> the type for whom the entire point of making things is to make money, not do something useful.
the fact that somebody is paying for said app implies that it is useful. Noone parts with money for an exchange that they don't find useful.
The idea that just because _you_ don't see it as being useful doesn't make it not useful.
If you suppose that the exchange ruins the world somehow, because there's some externality that causes harm to you, then it's a case of making such an exchange illegal through some democratic process, and have enforcement. Absent of that, i think it is totally legitimate, and that the person doing the entrepreneurial endeavor is just trying to improve their own situation. One does not have to have the purpose of "improving the world" - that naturally would happen as people exchange to make their own situations better.
>Noone parts with money for an exchange that they don't find useful.
Come on, there's many. You can, for example, manipulate people to pay for something. You can get them addicted, so that they become repeat customers, despite rationality. You can lie to a lot of people, so that you will have one time customers, but you can do that to a large crowd. You can quasi-force people to buy something, if it's a prerequisite for something else.
Just because people buy something, it doesn't mean it's useful. Far from it.
> You can, for example, manipulate people to pay for something.
How?
> You can get them addicted, so that they become repeat customers, despite rationality.
No one purchases anything to become addicted. You may download a game, find it fun and purchase in-game items. It's useful because it's entertaining.
> You can lie to a lot of people, so that you will have one time customers, but you can do that to a large crowd.
But you have to convince people with your lie that it will be useful and beneficial for them to purchase it. Then once purchased they'll find it was a waste.
> You can quasi-force people to buy something, if it's a prerequisite for something else.
So it's useful to gain access to something else?
No normal person willingly spends money that they know is a waste ahead of time. There's some imagined usefulness from it, either as short or long term entertainment, increased productivity, comfort, or for another specific purpose.
This question is the foundation of the marketing industry. There are so many ways to manipulate people into parting with their money, but one of the basic approaches is to introduce and build tension in the customer that your product claims to release. This tension always exists on a deeper level than the practical value of the product.
For example, if Apple want to sell a laptop, they don’t focus on selling the tech specs. Instead they promise the customer that if they buy a macbook, they’ll become a creative genius, a musician or a VFX artist - high status careers. So what they’re really selling is the promise of enhanced social standing, not technology. That’s as manipulative as it gets
How can you manipulate someone into spending money on something where they don't perceive any value from its usefulness?
Through blackmail or coercion?
There's no reasonable explanation where someone can be manipulated into spending money that they think is entirely wasteful from the outset.
The sibling comment on marketing, whilst somewhat manipulative, is still a useful purchase -- I want to be a musician so I buy a Macbook Pro to further my dream and use GarageBand. In that case I've been manipulated into buying something expensive for my end goal (however unlikely I'll be to achieve it) but I still perceive some use from it.
Even if you consider spending money on purely charitable causes there's a usefulness in the warm fuzzy feelings the donator will get and the anticipated beneficial use of those funds to the needy.
You can't think of anything? People manipulate people to spend money every day, literally all the time. Sales, ads, product descriptions, promotions... some of these things turn out to be useful, and worth the money, some aren't, or are worth less than expected at least, and you usually don't find out until after the fact. It is like the single most common human activity, convincing people to buy things.
Myriads of ways. For an example, consider a virtue signalling issue, greenwashing. Greenwashing is employing green marketing, without actually committing to green causes. By doing this, many choose the product, company or service to be more conscious of nature. But in the end, the promises are not kept, and the customer is already out of their money. So, manipulation for pay happened.
>No one purchases anything to become addicted.
Of course they don't, that's not what I meant, obviously. They get addicted in the meantime of consuming. I think a timely example is mobile games, as detailed in for example this article: https://www.nbcnews.com/better/lifestyle/why-mobile-games-ar...
>Then once purchased they'll find it was a waste.
Yes, but they are already out of money, and the recourse is not worth it, unavailable, or otherwise hindered. The result is that many don't return the product or react in any way - and that's how this business model works.
>So it's useful to gain access to something else?
If it needs to be made useful, it's not useful. It's like console exclusive games. It's not a natural thing, the software could probably be made to run in other environments easily, but they are artificially restricted, and they spin that as an advantage to the console. It's nonsense.
>No normal person willingly spends money that they know is a waste ahead of time.
Let's not muddy the argument with "normal person". First of all, these tactics are exactly targeted at the so-called normal people. Second, there's is nothing abnormal in belonging to any group of people that get taken advantage of, like young men getting roped into redpill, incel, PUA things. The dismissal of labeling these experiences as abnormal is part of what creates even more of this thing.
> Noone parts with money for an exchange that they don't find useful.
I think this is true at face value, but when we consider addiction and self-destructive behaviors it is clear that while the definition of useful my still apply, the result is a negative impact on society.
The easiest most inflammatory example is drugs, but a more nuanced example might be slot machines. I won't wax lyrical about the examples, but I think they show that a transaction of money doesn't imply a positive impact on society.
Another example is rent seeking and fees, sometimes the transaction of money is non-negotiable, and one side is exploiting the other, or a middleman has inserted themselves (sometimes through policy lobbying) and extracts rent that no one benefits from but them.
i would assert that drugs or slot machines both provide value - they are entertainment, and the people using them are deriving value out of it. Why is that those people's enjoyment doesn't factor into society as being positive? Are they somehow not part of society?
If you imply that because they must've committed a crime to obtain the money to pay for their entertainment, then it's not the entertainment, but the crime that's negative to society.
If you imply that slot machines are harmful to the players, and that they're better off not using it, then my argument is who's to say that it's harmful? Why is that there must be a negative moral attribution to using it?
Edit: i would agree that "rent seeking" is bad, but it's hard to actually specify exactly what rent-seeking is, so i will leave it to someone else to discuss.
I think there's a tautology hiding here. It's unstated, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
The tautology is that what people exchange for has value, but it has value because people pay for it. Specifically that it has the value people are paying or more.
This is a sort of free market idea: why would someone swap for something that isn't good for them? People must be swapping for stuff they want. To a degree this is totally reasonable. Why does a guy buy a razor if he doesn't think shaving is worth it?
The problem with this kind of thinking is it can never check itself. There's no independent way to give an item a value, so how do you know the exchanged values are correct? There's an assumption implicit that the market gives everything the right value, but it's not checkable without some other way to come up with a value.
And there are reasons to think this value might be wrong. For instance externalities, but also plain old "consumer misjudged the value".
I met a guy who exploited every trick in the book when building his business. He always picked addictive stuff. Online casinos, vapes. He would also put in fine print that people were buying a minimum subscription, so they would they surprised when they got billed a second time. On top of that he found a way to trick Facebook into showing his advertisements that were against the ToS. I doubt anyone got what they thought from this fellow, but he's rich now.
This isn't to say everyone who sets out to just make money makes a mess, far from it. I'm sure there are people whose get rich quick scheme is genuinely useful to other people. But it does mean we need to keep eye on behaviour to make sure there aren't abuses.
> but it's not checkable without some other way to come up with a value
which is the whole point - the value doesn't exist independently of what someone else values it for their own purpose. There's no objective measure of value, like the objective measure of some quantity like weight or energy.
So the free-market assumption is that everyone is always selfish but rational, and thus would only transact if the resulting transaction is beneficial.
in all the cited examples of otherwise, the transaction is fraudulent - someone tricking someone else (which is, technically already illegal, if somewhat un-enforcible all the time).
Anyone who has spent time around addiction and those afflicted by it can tell you it causes more pain than enjoyment. There is a big difference between someome getting high for fun and someone who feels they no longer have a choice but to be high. For what it's worth I am pro deregulation of drugs. I just think it's a good example that money changing hands doesn't imply a net positive had occurred. People pay for guns they use to murder people for another on the nose example.
I don't think anybody objects to the enjoyment of drugs or slot machines. They object to the addictive distortion of the enjoyer's mental state. The free market notion of value surely relies on the rationality of participants. Saying "it is rational for an addict to satisfy their addiction" is... well I suppose it is an argument.
Well the fact that somebody pays for somebody else to show me ads is useful to all of them, but it certainly isn't useful to me...
I'm not saying it's illegitimate in any legal sense. But morally it is not so clear.
> doing the entrepreneurial endeavor is just trying to improve their own situation
This person said they work as an engineer on growth teams in Silicon Valley, which is hilariously appropriate by the way, so they presumably have plenty of money. They're doing morally dubious things just to prove they can!
> somebody pays for somebody else to show me ads is useful to all of them, but it certainly isn't useful to me...
presumably the ads being shown has subsidized the usage of the app that you're using for free. So i dont think it's not useful to you - it might be an annoyance, but you've made the trade to use the app for free (or for a lower cost than it otherwise wouldve been).
> They're doing morally dubious
and different people ascribe different moralities. I dont think there can be one universal, objective, moral standard to which you can use to compare actions.
This is why i use the legal standard - at least it's an objective standard that the majority of people agree.
>presumably the ads being shown has subsidized the usage of the app that you're using for free
That's not how it works. Ads increase sales, every ad impression of yours is not an ad impression for your competitor, every ad impression makes you more familiar with the advertised - and there are other factors, I'm sure. But ads don't subsidize shit. I'm sure it seems like that in some products, but if that would be universal, cable TV, online news, and a lot of other stuff would be free. But what ends up being is that people buy things AND watch the ads. A lot of times the incentives are aligned in a way that this makes the most business sense, not lowering the price of the product.
People have different moralities, for sure, but that doesn't mean you have to pick the legal standard to break the tie. That's like.. not having any opinions of your own? The legal standard is pretty much unrelated to morality, anyway. The complaint here is anyway at an entirely different level: the level of virtue, of what a person _ought_ to do, rather than _should be allowed_ to do, which is significantly broader.
The point of griping about this author's morality is: people have different moralities, and this one in particular sucks, so if you're reading this, hopefully you noticed that.
The ad subsidized something, against my will. How can that be framed as some kind of "transaction"? Sure, if I can choose to direct or avert my attention to ads, like, using an app with ads. But in other less consensual cases it's difficult to make the case that ads are always a positive sum game.
You choose to use the app, not against your will, the app having ads is the consequence of you not paying for it, you make a transaction to be able to use the app you will see ads.
Ads are annoying but people wont buy subscriptions or microtransact for infomation, they wont pay for software either, if there was an alternative it would be running by now.
The ads themselves may or may not be useful but the service that's showing you them is probably useful to you, else why are you using it? The company who paid for the ad gets "use" out of showing you the ad, the service gets money from that, and you get a useful service in exchange.
I don't really like ads either but would you really be okay with paying out of pocket to remove every ad you see?
There are many situations where the amount someone is willing to pay does not equal the value of something.
Like you point out. Anything with negative externalities is in this category.
If value is derived from peoples experiences. Why would the experience of the customer count for more than the experience of another person affected by the purchase?
Another problem is that we (people) are not always good at deciding what is good for even ourselves in the long run. We are not homo economicus with perfect awareness of all effects going forward into the infinite future. That doesn't (always) mean people should be forbidden from making "mistake" purchases that they will eventually regret. But it means the value of the thing wasn't what they thought when they bought it. In short: they're not the same.
the fact that somebody is paying for said app implies that it is useful. Noone parts with money for an exchange that they don't find useful.
The idea that just because _you_ don't see it as being useful doesn't make it not useful.
If you suppose that the exchange ruins the world somehow, because there's some externality that causes harm to you, then it's a case of making such an exchange illegal through some democratic process, and have enforcement. Absent of that, i think it is totally legitimate, and that the person doing the entrepreneurial endeavor is just trying to improve their own situation. One does not have to have the purpose of "improving the world" - that naturally would happen as people exchange to make their own situations better.