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Comment by bobbygoodlatte | Hacker News Reader

Sure, that's mostly true. It doesn't mean they're wrong.

As Jaron Lanier pointed out in his recent TED talk, with previous information technologies like books we figured out how to both charge for the information being distributed while providing access free of charge to those who could not afford it via public libraries. https://www.ted.com/talks/jaron_lanier_how_we_need_to_remake...

Furthermore, what Feld and others are describing here is an economic externality. You could both be right that many people would not and/or could not pay $5/month, yet still the negative social cost of a free product costs that user far more in the long run in the form of political unrest.

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social cost of a free product costs that user far more in the long run in the form of political unrest

I believe you’re referring to the last elections. But the way I see it, this is mostly a case of people whose candidate lost wanting to change the rules of the game because their candidate lost. I voted for Hillary but I’m not delusional to blame the results on any nefarious use of ad targeting before blaming the campaign’s poor strategy (specifically, pouring money into states like Arizona to end up with 3m+ votes while getting too few votes in states that made a difference.)

I'm not blaming the outcome on nefarious ad targeting, rather I would say that engagement-maximizing algorithms massively amplified Donald Trump's voice during the campaign. My concern isn't so much that my team lost, but rather what sort of candidates will succeed in this new media landscape. No other 2016 candidate from either side was really comparable to Donald Trump in how he used social media, both organically or with ads.

Political campaigns are waged within the media landscape of the day. When Nixon sweated during the first televised debate, he lost the debate and the election. That signaled a transition from radio to TV as the dominant medium for political campaigns, and the types of candidates who won national office in the TV era were different from those from earlier eras. In that way the dominant medium of the day has a filtering & selection effect on who succeeds in a political race. Trump's election signaled another transition, this time to the era of social media. It's not partisan to worry about the type of candidates that transition will push to the fore.

Did you have the same concerns when Obama won?

No. But FWIW my concern is less about data harvesting & ad targeting, and more with how the algorithm itself is amplifying extreme views. But yes, I am aware that the 2012 Obama campaign used the same data collection API that Cambridge abused (although Obama's campaign didn't buy the data from a 3rd party)

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