Paying for it doesn't make it a market | Hacker News Reader

Paying for it doesn't make it a market

pluralistic.net

67 pointsecliptik16 comments

I think he makes the mistake that he defines the customer as the person who pays for a thing (or receives it).

It is better to define the customer as the person/organization who decides if the product is getting purchased or not.

This makes sense with breakfast food where advertising likes to targets kids (instead of the parents who pays for it) as it is the kids who decides what gets bought.

When advertisers do not have any choice and can only advertise on Facebook to reach customers, then the advertisers have no decision power and are therefore not customers.

In the case of FB, it might now be the policians who are the customers as due to their growing power on what FB (and advertisers) can do. So you will see the FB leadership focusing on WashingtonDC instead of the advertisers.

> the person/organization who decides if the product is getting purchased

This fits well with my understanding that Apple's customers are not those who have an Apple product, but rather those who don't and want it. That's why they look even better than they work, it's serving the primary customer who will buy it (not who has bought it).

AFAICT that's a restatement of Doctorow's point -- it's the lock-in that's significant, not who writes the cheques.

simple litmus for market:

is it truly innovative? something new and tangible? (iPhone/android/GPS/personal computer)

or is it just repackaged labor exploitation (Amazon fresh/uber/grubhub/most AI)

if at any point you detect having intentionally created a failure mode or problem in order to capture revenue, then you have not "created" a market. this is profiteering.

This article has been very helpful in helping me re-understand the 'market'.

This was all kinda inevitable. Industrial revolution, population explosion, fast technological advancement, etc... all lead to more centralization of power faster and faster (in every political system). And we are not evolved to deal with this rate of change. The corruption and doom of mankind is inevitable.

> Likewise, advertisers may be the tech companies' "customers" but that doesn't mean the platforms treat them well. Advertisers get ripped off just like the rest of us. The platforms gouge them on price, lie to them about advertising reach, and collude with one another to fix prices and defraud advertisers

That's awesome

Clever article which misses the point.

Getting stuff for free kills markets. Waiting for a decent legal system, clutching all your money in tight fists, kills markets.

Sure, don’t give monopolists more money than you have to. But pay for services as much as you can. Even if only 1/100 paid services can resist monopoly, it’s a huge success. If you don’t pay they might not exist.

> Getting stuff for free kills markets.

Yes, 100% this. Doctorow wants competition, wants to avoid lock-in, but how do you get competition and avoid lock-in when the market won't financially support many competitors? That's where paying for stuff is essential.

The attention economy is biased toward the big players. They can "make it up in volume", whereas smaller businesses can't.

> Paying for a service does not make a company fear you, and anyone who thinks they can buy a platform's loyalty by paying for a service is a simp. A corporation is an immortal, transhuman colony organism that uses us as inconvenient gut-flora: no matter how much you love it, it will never love you back. It can't experience love – only fear.

Right, but for a lot of us in tech, corporations are also how we get paid.

If users pay my employer directly, with cash? That's great. If users pay my employer indirectly, by viewing ads? If that's what they want it's fine, I guess.

But a solution where my employer can't afford to pay me? Unthinkable.

Other companies are paying, "users" are what's delivered to them in return. Some of the money the customer is using to pay for the "users" might come from the "users" themselves, but they're likely to have subsidies and revenue from entirely separate sources too.

Which underlines the fact that your employer is your customer.

> as tech platforms eliminated competition, captured their regulators and expanded their IP rights so that interoperability was no longer a threat, they became too big to care whether any of their stakeholders were happy. First they came for the users, sure, but then they turned on the publishers, the advertisers, and finally, even their once-pampered tech workers

I take this to be the crucial and correct part of the article. Customers don't have much leverage over corporations when there's little or no competition. The Apple/Google/Microsoft triopoly controls nearly 100% of the consumer computer operating system market on both mobile and desktop.

Unfortunately, a lot of this article seems exaggerated and cartoonish to me, much like Doctorow's straw man:

> "If you're not paying for the product" is grounded in a cartoonish vision of markets in which "the customer is king" and successful businesses are those who cater to their customers – even at the expense of their workers and suppliers – will succeed.

I think what Doctorow is missing, fundamentally, with the distinction between paying with money and paying with attention is that your attention is strictly limited by the number of hours in a day, can never be recovered when lost, and can never be increased in total amount available. By spending more money, you can increase your economic power in the market, whereas spending more attention is more a sign of weakness than of strength. I'm willing to pay more money for higher quality products with good customer service, but I'm not willing to pay more attention than I already spend. In fact, I'd rather pay more money so that I don't have to waste more time. Money can save you a lot of time in a way that attention spending cannot. I don't deny that attention is a form of market power, but it's the worst, poorest form of market power. Attention (on advertising, for example) is what you spend when you're either too poor to spend money on a product or you feel that a product is not even worth spending money on, which doesn't speak well for that product.

Think in terms of monetary ranges. I can spend 4 figures on a computer, 5 figures on a car, 6 figures on a house. But how much attention can I spend on anything? The range of individual attention is extremely limited. It's not a good market. As another commenter astutely observed, "Getting stuff for free kills markets." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40114432 The attention economy should be the exact opposite of what Doctorow wants, because it actually favors the monopolistic BigCos.

> The platforms used to treat us well and now treat us badly. That's not because they were setting a patient trap, luring us in with good treatment in the expectation of locking us in and turning on us. Tech bosses do not have the executive function to lie in wait for years and years.

This is just silly. Yes, tech bosses do in fact have the executive function to lie in wait for years and years. That's literally the business model of most startups. It's so well known and explicit that I'm not sure how Doctorow can even say this with a straight face.

The cathedral, the bazaar, and what is this monstrosity that technology-driven market-capture capitalism has created? Something that slows all humanity, creates drain and friction on everyone, yet everyone has to use it? The bear trap? The turnpike? I'd love to hear people's poetic ideas here.

Tar pit.

> Now, it's true that the advertisers used to get a good deal from the platforms, and that it came at the expense of the users. Facebook lured in users by falsely promising never to spy on them.

It did? I joined in 2005 – back when the footer read, "a Mark Zuckerberg production" – and never saw any such promises. The only promise I remember seeing was that it was free and always will be.

> But once those advertisers were locked in, Facebook turned on them, too. [...] This is the thing that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product" fails to comprehend. "If you're not paying for the product" is grounded in a cartoonish vision of markets in which "the customer is king" and successful businesses are those who cater to their customers – even at the expense of their workers and suppliers – will succeed.

But advertisers clearly wield the power, at least the direct power, over social media. How many "adpocalypses" have we had at this point? Social media companies have giant teams dubbed "trust and safety" whose job is to ensure the gross content doesn't end up next to ads or scare away the eyeballs.

If socialists want to overturn the "you pay for it or else you are a product" conventional wisdom, they need to account for that.

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