Certain features of social networks like likes, reactions, recommendations, etc. trigger micro-dopamine releases in the brain, which in turn keep the individual craving for more.
The infinity scrolling appeals to our hunger for more and more stimuli, which in turn has us spend more time browsing the network. That longer exposure allows FB to monetise even further.
One thing that worries me – and it's not discussed in the article – is the loss of productivity, as well as cost of the opportunity for the individual.
In fact, individuals who become addicted to social networks may carry a psychological cost as well, which in turn reflects on the productivity of the individual inside the global economy system.
You could argue that time spent on Facebook would've been spent on other leisure activities anyway. But is it true? Much of this time is now spent due to compulsive behaviour, every 5 minutes, 10 minutes, as soon as you wake up, before going to bed, etc.
An individual does not owe the world 100% productivity. An individual doesn't owe the world any productivity. The only time an individual owes productivity is when there is an agreement for services in exchange for money or something else of value.
People commonly use productivity to try to quantify something in dollars, but it's always struck a nerve. It seems like when using that argument, the arguer assumes the world is owed any type of productivity by nature.
In your argument, you say you are worried that Facebook use results in a loss of productivity, as if the world is owed productivity. It is not. I'm not criticizing you, it's a common argument, but it is based on a misconception. If a person wants to spend almost all their time reading Facebook, or reading literature, as long as they are neutral with the system (pay for themselves in some way), that's perfectly fine.
I understand both your view (the worth of an individual is more than simply the net productive output of said individual), and the view that you are replying to (the loss to the world expressed in terms of systems thinking along some dimension).
I think you can actually reconcile both views in terms of happiness i.e. the global economy measured in terms of happiness generated. With this sort of model in mind, both you and person you are replying to can both be correct in that it is possible that social media is sub-optimal compared to some alternative that delivers some combination of increased immediate happiness and/or increased probability/reliability/sustainability of future happiness.
Oh, the psychological effects of Facebook I'm certainly not arguing with. I would imagine there are some issues as there are some plusses. I'm not well versed in it because I dropped my account years ago, but my wife uses it to keep in touch with people and groups. Like anything, it depends on how it's used or how much it's used. I was just concerned with the concept of productivity cost as a measurement.
I think the Quality of Life indicator represents what you are talking about.
This is anecdotal but I've noticed my time online is more 'productive' since quitting facebook. In places like waiting rooms, public transportation or general boredom the precise parts of the internet you use to waste time all serve a similar purpose (e.g to keep from staring into space mindlessly in the absence of other stimuli).
The greater productivity enters the picture because now I read things like hacker news and look up random things on the internet. This has lead to me learning useful skills and enough general knowledge to be helpful with different courses I've taken and small chat with people about their professions, interests etc.
Granted, there's the whole issue of people choosing their smartphone over interacting with the equally bored stranger next to them, but thats an entirely different problem.
The thing is they get paid better than that by the advertisers for your attention. Their ARPU is estimated[1] to be $53 for 2016 and that is across all the users, not only people who are ready to spend money on online services. And as a free service, I bet they are quite a bit more resilient to churn than a similar paid offering would be.
My guess is, if the users could pay to opt out, the value of the customers that couldn't would drop dramatically, and you'd end up paying substantially more
You would, 99% of facebook would not. You would have to pay 1000 dollars/month together with the rest of the 1% for it to be viable, but with only 1% of Facebook, another free one would appear.
Most consumers really don't like paying for things and don't really mind unobtrusive ads, so seems unlikely the economics would work out for google search or facebook.
Presumably a major barrier to offering this is that it threatens to break up network effects and selectively remove the highest-value consumers from the advertising pool.
It's not just about losing 'reach', if only a few percent of people bought the opt-out that would probably be a minimal issue. It's also about who buys the opt-out; the people who can (and would) afford to do so are presumably wealthier than average and help justify ad sales more generally. I don't know the exact breakdown, but presumably it's a power-law situation. If you're the kind of consumer who could conceivably buy a truck through a Ford ad, how much more are you worth than everyone else? 2x? 10x? 20x?
(Of course, the kind of consumer who deeply dislikes ads is probably less likely to click them regardless of wealth. So maybe charging the ad-block contingent a flat rate would actually work out?)
I feel like this is the main reason more apps don't offer an ad-opt-out as an IAP or buying a license or whatever the format might be.
The users most likely to go for it are the ones with the highest disposable income, i.e. the people most valuable to Advertisers.
Users with high DI * fee for removing ads < value of users to advertisers lost * users with high DI
Basically meaning that the revenue gained from allowing removal of ads would devalue their user pool in terms of advertising revenue so much that it's a net loss, even if they gain reputation with the users and possibly attract new ones.
You might, I might, but how many others will? A vast number of users can't. Just as many simply won't, for any amount greater than zero (a point briefly alluded to in the article). At some point, the "network effect" breaks down, diminishing value even for the users who remain. Good, you say, so Facebook and Google collapse into the same ruin as AOL and Geocities and all the rest? Perhaps, but the billions of users and advertisers and employees/suppliers who currently get some sort of value from the system might not agree.
Also, the advertisers will still be advertising at you, BTW. They'll just be doing it with even less information about what ads might actually interest you. They'll be finding other ways to make sure their ads stay in front of your oh-so-valuable eyeballs. There'd be a lot more "sit through this damn video before we deliver content" all across the web. I for one would not be grateful for that.
> BTW. They'll just be doing it with even less information about what ads might actually interest you.
Good, Ads should be Contextual to the context of the site/subject being viewed NOT contextual to me.
i.e if I am on a site reading about the latest hard drive to come out, Show me ads for a NAS or a Computer, etc. Do not reach into a collection of data about me and show me diaper ads because you think I just had a new child
That's fine when you're on a niche site, but most people don't spend most of their time on those. What about a site - like Facebook, like Google, and so on - that covers every topic under the sun? If they limit themselves to ads that even the most hardened skeptic would agree are relevant to the content currently being viewed, they will be showing far fewer ads. That's what leads to their being more intrusive. Would you still be as happy about only seeing ads for a new NAS box if every such ad forced you to wait for 30 seconds before the content you came for was actually delivered?
Companies have been selling general ads for decades. Billion dollar industries have been created on selling General Viewer Ads.
I always found it fascinating that a TV Channel can sell Ads with out any real tracking any real data on the individuals users watching the ad, and they can sell these ads for $$$$$$$
Yet you tube which has much higher viewer numbers than any TV Channel can not seem to sell ads at all, the ads are of low quality, and they need to be ultra targeted.
At the end of the day though, if they can not find away to market their ad space with out tracking me and knowing every detail of my life well then they need to simply exit the market.
There is zero justification for building these types of databases, they should be resisted as strongly as possible, and we need to institute much strong data security and privacy regulations on how the data is collected, stored and used. Including the ability to require all services to allow individuals to audit the information they are collecting about them and to force a company to delete all information about them if the user wishes to stop using the services.
That's a misleading comparison. So companies will pay millions more for TV ads even though online ads might reach more eyeballs? Yeah, that's weird, it would be great to understand why they're such idiots, but the reasons don't affect the reality. The reality is that they won't pay more for the online ads. What they do pay, they pay on the basis of targeting which directly correlates to conversion rates etc. Do you think internet companies wouldn't jump at the chance to spend less on all those analytics systems, reduce privacy complaints, and still get more ad revenue? They have those systems and the people who run them because they have positive ROI. They're simply not going to do something that makes their whole growth/revenue model collapse. They might look with envy at what TV networks get away with, but only in the same way that you and I might look with envy at what singers and sports stars get away with. It's basically irrelevant.
> i.e if I am on a site reading about the latest hard drive to come out, Show me ads for a NAS or a Computer, etc.
So, it turns out that you completely ignore those adverts because you have banner blindness and you're on the site to read about the latest hard drive, not the one someone is paying to reach you with. If those ads worked, the CPM would be higher and advertisers would invest in those instead. But they don't, so contextual it is.
For what its worth, you can still call AOL on the phone if you get locked out of your account, and they still have millions of users. As someone who's helped people with their locked out AOL mail accounts before in the last five years, I can easily state that AOL is a superior customer service experience over Google.
(Mind you, case can be made that Google's lack of the same makes the account more secure.)
The trouble is that only the most engaged minority of users would be willing to pay for the service directly. What I'm interested to see is whether we can build services where the people who care most end up covering the costs for the rest of the users. So you pay $5 for a facebook-like service that then provides free services to everyone who knows you. You would have all the same funding problems as other public goods but there are plenty of them that make it work. Of course, even if something like a public radio or other public support model would fund a social network sustainably, you would still have the network effect problem in terms of getting people actually switched over.
The problem is that paying doesn't guarantee you won't be treated as product as well. Companies try to maximize their revenue, and if they can get away with charging you while continuing to show you ads and sell your data, they will.
I am looking at it from the standpoint that eventually some taxing authority will start the snowball by taxing any service based on perceived value or such. never under estimate a governments desire for revenue.
most likely an additional tax on the provider once their product is marked as a service. the users won't object because they won't be charged the cost, it would merely get passed on to investors and costs of advertising would increase to pay for it or more advertising would appear. embedded taxes are the easiest for governments to use, it puts the blame on the provider for the costs
That's a really good point. To the extent that power is the accumulation of capital, and gaining dominance in free services to produce lock-in and monetization in other ways, this is an obvious insight.
Also, it's been Google's business model this whole time, which suggests that it works really well. There's a conversation worth having about the balance between the benefits we get from natural monopolies of this nature, and the power traded away through enabling them.
I'll try to provide an answer as far as I understand the issue.
Poorer countries with less developed markets are forced to open their domestic markets to foreign countries and competitors who then completely outcompete and dominate the local offerings. This prevents local business from developing and many existing ones go bankrupt in the face of foreign competition. This tends to leave the local market largely undeveloped in terms of domestic companies, and results in money flowing out of the country to foreign shareholders.
Another problem is that so-called "free" trade isn't totally free.
Some of the places that espouse free trade, like the US and Europe, don't practice what they preach. The most egregious example I can think of is agriculture subsidies, which effectively prevent (for example) African farmers from selling their produce in those markets while additionally making produce (like poultry) from those countries cheaper than local offerings, which again bankrupts locals.
It's not free trade thats the issue though, it's trade barriers and subsidies which allow european and and americans to sell their products cheaper on local markets than ex the africans themselves. It's the opposite of free trade.
I don't believe in a 100% free market but I do believe that giving developing countries access to our economy is good for them (look at large parts of asia) and is better than less free trade.
Can we just call this the WalMart effect? I think most people are familiar with this idea in the context of big, bad WalMart coming into town and all the local mom and pops die off. It's basically that, but at an international scale.
> Poorer countries with less developed markets are forced to open their domestic markets to foreign countries and competitors who then completely outcompete and dominate the local offerings
Poorer countries which can't sell their agricultural goods on the global market don't fare too well. It goes both ways. Check the level of life in Cuba for example.
Cuba's not really the best example. The highest literacy rates on the planet, some of the best doctors in the world, and zero homelessness, all while being embargoed by the largest economy in existence. Not really that shabby all things considered.
> Poorer countries which can't sell their agricultural goods on the global market don't fare too well. It goes both ways. Check the level of life in Cuba for example.
Which proves free trade is a shit of a system for most developing countries.
I think there should be a distinction made between "Free trade" and "free trade", the former being what can be seen in a capitalist economy - not the free association of people, but the requirement of some people (workers) to sell labour-power to landowners (capitalists). This systematic requirement is anything but free[0]. However the latter is the actual equal freedom for all to trade what they want to, in what quantity, which they can do without fear of poverty, destitution and death if they do so.
This is what Communists mean when they say they are opposed to Free trade. Because the sale of labour-power for wage is an unequal relationship from the outset, in a similar way to how the feudal serf producing his quit-rent-corn for the feudal lord - yes, he may refuse to hand it over (he has the freedom of choice), but should he take that freedom, which is human-created, structural, he is liable to poverty, destitution and death.
Edit: I must also note that it also works the other way. The capitalist is not free from capital either, within a capitalist economy - he must employ wage labour, make it his only concern, in order to survive, without which he will either be forced to become a worker, or if he cannot find work then become destitute. As such, Property itself is a restrictive force, acquiring a mind of its own. It is in the self-interest of the workers and the capitalist to counter this system which restricts them so.
[0] Kropotkin wrote in The Conquest of Bread: "We cry shame on the feudal baron who forbade the peasant to turn a clod of earth unless he surrendered to his lord a fourth of his crop. We call those the barbarous times. But if the forms have changed, the relations have remained the same, and the worker is forced, under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. For, turn where he will, he can find no better conditions. Everything has become private property, and he must accept, or die of hunger.
The result of this state of things is that all our production tends in a wrong direction. Enterprise takes no thought for the needs of the community. Its only aim is to increase the gains of the speculator. Hence the constant fluctuations of trade, the periodical industrial crises, each of which throws scores of thousands of workers on the streets."
> but the requirement of some people (workers) to sell labour-power to landowners
There is no such requirement. Nobody is being slaved/forced to work (and if they are it's illegal) with anyone. And that's not what Free Trade is about at all.
Yes there is such a requirement, at least for the majority of people. The quote at the bottom by Kropotkin places it into perspective; under the name of free contract, huge numbers of people, I must say the vast majority of people, must either provide labour-time in exchange for wage, or die. I do not mean 'force' in the sense that somebody is putting a gun to your head, I meant it in the sense that there is a system set up and perpetauted by those who profit from it (the capitalist class) such that in order to live and indeed buy back the products which their labour gives value to these people are forced to work.
Do you think many people, especially the poorest or those in the least favourable jobs, would engage in such wage labour if they had the opportunity not to? No, they engage in it beacuse they are forced by the circumstance of the capitalist system. It is an impersonal force, but a human constructed social and structural force nonetheless.
I realise that there is a distinction between 'killing' and 'letting die', and it is philosophically significant, but most people would agree that a system in which 'letting die' is a fine course of action save for the intervention of the twisted charity of the State which defends the system is not an ethical one, nor a moral one, in a world in which it is certainly possible to do better.
Kropotkin's "analysis" is a nice soundbite, but it's just bashing a strawman and proposing a dream-like utopia to replace it with. Feudal times were nothing like capitalism. The capitalist "class" is fluid, unlike nobility - the surveys I've read put wealth churn at around 60-70% after just a couple of generations. There are people "stuck" in generational poverty, but they're not a "class" either - there's plenty of rags-to-riches stories, and there's no obvious system to uplift them all. Consider the situation in the US, where the people below the poverty line are richer than the lower classes of most other countries. Or how the US middle class is "eroding" into upper class citizens at a 2:1 rate(for every person dropping to the lower class, there's 2 rising to upper). Is this the "not ethical" "not moral" system that is "letting people die"?
Kropotkin's solution to the evils of capitalism is anarchism - a utopia where people would just cooperate and get along. This is a fantasy, and to substantiate it he day-dreams about the good old pre-feudal days(which never existed in the way he dreams of them). Just like communism, his proposals rely on fundamentally changing human nature - they are meant for a different species, not us. Your "certainly possible to do better" world is nowhere in sight, from my point of view.
We've had poets, sci-fi writers and activists speak about how we should do better, how we should find that utopia where everyone is equal(ignores intrinsic human variance), everyone is happy and getting along(ignores basic human nature), and no one is poor(ignores the relativity of wealth). In fact, the changes in human nature that these systems require would also change capitalism for the better - i.e. you don't need a system that fairly redistributes wealth, if everyone is as altruistic as Gates after his career.
That's precisely the point; we call the feudal system barbaric while it offers, at least in the respect he talks about, the same barbarism. However you are also right, the advancement of capitalism has brought many people to higher standards of living and continues to do so. The class system of the social Anarchists and Communists sets up all workers, from your SV programmer down to your Bangladeshi sweatshop labourer as proletarians, and this is the problem, it's nothing to do with riches or how much money you have, it's to do with the fact that people are alienated from their labour and still forced by necessity to sell their labour-power.
>Is this the "not ethical" "not moral" system that is "letting people die"?
Yes, none other than it. You'll notice that your point about raising standards of living is actually irrelevant to the deeper point I have made about selling one's labour-power for wage, which people must continue to do - it is this which I regard as the oppressive element, or rather, the Private property which ensures its existence. If mere standard of living were my concern, I'd be a social democrat, not a Communist.
>Just like communism, his proposals rely on fundamentally changing human nature
I love how unsubstantiated this argument always is. Is human nature unchangable, and to what extent can it be changed, and how can this change be examined? Erich Fromm examines this in Escape from Freedom, which is a psycho-social work. Marx comments:
>The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.
>where everyone is equal
No. This is a severe misunderstanding of Communist theory. I am no Leninist (not by any means) but he replied to a man (a "liberal professor") who made a similar mistake to you, here:
> Mr. Tugan repeats the old trick of the reactionaries: first to misinterpret socialism by making it out to be an absurdity, and then to triumphantly refute the absurdity! When we say that experience and reason prove that men are not equal, we mean by equality, equality in abilities or similarity in physical strength and mental ability. It goes without saying that in this respect men are not equal. No sensible person and no socialist forgets this. But this kind of equality has nothing whatever to do with socialism. If Mr. Tugan is quite unable to think, he is at least able to read; were lie to Lake the well-known work of one of the founders of scientific socialism, Frederick Engels, directed against Dühring, he would find there a special section explaining the absurdity of imagining that economic equality means anything else than the abolition of classes. But when professors set out to refute socialism, one never knows what to wonder at most—their stupidity, their ignorance, or their unscrupulousness.
>and no one is poor(ignores the relativity of "poorness")
Socialism does not promise that some will not have more than others; the relativity of poverty is accepted.
>i.e. you don't need a system that fairly redistributes wealth, if everyone is as altruistic as Gates after his career.
Again, I must correct you - it is not about redistribution, it is about workers owning the products of their labour and their free association. Capitalism guarantees neither (and in fact relies upon the infringement of both!)
I'll also finally note - it is extremely rare for my knowledge for the lowest wage labourers ("rags") to accrue sufficient capital via their wage, to support their family, etc. in order to become capitalists themselves. And if it does happen, there is still a huge number of people engaging in wage labour. Capitalism requires there to be more labourers than capitalists. So beacuse the injustice is a little smaller, it should be neglected, as you say? No, new people born every minute are destined to wage labour. The idea that it is possible ignores that for most people it really isn't possible. They still exist, and their state is a sorry one.
> Do you think many people, especially the poorest or those in the least favourable jobs, would engage in such wage labour if they had the opportunity not to? No, they engage in it beacuse they are forced by the circumstance of the capitalist system.
Many people could afford to live in very small homes, and live with about nothing but a bed and a shack and decide instead to have big cars, huge houses, big fields, 3 TVs and 3 smartphones, while they probably need none of those to live well. So "most people" are certainly not working just to sustain themselves, they are actively working to keep getting richer. That's what we see across the world, read any recent World Bank report explaining how poverty is decreasing everywhere and level of life is increasing (yet people still choose to work for more money, to buy more stuff when they can, not just be satisfied with what they have).
If you want to pitch your project and get feedback from HN readers, the recommended way is to create a "Show HN" submission, rather than hijacking another thread.
This meme that you pay for things with your data needs to die. You pay for it with your eyeballs on advertising. Data is not payment, it's sewage that people are finding a use for.
> You pay for it with your eyeballs on advertising. Data is not payment, it's sewage that people are finding a use for.
Advertising that is targeted using said data. One might be able to argue that it once was true (10 years ago?) that data was just a byproduct that people found a use for. But now it's more explicitly a goal for companies to collect. I don't think anyone can argue that the data google and facebook collect is incidental and they're just trying to find some use for it. Collecting users' data is a core part of their business model.
> Collecting users' data is a core part of their business model.
Collecting data is part of product strategy, it's not a business model unless you're actually selling it - which none of the companies people wring their hands over do.
I worked at a startup where part of the pitch to investors is that we would get in early and collect all this data that would be expensive and maybe even impossible to replicate. Well, we collected all the data during the course of actually providing our service, it just turned out there wasn't a whole tonne of value in large volumes of unlabeled data.
Every product person hopes that data will make their product better, but not all data is created equal. If it's not signalling what you want somehow, it's basically worthless.
My computer science teacher in high school who was pretty well off(and did this mostly as a favor to the school headmaster) used to say: "The best and easiest money is made by using something somebody else threw away."
The whole article is essentially a long moan about how things have changed, and how the beancounters would like things to go back to normal because right now they no longer understand how to add stuff up.
Example: "tiny payments for digital contributions might correct yet another problem, a misallocation of labour. If companies paid people for useful data, rather than mopping up what they leave behind as they use online services, then prices could nudge people towards more productive online activity."
Correct a problem? A problem for who? Neither the consumer nor the provider appear to be in any kind of trouble. The use of "mopping up" implies that the acquisition of data is somehow accidental, and simple an act of unwanted stuff discarded by the visitor, whilst in truth it is an aggressive and intelligent machine that flenses data from the visitor. Finally "productive online activity" is completely fucking meaningless in this context. productive how? for whom?
Yet another faux-intellectual bullshit piece by the Economist.
Which is interesting, and thanks for the links, but this isn't what the Economist is talking about. The Economist is talking about the mis-allocation of labor - not a problem for the producer, not a problem for the consumer, a problem for the person that has to tot up the stats and make it fit the framework of capitalism.
It is almost like people don't even care about the actual article, and only read what they want to see....
A problem for users' whose privacy is violated without their understanding, and for content providers, who have to cater to lowest-common-denominator clickbait nonsense.
The infinity scrolling appeals to our hunger for more and more stimuli, which in turn has us spend more time browsing the network. That longer exposure allows FB to monetise even further.
One thing that worries me – and it's not discussed in the article – is the loss of productivity, as well as cost of the opportunity for the individual.
In fact, individuals who become addicted to social networks may carry a psychological cost as well, which in turn reflects on the productivity of the individual inside the global economy system.
You could argue that time spent on Facebook would've been spent on other leisure activities anyway. But is it true? Much of this time is now spent due to compulsive behaviour, every 5 minutes, 10 minutes, as soon as you wake up, before going to bed, etc.