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Stop The JerkTech

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Re: Stop The JerkTech

#181

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#182

Post by jamesisaac »

icebraining wrote: post #178
jamesisaac wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can identify the difference - the cliché can't! That's my whole point! Wikipedia is the proof the paying is not always required to not "be the product", unlike claimed. Hulu proves that it's also not sufficient.

Fair enough - I thought you were claiming the cliché was generally incorrect, not that there are a few exceptions which break it. Obviously I can't argue with that. It's intended as a rule of thumb and applies to the vast majority of the internet. Especially if you count a donation-driven site like shareware software - an encouraged, but optional, request for payment.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#183

Post by eevilspock »

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 the advertising (and selling of your eyeballs) that makes you a product. Wikipedia has no ads. To the degree that Hulu relies on ads, we are their product. Labeling it a cliché doesn't make it less true.

There's nothing wrong with free, as long as it's truly free. Ad-supported services have huge costs that we all pay for as I explain in detail in my linked comment.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#184

Post by smsm42 »

wpietri wrote: post #167
smsm42 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 zilliona…

The third is not a majority. The first link says 57% were not born wealthy.

>>> And when I look around at the rich people I'm familiar with

Anecdote is not data. I don't know where you live, but depending on it and your social circle, the minuscule number (compared to the whole nation) of people you can observe personally would be very different.

>>> Often it was a right-place, right-time thing.

It was. So what? Nobody claims billionaires are superhuman. The claim is only they deliver (or delivered) value. Did they come into position of being able to deliver the value by luck? Maybe. So what? If you per chance found a deposit of gold or discovered very valuable technology - they fact chance played role in it does not change the price of gold or the usability of technology.

>>> If Bill Gates had been born 50 years earlier, for example, it's hard to imagine him becoming a zillionaire.

Sure, so that guy everybody mentions would be called "John Walles" instead, it's no different.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#185

Post by smsm42 »

untog wrote: post #163
smsm42 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That conclusion appears to be wrong, as there is a very large and consistent demand for non-identical restaurants with varied ingredients. Of course, investing in McDonalds or even Subway would probably be safer than in an unique restaurant, but that did not lead to the extinction of varied unique restaurants and probably never will.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#186

Post by mercer »

gfodor wrote: post #165
eevilspock wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe your startup is on the 'good' side of advertising, but is it really so unreasonable to state that advertising, in the vast majority of cases, is manipulative and dishonest?

(whether that's by definition a bad thing is another issue, though)

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#187

Post by wpietri »

icebraining wrote: post #146
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…

plenty of people who live here can't afford a sudden major bump in living expenses. Where I live, residents can get a small sign from the municipality that they can put in their car to avoid parking fees (when parked near their home). Seems like a simple solution.

Interesting. We have lots of area designated as neighborhood residents only if you're staying longer than 2 hours. But I don't think there's any place where a neighborhood sticker gets out out of the fees. Might be a good approach.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#188

Post by wpietri »

icebraining wrote: post #179
wpietri wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wikipedia is not a business, so that's irrelevant. So it's not "if you're not paying for it; you're the product", it's "if you're not paying and the provider is a business, you're the product". And then we're just missing a truckload of exceptions, instead of two truckloads. 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…

Are you just now discovering that simple heuristics don't always contain all the truth in the world? I think the rest of us generally know that, which is why we're comfortable with the notion that broad, pithy statements aren't perfectly accurate across all time and space.

Comcast is a fine example of something where you're the product even if you're paying for it. (Note that "if you're not paying for it you're the product" doesn't have anything to say about the case where you are paying.) Monopolies and oligopolies basically get to treat customers like property, because they know the customers don't have much real choice. Comcast is exactly what I had in mind when I said it depends on the industry.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#189

Post by wpietri »

gfodor wrote: post #121
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…

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…

I think he's generally right. Look at the informational content of most ads. What is Coca-Cola telling you about their products that you don't already know? Nothing. They changed their product once, 25 years ago, and it was a disaster, so they changed it back. There's nothing new to say.

They spend $4 billion per year not to inform people of the value they provide, but to manipulate people into purchasing more Coca Cola. And it works.

If they stop, then Pepsi will spend more, capture Coca Cola customers, and Coke will shrink. Or people will say, "Hey, maybe I should drink something more healthy," and stop buying sugar-water altogether. Can't have that! So Coke will keep burning money on manipulating people.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#190

Post by wpietri »

smsm42 wrote: post #184
wpietri wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 zilliona…

The third is not a majority. The first link says 57% were not born wealthy. >>> And when I look around at the rich people I'm familiar with Anecdote is not data. I don't know where you live, but depending on it and your social circle, the minuscule number (compared to the whole nation) of people you can observe personally would be very different. >>> Often it was a right-place, right-time thing. It was. So what? Nobo…

>> It was. So what?

So maybe you should read all the way to the the last line of my post, which explains my exact point: someone currently being a billionaire doesn't mean that they will make the world much better if they spend an hour on one thing versus another.

Ergo, kourt's point stands: somebody being wealthy is not any sort of proof that they can create more value per hour. Which is the (wrong) notion that NhanN was promoting.

If you're going to jump into a conversation in the middle, please try to pay attention to what's going on. It's frustrating to have to connect the dots for you.

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