The Internet as Television | Hacker News Reader

The Internet as Television

blairreeves.me

58 pointsntang56 comments

The "paradox of meritocracy." Meritocracy is seen, universally, as a good thing - the people who work the hardest get the most. But at a certain point, if you want to stand out at anything, you have to basically put every waking moment into something.

There was a really interesting article on Polygon recently[1] about how making video games is basically impossible now. There are so many developers making so many great games. Studios with 3 hits in the past go bankrupt off of a 4th game which is (only) alright.

But what's the alternative? We go back to a world where connections and your parents determine how far you can go? That's no good either!

The scary thing about the efficient market hypothesis is that it basically guarantees a feedback loop of people pushing themselves to the edge, farther and farther out, in order to do what they like.

[1] https://www.polygon.com/2018/9/28/17911372/there-are-too-man...

>Meritocracy is seen, universally, as a good thing - the people who work the hardest get the most.

This is not what meritocracy is about. Meritocracy is about achievements, not just working hard.

Yes, in fact because you can work infinitely hard at digging a hole and filling it back up again we would certainly not want a world that distributed rewards according to the labor theory of value.

It's my understanding that the labor theory of value is only concerned with "socially necessary labor," and not completely valueless labor -- digging and filling in a hole ad nauseam.

That isn't that much of a fix, because you can add hole digging/filling in any amount to the schedule of any socially necessary worker. Someone who digs and fills a hole in the course of welding a pipeline will engage in more labor than someone who just welds the pipeline, but they will both accomplish the same goal of welding the pipeline.

You might say, "by labor I mean the difficulty of accomplishing the task when operating at the greatest possible efficiency," but an idealized, infinitely smart programmer could write perfect, bug-free code as fast as they could type, and an ideal physicist could make all possible theoretical inferences instantly.

I don't understand your counter-argument; time spent doing useless things on a schedule in which non-useless work is accomplished doesn't mean that the time doing useless things is suddenly valuable. Any capitalist knows that they don't want to be paying someone to do work that doesn't produce value. The person who only welds the pipeline spends less time getting the task done, which is obviously the aim here.

Socially necessary labour is defined as labour performed under normal ("averagae") conditions of production using tools of average production potential. At least in the Marxian schema (which I'm not really here to defend) skilled difficult labour is only a greater magnitude of simple, unskilled labour. For Marx, the quantitative relationship between them (and indeed between value and socially necessary labour time) was not only not necessary to derive, but arguably impossible in a complex economy. The important part was that it worked. Value works "behind the backs" of participants in an economy to shift their labour to more profitable regions of the economy.

I'd recommend Cockshott et al.'s "Classical Econophysics" chapter on Value which clears up a lot in the Ricardian and Marxian schemas: http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/ecn265/value.pdf

You're right in that the further you get from "the labor theory of value" the better you do, like mixing a bowl of Doritos with a bowl of celery. Smith admitted a little bit of market valuation, and in doing so was a little bit better than completely wrong.

Quoting from your link,

>For the modern reader an alternative version of Smith’s calculation may seem more natural: the ‘labour commanded’ by a commodity represents the time you would have to work (say, at the average wage) in order to buy the commodity. In both cases – Smith’s version and the modern one – the calculation of labour commanded is the price of the item divided by some measure of the wage, usually an average.

Clearly, N hours of work at an average wage W is just a roundabout way of expressing a quantity of money NW, and from there Smith believed in market pricing.

Smith's error (which turned him to "market pricing") was not recognising the dual character of labour, which is solved in the Marxian schema; capitalists purchase labour-power, which is a commodity with an exchange value (i.e the labour commanded by it is the amount required to reproduce it) of W and a use value (value in use) of concrete labour itself, which is the capacity to create value. Unlike Smith's idea, this is compatible with both varying value of money, varying wages (assuming there is something to vary the wages) and useful in explaining the role of profit.

On the whole, though, I dispute the notion that the LTV must be abandoned; you are already starting from the position that a bowl full of celery is a good thing, but I'd say that we'd do just fine with the Doritos, and the case for a bowl of celery lacks the explanatory power of the bowl of Doritos.

This is true; it's very confusing to me why people insist that useless labour counts as valuable. Neither Adam Smith nor Ricardo and certainly not Marx actually held a labour theory of value in which objects which are not firstly of demand are valuable. Not only that, but the theory doesn't even attempt to draw normative conclusions about whether the theory is just or not.

My advice is that if one is going to talk about political economy (or the history of economics) then one ought to read the text themselves rather than assuming caricatures as if the proponents of such theories were truly idiots. Smith, Ricardo and Marx were extremely intelligent people.

Neither Smith, Ricardo nor Marx wrote the line that is being discussed in this thread.

The line being discussed in this thread can be abstracted to the question of useful labour in the LTV; if we are discussion the LTV then we are discussing the theory which was advanced by the Western European political economists, and the objections which they countered or in some cases didn't counter.

At the very least, it seems ignorant to discuss a theory while not taking into account the established literature on the topic.

Wouldn’t the labor theory of value HAVE to have taken into account not only the work (physics term) but also the “velocity” of the work?

In other words, the utility of the work.

Running four laps on a quarter mile track gets you nowhere (same as digging a hole) but it’s obvious to see one experiences physical gain from performing such an activity.

Increased physical strength is a result. Judging the product of the work instead of the difficulty of the work is a departure from the labor theory of value. The labor theory of value is not very highly regarded for this reason.

>Meritocracy is seen, universally, as a good thing - the people who work the hardest get the most

As far as I know, when the term was coined by Michael Young it was not intended to be a positive at all. To me it's strange that people see it as a positive, even in the theoretical principle, which for better or worse never actually manifests itself in real life.

Meritocracy turns out to be a lot like the harm principle - it is in a sense "hollow"[0], a principle which everyone would agree with, and to be used like a vessel to carry existing ideas (the definition of merit, absence of the effect of societal and external factors, that those with more merit can and will use their power wisely and justly etc.), which are taken as givens; any existing structure is deemed to be constructed through merit if the person advocating meritocracy is well positioned within it. A structure is not meritocratic if the person is not positioned well within it. Its proponents continually add ad-hoc specifications to the conception of merit.

For instance, when people point out that those who work hard aren't at the top, the response is "working hard is not working smart, and only working smart has merit", even in cases where there is little scope to "work smart".

When people point out that merit is hard or even impossible to objectively quantify in the case of several branches of a project that depend on each other, the response is that certain branches of the project (usually the factors the respondee is responsible for) are more worthy of merit than others.

When people point out that the concept of pure equality of opportunity is untenable because it requires correcting discrimination already in society, and that new inequalities arise with regard to ownership of assets even if everyone starts off with the same, the response is that the system is already set up the way it ought to be and we shouldn't worry about the process by which merit is accrued.

[0] Smith, Steven Douglas, The Hollowness of the Harm Principle (September 2004). U San Diego Legal Studies Research Paper No. 05-07.

>certain branches of the project (usually the factors the respondee is responsible for) are more worthy of merit than others

The same exact thing would happen in a world of "pure equality of opportunity".

Not if compensation was delivered in another manner (e.g. equally across the project team after a team-wide code review and not based on some manager's estimation of which of the inter-mingled facets of a project is more worthy).

I think it's not, it's just about better people grabbing everything. At least in the IT field, richest people i know hardly work a lot (or better said, at some points of their careers they did work whole lot, but what they did then didn't make them any money).

what is your definition of "hardly work a lot". When I look at rich people off the top of my head they are all extremely busy. They might not be busy writing code or something like that but they are nearly always in meetings, always someone needs their attention. They aren't just playing golf in their office.

>They aren't just playing golf in their office.

A lot of them are doing just that too (playing golf and delegating most of the work), all across the globe, in very rich positions.

But that's a red herring. Even the other stuff, meetings, negotiations, decisions, etc, are part of what they do by choice, not as work in the way billions of people do work.

Unless you'll go hungry or homeless if you've stopped working, you're not working, you're just doing what you want to do in the way you want to do it.

>We go back to a world where connections and your parents determine how far you can go?

go back? I don't believe we ever left such a world behind. but this probably varies across different cultures.

I would not trust anything that polygon would write. If anything, it was never as simple to create a game before as it is now, if you look at Steam it is basically an indie renessance.

That's exactly the point though - it's an indie renaissance for consumers, but for creators it gets harder and harder. As creating games gets easier, competing against everyone else to make them gets harder. It's the same reason as why creating a best-selling book is hard, because everyone can and wants to write a book.

One detail that really bugs me about this article:How is a cellist making 81k 2013 dollars as a cellist a failure of the web? That sounds like a decent amount of success to me, for what is a pretty niche genre. Would anything other than playing in an orchestra even allow a cellist to make even close to that before the web? Seems very strange and/or out of touch to claim this as a failure.

It's not some obscure cellist playing chamber music. It's a world famous pop cellist, with tons of fans, big tours, etc etc.

> She writes, composes, plays and tours widely, and has released a number of very successful albums. Keating enjoys a level of success that is beyond the wildest imagination of even the most talented musicians

I think the premise of his argument is that that’s her income as “wild success in the field of (musicians)”, not “reasonably successful in the field of (cellists)”.

A cellist at a top city orchestra might make more than that, but those spots are few.

Top orchestras pay well into 6 figures. $80k is definitely above average.

One of the most exciting and transformative things about the world wide web at first was the concept of "disintermediation", i.e. that small independent shops could reach out directly to customers via their web site, or (using the example in the article) artists could reach out directly to their audience. What has happened of course is in many ways the exact opposite of this, the "re-intermediation" of even bigger and even more dominant organisations than in the pre-internet era. Not sure what the solution to this is though. Even if there were a standard easy to use open source set of tools for users to build their own sites/apps and ecommerce facilities with very little effort (little enough to compete with near-zero effort), which integrated with a variety of low cost hosting providers so they could deploy and run at little cost (little enough to compete with zero cost), you'd still face the problem of how users would find these sites/apps - via an internet search or an app store?

Disintermediation did happen. I can reach my fans directly. Many independent shops have their own website. But disintermediation doesn’t mean guaranteed customers, just that the independent shop owner doesn’t have to pay $1000 in rent every month to sell.

Disintermediation is the cellist being able to sell on iTunes for $0 to anyone in the world, compared to having to ink a record deal and get lucky just to be in record stores.

>Disintermediation did happen. I can reach my fans directly. Many independent shops have their own website. But disintermediation doesn’t mean guaranteed customers, just that the independent shop owner doesn’t have to pay $1000 in rent every month to sell.

What we wanted to see was people buying 90% of the time from smaller shops, directly from producer websites, direct artists sites, and so on.

Instead, the intermediation is just what happens the 10% of the time, which is probably even worse than what happened pre-internet (when e.g. music fans in England would get most of their music from indies, not from Spotify and co).

It is my opinion that internet giants are destroying creativity on the internet. Creativity has to be paid for, whether it is journalism or artists.

As a publisher of the medical technologies news website (since 2004), I can tell you that what we have now is monopolized internet. Few entities, like Google and FB, took over the internet and crafted the landscape to their advantage. They monopolized ads revenue, search traffic, and they are actively spying on the general public, taking away any possible advantages from publishers and creators. So website for doctors cannot make money by advertising to doctors. Doctors will see Google ads on Candy Crush game. The result is a dearth of advertising money for creators. Google and FB own the biggest slice of internet money...

In the olden days we had websites and blog networks being born, Gawker, Weblogs Inc, TechCrunch network, political networks, etc etc. And what do we have now? Central stations with fake news shenanigans and retarded memes. While publishers, including your local newspaper and your favorite websites, are struggling. And your privacy is being exploited.

I think you are putting the blame on the wrong entity here. It isn't google or facebook who are to blame, it's the large news and media companies.

Google or facebook doesn't care which creators get paid. They actually want a variety of creators to get paid. The large news and media companies care greatly.

Vox, huffingtonpost, etc are media that are fairly new and they thrived in an open environment. But they are struggling because large established news and media companies have pressured google and facebook into giving them preferential treatment. So traffic that may have gone to vox, huffingtonpost, etc in the past is now being redirected to the nytimes or cnn.

You may have a medical technologies site, but if google or facebook has to favor large news sites over smaller specialized sites like yours, then you simply won't be getting much traffic.

Look at youtube. It's now mostly CNN, SNL, John Oliver, Will Smith, etc recommendations. Look at google news. Go look at reddit and any other social media platform. What used to be a user driven platforms are now traffic drivers for large media companies.

This is why it's so strange to see smaller players supporting the established media in attacking social media. What do you think will be the outcome? Social media is going to serve large media corporations.

Facebook nor google cares whether your medical site or the nytimes gets the view. They are middle man taking a slice of the ad revenue. They used to be pretty fair and showed the most relevant results. If your article had more traction than the nytimes article, your link would rank higher than the nytimes. Now, it's almost certain that the large established media companies will get the first billing.

The author raises some good points about a few gatekeepers controlling the majority of the audience, but then condemns recommendation algorithms and believes no one has attempted to solve the discovery problem. How does one miss the obvious when it's right in front of their face?

Discovery is fundamentally hard because its success is judged by two parties whose interests align on paper -- for publishers to find a receptive audience, and for a consumer to find enjoyable content -- but the market is so vast that a missed match isn't just that, but often a match for a different pair. And consumer attention is vast, but ultimately finite, in that it suffers from oversaturation and requires novel and exciting experiences to stand out from a sea of similar offerings.

So platforms use recommendation algorithms to try and guess the sort of stuff every person likes, and try to surface content they're more likely to appreciate, instead of surfacing something completely random. Content that's brand new has no data on its audience, so a chicken-or-egg problem occurs where popular content can bubble toward its most fitting audience, often growing until it can't, while never-before-seen content languishes in a popularity vacuum, desperate for out-of-band help.

The classic out-of-band help is word of mouth. Sponsored, promoted content is a kind of in-band help, allowing platforms to make money and producers to jumpstart their exposure, but has the same structural properties as popularity: those most equipped have the potential to rise the most, while those least-equipped are disadvantaged once more.

These are good points. Somewhat tangentially, I think my gripe with recommendation algorithms is simply my lack of control. If I had some knobs to fiddle with, I'm sure I could tune it to surface way more diversified content that I'm interested in.

Particularly with YouTube, I've recently gotten the feeling that their algorithm has pigeon-holed me into a couple different interests, and I rarely see videos outside those recommended to me. Even if it were just a slider from "our best guess <------> throw in some risky recs", it would feel a lot better.

It's easy to blame Facebook and Google for this "problem", but on the technical side, nothing has changed that prevents independent creators from setting up their own platforms to distribute their own content. It's as easy as it's ever been to rent some shared hosting, FTP over static HTML files, and start posting links to it around the web. There's still no guaranteed audience, though.

Facebook and Google are only "gatekeepers" to the extent their users treat them as such.

It's dangerous to set up one's own content distribution platform. The moment the media industry will perceive one as a competition or copyright trolls as a profitable target, one'll be torn into pieces.

Sorry, but that's just paranoia and scare mongering.

It's easier than ever for individuals to self distribute their own content. It costs less than $10 a month using Dreamhost (or dozens of others) and PayPal (or Square). Unless it's illegal or highly controversial nobody's going to shut it down.

>In a lot of ways, it would be a turn back to the early days of the web that some of us remember, except with much more democratic participation this time. And it’s a much more appealing vision for the internet than billions of people scrolling through their Facebook feeds.

Very much a dreamer I see. This basically can’t happen and he nailed why at the beginning. It WAS a thing for the small minority, outsiders, geeks. It will never go back to that.

Does make an interesting point though. That most of us here remember life before the internet (assuming demographic here is older than Reddit), but for 20-somethings that do not... fundamentally they MUST see it as something totally different than I do.

More like how people my age see electricity, of course it’s always existed and always will, it just makes sense it’s always been there. We don’t appreciate the work it must have taken or that anyone made decisions to shape it what it is today, nor that it could be “done wrong” or used to be better, because if mistakes were made surely someone would have fixed them by now!

Maybe I wasn’t hardcore enough, but my youth started trapped in AOL’s walled garden. It took a long time to realize there was an internet outside of it.

You broke out, that's all that matters. :) I was once trapped inside the CompuServe walled garden. It took a while to discover there were BBSes outside of it.

Ironically, jumping header on top of this page, that jumps to cover text that you are reading right now when you scroll, reminds you that you are living in this dark "instagram age" of interwebs.

> there are ... tons of creative products that you ... would truly love, if only you knew about them – music, art, stories, and more. The problem is that you don’t know about them yet ... This “discovery” problem is one that no platform on the web has really bothered to address in a meaningful way

Pandora attempted this, and for me, it worked. I think Pandora succeeded because they took the effort (in the Music Genome Project) to understand how to categorize music, so they could build a really good recommendation engine.

I'm always surprised when people are enthusiastic about Pandora. maybe I just haven't tried it enough (and/or recently enough). when I use Pandora I find that it plays a bunch of related artists that don't actually sound very similar. for instance, if I make a Death Cab for Cutie radio station, I just hear a bunch of mainstream indie rock from the mid/late 00s. I'm sure that modest mouse and dcfc are very close on an association graph, but they don't really sound anything like each other.

I've had better luck if I give Pandora a bit more input data (try the "add variety" button).

That being said, I used to listen to Death Cab and I'm not sure what to recommend either. Maybe Andrew Bird?

I think the lesson to be learned here is that recommendation engines are difficult.

Blair, I’m working on exactly the solution you’ve alluded to in your post.

Knophy.com is going to change the way we think about monetizing content. I haven’t posted on SHOWHN yet as I’m not quite finished with the prototype, but check it out and please email me at my username at gmail.

Our thoughts (from what I can tel in this article) and goals greatly overlap and I’d love to work with you both as a creator and to get your feedback on how the site works for you.

It’s absolutely time we give the power back to the individual, and that is the core philosophy of Knophy.

Oh, and also-all of this necessarily NEEDS to be open source and as decentralized as possible. So few can’t possibly be looking out for the betterment of the many.

For me the Internet as Television is most noticeable in how the gatekeepers enforce their content preferences.

Remember how the TV media pretended Ron Paul didn't exist whenever he ran for president and was doing well in polls? (Daily Show clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWet2SbU07c)

Similar windows of premeditated thought are being applied to the internet all the time; but the Jon Stewarts of the world that would point them out don't get to leverage the legitimacy of Viacom to avoid being called an old coot.

We all have a television set on our office desks, and we're wondering why millennials are on average poorer than their parents ...

People see the problem, but they have yet to see the solution. The solution to walled gardens is smart contracts platforms like Ethereum. People will eventually see this, but it'll take some time. Centralized organizations are NOT the future of the internet.

I really shouldn't engage with this, but if you are suggesting that we will eventually have a "decentralized" version of Facebook that's built on something like Ethereum's smart contracts then I think you are placing too much weight on the probability that people care about decentralization.

I'm placing a high probability that the UI/UX for these systems will improve drastically over the next decade, and that a decentralized FB will be more efficient and transparent than the current platform.

First time I've seen HN-friendly keyword stuffing as an attempted defense against downvotes.

Though I suspect you'll still be downvoted for complaining about downvotes (which is against the guidelines here).

I removed it. Didn't know it was against the guidelines.

Decentralised blockchain-based solutions either can't scale or aren't secure[0]. There may be some other more viable ways of (re-)decentralising the web though, e.g. Solid[1]. The problem I see with these is that they all seem to be a bit of a hassle for users, who aren't typically worried about the problems they try to address - so either the user experience has to be made as simple as opening a web site or installing an app, or vast amounts of users need to become worried about these problems (with the former being the path of least resistance).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilemma#In_blockchain

[1] https://solid.mit.edu/

I'm a big fan of solid and I think it's an important piece in a decentralized architecture, however it's still just an informational layer. You need a blockchain for the financial layer. And I'm aware of the shortcomings of a blockchain w.r.t. scalability, but there are several trade-offs that can be made on-chain or off-chain that will result in higher throughputs.

The solution is certainly decentralisation, but while there is a place for Ethereum, I don't think it lends itself well to every single problem.

I agree, which is why I said platforms like Ethereum. Financial contracts are an important aspect of content creation and distribution.

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