The User Always Loses
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Venture Capital also imports theories of scarcity and under-production that our entire open-source ecosystem have shown don't apply in the same way to the digital world. The funding of end-user friendly software development clearly isn't a solved problem but the history of the internet clearly demonstrates that our existing models aren't sufficient. VC is ripe for disruption.
I believe that the next leap forward to "make the world a better place" isn't new digital products but a new framework for how we build technology companies in the first place. We needn't accept this as a fundamental foundation that can't change - creative destruction is the name of the game after all.
As long as software development and user acquisition requires capital, software doesn’t seem all that different from other capital intensive activities.
IMO this will change when
1. Regulations and/or cultural norms inhibit user-hostile behavior.
Or
2. capitalism itself changes
Arguing that the current system is the only one that will work, regardless of how broken it is, is a very dangerous position to advocate for and an anti-pattern that would eventually lead us away from a fair and equal marketplace. That's not capitalism.
I'm old enough to remember when you could start a business by going down to the bank and borrowing money with a 5 year term. The problem is you can't play in a winner take all market with a slow steady growth model any longer. The multi national monopoly with a stake closest to your business model will just crush you for fun.
This results in new ideas being go big or go home. May as well not play unless you're going to over borrow and try to grow so fast that you corner the market over night. Once you get the market cornered though, you gotta pay back that loan.
It would be rad if there was enough pie for people to have a good idea and get some customers and pay all their people and go home without needing endless growth.
That way they could operate cheaper and could pass the savings in tax on to users or investors. For clients this would be nice too, they could reduce the risk of being locked in when choosing a provider and shouldn’t care as long as it’s not their core business.
The challenge would be preventing misuse and how to get countries to give away tax income that other countries might use.
Open standards as positive externalities would be a rational reason for tax discounts even if the value of it varies greatly - although good for repairs few would care for a specific printer model's firmware as it is so specific in its domain.
VCs are not the root cause. You're not looking hard enough for counterexamples.
Examples of software companies that didn't take VC money that many consider to be "user hostile" are:
- Intuit -- see 1-star reviews on Amazon of annual Quicken releases and forced upgrades of buggy software that nobody wants
- Autodesk -- expensive licensing and stagnant features and bug fixes in Revit, 3ds Max, etc
- Microsoft -- list of various user complaints over decades are well known [pedantic alert: MS took a little bit of VC money from David F. Marquardt but they didn't need it because they were already profitable with cash in the bank; they just wanted DFM as an advisor for their upcoming IPO]
The real root cause of "user hostility" is that companies are run by humans and humans are self-serving and want to make more money. E.g. Look at COVID causing some colleges/universities cancelling in-person classes and refuse to refund tuition fees claiming that "video instruction" is same quality of education. The money came from students and not VCs. You can't blame VCs for that.
>VC is ripe for disruption.
The issue is the company founders, not the VCs.
Let's take this further and ask What is the driving factor for humans to want to accumulate more money?
I think the human founders are responding to external pressures that incentivize the accumulation of wealth.
Never mind the loss of online privacy.
The problem is that raising these as the real issues they are puts you outside the dominant ideology.
If you don't do it anonymously you are in real danger of discrimination during job searches. And if you do it forcefully and polemically enough - to the point where you start getting an activist audience instead an audience of passive click-consumers you can monetise - you'll attract more direct forms of attention.
Humans are avaricious, but humans are not only avaricious. Our ability to cooperate and to look after each other is one of the key evolutionary developments that led to to our success as a species.
From this point view neoliberalism, nationalism, and other competitive/extractive ideologies are an unwelcome return to dumb competitive animality. Some individuals win big, but the species as a whole damages its long-term survival prospects - literally and eventually very tangibly.
These all seem like things wealth protects from, which helps explain why founders and all other humans will tend to want to accumulate it.
This sounds to me like Silicon Valley solutionism. Getting rich only works for some time in a world with widespread crop failures and the many other effects of global heating. [1]
When that happens I'd say it's only a matter of time before the pitchforks and guillotines come out...
“I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people.”
― Eduardo Galeano
How are crop failures a major problem if an area doesn't have a substantial amount of subsistence farmers and does have reasonably free trade? How could they threaten a developed economy without crop failures everywhere?
Would you be able to rephrase your question to help meet my need for clarity? Maybe you could state your position without it being a question? At the moment it is not clear to me what you are asking.
> How could they threaten a developed economy without crop failures everywhere?
An example is migration. If large areas of land continue to be plundered and made infertile [1] by Global North corporations (or 'developed' countries' as you call them), by imposing harmful industrial agriculture practices then the inhabitants of those countries will have to migrate to other areas.
So we, as inhabitants of the Global North and members of the 1% wealthiest in the world (as everyone on Hackernews is), would do well to integrate Global South perspectives.
"We are currently facing the most severe migration crisis in history. But this is only one dimension of a broader civilizational crisis. Thus, anti-racist movements should not focus solely on issues of human mobility rights, but also build new paths of solidarity with societies in the geopolitical Global South. A new perspective on internationalism is necessary, where people of the North and the South co-operate to overcome the current colonial division of nature and labor, as well as what has been called the imperial mode of living. In this sense, it is important to question the dominant notions of what it means to live a good life, to think global when it comes to social welfare and to link up with movements such as eco-feminism or degrowth. Doing so could open up new possibilities to address fears of social relegation due to immigration, as they exist in the Global North."
— Miriam Lang
Source: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-10-17/integrating-so...
At least for software, we know of one solution that works: free (as in speech) software. Still made by humans, but usually without the self-serving greed, and if any of that does turn up, you never lose access to the last-good version and source, in case you or someone else wants to fork it.
That's not to say that there aren't valid complaints about the availability and usability of free software.
There are some free applications that can do amazing things, but are genuinely less intuitive than comparable commercial software. It's not surprising that users who aren't free software diehards don't want to use these tools.
There are also entire ecosystems where free software just isn't a thing, e.g. phone software and hosted user services.
It somehow works for small individuals because having a nice github can be useful to get a job or bypass the ridiculous interviewing process of the day.
A few heroes barely live off donations from wealthy companies and patreons, others sell development courses on the side.
The real problem is that companies in our society grow too much and we end up with a few outliers companies and hordes of employees. Unfortunately, as soon as a company gets money or becomes successful enough to lobby the government for more regulations, they can effectively make it harder for competitor to pop up. The fact that starting a business is a logistic hassle because of corporate taxes is another barrier.
I'd like to see more micro companies and individuals providing value to society instead of giant corporations. OSS can be a part of that, but it doesn't have to be.
free software puts pressure on the giants.
(lets see when the free software phones come out over the next year or two how they do)
Look, capitalism works. But unfettered capitalism could use free software.
Sorry, but this is laughable. Instead of self-serving greed, you have self-serving "what interests the person writing it." That leaves us with open source software that has horrible user interfaces and is every bit as user-hostile as for-pay software. (For example, see the recent arguments about git's UI in this thread[0].)
I believe we could partially solve this problem if we could better support the work-a-day developer with a great idea, who either doesn't have the risk profile to quit their job or doesn't have the free time to slave away in their home after their normal job. These people tend to be the programmer/engineer who worked in one or several companies in a similar industry, has seen the mistakes and insights from each, and can visualize a better data structure for a common operation in this industry, or perhaps even a new operational model that works more efficiently for optimizing some common problem.
However, those developers just don't have the incentive/drive/motivation to do it, and usually that's because their method of survival is to sell their time to another person/corporation in exchange for money that can be used to buy food, shelter, etc. and thus they are too tired, too demotivated, or perhaps they just want to spend some time with their family and friends. Whatever the reason, if you allow them some more of their free time to work on other stuff, these developers will come up with amazing things. There is an argument that some make about the "laziness" of developers who can't do a job and become a CEO of a startup and have a family, but why insinuate or argue that they're too lazy and unworthy when we could un-block their "laziness" and get great results for humanity? (My view is that no one is "lazy", just that some people have a higher "activation energy", but once they are "activated" most people will work as hard as the next.)
Also, I personally think software serving the interests of one person is going to be generally better than software serving the interests of greed, but I have no evidence, just a feeling from my life experiences.
The constant hustle culture is extremely toxic. We don't live to work. And indeed making something of value requires a significant investment of energy. That shouldn't come for free and shouldn't be expected of the "community" to always play catch up with big and dedicated -- and very handsomely paid -- development teams in a corporation.
This doesn't work well for UI improvements for a very specific reason, which is that most of the UI criticisms of free software are about how it's difficult to learn rather than how it's difficult to use after you've learned it. So by the time you've spent the effort to learn the existing UI well enough to know what changes to make to it, you no longer have a personal incentive to make it easier to learn, because you've already paid the time cost of learning it.
But that isn't user-hostile, it's newbie-hostile, which is different. In particular it means that if you're willing to put in the time to get over the hump, you end up with software that actually does exactly what you want, even if the incantations to get it to do that aren't always initially intuitive.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" -- Misattributed
> horrible user interfaces and is every bit as user-hostile as for-pay software
This statement is laughable. A poorly designed UI is not equivalent to a UI filled with dark patterns. I was asserting that free software is a known solution to user-hostile software, not a solution to bad UI.
Do you really think being confused about how to rebase in git is the same as being tricked into creating an online Microsoft account instead of a local account when installing Windows? Or being tricked into buying some TurboTax add-on that you didn't want or need, and can't refund without wasting 2 hours on the phone?
The solution to the git problem is to read the documentation. Nobody is actively trying to prevent you from solving your problem, the designers are just bad at UI design. The solution to Microsoft's problem is to realize that it's intentionally user-hostile, and you have to find a workaround that they don't want you to use, like temporarily disconnecting from the internet. The solution to the TurboTax problem is to just be vigilant and paranoid and exhausted at all times.
The git situation is unfortunate. The Microsoft and TurboTax situations are stupid user-hostile bullshit. They're not even remotely equivalent.
I'm going to stick to my principles and continue working to create the software future that I actually prefer. I won't tell you to "just fork it and fix it yourself" like some other people might -- you're free to take the short term perspective if you prefer. You're free to laugh at me and others if you prefer.
But in the long run, your perspective is wrong. Free software is like a steamroller. It's slow, but it's slow because the people building it observe what's being built around them and tend to take the longer route of building it correctly rather than just cranking out whatever makes investors happy.
In the long run, the git UI will be improved, or an better replacement will turn up. Microsoft's telemetry, on the other hand, will never go away.
If you look at the discussions on the mailing list, you'll see people care a lot and make thoughtful decisions about the user experience, it just isn't aimed at the people for whom no possible user interface change would be helpful, because they don't know what's going on and don't read documentation.
> if any of that does turn up, you never lose access to the last-good version and source, in case you or someone else wants to fork it.
No it doesn't.
We have FAR too many pieces of open source software that are maintained by one person who gets no support.
Good software requires sustained support--generally from corporations.
Even something as venerable as emacs was just one of many until Lucid put a huge amount of effort behind it.
Imho, that's not the solution to the problem mentioned by GP. One needs to control self-serving greed, not give everything for free. I still need to live from something, but I don't need to earn six-figure numbers.
I agree that software can be free, if you happen to find people who support the idea behind it. But that doesn't happen that often. What does work for me is that everything I write in my sparetime is freely available. It's like other people do volunteering work.
https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura/issues/2810
There is also plenty of free software for mobile phones and hosted user services.
https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/LeavingTheCloud
Let my say the obvious, all those non-VC companies are publicly held. So let me get to the heart of the matter, if you have investors, they will demand returns on their investment. And if you don't have investors, you will have to compete externally (e.g. users) and internally (e.g. salaries) with those that do.
I'm interested in the properties of the system we've created and participate in and so this is a generalized observation. There are always counterexamples to generalisations but that's not to say that there isn't something valuable about the generalisation itself. I'm not arguing that without VCs founders would be perfect altruists but there could be other funding models that create fewer conflicts of interest between producers and consumers of technology.
[0] - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/indie-doesn-t-mean-bootstr...
The issue is the veneer behind these IoT, Social media, Internet time wasters, and occasional productivity boosters are wearing off.
There is no competition (less VC money) to serve the community better and the real reason for these companies existing remains bare. All they want to do is monitor you, manipulate you, get your money, and kill your productivity.
The user always will lose outside of the occasional paragdim shift or productivity boost. As it stands now there is no vision to change existing platforms thus in this age the user will always lose.
There is no reason to contribute anything to the online sphere (outside of technical areas) as it is like pissing in the wind.
All of the companies you mention have near-monopolies in their respective sectors. Hundreds of years of economic history show that monopolies are extremely harmful to their customers.
Autodesk is only able to get away with what it does because regulators allowed it to buy out its competitors. Further, the extreme technical difficulty of reverse-engineering complex file formats--including legal obstacles such as enforceable shrink-wrap contracts against reverse engineering, the DMCA ban on reverse engineering, and patent issues--means that it's virtually impossible for competing, interoperable, products to emerge in Autodesk's markets.
Microsoft continues to be a problem because the US government decided, 25 years ago, that stopping Microsoft from abusing its operating system monopoly was unAmerican.
Companies, like people, follow incentives. The incentives created by strong copyright and patent law, combined with the deliberate unenforcement of anti-trust laws in the United States, prevent competition. Without competition, customers always lose.
Getting users a fair deal means changing the rules that define the software market to consider the needs of users rather than only the wants of vendors.
The main competition for Autodesk's Fusion 360 is SolidWorks. It's possible, although not that easy, to get models back and forth.[1]
There's FreeCAD. There are many low end 2D CAD programs. If you're building something bigger than a house or more complicated than a keyboard, though, you probably want a pro product.
[1] https://www.buildercentral.com/solidworks-vs-fusion-360/
Constructive solid geometry is hard, but it's all math. User interfaces for 3D CAD are very hard. Open source is terrible at hard user interfaces. Hence, no really good free 3D CAD.
Office + Windows + Active Directory + Windows Server is the only viable enterprise-level software stack for white collar office work. There is no real competition in this space and, as a monopoly, Microsoft charges accordingly.
Microsoft's monopoly pricing is passed down to every business' customers and, ultimately, extracts money from all of our pockets.
In my books, post the antitrust case against it in 95, Microsoft has been the least monopolistic of the bunch, and a net positive to the rest of the world.
> The real root cause of "user hostility" is that companies are run by humans and humans are self-serving and want to make more money. E.g. Look at COVID causing some colleges/universities cancelling in-person classes and refuse to refund tuition fees claiming that "video instruction" is same quality of education. The money came from students and not VCs. You can't blame VCs for that.
I'm not sure this one fits, because the universities are between a rock and a hard place. They've switched to "video instruction" but none of their expenses have gone away because they're still maintaining a campus and about the same level of staffing since they expect to switch back to it in the not too distant future. But if their costs haven't gone down, it's pretty hard for them to charge less without going under.
https://twitter.com/robertghrist/status/1279489089063079938?...
Here’s some more interesting discussion.
https://twitter.com/robertghrist/status/1288218327127666690?...
https://twitter.com/stevenstrogatz/status/129713848913856921...
https://twitter.com/stevenstrogatz/status/130128164056044749...
Although I definitely feel for students, because prices for education are just insane in general. We should not be forcing debt upon our young people. But both professors and students are along for the tough ride.
Building a business and making money doesn't mandate user hostility; hockey-stick or growth in a saturated market does.
Office 365 is a great deal for $99 - 6 users each with 1TB of storage and I can use it with my iPad, iPhone, Mac, Windows PC etc.
That said, disrupting the "VC model" seems like an interesting question. The implication for me would be many more bets that are lower risk / more marginal returns. An IPO or buying stock would fit that profile, but that's small amount of opportunities overall and there's nothing disruptive about that. For me, an example of something different might be community-focused investing. Pick a region or town as a locus of investing, and invest in a number of existing business and infrastructure all across the broad, with the idea of moving that local instance of an economic system from a static phase to a growth phase. That has nothing to do with tech, per se. Maybe that's the disruption ...
This is basically localized forms of market monopolization. The internet is always pro-producer because the user has very little influence in the relationship.
It's not the root cause but it's along the right path and very close to the root. The root is the monetary system with banks being able to print trillions of dollars and decide who can get that money and who can't... And VCs get a lot of that newly printed money, so do corporations (who provide exits for VCs).
Centralization of economic (as well as political) power is the true killer of consumer freedom. It occurs so regularly that it's difficult to imagine any possibility of escape.
The internet has more content then ever, but the long tail of content there is consumed at a smaller rate relative to the big 3/5/100 web properties.
The problem isn't that consumer freedom has been killed- after all, all those films and content exist and likely more accessible than ever, its that the large centralized firms have managed to largely satisfy the majority of consumer demand without it. If I have the time to see a movie (a rare occurrence sadly) and Disney has a Marvel or Star Wars movie out, I'll just go see that, even if there might be a limited showing of a comedy-western-crime genre film out that I'd enjoy even more.
Note, I am concerned about media consolidation, but its more about distribution and IP ownership at this point than consumer choice.
The primary advantage of venture capital is access to capital for growth, which isn't a great fit for purely digital companies with low capital requirements and the ability to bootstrap. The ability to rapidly grow is handy, but primarily addresses the needs of investors, who make their money off of growth. Getting investors to satisfy the needs of investors is awfully circular.
The big reason we don't see tech co-ops is simply tradition. Most big tech companies were VC funded. Most good startup advice comes out of VC companies like YC that naturally push people towards venture capital. On the flip side, worker owned co-ops are most common in the food industry of all things, even though that is quite capital intensive, because of the same sort of tradition-inertia.
Does anyone know any tech ecosystems/communities promoting a worker co-op model?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_compa...
Let's say you, a hopeful founder, could get $0.5M/yr at a BigCo. Instead you're going to start a company where you'll earn maybe $0.15M/yr for a decade then either get a payout (10%) or fail (90%). To make them even in expectation after that decade, you need $5M = $1.5M + 10% * payout, so payout = $35M. Maybe you and your cofounder each have 25% (?) of the company at that point , so the valuation needs to be 4x that $35M, so $140M.
To take a paycut from a really good alternative, you need a giant incentive. Maybe that just means that if you would start a business that'll "only" make you $0.5-1M/year if you succeed, then in solely a financial perspective, you should just join a BigCo.
I am in my early 30s and have a wife and kids. At some point, your relationship with money changes. I am now more concerned about my own legacy and the example I’m giving my kids than whether my net worth in 10 years will be 2 or 20 million.
I’m also more deliberate about how I use my time. So I’m perfectly content in doing something that will net me “only” 250k or so a year.
The irony is that this might net me more if I decide to come back to a FAANG in the future.
Narator: The median wealth of a 30-35 year old American is $30k.
IMHO we can't just say that. Because nothing is stopping us users from paying for email, online document storage, blogs, etc. It would appear to me that greed is one cause, and an unrealistic expectation that infrastructure should be free, or at least an all-you-can-eat buffet, is another cause.
Although if I still stubbornly try to view this through the prism of greed, I note that it doesn't necessarily fall apart. Like maybe a user's wanting something for free is a form of greed, and the company that bases its business model around that, is really just turning that greed to its own advantage kind of like an aikido master throwing you ass over tit using mostly your own energy!
Mind you I don't want to imply or pretend I considered any of this ahead of time or intended it as part of my GP comment.
The great thing about the free market is anybody can create a company in whatever framework they like.
For example, the D Language Foundation. We don't make money, it's pretty much all volunteers and support from industry. We don't "extract" any value from our users.
This is hardly the only example.
What's scarce isn't software, it's time. For certain classes of products (specifically, those with network effects), getting earlier to a larger market can be the difference between a company worth billions and a company that goes bankrupt. What 2005-2015 VC tries to do is to inject funding into companies specifically so that they can go on massive hiring sprees and try to capture the market before any of their competitors.
> The VC model for funding technology...
This is the root of your misconception. VC doesn't fund technology, it funds growth. It's not the same thing. Sometimes it correlates, where technology is what permits previously-impossible growth to happen, but it's not the same thing.
> VC is ripe for disruption.
No, what you're seeing is a classic bubble. The success of early Silicon Valley VC funds like Sequoia and A18Z came from understanding that VC funds growth, not technology. Today you look at the funding landscape and you see thousands of sources for "VC" funding by people who think that any technology will lend itself to massive scale and growth, and most of those efforts fail miserably, particularly the ones where there are no network effects or other barriers to entry and the businesses eventually commoditize. At which point, it's very clear - if you sell a commodity, and you're not yet a Fortune 500-sized enterprise, then from a VC expectations point of view, you failed.
If you want to fund technology - really fund technology - then advocate for better public funding of research. Only state-level governments can afford to put funding into research projects that will have a 20+-year horizon from idea to commercially-ready product. There are well-established pipelines for taking academic research with commercial applications and turning them into profitable companies.
Blogging took off because half the worlds population started having access to the internet in the early 2000s. That seems incredibly myopic and US centric.
The timing lines up fairly well with Gulf War II but I would personally never have drawn a connection.
According to Wikipedia LiveJournal had to implement an invite-only system for new users because they were growing faster than the server architecture could handle. This was all started pre-9/11.
That being said, I didn't hear the word "blog" until the year 2003.
Beyond that I don't recall the Iraq War being a major blogging topic. Sure, everyone has an opinion on the Iraq War, but how many blog posts can the average person actually write about their feelings on the Iraq War? Can't be more than a few, not a topic that's going to keep the masses activity blogging.
To say blogging was a "shared response" to the invasion of Iraq is just... bizarre.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salam_Pax
Iraqi blogger.
>Why did blogging take off as a shared response to the US invasion of Iraq? (When “the Internet became an ideal valve to release opinions,” she writes, “who didn’t have an opinion on the Iraq war?”)
Basically claiming that blogging became popular because everyone wanted to share their opinion on the Iraq War. That's just not factual and, quite frankly, ridiculous.
A books worth: http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/deepdish/ebooks/i-was-wrong/
And when you use other's services, like, say, reading an article hosted at 'thenation.com', a site which attempts to block you from reading unless you run their javascript and CSS, use a browser with tools that allow you to toggle things like JS and CSS to read it anyway. Then re-share the article as plain text, https://write.as/tg3o7a6dfa5ck.md
And always remember: Lurking is good, https://i.imgur.com/7NYQ17y.mp4
It is and it isn't. Sure, you can run a website, forum, blog, whatever and host it yourself much easier than in the 90s. But people look for you and connect on the popular platforms they frequent: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
Back in the day even normies would pick up some tech and talk to you on IRC or USENET. Nowadays, it's the opposite, the bias is in the other direction. Even hackers are on Slack and Twitter.
But you're right that the bias has shifted, e.g. long twitter threads (with no real archivability) vs. a blog post.
Is that true?
Peak IRC users appears to be 10 million (2013) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Decline, Citation needed.
Pretending that all IRC users were in the US... That's ~3% of the population.
Usenet is arguably going strong (daily volume has exploded but isn't a useful metric here though. Can't find active users from cursory look).
~70% of US population are 'active' users of Facebook. This counts people that have only used it once in the last 30 days. And it's not a dichotomy - I don't think people have an issue stepping outside of facebook, as long as there are no barriers to entry.
Just playing devil's advocate, I don't disagree with you in general. I appreciate that my stats are lazy and blunt, but it shows how relatively minuscule the usage of IRC & Usenet were 2 decades ago, and that while direct messaging might be in a more 'walled garden' state, traffic to self-federated content is generally still as attainable. Perhaps 'eternal september' has swung so far to the other side that the old non-internet users of the 90s have funnelled through AOL and out the other side to Facebook (and notably, it's easier to grab traffic from FB users than non-internet users), while the core tech demographic has remained 'in the middle'.
Also was careful to state "stats are lazy and blunt"
Really the question of the choice is "Do you care about the audience at large or the way you and your small niche want it more?"
Cut the gordian knot. Just don't all centralize in one place and you no longer all need to follow the same rules.
That said, if you're using those platforms for monetary reasons then you'll have to stay there. Network effect. But that's for the best: profit motive is eventually toxic to community.
Dont you see the bars on the windows and doors?
Yup. Captchas are everywhere. Javascript is everywhere.
Finding a website that loads without having to enable javascript or go through captcha is a breath of relief. They do exist.
This is a much more serious problems in other fields, where you can only reach your crowd through YouTube or Instagram.
That being said, having a crowd wasn't even a thing back then. Platforms have given immensely talented people a free soapbox to show the world all sorts of things. Anyone can share something nowadays, not only people who know HTML and a few other things.
The snappy aphorism off the top of my head is that "only drug dealers and IT call their customers 'users.'"
One day perhaps we will indeed look at the apps of today as massive social engineering experiments gone haywire. But the author's categorization of Facebook as an "ant farm of humanity" and a "digital cesspool" is juuuust a bit too misanthropic and bitter for my tastes. The internet has connected humanity to an extent that is literally hard to grasp, and yes, that does come with very human problems, so it's silly imo to pin all of our woes on Facebook et al. I'd love to hear what kinds of creative derogatory phrases the author would come up with to describe the period of dominating telephone networks, or mass media television, or even before we had any wires at all and just had to rely on the post and grapevine in the horrific dark ages before the invention of the telegraph in the 19th century.
Plus, for nostalgia's sake, the indie web's still out there if you know where to look (e.g. https://wiby.me/)
For examples: from 1952, "A public library user is defined as an individual twelve years of age or over who used either a branch library or bookmobile during the thirty days preceding the interview." (Quoting "Rural reading habits; a study of county library planning, Prince Georges County, Md.", https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015034569759&vi... )
From 1931, "This was the first complete triple asyndetic dictionary catalog. It became a favorite with town and mercantile libraries, the idea always being that the user was searching for some book he knew about ..." ("Outline of the history of the development of the American public library", https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015019970162&vi...)
From 1928, "Consider the User of Bulletins", title of a letter to the editor in Science - https://science.sciencemag.org/content/67/1724/40.2 .
Maybe it wasn't specific to library science either. I just did a broader search for "user" and found, for example, a 1905 ad for a book of tables for surveyors and engineers: "The computations enable the user to ascertain the sines and cosines for a distance of twelve miles to within half an inch, and this by reference to but One Table, in place of the usual Fifteen minute computations required. This alone is evidence of the assistance which the Tables ensure to every user ... " https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015063579133&vi...
Is this really the dominant narrative? Are there lots of thinkpieces going around about how fair and kind Silicon Valley is, if only it weren't for all those mean people using their services? Maybe it is so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but when comparing the early internet to the current internet, we cannot let the users off the hook!
The further back you go, the harder it was to get on the internet, both as a user and a publisher. That meant the early internet was full of people who worked at universities, or were so motivated to discuss weird hobbies and interests with others that they struggled through the expense and technical difficulties, maybe even self-hosted, learned weird new languages from scratch. These were interesting, educated, intelligent, thoughtful and passionate people.
It's like air travel. If you were flying in the 1970s you probably had an interesting or important job or story. Getting on a plane meant meeting a bunch of interesting people. Now it doesn't. That is not a bad thing and it's not Southwest's fault. And when people complain about it, even though they might target Southwest (or Facebook), there is really an underlying snobbery about it. I can't believe I have to sit next to all these commoners on my internet!
> there is really an underlying snobbery about it
These contrast very interestingly, but I think it's missing an important point. The early internet was characterized by complete freedom of association. You could talk about whatever, with whomever. If enough people shared an interest, a community could form.
The problem with the modern internet isn't that the filthy plebs are using it - it's that all of the content suggestion algorithms, clickbait articles, and advertising are designed for maximum engagement. It's no longer what groups of "interesting, educated, intelligent, thoughtful and passionate people" collectively put forward, without an ulterior financial incentive, that determines what content people see. I think that's the ultimate issue - it's not that low quality content proliferates, it's that there are few if any ways of finding high-quality content among all the crap.
It's one of the main reasons I read Hacker News - it's an excellent content filter.
People forget the impressive quality of some online content now. Everyone can publish something now, not just technically inclined hobbyists. It gave us videos with insane production quality, top notch writing and larger and more diverse communities than ever before.
If a few ads and annoying modals is the price to pay for free, endless quality content, so be it.
I believe it would not be advertising to display the next episode of a series, or even auto play it. But it would be advertising to display a different series or film.
For a fuzzier one, how about a newspaper providing links to their other stories at the bottom of an article that you have read? Typically I gain nothing by ingesting more of a particular publication's writing, so that could be an ad rather than useful functionality. Perhaps not in a special circumstance such as if I am trying to catch up on news local to that publication.
(I kind of wonder if internet advertising would be a lot less hated if it had developed with a culture of restraint rather than maximum in-your-faceness, although to be fair, I'm not sure how that could ever have happened.)
I get it, advertising sucks. Still, save the military terminology for things that are related to the fucking military.
I mean, I wonder what a 57-year-old from Cambodia would think when he reads about how much the author suffered under the "carpet-bombing campaign" of AOL and the likes.
This is not much better than old media really, which was always mostly ad supported. Media has always been a deflationary race to the bottom. When one player offers something cheap or free everyone else must follow suit and the economic model collapses. The cheapest crap and/or content with ulterior motives funded by someone else wins.
You could maybe say that they're getting more measurable results than back in the day of TV and press dominance but having seen it from the inside, I doubt most are sophisticated enough to make use of that.
You could very easily measure the effects of a 90’ies styled super soaker TV adds in sales. You can’t as easily measure the success of the Facebook advertisement for your board game kickstarter campaign.
The article misses the point. The problem has its root in monetary policy. The problem is supply-side economics.
Money printing and giving control of the money supply to banks has made consumers redundant appendages of the financial system.
Imagine that you're the CEO of a unicorn startup or a big corporation and you constantly deal with investors, banks and customers. Which of these 3 groups do you derive most of your wealth from? Banks and investors.
Banks print money and loan it out to your investors and your investors use that money to buy your company stock and drive up its price - Also, banks loan your company money directly to buy back its own stock... As an executive, if you want to maximize your bonus, banks and investors are the only two entities you really care about... Your actual customers are merely appendages; they're merely a useful metric which allows you to get more money from investors and banks.
So long as all the new fiat money enters the economy through big institutions and big investors via bank loans, the consumer will always be an afterthought in the decision-making process. You're the product because you're not the source of money. Consumers don't have any money. Only institutions have money because they're printing it for free and distributing it among themselves by the trillions.
That's why we need UBI (Universal Basic Income) urgently - That's the only safe way to switch to sane demand-side economics.
If instead there could be a joint policy by The Fed and the Social Security Administration, then the flow of money (and thereby attention)_could be less lopsided.
I disagree completely that central banks trying to increase the money supply is righteous in any way. I'm a value producer and this monetary policy has harmed me.
I can see exactly how it has harmed me and I can see the kinds of people it has benefited and I don't agree at all. The central bank has stolen value from me and given it to my enemy.
It seems that my project was blacklisted/censored somewhere because no corporation seems to have ever used my project in spite of the fact that it's very popular with startups and independent developers. I got 0 consulting contracts from any big corporations. I had discussions with some corporates who backed out in a very suspicious way for no apparent reason.
And also, as a software developer I was harmed through the ongoing bureaucratization of the tech industry by big corporations and the startups who mindlessly copy them; I've witnessed the introduction of more tools, more processes and ever decreasing productivity in the industry.
I could go on and on for hours about all the problems I've encountered and most of them link back to corporations and their upper hand in our fiat monetary system due to Cantillon effects.
Now, most people are on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other massively high-traffic websites, while a minority of people are on the rest of the internet, often with their own blogs.
It's not as different as it looks, it's just that the TV networks got displaced by the few high-traffic websites. It's apocalyptic for for-profit TV, radio, and newspaper companies, who have been mostly circling the drain as FAANG gobbles up their ad revenue. But the impact on "the internet" is not as different as it looks, it's just that "the internet" now needs a new name, like maybe "the low-traffic-website internet" but shorter (tltwi, pronounced "tilt-we"), because the Old Media are now co-hosted on the same infrastructure.
Most people didn't get on the internet prior to AOL. Most people don't leave the high-traffic-sites internet now. It's not like there aren't any blogs left. It's not as different as it looks.
We all have many roles, in which it may be appropriate to consider us as “user”, “customer”, “consumer”, “driver”, “parent”, “friend”...* preferring the term “person” might remind us that at the end of the day that the user’s interest is not necessarily aligned with ours (usually joystick in face) and that we need them more than they need us.
* I had a colleague who refers to parents of teens as “protectors of terrorists”. Yes, he had four teens himself. While the term was unwieldy and the joke rapidly wore thin, it reminded me of the various roles played by parents...and kids, and made me more tolerant of the foibles of teens. When we bundle a person into “user” it’s easy to lose perspective on the actual objective.
For those if us not obsessed with twitter and Facebook the golden age is now, the amount and quality of information available to an engineer is incredible and the online communities are mostly positive.
I feel like the "correct" model is users hosting their data with apps operating on it in a decentralized (or multi-layer federation ) way. But the economics are just really, really hard without certain restrictions, like always on connections for a primary 'home' device.
I guess it all translates to "The small guy always loses".
And VCs piling up money doesn't work in favor of the small guy.
Part of my last-lecture pep talk to every 300-student CS class I taught.
I was listening to Richard Wolff describing to Patrick Bet-David how capitalism creates monopolies and in the end the consumers always lose [1]. As companies get bigger, they become worse actors. I can't think of a counter example.
Patrick thinks everything has gotten cheaper and the consumer is winning, at least today (since history only backs the thesis). Richard couldn't come up with immediate counter examples regarding how Amazon is abusing their monopoly priviledges but FBA pricing and seller fees came to mind. Someone in the comments mentioned prescription drugs.
[1] Heated Debate On Capitalism with America’s Most Prominent Marxist Economist - Richard Wolff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj-zFgxCUnY