Hacker News Reader

Comment by eloisius | Hacker News Reader

> On the Internet, did people want banner ads, DRM, and a loss of privacy?

You have to consider it in terms of tradeoffs instead of absolute "wants," but yes. We apparently want banner ads more than subscription services. DRM is apparently a cost we're willing to pay in order to enjoy entertainment, and privacy seems to be less valuable than convenience and connectedness.

Not saying I, or anyone in particular, values things that way, but I do think we've ended up with what "we" want.

View on HN

We didn't end up with what "we" want, we ended up with what Moloch[0] wants. Its an important distinction. Market economy and other feedback loops we run on produces results that are only partially aligned with human needs. There can be literally solutions that no one on Earth wants or needs, and yet they get created because they're local optimas. People have every right to reject and fight results they didn't want. It's how we keep the system aligned with human goals.

[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

It's wrong to say that the outcome we've arrived at is necessarily the one we wanted. Local/initial conditions, availability and options, and a whole mess of other things make it so that's not necessarily true at all.

I would suggest people really just want the effortless nature of banner ad consumption. They don't want to do work. Banner ads (advertiser pays) are opt-out and subscription services (or consumer pays) are opt-in. Further each site has to be opt-ed into manually over and over, and then you get to deal anxiety over the whole can I actually unsubscribe thing etc. So you are just trading being juiced in one way for be milked in another.

Further even if we had consumer-pays-for-content sites as low friction as advertiser-pays-for-content sites they still would likely converge towards having advertisements (ultimately maybe less, maybe not) to maximize earnings.

I think there are solutions to these problems but I think they require us to first rethink the assessment and reward of creativity, talent and effort in scarcity-free systems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com