
Nothing Fails Like Success - prawn
https://alistapart.com/article/nothing-fails-like-success/
======
xyzzy123
The truly scary idea is that there’s no conspiracy of capital even.

What if the advertising dollars aren’t evil, what if we can’t blame them?

What if the problem is that garbage and trash fires are just what people want,
and the ad dollars just follow the success?

I like the idea that there’s some kind of... imbalance? mis-structure to
blame? That it’s somebody’s fault or the system is wrong somehow.

~~~
pryelluw
It's pretty naive to try and think that people are not the issue. They are.
Advertising simply exploits the flaw.

~~~
throwaway-571
Advertising is people too. It’s people all the way down.

We decided child labor was morally unacceptable, so why not advertising?

~~~
pryelluw
Id say comparing advertising with child labor proves how biases distort
perception.

~~~
JohnFen
I think you missed his point. What I heard him saying is that in the past,
other commonly accepted practices were eventually deemed unacceptable and
ended. There's no reason the currently accepted practices of the advertising
industry can't follow a similar trajectory.

~~~
pryelluw
No, I got that. My point is that child labor is a bit too extreme for
comparisons sake.

Smoking and the tobacco industry would be more inline with advertising.

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jl2718
This is interesting, but it probably works the opposite way. Twitter et al
makes celebrities out of people who seek moral outrage. In this way they
overplay their righteousness, but the effect is exactly the same as amplifying
the offending message itself: more ad revenue. Interesting hack of our
society’s moral norms.

I’m not saying it’s wrong to be offended, but if you are, somebody’s probably
getting paid for it.

~~~
ptah
fine display of mental gymnastics

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powerslacker
> ...the fact is, hate speech is profitable. It’s killing our society and our
> planet...

Source? Hate speech has been part of every major society since at least the
time of the Egyptians. The opposite could easily be true. Hate speech might be
an integral part of society. Its also not very profitable. That's why
companies police their own content. No reasonable company wants their
advertisement associated with the Klan. As for hate speech's effect on the
planet -- I don't think the Earth cares who hates who.

~~~
cheerlessbog
By a broader definition it makes sense. People insulting and mocking each
other, talking past other. Even the president.. Did we used to do that IRL in
the 70's and 80's?

~~~
citrablue
Humans used to resort to physical violence as well as name calling. Rome had a
series of senators brutally murdered in session, even before Cesar. Andrew
Jackson used to physically attack opponents. The whole Aaron Burr story.

My unsupport theory is that we've pacified to the point where anyone can say
anything without getting beat up or killed, which allows people to push the
envelope.

I'm not suggesting we should go back to violence, but i think the lack of
direct violence in a person-to-person setting have enabled more and more wild
speech.

~~~
laurex
It may not be the pain of violence that was more effective a deterrent than
the pain of social ostracism, which bubbles and anonymity prevent.

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mdorazio
While I agree with the general sentiment of the author (and the same general
message comes up quite often on HN), I have two issues with the article:

1) It seems to equate "investors" with "VCs", who need big returns or quick
losses to make their overall portfolio numbers work. Angel investors don't
necessarily fall into this category, nor do more traditional funding sources.
Thus, I think the expressed opinion should more be that blindly chasing VC
money to fund a business that can't actually turn a legitimate profit on its
own is bad, rather than that taking investor money in general is bad.

2) There's an implicit challenge briefly touched on at the very end of the
article. If you have a project of love that gets popular quickly, it could
literally bankrupt you if you tried to keep it alive on your own. Scaled
hosting services aren't free, nor are community support, requested new
features, compatibility updates, API costs, etc. etc. It's entirely possible
that you could start a side project and then have to shut it down when it
starts getting traction because keeping it alive and not-shitty would take
more time than it's worth if you're not going to turn it into a venture-funded
business.

~~~
TeMPOraL
RE 2), I think the article pretty clearly implies your project of love should
pay its own costs. Once your users pay more than they cost you, scaling
problem disappears - in fact, economies of scale are your friend here.

~~~
mdorazio
I didn't read that implication at all. Many projects of love are free with no
revenue model at all, or maybe some random ads to offset costs (not cover
them), otherwise it's unlikely people would even start using it in the first
place. Going from that to a paid/subsidized model strong enough to cover
actual development, hosting, etc. is a tall order.

~~~
JohnFen
> Many projects of love are free with no revenue model at all

Yes. I myself have several different ongoing projects. Some of them are in no
way intended to be businesses and intentionally have no revenue model at all.
Those are free for everyone and will always be (at least until/unless I tire
of them and pass them along to someone else).

Others are intended to generate some sort of revenue -- with a couple, I only
want them to cover their own costs, with others, I want to see them make a
profit. Those are not free.

There is room for both types of project.

------
jppope
Enjoyable read.

I don't feel like anyone ever addresses the fact that the initial web was
modeled after academia, and yet most people were really just looking for a
place to share their identity. The (free) companies stepped in to make the web
accessible to them.

We're all angry at the broken promise of what the web could be and yet most
people I know have shuttered their accounts in the negative nether regions of
the internet. Facebook is a ghost town. Twitter was one presidential election
from going under. Instagram is thriving because there's little direct
communication (or hate communication).

And things are starting to happen again for the decentralized web. People are
blogging again on their own sites (including ditching medium). Github has been
a boon for collaboration and now is starting to help open science. New social
media platforms are popping up too (e.g. Mastadon).

how will it shake out? no clue... but I do think that it will shake out for
the better.

~~~
gambler
_> We're all angry at the broken promise of what the web could be_

Most users enjoyed the web in 200X. It wasn't a broken promise. It worked.
Then there was a concerted Web 2.0 campaign[1] that pushed in the direction of
"harnessing the collective intelligence". Well, Twitter is what "collective
intelligence" looks like in real life.

[1] Remember this? [https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-
web-20.ht...](https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html)

------
smag
This editorial makes sense: once a company takes outside investment that
demands outsized returns not in 10 years, but tomorrow, founders and employees
will feel pressure to take larger risks and act in ways that might not be
moral or ethical. VC-backing is definitely a factor in fraud, anti-competitive
tactics, and unethical behavior. But what's the alternative to VC-backing?
Doesn't seem possible for everything to be bootstrapped.

~~~
vincent-toups
How about we all just chill? We don't all need to be tech billionaires.

Like: just don't start a startup.

~~~
JohnFen
Or do a startup, but not with the intention of it making you a billionaire.

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willemave
It seems like it’d be possible to quantify what % of views derive from
enflaming content. A few starting points we could look at, # of people banned
and reach of said content, auction price of ad inventory that is temporally or
visually adjacent to inflammatory speech, etc. It wouldn't be an exact
science, but curious if it’s 10% or 70%.

I fundamentally agree that ad-driven revenue models have perverted many
business models for content-driven sites (UGC or publishing). Many of the
examples are publisher driven, are there any market examples of (perhaps
small) UGC content sites that don’t rely on either selling personal
information, or an ad-driven model?

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gambler
_> "You can cloak this basic economic trade-off in fifty layers of
bullshit—say you believe in freedom of speech, or that the antidote to bad
speech is more speech—but the fact is, hate speech is profitable."_

May I point out that this happens to be a major talking point of some big
media outlets right now? The same outlets, BTW, that mindlessly cheered on
Facebook/Twitter/etc. as late as 2013.

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gregoryexe
lost me at hate speech is killing our planet

~~~
the_gastropod
How much climate denialism would you estimate is rooted in little more than a
hatred for "globalists" and "the elite"? E.g.,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_conspiracy_theo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_conspiracy_theory)

