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Is wikipedia all that different? Youtube? Even Google itself? Different manifestations of the same sort of thing, if you shift your perspective just a bit an

Is wikipedia all that different? Youtube? Even Google itself? Different manifestations of the same sort of thing, if you shift your perspective just a bit and look at how people use them.

eropple 11y ago
Wikipedia isn't taking your money. Neither is Google. So, yeah. Difference in kind, not merely degree.
- waterlesscloud 11y ago
  Google/YouTube is making money from your addiction, so...no, not difference in kind.
  - eropple 11y ago
    You have a very long row to hoe to establish that incidental advertising revenue is the same as literally taking money out of the pockets of the fixed-income elderly. Feel free to start, but 'till then I'm going to have a powerfully hard time taking your argument seriously. And Wikipedia doesn't have advertising at all, so don't throw out your back lugging them goalposts.
    - waterlesscloud 11y ago
      LOL at "incidental" You know, it's just Google's main revenue stream. By several orders of magnitude.
      - eropple 11y ago
        incidental, adj.: accompanying but not a major part of something. Which is why I picked the phrasing I did; advertising is completely and inarguably incidental to the consumption of the content that somebody is on YouTube to actually see. Is it Google's main revenue stream? Sure. Is it significantly impactful to the consumer? No, not really. But let's take a step back. Do you actually intend to defend your assertion that advertising is the same in kind as literally taking money out of somebody's pocket? Or is this just the tacit admission that, no, you can't, so let's play definitional games?
        waterlesscloud 11y ago
        There's no question whatsoever that Google/Youtube would not exist if they didn't have advertising revenue. This is not in any way a debatable point. It's not even a little bit "incidental". My point, no matter how you attempt to recast it, is that Google/Youtube depend on an addictive dynamic. They do. You keep coming back. You keep watching the next video. they make money when you do that. You can try to recast that all you want, but if people didn't keep clicking on the next result or next video, Google/YouTube wouldn't make money. Why do you think there's a related videos sidebar on YouTube? Why do YouTube videos end with more links to other videos?
        reinhardt 11y ago
        Google et al. make money from advertisers, not from "addicted" people clicking on cat videos on Youtube. If you can't see the difference from the slot machines business model, I don't know what to tell you.
    - alanfalcon 11y ago
      The elderly have limited lifespans in addition to limited income, taking their time could be more costly than taking money in some cases. Money isn't the only thing of value in this world. I don't come down on the side of Google being responsible for YouTube addictions, nor of F2P game makers being resposible for IAP addictions in a general universal sense.
DanBC 11y ago
When you look at the bad bits of wikipedia you see people who are hooked into sub-optimal feedback mechanisms. There used to be a problem with "Vandal Patrol" - people would use tools to auto-revert edits and apply templates. Some of those people saw more reverts as being better, and would very rapidly revert and template, often catching good faith edits and users. (As far as I know that got mostly sorted out.) When people ran for admin there was sometimes a tendency to just count number of edits, rather than look at the quality of edits. But still, Wikipedia didn't want that, and they didn't deliberately set out to addict people in order to extract as much money as possible from them.
rawnlq 11y ago
I think you unfortunately choose a few companies that HNers love. If you had chosen tvtropes.org, television, and ad agencies as your examples then your point might be made clearer. If I am interpreting you correctly, you're saying that anything can become potentially addictive. I agree with you that our reward system is flawed enough such that as long as you provide any sort of value there are people out there who will mistakenly fall into an infinitely loop trading away all their resources (be it time or money) in exchange for the product/service. I think the intent is important distinction though. A company that maliciously constructs scenarios where they know the typical human will fail due to known bugs in their evolution is not much different from a blackhat. I think the more typical scenario is that the company has to work around our bugs (such as building user interfaces that our imperfect visual cortex can easily understand) just so we can make a fair and willing transaction that provides value to the both sides.

Is wikipedia all that different? Youtube? Even Google itself? Different manifestations of the same sort of thing, if you shift your perspective just a bit and look at how people use them.

eropple 11y ago

Wikipedia isn't taking your money. Neither is Google. So, yeah. Difference in kind, not merely degree.

waterlesscloud 11y ago
Google/YouTube is making money from your addiction, so...no, not difference in kind.
- eropple 11y ago
  You have a very long row to hoe to establish that incidental advertising revenue is the same as literally taking money out of the pockets of the fixed-income elderly. Feel free to start, but 'till then I'm going to have a powerfully hard time taking your argument seriously. And Wikipedia doesn't have advertising at all, so don't throw out your back lugging them goalposts.
  - waterlesscloud 11y ago
    LOL at "incidental" You know, it's just Google's main revenue stream. By several orders of magnitude.
    - eropple 11y ago
      incidental, adj.: accompanying but not a major part of something. Which is why I picked the phrasing I did; advertising is completely and inarguably incidental to the consumption of the content that somebody is on YouTube to actually see. Is it Google's main revenue stream? Sure. Is it significantly impactful to the consumer? No, not really. But let's take a step back. Do you actually intend to defend your assertion that advertising is the same in kind as literally taking money out of somebody's pocket? Or is this just the tacit admission that, no, you can't, so let's play definitional games?
      - waterlesscloud 11y ago
        There's no question whatsoever that Google/Youtube would not exist if they didn't have advertising revenue. This is not in any way a debatable point. It's not even a little bit "incidental". My point, no matter how you attempt to recast it, is that Google/Youtube depend on an addictive dynamic. They do. You keep coming back. You keep watching the next video. they make money when you do that. You can try to recast that all you want, but if people didn't keep clicking on the next result or next video, Google/YouTube wouldn't make money. Why do you think there's a related videos sidebar on YouTube? Why do YouTube videos end with more links to other videos?
        reinhardt 11y ago
        Google et al. make money from advertisers, not from "addicted" people clicking on cat videos on Youtube. If you can't see the difference from the slot machines business model, I don't know what to tell you.
  - alanfalcon 11y ago
    The elderly have limited lifespans in addition to limited income, taking their time could be more costly than taking money in some cases. Money isn't the only thing of value in this world. I don't come down on the side of Google being responsible for YouTube addictions, nor of F2P game makers being resposible for IAP addictions in a general universal sense.

DanBC 11y ago

When you look at the bad bits of wikipedia you see people who are hooked into sub-optimal feedback mechanisms. There used to be a problem with "Vandal Patrol" - people would use tools to auto-revert edits and apply templates. Some of those people saw more reverts as being better, and would very rapidly revert and template, often catching good faith edits and users. (As far as I know that got mostly sorted out.) When people ran for admin there was sometimes a tendency to just count number of edits, rather than look at the quality of edits. But still, Wikipedia didn't want that, and they didn't deliberately set out to addict people in order to extract as much money as possible from them.

rawnlq 11y ago

I think you unfortunately choose a few companies that HNers love. If you had chosen tvtropes.org, television, and ad agencies as your examples then your point might be made clearer. If I am interpreting you correctly, you're saying that anything can become potentially addictive. I agree with you that our reward system is flawed enough such that as long as you provide any sort of value there are people out there who will mistakenly fall into an infinitely loop trading away all their resources (be it time or money) in exchange for the product/service. I think the intent is important distinction though. A company that maliciously constructs scenarios where they know the typical human will fail due to known bugs in their evolution is not much different from a blackhat. I think the more typical scenario is that the company has to work around our bugs (such as building user interfaces that our imperfect visual cortex can easily understand) just so we can make a fair and willing transaction that provides value to the both sides.