The User Always Loses

Venture Capital also imports theories of scarcity and under-production that our entire open-source ecosystem have shown don't apply in the same way to the digital world. The funding of end-user friendly software development clearly isn't a solved problem but the history of the internet clearly demonstrates that our existing models aren't sufficient. VC is ripe for disruption.

I believe that the next leap forward to "make the world a better place" isn't new digital products but a new framework for how we build technology companies in the first place. We needn't accept this as a fundamental foundation that can't change - creative destruction is the name of the game after all.

Blogging took off because half the worlds population started having access to the internet in the early 2000s. That seems incredibly myopic and US centric.

And when you use other's services, like, say, reading an article hosted at 'thenation.com', a site which attempts to block you from reading unless you run their javascript and CSS, use a browser with tools that allow you to toggle things like JS and CSS to read it anyway. Then re-share the article as plain text, https://write.as/tg3o7a6dfa5ck.md

And always remember: Lurking is good, https://i.imgur.com/7NYQ17y.mp4

The snappy aphorism off the top of my head is that "only drug dealers and IT call their customers 'users.'"

One day perhaps we will indeed look at the apps of today as massive social engineering experiments gone haywire. But the author's categorization of Facebook as an "ant farm of humanity" and a "digital cesspool" is juuuust a bit too misanthropic and bitter for my tastes. The internet has connected humanity to an extent that is literally hard to grasp, and yes, that does come with very human problems, so it's silly imo to pin all of our woes on Facebook et al. I'd love to hear what kinds of creative derogatory phrases the author would come up with to describe the period of dominating telephone networks, or mass media television, or even before we had any wires at all and just had to rely on the post and grapevine in the horrific dark ages before the invention of the telegraph in the 19th century.

Plus, for nostalgia's sake, the indie web's still out there if you know where to look (e.g. https://wiby.me/)

Is this really the dominant narrative? Are there lots of thinkpieces going around about how fair and kind Silicon Valley is, if only it weren't for all those mean people using their services? Maybe it is so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but when comparing the early internet to the current internet, we cannot let the users off the hook!

The further back you go, the harder it was to get on the internet, both as a user and a publisher. That meant the early internet was full of people who worked at universities, or were so motivated to discuss weird hobbies and interests with others that they struggled through the expense and technical difficulties, maybe even self-hosted, learned weird new languages from scratch. These were interesting, educated, intelligent, thoughtful and passionate people.

It's like air travel. If you were flying in the 1970s you probably had an interesting or important job or story. Getting on a plane meant meeting a bunch of interesting people. Now it doesn't. That is not a bad thing and it's not Southwest's fault. And when people complain about it, even though they might target Southwest (or Facebook), there is really an underlying snobbery about it. I can't believe I have to sit next to all these commoners on my internet!

[0] https://imgur.com/a/SQSHh0i

I get it, advertising sucks. Still, save the military terminology for things that are related to the fucking military.

I mean, I wonder what a 57-year-old from Cambodia would think when he reads about how much the author suffered under the "carpet-bombing campaign" of AOL and the likes.

This is not much better than old media really, which was always mostly ad supported. Media has always been a deflationary race to the bottom. When one player offers something cheap or free everyone else must follow suit and the economic model collapses. The cheapest crap and/or content with ulterior motives funded by someone else wins.

The article misses the point. The problem has its root in monetary policy. The problem is supply-side economics.

Money printing and giving control of the money supply to banks has made consumers redundant appendages of the financial system.

Imagine that you're the CEO of a unicorn startup or a big corporation and you constantly deal with investors, banks and customers. Which of these 3 groups do you derive most of your wealth from? Banks and investors.

Banks print money and loan it out to your investors and your investors use that money to buy your company stock and drive up its price - Also, banks loan your company money directly to buy back its own stock... As an executive, if you want to maximize your bonus, banks and investors are the only two entities you really care about... Your actual customers are merely appendages; they're merely a useful metric which allows you to get more money from investors and banks.

So long as all the new fiat money enters the economy through big institutions and big investors via bank loans, the consumer will always be an afterthought in the decision-making process. You're the product because you're not the source of money. Consumers don't have any money. Only institutions have money because they're printing it for free and distributing it among themselves by the trillions.

That's why we need UBI (Universal Basic Income) urgently - That's the only safe way to switch to sane demand-side economics.

Now, most people are on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other massively high-traffic websites, while a minority of people are on the rest of the internet, often with their own blogs.

It's not as different as it looks, it's just that the TV networks got displaced by the few high-traffic websites. It's apocalyptic for for-profit TV, radio, and newspaper companies, who have been mostly circling the drain as FAANG gobbles up their ad revenue. But the impact on "the internet" is not as different as it looks, it's just that "the internet" now needs a new name, like maybe "the low-traffic-website internet" but shorter (tltwi, pronounced "tilt-we"), because the Old Media are now co-hosted on the same infrastructure.

Most people didn't get on the internet prior to AOL. Most people don't leave the high-traffic-sites internet now. It's not like there aren't any blogs left. It's not as different as it looks.

We all have many roles, in which it may be appropriate to consider us as “user”, “customer”, “consumer”, “driver”, “parent”, “friend”...* preferring the term “person” might remind us that at the end of the day that the user’s interest is not necessarily aligned with ours (usually joystick in face) and that we need them more than they need us.

* I had a colleague who refers to parents of teens as “protectors of terrorists”. Yes, he had four teens himself. While the term was unwieldy and the joke rapidly wore thin, it reminded me of the various roles played by parents...and kids, and made me more tolerant of the foibles of teens. When we bundle a person into “user” it’s easy to lose perspective on the actual objective.

For those if us not obsessed with twitter and Facebook the golden age is now, the amount and quality of information available to an engineer is incredible and the online communities are mostly positive.

I feel like the "correct" model is users hosting their data with apps operating on it in a decentralized (or multi-layer federation ) way. But the economics are just really, really hard without certain restrictions, like always on connections for a primary 'home' device.

I guess it all translates to "The small guy always loses".

And VCs piling up money doesn't work in favor of the small guy.

Part of my last-lecture pep talk to every 300-student CS class I taught.

I was listening to Richard Wolff describing to Patrick Bet-David how capitalism creates monopolies and in the end the consumers always lose [1]. As companies get bigger, they become worse actors. I can't think of a counter example.

Patrick thinks everything has gotten cheaper and the consumer is winning, at least today (since history only backs the thesis). Richard couldn't come up with immediate counter examples regarding how Amazon is abusing their monopoly priviledges but FBA pricing and seller fees came to mind. Someone in the comments mentioned prescription drugs.

[1] Heated Debate On Capitalism with America’s Most Prominent Marxist Economist - Richard Wolff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj-zFgxCUnY