Cognitive slavery | Hacker News Reader

Cognitive slavery

globalguerrillas.typepad.com

38 pointsfwdbureau22 comments

This is a ridiculous assertion because Facebook usage patterns do not follow a power law. As a simple calculation, Facebook has a 5000 friend limit so all 100,000 "superusers" would all have to be hitting up against this limit and all have completely mutually non-overlapping friend groups to reach out to the 500M current Facebook users. This is an absurd contention.

In reality, there's approximately 250M regular users and 250M light users which means each regular user would only "earn" $10 if Facebook brought them on as employees. That makes this a significantly less compelling argument.

The only thing is, he's not advocating the collectivization of FB (that would be stupid), but merely calling for new companies to enhance the user-generated-content model by sharing the wealth. Maybe the Diaspora people should look into this?

If a company relying on user-generated content did do this, it might well give them a useful advantage.

Though there would probably be problems with people gaming the system.

I agree with you that Facebook usage patterns do not follow a power law, but he doesn't imply that all of Facebook's 500M users are directly connected to the superuser group. He doesn't rule out the possibility that many users won't derive value from the them. There could only be 100,000 superusers (although this strikes be as an obscenely low estimate too) but have only a subset of Facebook's engage with their content.

that's an interesting perspective. but still... although the users are not receiving any direct monetary benefits, they are still deriving value from system, by using it as a means of entertainment and social networking. so facebook is providing a service, and people are using that service for their own benefit. it doesn't seem like cognitive slavery.

The point of view is rather extreme, but he's also touching something relevant at the end of the article, and may give some ideas. the term 'cognitive slavery' doesn't apply that much to google, i think. They may not create content or jobs, but they provide a lot of tools (cheap ads, free hosting) empowering a lot of small businesses and giving them something they wouldn't normally have access to (as a designer, i complete my clients website with a lot of google tools, and they very often express their amazement at the added value). So that's a point for them.

Precisely. The author uses the term "slavery" while completely ignoring the fact that the users are choosing to contribute their time and energy. Clearly they believe it is worth it.

It seems he thinks you should do more "liberal arts" to understand his point and see the "slavery" here :)

You're right. I'm normally first in the Facebook-bashing line, but suggesting that Facebook should pay it's users because they provide network effects is like suggesting the phone companies should pay users for hosting terminals. Or the post office should pay you for having a letterbox.

There's an interesting reversal in that statement. Historically, we host our letterbox or our phone terminal, and we buy equipment and such to do it with. (mailbox and phone). The post and phone networks provided connectivity, but not the place. Here, facebook is providing the place, but not the connectivity (users do that, by buying their internet connection), and the difference doesn't help the comparison

I'm not entirely convinced that this person knows what slavery is. Not only that, but he claims that "we all lose", then ends his post with nothing to support this quite insane claim.

Absolutely. We should definitely call bullshit on this one. Slavery means that you don't own any of your productive output and more importantly you don't have a choice whether or not to create this output. There are people in the world who are still actual slaves. Stuff like this isn't helping. We should try to keep this word a little more hardcore than this particular frivolous use.

No one is forced to use Facebook. They do it because it makes their lives better. The users are getting the value. That the company that supplies it gets some value out of it too is a brilliant... oh wait, no, that's just good old fashioned business, but on the interwebs.

I agree with you but he's probably using it in the same watered-down sense of "wage slavery". This is also a contradictory term but it's now in common use.

This can be looked at from many angles, the efficiency of communication on Facebook compared with things like phone calls and text messaging would have actually collectively saved Facebook users billions.

Sure you could argue it doesn't take Facebook to come in to give us these communication options but it takes someone to come in and create a common network which is easy to get started on. Sure we can argue that a distributed network would be a much better solution but the reality of it currently is that very few people have the technical inclination to becomes a part of something like that.

I'd also prefer to look at the benefits and not the downfalls of massive networks being able to be ran by few people. Giving people a job for the sake of having a job isn't the answer, we can all benefit from increased efficiencies.

The long term problem with such efficiencies is that there aren't enough jobs, and that causes a great monster of a social issue.

In short: Author states facebook (for that matter any user centric service) has grown to be worth few billions because of its users. The users' activity is critical to fuel the growth. Hence the user should be rewarded else this is cognitive slavery. And we are encouraging cognitive slavery widely on the web.

Good to encourage a share with the users for their contribution. There are blogging platforms like blogspot that share the advertising revenue inspite of giving a free blogging platform. It is an aligned incentive as users would write more effectively to get more ad impressions.

Facebook is different. The reward is the free subscription to all the networking, apps and fun that they get through facebook and not the other way round. Why should anyone be paid.

Edit: formatting

People are providing the 'value' for these networks in the way that watching television created 'value' for the television networks in most recent decades. Instead of people just sitting in front of the television being a captive audience, technology has made things more interactive, and companies have made the interactivity product added benefits for them (i.e. you bolster their data by developing a social graph, which can then be sold/rented/etc for added profit).

Or the obvious alternative, which is that Facebook's value is simply a product of Metcalfe's Law - the value is in the connections between users, not the content the users create. A stranger's Facebook page is worthless to me, none of the content is relevant. I don't use Facebook, but that's largely irrelevant. What I see as mattering is the fact that when my mum or your mom or whoever joins Facebook, they are barraged with opportunities to connect with people they might not otherwise have kept in touch with. N^2 is a really big number when N is nearly everyone in the western world. Add a decent portion of lock-in and it's fairly obvious that you've got a multi-billion dollar company.

I don't buy it. Facebook isn't marketing the comments or profiles themselves as content but instead marketing the network which is capable of storing and displaying user-generated comments and profiles. In other words, just like ISPs don't actually sell the content of the Internet but only participation in the network itself, Facebook markets the participation in their private Facebook network.

Er, no. Facebook is monetizing user-contributed content by slapping their own advertising across it with no kickbacks to the contributors. There is an asymmetry here; FB are creaming a profit off this material, in addition to covering their running costs.

FB also has the 500lb gorilla of network externalities on its side. For example, I dislike FB but I can't afford not to have an FB account: because 500 million other folks are on FB, there's an internal email system that doesn't interoperate with other networks, and some of those folks are (a) clueless enough not to have a non-FB email account and (b) important enough to my personal or business life that I need to communicate with them. So perforce I must use Facebook.

The high-value content-contributing users were a critical part of FB's growth dynamic insofar as they attracted other users (whether that's so now is another matter). But they get no monetary or in-kind reward for their activity.

I will concede that the term "cognitive slavery" is a bit over the top, but platforms like FB are very carefully designed to hit our reward feedback loops and make us feel good for coming back and feeding stuff to them, to the point of fostering addiction-like compulsive behaviour. This is, at best, unethical and at worst exploitative. And that's what's in play here -- FB make no pretense at doing this for anyone's benefit but their own.

How does the author propose to start financially rewarding power users in any case? What sort of perverse incentives would this create? It seems to me that such rewards would conflict with providing real value, so I'd be interested to hear how this would be avoided.

Where does the 100000 power users number come from?

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