Furthermore, the [online] advertiser gets astonishingly
precise feedback. They will know exactly how many people
have chosen to look at their ad and for how long, with
the result that an unwelcome ad for something no one's
interested in will quickly wither away, whereas one which
catches people's attention will thrive.
He talks about this as a good thing - a meritocracy of "unwelcome" ads and ideas vs. "interesting" ones, with selection favoring the interesting ones, cutting out all of the "dead wood", and so on.
In a literal sense, that is indeed how it turned out. "Interesting" won.
Unfortunately the version of "interesting" that many people chose was simply toxic dreck: conspiracy theories, social media feeds literally designed to make us feel negative emotions, scammy ads that have been engineered to trick the maximum number of people, and so on.
So yeah, "interesting" won, but I'm not sure this is the future Adams was excited about.
This stood out to me as well. There an impulse to think that once we have perfected something, it will be good. But then, we noticed that the "perfect" version of this thing is actually pretty bad. Which then makes you question the entire thing, fundamentally.
Like here in advertising. I'm coming to the conclusion that there is no good form of advertising. It is a fundamentally bad thing. There are just different degrees of badness.
And since it's a fundamentally bad thing, perfecting it makes it worse.
I had a response to a comment of mine here on HN recently that effectively made this same argument-- that letting corporations influence our behavior is being slept on as one of the great problems in our society.
After thinking it through, I thoroughly agree. I'm not convinced of a proper course of action to correct it, but I do definitely think it's a problem as a whole.
A world where we just seek out and buy the things we need and that will actually enrich or lives sounds like a great improvement over the current system.
I think there was almost a good system in place: a variety of ad-supported sites that professionally reviewed new products, and a variety of ad-supported forums where you could get the advice of other people. Manufacturers win in both cases if they can make a good product that survives the professional review and doesn't fall apart or immediately break so the forums give it a pass.
The problem is tracking and dependence on ad networks. Corporations doggedly chasing the bottom line don't want to spend the time or the money to pick and choose specific forums and sites to advertise. They want to pretend to automate that process. Their laziness not only killed the old networks and communities around various product segments, but helped start the "listicle" de-evolution that has decreased content quality across the entire internet.
I used to be able to type in "product_name review" and get some useful, well-known sites. Now I get recycled garbage content, and I have to check all of those sites individually or restrict the domain in the search. It's ridiculous.
Your comment reminded me of the old AdSense model where the advertiser (Google in this case) would look at the content of the page the ad was on and decide what ad to display as a result. In a way, this is just like magazine advertising where the seller can pick a publication that they think will cater to buyers. Maybe they can even pick a specific article.
Personally, this is the model I long for again. If I’m looking at articles about bike maintenance, I’m getting ads for bike tools and supplies. Instead, I’m getting ads for USB power cords because I just purchased a new one to replace the one my dog chewed.
Apparent that’s how it was in the U.S. before the 20th century. People would buy a few things like molasses in bulk. And that was it.
It’s quite hard to imagine.
It also sounds quite inefficient. Like everybody running their own wood stove vs using centrally generated electricity. But I don’t know.
Anyone aware of books that talk of life in these times? For the early 1900s, I enjoyed “The World of Yesterday”. It would be great to get the same glimpses into the world of the 1800s.
I had the chance to ruminate about wood burning recently during a conversation.
The conclusion I came to was that when there's few people and they're all manually whacking at wood with axes you're (as a group) okay. When the wood collection is essentially strip mining a forest for millions of customers it just isn't the same thing. Not really comparable.
Manual labor and using an axe is an efficient system in the sense that it ultimately limits use and production of wood per person.
At the turn of the century, Canada was >70% rural or some such. Now, it's reversed. >70% urban.
When you live on a farm, in the county, and own 100 acres, a few extra acres for wood provides a long supply of wood, with time for more to grow.
Every farm tended to have rocky, unusable bits, but still ok for trees. Back then, before everyone had backhoes, removing large rocks, even small rocks, was work.
So some fields were best left for trees.
And one of your neighbours would likely own 1000 acres or more of bush land, ok for trees, but too rocky or swampy for farming. Or local crown land would be used for harvesting trees.
Back when people went in with sleighs in the winter, felled trees by hand with axe and hand saw, no one strip cut. Why would they?
(It is easier with horses to pull logs out on sleigh, in winter, than over uneven, soft ground. Especially in frozen swampy land. Even today, people will use snowmobiles and sleigh to get trees out for personal use.)
Anyhow back then, it was only people living in higher density locations, away from nature, which exceeded easy supply.
Of course, population growth happens, and wood burning can be dirty, so now we warm homes with other methods typically.
Problem is of course that nobody threw a switch to go from one to another. Those two approaches to wood harvesting exist along a smooth spectrum and there was likely no point that you could easily identify as "the breaking point", even though each end is clearly distinct.
That is just wrong however. Europe outright depleted its forrest reserves in the age of sail, let alone farming uses. It took longer to reach but it was reached.
Little House on the Prairie has a few books where they live “in the city” which is a small whistle-stop.
Much of the supplies for day to day life came from your own work, money was spent on certain tools and other necessities- and sometimes on fancy foodstuffs.
one of the foundational problems with this sort of analysis is that "corporation" isn't really very well defined for this context.
If I live in some imaginary small town 1800's western America, and the owner of the general store convinces me to stock up on something that they happen to have an excess of, is this "corporations influencing our behavior" ?
If I live in some imaginary mid-size town in 1950's USA, and the local Ford dealer is on the radio telling me all about how their latest cars are just the absolute best, and this persuades me to get a Ford for my next car, is that "corporations influencing our behavior" ?
If anyone says anything to me that changes the behavioral trajectory I might otherwise have been on, how do I know if that's corporations influencing my behavior, or "just what people do" ?
Corporations are headless. A Sole Proprietorship like the one in your example is tied to a single human agent. The Corporation will swap out any human agent who gets out of line.
Although this definition, like all definitions, brings to light uncomfortable corner cases…
Like, is Facebook a corporation, or a Sole Proprietorship?
(I know legally it’s a Corp, but spiritually, is it just Mark Zuckerberg, since he has the controlling stake?)
OK, so let's take me as an example. For 21+ years, I've "run" a sole proprietorship (i.e. telling myself what to do). Soon, I may convert this into an LLC for various reasons. It's possible that after that, I might actually hire an employee.
At what point along the path from where I am now to being the next FAANG do I become "a corporation" in the sense of the comment under discussion? If I have an LLC and 1 employee, legally I'm certainly a corporation, but this seems to not be what the comment was describing?
Huh? In the real world we're currently living in you can probably track 80% of advertising people are exposed to to like 20 fortune 50 companies. Doesn't get more concrete than that
Sure, there's basically a continuum of influential behavior. But scale and purposefulness tip over a line at some point. The general store owner may be a gifted salesman, but he doesn't have a marketing department full of graduate degrees. The car dealership may have a professional ad-maker, but their reach is local. And both of them live where they sell, too -- if they're sociopathic ass____s, their business will suffer. The contrast with the behavior and capabilities of a transnational business is large enough to maybe be a difference of kind, not just degree.
Right, and I'm noting that because it's a continuum of behavior, you have to draw an arbitrary line to demarcate corporate from non-corporate behavior, and that's always somewhat tricky to do.
I can agree with that, but I'd say insisting on "corporate/non-corporate" is sort of a red herring. People use "corporation" as shorthand -- and maybe you're right that it's misleading shorthand -- to talk about scale.
Ok, but the problem is that people or businesses inherently only really want to facilitate the discovery of what they've created, regardless of whether it's the best thing for the person. In a perfect world people would have wants and they would be advertised to by the best solution for those wants and everyone would be happy, but what inevitably happens is that people advertise their products to people who don't want them in an attempt to ply them into being interested, or advertise their less suitable product more loudly than their better competitor.
Same thing when you apply for a job or you try to catch the attention of some girl you like. What you’re most concerned with here are your own expectations. And, just like an advertising come up you showcase your best attributes and downplay the worst.
(Which isn’t to say that, in a world where everybody does this, actual listening and radical honesty couldn’t be a much more profitable strategy.)
> Same thing when you apply for a job or you try to catch the attention of some girl you like.
No, it is not the same thing. The scale matters. Much of what is wrong with the world comes from allowing huge corporations to do stuff because a single person is allowed to do "same" stuff and we see no bad effects.
Scale is a social/political problem. A multibillion corporations can buy infinitely more bandwidth than a common man, regardless of the underlying technology.
This isn't a critique of capitalism, or at least not only. I happen to live in a country where the government is abusing its power to spam the public with its propaganda.
Sure. I agree with you on that. I also agree with the commenter who said that regulators should be a lot more proactive in enforcing the rules against false advertising and monopolies. It’s really quite amazing what companies can get away with.
Wouldn’t your “perfect world” just create monopolistic incumbents that are so entrenched in their segment that no other company could compete and it would ultimately stifle innovation since the “best” doesn’t have a reason to get better?
I mean, nobody is stopping you from making a better product right? You’d just have to advertise it “honestly”, which means that perhaps your thing would need to be better on some other axis like price or flexibility.
I'd say there was nothing inherently bad until it was pushed to a predictable conclusion. There are some folk stories along these lines, such as "the goose that laid the golden egg," or "the golden touch of King Midas." Someone is given a technology that is good for them if they use it with restraint, which of course they can't do, and it ends up destroying them. A modern story is "we can pump this black liquid out of the ground and double the human population."
Businesses are not entitled to discovery. If we want to know about stuff, we'll ask for it. They don't have an inherent right to our attention and forcing the issue is abuse.
I think the real problem here is the cowardice of commerce regulators. If they did their job properly so that no one organisation had more than (say) 10 percent of any market including social media advertising and search as markets, then we would not have as big a problem.
In other words, advertising is tolerable when the whole chain is thoroughly competitive.
What evidence is there for that though? It sounds to me as though it's free market dogma posing as reasonable common sense.
In social media, for example, there is currently competition. Yes FB is big, but new players are entering the market and causing them to shrink precisely by making the web even more toxic and unpleasant. Perfecting this process and introducing more competition (read desperation among product managers in the losing firms) isn't something I want to witness.
Company logos on the company’s own products - I don’t see an opportunity cost here so it’s hard to argue that the real estate was “purchased.”
Edit: Also, any advertisement for the advertising platform itself would be self-referential and thus violate your “generated by something else” clause.
Edit2: You could also take ads out to convince someone not to take an action even if there is no alternative. Still manipulation, but not to get someone to purchase a particular product.
Well, last week I discovered an entirely new category of product I didn't know existed (tag management assurance & compliance) via an advertorial piece posted on LinkedIn.
Other than the modern RTB ecosystem I don't think any other form of advertising is inherently flawed.
I don't see how this doesn't fit my definition of advertising. Liking the advertisement or finding it interesting is not in contradiction with what I wrote.
>> I'm coming to the conclusion that there is no good form of advertising.
We should really have a beer. I started in advertising when I was 15. (My dad said "sell shoes or find another job"). I was in and out of agencies through my twenties. Advertising is a fundamentally bad thing. But if your clients trust you, you can sometimes use it for good. You just have to actually twist the hell out of their message to do that, use their money in ways they didn't anticipate, and always have a really concrete idea of what you want to accomplish. All while making it seem like you're just having fun.
One thing it taught me is that there's no "system" in capitalist america. Not the way people talk about it. "The system" / "the man". The system is us. Just people in offices deciding how to frame something that will reach 100 million people. I was hated by teachers in art school for arguing my case in fine art crits. But arguing for showing something they don't like is the same skill that lets me argue the minority case for putting out controversial, socially meaningful ads that might get us in trouble, instead of inoffensive corporate pap.
You can always do good in advertising, simply because you have more power than almost anyone else. The temptation, and the easy thing, and the thing that pays, is to perpetuate little evils. But it's surprisingly easy to do good. It ain't "art". It's arguably more important, though. You're in the trenches where the battle for minds takes place.
I like this point of view. The system isn’t some permanent static game erected by Bezos and Schmidt for us to play out endlessly like Phil Connors in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.
We can shape things in limited ways. With some effort, we could see interesting results.
Do you have any examples of advertising that does good?
Insiders tend to deny that “the system” exists. Perhaps because they can’t imagine themselves being a cog in the machine. And judging by how much agency you give yourself that seems about right.
If you look carefully you might notice that your argument is also a critique of capitalism. The market mechanism in general selects for these “perfect” states of affairs, which often turn out out to be not that great in practice (although in fairness they are also genuinely pretty good often enough).
I’m not quite sure what the solution is, but I suspect it involves taking our foot off the gas of the “marketise everything” bandwagon and pluralising our approach, but without throwing the baby out with the bath water and removing these market mechanisms entirely.
Isn’t that also a critique of all desire, period? Thinking the next shiny thing will improve your life. Then again, how much of life consists of reacting to a state of unease or to some desire?
Critiques of capitalism are moldy and artic frigid takes. Largely because they operate under blind imperatives of unchecked assumptions and assertions. Two important questions are held as unspeakably rude and impertinent questions in their circles.
"How would that even work?" and in response. "Why (the hell) would anybody do that?". Those two questions are what make entreprise work, period. If a solution fails to address those two questions it is a guaranteed pipe dream or scam.
"Someone will repair my roof."
"How would that even work?"
"They show up with tools, climb onto the roof and inspect for damage before patching or replacing it."
"Why (the hell) would they do that?"
"Because it will get them paid a hefty bill."
Simple but there is still ample space pie in the sky thinking and outright lunacy in the heuristic. An example below to show what a thoroughly unconvincing answer would look like.
"Aliens will come out of the sky and fix my flat tire!"
"How the hell would that even work?"
"The electromagnetic emissions of our brain echo out into space of other dimensions unless retroreflected with a tinfoil hat. Then they'll ride space unicorns and laser fix my tire."
"Why the hell would do that?"
"For clicks on their alien equivalent of youtube."
Century of the Self claims that marketing in the naive old days prior to Bernays was like how the ad idealists picture it: if you want A, B, C, then our X can provide that for you. But people like Bernays realized that it was better to manipulate people’s wants rather than to simply respond to what people wanted. One example being “freedom sticks”, i.e. marketing smoking to women as a form of emancipation.
And arguably this form of marketing is necessary under consumer capitalism since you need people to use a lot of their income on consumption in order to keep the economy going.
This form of marketing and advertisement has been around for over a century and there is no going back.
And Adams even knew better. Earlier in his life he described the end result of optimizing elections for the candidate who best "catches people's attention". And that being that anyone capable of getting himself elected under those circumstances should in no way be given the power of holding office.
The media that is most "interesting" by web metrics is the least worth learning, and in many cases has negative informative value. Social media today is a million Zaphod Beeblebroxes saturating our senses.
Adams wrote absurdist satire, e.g. earth being destroyed for an intergalactic bypass.
Everyone back then had a fundamental belief that the internet would make things better just like the printing press had made things better. E.g. the nets elevating political discourse in Enders Game.
Back in the day, the web actually had to be sold to people and businesses. They were reticent to pony up money to "get online". They didn't understand the benefits. It was pretty common to make these kinds of pitches to businesses as part of a broader idea of getting everyone online where we would all enjoy the benefits of a free and open society.
Businesses were the last to take it up, and the first to destroy it. But no one saw that coming.
I heard this kind of pitch made a dozens times by 1999, to hundreds of businessmen who are now probably dead. No one thought for a moment that getting more metrics on people would mean the death of privacy. Everyone was worried about the government spying on us, and no one had an idea it would be through scrolling and click tracking. At the time this was written, I had a palm pilot and mobile web; but I never would have predicted what a combination of smart phones and social media would do to scramble the average American consumers' brains.
This is anecdotal but when I started as a CS freshmen a few years after this article was written online ”intelligent” advertisement, was, viewed as both interesting and positive in a lot of circles most people probably wouldn’t believe.
This was a time where advertising companies had to contact the owners of popular webpages, and then try to sell the idea of putting their advertisements on the webpage. Where in the modern world, it’s mostly the other way around, or at least easy because influential people on the internet typically leave their contact information. It was a time where “computer-clusters” were considered a revolutionary idea that might just topple mainframes. It was long before Linus stepped up and fixed version control because he was still working to make Linux great. It was at a time where the absolutely top anti-virus software couldn’t detect a cult-of-the-dead-cow Trojan in an image file.
I know this might not have been the case in California or other tech centrals but it sure was the reality of the CS department at the university of Aalborg in Denmark.
I remember these things because some of the first really interesting projects I got to hack at was creating spam-filters. Because most importantly of all, this was a time where Google had only just emerged, and years before g-mail became a thing.
Given how hard it was to sell advertisements, just think about how hard it is to find the Danish teenager who runs some popular website. Then how hard it is to get the business contract with a minor going, if you mange to convince him/her to put a huge ugly banner on their site. Coca Cola would obviously do it, but for a lot of smaller companies it was only natural to go for much easier (and cheaper) solutions, such as spamming e-mails.
So it was actually a time where an alternative to the most common advertisement practices was something everyone almost everyone wanted to help create. Most of us never even thought about the downsides, unlike the author.
What a negative view of the web and the world, and with the wrong interpretation. What won wasn't conspiracy theories and scammy ads.
What won was videos of cats, your aunt being able to get video instructions of how to replace a car tire, open-source software, and an explosion of tools that are getting more sophisticated by the minute, to the point that during a global pandemic, a lot of office jobs almost seamlessly moved fully remote, even if for a while.
Yes, someone needs to tackle those issues you've mentioned, but by and large your description of the internet is not accurate to global use we get from it.
Isn't it more like an arms race between the two?
It's hard to watch a cat video these days without having auto-play show you a conspiracy theory, one or two videos later...
What won wasn't conspiracy theories and scammy ads.
What won was videos of cats
Totally orthogonal. Your statement is about as insightful as stating, "no... pants didn't win. shoes won!"
There were always multiple things that were going to "win," right? The web/internet was always going to be some mixture of entertainment (cat GIFs, etc), commerce, communication, and information. They do not compete with each other in meaningful ways.
As you say, yes, there is a lot of great utility out there. I can look up how to fix anything in my house on YouTube. That's super cool, and it has made my life tangibly better.
But as for advertisements and other sorts of information, the outcome is a lot darker. From the article:
Now I regard magazine advertising as a big problem.
I really hate it. It overwhelms the copy text,
which is usually reduced to a dull, grey little
stream trickling its way through enormous glaring
billboard-like pages all of which are clamoring to
draw your attention to stuff you don't want; and the
first thing you have to do when you buy a new magazine
is shake it over a bin in order to shed all the
coupons, sachets, packets, CDs and free labrador puppies
which make them as fat an unwieldy as a grandmother's
scrapbook.
Tell me, with a straight face, that the overwhelming majority of the modern web isn't the digital form of exactly that.
You ignore sock puppets, troll farms, social manipulation by malicious actors, CP, literally wasting the energy consumption of Argentina to hash transactions to make money, the anti-vax insanity enabled by echo chambers, and god knows what else.
With the exception of hash energy waste you ignore their preexistence in society. Seriously, the people who find the internet the well of all sorrows keep on forgetting history beyond the remmit of their personal nostalgia.
Disturbingly look at netherlands in the 1971-1987 child pornography was outright legal and had Lolita magazine openly existing. Look up Joop Wilhelmus, the infamous proprietor of it. Somehow it remained legal for 55 magazine issues.
I believe that you ignore the scale of the things that are happening. To achieve the same "harm" then, as now, one needed significantly more money, and resources than they need today, and it was significantly more obvious.
We should also not forget everything that's happening on 4chan (/b/, /x/, /pol/), and the like. Countless trolling that resulted in suicides with zero repercussions, doxxing, incidents like the one that lead us to "we did it reddit", QAnon, and so on.
To ignore the scale and claim that it was happening then so nothing changes is dishonest.
The payment mechanism he talks about that would enable micropayments to individuals rather than corporations, never happened.
It technically happened of course in the form of various companies trying to build systems that do this (using e.g. crypto currencies) and put themselves in the middle to try to "own" and control the lucrative revenue streams. But that's the reason it never happens because as soon as you do that, you end up with a fragmented mess of different companies all failing to get a critical mass of actual micropayments happening. So, the money exchanged adds up to not much at all. Most artists keep on dealing with agents and big media corporations. And most consumers keep on handing over chunks of their income to those same corporations.
I've not actually bought a newspaper or a magazine in over ten years and very little in the ten before that. I regularly did this in the nineties though. There no longer is a need. I can read a lot online for free. And I do. But I do feel sort of bad for the hard working journalists producing all the content I read every day not really getting anything from me.
Authors struggle not in finding their audience but in monetizing it. Ads are not the way. I'd love to have a sane way to reward them without having to micromanage the expense. If somebody builds a way for me to fairly distribute 20$/month among the authors of all the content I enjoy every month, I'd be happy to. That doesn't exist. That's money I've not been spending for decades. I spent that on Spotify and Netflix though.
IMHO such a system should exist. Douglas Adams predicted it because it so obviously needs to exist. Instead we've got this endless amount of greed and stupidity preventing people from making a living from creating content because middle men peddling shitty ads for shitty products need to be payed off. The content creation is the bit I want to pay for. Everything else is redundant or can be payed for by authors as needed once they have revenue (e.g. editing is a useful service).
Maybe I read a few hundred articles per month. Lets call it 200 (nice round number). That's ten cents per article. Now imagine that a journalist produces something that is read by 1 million people and that 1 percent of those actually pay that 10 cent. That's a thousand dollar. It's not a lot. But if they write maybe a few articles per month, that's a nice income. And those articles stay online for a long time. It would actually stimulate the creation of content that has a long shelf life. Passive income basically. Exactly what I want as a reader: quality content.
The Stripe founders point to the fact that the HTTP protocol actually includes a status code for “payment required”. So the idea of micropayments actually belonged to the original conception of the internet.
It seems to me that is was is precisely because of the difficulty of receiving payment that we ended up with a few large players, and with advertising as the main vehicle for getting paid on the web - with all the consequences, including an unduly focus on short-term attention and clicks.
Very few people seem to be aware that PayPal does in fact provide micropayments that have dramatically lower costs for low-priced transactions. Over at ardour.org, a large chunk of our income comes from US$1 transactions, and using PayPal for that saves us US$0.23 per transaction!
However, the friction is still too high for this to be a reasonable implementation of what you're asking for.
It is also harrowing to think about the roughly 25% reduction in income that we'd face if PayPal dropped this fee structure at any point.
Funny, I first read "passive income" as "basic income". It's a related point, though. If you cannot afford to work for free, you'll never write that first lucky rent-generating article.
It matches what I see on Patreon (web comics at least): None of the creators seem to have started with the assurance that they could generate a significant income, or even quit their full-time job. A few of them do now, but I'm pretty sure most of those comics would have happened anyway (given the time), because the artists really wanted to create them.
By the way, free alternative platforms like Liberapay do exist (still growing, too). But I cannot blame artists to use Patreon instead - most of their audience is there. Audience comes first, and paying 10% in fees doesn't matter when you expected no significant earnings anyway.
Another interesting point on Patreon is that I can see the artist's approximate income. I may decide to support new creators instead when I see that they have already 10k a month. Not the most common case on Patreon, of course, but it matches my goal to support the creation of new art better than helping some super-popular ones to get their next million.
The problem with Patreon is that it is the opposite of micropayments. It's handful of people paying a small selection of people. It helps of course but I'm subscribed to well over a hundred Youtube channels (many of which have Patreon accounts) and I'm simply not able to pay all of them a significant amount because that would be too expensive and I'm reluctant to cherry pick just a few because that would be unfair to the others. And I don't want to micromanage a hundred plus micro payments assuming that's even possible. But I'd have no trouble to have say 10$ per month distributed among them. It would have to be easy, fair, transparent, and automated. Even if it's just 1 cent; that adds up to interesting money if you get thousands to millions of views per month.
I had never heard of Liberapay. But it definitely looks very interesting. And they seem to be handling some non trivial amounts of cash despite being relatively small.
I noticed Aurelien Pierre is on it apparently and I actually do enjoy his content and work (he works on and publishes about Darktable). Something like that with millions of users paying every month would sustain quite a few content creators; even if the individual payments are small. It's one of those things where a critical mass of content creators need to join for this to start working.
It's free in the sense of being entirely free software. You can read the SQL code that calculates your balance. It's alternative in the sense that they don't take a cut of your donations. (Sites like Patreon take a much bigger cut than any payment provider.) They suggest donating to Liberapay itself, but it's optional.
But yes, it isn't alternative as in "truly micro". In fact they got kicked from of their previous provider, probably for generating too many small transactions. They changed the system, so now you usually pay for a few months in advance.
Technically it wouldn't be hard, and stuff like Substack makes you think it's possible. The problem is getting the authors and publishers to agree to it. Consumers will never be able to micromanage content; one thing we've forgotten in the day of swiftly switching between ad/news platforms is that traditional media does serve a purpose as consolidators. Only the most wonkish will seek out individual writers and pay for their articles. If writers could make money that way, they would. But they have to go under contract with whomever will pay; and the WaPo isn't going to let you get through their paywall and read one journalist's post for 10¢.
Also, a dime here and there doesn't pay for a middle east bureau or a team of reporters to cover an election or a war. It's unrealistic to expect reporters to risk their necks on the possibility of keeping an audience and it just might lead to the kind of unanticipated negative results that online advertising did.
Me, for instance, I'm done sending any money to Matt Taibbi until he goes back to Russia, drinks at least four gallons of vodka, and gets an interview with Vlad. Should he do that for my $1? Fuck no! A world where we pay journalists directly is a world without editors, where you can't trust any information to be vetted at all. In all probability it's just some lies their personal subscribers want to hear. They may be hired whores, but at least if they work for a newspaper you know who hired them.
> Also, a dime here and there doesn't pay for a middle east bureau or a team of reporters to cover an election or a war.
Check out Patreon and Kickstarter some time. Sure, that's way more than "a dime" for the basic individual contribution, but the dollar amounts are still very manageable. And it all adds up.
> A world where we pay journalists directly is a world without editors, where you can't trust any information to be vetted at all.
You can pay people for editorial work, too. Ultimately, you're just choosing whom to trust.
The technology for this is mostly boring, off the shelf stuff. Or it should be. Crypto might help but is probably more of a distraction than an asset given all the scams, hypes, etc. that surrounds it. But building such a thing on e.g. Stellar or something similarly suitable for fintech and micropayments would be pretty doable. I actually know one company in this space, Satoshi Pay, that have been trying to do this using Stellar.
The issue is that building something like this is something that needs funding. You need engineers, lawyers, financially savvy people, etc. The tech side is actually the easy part. This in turn often implies companies and central control and ownership. Investors get involved and from then on it's about them getting a return on investment rather than actually solving the problem. And of course these companies start competing with each other and start creating walled gardens. And then there are people inside the walls and outside the walls. And of course multiple walled gardens just makes it worse. That's basically the history to date of micropayments: it has not worked so far and IMHO it cannot work this way.
In my view, such a thing would instead have to be run and coordinated by non profit organizations (you'd probably need multiple legal entities in different countries) and be based on open standards. Getting that organized is not primarily a technical problem. In fact, it would probably be best for journalists themselves to get organized and jointly own such a thing instead of waiting for some entrepreneur to wave a magic wand to make it happen.
You could fund this from memberships. For example authors wishing to earn on the platform could pay a flat fee per year in exchange for a cut of the monthly revenue based on the performance of their content or some other rules. That way 100% of money payed to readers would go to content creators and the platform maintenance would be payed for by the receivers of that money. And you could simply withhold that from their monthly earnings. For example 10$ per author adds up quickly. It basically means that they'd only need 100 reads at 10 cents. Anything beyond that would be profit. A few tens of thousands of authors like that could manage to fund a pretty sizable organization + hosting and other cost.
Anecdotally I’ve just started buying magazines last year to drop on the table for my kids to pick up and read, something I remember doing myself when I was a child. It is impossible with personalized devices to just casually stumble onto something interesting without trying to.
I think when I miss the old internet I miss the promise of a new way of living. The whole "information wants to be free" thing. Of course, we _have_ a new way of living, and it's amazing how much great information is freely available, but the downsides are pretty substantial.
There are plenty of worthwhile efforts on the Internet focused on making information "free(r)", and they're humongously larger nowadays compared to the late 1990s. Get away from the commercialized Web and social media sites, and you might enjoy them too.
I caught the tail end of this wind of optimism when I was first connected in 2001. In my head, the Internet will always be that hectic, eclectic place it was then. Even the design of this website fits that paradigm.
Watching it taper off with the rise of "social media" was a sad thing indeed, but I don't think the old spirit is fully lost.
And I'm already running my own self managed website on a VPS.
What I meant was the rise of "social media" to supplant what "the internet" means in the popular imagination. I've quite a collection of bookmarks that proves that Internet still lives.
There was a void that fearmongerers and fuck ups failed to fill yet with the fall of the Soviet Union. You unironically saw Hollywood bitching about the lack of an enemy power leaving spies with nothing to justify themselves. Of course frankly Hollywood goes out of the way to show how infested they are with sociopaths and narcissists via bizzare unironic moral takes that get through while far more innocous ones get blocked. It is downright bizzare even for an entertainment bias.
> Since you're currently holding a magazine, let's think about what might happen when magazine publishing is no longer a river in its own right, but is just a current in the digital ocean.
…
Once we drop the idea of discretely bound and sold sheaves of glossily processed wood pulp from the model, what do we have left? Anything useful?
That phrase was fun to read on my iPhone today ;-)
What have we got to lose, ad wise? Both privacy and the chance to expand our horizons.
The privacy issues are talked about daily.
Getting ads for just things you're interested in means you don't get ads for anything you haven't seen before. And what's worse, the same goes on for content selection wherever you're being given a custom selection of content. You end up in a bubble plus some things sprinkled in to outrage you and make you stay.
how about Not getting ads you expicitly said you did Not want to get?
if one day that means All ads, well, fine.. someone's fantasy has been too limited.
"ifndef NOCATS" is much more powerful than "ifdef CATS"
..
Always a pleasure to read Douglas Adams. As usual an engaging and insightful read. I’d be curious to know what his thoughts would have been on the current state of online ads, social networks (engineering?), and NTFs. I suppose they all pop out as derivatives of the main point of the article, that new things often come from realising old limitations no longer apply.
> The advertisers pay the magazine for the opportunity to put links to their ads on popular pages of the magazine and - well, you see the way it works. It is, I am told by people with seriously raised eyebrows, astonishingly effective. The thing which drops out of the problem is the notion that advertising need be irritating and intrusive.
Unfortunately, the notion "that advertising need be irritating and intrusive" didn't drop out, which is why browsing the web without uBlock is a horrible experience.
The problem with Douglas Adams is the beauty of the writing distracts
from the the real message. I barely noticed this was about
_advertising_ as most commentators here have picked up. To better
understand a piece like this, remember that Adams is working as a
professional writer and has to give his employer - a magazine here -
something they want. In this case the vehicle is a story about
magazines and how they are dysfunctional with respect to
advertising. The real writing, as is always the case with Adams, is at
a higher level, and is about how we stupidly build complexity,
obfuscation, indirection and side effects into technological life,
failing (or forgetting) to see the value of simpler and more humane
configurations.
I wonder who would still trust such 'clicks' metrics.
Wild guess, in the context of selling "something" and using ads on the web, the only reliable metric is the correlation between the sales amount and the ad campaign.
> All that mucking about they do developing high-tech copying and printing machines is just creating a commodity market in toner cartridges, which is where their profit lies.
Isn't that the exact opposite of what they are doing? I.e. creating specialized cartridges which only work on one brand of machine, rather than a commodity that is interchangeable with other brands?
He meant commodity 'something that can be traded, or any useful thing' rather than commodity 'when customers perceive little or no value difference between brands or versions.'
Douglas Adams tells how the internet commerce should work.
No subscription to online magazines or content streaming services. When you notice something you like, you pay for it: one article, one TV-show at at time.
Artificially bundling stuff together is unnatural in the Internet.
How it worked out: if you notice something interesting and there’s a paywall, you forget about it and go back to whatever cat pictures you were browsing.
Well... yeah. Why would I pay for something on the Internet? We've all been conditioned that text content (at least, and also music and videos to some extent) should be available for free, and ads can be blocked.
I'm vaguely for the idea of micropayments, as long they're actually micro (10⁻⁶). Even 10 cents for a piece of content seems somehow too much, because it all adds up. If we do the napkin math, large newspapers like the NYT might not be able to sustain themselves in that new world:
They have always thought that way about software. All my early-childhood games (even on the Commodore 64) came from copied floppy disks. In my teens I bought my own games, but those were always group-buys: I had copies of all the games my friends bought too, and they had copies of mine.
that describes my experiences. If my interest is high enough then i'll go through the various settings to disable the paywall. Once, and only once so far, I bought a pdf about a particular type of rocket engine that i couldn't get out of my head.
For context, this was a naive era in the first dot com bubble. The money was flowing freely from highly funded advertisers for relatively unobtrusive banner ads. That changed drastically in the early 2000s.
For a long time advertising was the art of creating "wants". For a century it worked "like a charm". We are now living in a world that (at least in so called developed world) is overconsuming by a very large factor.
The proliferation of the incredibly regressive practice of building and selling behavioral profiles of unsuspecting "consumers" may in part be due to the cannibalistic arms race of an exhausted economic paradigm.
Somehow we need to find sane digital ways to connect people who have to say, sell, announce something with people who want to hear, buy, be informed about something.
It doesn't sound that complicated if we lose our unsustainable ways of thinking and acting
Title seems very incorrect. First issue of Wired was 1993, not 1998. The URL makes it look like this is from 1998, so definitely not from the first issue.
This just shows how incredibly hard it was in 1998 to see what would happen when 4 billion illiterate assholes got online. The assumption at the time was that anyone able to see the ads (on Hotwired!) were totally immune to any kind of serious manipulation.
There seem to be a lot of references to irreverent iconoclasts lately here, Adams and (always) Feynman and some Hamming and Hawking all the rest. In my personal life I've heard people mention Magritte much more often than usual. Is that part of the zeitgeist? Is silly the hat we wear because someone tells us we must wear somber hats? Or else?
Under the harshest, most doctrinaire leadership, the outliers thrive most and gain an audience. Not to call out Biden or dems here, but to say that both of those power parties seem awfully authoritarian, so . . .
In a literal sense, that is indeed how it turned out. "Interesting" won.
Unfortunately the version of "interesting" that many people chose was simply toxic dreck: conspiracy theories, social media feeds literally designed to make us feel negative emotions, scammy ads that have been engineered to trick the maximum number of people, and so on.
So yeah, "interesting" won, but I'm not sure this is the future Adams was excited about.