[mitchdoogle]

This kind of wording is conspiratorial mumbo jumbo. A social media's product is it's platform and software. Their revenue comes from advertising. No one ever told someone watching network TV in the 80s, "you are the product", because that would be ridiculous. It's no less ridiculous to do that with websites and phone apps.

Why can't we just have a frank discussion about advertising and privacy without this kind of manipulative language?

[manapause]

“Talking past each other” is now the norm; culture is not a solution of molecules that can settle back down - how the crap do we unbake a cake?

This sounds like fluff: appreciating the art, style, aesthetic of the work/entity we are talking to should be #1 goal.

Engaging in the appreciation of art is to jettison our judgement of the subject to focus on the choices “why” and “how.”

I don’t know if this groks with anyone else....that’s kinda part of it too.

The prospect of work being judged by peers negatively is the pain amplifier on all our hands.

There are some of us out there - good people that are just broken.

Their path has made them feel it as if it’s on all the time, and they are as unstable and judgemental as they arw talented.

I have no idea how to fix the broken - I am just trying to paint myself whole again, one human interaction at a time.

[etripe]

A social media's product is its platform/software only if it manages to sell those or extract rent. That could apply to "Facebook at Work" and LinkedIn, but they're the exception. For other social media, the platform and software are infrastructure, not the product.

The key difference between network TV in the 80s and social media now is the former had content to offer. As such, you could call the ads supplemental. TV also has dual income streams: subscriptions and advertising.

A social media platform has no content to offer, except the content provided by its users. If you provide content for free and the company benefits through increased eyeballs and therefore ad revenue, in a sense you're an unpaid employee. That makes you the product as shorthand for you providing the product.

Based on main revenue streams, network TV is either in the entertainment or advertising sector (I haven't looked up the numbers), but social media are squarely in the advertising sector. That makes the user's data the product, and "you are the product" a totum pro parte.

[cmehdy]

Nielsen ratings[0] have been a thing since the 1930s, so in a way people's attention has indeed been commoditized for a while now - only with an increasing granularity that has now reached some of an individual's metrics (and we're continuing to go along that path with smart devices and addition of sensors).

I'm not sure why saying to people that their attention and subsequent changes in behaviours were the fundamental parts of entire markets would be conspiratorial, but I might be misunderstanding you.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_ratings

[1propionyl]

Two key differences:

1. Nielsen boxes were and are opt-in.

2. You were and are compensated for keeping one.

[cmehdy]

1. Social media is opt-in

2. You are compensated by accessing an incredibly complex system and network for free where otherwise you would have to maintain or pay for some kind of infrastructure.

(I am playing the devil's advocate here because it is interesting to me to understand in what way other than granularity this would be any different from the way the media has been communicated to us for a long time)

[izacus]

What was once "analyitcs" is now called "spying" on HN as well, which pretty much shows how much nuanced debate is now possible here - any kind of attempt at talking about certain products just brings out extremist rhetoric which kinda defeats constructivity on both sides.

[donny2018]

In the 80s you weren’t individually targeted based on data collected on you personally.

[shi314]

Ever Heard of Nudge Economics?