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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair You're putting all the responsib

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair You're putting all the responsibility on the consumer, and none on us, the technologists, the so-called innovators. Where are our innovative powers to come up with alternate busniness models? Where are our backbones to stand up against selling out the internet so that we can get rich quick? Because that is what the advertising business model is: a get rich quick scheme. Undercut the straight up competitors that charge for their product by fooling consumers into thinking you're offering what the other guy is offering, but for free. Come on, who could turn down that? Only the truth is it isn't free. We all pay in the end. The lunch is not only not free, it's costing us more and its loaded with toxic crap. The saddest thing about Hacker News is that we all get behind radical things like FOSS (Bill Gates called it un-American) and Snowden[1], and fight SOPA and NSA violations of privacy, but because too many of our salaries depend on advertising revenue, our cognitive dissonance blinders go up lightning fast. You can already see it in the top comments to this post. Admittedly I suck as a writer, but ever time I make my very strong case that advertising may be the primary evil of internet[2], I almost invariably receive a great number of silent downvotes. No one solidly counters my arguments, except to fall back on the utter bullshit that that advertising is great because it gives us the internet for free, which proves that they didn’t even read my argument. Boykis is wrong in saying that things were fine in 2012. No, they were bad then, and the internet's original sin, relying on advertising, started long before that. It’s only that now it is accelerating toward a crescendo. It will get worse unless we do something about it. - [1] Today on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961527 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237

josh2600 11y ago
I find comments like this to be sorta akin to putting your fingers in your ears and screaming "lalalalala I can't hear you!". Whenever people say "free" in the context of information exchange, my belief is that they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of information. Information is a proxy for power, and the power comes from asymmetry. If everyone has a level playing field from an information access perspective, you cease to have functioning markets of exchange. The essential point of business is information arbitrage (I know something you don't know so I can buy low and sell high) and free access to information is antithetical to that view. In short, everyone remembers the first half of that quote: "information wants to be free..." but conveniently forgets the second part: "... But information also wants to be expensive". There is no "free exchange of information". It is always subsidized by the rich and powerful (no part of the internet's infrastructure is "free" and therefore any "free" exchange of information is a form of charity). That is to say, it's hard for me to tell people to give up the information which is, in effect, their livelihood.
- eevilspock 11y ago
  I made a mistake by ending my comment with: > The author nails it at the end: > "There have to be other business models that free up the internet for what it was meant for: free exchange of information.” I'm with you. People need to get paid. I'm only calling for coming up with better business models or go back to the straight up "charge for it" model that the free market system is built on. The bit about "free up the internet for what it was meant for: free exchange of information" is not my point, though we do need to come up with a business model that gets people paid but also let's the information that is the lifeblood of democracy flow freely to all people regardless of ability to pay. You focused on a red herring (though it was my fault to put it there, and I've deleted it, thank you). Now please address my points about the ills of advertising. (P.S. We'll leave to another day the question of whether "It is always subsidized by the rich and powerful" or whether the rich and powerful are in fact subsidized by the people at the bottom, whom you consider the recipients of "charity".)
  - josh2600 11y ago
    Advertising is the worst model, except for all the rest of them. Charging for things, in and of itself, is hard and, on some level, facetious. If all knowledge were known, why would you pay anyone to do anything? It's not clear to me why anyone pays anyone except in the case of information arbitrage. Advertising is a form of explicit information arbitrage, where we convert dollars into attention. Other information arbitrage's include licensing, where we essentially leverage the properties of intellectual property and technical obfuscation to generate returns. The ills of advertising are a consequence of information arbitrage. What most people are railing against is the act of arbitraging what they view as trivial information, and yet this is the essential point that makes a business. We think advertising is evil because it monetizes our attention in a vaguely non-consensual manner, but there are tons of businesses which are valued with respect to attention that are not valued with respect to dollars (think porn as the canonical example). Advertising is simply the easiest way to convert attention into dollars. There are higher friction methods, but their returns are generally commensurately lower. If I could just reach into your bank account and pull a penny out for every minute you use my app, or listen to my song, or read my book, that might be a viable business. Barring that access, advertising appears to be best.
mcphage 11y ago
> [U]s, the technologists, the so-called innovators. Where are our innovative powers to come up with alternate busniness models? Well, we're technologists. Our innovative powers are good for coming up with technological solutions, but this is a business and social problem. Our ability to solve those problems are no better than anyone else's—worse, probably, given our focus on problems with very different constraints.

josh2600 11y ago

I find comments like this to be sorta akin to putting your fingers in your ears and screaming "lalalalala I can't hear you!". Whenever people say "free" in the context of information exchange, my belief is that they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of information. Information is a proxy for power, and the power comes from asymmetry. If everyone has a level playing field from an information access perspective, you cease to have functioning markets of exchange. The essential point of business is information arbitrage (I know something you don't know so I can buy low and sell high) and free access to information is antithetical to that view. In short, everyone remembers the first half of that quote: "information wants to be free..." but conveniently forgets the second part: "... But information also wants to be expensive". There is no "free exchange of information". It is always subsidized by the rich and powerful (no part of the internet's infrastructure is "free" and therefore any "free" exchange of information is a form of charity). That is to say, it's hard for me to tell people to give up the information which is, in effect, their livelihood.

eevilspock 11y ago
I made a mistake by ending my comment with: > The author nails it at the end: > "There have to be other business models that free up the internet for what it was meant for: free exchange of information.” I'm with you. People need to get paid. I'm only calling for coming up with better business models or go back to the straight up "charge for it" model that the free market system is built on. The bit about "free up the internet for what it was meant for: free exchange of information" is not my point, though we do need to come up with a business model that gets people paid but also let's the information that is the lifeblood of democracy flow freely to all people regardless of ability to pay. You focused on a red herring (though it was my fault to put it there, and I've deleted it, thank you). Now please address my points about the ills of advertising. (P.S. We'll leave to another day the question of whether "It is always subsidized by the rich and powerful" or whether the rich and powerful are in fact subsidized by the people at the bottom, whom you consider the recipients of "charity".)
- josh2600 11y ago
  Advertising is the worst model, except for all the rest of them. Charging for things, in and of itself, is hard and, on some level, facetious. If all knowledge were known, why would you pay anyone to do anything? It's not clear to me why anyone pays anyone except in the case of information arbitrage. Advertising is a form of explicit information arbitrage, where we convert dollars into attention. Other information arbitrage's include licensing, where we essentially leverage the properties of intellectual property and technical obfuscation to generate returns. The ills of advertising are a consequence of information arbitrage. What most people are railing against is the act of arbitraging what they view as trivial information, and yet this is the essential point that makes a business. We think advertising is evil because it monetizes our attention in a vaguely non-consensual manner, but there are tons of businesses which are valued with respect to attention that are not valued with respect to dollars (think porn as the canonical example). Advertising is simply the easiest way to convert attention into dollars. There are higher friction methods, but their returns are generally commensurately lower. If I could just reach into your bank account and pull a penny out for every minute you use my app, or listen to my song, or read my book, that might be a viable business. Barring that access, advertising appears to be best.

mcphage 11y ago

> [U]s, the technologists, the so-called innovators. Where are our innovative powers to come up with alternate busniness models? Well, we're technologists. Our innovative powers are good for coming up with technological solutions, but this is a business and social problem. Our ability to solve those problems are no better than anyone else's—worse, probably, given our focus on problems with very different constraints.