>Capital interests have this innate expectation that everything must be profitable.
What rubs me the wrong way about statements like this, is that it is almost always said by people who totally miss that they are advocating for things that are personally profitable for them.
A website that allows you to skirt paywalls, is immensely profitable to the end user. That same end user, who detests the idea of having to spend money, then complains loudly that corporations just want their money. And it is completely lost on them they are playing the exact same game as corporations.
The actual break from "corporate profits" is to not engage with the corporations products at all. But that overwhelming is not what we see. Instead it is just two entities fighting over money, because they both have the same root motivation to maximize money.
>The actual break from "corporate profits" is to not engage with the corporations products at all.
This is difficult to do when corporations control elements of the public sphere and the proceed to run them in such a way as to maximize profits but to the disadvantage of the public.
In its infancy, I recall frequent descriptions of Twitter as the "new public square". A company doesn't get to have its cake and eat it, too. If something that is a public good is operated to maximize private profits instead of the public good, there's going to be conflict with the public.
Perhaps what we need is a broader classification of utilities, and then run them for public benefit rather than private profit, so the citizenry truly can choose to live their lives as something other than rural hermits without engaging with for-profit corporations.
I do not "immensely" benefit from free access to servers that will relay public microposts. I don't think my accesses even cost X a dollar per year. I would happily step in with my own server to replace 10x or even 100x the server resources I consume if it was possible. And if it was actually expensive they should be jumping at a way to make it possible.
I remember when you paid your ISP for internet access and in that cost they also provided you with an e-mail address, they ran a Usenet server for their customers, and gave you space for web hosting. Now all of that is expected to be paid for with ads instead.
Im too young to remember this but it would be an interesting idea if ISPs paid website hosts (kinda like cable companies pay networks based on viewership)
The privacy implications of this are many, but the idea itself could be interesting.
That battle was called "net neutrality", and the reason we who lost it fought it was to prevent web 2.0 becoming a set of giant moated properties.
That's creative and could probably be crafted so it turns out better than it is now.
OTOH how about commercial websites paying ISPs for access to the ISP's valuable customers' eyeballs?
And structuring it so that it more than covers everything, then the ISPs can pay the non-commercial websites to be there. If nothing else but to have an abundance of relief for tired eyeballs :)
If the average commercial websites aren't rolling in the dough well enough to afford supporting the non-commerical, what are they doing there anyway, find some that are ;)
How does one not engage with the corporate product at all?
Im typing a comment on a website of a corporation whose goal is to grow companies into corporations, via a computer manufactured by a corporation on a keyboard produced by a corporation, staring at a screen produced by a corporation, while connecting to an internet service offered by a corporation. Never mind that im also employed by a corporation, dressed by a corporation, drive a car manufactured by a corporation that takes fuel from a corporate gas station that is extracted and proccessed by a corporation.
What is the alternative exactly
It's basically impossible to not engage with any corporate products at all. It's trivially-easy to not engage with specific corporate products. I don't engage with Twitter, because I won't sign up and that makes it useless to me. I'm not missing out on anything I care about.
Just one example: Facebook is mandatory for school/university in large parts of Asia. You cannot trivially block them. They should be considered an utility.
How did facebook make its way into education like this? Can you explain to an outsider?
> How does one not engage with the corporate product at all?
By not using it. Which is exactly why I don't use X or Facebook, and minimize my use of Google (I use DuckDuckGo for search, and as Maps continues to suck more I use it less).
On some level there is local/small businesses. They are less efficient and hence you usually have to pay more for less, but it avoids the a lot of the "power structure" that people have strong distaste for.
On a deeper level there is none. Overwhelmingly peoples complaint is that they need to do something to get something, which is just how life is, a shared annoyance that is just a fact of reality.
> they need to do something to get something, which is just how life is
FLOSS invalidates that statement.
Many people are happy to contribute to something greater than themselves. They also happily acknowledge they're standing on the shoulders of giants.
I'm not totally dismissive of FLOSS, but it's kind of a unique situation so you can't really extrapolate broad generalities about society from it.
Software basically has zero marginal cost, and is pretty unique in that regard. If baking 1 loaf of bread was identical to baking 10,000,000 loafs, we would have solved hunger centuries ago...
There also is the fact that a large amount of FLOSS is an exercise in resume building (FLOSS contributions is SWE resume building 101), and one rung lower, an exercise in ego building ("my design runs on millions of computers daily" is definitely something a human would value). So I wouldn't call it completely selfless (we are now also at the boundary of the philosophy of "selfless acts").
But in short, there is a reason software is pretty much the only field with a vibrant "free/open source" scene. It falls off a cliff once more than pressing keys on a keyboard a few hours a week/month is involved.
> There also is the fact that a large amount of FLOSS is an exercise in resume building (FLOSS contributions is SWE resume building 101)
Not all of it. Plus, we could say the same thing about the typical worker at the average modern company. Google's product graveyard is a popular example of this. Resume padding, job hopping and ladder climbing are the norm now. In that respect, I can see why you're so pessimistic about the average human.
Much of the dedication often found in modern FLOSS is reminiscent of how companies used to operate: valued employees actually believed in the shared mission they were all striving for, and they took pride in their work as a result.
> valued employees actually believed in the shared mission they were all striving for, and they took pride in their work as a result.
And then it turned out that all that was a long con by the companies, who started reneging on all their promises of lifetime employment, good benefits, and retirement pensions as soon as the costs of those things began to exceed the profits available to them by using those promises to attract employees.
The key thing to address is the near zero marginal cost part.
If the philosophy extended beyond a binary blob, we would have a whole parallel economy of free tangible goods, from workers using their expertise on their own time. But this basically doesn't exist because real costs are involved.
This thread started with me citing a counterexample to your wide sweeping attempt to lump self-interested corporations in with humans who tend to be generous under many circumstances. I've made my point, so I'm done here.
What about books or art or movies?
The electronic version of all those is also near zero marginal cost.
>What is the alternative exactly
There's not supposed to be an alternative.
To fully function within the system you need to be a corporation your dang self.
That doesn't mean you have to be a capital corporation, you can go forward without any of Other Peoples' Money and therefore not be an actual capitalist yourself. Even if you make more money per invested dollar that alone does not make you a capitalist, regardless of how much true capitalists can admire the returns. Without capital you would be merely an entrepreneur, sometimes that's a better choice, sometimes not.
Beyond that you still need to function in a capitalist market either way, no matter what because that's what dominates.
Which could be overwhelming too, and the kind of thing that would make a promising alternative seem very attractive also :\
The system is so totally dominated that you can't enumerate anything that is not . . . corporate-controlled.
Advocating for demonetization of a service is not the same as trying to maximize personal profits. Maybe not everything in the world is about money.
No, it's about value.
Money is just a convenient abstraction of time and energy. Basically everyone, all the time, is focused on min-maxing their time and energy (optimally is another question, hah). These are both fundamentally scarce things and likewise have intrinsic value to everyone.
If you spend time reading an article or watching a YouTube video, it defacto has value to you, and the creator of it spent both time and energy making it. And just like that, there is a market.
And when the creator decided to make that free to access, it's improper for a company to throw up a wall in front of it.
I think you might be confused, because any creator can make their content free to access. If they are playing in someone else's house, yeah there might be rules they don't like, but it's also not their house.
Nothing stops creators from self-hosting and absorbing the full cost themselves.Yt doesn't even care if you link to your own hosted version of the video on their platform.
It used to be that when your house is the size of a city or even country that it isn't just your house anymore and you don't get to set the rules on your own. When a platform becomes big enough it should be treated more like a utility and a startup.
I meant what I said. Companies are allowed to be rude to everyone but it's still bad for them to be rude.
Rude that they don't give you free unencumbered access?
When they got the content for free, usually yes.
Youtube pays 60% of revenue to creators...
Youtube is pretty much fine. Outside of a few janky age restrictions, you can just go to youtube and watch videos.
Remember right at the start: "There's no reason you can't abolish login walls while still serving ads." This is how youtube works.
X is the one blocking or messing up views without accounts (and also being too likely to ban accounts that don't give a phone number).
Though most people posting on youtube are doing it for free or negligible revenue (I'm not sure how it works out on a per-view basis), and a lot of the rest make almost all their money elsewhere.
You neglect to consider that these social media websites were giant bait & switches - they were open-access to trick people into going there and making them popular, and only when they got enough network-effect lock-in, did they turn hostile. Morally equivalent to fraud.
this entire thing is about people that aren't even users of the service.
Users were affected in exactly the same way. And every user - i.e. poster - was first just a visitor. Much fewer would have become posters if they'd been greeted by a login wall that wanted an e-mail and phone-number.
i don't think there is a page on x that just gives you a login wall that a normal non-logged in user would go to. if you link to something like a tweet or a profile page it shows you them. these services are for scraping.
Don't lie. When not logged in, if you visit someone's profile, X shows you only 5 tweets. If you visit a tweet, only 3 replies are visible. It's not "scraping" (which is perfectly fine and legal to scrape public content by the way) - you cannot read conversations or follow someone's posts in any meaningful capacity without logging in.
it is legal if you can do it, doesn't mean they have to like it. keeping features for logged in seems super reasonable to me.
"features" for logging in is in a broad sense reasonable.
When one of those features is being able to see the most recent tweets from an account, that's asinine.
In other words: If you link to a profile page, X doesn't properly show you. It gives you a random selection of popular tweets that person has made, often several years old.
Well, to be fair, time is more valuable than money. You can't make more time.
Scarcity is only one factor in a valuation. You can't make more of my boogers yet I doubt you'd trade any of your time or money for them haha.
True, but I can make my own boogers, and kind of do automatically, so that's pretty common. Some people get fecal transplants, which is rarer, but let's say if I want to build... I don't know, lets say a house. I can lay the bricks myself, which is a transaction against my lifespan (not just a transaction on a product of my body like boogers or fecal matter), or I can hire you. When you're hired, I essentially get two lives since I can do life things at a rate of 2x while you remain employed. I guess the real value comes in buying your time, not necessarily the product of 'you.'
Life is both scarce AND irreplaceable, which is why the valuation is so high.
profitable? whats the revenue and whats the expense? give an example of real money somebody makes by seeing a bad meme on twitter through xcancel
I can't write out here how economics works, how things have value, and how humans barter time and energy using abstractions like money.
By virtue of people spending time on twitter, twitter has value. If that sentence is non-sensical to you, then now is not the time to for it.
I’m personally upset that the modern day companies have decided only extracting profit matters and not building a better product that makes people willing to pay.
At least in the digital world almost every piece of software and website I use has been getting objectively worse the past few years. And I don’t mean like, I hate this UI layout so it’s objectively worse. I mean like new Reddit freezing my tab completely ~50% of the time and its notifications page not registering my clicks and instead clicking on the page behind it. Or like Microsoft breaking pasting in fucking Excel and managing to ship that to consumers as another article today showed. Or the fact that activities in Windows that used to be lightning fast like searching or opening an application now take seconds to 10s of seconds.
We’ve reached a point where companies are too entrenched in their monopolies and are currently in a mode of just figuring out how to extract as much rent as possible.
The only companies I know of still in heavy competition are AI companies but they are doing the tried and true method of heavily subsidizing their business until they kill their competition and I have no doubt that whoever wins will switch over to rent extraction as well.
Read the story of vid.me, YouTube's only ever credible competitor.
There is also nebula and curiosity stream, which also illustrate my point. Both solid good services with <1% conversion rates.
There is no better service than YouTube while using an ad-blocker, and no amount of "awesome new platform" can break that. Most people's response to "YouTube sucks" is to ad-block on YouTube, not go to a competitor(and pay/view ads). It totally breaks the market and ultimately makes things shitty. That debt must be repaid somewhere.
It's interesting to think about what is actually so good about YouTube. Is it being able to go to the homepage and see a bunch of stuff to click on? Nebula has that.
I signed up to Nebula to support alternative platforms, yet I still click on YouTube all the time and not Nebula. Why is that? I'm not sure.
Because yt pays creators more than the others, both in absolute (total dollars) and relative (revenue share) terms.
As long people are "sticking it to the man" with ad-block, youtube gets to keep it's monopoly. They have literately turned people's greed back against themselves, since it ensures starvation of competitors. And yt doesn't have anything to do with it, hence not monopolistic.
Even with creators who post on both Nebula and YouTube, I still end up watching them on YouTube for some reason.
> As long people are "sticking it to the man" with ad-block…
Do you think people are using as blockers because they are being rebellious?
Modern day ads interrupt the content people are intending. The content isn’t built around them like back in the days of tv with commercial breaks, they usually just randomly intercede.
They also aren’t what anyone is watching the content for. The only exception I can think of is the superbowl where the ads are legitimately something people intend to watch.
> And yt doesn't have anything to do with it, hence not monopolistic.
That is inherently not true. A company doesn’t have to take an action to be a monopoly. And actually that’s even more not true after thinking about it. YouTube has nothing to do with YouTube being the number one video site?
Actually that’s a decent counter example.
YouTube hasn’t degraded in service or quality and when I pay them for the ad free service, they don’t try and sneak more ads in anyway like some other services have or the historical example of cable tv.
I’d probably be a lot happier if most software companies produced a product and kept a user relationship with me the way YouTube has.
> A website that allows you to skirt paywalls, is immensely profitable to the end user.
login wall != paywall
As for your apples:oranges comparison about maximizing money, which group do you suppose has an unfair advantage these days?
Modern Capitalism Is Weirder Than You Think: It also no longer works as advertised
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/how-asset-managers-h...
(https://archive.is/wSmtd)
All the evidence in the world that corporations are greedy doesn't detract from the fact the end users are also greedy.
It's all greed, all the ways down.
I also can't read the article, not going to make an account, and I stand by not backdooring.
What's wrong with that? Capitalism is about everyone being as greedy as possible. If you aren't greedy while your adversary is greedy, you give up everything you have.
The wrong part is fooling yourself that you are above those principles while actively devoting all your energy too them.
And I'm not talking food, water, medicine here. I'm talking entertainment and general internet stuff.
If you aren't being maximally greedy in all things, including entertainment and general internet stuff, you aren't doing capitalism right.
The current global power imbalance was shaped to a large part by us not being greedy while the rich people were being greedy. It only resulted in them owning all of our stuff. It's about time we tried to own their stuff, to restore balance.
>If you aren't being maximally greedy in all things, including entertainment and general internet stuff, you aren't doing capitalism right.
It transcends capitalism (or really free markets, I haven't bothered so far in this thread to make the distinction) and is just kind of base human behavior. You can watch animals in the wild and they have the same "maximally greedy" behavior. Your groundhog won't leave any carrots in your garden for you.
Communism unwinds exactly because everyone is there little own min-max engine working to ultimately serve themselves (not to be confused with colloquial selfish behavior, group good can be in ones best interest). At least with free market capitalism, this idea is embraced and turned back on itself to act as the natural mediator. The friction of the mediation though, obviously, is pretty uncomfortable for everyone. And more over, worse for some more than others.
Cooperation is possible, and can become the dominant strategy under certain conditions. However, those conditions are currently not present.
Market economies create economic cooperation. The dinner you ate required countless people from ranchers, farmers, mechanics, chemical manufacturers, steel manufacturers, automotive manufacturers, paper manufacturers, tubing manufacturers, oil manufacturers, fastener manufacturers and countless others working on intermediate factors of production. None of them deliberately and knowingly cooperated, rather prices in the market economy allowed for decentralized cooperation between people who don't even know each other. That is the power of market economies. Command economies cannot deliberately arrange cooperation at the same scale due to information being too disbursed and rapidly changing.
So you are correct that cooperation can become the dominant strategy under certain conditions; those conditions require a small population though.
All of these entities are competing ruthlessly to extract as much value from each other as possible. When they don't compete, the ones they're competing with steal their lunch. See: supermarket monopsonies in Australia pushing food prices to unsustainably low levels, American farm megacorporations taking over from small farmers, everything open source getting sherlocked by amazon.
The discussion wasn't about market vs command economy but about capitalism vs socialism/communism.
See: Market socialism
The discussion wasn't about any economy except for the one we currently live in.
Seems like people who try to argue that Capitalism creates greed are almost always just narcissistic looking for something to blame their greediness on.
> Capitalism is about everyone being as greedy as possible.
Depends on what you mean by "capitalism". The current definition, at least among the big-time capitalists, seems indeed to be "do whatever it takes to get me more capital, by hook or by crook".
But that's not what actually built most of the wealth in the modern world. What built most of that was cooperation, specialization, and positive sum trades, in which everyone involved became better off, but nobody obsessed about counting down to the last penny exactly how much better off they were than the next person, and complaining about unfairness if things didn't balance out exactly the way they thought things should. In other words, focusing on creating wealth, not on grabbing whatever you can, or making sure you grabbed more than anyone else.
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Convenient that your "principles" disallow you from seeing critique of said principles.
Funny that your critique is still capitalist...
It's not though. That's literally the point of the article.
The article that I need to hand over my monetizable information over to read? The article written by a journalist getting paid to produce content so it can be pushed to the market of articles to retrieve more than it's cost to procure?
If they are going to claim to ride a high horse, I'm not paying them any credence when they show up on the same dinkey donkey as everyone else they loudly spite.
Quite the mental gymnastics to simultaneously acknowledge the bootstrapping problem when it suits you, and pretend it doesn't exist otherwise.
I can assure you that whatever the nymag article written by a creative writing major turned socialist journalist says, isn't going to be a life changing read to a long time economics geek.
Pure cope and baseless assumptions.