Hacker News Comments on
The Power Of Selling Out: Your Customers As Political Capital - Onion Talks - Ep. 9
The Onion
·
Youtube
·
13
HN points
·
10
HN comments
- This course is unranked · view top recommended courses
Hacker News Stories and Comments
All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.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 cost much. The actual test is what happens on a very bad day when you're exhausted and worried about other problems. Most people eventually end up caving and "cheating" on their diet, simply because we're terrible at judging risks and overestimate our ability to resist temptation when it isn't actually being tested.
The solution to this problem is to have the humility to admit our weaknesses in assessing risks and how easy it can be to overestimate our own abilities. From that point of views, prudence suggests a good idea might be using the benefits available on good days to prepare for the bad days and moments of weakness. Don't allow the temptation into the house so succumbing to temptation isn't possible or involves a much higher cost.
Words that promise that you won't fall to temptation are hard to enforce on yourself if the company has as bad quarter/year and finances are tight. Instead of words, the way for as company to distinguish themselves from the mostly-empty promises of the past is to publicly remove your own ability to make the wrong choice. If your hands are tied by a Ulysses Pact[2], it doesn't matter if someone offers to drive a dump truck full of money to your house if you sell out your users[3]: the decision has already been made and you no longer have that power.
[1] https://youtu.be/Yth7O6yeZRE?t=18765 (Doctorow's talk starts at 5:12:45)
The Onion was also prescient about the end game for surveillance based companies:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8c_m6U1f9o
(this video is especially interesting in light of Google's recent involvement in Chinese censorship)
⬐ mindcrashHoly shit, thats a good one aswell. Bookmarked. Thanks!
Another infamous Onion video in a similar style is "The Power Of Selling Out: Your Customers As Political Capital".
⬐ samstave"Facebook former head of security now works for the NSA"https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/faceb...
Not to mention the cadre of other governmentalistia that work there...
As usual, The Onion has this covered (2012):https://youtube.com/watch?v=w8c_m6U1f9o
"The Power Of Selling Out: Your Customers As Political Capital - Onion Talks"
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 interesting experiments, are only the first generation of what is enabled by the internet.
Unfortunately, untested and unproven (by somebody else) ideas do imply some amount of risk, which scares a lot of people back into the traditional method where the advertisers get to paint over everything.
edit: forgot URL
The Onion on The Power of Selling Out, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8c_m6U1f9o
Ha! This one feels relevant :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8c_m6U1f9o
⬐ HoushalterThat was made last year? Wow. That's surprisingly prescient.
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: http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/201...This Onion talk put it really well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=w8c_...
⬐ X4@smokinn thank you for the great video! I didn't know that the onion had such quality talks. I personally use Mendeley, but only to obtain other people's Papers and sync my Bibtex fies.@afandian NOT OPENSOURCE! Not worth it for academia.
Generally speaking, I really don't get what's good about those platforms. Can anyone try to explain why people keep using it for another thing than peer-pressure?? I mean you upload a damn pdf with some meta-data attached to it. What's so hard? Use XMPP/IRC or Usenet for the communication and you're set, I must be dumb. I don't see why there is a need for those "new social networks". When email/mailing-lists/irc/xmpp/usenet/forums etc. already exist.
⬐ afandianSorry I didn't understand your comment "NOT OPENSOURCE! Not worth it for academia". Could you clarify?⬐ X4⬐ gjugglerNot worth it for academia means, that academia deserves something better than a vendor lock-in, by some closed-source software. It deserves a medium that doesn't stand in it's way, but empowers students/professors, scientists and other people, instead of depowering them by centralizing all power to one login provider.Academia is about innovation and sharing knowledge. A gatekeeper or a closed-source platform inevitably creates a bottleneck that slows innovation and knowledge sharing down. Furthermore, a social network as Academia requires a medium that adapts to it's need, not the other way around, therefore an optimal solution can only be opensource.
A large chunk of ORCID actually is open source: https://github.com/ORCID/ORCID-Source (though I don't necessarily agree that it should be, since ORCID is not a library or tool, but rather a service that only has real value if there's a single instance in existence).I think there's a misunderstanding here on what ORCID is exactly. The name is an acronym for "Open Researcher and Contributor ID." It has nothing to do with publishing, but rather is being built as a central arbiter of academic identity.
Academics love to measure their importance by the papers they've authored or co-authored. Most databases currently track the names of authors associated with each published paper. But names are frustratingly ambiguous or degenerate, which makes it difficult to do things like create an auto-updated list of all the papers you've published.
ORCID is a publisher-funded non profit designed to reduce ambiguity in author identification, by simply assigning a UUID to every researcher. This is a case of publishers agreeing that collaboratively funding a single, centralized technical solution will benefit everyone much more than having a bunch of competing, siloed systems.