The Power Of Selling Out: Your Customers As Political Capital - Onion Talks - Ep. 9

What Hacker News said

Recommends smokinn · 2013-10 · on “The Story Behind a Radical New Idea: A Social Network for Academia”

One of the problems with for-profit is that the company is likely to sell its community out if they think that'll make them more money. See: Elsevier buying Mendeley and the backlash from that: [LINK] This Onion talk put it really well: [this video]

Cites pdkl95 · 2014-10 · on “Ad blocker that clicks on the ads”

Paying directly changes the relationship significantly - a business is generally going to pay attention to their customers that produce their revenue than the "free" accounts that are the merely the product being sold to advertisers. The Onion was right[1]. In the rush to sell out their "users" to to whomever is willing to pay, a lot of people seem to have come to believe that advertising is the only way to the internet can work. The internet enabled many new ways of publishing due it removing most of the per-transaction costs. I suspect we haven't even seen most of these methods. While "Kickstarter" style funding and Wikipedia's "public television style" requests for donations, while intere

Cites pdkl95 · 2018-11 · on “Facebook Applied for Patent to Predict Who’s in House Based on Family Photos”

Words on their own are not worth much in the long run. It's easy to pursue well-meaning plans on good days when everything is working like it's supposed to and everywhere you go people seem to be talking about the amazing stuff your "unicorn trajectory" will create. Cory Doctorow had a useful analogy[1]: if you're trying to lose weight, most of the time it isn't very difficult to resist tempting siren's call from the box of cookies in your pantry. Obviously not buying the tempting snack would have been a better (and simpler) idea, but willpower is plentiful on good days. Obviously that's a poor risk assessment: of course it's easy to make the annoying-bug-beneficial choice when it doesn't co