[sirclueless]

Who is "Rebecca"? I agree with 90% of her statements, and she appears in this conversation to have further ambitions of continuing with the ideas and convincing some powerful people, especially Paul Krugman, of their validity.

Did she ever succeed? Did she write her thoughts in a more digestible format and make those writings public? Does she have further commentary on her thesis on the capitalist or non-capitalist tendencies of modern software companies, or on other topics?

Mostly I'd just love to read more of her writing, if it exists.

Edit: I believe she is Rebecca Frankel, according to http://danluu.com/programming-blogs/#rebecca-frankel. Still interested in any pointers to more of her writing if it exists.

[nickpsecurity]

Many of her comments are very interesting and I'd probably like to read more on other subjects. That said, she almost shills for Google even if she doesn't intend to. This jumped out when she pointed out that Microsoft's strategy was to profit off of "artificial scarcity" while Google's was not. Bullshit haha! It's called PageRank: the patented, artificially-scarce algorithm that made them the multi-billion dollar company worth discussing. That plus them going public told me they'd shift toward evil for the financial, "greater good." Which is evil in surveillance and software empires more often than it is good. We see them pulling stuff with Chrome and Android that wouldn't have gotten them celebration in the early days.

Another is the part about people paying ad words for freedom or stuff they couldn't otherwise get. The fact that Google's system can reach more people and more cleverly than before is certainly a benefit. There were alternatives, though, like listing your product in online stores, Buy It Now on eBay with a link to a store, or mass marketing after buying listings of leads. Similarly take less staff than traditional marketing at big firms. The online ecosystem for ads also involves lots of fraud with estimates showing it is a good percentage of ad expenses. So, Google is actually yet another middleman in this sense that tries to lock you into their set of benefits and problems. They also try to shift the benefits toward themselves a bit more over time like any business. So, they're just middlemen with a bent toward lock-in rather than purveyors of freedom.

So, aside from the Google comments, other stuff was pretty interesting. Lots of historical and economic tie-ins to her analyses.

EDIT to add: I'm only through around half the post. It's pretty huge haha.

"When I was at Google I hung out "

She also apparently worked at Google. Explains the bias. :)

[sirclueless]

I suspect, though I have no way of knowing, that she has been thoroughly disabused of any Google-exceptionalism she may have harbored at one point. Remember this was from 2010. Google Reader was 3 years from being discontinued, Google's motto was still "Don't be evil," Buzz was an experiment that people still took seriously. The rose-colored glasses were firmly affixed to many intelligent faces, and it's hard to fault her for hoping something was intrinsically different about the company and its culture.

I'm very curious whether she still thinks and hopes the same things about Google that she did then.

[abysmallyideal]

She is right about one thing, "Silicon Valley", is the worst thing that has happened to the decentralization and distribution or the powers of the internet. Their entire motive is centralization and monopolization.

[nickpsecurity]

Good points. I agree.

[wutbrodo]

> This jumped out when she pointed out that Microsoft's strategy was to profit off of "artificial scarcity" while Google's was not. Bullshit haha! It's called PageRank: the patented, artificially-scarce algorithm that made them the multi-billion dollar company worth discussing.

I'm not following your extension of artificial scarcity to Google. Do you mean that because PageRank isn't public, it's artificially scarce? That doesn't seem to hold water....there's no anti-user conspiracy theory required to understand why PageRank is private, but rather the fact that it would rapidly render Google Search pretty useless, due to the strong financial incentive for publishers to "teach to the test". A federated Facebook with public APIs would add to user surplus/utility, while a system based on a public PageRank would rapidly degenerate into a measure of how good a website is at matching PageRank, which would waste a ton of resources _and_ make search quality much worse (again, destroying user utility).

Maybe you've misunderstood what artificial scarcity and rent-seeking mean. She's talking about it in the widely-used economic sense of "scarcity that's imposed solely to extract rents, inferior to an alternative method which would increase net utility". A federated Facebook and open-API Windows both fit this neatly[1], and a public-PageRank Google doesn't even come close.

[1] One could make the argument that Facebook needs to be closed for reasons that benefit the user, but I've never heard any compelling arguments for that.

[nickpsecurity]

"Maybe you've misunderstood what artificial scarcity and rent-seeking mean. She's talking about it in the widely-used economic sense of "scarcity that's imposed solely to extract rents, inferior to an alternative method which would increase net utility". "

Ahhh. That could be it. I didn't realize it was a defined economic term. I thought it meant creating an artificial monopoly to grab a market, lock users into the benefits, deny competition via that tech, and make a financial killing in the process.

If I was wrong, I take back the critique based on artificial scarcity but keep it based on monopoly. PageRank was simply too good to beat. Patenting it led to their billions and continued dominance. They did smart things on top of that success. They might have not pulled it off without being monopolistic about search, though.

"a public-PageRank Google doesn't even come close."

How? It let them dominate search, control much ad revenue, put players with most money on top results, create a major contender in browsing, and later dominate mobile market. All that came from PageRank being both good and patented.

[wutbrodo]

>> a public-PageRank Google doesn't even come close."

> How? It let them dominate search, control much ad revenue, put players with most money on top results, create a major contender in browsing, and later dominate mobile market.

The context of my original comment was that a public Pagerank algorithm isn't an artificially scarce environment. I don't understand your "how" question, and I don't see what the rest of this paragraph has to do with artificial scarcity.

Duckduckgo doesn't have a public spec for their algorithm either, because again, it would render their results useless in a short amount of time. That example should hopefully illustrate how keeping one's ranking algorithm private has pretty much nothing to do with artificial scarcity or abuse of monopoly.

[nickpsecurity]

"a public Pagerank algorithm isn't an artificially scarce environment"

I already told you I retracted artificial scarcity claim since I didnt know it had established meaning in economics. I shifted to a similar argument based on monopolies. Google's PageRank wasnt just publuc: it was patented (monopoly), extremely effective, and more efficieng than contenders that sprang up. That nobody could copy or beat the algorithm is why they stayed on top despite tons of search and meta-search engines existing.

If it was public and not patented, search landscape + Google's valuation might look a lot different. The monopoly on the best technique is why they got huge rather than a temporary advantage.

[jimminy]

I would assume it is Rebecca Frankel as well. I looked for a connection to Piaw and he had blogged about her during the period this conversation had taken place.

[sirclueless]

Yes, she is a truly excellent writer.

I went digging into a Buzz post about the Boston startup scene that Piaw referenced, and could only find a crufty unstyled version in the Internet Archive. If you can forgive the formatting, it's still excellent reading: https://web.archive.org/web/20100613173203/http://www.google...

[laser]

Better copy: http://danluu.com/mit-stanford/

[shalmanese]

Prior HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1416348