Ending our Medium integration

I can’t highlight/select text without it getting all hyperactive on me. I just want to read an article.

The other trouble is, once you have some experience there just aren't very many good tutorials. I was looking through tutorials for node, and most of the ones I found started off with how to open the developer console, and what a for loop is. I'd very much prefer if tutorial authors would just link to one of the many basic CS fundamentals tutorials, and then skip much of the basics. If I'm learning Javascript, I just want to know what the for loop syntax is, without needing an explanation of the concept.

I should write a blog post about this, but I'm like the last person on Earth who feels like writing articles about tech biz finance stuff, but I feel like somehow in the past twenty years one of the basic principles of transacting with other humans got lost.

If you're using a product or service, partnering with a company, using their API, buying their stuff, selling stuff to them, whatever, you should at some level understand their incentives. And, in a capitalist economy, "incentive" is mostly synonymous with "money".

If you don't know how the businesses you interact with make money, you're setting yourself up for heartbreak. As far as I can tell, tech companies make money one of four ways:

1. VC funding.

2. Selling your attention to other companies.

3. Selling your data to other companies.

4. You pay them for stuff.

1 has a finite lifespan which means, eventually, they will switch to one of the others. Unless you are certain which of the others they'll switch to and how, committing to use a business at this stage is a crapshoot. In practice, it seems businesses that currently rely on VC funding to stay solvent more often than not pivot to sad shady shit. Much of this has to do with not giving themselves any other options. Once they have a big userbase used to spending zero for their product, it's very hard to change, so they end up having to find money other sketchy ways.

2 is OK if you're OK with it. However, your attention is literally the most priceless commodity you own. Everything else you will ever do with your life begins with you spending attention on things. So if squandering a bit of that looking at dumb ads so that you can read a free article is worth it to you, that's fine, but I think most of us could probably find better things to do with our limited brain juice.

3 is maybe OK, but, man, it's dubious. The more a company knows about you, the more leverage they have to influence you. With machine learning is going, the amount of actionable intelligence companies can squeeze out of a given blob of data keeps going up. Stuff like Cambridge Analytica doesn't keeps me up at night. The long trajectory of this path looks an awful lot like straight up dystopia to me.

4 has served humanity fairly well for thousands of years. Its main point against is that you have to pay for stuff.

Personally, I try to do 4 when I can. Whenever I use a business that doesn't do 4, I assume anything at all could happen in the future. They owe me nothing because I've paid them nothing.

Anyone who's surprised by formerly-beloved-VC-backed-startup-that-turns-evil today must really be willfully blind.

You know, it's obvious it's a link, and I'm pretty sure I clicked on it and noted it adds the quotes then immediately forgot.

I'm sitting here looking at it now and I still can't believe that's the function. It looks like a link to a search of just that term.

Of course, even when I click on it, I get ads for hotels that are missing "proton" and "transfer" first, then random word dictionaries, both well above perfectly valid results talking about chemists who played the balalaika or research done in the city of Balalaika.

Which means that it's a link to getting a different wrong set of results and it's there as a kind of fig leaf on the sin of distorting searches so heavily.

Platform quality is long term money, platform monetization is short term money.

With VCs who only care that the growth curve is exponential, they go for short term money every time, because yeah you might crash the company, but you've got a 5% chance of becoming a big evil corp.