Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

> Free content entitlement, that’s what.

From the beginning the web has been about cutting out middlemen. Sure, everyone still pays for the bytes, but consider how much less it costs, per-viewer, to distribute a paragraph on the web versus printed on paper.

Want to communicate quickly and cheaply, without paying for stamps or surcharges for expedited delivery? E-mail.

Can't find a publisher willing to take a golden-master and create thousands of CD-ROMs? Sell your own software online.

> This sounds sober and serious, but it omits one crucial clause: the people who create free online content expect to get paid.

The real issue is that there are middlemen who promise "I will convert your consumer-visits to cash" that also expect to be paid. Many happen to be ad-networks, and the profit motive (both from producers and middlemen) has led towards practices that harm consumers and (indirectly, long-term) the producers.

Privacy invaded, malware distributed, computers slowed, load-times skyrocketing, etc. Absent a reaction from producers or consumers, the most-ruthless ad-schemes tend to rake the most profit, so it becomes a race-to-the-bottom.

In this sense, consumer-driven ad-blocking is ecologically-necessary to make that "Visitors-To-Cash" industry refocus on other mechanisms and better ways of interacting with their two main stakeholder groups. In a very broad sense, it's their job to find a better solution.

> but consider how much less it costs, per-viewer, to distribute a paragraph on the web versus printed on paper.

From my understanding of publishing, most of the cost is in creation, editing, design, and marketing...not in actually printing it.

It's common to assume that electronic versions of paper media should be cheap (if not free) but that's very mistaken.

True, but even some of those aspects are lessened, ex:

1. It makes sense to invest a lot to minimize defects (e.g. typos) before printing, but digitally it's much easier to issue a revision.

2. Marketing is less-critical for reaching "already interested" consumers, due to search-engines and the ease of passing links around.

3. Marketing is less-critical for pushing copies into "nearby retailers", because consumers can reach your presence directly.

I see what you're saying with your first point, but does that mean it's more acceptable for people to put out less-polished professional work now that it's easier to go back and correct it? I hope not.

Regarding points two and three, very few authors have an adequate following of "already-interested" customers.

Sharing is easier with digital networks and social networks, sure, but the siloed nature of these media is a new challenge for authors/publishers.

There's a big struggle right now within publishing to figure out discovery.

>From the beginning the web has been about cutting out middlemen.

I don't think that is quite correct. The Internet doesn't function, at all, without 'middlemen' - you can't send an email without involving a third-party, or even many third-parties sometimes. This message took rather a few middle-men to get to your eyeballs.

What I think is that the Internet expanded as rapidly as it did because it is far, far, far cheaper to be a middleman on the Internet than it is in the physical world. In other words, the capital required to get involved in the Internet is absolutely minor - anyone with a computer can expand the Internet horizon, cheaply and easily, for anyone else they care to share the service with.

Where this collides with the cultural reality that preceded the Internet (and this hot mix is still in states of turbulence) is that there was, previously, a huge liability proposition to handling other peoples' stuff for them. Capitalism depended on this liability in order to function (dialectic materialism) but yet we don't have such huge liabilities with the Internet. If someone drops your packet, chances are, someone else will forward it for you on the next, ultra-cheap, try.

So what I think is happening with the current state of the war for paying consumers is that we are swinging back and forth between points of supposed plenty and imposed rarity. Somewhere in that hot mix is the sweet spot where people are happy to pay for content that they're also happy to share freely...

> From the beginning the web has been about cutting out middlemen.

That should have read 'the internet' not 'the web', otherwise it is pretty accurate.

It certainly includes more than just HTTP, but you've gotta be careful not to go too far in the other direction:

On an hardware/network level "the internet" was actually about tolerating more "middlemen", moving away from single-owner corporate or governmental networks and dedicated pipes.

> On an hardware/network level "the internet" was actually about tolerating more "middlemen"

It still is. And the web was all about that too, but billions of $ were spent to push it in the direction of walled gardens and data silos.

I'm confused, are you saying that the operators of walled-gardens and app-stores are not middlemen?

No, they are middlemen. But they are also consolidated. And that need not have happened. See, hosting your own homepage is work, and it made some sense to farm out parts of the work that needed to be done to others, just like not everybody maintains their own car, but they do own their own car.

And now we have moved in a totally different direction, where all the would-be-small-middlemen and their functions have been absorbed into a couple of giant data warehouses/web properties. That's about as far away from the 'peer-to-peer' nature of the internet as you could be. Firewalls were also a huge nail in the coffin, the fact that to be able to securely connect a computer to the net at a consumer level your best bet is to make it a device that does not allow connections from the outside in.

Moore's Law will ensure the cycle will come back. When a smartphonesque device can robustly house your private cloud. At that stage the brick and mortar warehouses will have to offer other solutions than just enabling cloud services.

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