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Comment by latexr | Hacker News Reader

> The viewers who watched [Gangnam Style] earned nothing, even though many of them contributed and were critical to the video's ultimate success. What if there was a way to incentivize people upfront to contribute to such a success? What if there was a way to let everyone who contributed earn a piece of the rewards?

What if we stopped trying to monetise every single action from every single person every single day?

People used their free time to see a video, liked it, and shared it. Their contribution had an impact because it was free. If you change the equation so that sharing videos is remunerated, you (or your bots) will share any turd hoping to hit gold. You’ll actively make online culture worse by making the signal (content worth sharing) indistinguishable from the noise.

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> You’ll actively make online culture worse by making the signal (content worth sharing)

The implicit argument these people make is what you might call the financial-postmodernist one: all content is worthless and meaningless, except for its exchange-value.

Hey Artists -

Would you like to make even less money than you already do by splitting your rewards with every single person who looked at the thing you did?

> What if we stopped trying to monetise every single action from every single person every single day?

But it is already monetized, we just don't get the profit.

I thought the idea was to have less middlemen?

No, its that there is no middlemen, but the function that the middlemen were doing gets done and now the profit he was making can go to the users and creators.

Sounds suspiciously like you're moving the middlemen around not removing them if a bunch of other people are being paid to do the same job.

No, there are no people being paid for the job, the job is automated so the profit of that job can go to other people not the middlemen. Kind of the opposite of how everything works right now where you get free as in beer software that becomes infrastructure and then starts to exploit that in every possible way.

> and now the profit he was making can go to the users and creators

Conveniently using this speculative investment that I own a lot of and you don't as the payment currency!

You could also punish people who vote for unpopular content. Similar to how captchas work, if you vote in the minority, you could be assumed to be a 'bot'. This would also require some kind of ML to account for your interests, so you would be compared against others with similar interests.

There is enough conformity without adding additional punishments for liking something majority dont like.

Assuming this is not sarcasm, this is probably the worst idea I've heard all month. If I were the king, I'd give less weight to people that vote in utterly conventional ways.

It seems like this suggestion is unpopular, so I'd better not upvote it.

If you're serious about finding real cultural value, you should do the exact opposite of what you just proposed.

Also, the premise is wrong. Lots of people that saw Gangnam Style liked it, they spent a nice moment watching it. They contributed in exchange with one or multiple views, and maybe a like, to promote this kind of content.

> What if we stopped trying to monetise every single action from every single person every single day?

Commoditization of labour (and of pretty much everything else TBH) is one of the founding pillars of the capitalism that survived pretty much unchanged from its inception to the modern days, so you proposition is a non-starter. You see, if you prohibit to monetise something that curbs the free entrepreneurial spirit and so inevitably lowers the efficiency and growth of the economy as a whole: if something can be done for profit, it should be done for profit and that will only improve the resource allocation and in the end, the wealth distribution too.

I can’t stop thinking of the Tom Toro cartoon[1]:

“Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20201112030542/https://i.etsysta...

Your argument rests on the assumption that capitalism is the best or only economic system.

It is not profitable to feed poor children. And we don't. 25% of children are food insecure in the US, one of the wealthiest countries not just in the modern day but the history of this planet.

It is not profitable to vaccinate the poor. And we didn't. COVAX still hasn't hit their original goal of vaccinating 20% of the world's poorest. Unfortunate that poor people get sick too and spread it without regard for class lines.

Capitalism is subsidized by human capital. Whether that human capital are literal chattel slaves or Honduran strawberry pickers coming to California after the US destabilized their countries.

And capitalism requires markets too, obviously. Have to unload that cheap shit. How do you do that? Gunboat diplomacy. Open up Japan, open up China, close the entirety of Latin America to any other industrial power, and profit. Maybe sit on the sidelines of a "great war" and then after the fact you can sell stuff to the survivors.

In the 21st century we reached the end of scarcity. For nation-states. Not for people. They're still disposable, just ask who is willing to sell their grandparents to save "the economy"

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