5 ms·

>Google makes $40bn...If I can create something that just a tiny fraction of people find useful, then I can create a huge amount of value. You conflate two mea

>Google makes $40bn...If I can create something that just a tiny fraction of people find useful, then I can create a huge amount of value. You conflate two meanings of value: monetary value, and intrinsic value. Search engines are intrinsically but not monetarily valuable to users. Search engines are monetarily, but not intrinsically, valuable to advertisers. You can get into trouble when you conflate these two meaning of "value". In fact, right here is the pivot on which the internet goes from an idealistic shang-ri-la for geeks, to a commercial hellscape for the unwashed masses. It is surprisingly easy to create intrinsic value with computers! You see it all day every day on HN: some geek had a thought, spends a weekend making it, and then deploys a solution. It is surprisingly hard to extract monetary value from an intrinsically valuable solution. In fact, I believe that creating artificial scarcity is the hardest part of building an internet business, requiring invention on par with the intrinsically valuable part - and yet its the very thing that idealists rail against. (And making something artificially scarce does seem morally repugnant. And yet I don't see any other way to pay developers. Full stop. Open source software + consulting fees is a good way to go, but that can't apply to hosted search for the public. Well I guess it could, you could teach businesses how to game your own engine!)

amelius 4y ago
> It is surprisingly hard to extract monetary value from an intrinsically valuable solution. This is like saying that our entire economic system is backward ...
- throwawaymaths 4y ago
  I have no idea what gp means by this. It can be surprisingly hard, but it's not always. Go buy a cooler of water bottles and sell them for 50c in the summer on the side of the street
  - WJW 4y ago
    It seems pretty obvious in an internet context. It's very difficult to make money with a product if the competition is giving their products away for free because it gets paid in a different way. Even your "sell water on a hot day" idea probably won't sell a lot if you set up shop right next to an enormous promo stand from a global bottled water company that gives away bottled water for free. (And due to the magic of the internet, every spot you pick is right next to a global competitor with deep pockets)
    - throwawaymaths 4y ago
      Ok your explanation makes sense but I don't see how what you said related to the single qualifier presented: being intrinsically valuable, and gp states it as if it were an accepted rule of thumb for all economics, not specific to the internet.
    - p2hari 4y ago
      No, even then it is the same concept. The big global bottled company thought that the intrinsic value of the water is more than 50c or maybe more than 50$ . Now you have bunch of people carrying their water bottles around, giving them even more advertising. People think that water bottle company is what I should get based on those carrying it around. So infact, they are giving away water bottle for free, which compared to competitors might be 50c or 50$. but they think it is worth losing that for ad
  - jacobmischka 4y ago
    Those sell for $5 in some places.
- thatwasunusual 4y ago
  First an foremost it says that "the search engine economy" is f...ed up.
- ItsMonkk 4y ago
  It is. Capitalism relies on the basic system of supply and demand. When the marginal supply is free - the only proper price is zero - anything else isn't pure Capitalism. And so as free would mean no incentives, we give an even worse of a hack to deal with it, ownership. A better way to deal with this is to discover what the intrinsic value for the product is, allow the creator to give it away, and then subsidize the creator the value they generated. The nice thing with this system is that we can transition to it really easily. There are already many Open Source projects that exist, all we need to do is ear-mark a certain sized pot, figure out the weights of existing products, and hand it out. And as the economy gets stronger, allow the pot to grow, and eventually there might not be a thing as closed software, as open software will always be able to generate more value than closed.
  - javajosh 4y ago
    There exist grant programs at most institutions designed to support such work and precisely for that reason. Sadly, writing grant applications are a job in-and-of-themselves. Consider the case of Justine Tunney, the creator of redbean. If anyone deserves a grant or three, it's her. But she's too busy making cool shit to a) research which grants are available, and b) satisfy their onerous application requirements. Obviously the problem is that those in charge of giving away money are very passive, and in fact put up large barriers (the onerous application process) for anyone wanting the money. This, to me, is absurd. The admins of such a fund should themselves be active in one or more areas of interest, such that they themselves should be approaching people like Justine and telling her, "Here, please take my money." I don't know much about grants, but like most things that are broken I suspect there are perverse incentives here. For example, someone is probably investing that grant money, and if they give it away the money leaves the market, and that will make the admins sad. (I don't know if that's the case, but that's the kind of thing I would expect to see.) Oh, another surprisingly effective thing people are doing are subscriptions to people you like. You see this particularly on twitch, and sometimes on youtube. People can and will give money to the creators they like! It's kind of amazing to me. I suppose the analog for people like Justine is Patreon. It's fascinating though that people will happily subscribe to an entertaining personality, but will happily ignore someone who toils at making incredible things behind closed doors (but still use their tools). The obvious solution is that all open source projects should become a source of entertainment.
spencerchubb 4y ago
I would also add that human attention is inherently scarce. Advertising businesses like google and facebook leverage this fact. Google provides unlimited searches to users without charge. On the other side, google provides human attention to advertisers, and charges for it due to the scarce nature of attention. Sort of like a marketplace business.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
freediver 4y ago
> Search engines are intrinsically but not monetarily valuable to users. Search engines are monetarily, but not intrinsically, valuable to advertisers. I”d like to offer a different view, one that thousands of subscribers at Kagi search can hopefully stand behind too. (Kagi founder here) Searching has a monetary value and a cost, the only question is whether the user is paying for it or a third party is paying for the user (a cringy thought when you think about it). This question is answered by the very business model of the search engine, which determines who its customer is. It can either be its users (like in the case of Kagi and mwmbl) or advertisers (like most other search engine). Although it is really hard to break through the habit of getting search for "free", we are at least happy to be able to offer this choice to the consumer today. I am expecting to see many more paid search engines in the future.
- techdragon 4y ago
  As someone who has been architecting a paid “deep search” tool for a couple of years now ( my approach is trying to enable very deep search flexibility, like you can grip files on your hard drive, but balancing that against usability at internet scale is very hard ) I have been on board with the idea the “search is valuable enough to end users that they will pay” for awhile. The issue isn’t value, it’s marketing it successfully enough to gather users at a rate that covers costs. I haven’t launched my project even in private alpha to anyone because it still costs too much per search, for other search engines it will cost less and hopefully we get a healthy ecosystem of search tools eventually. Based on what I’m seeing in google search quality… their days of unquestioned dominance died a few years ago. The king is dead, the prince (bing) is on vacation somewhere, and the crown is up for grabs.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  How is 'kagi' related to CEO Kee Nethery ?
jart 4y ago
I don't think artificial scarcity makes sense as a mental model here. A better way to make money is probably to just find some way where people need you. When you contribute your work to the commons through open source, it earns you a lot of love and admiration. However people don't need you. It's kind of the whole point. The biggest technological services in our society that are the most crucially needed, were all built on open source. Since the whole point of open source is to give you the power and opportunity to build things you can control yourself. The people who build stuff with open source are very smart, so they usually don't need foss devs as consultants to explain to them how to do it. I make some of the most popular projects on this website. Been doing it for years. I get plenty of donations because my work makes people so happy. But no one has ever offered to pay me for something in return, since I don't have anything with any economic value, other than me myself. So I get plenty of job offers from people who would love to be able to say I'm their employee. Since controlling people is about as valuable as controlling the services people need. It'd be nice if our cultural mythology about earning your keep doing an honest day's work through fair trade was how the system worked, rather than me needing to depend on the gift economy that's funded by control. But I think there was just so much abuse of the classic models of human cooperation that they just couldn't transition to the digital era, and as such we need to find a way to adapt.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
solardev 4y ago
IMHO only, as an idealistic aside: It would be lovely to see a society in which programming was done as civil service, in a program similar to Americorps or Peace Corps or what the old CCC did: provide public infrastructure using public funds. Programming reminds me of other professions with high inputs but low per-unit-cost outputs: teaching, music, movies, art, journalism, etc. -- basically anything that is create-once, share-often. All those (for the most part) are things that America's shortsightedly capitalist economy fail to adequately incentivize/reward unless you happen to become a celebrity. There is already, and will continue to be, a class of human labor output that is intrinsically valuable but which our economy is unable to adequately price. I'd argue that's more an issue with the speculation-driven economy that we have than with the labor in question. It'll only get more drastic we we automate more and more and further amplify human creativity. It'd be cool to see a nonprofit search engine/email service/office suite/whatever funded in a similar style as NPR, but of course that'd run into political issues at every level. In an utopian cyberpunk future, what if there were multiple voluntary nonprofit "shadow governments" that you can choose to tithe every month, almost like churches? You can choose between e-governments red, blue, green, yellow, purple, gray, whatever... give them 1% of your income a year in exchange for a suite of services run and staffed by professionals who are salaried but own no equity; they work as a form of civil service, not a wealth-building scheme. Syndicates for the public good, I suppose. Lol, in all the video games, these usually turn into private military companies with killer androids, but what if they just, uh, provided really good email (and automatic online driver's license renewals) instead? Such systems would probably never be able to attract the best talent (unless they turn into something like Mozilla, which is a big enterprise masquerading as a nonprofit), but you often don't NEED the best. Wikipedia, the sum total of human knowledge, is also the sum total of human mediocrity (with plenty of redundant efforts, infighting, unoptimized problems, etc.). But having stable collaborative communities is something that is critical for producing works of intrinsic value, and developing slow-trickle funding streams for such communities -- the kind that can sustain without turning them into potential get-rich-quick schemes, or subject them to violent boom-bust cycles -- is what allows them to both keep working effectively, AND keeps away the exploitative get-rich-quick types looking to subvert public labor for personal gain. We need a funding model that provides enough income to attract people who want to do it for the public good, but not so much that it also attracts people who want to turn it into personal wealth. In high-input, low-per-unit-cost services, optimizing for maximum (as opposed to sufficient) monetization will too often mean that the users themselves become the product, as we see time and again with Google, Facebook, Twitter, and basically the entire modern online economy. It's the difference between Amazon and your local library, Oracle and Postgres, EvilOS and Linux, etc. Things don't have to be artificially scarce if we can learn to ask, "How can I make this as widely accessible as possible while ensuring I have my own basics needs covered?" instead of "How can I make this as monetarily valuable as possible?" There are always going to be people who want to just do things to make the world a better place, just as surely as there are always going to be people who want to optimize for personal profit. We have every system to fund the latter, but not so much the former right now. Is the for-profit business model the only, or best, way?

amelius 4y ago

> It is surprisingly hard to extract monetary value from an intrinsically valuable solution. This is like saying that our entire economic system is backward ...

throwawaymaths 4y ago
I have no idea what gp means by this. It can be surprisingly hard, but it's not always. Go buy a cooler of water bottles and sell them for 50c in the summer on the side of the street
- WJW 4y ago
  It seems pretty obvious in an internet context. It's very difficult to make money with a product if the competition is giving their products away for free because it gets paid in a different way. Even your "sell water on a hot day" idea probably won't sell a lot if you set up shop right next to an enormous promo stand from a global bottled water company that gives away bottled water for free. (And due to the magic of the internet, every spot you pick is right next to a global competitor with deep pockets)
  - throwawaymaths 4y ago
    Ok your explanation makes sense but I don't see how what you said related to the single qualifier presented: being intrinsically valuable, and gp states it as if it were an accepted rule of thumb for all economics, not specific to the internet.
  - p2hari 4y ago
    No, even then it is the same concept. The big global bottled company thought that the intrinsic value of the water is more than 50c or maybe more than 50$ . Now you have bunch of people carrying their water bottles around, giving them even more advertising. People think that water bottle company is what I should get based on those carrying it around. So infact, they are giving away water bottle for free, which compared to competitors might be 50c or 50$. but they think it is worth losing that for ad
- jacobmischka 4y ago
  Those sell for $5 in some places.
thatwasunusual 4y ago
First an foremost it says that "the search engine economy" is f...ed up.
ItsMonkk 4y ago
It is. Capitalism relies on the basic system of supply and demand. When the marginal supply is free - the only proper price is zero - anything else isn't pure Capitalism. And so as free would mean no incentives, we give an even worse of a hack to deal with it, ownership. A better way to deal with this is to discover what the intrinsic value for the product is, allow the creator to give it away, and then subsidize the creator the value they generated. The nice thing with this system is that we can transition to it really easily. There are already many Open Source projects that exist, all we need to do is ear-mark a certain sized pot, figure out the weights of existing products, and hand it out. And as the economy gets stronger, allow the pot to grow, and eventually there might not be a thing as closed software, as open software will always be able to generate more value than closed.
- javajosh 4y ago
  There exist grant programs at most institutions designed to support such work and precisely for that reason. Sadly, writing grant applications are a job in-and-of-themselves. Consider the case of Justine Tunney, the creator of redbean. If anyone deserves a grant or three, it's her. But she's too busy making cool shit to a) research which grants are available, and b) satisfy their onerous application requirements. Obviously the problem is that those in charge of giving away money are very passive, and in fact put up large barriers (the onerous application process) for anyone wanting the money. This, to me, is absurd. The admins of such a fund should themselves be active in one or more areas of interest, such that they themselves should be approaching people like Justine and telling her, "Here, please take my money." I don't know much about grants, but like most things that are broken I suspect there are perverse incentives here. For example, someone is probably investing that grant money, and if they give it away the money leaves the market, and that will make the admins sad. (I don't know if that's the case, but that's the kind of thing I would expect to see.) Oh, another surprisingly effective thing people are doing are subscriptions to people you like. You see this particularly on twitch, and sometimes on youtube. People can and will give money to the creators they like! It's kind of amazing to me. I suppose the analog for people like Justine is Patreon. It's fascinating though that people will happily subscribe to an entertaining personality, but will happily ignore someone who toils at making incredible things behind closed doors (but still use their tools). The obvious solution is that all open source projects should become a source of entertainment.

spencerchubb 4y ago

I would also add that human attention is inherently scarce. Advertising businesses like google and facebook leverage this fact. Google provides unlimited searches to users without charge. On the other side, google provides human attention to advertisers, and charges for it due to the scarce nature of attention. Sort of like a marketplace business.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

freediver 4y ago

> Search engines are intrinsically but not monetarily valuable to users. Search engines are monetarily, but not intrinsically, valuable to advertisers. I”d like to offer a different view, one that thousands of subscribers at Kagi search can hopefully stand behind too. (Kagi founder here) Searching has a monetary value and a cost, the only question is whether the user is paying for it or a third party is paying for the user (a cringy thought when you think about it). This question is answered by the very business model of the search engine, which determines who its customer is. It can either be its users (like in the case of Kagi and mwmbl) or advertisers (like most other search engine). Although it is really hard to break through the habit of getting search for "free", we are at least happy to be able to offer this choice to the consumer today. I am expecting to see many more paid search engines in the future.

techdragon 4y ago
As someone who has been architecting a paid “deep search” tool for a couple of years now ( my approach is trying to enable very deep search flexibility, like you can grip files on your hard drive, but balancing that against usability at internet scale is very hard ) I have been on board with the idea the “search is valuable enough to end users that they will pay” for awhile. The issue isn’t value, it’s marketing it successfully enough to gather users at a rate that covers costs. I haven’t launched my project even in private alpha to anyone because it still costs too much per search, for other search engines it will cost less and hopefully we get a healthy ecosystem of search tools eventually. Based on what I’m seeing in google search quality… their days of unquestioned dominance died a few years ago. The king is dead, the prince (bing) is on vacation somewhere, and the crown is up for grabs.
mistrial9 4y ago
How is 'kagi' related to CEO Kee Nethery ?

jart 4y ago

I don't think artificial scarcity makes sense as a mental model here. A better way to make money is probably to just find some way where people need you. When you contribute your work to the commons through open source, it earns you a lot of love and admiration. However people don't need you. It's kind of the whole point. The biggest technological services in our society that are the most crucially needed, were all built on open source. Since the whole point of open source is to give you the power and opportunity to build things you can control yourself. The people who build stuff with open source are very smart, so they usually don't need foss devs as consultants to explain to them how to do it. I make some of the most popular projects on this website. Been doing it for years. I get plenty of donations because my work makes people so happy. But no one has ever offered to pay me for something in return, since I don't have anything with any economic value, other than me myself. So I get plenty of job offers from people who would love to be able to say I'm their employee. Since controlling people is about as valuable as controlling the services people need. It'd be nice if our cultural mythology about earning your keep doing an honest day's work through fair trade was how the system worked, rather than me needing to depend on the gift economy that's funded by control. But I think there was just so much abuse of the classic models of human cooperation that they just couldn't transition to the digital era, and as such we need to find a way to adapt.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

solardev 4y ago

IMHO only, as an idealistic aside: It would be lovely to see a society in which programming was done as civil service, in a program similar to Americorps or Peace Corps or what the old CCC did: provide public infrastructure using public funds. Programming reminds me of other professions with high inputs but low per-unit-cost outputs: teaching, music, movies, art, journalism, etc. -- basically anything that is create-once, share-often. All those (for the most part) are things that America's shortsightedly capitalist economy fail to adequately incentivize/reward unless you happen to become a celebrity. There is already, and will continue to be, a class of human labor output that is intrinsically valuable but which our economy is unable to adequately price. I'd argue that's more an issue with the speculation-driven economy that we have than with the labor in question. It'll only get more drastic we we automate more and more and further amplify human creativity. It'd be cool to see a nonprofit search engine/email service/office suite/whatever funded in a similar style as NPR, but of course that'd run into political issues at every level. In an utopian cyberpunk future, what if there were multiple voluntary nonprofit "shadow governments" that you can choose to tithe every month, almost like churches? You can choose between e-governments red, blue, green, yellow, purple, gray, whatever... give them 1% of your income a year in exchange for a suite of services run and staffed by professionals who are salaried but own no equity; they work as a form of civil service, not a wealth-building scheme. Syndicates for the public good, I suppose. Lol, in all the video games, these usually turn into private military companies with killer androids, but what if they just, uh, provided really good email (and automatic online driver's license renewals) instead? Such systems would probably never be able to attract the best talent (unless they turn into something like Mozilla, which is a big enterprise masquerading as a nonprofit), but you often don't NEED the best. Wikipedia, the sum total of human knowledge, is also the sum total of human mediocrity (with plenty of redundant efforts, infighting, unoptimized problems, etc.). But having stable collaborative communities is something that is critical for producing works of intrinsic value, and developing slow-trickle funding streams for such communities -- the kind that can sustain without turning them into potential get-rich-quick schemes, or subject them to violent boom-bust cycles -- is what allows them to both keep working effectively, AND keeps away the exploitative get-rich-quick types looking to subvert public labor for personal gain. We need a funding model that provides enough income to attract people who want to do it for the public good, but not so much that it also attracts people who want to turn it into personal wealth. In high-input, low-per-unit-cost services, optimizing for maximum (as opposed to sufficient) monetization will too often mean that the users themselves become the product, as we see time and again with Google, Facebook, Twitter, and basically the entire modern online economy. It's the difference between Amazon and your local library, Oracle and Postgres, EvilOS and Linux, etc. Things don't have to be artificially scarce if we can learn to ask, "How can I make this as widely accessible as possible while ensuring I have my own basics needs covered?" instead of "How can I make this as monetarily valuable as possible?" There are always going to be people who want to just do things to make the world a better place, just as surely as there are always going to be people who want to optimize for personal profit. We have every system to fund the latter, but not so much the former right now. Is the for-profit business model the only, or best, way?