| Dave already connected some dots with this here:
What think ya’ll?
Doc On Jan 5, 2017, at 11:07 AM, John @ BB <
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> wrote:
Dave Winer On The Topic Of Medium :
In other posts - he has declared that he too would like to help Ev with Medium - maybe you can connect some of the dots for him Doc?
/J
On Jan 5, 2017, 8:55 AM -1000, Doc Searls <
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>, wrote:
On Jan 5, 2017, at 6:20 AM, Don Marti <
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> wrote:
Fried rat found in bucket of fried chicken.
Sanctimonious vegans seize the opportunity to tell
everyone to start eating kale instead.
That's what this "people should pay for news" jive,
that comes up every single time there is a problem
with web ads, sounds like to me.
Are you suggesting that’s what EmanciPay is about?
It’s not. Instead it’s just a way (and only a suggested way, so far) that people *can* pay for news. Or anything, for that matter.
Yes, some people will eat kale, or pay for content,
and feel smug about it. But others will not.
I sometimes caught the Rush Limbaugh show driving
across the USA. The most common sound effect
was the newspaper page turning -- as he quoted and
re-interpreted the New York Times and other mainstream
media for an audience that was not paying for that
content.
Is that the experience of mainstream news that we
want people to have? Tom Standage summarizes the
conventional wisdom:
https://twitter.com/tomstandage/status/816768005094916096
That summary is a quote from Ev Williams of Medium, explaining that he fired his adtech team and now needs help making money some other way: <https://blog.medium.com/renewing-mediums-focus-98f374a960be#.q10cggqfu>. (Also cited below.)
I’d like us to help him with that. I also think he’ll listen. I’ve known him a long time. Some others here do to, I’m sure.
I'm sure that he has, in the past, been right
about some things, but as a digital (1) editor
(2) for The Economist (3) he may be the most Wrong
About Everything person on Planet Earth as of late
2016/early 2017.
BTW, I don’t think Ev is throwing out the brand advertising baby with the adtech bathwater there. (He says “ad-driven,” not “ad-supported” or “ad-sponsored”. A subtle but essential difference there.)
Medium is one of the few online publishers that could actually host good high-paying brand advertising, and one or more of us should tell him that. Standage too.
Do we want every news item re-written and spun by
the lean, fact-checking-free operations that _can_
afford to live on crappy web ads?
Or just see news cut/pasted into Facebook or Reddit
(with a few facts changed in the middle for lulz?)
Or see news organizations turn into DRM/anti-fair-use
maximalists, trying to crack down on all
re-interpretation or quotation from the news?
I doubt anybody here does.
Look, web advertising is broken, because browsers
still have 1990s bugs. But all kinds of other software
had _harder_ 1990s bugs and people fixed those.
TV news is free and ad-supported. A lot of people
get their news from TV and don't pay for it.
Advertising can work, if it's at any quality level
above "shittiest possible advertising" where the
web is now.
I know that the fashionable thing to do now is to
write off all advertising because it's infested with
Lumascape companies. But that's like writing off
keeping a computer in your house because your Windows
98 box crashed all the time. If Microsoft can,
without breaking old applications, add protections
that keep programs from crashing each other, then
browser developers can add the protections needed
to prevent cross-site tracking and get the adtech
infestation down to a manageable level.
I assume you’re helping Mozilla do that. Love to help too, if they’re interested.
Doc
Doc Searls quotation of Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 09:16:29PM -0800:
Thanks, T.Rob.
Good piece. (Linked below.) And great points. Some comments inline...
On Jan 4, 2017, at 7:59 PM, T.Rob <
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> wrote:
We spent a couple days either side of New Year's Eve in the hospital with my father in law. Afterward my mother-in-law started searching for all the conditions and meds mentioned in his discharge paperwork. Next thing you know, she's picked up ransomware which as best as I can tell was delivered through an ad rendered while she was reading email in Outlook Live.
As I mention in the linked post, I can't ever know for sure that the malware specifically targeted sick and elderly people but based on the ads she's now seeing it would be hard to win an ad placement bid right now for any other criteria. So right after nearly losing her husband of 60+ years, emotionally and physically exhausted and unable to sustain her normal levels of web vigilance and security hygiene, she suddenly becomes a ripe target for malware delivered in ad-tech that ransoms all her family photos and correspondence. It took hours to recover her PC and she was practically in tears the whole time.
Which to me is a big part of the problem. Much of the discussion of ad tech and ad blockers centers around tech-savvy mainstream users, not the elderly parent or grandparent whose online experience is determined largely by default settings of their devices and technology-specific cataracts that blind them to how this stuff works. Designing for the least abled among us results in designs that everyone can use. Designing to the 80th or 90thpercentile is much easier but renders millions of people "statistically insignificant" even to the point of creating new classes of disability where once there were none.
What we have are discussions among a certain .1% about a different .1% taking advantage of 99.9%, thanks to a business model (adtech) that rewards anyone producing any kind of “content,” regardless of its value, resulting not only in adtech’s fraud- and malware-filled four-dimensional shell game, but a giant rolling shitball of “content” rewarded just for being “content” that only wants more “content" in the world, all the better to make more money from adtech that cares not at all for the lives of that 99.9% or the consequences of abuses by the adtech industry and its beneficiaries.
I understand that web sites need to make money to deliver high quality content but any web property owner or manager who believes the number of users who are actually victimized through malvertising is statistically insignificant needs to look my mother-in-law in the eye while they explain to her just how insignificant she personally is to their revenue stream and why. Until ad-tech can be directly accountable to its victims site owners don't get to whine about ad blockers.
https://medium.com/@tdotrob/dont-claim-your-web-site-depends-on-ads-d1aec0d45b3f#
In fact they regard your mother in law the way a threshing machine regards wheat.
Want to see some moon-high contempt for the lives of the adtech-exploited? Check out the new petition to the FCC just filed by attorneys for these creeps:
Association of National Advertisers
American Association of Advertising Agencies American Advertising Federation
Data & Marketing Association
Interactive Advertising Bureau
Network Advertising Initiative
Here it is: <http://www.ana.net/getfile/24564
Their case is against the FCC’s ruling in October <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/10/27/the-fcc-just-passed-sweeping-new-rules-to-protect-your-online-privacy> that says “consumers’ information” used by others should be “consumers’ choice.” They say the ruling “violates First Amendment protections of commercial speech.”
These creeps want you to have no rights at all on the Internet, which they regard as their sovereign and absolute commercial property. They get to speak there. You’re just the eyeballs they sell.
On the positive, I expect this kind of vain and clueless arrogance will have the effect of driving some people who had occupied middle ground over to our side. Toward that possibility, take a look at what Ev Williams, CEO and founder of Medium (and earlier of Blogger and Twitter), just posted:
<https://blog.medium.com/renewing-mediums-focus-98f374a960be#.7liiy6j0y>.
I’ll leave out the opener, where he says he’s laying off 50 people, most of which have been working, apparently, on an advertising model. Here is most of the rest of what he says, with some inline comments...
Our vision, when we started in 2012, was ambitious: To build a platform that defined a new model for media on the internet. The problem, as we saw it, was that the incentives driving the creation and spread of content were not serving the people consuming it or creating it — or society as a whole. As I wrote at the time, “The current system causes increasing amounts of misinformation…and pressure to put out more content more cheaply — depth, originality, or quality be damned. It’s unsustainable and unsatisfying for producers and consumers alike….We need a new model.”
We set out to build a better publishing platform — one that allowed anyone to offer their stories and ideas to the world and that helped the great ones rise to the top. In 2016, we made big investments in teams and technology aimed at attracting and migrating commercial publishers to Medium. And in order to get these publishers paid, we built out and started selling our first ad products. This strategy worked in terms of driving growth, as well as improving the volume and consistency of great content. Some of the web’s best publishers are now on Medium, and we’re happy to work with them every day. We also saw interest from many big brands and promising results from several content marketing campaigns on the platform.
However, in building out this model, we realized we didn’t yet have the right solution to the big question of driving payment for quality content. We had started scaling up the teams to sell and support products that were, at best, incremental improvements on the ad-driven publishing model, not the transformative model we were aiming for.
To continue on this trajectory put us at risk — even if we were successful, business-wise — of becoming an extension of a broken system.
That system isn’t just adtech. It’s the vast avalanche of “content,” which was once “editorial” and “journalism,” but now includes every damn thing you can publish, regardless of whether it’s worth anything, or even true. And which grows bigger and more shit-filled every day, wreaking all kinds of damage, including making people hate each other: <http://bit.ly/nvzib>.
Here comes Ev's pull-quote paragraph:
Upon further reflection, it’s clear that the broken system is ad-driven media on the internet. It simply doesn’t serve people. In fact, it’s not designed to. The vast majority of articles, videos, and other “content” we all consume on a daily basis is paid for — directly or indirectly — by corporations who are funding it in order to advance their goals. And it is measured, amplified, and rewarded based on its ability to do that. Period. As a result, we get…well, what we get. And it’s getting worse.
Amen.
Adtech is a reward system for production of boundless “content,” without restraint, and is intellectually, morally and structurally incapable of fixing itself. It can barely even help its best high-quality publishers, such as the Guardian, the NY Times and the WSJ. As Don Marti started pointing out long ago, if an adtech robot can find a reader of one of those pubs in some skeevy place, it’ll track them down and throw ads at them there. The system doesn’t care, and is designed not to care. Ev and his team know that now. The writing was on the wall they just tore down.
That’s a big part of why we are making this change today.
We decided we needed to take a different — and bolder — approach to this problem. We believe people who write and share ideas should be rewarded on their ability to enlighten and inform, not simply their ability to attract a few seconds of attention. We believe there are millions of thinking people who want to deepen their understanding of the world and are dissatisfied with what they get from traditional news and their social feeds. We believe that a better system — one that serves people — is possible. In fact, it’s imperative.
So, we are shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating for people. And toward building a transformational product for curious humans who want to get smarter about the world every day.
It is too soon to say exactly what this will look like. This strategy is more focused but also less proven. It will require time to get it right, as well as some different skills...
Anybody want to help dust off and update EmanciPay <https://cyber.harvard.edu/projectvrm/EmanciPay>?
Other ideas are welcome too. Key VRM thing... They need to come from our side: the individual reader's, viewer's or listener's side. What is the easiest and most normalizable way anybody can reward anybody or anything that provides value?
Do we really need separate, arcane and coercive systems (e.g. paywalls) for every “content provider” out there? (That’s the current default.) Or can we scaffold up something better that starts with *our* ability to operate the pricing gun? And to express genuine loyalty?
I say we can.
Doc
On Jan 4, 2017, at 7:59 PM, T.Rob <
" class="">
> wrote:
We spent a couple days either side of New Year's Eve in the hospital with my father in law. Afterward my mother-in-law started searching for all the conditions and meds mentioned in his discharge paperwork. Next thing you know, she's picked up ransomware which as best as I can tell was delivered through an ad rendered while she was reading email in Outlook Live.
As I mention in the linked post, I can't ever know for sure that the malware specifically targeted sick and elderly people but based on the ads she's now seeing it would be hard to win an ad placement bid right now for any other criteria. So right after nearly losing her husband of 60+ years, emotionally and physically exhausted and unable to sustain her normal levels of web vigilance and security hygiene, she suddenly becomes a ripe target for malware delivered in ad-tech that ransoms all her family photos and correspondence. It took hours to recover her PC and she was practically in tears the whole time.
Which to me is a big part of the problem. Much of the discussion of ad tech and ad blockers centers around tech-savvy mainstream users, not the elderly parent or grandparent whose online experience is determined largely by default settings of their devices and technology-specific cataracts that blind them to how this stuff works. Designing for the least abled among us results in designs that everyone can use. Designing to the 80th or 90thpercentile is much easier but renders millions of people "statistically insignificant" even to the point of creating new classes of disability where once there were none.
I understand that web sites need to make money to deliver high quality content but any web property owner or manager who believes the number of users who are actually victimized through malvertising is statistically insignificant needs to look my mother-in-law in the eye while they explain to her just how insignificant she personally is to their revenue stream and why. Until ad-tech can be directly accountable to its victims site owners don't get to whine about ad blockers.
https://medium.com/@tdotrob/dont-claim-your-web-site-depends-on-ads-d1aec0d45b3f#
Kind regards,
-- T.Rob
T.Robert Wyatt, Managing partner
IoPT Consulting, LLC
+1 704-443-TROB (8762) Voice/Text
https://ioptconsulting.com
https://twitter.com/tdotrob
--
Don Marti <
" class="">
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
Are you safe from 3rd-party web tracking? http://www.aloodo.org/test/
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