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Comment by rapht | Hacker News Reader

As some others have said, a well-thought-out article on the larger scale impacts of the Internet as a new medium of communication - just get past the intro.

In the end, it's interesting because it puts together a number of intuitions you may already have about the upcoming western social-democratic crisis stemming from the loss of authoritative sources of information.

What is missing is actually ideas about what system we should collectively aim for in order to restore trust in actual truths and distrust in actual falsehoods - because of course, you can't have a society without a shared framework for that.

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I think the core issue here is the elephant in the room in tech that noone wants to talk about. The tech industry has put most of it's money making eggs in the ads basket. This means companies selling ads are promoting the kind of mass information spread that is sensationalist because it gets their ads the most views, and the tech community makes money off of this.

How well do ads actually work? I really don't know. Is there any objective data to measure this? There are three main companies who sell ad spaces on a real time market and it is a very interesting market that I feel like most people know little about, especially people in tech.

Regardless of how well or not well this works, it's what floats companies like Google and Facebook.

I would say the tech companies are the ones fueling this because it is the their multibillion dollar business models that rely on sensationalist news to sell ads. period. To shift the blame to politicians or to even journalists trying to compete with other sensationalist news blogs or companies who make money from selling ads, is shifting the source and the root cause of the issue, from us, the tech community.

To act like as a tech community we are severely concerned about mass information, the spread misinformation etc etc but also not address how we can fundamentally move away from a market in tech that makes money off of anything besides selling ads to people, or selling peoples information to ad companies (and god knows who else, I mean, only the big tech three know who else), is delusional and self serving, at best.

Despite this, I rarely hear anyone in the tech community willing to openly talk about these problems, much less come up with alternative business solutions.

I would love for there to be more conversation around moving away from a tech market that preys on harvesting user data and ads to solutions that solve people's problems instead of activist posturing from people in tech who talk alot about being concerned about politics etc but work for the companies that fuel this spread of misinformation.

I agree with you that the ad models which are all about maximizing engagement are a problem, but I think that the article is trying to say that those sorts of models are inevitable given how the internet works. Like suppose no websites did ads at all and they all worked on a subscription model or something similar. Then you'd still have websites trying to get more eyeballs, because more attention means more subscribers. No matter what the model, for a given media source, more users means more money. And if you're trying to get more eyeballs, you'll end up with clickbait and attention seeking, a flood of information and misinformation, and we'd be back where we started.

I get your point, but I think it's lazy (not of you, I mean the entire tech community) to take on this assumption "those sorts of models are inevitable given how the internet works" How does the internet work where the only way to make money is to make money off of ads? That's the only ranking system possible? That's now how y combinator works yet there's a pretty aggressive ranking system on how even these comments are ranked and what is shown first to the user. What if we are were rewarded directly based on the quality/relevancy of our comments using a ranking system similar to this one or in general a quality based ranking system, or really anything with even a slightly democratic approach to it.

"Is there any objective data to measure this?"

Pretty much every digital marketer's job description consists of measuring and optimizing this. All the major digital ad platforms let you put tracking beacons throughout your page's sales flow so you can measure conversion rates directly and know exactly which ad campaign led to a sale; that's one of the major advantages of digital over print or TV.

You can certainly debate the ethics of advertising in general, and whether it's ethical to psychologically manipulate people into buying products they don't need and wouldn't have bought otherwise. I personally don't really want to first because I hold opinions on both sides and second because nothing's going to get resolved by such a debate on HN - it's a debate that's been going on for 120 years, though the media hegemony described in the article silenced it for many years. But as an objective fact, there's little room for debating the effectiveness of advertising. Ads work, even if they might be evil.

HN has been here for 120 years? I thought I was new to the game. I'm not sure ads work, or what data digital marketers use "digital marketer's job description consists of measuring and optimizing this" other than the demand price which is a real time price that fluctuates way more than the 500 index stock market which, to justify their prices is still something that is of high debate much less a more voltatile market. I would say there is an overall input and an output, and if the financial output is multiple times that of the input the digital marketers can say theyve done their job, but they have very little data to show the objective intermediaries of linear data measurements for the flow of this information, which is why big data kafka and spark shops currently pitch over $300k/yr to anyone who can make sense of this data to a digital marketer in any consumable format on a monthly not even a weekly basis, mind you.

I'm not debating the ethics, just the reality of what granularity of data they can actually sign their id signature hash next to and say they verify this data, as opposed it to it being a roll your own analytics shop to meet whatever objective analytics data you are looking to meet for that quarter. I think we have all learned from the news on both sides in recent years that you can spin a story or a set of data however you want to, so I am not nearly as concerned with the anecdotal motives of any particular digital advertiser in the first place as much as I am with how not only your response but the entire industry in general shuns the idea that there is any alternative to this whatsoever and justifies all movements to the counter as "the only way" or the only logical ways and evil as such. I understand saying something is evil and those are the only companies who pay me six figures, and so therefore its okay for me, is very easy for most engineers to say now, but it's not something I'm willing to say.

I think if you want to justify this statement in general, you should explain to everyone how bidder as a service works, how its not a monopolized industry when it comes to ad spaces on websites ranked by domain popularity (3 players in the market 2 of the CEOs from Google SEO team) and how it correlates with rationale decisions from a digital marketers perspective and have measureable outputs other than "the extremely volatile price of this adspot which varies every 6 seconds was worth it based on the outcome this time, based on how targeted this ad campaign was, which was targeted based only on harvesting user data the user would not be ok with if they knew we were using this data". Honestly, justify your case here....and make sure you include the consent forms included in the onboarding process of every 12 yr old who has to click yes to create a facebook profile and what the implications are for the default oks in this case are...

I've just watched a documentary about Bellingcat, and one suggested answer there is transparency about the data, sources and methods.

So when the news media will lose their aura of journalistic professionalism and authority stemming from that, there will be something actually better that will arise after that.

Interesting view. Have you heard of Onora O'Neill?

She's aiming to take transparency further. O'Neill and her colleagues at the Royal Society have been pushing for 'intelligent openness' where data and information would be made accessible, intelligible, assessable, and usable by anyone. If interested, there's a report called "Science as an Open Enterprise", which goes in depth.

https://royalsociety.org/news/2012/science-open-enterprise/

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