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You Are the Product (2017)

lrb.co.uk

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Re: You Are the Product (2017)

#41

Post by thesz »

Quote: "Plenty of companies, indeed entire industries, base their business model on being evil. The insurance business, for instance, depends on the fact that insurers charge customers more than their insurance is worth."

No, it is not.

The insurance business depends on getting money mass to hedge risks and invest into something else. Basically, this is what any semi good government does with taxes - hedges risks (healthcare, unemployment benefits, etc) and invests in projects that would boost the economy.

Insurance business model is evil if good government modus operandi is evil.

Now I will continue reading and will thoroughly watch my Gell-Mann amnesia.

Re: You Are the Product (2017)

#42

Post by tomjen3 »

dghughes wrote: post #5

It's tiring having a finger waved at you for blocking advertisements. When we all know that our data of who we are and our actions is just as valuable as the ads we are forced to watch. The Internet has become an ad machine that throws a tantrum if anyone dares to block advertising or tracking (of yourself). YouTube was meant for sharing videos but now "influencers", many channel owners, and YouTube itself balk at an…

You can subscribe to RSS feeds for any channel you care about.

To watch the videos, you can copy paste the url into VLC. No ads and very little tracking. Best of all no related videos so you won't waste tons of time there.

Re: You Are the Product (2017)

#43

Post by nwienert »

alexh1 wrote: post #27

Social media is a tricky one because it's got such a bus factor wrt. usage, however I'm pleasantly surprised at the abundance of products coming out where you (your data, that is) are _not_ the product. Analytics - Fathom ( https://usefathom.com ), Plausible ( https://plausible.io ) Project Management - Portabella ( https://portabella.io ) (disclaimer: I'm behind this one) Chat - Signal ( https://signal.org/en/ ), Ma…

Bus factor related to usage? Am I thinking of the wrong bus factor?

Re: You Are the Product (2017)

#44

Post by Aunche »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #39
Aunche wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can disable the the tracking on your account if you want with or without Youtube premium. https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6139018?co=GENIE....

I'm not going to trust google with that after a decade of terrible track record. I don't believe one second there is a way to opt out of Google tracking you. At best, you can lower the settings on how much it displays the informations it has on you.

I personally don't think that Google spend money to store your data if they aren't actively using it, though I can understand the sentiment. That said, you might as well switch it off if privacy is something you care about.

Re: You Are the Product (2017)

#45

Post by omgwtfbyobbq »

nwienert wrote: post #43
alexh1 wrote: post #27

Social media is a tricky one because it's got such a bus factor wrt. usage, however I'm pleasantly surprised at the abundance of products coming out where you (your data, that is) are _not_ the product. Analytics - Fathom ( https://usefathom.com ), Plausible ( https://plausible.io ) Project Management - Portabella ( https://portabella.io ) (disclaimer: I'm behind this one) Chat - Signal ( https://signal.org/en/ ), Ma…

Bus factor related to usage? Am I thinking of the wrong bus factor?

I think business factor (eg collecting day for advertising), but that's just a guess.

Re: You Are the Product (2017)

#46

Post by hansvm »

RussianCow wrote: post #30
kmnc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the content producers just advertise to you directly, why wouldn’t they? The bigger they get, the more premium viewers, the more sponsors they receive. Eventually YouTube won’t like being cut out gain and boom to YouTube premium now has ads.

This doesn't make sense. If you're paying for YouTube, then Google is already making a steady income stream from you; no need for ads.

But they could potentially make a larger steady income stream if they also had ads. It happened to cable TV, it happened when HTC introduced ads to their tiles or timeline or whatever it was called, ordering food online you'll get spammed when you try to checkout to buy their new promotional item (even if you already have it in your cart), and so on.

If ads aren't a perfect fit then they'll still try to add other revenue models to things you've paid for -- smart TVs selling data about what you watch or which products your conversations are about, car diagnostic products shipping a patch to only work if you start shipping them location data, large companies like Garmin buying up smaller companies and cancelling any lifetime accounts in favor of a subscription model (and vehemently denying that it's a money-grab), needing a Facebook account to use your Oculus, and so on.

If they're able to extract more value from you without excessive negative repercussions then they will, independently of what's "right" or legal.

Re: You Are the Product (2017)

#47

Post by Glanford »

thesz wrote: post #41

Quote: "Plenty of companies, indeed entire industries, base their business model on being evil. The insurance business, for instance, depends on the fact that insurers charge customers more than their insurance is worth." No, it is not. The insurance business depends on getting money mass to hedge risks and invest into something else. Basically, this is what any semi good government does with taxes - hedges risks (he…

Full quote for context:

>Plenty of companies, indeed entire industries, base their business model on being evil. The insurance business, for instance, depends on the fact that insurers charge customers more than their insurance is worth; that’s fair enough, since if they didn’t do that they wouldn’t be viable as businesses. What isn’t fair is the panoply of cynical techniques that many insurers use to avoid, as far as possible, paying out when the insured-against event happens. Just ask anyone who has had a property suffer a major mishap.

The article isn't saying that insurance companies are 'evil' for making a profit but instead for doing everything they can to withhold payment, not every insurance company does this of course but many of them know that customers are more likely to accept 50% blame in a 0% blame car accident or accept a reduced payout over minor technicalities because the alternative is going months without a car and spending a significant amount of time and money in court.

This analogy is entirely applicable to governments too where an 'evil' government might, at great cost, make benefit programs difficult or humiliating to obtain to discourage legitimate claimants from doing so, never mind straight up corruption or cronyism when it comes to allocating public funds.

Re: You Are the Product (2017)

#48

Post by tehjoker »

thesz wrote: post #41

Quote: "Plenty of companies, indeed entire industries, base their business model on being evil. The insurance business, for instance, depends on the fact that insurers charge customers more than their insurance is worth." No, it is not. The insurance business depends on getting money mass to hedge risks and invest into something else. Basically, this is what any semi good government does with taxes - hedges risks (he…

Their service may depend on hedging risk, but they would have no profit if they didn't ask for more than they give. That's the simplest balance equation you could ask for.

Re: You Are the Product (2017)

#49

Post by mdifrgechd »

didericis wrote: post #38
freediver wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads are not evil per se, overdoing them is. Do you think youtube algorithms optimize for you learning and becoming a better human or to maximize ad revenue? Based on the answer the knowledge you gained is on average either deep and meaningful or shallow, bordering entertainment value. That is not to say you can’t find deep structured knowledge on youtube, but the proper way to support its creation is to directly pay…

What is the root cause of those incentives? Is it the platform, or the predominate audience on the platform? I’d argue the only reason subscription based platforms have a higher probability of offering quality is that the pay barrier creates a more filtered user base that prefers quality. If a platform dependent on ad revenue had some other barrier to entry, like content only accessible to an audience that preferred…

I think there is also an element of short term vs long term reward. Things that are more likely to be worth paying for often are harder and longer term in some way (like university or even reading a novel) while ad delivered content generally is optimized to be easy to consume, and almost consequentially is very shallow. Because the goal is to keep attention, not to be comprehensive or useful.

So I think there is an argument that ad support, and attention focused platforms in general, do have a negative effect on the content.

Re: You Are the Product (2017)

#50

Post by mdifrgechd »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #25
kmnc wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshit. I pay to go to the movies, I am advertised to. Why do you think online services will maintain this “pay is for ad fee”?

So specifically, how should sites support themselves if such as you won't pay?

If they cant support themselves, they should find something people do want to pay for. The universe doesnt owe the website creators a revenue stream.
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