[soarfourmore]

The following quotes are fairly interesting and ironic:

> Larry Page and Sergey Brin were originally pretty negative about search engines that sold ads. Appendix A in their original paper says:

>> "we expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers"

> and that

>> "we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm"

[sseagull]

Wasn't this also the story of a dating site (whose name escapes me. OKCupid? PoF?)? Original owner wrote an article about how paying for a dating site is a bad idea. Money is offered, article disappears.

Searching is failing me at the moment

edit: Was OKCupid: https://www.themarysue.com/okcupid-pulls-why-you-should-neve...

[dheera]

From the article

> 12-moth plan

> 6-month plan

Why would a dating site have a 12-month plan, and why would a user of a dating site want a 12-month plan?

Not only would you hopefully want to be off the site within 12 months, as soon as you found someone compatible, you would hopefully delete the app, but you've unnecessarily paid for months you will (hopefully) never use. I don't understand why anything but month-to-month would make sense for dating, specifically.

I mean, if you are a dating app, you should be striving to get users to delete your app as fast as possible (for the right reason), not hang onto an annual subscription.

[derefr]

Month-to-month is just as bad. The ideal business model for a dating site, from the users' perspective, is a one-time advance payment. This puts the business into the situation where they have an incentive to get you satisfied as quickly as possible, so that they can spend as little time/money on you as possible, so that your value to them doesn't go negative from allowing you to spend too much of their time/money.

This is, as it happens, how professional matchmakers tend to charge.

[dheera]

> This puts the business into the situation where they have an incentive

If the payment is a one-time advance payment, I would imagine this disincentives the business to truly do their best, since they already have your money.

I would think, idealistically, maybe the best model would be an advance payment but with a money-back guarantee of say half the payment if you don't find a match through them.

Legally establishing that you don't find a match could be troublesome though, since the "couple" that actually liked each other could both claim they didn't match, get their 50% back, but you as a business would have no recourse if they got together and lived their lives happily ever after, behind your back. You don't have "rights" to their personal life together as a business.

Unless of course it was a government-run dating service that had marriage, housing, and financial records of everyone. That might work. And for many reasons it's in the best interest of the government to get as many people married as possible.

[derefr]

You don't need a refund. Just presume an efficient market of such companies, where the matchmakers who actually make matches have better reputations, and the ones who don't quickly go out of business. That's how most single-shot service-provider businesses work. (At least, the ones with clear success criteria. Psychics and the like never lose reputation, because there's no standard to measure their claims against.)

The one thing single-shot service-provider businesses (including professional human matchmakers) will do, though, is to calculate a quote for their service, corresponding to how much trouble they think your account is going to be for them. They don't usually bill more if it turns out to be even more of a challenge, but they do refine their quote process after each experience.

Though also, back to refunds: a refund guarantee doesn't need to be part of an explicit business-model, to be part of the effective business model. Dating sites charge people's credit cards. Large one-time charges from unknown companies you don't have an ongoing relationship with are exactly the type of thing that banks/credit-card companies are happy to do charge-backs for. Whether they offer refunds or not, the system will offer refunds for them — and kill their business by taking away its payment-processing if too many users ask for said refunds.

[pdpi]

> Just presume an efficient market of such companies

And those companies are in the business of matching spherical cows in a vacuum.

Efficient markets are useful as a simple model, but you don’t get to wish away real-world problems by pretending the world conforms to that model.

[fallingfrog]

The efficient market hypothesis is wrong.

Here’s why: it assumes that the only form of power or leverage that exists is supply and demand. However there are all kinds of forms of leverage in the real world. There is legal power. Voting. Guns. Unions. Price fixing. Cultural norms. Marketing. Blackmail. All of these are forms of leverage and they are not special cases; rather, supply and demand is one special case which comprises a fraction of the total pressure on wages and prices and success or failure at any moment.

[Pet_Ant]

Sure, but if it doesn't have rundle potential it's not a modern business.

[behnamoh]

IMO the ideal business model from users' perspective could be pay-as-you-go, where you pay for each individual you want to send message to (e.g. $1.99).

[bayesianbot]

There are a lot of dating sites at least in Scandinavia/central europe, where men pay per message (or usually buy message packs, it ends up being around 1€ a message IIRC).

The (mostly) men answering these messages, pretending to be women, get paid around 0.15€ per reply. And obviously writing messages where they try to prolong the conversation and turn down real life meetings or changing to other (free) messaging system "for now"

[dheera]

Why does the system charge men and pay women to message, instead of just charging everyone to message?

I would have thought that of all places Scandinavia would not price-discriminate users based on their gender ...

[imtringued]

If you wanted to go down this route you would pay per date, otherwise what are you paying for? Sure, the algorithm may jinx it by sending you on more bad dates than you wanted, but it would get you further than just a message.

[cratermoon]

> pay per date

Hmm, I'm pretty sure that's been a business model for a very long time.

[dheera]

Maybe ideally yes, but that's assuming you only had the option to message them through the platform.

You could always message people for free outside the platform, considering any profile worthy of messaging probably lists enough information to find them on, say, LinkedIn or Facebook, and users likely often drop their personal websites or Instagram/Twitter IDs on their dating profiles.

[SkyBelow]

That would incentivizing matching people with those whom they want to message but aren't likely to start a relationship with.

[dexen]

Counter-intuitively this might be about hedging the incentives for the service provider - to avoid the moral hazard of pushing for indefinitely extending the subscription.

Just as you mention, successful finding a partner means as few "attempts" (apologies) as feasible, which in turn means two "lost customers" to the platform. That introduces a perverse incentive for the platform to "spoil" the dating to keep the customers. By making one long-spanning plan, the perverse incentive is lessened.

[1_person]

I fail to see how making money by shafting the customer one way precludes making money by shafting the customer another way at the same time.

[dkarl]

Assuming you're looking for one lifelong partner, which isn't true of everybody, is it normal to find somebody "compatible" that quickly? Without apps, I think it's common for people to go for years between serious relationships. I don't know why the timeline needs to be so compressed.

For me as a fairly awkward and introverted person, who didn't naturally generate a high volume of new social contacts, one of the things I liked about online dating was that I could make choices more like an extroverted person. I didn't have to think, holy shit, I actually met somebody I get along with, and she seems to like me, I can't afford to let this go or I'll probably be completely alone again for years until I meet the next person. Instead, I could think, this is okay, but is this person a really good match for me? Does she bring out the best in me? Are we going to have disagreements about big life things?

In other words, I could meet somebody I liked, enjoy spending time with them, and still decide not to marry them. And do that over and over again until I met somebody I was confident was a really good fit for me. Like regular people do!

Even when finally I met my wife, it didn't immediately mean the end of dating other people. She had just started dating after many years of focusing on her career. In fact, after having a big heart-to-heart over wine with a close friend one evening about how she needed to start dating again, her friend helped her install Tinder, and I was the second person she matched with. Obviously, after many years out of the dating pool, she was leery of falling for the first halfway decent guy she met, so she wanted to take her time and see what was out there and figure out what she waned. To avoid going insane while she was meeting other guys, I kept meeting new women. We didn't become exclusive until six months after we met.

I think, if I had a single friend who was starting online dating, if they were using a paid app, I would recommend a 6-month plan or 12-month plan, as a reminder that they can afford to be patient and shouldn't rush into things.

[dheera]

Maybe. But I would think that that also introduces a paradox of choice where you are constantly doubting the person you are currently dating, thinking that maybe there is someone that is a better fit for you.

The problem is I don't really think "fit" is an absolute thing. I think the reality is that there is a large set of people can be your best fit if you can grow together with them to be that best fit. A healthy relationship is about actually turning a local maximum into a global maximum by the function naturally and healthily changing to that effect, not assuming the function is constant and then hopping around looking for the global maximum and wondering whether you have reached it. One needs to find one of those people that they can grow with and commit to that growing, one where that local maximum is continually rising in prominence. Some degree of initial commitment and emotional investment without shopping around helps you see whether or not you can grow with that person. If growing together isn't possible, that's a big red flag and the relationship should end.

I agree with not committing after only 1 or 2 dates, but if the dates continue, I would sure hope for exclusivity a lot less than 12 months into it.

[dkarl]

For me, doubt in my ability to know who I could be happy with rose dramatically with a little bit of experience and then fell as I accumulated more and more. Meeting more people made me more and more comfortable with my own judgment about other people and my understanding of what made me happy. I think people who find partners very early in life are very lucky in some ways, though. It's a trade-off, like so many other things. You can have X more years of experience with relationships and with yourself when you choose your partner, or you can have X more years of shared history with your partner.

I do think any doubts you can put to rest in six months or a year, the time is worth it. Couples who divorce take years to do it, and I think they're unhappy for at least half that time.

[jetbooster]

The problem is, for the _business_ the incentive is the opposite. You want the suckers who are willing to pay for your dating app to keep paying, so from a purely callous point of view you want to provide the absolute minimum benefit over the non-paying users that is required in order for them to not leave and try somewhere else. There is almost no incentive for them to _actually_ match you with someone, just string you along just enough to keep you coming back.

[purerandomness]

You're assuming that everyone uses online dating platforms to find one (1) long-term partner with whom they'll be monogamous, which is not the case.

There are couples looking for other couples or thirds, there is the BDSM scene with people looking for casual play partners, and so on.

[spijdar]

This is true, but I believe that the majority of users on "normal" dating sites are looking for single, long-term partners. As I understand, within the BDSM scene there are several websites including social networking sites and dedicated match making sites catering to the specifics of BDSM. I find it unlikely you'd use a "normal" dating site when you likely have pretty specific interests that likely (?) need specific UI/UX to cater to.

Just sort of overall, when your interest is in building a network, finding people to have casual sex/encounters with, a "stream of people to meet" as someone mentioned below, I think you'd want a different website/UI than these big dating sites seem to offer/encourage. That said, I've never used them, just speculating based on the ads I've seen over the years and how they paint themselves.

[purerandomness]

Dating sites that make you answer questionnaires and match based on answers are a really good way to get to know people with similar kinks and interests.

While there are specific sites for BDSM dating with more nuanced optoins, the ads for generic dating sites are all very "tame" and try to not deviate from the perceived norm too much (= "find a partner, have a happy family" type messaging)

The reason is that if you do, it's virtually impossible to get included in Ad networks and App Stores. So you naturally see only dating ads catering to the very conservative viewer.

Example: A BDSM dating site got banned from Googles Play Store after including a background image of a simple leather whip. [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/devianceapp/status/1384015666185834501

[vmception]

sure maybe a majority of users think they are, but really aren't.

many users of that kind of profile are just outsourcing actual human interaction to dating apps that claim to solve it but are incapable of doing so

[prepend]

The incentive for the dating app is to keep you unsatisfied, but with some hope, to keep dating and failing over and over. Or I suppose the business models could be either “subscription” based where you keep using it forever or “contract” based where it’s a single fee.

I think the okcupid papers called out how free dating is better aligned with users because they wouldn’t have to compete with the natural tendency to want to make more money through ongoing subscriptions.

Of course, I know friends who are continuously dating and plan on staying that way.

[galaxyLogic]

That is true. At the same time this viewpoint makes me wonder, what about doctors? Isn't it in their interest to keep us sick so we keep on coming back? And the policemen and prison industry, if crime disappeared they would lose their business. And firefighters too.

[vngzs]

Dating sites are not actually designed to help you find relationships.

They are designed to leave you constantly questioning the relationship you're in, knowing you could always find something better around the corner. They might get signups because people believe they can find a partner, but they keep customers because those people are addicted to the game of newer, "better" lovers.

It's another of many cases of businesses that claim to solve one problem, but really solve a different one that's not in the user's best interest.

[langitbiru]

I'm building a dating app, SwanLove (https://swan.love). It's still in MVP mode and centralized mode.

I'm thinking of pivoting into this kind of business model: B2B. So I make my dating app something like GitLab or WordPress. You can install it and host it yourself. You pay me every month if your users exceeds 100.

Say, you are a priest or a gym owner. You have a community. You want your people in the community (church, gym) to have a chance to find a romantic partner inside the community. Anyone who wants to register in your dating app needs to be a member of your community first (church, gym). This way, I don't even hold the data (avoiding becoming a honeypot for hackers). I just want the money (in an ethical way).

What do you think? Is this ethical business model for a dating startup?

For the centralized dating app, maybe the subscription package can help them foster their relationship. I don't know. I'm still thinking about it.

Or you can create a bounty in the dating app for someone who can introduce a wonderful person to you. Then if you get married, the dating startup gets a cut from the bounty. The problem is how you verify whether people get married or not. Can we do something like bootcamps offering ISA that can access their students' tax records?

[nonameiguess]

This sounds perfectly ethical to me but it's not clear what value it provides. People who are part of the same church or gym already have the opportunity to get to know each other by being in the same physical community in the first place and don't need a website where they can interact with the same people but online. If they do want that, they're likely to just set up a Facebook group. While the obvious disadvantage there is now Facebook owns their data, but it's also free and most people are going to choose free.

Ironically, online venue for a real-world network limited to verified members of that network was what Facebook itself originally was, until they realized opening up to everyone was the difference between a novelty for college students and a multi-trillion dollar world eater.

[TheAdamAndChe]

Dating apps and websites depend on proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding in order to lead. As such, they are very prone to becoming monopolies, and a market leader wouldn't be likely to use someone else's SaaS app. I'm just not sure there is the demand for 1000 semi-large dating apps unless tech isolationism somehow becomes the norm, and it that happens then it would include SaaS isolationism.

[Aethelwulf]

There are already white-label dating-site providers out there. Most of the "specialised" sites (e.g. uniform-wearers, "professionals") are running on them.

[GCA10]

But wait!

Yes, aspiring monogamists will fit your bill of people who "want to be off the site in 12 months" or sooner. That's one segment of your users, but it really isn't everyone by a long shot.

Plenty of users are signing up for the chance to meet ("get to know") a steady stream of people. We don't stigmatize people who subscribe to Netflix for many years so that they can keep watching different movies and shows. There's some segment of the dating-site world that has more of a Netflix model in mind.

[dheera]

> There's some segment of the dating-site world that has more of a Netflix model in mind

Although I'm sure those users exist, I'm sure they aren't the majority of the world, who would rather just be happily married and get on with life? And even if not, these users who have different expectations should not be matching with the former.

[TeMPOraL]

> And even if not, these users who have different expectations should not be matching with the former.

Actually, given the extreme social stigma worldwide (even in the most progressive western countries) against casual hookups and low-commitment dating, people looking for "more of a Netflix model" will still gravitate towards the same sites ostensibly servicing those "who would rather just be happily married and get on with life"[0], because these services offer the widest choice of possible partners, while giving everyone plausible deniability.

--

[0] - I think that, given aforementioned stigma, it's even hard to estimate how many people in a given age bracket want this, and how many just say they want this, because it's the only accepted thing to say out loud.

[FridgeSeal]

Bumble has a feature where you can indicate what you’re looking for, options are “something casual”, “don’t know yet”, “relationship” and “marriage”. You can also filter for this.

From experience: very few people have “something casual” set, but I know from female friends that there’s plenty of guys with “don’t know” or “relationship” set despite looking for something casual.

[p_j_w]

Those users don't have to be a majority to be money makers for the companies that put out the sites.

And even amongst people who want to settle down, a fair share of them probably also wanna do a fair amount of looking around in their late teens through some point in their 20s, and maybe even early 30s.

[6510]

People are not having kids because it's to expensive.

[jdminhbg]

The cost of 12 months of a dating site is trivial compared to the benefits of finding the right person. If someone offered you a soulmate if you gave them a couple hundred dollars, you'd take it in a second, right? Paying ahead actually aligns your incentives better, because the site is no longer incentivized to drag you along single month after month to keep you paying.

[throw14082020]

This is bordering on logic like the following: - Water is really important, why don't you buy this $100 bottle of water. - The site has an incentive to improve your dating outcomes. No, it's primary objective is to maximise revenue, everything else is a side effect. - Paying more for something means someone will commit/ follow through, somehow raise incentives. This is just a guess, not supported or disproven by reality.

I like to think defensively especially when it involves companies. What are they doing, and what do they stand to achieve?

These apps have not shown any value to their users, paywall their content and have an aggressive-long-term subscription model because they have optimised themselves straight into the garbage can, by thinking short term.

[hansvm]

Effectively, you're not paying for "12 months" despite the label, you're paying for a significant chance at finding a soulmate? If that's the case, why not label it as such?

[chucksmash]

Because after your 12 months you can't use the profile any more. Better to label what you pay for accurately.

[fho]

Kind of related: one of the dating platforms in Germany advertises with "every 10 minutes a single falls in love on XYZ" ... 1 year / 10 minutes = 52560 ... that's a pretty bad success rate for a platform that supposedly has millions of users.

[billytetrud]

The big spenders on dating sites are the ones there just to screw around. That's why they all mostly become toxic hell holes, because the economics incentivize catering to those assholes

[otabdeveloper4]

This is an open secret, but many (most?) "dating" sites are just ubertized prostitution providers.

In this context, a "12 month plan" is just their bulk discount.

[Abishek_Muthian]

If a dating platform fulfills its promise i.e. offers users only the best date with whom the user could potentially have a long-term relationship then the user gains but the platform would soon run out of the users(Chicken-and-Egg is most prevalent in dating platforms).

So these platforms are only optimized for - Choice overload, Doom scrolling based on physical attractiveness.

[Breza]

Dating websites are the one category where either having an amazing site or a truly terrible site both lose you subscribers.

[IQunder130]

Wanting to be done in under 12 months and actually being done in under 12 months are two very different things.

[vmception]

you described one user profile of a half dozen use cases of dating apps

no dating app is actually designed for that one use case, just like Cosmopolitan magazine, they are built on frustration and doing counterintuitive things designed for never reaching that kind of user's goal

[toper-centage]

Why are you assuming everyone is looking for long term relationships and not hookups or fwb?

[dheera]

I guess one of the fundamental problems then is that these two mutually incompatible groups of people are mixed up in the platform?

[distantaidenn]

Some users just wanting a string of hookups, perhaps?

[chovybizzass]

Serial daters. Plenty of guys just using these apps for one-timer hookups or FWB. They stick around for a month then onto the next branch like a damn monkey.

[dncornholio]

This. Before tindr you just had 'dating' sites.

[toomuchredbull]

This guy doesn't understand modern dating...

[asiachick]

I find there are mixed incentives. An evil paid dating site might try scammy things to get you to sign up. Some site I tried did this. Free to sign up and immediately got "too good to be true" matches that you could only access if you paid. But conversely, free sites I get lots clear predators either only looking for sex or scammers trying to get money. OTOH my experience on an actual paid site ($150-$400 a year) no free sign up, is that nearly everyone is seriously looking for long term relationship.

[kumarvvr]

Haha. I remember an interview of Eric Schmidt by Stephen Colbert. Stephen asks a great question in the interview.

Stephen : So the goal of Google is "not be evil"

Eric : Yes. Not be evil.

Stephen : How low would the stock price have to go for your to start being evil? (or a similar question to that effect)

[carrozo]

Everybody’s got a plan until they’re punched in the face (with hundreds of billions of dollars).

[Zelphyr]

Or, maybe, "Everybody is altruistic until they have shareholders."

The idea that companies should only be beholden to shareholders that has taken firm hold over the past 50(+/-) years doesn't look to be a good one, in hindsight.

[simonh]

Past 50 years, really?

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." - Adam Smith, 1776

[nowherebeen]

> The idea that companies should only be beholden to shareholders

This concept was popularized by Milton Friedman with his Shareholder Theory. OP is not wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

[simonh]

Maybe, but it’s repackaging a point Smith made 194 years earlier.

[ahepp]

I think Friedman's ideas are substantially different.

The quote from Smith is discussing tradesmen running a business in their own self interest.

In some ways, Friedman's point is the opposite. That the laborers perform in the self interest of the owner.

I don't know the full context of the Smith quote. I did a bit of digging for Smith's views on publicly traded companies, and came across this quote[0]:

>The directors of such [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own.... Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company.

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

[pjmorris]

A shareholder is more like the butcher or baker's brother than the butcher or baker. The incentives are different.

[dredmorbius]

Smith had very few good things to say of joint-stock (shareholder-owned) corporations. They were comparatively scarce at the time. Most businesses of his time, including the "baker and butcher" line you quite, were sole proprietorships or family-owned and operated.

The interests he writes of are those of the butcher and baker to themselves. Not to their shareholders.

"Shareholder value" is a recent error attributed to Milton Friedman.

[SkyBelow]

Psychology studies in the past showed people were altruistic. Then psychologist accounted for social capital/good will and worked to remove it from their altruism tests. People stopped being overly altruistic when it stopped benefitting them, likely meaning that what we see as altruism is really a failure to account for all the benefits a person expects to gain and all the negatives they expect to avoid when choosing to perform a certain action.

As for shareholders, I think that comes down to the incentive to avoid the negative outcome of being replaced. Those at the top optimize their actions to avoid being replaced which filters down through each level until it effects every level of a company. There is some variety that results from how a company chooses who to promote, but that is still an outcome of not wanting to be replaced. Promote people who you think will strengthen your own position and not those who will weaken it. This ends up being the primordial pool that spawns corporate culture.

[heterodoxxed]

The concept of altruism does not require it to be "pure" or entirely selfless. Altruism can have benefits but those benefits can exist outside of economy and into the realm of the personal, spiritual, social, etc.

In other words, that doesn't disprove altruism so much as it proves that economic self-interest is not our only motivator.

[wnevets]

They don't have to be. Everyone just chooses to do it that way because its easier to make loads of money.

[dimitrios1]

It's not some idea that came about from a vacuum. Put yourself in an investors shoes: you may have some investments that you do for the sake of charity or philanthropy, however, the majority of your investments are to increase your investment. It isn't surprising then, following this basic premise, that we have arrived at the current situation. Capitalism factors in greed for the general welfare of the most people. It just seems that we underestimated the upper bound of human greed.

[Swenrekcah]

It's not so much an underestimation as it is a systematic breakdown of constraints and personal responsibility for owners/directors of large corporations.

[Causality1]

Yep. Money is the one unpatchable zero-day for every platform and service on earth.

[lifthearth]

There is a patch thanks to contributor Marx but everyone keeps pressing "remind me later".

[daenz]

Does bribing not exist in that system?

[sudosysgen]

Sure there is. I don't know which motivation you'd have to bribe someone to promite your product, though. Would also be hard to sustain if intellectual property was decommodified.

Other, more pressing concerns have to be addressed, though.

[daenz]

>your product

In a hypothetical world where I don't benefit from a competitive advantage, in what sense do I own the product / company?

[avereveard]

because there aren't luxuries in that system. that creates a need, and from it a secondary market, which without titles[1], sees the exchange of power either via favors exchange or plain tribalism. bribery then becomes the norm for the influential, even if actual money doesn't change hand, favors and contraband do.

1: a catch all to include both money, 'quota cards' and the likes

[CoastalCoder]

Working example needed.

[dclowd9901]

Socialism, like capitalism, also has a zero day vulnerability by the name of mundane old “human corruption” that undermines its goals. Capitalism just works better because it pits people against each other, keeping the focus off authority and top level control.

[edgyquant]

Let me know when we reach post scarcity and no longer need a rationing device such as money.

[sudosysgen]

People thought of this issue since 1870 and the solution they came up with is simply non-transferable rationing devices. In traditional Marxist terms this was labour vouchers but nowadays there are much better solutions. Marx himself wrote about this, in terms of primitive accumulation in socialism.

For sure there are a lot of issues, but this isn't one of them.

You could in theory have bribery in material terms, but this is much easier to trace than in money terms.

[edgyquant]

My argument was with the idea that money will be gone as a rationing device. You can come up with alternatives but it’s the human nature that is the problem not the technology we use to ration resources. Let me know when this bug is fixed.

[imtringued]

I don't really get it. How does this prevent people from holding onto foreign currency or gold?

[nautilus12]

Probbably due to the memory of the deaths of millions of people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_...

You get bit by a viper in the bathroom and your going to avoid that bathroom for a while.

[thescriptkiddie]

> This article has multiple issues

[marcusverus]

I assume that this criticism is offered in good faith, and that you're in need of good, solid Wiki articles about the tens of millions of victims of Communist regimes--well, I'm happy to get you started!

Here's an article about the Soviet terror-famine (known as the Holodomor) which killed 4 million Ukranians. No worrisome notifications on this article, so I assume it meets your rigorous standards:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

And here's one about the so-called 'Great Leap Forward', when the Chinese Communist Party's top-down modernization plans resulted in the accidental deaths of ~50 million human beings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

[erikpukinskis]

That doesn’t really explain anything, given there are millions of deaths under capitalism too.

[throwaway3699]

Big difference.

[narrator]

Bitcoin at least rations out the zero-days. You don't just have one authority that can create them as needed.

[cletus]

At this point, the snide dismissal of all things advertising is nothing short of boring.

To be sure there are many forms of advertising annoyance: auto-playing sound/video, remarketing (or what I like to call advertising a product I've already bought), interstitials, popups (to be fair, there are many non-advertising forms of these eg "sign up to our newsletter" dialogs) and so on.

But what made Google a money-printing machine is that search advertising is actually largely aligned with the interests of the user. That is, just by searching for something the user has shown an intent that other advertising doesn't have (where generally it's just attention thievery). Imagine I search for "how do I sleep on an airplane". Isn't a neck travel pillow an appropriate result here?

I get that it's popular to just hate on all advertising but that's just shallow.

As long as search results are marked as ads when they are ads and paying for ads doesn't improve your organic search ranking (aka the Yelp business model) then I'm completely fine with it.

There is a lot of crap in search results and this is a constant battle of whack-a-mole. At one point it was content farms. As someone who has search for a lot of home furnishing stuff recently I can tell you a big problem is affiliate link blogspam. There'll be some real-sounding domain like mattressreviews.com but it becomes pretty clear it's just mass-produced "content" to justify affiliate links.

Honestly, this will probably get to the point (I hope) where Google does the same thing it did to content farms and starts downranking sites with affiliate links (cough Pinterest cough).

[jodrellblank]

> "Imagine I search for "how do I sleep on an airplane". Isn't a neck travel pillow an appropriate result here?"

No?

I mean, seen through the lens of extractive capitalism where "how do I X" is the same as "what product do I buy to do X", and "someone asking about X" is the same as "which product to shove in their face to make them stop asking and extract the most money out of them", maybe yes. Doesn't "information technology" suggest some alternatives? Like, information about sleeping in planes - noise reduction, positions people have found comfortable, stress reduction, light pollution, circadian rhythms, stretches that can be done in a small space or sitting down, etc?

> "As someone who has search for a lot of home furnishing stuff recently I can tell you a big problem is affiliate link blogspam. There'll be some real-sounding domain like mattressreviews.com but it becomes pretty clear it's just mass-produced "content" to justify affiliate links."

This seems to fly in the face of your previous paragraphs: you searched for home furnishing stuff, isn't some generic advertising of a mattress an appropriate result here? You want something better than that for yourself, but think other people don't deserve better and are shallow for complaining?

[jquery]

This should be the top reply.

Google’s advertising may be very profitable and effective, that doesn’t mean it’s in the user’s best interest.

[sobellian]

We know that paid advertising works, so it should not surprise us to discover that paid advertising on the Internet also works. But Google and other search engines seek to organize the world's information, not the world's commercial products and services. For a multi-multi-billion dollar company's core product, I'm somewhat surprised they cannot do a better job killing the blogspam. Given the resources at their disposal, I think most people just assume that they don't care about the blogspam.

[semi-extrinsic]

"We know that paid advertising works" [citation needed]

I mean, the ad business of course likes to throw various metrics around. But as far as I'm aware there are no proper randomized controlled trials that show statistically significant positive ROI of online advertising versus no online advertising.

I mean, it would be really simple to do, right? To provide conclusive proof of the efficiency of ads? Pick a populous state in the US where people enjoy Soft Drink X. Randomly divide the households in the state into two groups. For the next full year, run normal amount of targeted online ads for Soft Drink X in Group 1, no targeted online ads whatsoever in Group 2. Did the sales in Group 2 decrease by more than what the cost of advertising to that group would be, yes or no?

[auntienomen]

There are two significant complications:

1) Google is running many parallel ad campaigns, which may target the same individuals. This in some ways gives opportunities, because one can run 'natural experiments' on the effeciveness of advertising for X by simply selecting the people who never saw the ad for X. But there is also probably some legal peril; Google has to be careful about what promises it makes to people purchasing ads.

2) Google has very little incentive to release the results of any such studies, because -- whether or not advertising works -- they don't need their customers to have accurate side-info about the value of advertising.

[initplus]

They have every incentive to release the results - if they showed that the market was undervaluing advertising.

[oblio]

Advertising has been about what 2? 5? percent of US GDP for more than one hundred years. The odds of advertising naysayers are probably infinitesimal at this point.

[disabled]

This is a thoughtful post. However, the issue is that these advertisements play into your hopes and fears to maximize the likelihood of getting a click from you. The fact that Google (especially) and other adtech companies are playing into your hopes and fears, by microtargeting and hoarding the most private and intimate details about your life is abusive.

I have to say that I am lucky that I have a print-related disability, because I almost never need to go websites with ads.

Services I get access to (no-ads):

* 975,000+ books for $50/year (Bookshare.org)

* 60,000+ professionally narrated audio books for free (US National Library Service)

* 80,000+ volunteer narrated audio books for $135/year (LearningAlly.org)

* Hundreds of Newspapers and Magazines for free (NFB Newsline)

* 99% of the books posted on OpenLibrary.org for free (even books currently "borrowed")

* Virtually all libraries for print-related disabilities around the world (sometimes free, sometimes paid) (I can get books in foreign languages easily)

Additionally, I use the paid audio apps Blinkist, Audm, and Curio, which everyone has access to. I find them to be super helpful. Blinkist in particular is almost 100% of the time a YouTube and TED talk replacement for me. I also use The Economist app, which has the entire weekly edition professionally narrated, along with the vast majority of the rest of its material.

[cratermoon]

Free books? What kind of socialism is that? /s

Seriously though, "Imagine there was no such thing as a library, and that members of the current neoliberal policy consensus were to sit down today and invent it." https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/citizen-coup...

[kingsuper20]

My main problem with advertising and the technologies surround it, aside from the obvious privacy issues and their misuse, is that it seems to suck all the air out of the room.

The birth and dominance of the online advertising business model looks to be the greatest misallocation of engineering talent in the history of humanity.

[p_j_w]

This is a bit how I feel about advertising in general. Human beings' time is being taken and mouths are being fed not to increase overall output, and thus lifting the overall well being of members of society. Instead, Company A hires advertisers to convince the public to buy their product instead of a competing product to Company B. Value is created for Company A, but entirely at the expense of Company B. At no time in the economic... chain?... of events that is advertising is anything actually created, yet vast sums of money, and thus allocation of resources, is put here. It seems INSANELY wasteful.

[imtringued]

>At no time in the economic... chain?... of events that is advertising is anything actually created, yet vast sums of money, and thus allocation of resources, is put here. It seems INSANELY wasteful.

You're forgetting something, companies start off completely unknown. How did they reach the point where the market has been fully saturated and the only real way to gain more customers is to take them from someone else? Oh right, it's because advertising increased the grow rate of your company to the point where there is barely any growth left.

Let's manufacture a completely artificial scenario to illustrate my point:

Person A: So, you're telling me you spent $5 billion on advertising and all you have to show for it is a 5% higher market share than your biggest competitor?

Founder: Yes, we used the advertising budget to grow our market share from less than 1% to 40%. Our next biggest competitor has a 35% market share.

[agalunar]

Right, but there's a difference between connecting a business to a customer who wants the product (which is good!) and influencing the wants and needs of the customer, particularly against the long-term interests of the customer (which is bad).

[I think it's impossible to try and succeed at connecting people with businesses without somewhat influencing their wants and needs, but ideally we limit that.]

Modern ad tech is problematic because it has little regard for people's long-term interest and demonstrably affects people's wants, particularly in the context of searching and automatically-curated feeds: since the internet is so absurdly vast and searches/feeds are the windows to the world, you can partially control the reality in which users live.

[FridayoLeary]

but the advertising industry has almost alone managed to produce google. That's a trillion dollar company that has literally changed the world.

Some perspective is needed. What looks like an evil industry of insane waste is at the end of the day subsidising our most important tools for business, communicating, and relaxing. All thanks to the vast allocations of resources and money into advertising.

[fuball63]

I agree with your point that there is a need for advertisements to inform consumers about available options. I'd generally fall in the "dismissal of all things advertising" box, but I would add a nuance to it that it really depends if it was requested vs. forced upon you.

In both instances you mention as being useful advertising, shopping for furniture or how to sleep on an airplane, you are asking for advertisements. That makes sense. You are looking to solve a problem by purchasing a product.

From my perspective, there are two issues with the current climate of ads: First, that the overwhelming majority of ads are forced upon you. They track you, distract you, and have generally turned the internet into a wasteland. Second, that a search engine/social network/news site is the place to view ads. I would prefer a site dedicated to this use case, not have the use case tacked on to unrelated sites constantly in the way.

I feel the same way about physical ads, too. I don't want uninvited people knocking on my door to sell me their ISP. I don't want those terrible mailers with coupons in them. Billboards are ugly and distracting.

[astrange]

> Imagine I search for "how do I sleep on an airplane". Isn't a neck travel pillow an appropriate result here?

Yes, but advertising doesn't do that. They do retargeting and only show you the most valuable ad for what they know about you. Sometimes that ad is just what the advertiser has paid to show you in particular, like "you left something in your Amazon cart".

[mcguire]

One might suggest that what made Google a money-printing machine is compiling dossiers on as many people as possible.

[guerrilla]

> But what made Google a money-printing machine is that search advertising is actually largely aligned with the interests of the user. That is, just by searching for something the user has shown an intent that other advertising doesn't have (where generally it's just attention thievery). Imagine I search for "how do I sleep on an airplane". Isn't a neck travel pillow an appropriate result here?

This doesn't hold water. It's just being shown because someone paid for it to be, not because it's the best thing to be shown which is what algorithms would be tuned for if they were in the users interest.

> I get that it's popular to just hate on all advertising but that's just shallow.

That's pretty dismissive of all the thought that has gone into criticism of advertising and it's effects on products and services, without even giving a hint of an argument as to why you feel it's shallow.

[cletus]

> This doesn't hold water. It's just being shown because someone paid for it to be, not because it's the best thing to be shown which is what algorithms would be tuned for if they were in the users interest.

You are factually incorrect and this is part of the problem: a lot of proselytizing (and, honestly, virtue-signaling) by people who don't know how advertising actually works.

Display advertising works on a CPM basis (ie paying for the impression) so yes, that's pretty much a case of someone paying to show the ad and that's it. They may be paying for that based on contextual information (eg RTB) or not.

But search advertising, at least how Google does it, it sold on a CPC basis (ie paying for the click not the impression). This actually means Google is motivated to show you the search ads you're most likely to click on because that's some revenue vs just who bid the most.

> That's pretty dismissive of all the thought that has gone into criticism of advertising...

No offense but if you don't know how search advertising works at the highest level then either you haven't put much thought into it or you're simply parroting someone else (who also hasn't) because it fits your world view.

[orhmeh09]

I’ve never clicked on any ad on Google in maybe 20 years of using it. How do the results help me?

[cratermoon]

> "how do I sleep on an airplane". Isn't a neck travel pillow an appropriate result here?

Late to the party, but I want to say here the answer is "maybe". However, the idea that the solution to every problem or need is to buy something is pretty regressive and is kind of at the core of the problem with consumerism and rapacious capitalism.

For a person to buy something, that something has to have been manufactured, shipped, sold, shipped again, etc. All that is extractive and depends on externalities that are too-often finite.

Also, the person buying has to have money, which they made through some kind exchange for labor, possibly fairly, possibly not. For capitalism, incentivizing people to treat a want or need as an opportunity for a financial transaction is essential, even when there are other solutions. Remember, for example, that the Listerine company essentially "invented" bad breath as a problem requiring a product to solve. Not that people didn't legit deal with bad breath before, just that they weren't sold a pre-packaged "cure".

So the question "how do I sleep on an airplane" has many answers other than "buy something".

[solosoyokaze]

I don't see targeted search advertising as user friendly. A search engine should return the most valid results. As soon as you have sponsored results, there's a conflict of interest. What if the competitor to the neck pillow ad people actually have a better pillow? They should be the first result, but won't be since Google's interest is in helping advertisers, not the users of their search engine.

I don't think there's an argument where advertising is pro-user, since a service that focused on the user would return the best results for a search, not who paid for placement.

[JohnJamesRambo]

https://imgur.com/t/funny/fjqdCZz

I like the whole quote. There’s one more gem in the middle. It shows they were good once. That they know. Any chance it can return?

[erezsh]

No. I don't think it's in their hands anymore.

[cratermoon]

Systems work in funny and unexpected ways. When they started their company Brin and Page may have truly believed they could go in the non-profit direction. But the forces at play in late capitalism worked inexorably to extract value, and little by little, possibly before they realized it, Brin and Page were no longer in control of what they created.

[zitterbewegung]

The AI that makes Google work is not the algorithms they use to index the web its AdWords which uses a general purpose algorithm to auction ads. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

Sure, google search was the core prototype that used algorithms to give great search results but without Adwords google wouldn't be google.

[johndags]

I think this is largely misunderstood about Google. It seems like ads placed in search results only accounts for a small portion of their revenue. Not sure how much the targeting of ads by analyzing your search history actually contributes either. I think Google just figured out how to scale online ad sales really well.

[rkagerer]

It seems like ads placed in search results only accounts for a small portion of their revenue.

Do you have a source for that? Last time I checked (which granted was some years ago) my understanding was that over 90% of their revenue came from advertising, and I think most of that was driven by search results.

[mcguire]

At roughly that same time, doubleclick.net was the most hated company on the Internet.

Then Google bought them.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~page/google7.html

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~page/google4.html

"Currently most search engine development has gone on at companies with little publication of technical details. This causes search engine technology to remain largely a black art and to be advertising oriented (see Section ?). With Google, we have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realm."

They never delivered on this "strong goal" to make web search an academic endeavour.

They managed to domainate web search but the endeavour is now 100% commercial. It is intentionally nontransparent (due to commercial incentives) and remains a "black art". Don't try this at home.

"Also, it is interesting to note that metadata efforts have largely failed with web search engines, because any text on the page which is not directly represented to the user is abused to "spam" search engines. There are even numerous companies which specialize in manipulating search engines for profit."

"Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine the top result for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's home page when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm."

[ModernMech]

That's not irony, it's evidence of mens rea.