Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

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It's bullshit allright. Thousands of cpu hours, megabytes and dollars wasted on some user spying turdheap the marketing guys NEEDED to put in an app, 'to track user behaviour'. What a euphemism. Without spilling too many beans, we're using a solution that records an actual movie of the user using our app, each time a session is started.

In six months, the only thing we learned: half of the users that finish setting up don't continue to use the app. We could have learned that from server side logs without invading user privacy.

Another story: four employees of a large corporate running target marketing based on behaviour of customers logged in to their website.

Added revenue versus control: 60.000 yearly. Sub-0.1% conversation rates. The corp had been running these campaigns for at least five years.

My personal stories. Anecdata, I know.

There is SO MUCH BULLSHIT.

Edit: to clarify the first example, it's not a movie using the front facing camera, 'just' a screen grab

>Thousands of cpu hours, megabytes and dollars wasted on some user spying turdheap the marketing guys NEEDED to put in an app, 'to track user behaviour'.

I understand that somewhere in a perfect universe, tech guys just make things right and money just flow in without those pesky marketing people ever involved. Unfortunately, in our universe if you don't do marketing and don't analyze user behavior your business is toast.

Sure, if your content sucks. If you need all that bullshit to stay profitable then perhaps the business isn't really needed at all. "but that is the industry competition for you, everyone does it."

To that, all I can say is perhaps some regulation is required to level the playing field.

Strictly speaking, most individual business isn't needed.

If the NY Times folds tomorrow due to bankruptcy, there are dozens of other papers where we can get the news. Their reporting is good, and I choose them over their competitors but losing them wouldn't be the end of news as we know it.

That's the case with most businesses---the marketing and sales are only needed to compete, whereas without them the product would still exist for consumers.

Your choice of journalism as an example is unsettling. If the New York Times goes out of business, there is no guarantee that another news publisher will break the same stories. Some things will just not be investigated anymore and some important stories will just not be told.

But doesn't that hold true regardless? The presence of the New York Times means there are certain stories not being investigated or told. And we aren't even fully aware. We have no idea if those stories would be of more worth to us or not.

Can you elaborate more? I was working with the model that more investigative journalism is better, but you seem to be suggesting that the presence of some news outlets inhibits others.

Just in a basic sense. The NYT employs X people, sells to Y people, etc. Those are people who won't be employed by someone else, people who won't buy another paper.

There's a sort of critical mass of "news" that can be made. We can't all be investigative journalists.

So whatever that would be here instead of the NYT might be different, it might not be worse. It could be just as good, just different.

Of course, it could be worse. It could be better. We can't know.

I see your point. If you make great content/product users should somehow learn about it in order for your business model to work, because no users means no money. You can assume that people will just get so excited about your product that they will just tell other people about it, share links, post social stuff, so that the growth happens organically without all that "marketing bullshit". And it does happen organically. The problem is that even for very good products such organic growth is way too slow because it has exponential nature (very slow in the beginning, quickly accelerating only at the end), so you run out of money before hitting profitability. There are outstanding examples of products that quickly became viral, but these are extremely rare cases. Hoping for this luck is like hoping to accidentally build next Twitter. In other words, you shouldn't hope for it if you're serious about your business. You would need something that propagates awareness about your product in a more manageable way than pure luck. It's called marketing.

You don't want regulation to level the field, you want to set up a barrier to entry for smaller players. And I've thought of this many times, regarding all the terrible news outlets out there.

But you'd have to gut 1A to do it, and it would instantly be used for evil. Nope, just hell no.

I mean regulations in terms of specifically protecting ourselves with a digital bill of rights. No one gets to use telematics, no one gets to track users, etc.

In the pre-monetized web, yes the tech guys made things right without money extracted from the web.

Standards & many applications that implemented them (including commercial) were attempted to be designed to make online computer use possible and beneficial. This is the domain of academics, committees, and concerned individuals creating the means of useful computing & communication, outside of parasitic desperation to inject unnecessary rent-seeking lock-ins into everybody's lives.

Swell history lesson, but I don't care about academics and nor do the vast majority of internet users. They can use the internet too, of course, but there's no point moaning about web pages getting larger. I was using the internet in the 90's and it sucked - literally everything about the internet is better today. My life would be no different whether a web page was 5 megs or 5k just like it makes no difference if moby dick was 100k or 100 megs. It's still getting downloaded on my phone, getting copied onto my Kindle etc.

> I don't care about academics [...] literally everything about the internet is better today.

The average message posted to comp.lang.c before Eternal September was far batter than the average message posted to HN, Proggit, etc. But many of the former were written by academics, so you probably don't care.

My post has nothing to do with web page size. This is specifically on how monetization has affected that which we use for personal communication and seeking information.

> In the pre-monetized web, yes the tech guys made things right without money extracted from the web.

It was extracted from tuition paid by undergraduate students and taxes paid by taxpayers.

And that money all eventually came from dirty capitalism.

It's not some nebulous evil of "capitalism" that is the issue here, it is the issue of filtering, manipulation, and distribution of people's private communications & data, and of the effective "town square". Money can be and has been made without these practices, which the laws have not caught up with, and to which there's strong ethical disagreement.

And yes, it cost a lot of money to get online and/or host data back then, which was subsidized by piggybacking corporate and university internet presence. Nowadays it's dirt cheap to personally host & access tons of content, so there's even less need to monetize.

How do you know if the client has an error and the content was not loaded/displayed as expected? How do you know if placing the content on the right side or the left side increases conversion rate by 10% if you don't do A/B testing? There are huge business advantages when you use analytics. You don't care about creepily "tracking" a specific person, you just care about getting better conversion rates and happier users.

You may not care about tracking individual people but in order to realize your business advantages you end up doing it anyway. They always put their business needs above those of the users. Increasing conversion rates always trumps user privacy and peace of mind. Claiming businesses care about happy users is just dishonest. They care about bottom line.

Business just shouldn't be able to freely collect mountains of information. They can't be trusted to do it responsibly. Collecting data is a privilege and it can be revoked. If they insist on doing it, we'll find a way to avoid sending the data. If they lock us out for not sending data, we'll send fake data.

Over all I think that this type of metric has had a significant detrimental effect on the quality of news items. I understand that there is a business advantage to knowing things like this, but I think that there would be much less rage porn and click bait around if this information wasn't known to an entity that can use it to forgo relevant reporting on things that matter and manipulate our tendencies towards morbid curiosity and outrage.

I'd go as far as to say that it isn't only unethical to collect this information, but that it's unethical not to take active measures not to share it.

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