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Comment by rekshaw | Hacker News Reader

I've worked with gov.uk. They are essentially a startup inside a huge organization, and their great work reflects that. One of the things they told me that struck me: most websites have customers, we have users. What they mean by this is that being a customer implies choice, whereas there is no alternative to .gov.uk, hence users don't have a choice. So it's gov.uk's responsibility to make their website as clear, accessible and useful as possible.

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I think there are some parallels between "just leave (insert technology provider here)" and "just leave the country you call home".

> most websites have customers, we have users.

Interesting thought: Do Facebook, Google, etc have "users" and not "customers" for their consumer products?

For many people, leaving digitally can have bad effects on their social life. It's arguably not as bad as moving out of the country, but it's still a practically impossible hurdle for a lot of people.

For at least some (perhaps many) businesses (especially small ones), leaving Facebook is not an option. Perhaps even more so for Google.

> Interesting thought: Do Facebook, Google, etc have "users" and not "customers" for their consumer products?

Advertisers are the customers. Non-advertisers are the product. The goal is not to provide a good service to the product, it's to drive engagement of the product up so customers are happy.

Damn... this hit me hard and makes me realize why corporations can be pretty evil :/... in the back of their minds, they're always thinking of how to please their "true" customers.

Corporations, at least the for-profit ones, are principally amoral legal constructs, which I find all the more terrifying than the notion that they could be evil.

Insomuch as they can be anthropomorphized they don't even truly care about whatever their 'customers' are or their well-being, so long as the bottom line is optimized across time.

The rank and file humans that make up the functions of a corporation might be moral and may influence the corporation to make 'irrational' choices due to human morality, but that is not the rule.

> Corporations, at least the for-profit ones, are principally amoral legal constructs, which I find all the more terrifying than the notion that they could be evil.

I had a pretty spirited argument that was ongoing for about a week with my friend, who was my co-founder at the time, where my position was similar to yours. (Note: this is all in the context of U.S. Law and Government) His argument was that it's impossible for any entity to be amoral because whether a corporation or person, both are treated as persons or entities meaning that they can provide their will. So, once a corporation reaches a point it indeed can be moral because it goes beyond a legal instrument and is dictated by a collective staff, leadership, and/or stakeholders. He would have said that in the case of a solo entrepreneur's company, it would just be an abstracted will of the entrepreneur. I eventually got to the point where I couldn't argue against the legal precedence of Corporate personhood. [0] I think there is a point when a corporation outgrows their founder and becomes self-sustaining where it's corporate culture dictates it's "morals".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

I agree that a corporation can make what would be perceived as moral actions, exactly due to the human staff running it, but that does not erase that morals does not factor into the objective function that a corporation is meant to optimize. This is exacerbated as the morals of its actions become difficult to analyze for the individual and the moral actions of employees becomes less individually significant. The concerted effort, on which the fitness of the corporation is ultimately measured, will still amount to the optimization of the bottom line.

This is especially true when the corporation outgrows the control of its original founders who may have had a moral vision.

In the end the analogy I am making is that a corporation has reins, and as it grows it becomes increasingly unwieldy for the handlers (= staff) to direct it where it does not want to go (away from profit).

It is of course easy to have a corporation act moral when this objective overlaps with optimization of its objective function. I don't consider such a happy occurrence to qualify as truly moral, however.

The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder — its DNA — xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane...

- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

Remember when everyone was talking about how an amoral AI paperclip optimizer could destroy the planet? We have those, they're called corporations and they optimize dollars.

For that to be always true, the customers would have to be amoral too. Many companies find success in differentiating themselves to appeal to morally conscious consumers, and even more companies find themselves having to react to them from time to time.

But that is not moral, is it? The company is still not beholden to a willful idea of morality, but rather sociopathically concerned with appearance. For companies where this matters little this concern for appearance is quickly shed.

You could say the same about any social contract. The criticism applies to any person as much as it applies to any company. It’s the same as saying that altruism doesn’t exist because it’s logically impossible to conceive a scenario where an altruistic act doesn’t benefit the actor.

A vital difference is that companies do not have a sapient capacity for emotion and empathy.

Both are customers though. As long as there is paying tier on the end user side, it is also a customer who has a presence in the decision that are made.

To Google’s credit, Youtube Red for instance goes in that direction. Same for Google Suite customers, Google Play users etc.

Of course the power balance is tipped toward the companies who are willing to pay more, but that’s a balance, and not a one sided relation.

For facebook I think the picture is darker, but then that’s facebook afterall.

The paying tier are customers (sort of). All the rest are product. It's quite a specific product, because it has to be seduced and tempted by perceived benefits to forfeit its privacy, but still a product it is.

Non-advertisers are consumers. That's the term the television industry adopted to differentiate between the two groups.

> Advertisers are the customers. Non-advertisers are the product. The goal is not to provide a good service to the product, it's to drive engagement of the product up so customers are happy.

No.

Advertisers are the customers of the Facebook Ad product line (Business manager, boost, campaign, pixel facebook).

Users of Facebook Social Networking services are prospects tracked by Facebook.

2 products:

- the tracking and targeting tools

- the social network

Users aren't the product. Interfaces to target segments based on users's data is one of the two products Facebook offers.

There is consumer choice. If there's anything the Internet has taught us, seemingly unstoppable companies usually have the most spectacular explosions.

> For many people, leaving digitally can have bad effects on their social life. It's arguably not as bad as moving out of the country, but it's still a practically impossible hurdle for a lot of people.

That's nonsense. It is absolutely not "practically impossible" to leave Facebook, and anybody saying so is exaggerating its importance and being melodramatic.

On the other hand, it can be literally impossible for a person to legally leave their country.

I wouldn't say it's impossible, but it does have a non negligible impact on your social life. It would be rather dismissive to wave away the impact of removing your social media accounts if you have by any stretch of the imagination a social life.

I think this is an age thing. For that group of people that have not known life without the internet, having a social life not attached to being online seems unfathomable. For those of us old farts that had a life before the internet, having a social life without the facebook is just another day. For those that think not having social media is the end of the world, I'd suggest you're just not very imaginative.

I think rather that it's not the person themselves but their peers and aquaintances. For example, I had never used facebook before moving to my current town, but now living here I practically had to create an account and use it semi-regularly because everything from finding a house to advertising a music concert was done within facebook.

Now that I am settled in, my usage has wound down a lot. I have found a comfortable rythmn with the activities and things I need, but should I ever want to discover new experiences or join social gatherings I would have to bring it up once again.

As someone who's experienced life prior to the internet, it's not that one can't live without social media but it does affect how easy it is to organize things when everyone else does. As another comment pointed out, social events are organised as a part of facebook events, or through group chat. Buying and selling things locally are done through facebook groups rather than a newspaper or even eBay or CraigsList. Photos and the like are shared on social media for key important events in people's lives that you mightn't have the opportunity to see all that often.

All of these things can be worked around, but the alternatives are slower paced and less efficient and leave you ultimately out of the loop. So it's not a problem of imagination, it's a problem of wanting to be able to keep up with what's going on.

Facebook has users who don't know about anywhere else to go. Hence no need for fb to fix bugs and imo FB is ridden by bugs and poor UX that would have killed a startup.

>hence users don't have a choice. So it's gov.uk's responsibility to make their website as clear, accessible and useful as possible.

If only that sentiment were contagious. The status quo with every government department where I live seems to be "fk you, we're the government we do what we want." I wish more departments would take a "well our users have no choice so let's try not to suck too bad" attitude.

As someone who previously worked in the government of an American state known for its bureaucracy and corruption, there are a lot of people on the inside who dislike bad processes and bad apples just as much as users do, but they're not empowered to do so, either through inertia or lack of funding or whatnot.

The quintessential examples are transportation departments and urban planners. A lot of them are aware of newer developments in those fields, and that the current paradigms are problematic and misguided. But rocking the boat will just result in the status quo and leave the person without a job and no references for any future ones, especially if it is potentially unpopular.

Not to nitpick, but I thought there was a choice, in the sense that, if a citizen can't (or won't) find what they need on .gov.uk, they'll ring a government office or go in person, getting their question answered much more expensively.

It all comes down to the same thing, though, which is the importance of making the site useful.

Great point! I hope people working on Indian government websites are also reading this. Most of them are far from "user-friendly". Things have improved a lot in recent years(based on my experience on the new IRCTC website and the Aadhar website). But earlier, almost all of them were just "horrible". Some still are, for example: https://www.incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in/home. I hope user experience is taken seriously by developers and the government. Unlike Facebook, these sites do more than just provide some service. Messed up UI and non-compatibility can cause ridiculous delays in getting government work done.

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