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by me1010
4342 days ago
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I think you are wrong on the control and privacy issue. It would seem to me to be more a lack of understanding on what control and privacy mean for the average user. Most Internet users are like most car owners. They have no idea about the inner workings, nor do they care. They don't generally assume that having a seat belt is more safe than not having one. And they generally trust that the manufacturer has their [the user's] individual best interests in mind when developing, building, and selling the car. -- Likewise, most internet users firmly believe that if it was "good" for me it would be already "built-in" to the system. This inherent trust in what is presented is the problem, rather than consumers not wanting control and privacy. |
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1. The advertisers who pay for it all still get their money from us, but baked into prices of the things we buy from them. There is no free lunch.
2. The overhead cost of advertising is huge and we pay for that too. Ad systems and data collection systems, ad engineers and people like the author. Ad agencies. Creative agencies. Ad tracking. Marketing departments.
3. As the article points out, we pay the opportunity cost of a product that cannot put users first because they live or die by giving advertisers what they want. Costs include our lost privacy, content and services design that optimize for advertising revenue instead of its users, and our time and attention stolen by surreptitious ads. As has been said, we are more Google's products than we are their customers.
4. We pay the social costs. Democracy and the free market assume people make voting and purchasing decisions based on facts and reason. Advertising is predominantly about manipulation and deceit. To me this is the most expensive cost of all.
Added together, we are paying a lot more for "free" web content and services than if we could just straight up pay web sites for straight-up ad-free versions. But as in the prisoners dilemma, we individually make decisions that hurt us all collectively. Whatever you think of MaidSafe, the article is so right when it says,
"Do we have the Internet we deserve? There’s an argument to say that yes, we absolutely do. Given web users’ general reluctance to pay for content. We are of course, paying."
So, as you point out, the question is, "How do we get users to understand this?" Got any ideas?
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[1] This is a condensed version of a more detailed case with reference links that I made here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773