4 ms·

The cruft is because the underlying economics of how data is hosted and distributed is flawed. The incentives between advertisers, readers, publishers, hosting

The cruft is because the underlying economics of how data is hosted and distributed is flawed. The incentives between advertisers, readers, publishers, hosting and distribution providers are currently misaligned. In other words, building an info-economic system based on "free" content that is supported by online advertising results in: the people who make the content don't get paid enough and the content itself is horribly mangled by advertisements and other priorities. However, we can build other kinds of info-economic systems. Perhaps we could follow the model of publishing back when we still used copyrights as an effective way to align the incentives between authors and publishers. Covering the costs of hosting and distribution are a lot easier to manage when the content itself isn't hard-coded in to an ad-selling-machine as delivery options like BitTorrent or WebTorrent are now an option. Permanent seeds could be kept alive at very little cost to publishers. Perhaps we could experiment with royalties, or selling virtual shares in media, or buying virtual goods that list you as a supporter, or allow people to invest in the creation of and share ownership in media...

ommunist 11y ago
I like the direction of your thought. However, the practical future may bring more of personal complex of intelligent browsing agents, pre-fetching info for the user, stripping out 'cruft' to make web useful again and ....m consumable after all. Good example is Safari Reader feature and Readability plugin for Chrome. Those are just the beginning.
- williamcotton 11y ago
  That only satisfies the demands of the consumer. A functioning economic system needs to also reward the supplier and at a bare minimum cover their expenses. The answers are right in front of us: just treat digital media as property and follow the same model of copyright that's been working for over 300 years. The issue has been that tracking ownership and the accounting around payments wasn't able to keep up when things went purely digital. These were tasks that were at one point fully monopolized and facilitated by government and still are to some extent with things like SoundExchange. Right now the only things worth owning are shares in the aggregators, not the actual media itself. Digital media is no longer even remotely aligned with the interests of authors. In music for example, Sony didn't directly license content to Spotify, it wanted equity in Spotify itself. Whatever deals are being signed are done without the consent nor consideration of the authors. Tidal is a service where a few artists realized they need to own equity in the aggregation service because their ownership over songs and recordings has become worthless. Intellectual property is a fantasy. It is a legal construct. The only reason we've ever had a vibrant market economy of books, music, and movies is because we set up the legal and accounting frameworks to make it possible. Whatever mess we've created over the last 20 years is really starting to show it's ugly side, especially in relation to music. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a wholesale musicians revolt when it comes to digital media. Vinyl sales are up year-over-year for coming on a decade now.
  - ommunist 11y ago
    I really like your point about the vinyl. However, land property rights are also a fantasy. Its a legal construct. I mean that. How can anyone claim to"own" the land if us as a species are just 2M years old, comparing to the Earth's estimated 4000M years existence. But look at the mess we created around land property over past 2000 years! So why everyone in the West was so surprised when Russians revolted in 1917 to bring land back to those who works on it and depends from it?
    - williamcotton 11y ago
      At least in the Anglo-American world, the only world I know much of anything about, we've built our entire societies on the back of common law constructs around contracts, tort and property rights. For better or for worse, it's how we do things. The American revolution was just a logical extension to the legal structures that had been evolving in the United Kingdom for hundreds of years. I can see the appeal of throwing out the concept of property rights if you, well, own no property, which was entirely the case for the vast majority of people living in Russian in 1917. However, here in the United States, we've taken another approach, and that is to encourage ownership and participation in the legal and market structures that define our society. We want more homeowners, more intellectual property owners, and more equity owners. The more people we have benefitting from these fantasies, the more likely that these fantasies continue. I think for the intents of this discussion, we've already tried out the "communist" approach to digital media ownership on the Internet. We got to where we are right now because we've basically abandoned intellectual property. But we didn't get rid of ownership. There are plenty of profitable companies who deal in hosting, distributing and organizing digital media who don't track nor care about who owns anything. Just like with the communist experiments on the grand scale of the Soviet Union, property ownership doesn't go away entirely, it just lays in the hands of a select few to the detriment of everyone else. It's not like you could ever stroll in to Stalin's house and borrow his hat without asking. Now, if we could just get more private entities in the Western world to realize that all of their ownership stems from the fantasies of a social contract between a people and it's government, we might be able to get somewhere. Acting like the government is always the enemy is absurd. You can't have a corporation without government or some other system for managing the state of ownership... hmm, what's that technology that showed up recently related to coming to consensus on who owns what on a shared public ledger?
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  You mean like a RSS aggregator and reader?
normloman 11y ago
Copyright hasn't gone away. Media organizations still own the rights to content they produce, and can sue anyone who copies it without their permission. Now, de facto, there are many people who will rip content and publish it on their own site. But that's not the plauge that's driving media companies to cruft up their websites, and by and large, it's a minor problem, thanks to Google's filtering of duplicate content. People aren't paying for content because the publishers are giving it away. Copyright doesn't change that. They own the rights to their own content, and are free to charge whatever they want for it, including nothing. If they want to put up a paywall, nothing's stopping them. I want to make clear that content isn't suffering because people won't pay. Newspapers and magazines never made the bulk of their money from subscriptions. It was always about advertising. Thanks to Google, advertising's a commodity, and publishers can't charge what they used to for it. The solutions you list may work, or they may not. But let's not confuse the copyright issue and the advertising issue.
- williamcotton 11y ago
  But publishers have to give it away with the "ad selling engine" embedded right in the content or else they make no money because... no one will honor their copyright and funnel advertisement earnings to the rights-holders. Look at FM radio. They run ads. The songwriter is entitled to royalties on that income because of our copyright laws and accounting infrastructure. Funny enough, the recording artist is not entitled to royalties because at the time this stuff went in to action it was assumed that radio airplay was a good advertisement for the record, and that's how the artist would be compensated! The way we're doing thing right now with social media is if the songwriters didn't get any money from radio play. Facebook isn't paying anyone for the content they monetize. Neither is Google. They just index and aggregate and profit and ignore copyright. Imagine FM radio if it was like this. Every song would have to be an advertisement for something else for anyone to make any money. That's exactly what's happened to our content. They are filled with advertisements and there is no way to remove them! This "web cruft" is a perfect example of this effect! Why can't I just get pure, clean content anywhere? Because then anyone could link to it, and in the process, sell some deodorant on someone else's behalf. Facebook has realized this and, much like Apple, they've decided to act as a private monopoly of a content industry where they get to set their own royalty rates. They'll take 30%, the "content creator" takes 70%. They'll decide what is worthy of publication and what isn't. We figured out hundreds of years ago that this monopoly should absolutely not be run by a private entity. Not only would it be much better for individual liberty, but it would be much much easier and apply to ALL content if we could just include royalty payments to rights-holders. That way I just put "content" on the Internet and then if someone happens to be slapping ads on it directly or indirectly, money is making it's way back to the people who made it or paid for it to be made. I'm not really talking about anything novel here, just looking at some recent history of examples of how copyright has been used in contracts to the mutual benefit of many different parties, including artists, publishers and distributors.

ommunist 11y ago

I like the direction of your thought. However, the practical future may bring more of personal complex of intelligent browsing agents, pre-fetching info for the user, stripping out 'cruft' to make web useful again and ....m consumable after all. Good example is Safari Reader feature and Readability plugin for Chrome. Those are just the beginning.

williamcotton 11y ago
That only satisfies the demands of the consumer. A functioning economic system needs to also reward the supplier and at a bare minimum cover their expenses. The answers are right in front of us: just treat digital media as property and follow the same model of copyright that's been working for over 300 years. The issue has been that tracking ownership and the accounting around payments wasn't able to keep up when things went purely digital. These were tasks that were at one point fully monopolized and facilitated by government and still are to some extent with things like SoundExchange. Right now the only things worth owning are shares in the aggregators, not the actual media itself. Digital media is no longer even remotely aligned with the interests of authors. In music for example, Sony didn't directly license content to Spotify, it wanted equity in Spotify itself. Whatever deals are being signed are done without the consent nor consideration of the authors. Tidal is a service where a few artists realized they need to own equity in the aggregation service because their ownership over songs and recordings has become worthless. Intellectual property is a fantasy. It is a legal construct. The only reason we've ever had a vibrant market economy of books, music, and movies is because we set up the legal and accounting frameworks to make it possible. Whatever mess we've created over the last 20 years is really starting to show it's ugly side, especially in relation to music. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a wholesale musicians revolt when it comes to digital media. Vinyl sales are up year-over-year for coming on a decade now.
- ommunist 11y ago
  I really like your point about the vinyl. However, land property rights are also a fantasy. Its a legal construct. I mean that. How can anyone claim to"own" the land if us as a species are just 2M years old, comparing to the Earth's estimated 4000M years existence. But look at the mess we created around land property over past 2000 years! So why everyone in the West was so surprised when Russians revolted in 1917 to bring land back to those who works on it and depends from it?
  - williamcotton 11y ago
    At least in the Anglo-American world, the only world I know much of anything about, we've built our entire societies on the back of common law constructs around contracts, tort and property rights. For better or for worse, it's how we do things. The American revolution was just a logical extension to the legal structures that had been evolving in the United Kingdom for hundreds of years. I can see the appeal of throwing out the concept of property rights if you, well, own no property, which was entirely the case for the vast majority of people living in Russian in 1917. However, here in the United States, we've taken another approach, and that is to encourage ownership and participation in the legal and market structures that define our society. We want more homeowners, more intellectual property owners, and more equity owners. The more people we have benefitting from these fantasies, the more likely that these fantasies continue. I think for the intents of this discussion, we've already tried out the "communist" approach to digital media ownership on the Internet. We got to where we are right now because we've basically abandoned intellectual property. But we didn't get rid of ownership. There are plenty of profitable companies who deal in hosting, distributing and organizing digital media who don't track nor care about who owns anything. Just like with the communist experiments on the grand scale of the Soviet Union, property ownership doesn't go away entirely, it just lays in the hands of a select few to the detriment of everyone else. It's not like you could ever stroll in to Stalin's house and borrow his hat without asking. Now, if we could just get more private entities in the Western world to realize that all of their ownership stems from the fantasies of a social contract between a people and it's government, we might be able to get somewhere. Acting like the government is always the enemy is absurd. You can't have a corporation without government or some other system for managing the state of ownership... hmm, what's that technology that showed up recently related to coming to consensus on who owns what on a shared public ledger?
JupiterMoon 11y ago
You mean like a RSS aggregator and reader?

normloman 11y ago

Copyright hasn't gone away. Media organizations still own the rights to content they produce, and can sue anyone who copies it without their permission. Now, de facto, there are many people who will rip content and publish it on their own site. But that's not the plauge that's driving media companies to cruft up their websites, and by and large, it's a minor problem, thanks to Google's filtering of duplicate content. People aren't paying for content because the publishers are giving it away. Copyright doesn't change that. They own the rights to their own content, and are free to charge whatever they want for it, including nothing. If they want to put up a paywall, nothing's stopping them. I want to make clear that content isn't suffering because people won't pay. Newspapers and magazines never made the bulk of their money from subscriptions. It was always about advertising. Thanks to Google, advertising's a commodity, and publishers can't charge what they used to for it. The solutions you list may work, or they may not. But let's not confuse the copyright issue and the advertising issue.

williamcotton 11y ago
But publishers have to give it away with the "ad selling engine" embedded right in the content or else they make no money because... no one will honor their copyright and funnel advertisement earnings to the rights-holders. Look at FM radio. They run ads. The songwriter is entitled to royalties on that income because of our copyright laws and accounting infrastructure. Funny enough, the recording artist is not entitled to royalties because at the time this stuff went in to action it was assumed that radio airplay was a good advertisement for the record, and that's how the artist would be compensated! The way we're doing thing right now with social media is if the songwriters didn't get any money from radio play. Facebook isn't paying anyone for the content they monetize. Neither is Google. They just index and aggregate and profit and ignore copyright. Imagine FM radio if it was like this. Every song would have to be an advertisement for something else for anyone to make any money. That's exactly what's happened to our content. They are filled with advertisements and there is no way to remove them! This "web cruft" is a perfect example of this effect! Why can't I just get pure, clean content anywhere? Because then anyone could link to it, and in the process, sell some deodorant on someone else's behalf. Facebook has realized this and, much like Apple, they've decided to act as a private monopoly of a content industry where they get to set their own royalty rates. They'll take 30%, the "content creator" takes 70%. They'll decide what is worthy of publication and what isn't. We figured out hundreds of years ago that this monopoly should absolutely not be run by a private entity. Not only would it be much better for individual liberty, but it would be much much easier and apply to ALL content if we could just include royalty payments to rights-holders. That way I just put "content" on the Internet and then if someone happens to be slapping ads on it directly or indirectly, money is making it's way back to the people who made it or paid for it to be made. I'm not really talking about anything novel here, just looking at some recent history of examples of how copyright has been used in contracts to the mutual benefit of many different parties, including artists, publishers and distributors.