Stop The JerkTech • Hacker News Board

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#161

Post by jamesisaac » Fri, Jul 04, 2014, 2:29 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #142

eevilspock wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Count all of the web content you've consumed and all the web services you've used in the past year. Now count all the ones you've paid for. Also, those paid-for services you mention are of such high quality (to you, not advertisers) because you pay for them. You are the customer not the product, as they say.

Most people don't pay for Wikipedia, how are they the product? Many people pay for Hulu and many other services, and still get ads, how are they not the product? That cliché can't die soon enough.

It's quite representative of the problem if you can't identify the difference between Wikipedia - a non-profit which is entirely ad-free and runs exclusively on donations, compared with the majority of other free sites which are funded by subjecting their visitors to advertising. No wonder Wikipedia has so to push so hard with its annual donation drives, if people can't even recognise the benefits of keeping it free from commercialism.

Hulu is an example which mixes both approaches - clearly an $8/mo premium subscription isn't enough to support their business model, so it has to be supplemented with ads. Not sure why this needs explaining. TV is obviously an industry very tightly coupled with ads, making it more difficult to disrupt with a fully ad-free approach.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#162

Post by wpietri » Fri, Jul 04, 2014, 3:10 PM UTC

MBlume wrote: post #35

wpietri wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're doing some of that. But there's a problem with that: plenty of people who live here can't afford a sudden major bump in living expenses. In the long term, correct pricing is part of the solution. But in the short term, it'd be unfortunate to solve the problem by screwing poorer people. And anyway, this could be a temporary spike in demand. Once places like ZipCar and Uber get ahold of self-driving cars, I exp…

Politically impossible, but my blanket response to "how will this affect poor people" arguments is "give them money" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

Yeah, that's an approach I'd be happy with, although getting the levels right is certainly tricky. Another approach is to spend the revenue raised in ways that help, like improving transit.

If they put connected meters on all the news spots, we could also give people who live nearby income-based discounts.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#163

Post by untog » Fri, Jul 04, 2014, 3:15 PM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #134

untog wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, while it would shift the value to rich people, it also free up the rich people's time, so they (rich people) can create more value. Have trickle down economics ever been proven to actually work? Either way, my problem is this: millionaires don't care about running one-off, unique restaurants. They'd want to set up a chain, or something similarly profitable. So if we go with this "redirecting money to rich people…

McDonalds doesn't require reservation and nobody would pay for a reservation to McDonalds. In order for the scheme to work, you need to have restaurant that is so popular that people would pay premium just to get a reservation there. That's not McDonalds, that's usually the same one-off, unique restaurant, and rich people would seem to care well enough for it if they agree to pay just to get into the door. So there's…

I don't mean that as anything to do with reservations. Just that because there are savings to be made in an industry doesn't mean they should be. The result for the restaurant industry would be endless identical restaurants with the same ingredients.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#164

Post by wpietri » Fri, Jul 04, 2014, 3:16 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #142

eevilspock wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Count all of the web content you've consumed and all the web services you've used in the past year. Now count all the ones you've paid for. Also, those paid-for services you mention are of such high quality (to you, not advertisers) because you pay for them. You are the customer not the product, as they say.

Most people don't pay for Wikipedia, how are they the product? Many people pay for Hulu and many other services, and still get ads, how are they not the product? That cliché can't die soon enough.

Wikipedia is not a business, so that's irrelevant.

Hulu's just funny to me. You're paying to be a product. It means the business decision makers will respect you a little, but how much depends on how much of the revenue you're bringing in and what sort of industry it is.

The cliché is an excellent guide to the situation. So many people don't seem to understand why ad-supported businesses work they way they do, and in particular why they don't seem to have the customer's best interests in mind.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#165

Post by gfodor » Fri, Jul 04, 2014, 3:16 PM UTC

eevilspock wrote: post #133

gfodor wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is advertising "fundamentally manipulative and dishonest?" People aren't stupid. Give them more credit. Truly effective advertising gives more credit to its viewers than you seem to. Have you ever run an advertising campaign? Do you know anything about marketing a product? Cynically manipulating people may help you in the short run, but good sales and marketing is about informing people of value you can provide i…

The Co-Founder and CTO of Adtuitive, an ad platform startup, defending advertising! You make Upton Sinclair proud! Like I said, "When I talk to anyone who's livelihood doesn't rely on advertising or marketing, there is near unanimous agreement that advertising is fundamentally manipulative and dishonest." People can be stupid. People can be manipulated. Propaganda works. Take political ads. Which ones work best, the…

Nice ad hom, but it turns out my ad tech startup (which was now many years ago) focused on ads that simply delivered product names, images, and prices that were contextually relevant. So pretty much the most non-manipulative form of advertising possible, and it worked well. I think working in this space for a few years at one point in my career (but no longer) lends more credibility to my argument, not less.

I never said there isn't such a thing as manipulative advertising, what I said was that advertising is not inherently manipulative and dishonest. It's a tool for communicating, and in my experience in general people see though manipulation tactics, such like they do when you try to sell them something by bullshitting them. Well written Google ads, well written marketing for websites, etc, all generally flow from a central theme of communicating clearly and honestly to the reader what value you are offering, and giving them reasons to want to pursue your business. It's salesmenship, and I guess only if you think salesmanship is inherently dishonest and manipulative then you'd think advertising is too.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#166

Post by wpietri » Fri, Jul 04, 2014, 3:20 PM UTC

EdwardDiego wrote: post #81

eevilspock wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Because nearly every internet business gets it's revenue from advertising, a lot of good people jump through hoops to convince themselves that they have not made a deal with the devil. The downvotes[1] come fast when I point out this moral and cognitive dissonance, usually without any counter argument since t…

> When I talk to anyone who's livelihood doesn't rely on advertising or marketing, there is near unanimous agreement that advertising is fundamentally manipulative and dishonest. Besides the social cost of Advertising, there many other costs. Such as? Keen to hear. :) Also, what would you propose in lieu of the current advertising supported model that is dominant today?

For me the biggest problem with it is the enormous waste of talent. If we banned all advertising tomorrow, nothing particularly bad would happen. People would still learn about products; companies would still gain and lose customers. Indeed, that whole process might be more effective. But suddenly the US would have $500 billion or so worth of labor and goods to devote to some purpose that is actually productive.

Actual smart humans waste their entire lives doing something that adds zero net value the system. When I think of my friends in advertising, it always makes me a little sad. What good things could they have done with their lives?

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#167

Post by wpietri » Fri, Jul 04, 2014, 3:33 PM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #137

kourt wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A rich person earns more money per hour than a poor person (by definition). No, that's a person with "high hourly earned income". Making wealth is not the only way to get rich. For most of human history it has not even been the most common. Until a few centuries ago, the main sources of wealth were mines, slaves and serfs, land, and cattle, and the only ways to acquire these rapidly were by inheritance, marriage, con…

We're not living "a few centuries ago", however. And there is also an important qualifying word "rapidly". One doesn't have to become rich overnight to be rich now. As for the "bad reputation", given that most things that were written and otherwise arrived to us were composed by people of some means at least (excluding monks, etc. which are harder to classify by modern standards) - really poor folks had high illitera…

One study says that only a third of the Forbes 400 started from a middle-class background or lower. [1] A third of them had purely inherited wealth. [2] And when I look around at the rich people I'm familiar with, they aren't enormously more productive than their peers. Often it was a right-place, right-time thing. If Bill Gates had been born 50 years earlier, for example, it's hard to imagine him becoming a zillionaire.

So I think it's an enormous error to confuse wealth with creating lots of value per hour. Wealthy just means you control a lot of capital.

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/id/49167533#

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/erincarlyle/2013/09/18/how-self-...

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#168

Post by nl » Fri, Jul 04, 2014, 3:39 PM UTC

aaronwall wrote: post #23

nl wrote: post #17

Just wait someone realizes that it costs less for a driverless, electric car to sit in a traffic jam than a car park.

Then they can have a fleet of them which go into traffic at peak hours & allow people to bid to have them removed from traffic. ;)

It's more serious than that. Car owners (or co-ops) can send their cars to loiter in deliberately created traffic jams and have them wait there all day, because it is cheaper than paying for parking. Then you press a button when you want your car, and it turns out of the traffic jam and comes and gets you.

If you actually want to go down the road that has been selected as the most appropriate place to loiter... too bad for you.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#169

Post by Tominator0 » Fri, Jul 04, 2014, 3:44 PM UTC

Mandatum wrote: post #60

wpietri wrote: post #7

God yes. The whole point of commerce is the creation and exchange of value. The great startups have been great because they create massive amounts of value in the world. Startups like this don't create value. They just shift the value around. In the case of these startups, they shift the value to rich people while pocketing the cash. They are essentially parasitic. Not only is that a dick move, it's dumb for a startu…

They're just clipping the ticket for bribery. This same thing exists in the underworld, however tech has made this sort of thing a "legitimate" business. I don't see much of a difference between this, and say, high frequency trading. Different areas, but same concept.

You seem to accept the media's sensationalist take on HFT which was provided to them solely by Michael Lewis. While HFT isn't exactly kosher, it's not as bad as you may like to think. Here's a video explaining some advantages of HFT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9aYZYSwCLo

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#170

Post by wpietri » Fri, Jul 04, 2014, 3:55 PM UTC

fidotron wrote: post #47

wpietri wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parking isn't undervalued. People just pay in time, not money. Better to say that it's inefficiently priced. Shoup's "The High Cost of Free Parking" is the bible on that: http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Parking-Updated-Edition/dp/1...

It's totally undervalued. Ask the average person if they think the price of parking is right and they'll probably claim it's outrageously high, when the existence and apparently enough-to-be visible success of this app prove the opposite is true.

You're making the same mistake I pointed out above. Ask people how they feel about getting a good parking spot and you'll clearly hear that they value it. Or measure the amount of time they spend driving around looking; it's a clear demonstration that they value parking.

They do, however, expect it to be free. It's not a normal market.

Note that the same is true about love and sex. Most people value those things highly, but you won't discover that by looking at what they pay for it.