Yeah. Digital communication removes costs such as paying for paper etc. But after all these costs are gone, two remain:
the time and work it cost you to produce the information;
the time and work it costs other people to select the information they want.
Here the relation is a bit adversarial: the delivery of the right information to the right reader is a cost that the writer and the readers most split somehow.
The writer may pay the cost by thinking twice whether something should be written at all, by doing some research and writing it well, perhaps by tagging it somehow so the readers can easily (preferably automatically) decide whether they are interested. Or the writer may simply throw around many scraps of content, of random topic, length, and quality, and let the readers sort it out.
This is partially about the writers (choosing to write about something, doing your homework first) and partially about the publishing systems (do they support tagging and filtering by tags, preferentially following your favorite writers, is there a possibility to mark something as “important” and a punishment for abusing this flag). Maybe the systems are frustrating because designing a non-frustrating system is extremely difficult. Or maybe the systems are frustrating because anything more complicated than “throw around scraps of content” would be too complicated to use for most users.
And the advertising! How could I expect companies to give me only the content I am interested in and filter out everything annoying, if “giving me the annoying things” is precisely their business model? So not only are good systems difficult to design and unlikely to become popular, there is even smaller incentive to create them.
How could I expect companies to give me only the content I am interested in and filter out everything annoying, if “giving me the annoying things” is precisely their business model? So not only are good systems difficult to design and unlikely to become popular, there is even smaller incentive to create them.
I don’t think that either Google or facebook as well described as “giving you the annoying things”. Both companies invest into giving people ads that they might engage with.
This happens both because they want to keep their users and don’t push them away and because the people who appreciate a given ad are most likely to engage with it.
If I search for a new microwave on Google and then get a bunch of new microwave ads everywhere I browse I’m likely getting those at the time of my life where I’m least bothered by them given that I actually want to buy a microwave.
If I search for a new microwave on Google and then get a bunch of new microwave ads everywhere I browse I’m likely getting those at the time of my life where I’m least bothered by them given that I actually want to buy a microwave.
When I buy a microwave, I typically open the websites of the few shops I trust, search for the products, compare their parameters, and read the reviews. I don’t really understand what extra value I get from Google showing me more microwave ads when I am trying to listen to some music on YouTube afterwards. My priors for Google showing me a better microwave are quite low. (But this is all hypothetical, because Google will show me the ad for Grammarly regardless.)
This happens both because they want to keep their users and don’t push them away and because the people who appreciate a given ad are most likely to engage with it.
My knowledge may be obsolete, but the last time I checked, there were essentially two models: “pay per view” and “pay per click”. Given that I am the kind of user who almost never clicks on ads, it makes more sense to show me the “per per view” ones, right?
But then, the income from ads shown to me is proportional to the number of ads shown to me. So the optimal amount of ads to show me is… smaller than the amount that would make me stop using the website… but not much smaller. Did I get my math wrong somewhere?
Yeah. Digital communication removes costs such as paying for paper etc. But after all these costs are gone, two remain:
the time and work it cost you to produce the information;
the time and work it costs other people to select the information they want.
Here the relation is a bit adversarial: the delivery of the right information to the right reader is a cost that the writer and the readers most split somehow.
The writer may pay the cost by thinking twice whether something should be written at all, by doing some research and writing it well, perhaps by tagging it somehow so the readers can easily (preferably automatically) decide whether they are interested. Or the writer may simply throw around many scraps of content, of random topic, length, and quality, and let the readers sort it out.
This is partially about the writers (choosing to write about something, doing your homework first) and partially about the publishing systems (do they support tagging and filtering by tags, preferentially following your favorite writers, is there a possibility to mark something as “important” and a punishment for abusing this flag). Maybe the systems are frustrating because designing a non-frustrating system is extremely difficult. Or maybe the systems are frustrating because anything more complicated than “throw around scraps of content” would be too complicated to use for most users.
And the advertising! How could I expect companies to give me only the content I am interested in and filter out everything annoying, if “giving me the annoying things” is precisely their business model? So not only are good systems difficult to design and unlikely to become popular, there is even smaller incentive to create them.
I don’t think that either Google or facebook as well described as “giving you the annoying things”. Both companies invest into giving people ads that they might engage with.
This happens both because they want to keep their users and don’t push them away and because the people who appreciate a given ad are most likely to engage with it.
If I search for a new microwave on Google and then get a bunch of new microwave ads everywhere I browse I’m likely getting those at the time of my life where I’m least bothered by them given that I actually want to buy a microwave.
When I buy a microwave, I typically open the websites of the few shops I trust, search for the products, compare their parameters, and read the reviews. I don’t really understand what extra value I get from Google showing me more microwave ads when I am trying to listen to some music on YouTube afterwards. My priors for Google showing me a better microwave are quite low. (But this is all hypothetical, because Google will show me the ad for Grammarly regardless.)
My knowledge may be obsolete, but the last time I checked, there were essentially two models: “pay per view” and “pay per click”. Given that I am the kind of user who almost never clicks on ads, it makes more sense to show me the “per per view” ones, right?
But then, the income from ads shown to me is proportional to the number of ads shown to me. So the optimal amount of ads to show me is… smaller than the amount that would make me stop using the website… but not much smaller. Did I get my math wrong somewhere?