Furthermore, the [online] advertiser gets astonishingly
precise feedback. They will know exactly how many people
have chosen to look at their ad and for how long, with
the result that an unwelcome ad for something no one's
interested in will quickly wither away, whereas one which
catches people's attention will thrive.
He talks about this as a good thing - a meritocracy of "unwelcome" ads and ideas vs. "interesting" ones, with selection favoring the interesting ones, cutting out all of the "dead wood", and so on.
In a literal sense, that is indeed how it turned out. "Interesting" won.
Unfortunately the version of "interesting" that many people chose was simply toxic dreck: conspiracy theories, social media feeds literally designed to make us feel negative emotions, scammy ads that have been engineered to trick the maximum number of people, and so on.
So yeah, "interesting" won, but I'm not sure this is the future Adams was excited about.
This stood out to me as well. There an impulse to think that once we have perfected something, it will be good. But then, we noticed that the "perfect" version of this thing is actually pretty bad. Which then makes you question the entire thing, fundamentally.
Like here in advertising. I'm coming to the conclusion that there is no good form of advertising. It is a fundamentally bad thing. There are just different degrees of badness.
And since it's a fundamentally bad thing, perfecting it makes it worse.
And Adams even knew better. Earlier in his life he described the end result of optimizing elections for the candidate who best "catches people's attention". And that being that anyone capable of getting himself elected under those circumstances should in no way be given the power of holding office.
The media that is most "interesting" by web metrics is the least worth learning, and in many cases has negative informative value. Social media today is a million Zaphod Beeblebroxes saturating our senses.
Back in the day, the web actually had to be sold to people and businesses. They were reticent to pony up money to "get online". They didn't understand the benefits. It was pretty common to make these kinds of pitches to businesses as part of a broader idea of getting everyone online where we would all enjoy the benefits of a free and open society.
Businesses were the last to take it up, and the first to destroy it. But no one saw that coming.
I heard this kind of pitch made a dozens times by 1999, to hundreds of businessmen who are now probably dead. No one thought for a moment that getting more metrics on people would mean the death of privacy. Everyone was worried about the government spying on us, and no one had an idea it would be through scrolling and click tracking. At the time this was written, I had a palm pilot and mobile web; but I never would have predicted what a combination of smart phones and social media would do to scramble the average American consumers' brains.
This is anecdotal but when I started as a CS freshmen a few years after this article was written online ”intelligent” advertisement, was, viewed as both interesting and positive in a lot of circles most people probably wouldn’t believe.
This was a time where advertising companies had to contact the owners of popular webpages, and then try to sell the idea of putting their advertisements on the webpage. Where in the modern world, it’s mostly the other way around, or at least easy because influential people on the internet typically leave their contact information. It was a time where “computer-clusters” were considered a revolutionary idea that might just topple mainframes. It was long before Linus stepped up and fixed version control because he was still working to make Linux great. It was at a time where the absolutely top anti-virus software couldn’t detect a cult-of-the-dead-cow Trojan in an image file.
I know this might not have been the case in California or other tech centrals but it sure was the reality of the CS department at the university of Aalborg in Denmark.
I remember these things because some of the first really interesting projects I got to hack at was creating spam-filters. Because most importantly of all, this was a time where Google had only just emerged, and years before g-mail became a thing.
Given how hard it was to sell advertisements, just think about how hard it is to find the Danish teenager who runs some popular website. Then how hard it is to get the business contract with a minor going, if you mange to convince him/her to put a huge ugly banner on their site. Coca Cola would obviously do it, but for a lot of smaller companies it was only natural to go for much easier (and cheaper) solutions, such as spamming e-mails.
So it was actually a time where an alternative to the most common advertisement practices was something everyone almost everyone wanted to help create. Most of us never even thought about the downsides, unlike the author.
What a negative view of the web and the world, and with the wrong interpretation. What won wasn't conspiracy theories and scammy ads.
What won was videos of cats, your aunt being able to get video instructions of how to replace a car tire, open-source software, and an explosion of tools that are getting more sophisticated by the minute, to the point that during a global pandemic, a lot of office jobs almost seamlessly moved fully remote, even if for a while.
Yes, someone needs to tackle those issues you've mentioned, but by and large your description of the internet is not accurate to global use we get from it.
The payment mechanism he talks about that would enable micropayments to individuals rather than corporations, never happened.
It technically happened of course in the form of various companies trying to build systems that do this (using e.g. crypto currencies) and put themselves in the middle to try to "own" and control the lucrative revenue streams. But that's the reason it never happens because as soon as you do that, you end up with a fragmented mess of different companies all failing to get a critical mass of actual micropayments happening. So, the money exchanged adds up to not much at all. Most artists keep on dealing with agents and big media corporations. And most consumers keep on handing over chunks of their income to those same corporations.
I've not actually bought a newspaper or a magazine in over ten years and very little in the ten before that. I regularly did this in the nineties though. There no longer is a need. I can read a lot online for free. And I do. But I do feel sort of bad for the hard working journalists producing all the content I read every day not really getting anything from me.
Authors struggle not in finding their audience but in monetizing it. Ads are not the way. I'd love to have a sane way to reward them without having to micromanage the expense. If somebody builds a way for me to fairly distribute 20$/month among the authors of all the content I enjoy every month, I'd be happy to. That doesn't exist. That's money I've not been spending for decades. I spent that on Spotify and Netflix though.
IMHO such a system should exist. Douglas Adams predicted it because it so obviously needs to exist. Instead we've got this endless amount of greed and stupidity preventing people from making a living from creating content because middle men peddling shitty ads for shitty products need to be payed off. The content creation is the bit I want to pay for. Everything else is redundant or can be payed for by authors as needed once they have revenue (e.g. editing is a useful service).
Maybe I read a few hundred articles per month. Lets call it 200 (nice round number). That's ten cents per article. Now imagine that a journalist produces something that is read by 1 million people and that 1 percent of those actually pay that 10 cent. That's a thousand dollar. It's not a lot. But if they write maybe a few articles per month, that's a nice income. And those articles stay online for a long time. It would actually stimulate the creation of content that has a long shelf life. Passive income basically. Exactly what I want as a reader: quality content.
The Stripe founders point to the fact that the HTTP protocol actually includes a status code for “payment required”. So the idea of micropayments actually belonged to the original conception of the internet.
It seems to me that is was is precisely because of the difficulty of receiving payment that we ended up with a few large players, and with advertising as the main vehicle for getting paid on the web - with all the consequences, including an unduly focus on short-term attention and clicks.
Very few people seem to be aware that PayPal does in fact provide micropayments that have dramatically lower costs for low-priced transactions. Over at ardour.org, a large chunk of our income comes from US$1 transactions, and using PayPal for that saves us US$0.23 per transaction!
However, the friction is still too high for this to be a reasonable implementation of what you're asking for.
It is also harrowing to think about the roughly 25% reduction in income that we'd face if PayPal dropped this fee structure at any point.
Funny, I first read "passive income" as "basic income". It's a related point, though. If you cannot afford to work for free, you'll never write that first lucky rent-generating article.
It matches what I see on Patreon (web comics at least): None of the creators seem to have started with the assurance that they could generate a significant income, or even quit their full-time job. A few of them do now, but I'm pretty sure most of those comics would have happened anyway (given the time), because the artists really wanted to create them.
By the way, free alternative platforms like Liberapay do exist (still growing, too). But I cannot blame artists to use Patreon instead - most of their audience is there. Audience comes first, and paying 10% in fees doesn't matter when you expected no significant earnings anyway.
Another interesting point on Patreon is that I can see the artist's approximate income. I may decide to support new creators instead when I see that they have already 10k a month. Not the most common case on Patreon, of course, but it matches my goal to support the creation of new art better than helping some super-popular ones to get their next million.
Technically it wouldn't be hard, and stuff like Substack makes you think it's possible. The problem is getting the authors and publishers to agree to it. Consumers will never be able to micromanage content; one thing we've forgotten in the day of swiftly switching between ad/news platforms is that traditional media does serve a purpose as consolidators. Only the most wonkish will seek out individual writers and pay for their articles. If writers could make money that way, they would. But they have to go under contract with whomever will pay; and the WaPo isn't going to let you get through their paywall and read one journalist's post for 10¢.
Also, a dime here and there doesn't pay for a middle east bureau or a team of reporters to cover an election or a war. It's unrealistic to expect reporters to risk their necks on the possibility of keeping an audience and it just might lead to the kind of unanticipated negative results that online advertising did.
Me, for instance, I'm done sending any money to Matt Taibbi until he goes back to Russia, drinks at least four gallons of vodka, and gets an interview with Vlad. Should he do that for my $1? Fuck no! A world where we pay journalists directly is a world without editors, where you can't trust any information to be vetted at all. In all probability it's just some lies their personal subscribers want to hear. They may be hired whores, but at least if they work for a newspaper you know who hired them.
Anecdotally I’ve just started buying magazines last year to drop on the table for my kids to pick up and read, something I remember doing myself when I was a child. It is impossible with personalized devices to just casually stumble onto something interesting without trying to.
I think when I miss the old internet I miss the promise of a new way of living. The whole "information wants to be free" thing. Of course, we _have_ a new way of living, and it's amazing how much great information is freely available, but the downsides are pretty substantial.
I caught the tail end of this wind of optimism when I was first connected in 2001. In my head, the Internet will always be that hectic, eclectic place it was then. Even the design of this website fits that paradigm.
Watching it taper off with the rise of "social media" was a sad thing indeed, but I don't think the old spirit is fully lost.
There was a void that fearmongerers and fuck ups failed to fill yet with the fall of the Soviet Union. You unironically saw Hollywood bitching about the lack of an enemy power leaving spies with nothing to justify themselves. Of course frankly Hollywood goes out of the way to show how infested they are with sociopaths and narcissists via bizzare unironic moral takes that get through while far more innocous ones get blocked. It is downright bizzare even for an entertainment bias.
> Since you're currently holding a magazine, let's think about what might happen when magazine publishing is no longer a river in its own right, but is just a current in the digital ocean.
…
Once we drop the idea of discretely bound and sold sheaves of glossily processed wood pulp from the model, what do we have left? Anything useful?
That phrase was fun to read on my iPhone today ;-)
What have we got to lose, ad wise? Both privacy and the chance to expand our horizons.
The privacy issues are talked about daily.
Getting ads for just things you're interested in means you don't get ads for anything you haven't seen before. And what's worse, the same goes on for content selection wherever you're being given a custom selection of content. You end up in a bubble plus some things sprinkled in to outrage you and make you stay.
how about Not getting ads you expicitly said you did Not want to get?
if one day that means All ads, well, fine.. someone's fantasy has been too limited.
"ifndef NOCATS" is much more powerful than "ifdef CATS"
..
Always a pleasure to read Douglas Adams. As usual an engaging and insightful read. I’d be curious to know what his thoughts would have been on the current state of online ads, social networks (engineering?), and NTFs. I suppose they all pop out as derivatives of the main point of the article, that new things often come from realising old limitations no longer apply.
> The advertisers pay the magazine for the opportunity to put links to their ads on popular pages of the magazine and - well, you see the way it works. It is, I am told by people with seriously raised eyebrows, astonishingly effective. The thing which drops out of the problem is the notion that advertising need be irritating and intrusive.
Unfortunately, the notion "that advertising need be irritating and intrusive" didn't drop out, which is why browsing the web without uBlock is a horrible experience.
The problem with Douglas Adams is the beauty of the writing distracts
from the the real message. I barely noticed this was about
_advertising_ as most commentators here have picked up. To better
understand a piece like this, remember that Adams is working as a
professional writer and has to give his employer - a magazine here -
something they want. In this case the vehicle is a story about
magazines and how they are dysfunctional with respect to
advertising. The real writing, as is always the case with Adams, is at
a higher level, and is about how we stupidly build complexity,
obfuscation, indirection and side effects into technological life,
failing (or forgetting) to see the value of simpler and more humane
configurations.
I wonder who would still trust such 'clicks' metrics.
Wild guess, in the context of selling "something" and using ads on the web, the only reliable metric is the correlation between the sales amount and the ad campaign.
> All that mucking about they do developing high-tech copying and printing machines is just creating a commodity market in toner cartridges, which is where their profit lies.
Isn't that the exact opposite of what they are doing? I.e. creating specialized cartridges which only work on one brand of machine, rather than a commodity that is interchangeable with other brands?
He meant commodity 'something that can be traded, or any useful thing' rather than commodity 'when customers perceive little or no value difference between brands or versions.'
Douglas Adams tells how the internet commerce should work.
No subscription to online magazines or content streaming services. When you notice something you like, you pay for it: one article, one TV-show at at time.
Artificially bundling stuff together is unnatural in the Internet.
How it worked out: if you notice something interesting and there’s a paywall, you forget about it and go back to whatever cat pictures you were browsing.
For context, this was a naive era in the first dot com bubble. The money was flowing freely from highly funded advertisers for relatively unobtrusive banner ads. That changed drastically in the early 2000s.
For a long time advertising was the art of creating "wants". For a century it worked "like a charm". We are now living in a world that (at least in so called developed world) is overconsuming by a very large factor.
The proliferation of the incredibly regressive practice of building and selling behavioral profiles of unsuspecting "consumers" may in part be due to the cannibalistic arms race of an exhausted economic paradigm.
Somehow we need to find sane digital ways to connect people who have to say, sell, announce something with people who want to hear, buy, be informed about something.
It doesn't sound that complicated if we lose our unsustainable ways of thinking and acting
Title seems very incorrect. First issue of Wired was 1993, not 1998. The URL makes it look like this is from 1998, so definitely not from the first issue.
This just shows how incredibly hard it was in 1998 to see what would happen when 4 billion illiterate assholes got online. The assumption at the time was that anyone able to see the ads (on Hotwired!) were totally immune to any kind of serious manipulation.
[+] [-] JohnBooty|4 years ago|reply
In a literal sense, that is indeed how it turned out. "Interesting" won.
Unfortunately the version of "interesting" that many people chose was simply toxic dreck: conspiracy theories, social media feeds literally designed to make us feel negative emotions, scammy ads that have been engineered to trick the maximum number of people, and so on.
So yeah, "interesting" won, but I'm not sure this is the future Adams was excited about.
[+] [-] cyborgx7|4 years ago|reply
Like here in advertising. I'm coming to the conclusion that there is no good form of advertising. It is a fundamentally bad thing. There are just different degrees of badness.
And since it's a fundamentally bad thing, perfecting it makes it worse.
[+] [-] whoopdedo|4 years ago|reply
The media that is most "interesting" by web metrics is the least worth learning, and in many cases has negative informative value. Social media today is a million Zaphod Beeblebroxes saturating our senses.
[+] [-] noduerme|4 years ago|reply
Businesses were the last to take it up, and the first to destroy it. But no one saw that coming.
I heard this kind of pitch made a dozens times by 1999, to hundreds of businessmen who are now probably dead. No one thought for a moment that getting more metrics on people would mean the death of privacy. Everyone was worried about the government spying on us, and no one had an idea it would be through scrolling and click tracking. At the time this was written, I had a palm pilot and mobile web; but I never would have predicted what a combination of smart phones and social media would do to scramble the average American consumers' brains.
[+] [-] EnKopVand|4 years ago|reply
This was a time where advertising companies had to contact the owners of popular webpages, and then try to sell the idea of putting their advertisements on the webpage. Where in the modern world, it’s mostly the other way around, or at least easy because influential people on the internet typically leave their contact information. It was a time where “computer-clusters” were considered a revolutionary idea that might just topple mainframes. It was long before Linus stepped up and fixed version control because he was still working to make Linux great. It was at a time where the absolutely top anti-virus software couldn’t detect a cult-of-the-dead-cow Trojan in an image file.
I know this might not have been the case in California or other tech centrals but it sure was the reality of the CS department at the university of Aalborg in Denmark.
I remember these things because some of the first really interesting projects I got to hack at was creating spam-filters. Because most importantly of all, this was a time where Google had only just emerged, and years before g-mail became a thing.
Given how hard it was to sell advertisements, just think about how hard it is to find the Danish teenager who runs some popular website. Then how hard it is to get the business contract with a minor going, if you mange to convince him/her to put a huge ugly banner on their site. Coca Cola would obviously do it, but for a lot of smaller companies it was only natural to go for much easier (and cheaper) solutions, such as spamming e-mails.
So it was actually a time where an alternative to the most common advertisement practices was something everyone almost everyone wanted to help create. Most of us never even thought about the downsides, unlike the author.
[+] [-] vasco|4 years ago|reply
What won was videos of cats, your aunt being able to get video instructions of how to replace a car tire, open-source software, and an explosion of tools that are getting more sophisticated by the minute, to the point that during a global pandemic, a lot of office jobs almost seamlessly moved fully remote, even if for a while.
Yes, someone needs to tackle those issues you've mentioned, but by and large your description of the internet is not accurate to global use we get from it.
[+] [-] fennecs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|4 years ago|reply
It technically happened of course in the form of various companies trying to build systems that do this (using e.g. crypto currencies) and put themselves in the middle to try to "own" and control the lucrative revenue streams. But that's the reason it never happens because as soon as you do that, you end up with a fragmented mess of different companies all failing to get a critical mass of actual micropayments happening. So, the money exchanged adds up to not much at all. Most artists keep on dealing with agents and big media corporations. And most consumers keep on handing over chunks of their income to those same corporations.
I've not actually bought a newspaper or a magazine in over ten years and very little in the ten before that. I regularly did this in the nineties though. There no longer is a need. I can read a lot online for free. And I do. But I do feel sort of bad for the hard working journalists producing all the content I read every day not really getting anything from me.
Authors struggle not in finding their audience but in monetizing it. Ads are not the way. I'd love to have a sane way to reward them without having to micromanage the expense. If somebody builds a way for me to fairly distribute 20$/month among the authors of all the content I enjoy every month, I'd be happy to. That doesn't exist. That's money I've not been spending for decades. I spent that on Spotify and Netflix though.
IMHO such a system should exist. Douglas Adams predicted it because it so obviously needs to exist. Instead we've got this endless amount of greed and stupidity preventing people from making a living from creating content because middle men peddling shitty ads for shitty products need to be payed off. The content creation is the bit I want to pay for. Everything else is redundant or can be payed for by authors as needed once they have revenue (e.g. editing is a useful service).
Maybe I read a few hundred articles per month. Lets call it 200 (nice round number). That's ten cents per article. Now imagine that a journalist produces something that is read by 1 million people and that 1 percent of those actually pay that 10 cent. That's a thousand dollar. It's not a lot. But if they write maybe a few articles per month, that's a nice income. And those articles stay online for a long time. It would actually stimulate the creation of content that has a long shelf life. Passive income basically. Exactly what I want as a reader: quality content.
[+] [-] leobg|4 years ago|reply
The Stripe founders point to the fact that the HTTP protocol actually includes a status code for “payment required”. So the idea of micropayments actually belonged to the original conception of the internet.
It seems to me that is was is precisely because of the difficulty of receiving payment that we ended up with a few large players, and with advertising as the main vehicle for getting paid on the web - with all the consequences, including an unduly focus on short-term attention and clicks.
[+] [-] PaulDavisThe1st|4 years ago|reply
However, the friction is still too high for this to be a reasonable implementation of what you're asking for.
It is also harrowing to think about the roughly 25% reduction in income that we'd face if PayPal dropped this fee structure at any point.
[+] [-] Matumio|4 years ago|reply
It matches what I see on Patreon (web comics at least): None of the creators seem to have started with the assurance that they could generate a significant income, or even quit their full-time job. A few of them do now, but I'm pretty sure most of those comics would have happened anyway (given the time), because the artists really wanted to create them.
By the way, free alternative platforms like Liberapay do exist (still growing, too). But I cannot blame artists to use Patreon instead - most of their audience is there. Audience comes first, and paying 10% in fees doesn't matter when you expected no significant earnings anyway.
Another interesting point on Patreon is that I can see the artist's approximate income. I may decide to support new creators instead when I see that they have already 10k a month. Not the most common case on Patreon, of course, but it matches my goal to support the creation of new art better than helping some super-popular ones to get their next million.
[+] [-] noduerme|4 years ago|reply
Also, a dime here and there doesn't pay for a middle east bureau or a team of reporters to cover an election or a war. It's unrealistic to expect reporters to risk their necks on the possibility of keeping an audience and it just might lead to the kind of unanticipated negative results that online advertising did.
Me, for instance, I'm done sending any money to Matt Taibbi until he goes back to Russia, drinks at least four gallons of vodka, and gets an interview with Vlad. Should he do that for my $1? Fuck no! A world where we pay journalists directly is a world without editors, where you can't trust any information to be vetted at all. In all probability it's just some lies their personal subscribers want to hear. They may be hired whores, but at least if they work for a newspaper you know who hired them.
[+] [-] baq|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theowenyoung|4 years ago|reply
[0]: https://docs.like.co/
[+] [-] colechristensen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CalRobert|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lariati|4 years ago|reply
It didn't even take 25 years to make 1984 look like an improvement in privacy and surveillance compared to what we have now.
[+] [-] HeckFeck|4 years ago|reply
Watching it taper off with the rise of "social media" was a sad thing indeed, but I don't think the old spirit is fully lost.
[+] [-] fullshark|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nasrudith|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avgcorrection|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tveyben|4 years ago|reply
That phrase was fun to read on my iPhone today ;-)
[+] [-] nottorp|4 years ago|reply
The privacy issues are talked about daily.
Getting ads for just things you're interested in means you don't get ads for anything you haven't seen before. And what's worse, the same goes on for content selection wherever you're being given a custom selection of content. You end up in a bubble plus some things sprinkled in to outrage you and make you stay.
[+] [-] avgcorrection|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] svilen_dobrev|4 years ago|reply
"ifndef NOCATS" is much more powerful than "ifdef CATS" ..
[+] [-] qrybam|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpm_sd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hard_Space|4 years ago|reply
And that was 1980! He was decades ahead.
[+] [-] caaqil|4 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, the notion "that advertising need be irritating and intrusive" didn't drop out, which is why browsing the web without uBlock is a horrible experience.
[+] [-] jjbinx007|4 years ago|reply
Here's the thing: I'm not against ads. I used to quite enjoy ads in newspapers and magazines.
[+] [-] nonrandomstring|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sylware|4 years ago|reply
I wonder who would still trust such 'clicks' metrics.
Wild guess, in the context of selling "something" and using ads on the web, the only reliable metric is the correlation between the sales amount and the ad campaign.
[+] [-] jb1991|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|4 years ago|reply
Isn't that the exact opposite of what they are doing? I.e. creating specialized cartridges which only work on one brand of machine, rather than a commodity that is interchangeable with other brands?
[+] [-] kbutler|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fguerraz|4 years ago|reply
https://web.archive.org/web/19991005013034/douglasadams.com/...
[+] [-] nabla9|4 years ago|reply
No subscription to online magazines or content streaming services. When you notice something you like, you pay for it: one article, one TV-show at at time.
Artificially bundling stuff together is unnatural in the Internet.
[+] [-] baq|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antiterra|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] streamofdigits|4 years ago|reply
The proliferation of the incredibly regressive practice of building and selling behavioral profiles of unsuspecting "consumers" may in part be due to the cannibalistic arms race of an exhausted economic paradigm.
Somehow we need to find sane digital ways to connect people who have to say, sell, announce something with people who want to hear, buy, be informed about something.
It doesn't sound that complicated if we lose our unsustainable ways of thinking and acting
[+] [-] grgbrn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomstuart|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|4 years ago|reply
> The thing which drops out of the problem is the notion that advertising need be irritating and intrusive.
[+] [-] noduerme|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackerlytest|4 years ago|reply
Here goes nothing.
[+] [-] arthurkarell|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] katzgrau|4 years ago|reply
Doug Adams is funny even when he's not trying to be.
He ignored that the "river rules" no longer apply.