fuss about it with our dollar-votes. For what it's worth, I block all ads without giving it a single thought. The way I think about it is that on the flip side of the prisoner's dilemma, I'm just defecting like some companies would. It's a race to the bottom in terms of the trust between customers and companies, but I didn't make the rules of the game...
  - dasil003 5y ago
    Keep in mind that capitalists have all the power and a lot of time and incentive to rationalize the status quo. The assumption in this argument is that consumers are able to observe and quantify the harm of tracking more effectively than regulators could create laws against data collection. Personally I think the success of either one comes down to cultural factors that are currently stacked in favor of advertisers.
    - airstrike 5y ago
      > The assumption in this argument is that consumers are able to observe and quantify the harm of tracking more effectively than regulators could create laws against data collection. Not necessarily, because creating laws isn't enough to regulate. You also need to enforce such regulation, and that's where the challenge lies. The argument assumes that in the long run consumers are more effective at rationalizing their choices than the government is able to appropriately enforce regulation. Alternatively, it assumes the cumulative harm created by the disconnect between current customer behavior and rationalized customer behavior (i.e. prior to their rationalizing the status quo) is less than the cumulative harm caused by inefficient regulation, including the defector's problem mentioned earlier but also other negative externalities such as encouraging corruption / fraud (which itself requires further enforcement)
      - dasil003 5y ago
        Yes, my choice of words was hasty and suboptimal. I meant addressing data collection practices via regulation as a whole vs consumer choice as whole. The way you are framing this serves only to reinforce talking points from those who are benefitting from the current situation. For instance, you're basically stating a priori that regulation is expensive and ineffective, and as evidence you talk about long tail of enforcement and defectors. But the ad revenue market is so consolidated you only need to enforce on a handful of players (Google and Facebook basically). The idea that defectors would then swoop in and create a massive enforcement problem is not substantiated. There have always been fly-by-night operations in all types of business, and they don't gain a huge advantage that catapults them to overnight success just because others play by the rules. No one is saying enforcement is easy, but to assume that it will be fatally flawed if it can't be perfectly applied to everyone plays right into the hands of those who are profiting from abuse of our data. Now on the other side framing this as a "customer value" problem that will be sorted out by the hand of the market is just pure capitalist oligarch koolaid. How do you expect customers to have any sense of what data practices are behind their every day digital product choices, let alone quantify that into a dollar value? And even assuming they do all that, where are the market choices when everyone behaves this way? Even where there is theoretically a choice, many services have a huge network effect that makes a consumer's choice all but pre-ordained. We need to have a reality check here. Markets are great when they work, but they are not magic and can not solve all problems.
andrewingram 5y ago
The bit you're replying to here hasn't yet introduced the problem of marketing teams. The kind of tracking in the first section is "understanding how people use your product", and is usually introduced by the product team, rather than marketing. And most product teams i've worked on fiercely fight back against the addition of excessive tracking. Whilst the goal of a business (and therefore a product team), is usually about maximising profits, it's not exclusively about that. I've worked for businesses that literally have a social charter in their articles of association, but they still want to measure how people use their products.
- jeltz 5y ago
  You have been lucky then. At the places I have worked the product people have not fought with thech but if anything they have fought against tech on this matter.
  - andrewingram 5y ago
    You're right about luck. Though I should clarify, I include tech in the "product team"; and it's usually me fighting back :)
collegeburner 5y ago
That's not true. I run a site like this and I want both. Yes I want to test what maximizes conversions, but this is also what helps me provide value to more users. And I also need it to determime how to improve the service I provide to users.
y42 5y ago
That's to easy IMHO. Yes, online marketing is about profit. But tracking is not always about profit. I work for a customer that offers kind of a job search engine. All they want to maximize is the rate of succesful employments. Yes, they need to optimize marketing budget. But not to sell useless stuff, but to reach out to potential employees.

by janpot 5y ago

franga2000 5y ago

Exactly! A company's goal is profit and most of the time, that does not align with the customer's goals. Amazon's goal is to sell me the highest margin item, I want the best value or highest quality. I have very limited information about which items are a good value or high quality, so why should amazon have the tools to most effectively steer me towards high-margin items? They exist to provide us a service and we grant them the right to make a small % of profit while doing it. Not the other way around!

airstrike 5y ago
> I have very limited information about which items are a good value or high quality, so why should amazon have the tools to most effectively steer me towards high-margin items? They exist to provide us a service and we grant them the right to make a small % of profit while doing it. Not the other way around! As a small aside, The capitalist's answer is that regulating companies to prevent them from steering to the most profitable items is both impossible to be adequately done and prohibitively costly. Even assuming cost isn't an issue, it's hard to imagine such regulation to be equally applied to all market participants (or to be equally effective). So we would be left with companies that cooperate and others that defect, and the defectors would be favored (more profitable) and outcompete the cooperators in the long run. So instead we start from the assumption that companies are greedy and let them compete to offer customers the best value -- and if that value comes (at least in part) from not being tracked, companies that do not track will attract more customers. We probably just haven't made enough of a fuss about it with our dollar-votes. For what it's worth, I block all ads without giving it a single thought. The way I think about it is that on the flip side of the prisoner's dilemma, I'm just defecting like some companies would. It's a race to the bottom in terms of the trust between customers and companies, but I didn't make the rules of the game...
- dasil003 5y ago
  Keep in mind that capitalists have all the power and a lot of time and incentive to rationalize the status quo. The assumption in this argument is that consumers are able to observe and quantify the harm of tracking more effectively than regulators could create laws against data collection. Personally I think the success of either one comes down to cultural factors that are currently stacked in favor of advertisers.
  - airstrike 5y ago
    > The assumption in this argument is that consumers are able to observe and quantify the harm of tracking more effectively than regulators could create laws against data collection. Not necessarily, because creating laws isn't enough to regulate. You also need to enforce such regulation, and that's where the challenge lies. The argument assumes that in the long run consumers are more effective at rationalizing their choices than the government is able to appropriately enforce regulation. Alternatively, it assumes the cumulative harm created by the disconnect between current customer behavior and rationalized customer behavior (i.e. prior to their rationalizing the status quo) is less than the cumulative harm caused by inefficient regulation, including the defector's problem mentioned earlier but also other negative externalities such as encouraging corruption / fraud (which itself requires further enforcement)
    - dasil003 5y ago
      Yes, my choice of words was hasty and suboptimal. I meant addressing data collection practices via regulation as a whole vs consumer choice as whole. The way you are framing this serves only to reinforce talking points from those who are benefitting from the current situation. For instance, you're basically stating a priori that regulation is expensive and ineffective, and as evidence you talk about long tail of enforcement and defectors. But the ad revenue market is so consolidated you only need to enforce on a handful of players (Google and Facebook basically). The idea that defectors would then swoop in and create a massive enforcement problem is not substantiated. There have always been fly-by-night operations in all types of business, and they don't gain a huge advantage that catapults them to overnight success just because others play by the rules. No one is saying enforcement is easy, but to assume that it will be fatally flawed if it can't be perfectly applied to everyone plays right into the hands of those who are profiting from abuse of our data. Now on the other side framing this as a "customer value" problem that will be sorted out by the hand of the market is just pure capitalist oligarch koolaid. How do you expect customers to have any sense of what data practices are behind their every day digital product choices, let alone quantify that into a dollar value? And even assuming they do all that, where are the market choices when everyone behaves this way? Even where there is theoretically a choice, many services have a huge network effect that makes a consumer's choice all but pre-ordained. We need to have a reality check here. Markets are great when they work, but they are not magic and can not solve all problems.

andrewingram 5y ago

The bit you're replying to here hasn't yet introduced the problem of marketing teams. The kind of tracking in the first section is "understanding how people use your product", and is usually introduced by the product team, rather than marketing. And most product teams i've worked on fiercely fight back against the addition of excessive tracking. Whilst the goal of a business (and therefore a product team), is usually about maximising profits, it's not exclusively about that. I've worked for businesses that literally have a social charter in their articles of association, but they still want to measure how people use their products.

jeltz 5y ago
You have been lucky then. At the places I have worked the product people have not fought with thech but if anything they have fought against tech on this matter.
- andrewingram 5y ago
  You're right about luck. Though I should clarify, I include tech in the "product team"; and it's usually me fighting back :)

collegeburner 5y ago

That's not true. I run a site like this and I want both. Yes I want to test what maximizes conversions, but this is also what helps me provide value to more users. And I also need it to determime how to improve the service I provide to users.

y42 5y ago

That's to easy IMHO. Yes, online marketing is about profit. But tracking is not always about profit. I work for a customer that offers kind of a job search engine. All they want to maximize is the rate of succesful employments. Yes, they need to optimize marketing budget. But not to sell useless stuff, but to reach out to potential employees.