
The Price of Free Is Actually Too High - anacleto
https://www.feld.com/archives/2018/04/the-price-of-free-is-actually-too-high.html
======
godot
Nearly every first level reply on this post are in response to the title only
(price of free is too high).

But if you read the actual article, that was only the intro/lead-in. The main
point of the article is near the end:

> I think something more profound is going on here. We are getting a first
> taste of how difficult it is for a world in which humans and computers are
> intrinsically linked. Tristian’s punch line “The problem with Facebook is
> Facebook” hints at this. Is the problem the leadership of Facebook, the
> people of Facebook, the users of Facebook, the software of Facebook, the
> algorithms of Facebook, what people do with the data from Facebook, or
> something else. Just try to pull those apart and make sense of it.

> ... the big transitions are hard to see when you are in them but easy to see
> with the benefit of decades of hindsight. This might be that moment of
> transition, where there is no going back to what was before.

Brad is bringing up a question here. He's not making a claim about anything.
Our world is being changed. We don't know how things are going to turn out
yet.

~~~
indigochill
My feeling is the problem with the link between humans and computers is that
the people funding things like Facebook and other high-profit digital services
are applying an economic model which may have worked in an age before
computers, but is completely absurd when it meets computers. Let's think of
Facebook for a second as a "public meeting space", like a dog park. How many
dog parks do you know valued at hundreds of billions of dollars?

You could run a social media platform instead as a service for users funded by
donations, in the vein of Wikipedia. This way you don't need to convince most
people to pay. You only need a small passionate few who keep the service going
for everyone else. I think the business model would generally incentivize much
more user-friendly operational decisions than an ad-sponsored approach does.
And since this is a digital service, the operational cost can be scaled
proportionally to the donations received.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
How much do you think a company would have been valued that let you create a
meeting space for people with very little work, communicate it almost
instantaneously to everyone you wanted invited, and to have the meeting space
focused on any subject you liked - not just dog parks.

I believe Facebook is overvalued, but comparison to the value of a dog park is
not exactly fair either.

~~~
indigochill
You make a fair point. Facebook does provide a lot more functionality for
users than the comparison gives them credit for.

What I was trying to convey was that a social network doesn't necessarily need
to move the mountains of money that Facebook does. Diaspora* is an example of
a free open source social network platform. Of course it still cost people a
lot of time and money to build and host it, but nowhere near Facebook levels.

I also think the business model of running specifically a social network as a
profitable business is likely to lead to "perverse incentives". Making a
profit isn't necessarily opposed to helping people connect (e.g. OKCupid's
business model of being free to all but selling advantages to power users),
but it takes both the willingness to align your business model with your
users' interests and the fortitude to stick to that approach even though other
approaches could be more profitable.

------
drchiu
I find whenever I consider the alternative to free, I need to examine deep
within myself to ask if I’d be willing to pay for the half a dozen services or
so that I use every day for free, subsidized currently by an advertising
model. Although the idea would be great if companies existed solely to serve
people like myself for free, it isn’t realistic. Weighing the cost of free vs
the potential loss of privacy at some point in the future, I can’t help but
choose free today and kick the proverbial privacy can down the road. Thus, I’m
a bit hesitant to go find my pitch fork in this fight for privacy.

~~~
ajeet_dhaliwal
This is an honest answer that I think many people who are outraged about
privacy and advertising would begrudgingly have to admit if forced to really
answer. The only way to know whether the price of something is too high or not
is to put up two options. A free version where privacy is lost, and a paid
version where it's not. See how many people opt for the paid version. Now
unfortunately many services that go the advertising route do not offer a paid
version. I happen to be in the camp that does pay for several services I use
online, and I run a service that charges customers too. Where I can I like to
pay and be free of advertising.

~~~
bilbo0s
Here's the thing though, would we ever get privacy? Even if we were to pay?

I know that there are several defendants [drugs etc] even in my small area who
have had deleted snapchat posts, deleted texts, deleted emails, "anonymous"
forum posts etc etc etc show up as evidence in court. Now I'm obviously
unfamiliar with the legal and technical means by which police investigators
made things like that happen, but the fact that they happen means that we can
assume that at LEAST the government has access to a record of most everything
we do online. Free or otherwise.

Even ignoring the question of the government surveillance net, once your data
is on that company's server, how would you even be able to reliably validate
what's being done with it? By which I mean, they say they don't share it, but
how do you KNOW?

So maybe we would get some pretty compelling new features in a lot of our
services if we were to pay for them, but I'm not at all certain that ironclad
privacy would be one of them.

In fact, I'm fair certain that it wouldn't be.

~~~
kgwxd
I don't think paid-for services are going to solve anything. We pay up and out
the ass for television, which obviously has ads, but I'm sure they're tracking
as much as possible too.

Unless you've been extremely diligent, there's no way you're going to escape a
targeted invasion of privacy when someone, or some group, government or not,
wants it bad enough. Trying to stop that would be exhausting and futile.

Right now, we're allowing highly coordinated, highly detailed, nearly
invisible, for-profit, stalking to take place legally. There's no doubt that's
bad for society. We have anti-stalking laws for good reason. It's worth doing
something about the current state of things, even if it doesn't bring the
tracking down to nothing. The free market and tech has failed to fix it so
far. They don't have forever to keep trying. Laws are the next line of
defense. Laws might not stop criminals from crimin' but I'm sure the Tim Cooks
of the world aren't going to risk their company profits (or personal freedoms,
if the laws are strict enough) to get a little extra info on everyone.

~~~
realpeopleio
What if there were paid services that promised no ads? Ever? Make it part of
their policy?

~~~
HelloNurse
Naive: instead of serving ads directly, the service would just eagerly sell
your data to someone else for possibly worse purposes than ads (e.g. denying
you health insurance, mortgages, a job, etc.)

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Why? Why wouldn't the income from subscriptions be enough?

~~~
vageli
There is no such thing as "enough" when corporations seek perpetual growth.

------
jimmaswell
"We cannot afford the advertising business model. The price of free is
actually too high. It is literally destroying our society, because it
incentivizes automated systems that have these inherent flaws."

This is ridiculous. If nobody knew that this was happening, we'd be going on
with our lives and nothing would be different. Society is not being destroyed
by advertisements being delivered more effectively with user data. Whatever
they're doing with it, it's preferable to having to pay to use websites.

How about the very small vocal minority of people who legitimately care about
their data being harvested get to pay every website they want to visit, and
the rest of us stick with ads?

~~~
mistermann
I don't think the author is talking about simple advertising, I think he is
talking about the power to influence the public on a mass scale. I think it is
fair to say that western societies are more polarized than they were ten years
ago, and a reasonable argument can be made that social media has something to
do with it. Ad-based business models make it necessary, to a degree at least,
for platforms to monetize their user base.

~~~
notahacker
I think it's fair to say Western societies have at least one millennium of
being easily roused by pretty crude propaganda and much more polarised when
the economy's not going so good. It's not like good old fashioned paid-for
newsprint had a reputation for not provoking hysteria on a mass scale, or like
the most obnoxious political commentators on the internet don't have Patreon
accounts. Nothing to do with the payment model and everything to do with
people being willing to influence and others being easily influenced.

~~~
mistermann
If membership on Facebook was paid rather than ad based, is it not reasonable
to think there would be less people available to be influences on that
individual platform?

Add some more restrictive legislation on what major online platforms are
allowed to display to users, and I think it would be a very different ball
game.

~~~
mistermann
So, at least two people _disagree with the assertions that_ :

\- Facebook being a paid platform for subscribers would reduce subscribers

\- Adding restrictions to what Facebook was allowed to show users would have
some affect

Very interesting.

------
zaidf
Almost everyone making this claim is pretending to speak from a highly
priveleged position on behalf of people who aren’t priveleged.

They assume that just because _they_ don’t have a problem paying $5/mo, rest
of the world doesn’t either. Their naive solution (“charge me money!”) is all
about providing them some privacy while leaving the overwhelming majority of
the world either without the free services or without the same privacy the
relatively-rich would get.

~~~
bobbygoodlatte
Sure, that's mostly true. It doesn't mean they're wrong.

As Jaron Lanier pointed out in his recent TED talk, with previous information
technologies like books we figured out how to both charge for the information
being distributed while providing access free of charge to those who could not
afford it via public libraries.
[https://www.ted.com/talks/jaron_lanier_how_we_need_to_remake...](https://www.ted.com/talks/jaron_lanier_how_we_need_to_remake_the_internet)

Furthermore, what Feld and others are describing here is an economic
externality. You could both be right that many people would not and/or could
not pay $5/month, yet still the negative social cost of a free product costs
that user far more in the long run in the form of political unrest.

~~~
zaidf
_social cost of a free product costs that user far more in the long run in the
form of political unrest_

I believe you’re referring to the last elections. But the way I see it, this
is mostly a case of people whose candidate lost wanting to change the rules of
the game because their candidate lost. I voted for Hillary but I’m not
delusional to blame the results on any nefarious use of ad targeting before
blaming the campaign’s poor strategy (specifically, pouring money into states
like Arizona to end up with 3m+ votes while getting too few votes in states
that made a difference.)

~~~
bobbygoodlatte
I'm not blaming the outcome on nefarious ad targeting, rather I would say that
engagement-maximizing algorithms massively amplified Donald Trump's voice
during the campaign. My concern isn't so much that my team lost, but rather
what sort of candidates will succeed in this new media landscape. No other
2016 candidate from either side was really comparable to Donald Trump in how
he used social media, both organically or with ads.

Political campaigns are waged within the media landscape of the day. When
Nixon sweated during the first televised debate, he lost the debate and the
election. That signaled a transition from radio to TV as the dominant medium
for political campaigns, and the types of candidates who won national office
in the TV era were different from those from earlier eras. In that way the
dominant medium of the day has a filtering & selection effect on who succeeds
in a political race. Trump's election signaled another transition, this time
to the era of social media. It's not partisan to worry about the type of
candidates that transition will push to the fore.

~~~
zaidf
Did you have the same concerns when Obama won?

~~~
bobbygoodlatte
No. But FWIW my concern is less about data harvesting & ad targeting, and more
with how the algorithm itself is amplifying extreme views. But yes, I am aware
that the 2012 Obama campaign used the same data collection API that Cambridge
abused (although Obama's campaign didn't buy the data from a 3rd party)

------
EGreg
Actually, the problem is centralization, as Tim pointed out. The early
pioneers are often proprietary systems (Windows, IE, Britannica) followed by
open source software (Linux, WebKit, Wikipedia) which are better in tons of
ways. For one, the long tail is served better (Linux has even been known to
run on toasters, Wikipedia has way more articles). For another, people own
their own data, identity and brand.

Look, you are writing this on YOUR domain because Wordpress gave you that
ability. It powers 20% of all new websites. What we need as a society is a
Wordpress for social networking.

~~~
carapace
Exactly! The peer-to-peer file sharing services prove that we can have nice
things and not pay for them too.

(Although there is a problem if you want to make nice things and get paid for
them...)

There already are P2P social network platforms, the problem is how do you get
mass adoption?

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
I think it is important to realize that you are actually paying for the
service, and that that is actually the right way to pay for it: You pay for
the infrastructure of the internet by paying your ISP, and for the processing
and storage of your own hardware by buying it. That is the service that
someone actually has to operate for us, and it is a product everyone does
already buy.

~~~
carapace
Yes, distributed infrastructure, including mesh networking in a hypothetical
ideal world.

The actual _cost_ of what e.g. FB does for its users is tiny.

------
makecheck
What ought to happen is that people have more than enough money to buy things
they’re likely to use, driving money into the economy for things that are
useful.

Instead, wages are _terrible_ for the most part. Income inequality is so off
the scale now that you _can’t_ expect people to just pay for all the little
things they use. Making all these free things might have the side effect of
distracting people from realizing how little they can actually afford.

Since no one is paying for things that are useful, instead money goes to
whatever can trick the most ad viewers: sensational news, outrageous things,
etc. Anything that can’t be made interesting to most people has trouble making
money.

~~~
fiatjaf
So if people had more money they would buy useful things, since they don't
have money they buy useless things?

------
chiefalchemist
Facebook is a mirror, and a magnifier. "Fixing" FB is, at best, curing a
symptom. A general lack of critical thinking is not FB's fault. To promote
otherwise is naive and dangerous.

~~~
snarf21
I personally see the biggest problem with FB (and others) is their continuing
focus of making their platform as addictive as possible. While I agree that
people will likely always be addicted to something, we've gone after the
tobacco industry already and are starting to hold the food industry more
responsible. For gambling, every advertisement comes with a warning and free
resources about how to stop that _MUST_ be funded by the people making the
money. I think that is the thing that we should be making these social
platforms fund, resources to help break the chase of the constant need for
dopamine via likes.

~~~
chiefalchemist
Yes. But that's still a mirror.

No doubt humans are flawed. But is that FB's fault?

------
eevilspock
_" It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary
depends upon his not understanding it.”_ – Upton Sinclair

SV makes too much money from advertising to be able to admit the truths about
it.

There is no free lunch:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237)

Advertising is our C8:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10047706](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10047706)

------
textmode
"There are a few mentions of Zynga (which we were investors in) in the various
article chain which caused me to reflect even more on the 2007 - 2010 time
period when free-to-consumer (supported by advertising) was suddenly conflated
with freemium (or free trials for enterprise software)."

Is that the company that sold "virtual goods" on Facebook.

Pay real money to "send" a cartoon image of a brownie to another Facebook
user.

"What is going on here ("free services") is nothing new.

The entire television industry was created on it (broadcast TV was free,
supported by advertising, dating back well before I was born.)

Nielsen ratings started for radio in the 1940s and TV in the 1950s. The idea
of advertisers targeting users of free services based on data is, well, not
new.

Propaganda is not new either. The etymology of the word from Wikipedia is
entertaining in its own right."

Questions:

What if a user simply wants a method of communicating with a friend, family
member or colleague

Is that type of communication done via television, radio or propaganda

How about telegraph, telephone or internet service

What is the "service"

Is it entertainment

Is it a means of communication between friends, family and colleagues

If it is entertainment, then is it _dissemination_ [1]

1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840205](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840205)

Is advertising also dissemination

Is communication with friends, family and colleagues different from
"dissemination* See [1]

Is there any history of surveillance of _communication_ over telegraph,
telephone or (until recently) internet service in order to inform advertising

~~~
kitotik
This is such a great point.

I remember first seeing ads in gmail and trying to figure why it made me feel
physically nauseous, while the early implementations of Google search ads
seemed completely reasonable and inoffensive.

It was definitely the fact that they were showing me ads based on private
communication as opposed to my previous consumption habits that caused the
visceral reaction.

------
wangii
It's paradoxical b/c paying customers are even better ad targets.

I think advertisements are OK, as long as personal data not aggregated, nor
cross referenced/shared. I'm OK with google display few search related ads
along the page. But it's insane to see van ads on youtube after I searched for
one.

------
tedunangst
> We are getting a first taste of how difficult it is for a world in which
> humans and computers are intrinsically linked.

It's not just the humans being linked to computers. They're also linked to
other humans.

~~~
mirimir
And computers that pretend to be humans. And computers that process, redirect
and focus stuff from other humans.

Unless AIs have a higher ethical standard, free will for humans will become
more and more an illusion.

Edit: I'm thinking of Ian Banks' Culture novels. In _Excession_ , there's a
ship mind that doesn't respect human autonomy. Other ship minds call it
"meatfucker". As a slur.

------
thomastjeffery
Yet another false dichotomy.

There is a difference between free as in beer and free as in freedom. Only the
latter can offer us privacy and security.

------
realpeopleio
Exactly why RealPeople.io ([https://realpeople.io](https://realpeople.io)) was
created. The business model of using targeted advertising needs to go away.
With ads, platforms have the incentive to sell user data and keep users online
as much as possible to maximize ad impressions. AI creates and uses
phycological profiles of users and not only shows them targets ads but decides
who sees what.

We need to support social media that use paid subscriptions with no ads. And
we need to support platforms that make it core to their offering that they are
not going to share user data, and which have a business model that will align
with that.

There is a lot of discussion around this nowadays which is good, but it's time
for people to actually take action and be leader and make the change
themselves.

~~~
klunger
I like this idea. But... you really need to put up more content or content
preview so users know what they are getting before signing up.

------
methodover
Oh please. The price of free -- being shown ads -- is not too high. It's free.

We need good advertising systems. Businesses need to be able to pitch new
customers. We need to clean up some issues wrt privacy of course. But well-
targeted, relevant ads are a good thing.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
> Oh please. The price of free -- being shown ads -- is not too high. It's
> free.

Seriously? That's supposed to be an argument?

> We need to clean up some issues wrt privacy of course. But well-targeted,
> relevant ads are a good thing.

How do you define privacy that using data about a person to target them is
compatible with that concept of privacy?

------
mosselman
Just as you think the introduction is done, the whole article is over. It
feels very incomplete and there are some punctuation mistakes and incomplete
scentences. Sheep-like upvoting seems like the cause of it reaching the top
here.

------
cleandreams
Pretty good. The one thing in this article I found off was the notion that
regulation by "the community" was preferable to regulation by, well,
regulation. That is a fundamental mistake. "The community" is a bunch of
businesses that follow this system because if they didn't, someone else would,
and get market share. This lack of privacy is just capitalism at work. The
problem to excesses in capitalism is government regulation. True that, for
child labor, pollution, whatevs. "The community" is just mouthwash.

------
nstj
Good point to the article, though the quote about Cambridge Analytica seems a
bit misguided - the leak there was as a result of Facebook _Platform_ which is
antithetical to the ad targeting model which the rest of the article is about.

FB leaking user data through CA _is not_ part of FB’s business model.

------
John_KZ
I completely agree, and this is a prime example of when government
intervention is absolutely necessary:

Consumers cannot protect their long term interests and someone is taking
advantage of it.

There are many reasons why they can't. Sometimes there's competition that
forces you to only consider your short term interests. Other times a limited
resource (ie time, expertise) is required to evaluate a set of choices and the
consumer can't afford it on it's own. Or maybe the widespread adoption of one
thing creates a monopoly and makes other choices impossible. Whether the end
result is nutritional deficiencies from unenriched food or complete and total
misinformation, someone needs to intervene, and the only organization that has
the obligation and means to do so is the government.

The governments all across the world need to stop this cancer of
misinformation and deception from spreading any further. We need to make them
stop it.

~~~
chiefalchemist
"The governments all across the world need to stop this cancer of
misinformation and deception from spreading any further. We need to make them
stop it."

The irony is, a good number of these govs persist because of misinformation
and deception. Until a tool like FB actually undermines that status quo the
odds of change are low.

Look at the alleged Russian interference in the USA. The USA's spin was on the
order of "we would never do that." Obviously, we know, that's no true. The US
has been "protecting American interests" for ages.

~~~
squiggleblaz
But Facebook does seem to have undermined the status quo in the US and
Britain, if we attribute anything to fb. Actually, what they have to do is
almost undermine the status quo but not quite, and still look threatening. If
the status quo is undermined, the new people have no motivation to change it.

~~~
chiefalchemist
Allow me to be blunt.

1) The rich and powerful have gotten more rich and powerful since the birth of
FB.

2) Cyber-surveillance by state and non-state actors has increased since the
birth of FB.

Yes, on one hand it's correlation (but on the other it's an assessment of the
status quo). If 1 depends on 2 then FB is not to be considered on the side of
the people.

------
retrogradeorbit
There is an alternative to this method of providing a free service: Mining
cryptocurrency on the users computer. Yet doing that, even floating the
possibility of it, is met with great, vociferous anger. "How dare you use my
CPU." Even if you are up front and ask people first. And so joining a massive
surveillance system is the alternative left. People are their own worst enemy.
No one is putting a gun to anyone's head to use facebook, and even when people
find out what's going on, 90% keep using facebook.

~~~
nukeop
The problem is that cryptominers are not an alternative to ads, they're used
in parallel with ads.

------
shmerl
_> The Price of Free is Actually Too High _

The price of centralized "free" is indeed too high.

------
fiatjaf
Facebook is not bad because they leak your data, it is bad because it
hypnotizes people.

------
piracykills
Stupid clickbait.

------
skookumchuck
I'm amazed that storage is cheap enough that companies can afford to keep all
that data.

~~~
thomastjeffery
The type of data we are talking about has not grown, while storage capacity
has.

Back in the 90s, that sentiment reflected reality; but not today.

