

Webapps are ruining you life: Or, the future is micropayments - ekpyrotic
http://jordangreenaway.tumblr.com/post/3210370420/web-applications-are-ruining-your-life
Originally submitted as .pdf.
======
athom
After reading (most of) the article, I'm not so sure about Jordan's premise.
Can we really assume that webapps are really designed to streamline our lives?
Perhaps that's the _idea_ behind them, but let's consider the example of a
(generic) news aggregator. Here's an application which, if I understand
correctly, gathers news articles it deems of likely interest to the user. In
theory, this saves the user hours of searching for these articles himself, but
let's ask ourselves: would any user spend that kind of time, every day,
looking for articles _without_ the aggregator?

Many would, perhaps. I think most, however, would simply let it go, and save
their attention for the items that rise to general attention more or less on
their own. What the aggregator does, by dredging up _any_ articles it deems
potentially interesting, is to encourage the user to read more articles he
might have otherwise missed or skipped, thereby spending _more_ time reading;
more even, perhaps, than he would have spent searching.

Now, it might be argued that such aggregators serve the user by alerting them
to important articles _before_ they become Big News. Although it's really
beside the point, the fact is that most articles simply aren't going to rise
to that level of importance. The user ultimately has to decide whether it's
worth the effort to read them all; or how much time to spend deciding what to
read, on top of the time spent reading. It all adds up to time spent on the
aggregator's results, that might never have spent at all without them.

I _really_ don't think Facebook is meant to simplify communication at all! It
certainly hasn't been my experience. It's made it easier to find and contact
other people, after a fashion, but then you've got to deal with all of those
connections! Whose stuff do you actually want to see on your wall? (HINT: NOT
every friend you've got, if you've got more than five!) What do you do about
all those "gifts" and "invitations" to storm yet another castle? Can you just
ignore them, or do you have to worry about somebody's feelings if you turn
them down? Then, if you _do_ take the gift, you get your turn to send your
own! And, if you think for a moment, you might consider the quandary you just
faced, and wonder if you really want to put other "friends" through the same
thing? Now, maybe I'm just overthinking all of this, but to me, this doesn't
sound like simplified communication. If that's what Facebook really meant to
achieve, I think they've been doing it wrong.

This is before we even get to Jordan's point: the extra ad-riddled pages. To
tell the truth, annoying as the ads can be, they really haven't seemed that
much of a problem to me. Facebook doesn't even shove them in my face, just
tucks them off to the right, where I can easily ignore them. In fact, what's
annoyed me the most about advertisements is that they're all for about the
same five different things! Seriously, if I'm going to have to look at fifty
different ads, could they try to find at _least_ twenty-five _good_ products
to promote? I probably still won't buy anything, but at least I could not-buy
more stuff!

Anyway, that brings us to Jordan's solution: paid accounts, if I'm reading
correctly. Pay to get rid of the ads, pay for fewer pages to click through,
pay for less of whatever annoys you? I don't know. It seems to me I could save
a lot of money, _and_ a lot of time with a completely different solution:
ditch the service entirely. I never needed Facebook in the first place, and
only got in after receiving invitations from two different friends (as in
people I actually know and like), one of whom had all but ditched the service
himself by the time I finally took them up. I just might be the sociable type
who benefits from a service like Facebook, but then I have to wonder: does
someone who's actually sociable need an app to help them in that department?
Keeping track of your contacts, sure, it can be helpful. Finding lost friends?
Almost amazingly good! Actually being sociable? Eh, pick up the phone. Or
email, whatever.

~~~
zalew
> Pay to get rid of the ads, pay for fewer pages to click through, pay for
> less of whatever annoys you? I don't know. It seems to me I could save a lot
> of money, and a lot of time with a completely different solution: ditch the
> service entirely.

It's not that we don't need their functionality. The point is, we come for the
basic solution, but we're flooded with a whole ecosystem which is far from the
core functionality we seek. I could loosely compare the 'paying for less' idea
to sportified versions of road cars - there are a lot of such examples in the
automotive industry, where a more expensive version is the one where producers
got rid of all unnecessary items and instead boosted only the core values -
power, speed, handling, weight loss (Porsche GT3RS, BMW M3 CSL, Mercedes Black
Series, and lots of others). And you get what you really want - you didn't get
rid of the car, you got a faster better handling car without 4-zone a/c and 2
speakers instead of 16. Not a direct example, but you get the point: sometimes
less can be worth more.

Summary: the annoyances are there because they need it, maybe if we paid them,
they wouldn't be there.

------
michaelchisari
I think this is a problem social media is going to have to solve. Much of the
privacy/data mining/etc issues stem from the fact that advertisers are the
customers, not the users. And with the absurd valuations, there's going to be
an insane pressure to monetize which is going to lead to some really dodgy
business decisions. So there has to be another way.

Reddit's gold subscriptions are $3.99 a month. Maybe this is too much? What if
Facebook started charging $1 a month to remove ads? What about $0.50? Would
people pay it? At that point, it's really not the cost that's an issue, it's
the hassle of signing up.

I do really like the idea of an aggregator service where the providers receive
a cut of the subscription. But is an API (say, restful JSON) so much less
bandwidth-intensive on a large scale that this is more viable?

~~~
athom
You know, I really never wanted to join Facebook in the first place. I only
got involved after a couple of friends invited me. After about half a year
blowing _way_ too much time on Farm Town, Mafia Wars, etc., I pulled way back,
and only drop on occasionally now, usually just when I get the odd notice in
my email. If FB started trying to charge me for _anything_ , I'd give 'em the
Holy Water and Silver Cross for good. Of course, there's still the matter of
what personal information I've actually given them, and the challange of
getting it removed, which brings up an interesting thought:

How likely might Facebook try to monetize its 'assets' by charging users for
its privacy protections? Maybe they'd start offering to close/scrub
accounts... for a fee? It reminds me the old joke about the school band's free
concert. Admission costs nothing, but you'll pay ten bucks to get out!

Given

------
zalew
My problem with most of social, sharing, reading apps is that they save time
in the beginning, but reality is the more you engage, the more you notice they
all have a very low signal to noise ratio. I don't need to administer all my
streams from one app, what I need is apps that give me the content and
functionality I really need instead of generating an endless flow of links
(the long tail).

IMO personalised web is in its infancy. And that's where I agree with Jordan,
that for the moment developers want us to waste time and boost stats, so we're
flooded with suggestions we don't want on websites bloated by functionality we
don't need. Paying for apps just to be able to get rid of distractors and
replace them with better quality services seems like a solution.

------
eik3_de

       If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.
    

Source/Discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1684732>

