Obviously.
868 karma · joined May 14, 2013
How do I know this without viewing ads that I don't agree to view?
> It is your attention which you are agreeing to trade for information or entertainment.
The ego required to tell people who are explicitly not agreeing to your terms that they are implicitly agreeing to your terms is appalling. Surely we can believe people when they tell us what they agree to.
> This is more commonly happening now. Then we all have to deal with people complaining about that. Taking up /my/ attention which they are refusing to pay for. Pay me for reading your posts.
You loaded this hacker news page with the intent of reading other users' posts.
I've never once loaded a page with the intent of viewing an ad.
If you don't want to view my posts, I'd be entirely fine with you writing a browser plugin that strips my posts from your page. Consume the content you want to consume, that's your prerogative.
There isn't a god-given right to make money via your chosen business model. Ads are a sleazy way to make money, and if you choose that, you should pay the consequences. Appealing to "people we know" as if that makes their behavior better? Ugh.
> 3. I dislike activism without clear objectives. I see no list of guidelines here or good behavior that companies could adopt to immediately place them on the side of the good guys.
I can't speak to the goals of everyone who is anti-advertising, but my goals here are:
1. Users should be customers, not products, so that companies act in the interest of users, not in the interest of other companies.
2. Users' attention should be respected, only giving users content they ask for.
3. Companies should create products users value enough to pay for, and compete on quality, rather than competing on how many users they can shove idealized presentations of their product (often outright lies) in front of.
Again, this is dependent on your goals. If your goal is just to make a quick buck, any well-advertised shit will do, so any engineering you can cut out is waste.
But for my goals, I strongly disagree. The most widely-used front-end language lacks an integer type and has laughable security. MongoDB, a data store which requires replication not for scaling, but to maintain uptime when instances memory leak and crash, has a significant user base. The latest Macbook Pro sacrificed performance for a touch bar with questionable urility. Massive sections of our industry are built on sand. Over-engineering isn't the problem, under-engineering is.
> avoiding regular communication with management and avoiding budget discussions will both result in poor quality software
What do these contribute to high quality software?
Removing the bottom line from consideration doesn't guarantee a good result, obviously. But that doesn't mean that bottom lines can't decrease quality.
I'm not making leaps to anything so large. I just want people to recognize that the outcomes business optimizes for are bottom line outcomes, not outcomes we would all agree are good. Too many people in industry believe that they're saving the world, which is only true as long as saving the world coincides with their bottom line (that is to say, not long).
> Can you cite some examples of companies with good outcomes unrelated to bottom line?
Sure. RethinkDB produced a great data store--I'd argue the best out there.
Incidentally they aren't in business any more. Producing good outcomes that don't affect your bottom line is an inefficiency companies can't afford.
> What is a good outcome that doesn't involve the bottom line?
This is somewhat subjective, but I think there are lots of things we can agree are good outcomes. RethinkDB (the data store) is one--usable, reliable software is a good outcome. But RethinkDB (the company) made money selling support--if you want to sell support for a piece of software, there's no reason to make it usable and reliable because then people don't need support. IBMs software business is a great example: it's so crap it's unusable without support, but IBM rakes in the cash.
> How can a company even exist to produce a good outcome without a bottom line?
It can't. You can produce good outcomes, but the gods outcomes you can produce are limited to those that help your bottom line.
> The problem with the manifesto and with your thinking here is that budgets are unavoidable.
Within the context of a company, sure. Outside the corporate world, I'm not so sure.
> There are no jobs, no projects, and no companies with infinite resources. Placing quality over deadlines can never work for all companies, and cannot work for any company indefinitely.
This is all true.
> FWIW, the premise behind capitalism is "an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit." (Wikipedia "Capitalism")
That's the definition of capitalism, not the premise. The reason we are told that we should accept and participate in capitalism is that it supposedly produces good outcomes.
> The Longflow Manifesto is written in the context of business, and I was responding in the context of business. If it doesn't work for business as you suggest, then you agree with me that it would be a bad idea for engineers working at their job to actually adopt this philosophy?
No, whether you should adopt this philosophy depends on your goals. If you want to produce good results and don't care about making yourself or (more likely) your boss rich, you should absolutely adopt this philosophy. But if you just want to get rich, your best move is to become the boss and persuade you're engineers that the Longflow Manifesto is some crazy unreasonable thing.
If all you want is to make your business succeed, not caring for good outcomes or personal gain, then sure, keep working as an engineer and do whatever your boss tells you. I just don't think that's what most people want.
The driving premise of capitalism is that various competing companies pursuing the bottom line will produce the best outcomes.
Yet here we have a case that shows this premise to be a lie. The engineer in your story wants to produce a quality product, a good outcome. But the manager in your story won't allow a quality product because it conflicts with his bottom line. The bottom line is directly at odds with a good outcome.
And sure, within the context of business there has to be a balance between seeking good outcomes and the bottom line. But to me, that means we should be seeking a better model than business, that allows better outcomes.
Maybe the Longflow Manifesto doesn't work in business, but maybe that is because business is wrong, not because the Longflow Manifesto is wrong.
Investors take on high risk when investing in a startup, but that risk is localized. They typically have a diversified portfolio so that the successes outweigh the failures. As a result their local risk tolerance can be high.
Founders, on the other hand, are typically investing their time, energy, etc., mostly in their company. Their risk isn't localized, so they can't have as high of risk tolerance. As such, they need a higher EV in order to justify an equivalent probability of failure.
Giving up power lowers your EV. In the event of an exit, people with power get paid.
As such, founders should be looking for investors who are collaborators. The investor you're describing should be avoided at all costs, because they're just looking for patsies to take on unreasonable risk for their own gain.
The collaborative model isn't bad for investors--it doesn't have as high of reward if it succeeds, but there's also lower risk because being involved in a company gives you a better idea of when to invest more or pull out.
But this model isn't popular with investors because it takes more work.
Given all I've seen of saastr is a pop-up, no, I do not want more pop-ups.
This, more than anything, is why I refuse to view ads and jealously guard my data.
I'm old enough to remember when people put things on the Internet because they wanted to, and people still do that. I'm also happy to pay for services. But until I view a webpage, I have no way of knowing whether it's one of those pages, or whether it's one that's going to ram a bunch of crap down my throat. The idea that I can agree to a business transaction without even knowing it just by viewing a page is ridiculous.
Let it be noted that only one of us has resorted to name-calling in this conversation.
This is one of the most compelling reasons we should adopt Bitcoin. The nationalism that tells us that we should be concerned about this is appalling.
It may be that given proper tooling for database-driven configuration it could be visible and accessible, but the fact is, I haven't seen timing that pulled that off.
The parts of the Internet which are paid for by ads have a net negative impact on humanity.