We've traded quality and accountability for "free" garbage floating in a sea of ads.
The NYTimes is still too dependent on advertising. That they consider "native advertising" acceptable shows compromised journalistic principles.
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." – Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera
We call ourselves hackers and innovators. Yet instead of pouring our energies into figuring alternative business models and micropayment solutions, we spend our energies on more ways to capture users in viral schemes and then collect their data for sale to advertisers.
As I wrote the other day: 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?
The saddest thing about Hacker News is that we all get behind radical things like FOSS (Bill Gates called it un-American) and Snowden, 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.
The reason I'm ambivalent about ads is not because it funds my paycheck (it doesn't, we charge for our services), but because for all their evils, ads work as a kind of enforced redistribution mechanism, and since geographic adjustments of prices work poorly on the web, I fear that any kind of payment system will inevitably lead to prices being set at the US middle class income level, shutting out everyone with a lower income level.
I know can afford to pay for stuff, and I'm happy to do it, but that's only been true since I started working, and only because I'm lucky enough to have a decent job.
I suppose "we'll figure it out" is one answer, but I'm afraid I can't put my heart behind a proposal that would have left my teenager self closed off from most of the web.
Authors in this world would say they have no choice, because readers will always choose the free book over the $10 or even $5 book. The bookstores only stock the free books for the same reason.
In that world you would make exactly the same argument that you just made to me.
I'm glad you work on non ad-supported software. But look at it from a consumption, share of revenue and availability perspective: ad supported software is eating the web.
Would I have traded? Yes, I probably would have.
---
I also don't agree that one must oppose all advertising or none; we can oppose native ads and personal tracking without being necessarily opposed to well demarcated side ads.
What? I don't think I've ever read a positive comment about ads on HN. Also, I'm apparently in the only one on HN who would rather see ads than pay for stuff.
Bashing ads is just starting to get hip, just as bashing Flash only got hip relatively recently, after an earlier period where Apple got bashed by many simply for being ahead of the mainstream.
Perhaps we'll have greater success if we can first agree on common ground?
There's a fundamental force at play here that extends far beyond the internet. I'm not entirely sure what it is.
Attention and mind share can be bought. This causes some weird outcomes in the Internet and politics.
It has to do with how we obtain/exchange value in our society - speech, information, material goods, attention, justice, etc. Perhaps how we make people produce value: labour, creation, votes.
Could we get closer to a solution if we spent more time understanding the root cause?
Quality and accountability is what happens when we pay.
We probably wouldnt even have the internet if people always believed pronouncements that seem to be irrefutable, but in truth rest on narrow assumptions or narrow thinking.
Think out of the box.
Publishing, traditionally, has worked through integrated purchasing rather than dis-integrating purchasing. Magazines, newspapers, books, subscriptions, broadcast advertising (bundled payments through advertisers rather than subscribers). Music syndication. For numerous reasons.
Individually assessing the purchase validity of ever smaller quantities of content simply doesn't pan out. Paying into a kitty and apportioning based on general consumption patterns, rather more so.
Micropayments are the media payment plan of the future, and always will be.
2. His arguments are one of an anal accountant. Do you know what fraction of the population even reviews their monthly credit card statement, their long distance phone charges, whether or not their mobile data plan minutes are being counted accurately, or whether their iTunes charges matches the number of songs they download exactly? A very small fraction. Do we need to? No, not all of us. We can trust that if a vendor violates trust and commits fraud, someone will catch it and they will suffer a class-action lawsuit, as does actually happen.
3. "Paying into a kitty and apportioning based on general consumption patterns" can work great if the amount I pay per month is fixed, and that fixed payment is apportioned among the things I consumed in a way that rewards quality. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008960. This is just a simple idea by me, an amateur.
Back to "impossibles":
- If before Wikipedia existed, someone proposed to create an online encyclopedia that anyone in the world could anonymously edit, that it be funded by donations and that it become the encyclopedia that most people refer to, nearly 100% of us would have rolled on the floor and laughed out loud.
- If before it existed someone described a magical currency with the properties of what we now call Bitcoin, most would have said, "yeah right".
- If before asymmetric public-private key encryption was invented, someone said we needed a way to communicate where one side could decrypt something sent by the other but not be able to do the reverse and thereby pose as the other, most would have said, "good luck."
Please, please stop speaking in absolutes. It comes off as rather arrogant and foolish rhetoric.
And yet... there are numerous alternatives which aren't Apple: streaming music services (a bundled, non-micropayments model, either pre-paid or adverts supported), YouTube (adverts). Frankly, I've largely gotten out of the music-buying habit, though I'll pick up a CD occasionally at a show.
Your points on statement review largely make my point: if the idea of micropayments is to make people rational consumers of content, then if they're failing to review and assess their purchase habits, they simply aren't rational consumers. Which is to say, the premise of micropayments is false.
For long distance, he specifically addresses the case: the cost of attributing billing costs was itself a huge portion of the cost of service itself. By moving to flat pricing you can at once reduce costs and reduce customer anxiety over service use. I've been on flat-fee pay-as-you-go comms plans for years now. For what I'm paying, it literally isn't worth the telco's time to compute costs.
The kitty payment method is pretty much precisely how music broadcast and public performance (think bars, restaurants, stores) payments work. You've got a few licensing agencies (ASCAP, Harry Fox), playtime measurement (logs from radio stations and the services providing streams to retail establishments), and artists are cut a check based on plays.
Various checks and balances keep everything reasonably honest. Performance licenses are held by establishments and not performers -- it's the nightclub owner, not the band, who's on the hook for the fee. That greatly simplifies logistics -- on the spectrum of unreliable characters, bar owners rate higher than drummers, or even front-men. Shenanigans by the licensing agencies can be pursued by class-actions among musicians (not to say they can't or don't get screwed, but there are some checks). And the end consumer of the music (bar / nightclub / restaurant / store patron) doesn't worry about any of this at all.
The whole "rewarding quality" is something to consider, though I'll note that Apple dispensed with this entirely at least initially: everything cost the same amount. I can see (and have made) arguments to why this shouldn't be the case (high-quality scientific research or investigative journalism strikes me as more worthwhile than algorithmically generated tone patterns). And I'm not pretending to have a solution fully worked out. But I'm almost certain it lies in the direction of aggregated, not disaggregated, payments. Broadband tax. Syndication fee. General funds tax. Patronage to creators. Something like that.
As for Wikipedia: it follows patterns of collaborative work which date back centuries (review some of the early history of dictionaries and encyclopedias).
Bitcoin's got numerous problems, of which scaling is one. Trust another.
PKI's roots trace back to at least 1874 and William Stanley Jevons, who's just become even more interesting in my estimation. The primary limitation, aside from successful algorithms, was cheap and ubiquitous computing. As that came online, first for institutions and governments, later for individuals.
I'm not aware of any significant discussion that PKI was impossible. One-way functions have been known for centuries. Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman's work postdated national security implementations of PKI by British GCHQ by only three years.
Discussion of absolutes is risky, but there are a few.
I challenge you to exceed 300,000 km/s.
Others similarly exist in various fields, including social and economic ones. Part of the basis for my own statements is Gresham's Law, which I'm coming to view as a fundamental and principle limitation for economics. Others would include the Law of Diminishing Returns, and variations of the maximum power principle (Darwin-Lotke energy law, White's Law).
Clearly, you can play with these numbers with various assumptions and readerships. But, the point is you can scale things down with paid subscribers.