It is a well-known description for what each brand calls something different. As I wait in a physiotherapist office I am being subjected to a soap opera against my will. Many will have seen snippets of The Bold and the Beautiful without watching a single episode, but enough to know that it looks 'different'.
You might be conflating capitalism (owning things like factories) with consumerism (buying things like widgets).
If all of the factory owners discover a type of widget to sell that can incidentally drive down wages the more units they move, it's unlikely for consumers to be provided much choice in their future widgets.
Search, music streaming, books: heavily consolidated markets where the value-based offering has supremacy (Google vs any paid search; Spotify/Apple Music vs Tidal; Amazon vs anything). It's the market supremacy that generally allows this.
If quality were a sufficiently motivating aspect, Google's deteriorating search wouldn't be a constant theme on this site, and people on the street would know where to download and play a FLAC file.
Tidal is a great example. They seem do be doing fine with a niche. If more people wanted what they offer instead of Spotify, Tidal would eat market share.
The market supremacy came afterwards, not before. Most people don't want the expensive premium version - they want good enough at a low investment. And that's fine
There's also a segment of the market that wants the FLAC, premium handcrafted experiences at top price. They're not in direct competition and both can co-exist
My initial point was that companies can't just exploit consumers relentlessly because the market won't let them. The good value option can't just box people in and show them only ads. I bet YouTube would love to show you unskippable ads for 75% of the video length. Good luck staying market leader with that
I don't think Google is a good example here. They've been actively trying to fight and failing against SEO and affiliate spam for a decade. No-one else has solved that problem either which is why Google remains at the top. I personally had a hand-crafted content site thrown out of their search results because of them going after spam
I can go into an art gallery but I may not touch the works. Often there aren't physical barriers but we all understand some behaviours are not acceptable.
Similarly, publication of an image on the internet is not implicit permission to use it for any possible purpose, however technically feasible. For example, deepfakes.
If you draw a mustache on a drawing in an art gallery, you ruin the original for everyone else. If you take the drawing home, no one else has the original any more.
If I download, copy, or edit images sent to my computer, the original is still there.
The artist puts their art on the gallery with the intent that people will enter that gallery and look at it without touching. The image uploaders uploads the image with the intent that a copy (not the original) gets sent to our computers when we look at Google Reviews.
- Drawing a mustache on the art = Vandalizing the original data (not what's happening).
- Taking the art home = Deleting the original data (also not what's happening).
- Scraping faces for an AI = Following visitors around the gallery, taking secret photos of them, and publishing a book that rates them by attractiveness.
The fact that the gallery is "public" does not make that behavior acceptable. The same is true here. "Publicly viewable" does not mean "publicly available for any use."
> Following visitors around the gallery, taking secret photos of them, and publishing a book that rates them by attractiveness.
Gallery visitors aren't publicly publishing gallery reviews with their pictures. This website doesn't go into restaurants and take pictures of the customers.
All the pictures here were attached to restaurant reviews by the person themselves with the expectation that the picture would be sent to others and be available to people not currently in the restaurant.
This is easily solved. Particularly as industry is such a large contributor to GHG emissions, imposing a carbon tax on industry and possibly even allowing grandfathering allows the costs to be baked in to (only) future considerations, and makes cleaner companies more competitive compared to dirtier ones.
Baking them into future decisions will not be enough. Sorry, if people made bad investments it will teach them to be smarter. Accomodations can only go so far to be effective.
Why are you happy that people are out of a job here? You still suffer the ills of the product, now infinitely more incessant, at a marginal cost of $0.
I think it's reasonable to be happy that someone is not getting paid to do something you hate. In fact, if you're suffering unwillingly, you probably want as few people as possible to benefit.
I don't know which of "5 randos getting a living wage by spamming me" and "Altman getting filty rich by spamming me" is worse. I'm inclined to say the latter, though of course it's quite close.
Wish SV would stop thinking anything that makes money is great, no matter the crap it inflicts on people. Guess I'm asking for way too much.
I don’t think so. Marketers don’t send X amount of spam because X is the right amount of spam they want to send. They are limited by how much money they want to pay in salaries and management, which defines how many people they can hire to send spam.
If the people they employ today suddenly became twice as productive, the company wouldn’t fire half of them - they just would enjoy twice the profit. The same applies to AI.
Having tried to start a business and known other business owners, I will die on this hill: sales and marketing are not "acts of malice". Without salespeople we wouldn't live in the world we lived today.
This is like the irrational hate some developers have for recruiters, despite them finding jobs for many people that they otherwise would never have known about.
Marketing is fundamentally aimed at changing people's opinions. This can be done
1. covertly (why do you need to do it covertly? Would people mind if they knew? Doesn't that indicate you're doing them a disservice?)
2. overtly, against people's will. (Again, doesn't that indicate you're doing them a disservice?)
3. overtly, with their consent (express or assumed). How often have you seen this happen?
The "indicates" vs "shows" distinction above deals with the edge case of "interacting with covert/unwanted marketing is actually good for them, even if they don't know it". I dare you to make that argument...
The logic in 'Without salespeople we wouldn't live in the world we lived today' doesn't really support the point you are trying to make.
Consider that without thieves we also wouldn't live in the world we live today. That should not be read supporting theft, only an acknowledgement that it exists and that we have designed our lived environment in response.
> This is like the irrational hate some developers have for recruiters
It's not like that. As a business owner, be honest with us and yourself: just how much of sales and marketing you did was just bullshit? Exaggerated claims bordering on lies? Manipulative patterns? Inducing demand?
Approximately all marketing is that. It is that because it works, and those who refuse to do it get outcompeted by those who don't. Doesn't mean the world should be like that, or that I'd like to be subjected to it.
I also question the "we wouldn't live in the world we lived today" bit. In a competitive environment, marketing is a zero-sum game[0]: there's only so many people around, with so much money and time available; most of the marketing spend ends up being used to cancel out the efforts of the competition, and that race can consume all surplus of a company. Red Queen's race and all.
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[0] Or negative-sum, if you account for externalities.
> Having tried to start a business and known other business owners, I will die on this hill: sales and marketing are not "acts of malice". Without salespeople we wouldn't live in the world we lived today.
Are we supposed to silently suffer because capitalism says so?
Spammers and salespeople are pretty much on the same level as criminals in my book. Heck, whenever someone calls me for some sort of unsolicited survey or similar, I think "these people have such low standards, they would also sell heroin on the street if they had any source."
Suffering is "the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship".
Having to delete the occasional marketing or sales email that get past your spam filter is hardly any of these. Annoying or frustrating, yes. Suffering? Really?
I am absolutely serious. Any employment has opportunity costs: a person who writes and sends out cold call spam e-mail for 8 hours a day is a person who could be spending those 8 hours on something else, but isn't. Yes, switching jobs is not very easy, and it's stressful but humans, thankfully, are not (yet) a species of highly-specialized individuals, with distinct morphological differences that heavily determine the jobs they potentially can or can not do.
I wonder how this compares to using Discog's API [1] and searching by barcode with a USB barcode scanner. Almost all of my record covers have some sort of barcode on them and I find the accuracy of searching Discogs to be quite high for records with reasonable popularity. Given the examples shown in the video, I would expect no problem.
It's not that ironic; it's a web page that contains far more information that one might expect in any but the largest of emails.
The web is where the eyeballs are and nobody's going to convince anyone of a new idea by wrapping whole-page content in a <pre> tag, no matter the idealological purity this would reveal. To reduce friction (already created by telling someone to potentially change email clients) with readers the author needs to speak the visual language of the medium.
