4 ms·

There's this great small village where everyone makes stuff and buys stuff from each other: good ecosystem, works well and popular stuff makes more money than l

by marquis 13y ago

There's this great small village where everyone makes stuff and buys stuff from each other: good ecosystem, works well and popular stuff makes more money than less popular, as expected. Someone comes up with an idea to make money off the stuff by giving it away for free but putting some ads on it. People don't mind much: the stuff is free now and the people making popular stuff make good money from their share of the ads. What happens next seems to be some kind of bizarre need to make more money. This is the part I don't really understand. So the people giving away the free stuff with the ads put more ads, which starts to put the people off watching it for free. The people getting the free stuff start to try and find ways of getting the free stuff without the new annoying ads, which makes the people making the ads want to make more ads and make it criminal to block the ads. People stop making stuff because they aren't making as much money as in the hey-day of free-stuff-and-not-too-many-ads and people stop watching stuff and maybe go outside and watch the sunset (still free) or play card games and charades (not yet patented) or make their own stuff and put it on FaceGramSnap (which has ads but not yet so annoying). The people who put ads on the free stuff scratch their heads and wonder what went wrong.

Florin_Andrei 13y ago
> The people who put ads on the free stuff scratch their heads and wonder what went wrong. greed
- varelse 13y ago
  Also spelled Wall Street. And if at any point you come under the delusion that Wall Street is of any benefit to anyone but themselves, go read some analyst's alternate reality review and recommendations for a technology/company you understand top to bottom as an engineer. It's a terrifying Morlock/Eloi dichotomy that explains a lot (at least to me). Add in blind allocation at Google and they themselves are doing their very best to hire smart people who have no passion whatsoever for the job they're doing, staying only for the compensation and perks, perhaps fleetingly hoping that one day they can transfer to a fun project they believe in.
- bittercynic 13y ago
  Agreed. Greed.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    I work in a sort of purgatory of the broadcast/internet TV space, and with regards to ads, completely agree. Broadcasters have gotten accustomed to very high rates for the ads shown on television. They're trying to get these rates on the web, but advertisers don't want to pay them (which is crazy, since you can directly measure response on the web; not as much with broadcast). So they show more ads. A lot more ads, to try to get to the same revenue level as broadcast television. During the day, I sometimes feel like I'm watching two dinosaurs fight over a carcass as the meteorite comes screaming towards the ground.
    - 001sky 13y ago
      Entitlement. You have to remember that old media is a monopoly biz. That explains alot about the culture. The people believe they are entitled to be at a certain level of power/money/presitge in society. Its not surprising they are masters of political interventions to support their positions. They don't do product as much as they do monopoly business model, legislated advantage(s) and regulatory capture. From that position, it's just extraction by contract terms.
      - marquis 13y ago
        >The people believe they are entitled to be at a certain level of power That's a very good point to make: old school media (broadcast media/print) set the cultural standards for a society. That's changing: the Internet is allowing everyone to learn together what they think, or want to think. We know that anyone losing power will do anything to try and keep it, as they fall deeper into the well of redundancy. You just helped me realise that broadcast is going away, but we'll maintain our celebrity/expert hierarchies based on new media explorations (e.g. XKCD, notch, Colonel Hadfield)
angryasian 13y ago
While I understand the tone of the comment, to think song writers/singer or movie creators or even software developers will stop creating because its harder to make money is not a reality. People will continue to create regardless, but to be compensated for it, is nice.
- marquis 13y ago
  >People will continue to create regardless Yes I think that's a given. Yet thinking of my colleagues who are full-time artists, I think we as a society to work really hard to justify not paying for their work and I find it hard to fathom.

by marquis 13y ago

Florin_Andrei 13y ago

> The people who put ads on the free stuff scratch their heads and wonder what went wrong. greed

varelse 13y ago
Also spelled Wall Street. And if at any point you come under the delusion that Wall Street is of any benefit to anyone but themselves, go read some analyst's alternate reality review and recommendations for a technology/company you understand top to bottom as an engineer. It's a terrifying Morlock/Eloi dichotomy that explains a lot (at least to me). Add in blind allocation at Google and they themselves are doing their very best to hire smart people who have no passion whatsoever for the job they're doing, staying only for the compensation and perks, perhaps fleetingly hoping that one day they can transfer to a fun project they believe in.
bittercynic 13y ago
Agreed. Greed.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  I work in a sort of purgatory of the broadcast/internet TV space, and with regards to ads, completely agree. Broadcasters have gotten accustomed to very high rates for the ads shown on television. They're trying to get these rates on the web, but advertisers don't want to pay them (which is crazy, since you can directly measure response on the web; not as much with broadcast). So they show more ads. A lot more ads, to try to get to the same revenue level as broadcast television. During the day, I sometimes feel like I'm watching two dinosaurs fight over a carcass as the meteorite comes screaming towards the ground.
  - 001sky 13y ago
    Entitlement. You have to remember that old media is a monopoly biz. That explains alot about the culture. The people believe they are entitled to be at a certain level of power/money/presitge in society. Its not surprising they are masters of political interventions to support their positions. They don't do product as much as they do monopoly business model, legislated advantage(s) and regulatory capture. From that position, it's just extraction by contract terms.
    - marquis 13y ago
      >The people believe they are entitled to be at a certain level of power That's a very good point to make: old school media (broadcast media/print) set the cultural standards for a society. That's changing: the Internet is allowing everyone to learn together what they think, or want to think. We know that anyone losing power will do anything to try and keep it, as they fall deeper into the well of redundancy. You just helped me realise that broadcast is going away, but we'll maintain our celebrity/expert hierarchies based on new media explorations (e.g. XKCD, notch, Colonel Hadfield)

angryasian 13y ago

While I understand the tone of the comment, to think song writers/singer or movie creators or even software developers will stop creating because its harder to make money is not a reality. People will continue to create regardless, but to be compensated for it, is nice.

marquis 13y ago
>People will continue to create regardless Yes I think that's a given. Yet thinking of my colleagues who are full-time artists, I think we as a society to work really hard to justify not paying for their work and I find it hard to fathom.