I think the story of media, particularly online media, in the last couple decades is basically “market becomes more efficient, society realizes inefficiency was load bearing ”
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Yes. Physically requiring you to get off your couch and get to the casino was already some deterrent. Hell even needing to wait half a minute for a slot machine to run already limits your loss rate. (Those spins in the app are crazy fast)
Efficiency? Nah. Returns to scale, merger/acquisition problem - just like with tech companies buying up competitiors to retain and expand market share. It's part of the US oligopolistic capitalism problem.
"I think the story of media, particularly online media, in the last couple decades is basically"... Neil Postman was right in 1985 and people are entire addicted to entertainment spectacle news. Which Drew Curtis (Fark) re-affirmed in 2007 interview.
This absolves tech giants too much. Elmo is an idiot, but his execs and engineers are not. They know they’re making site worse. I’m still doctorov pilled: the point is to make it good, then see how bad you can make it while using IP and lack of antitrust to protect dominant position
Take self checkout: it’s not more efficient in any real sense. Walmart makes experience longer and worse for customer, while allowing greater theft. But it is cheaper, and they found customer will eat the time cost and do it themselves
Self checkout is objectively better, though. Maybe 1 in 5 times a bagger does a better job than I could. And even though the cashier scans faster than me, that's not good if I'm trying to keep an eye on the bagging and make sure the prices are coming up as I expect!
Not to mention the times the unused capacity was there in case of an emergency or just a change over time. Oh shit we had a temporary drop in enrollment, closed schools, and ten years later we don't have enough school buildings
Holy crap, “Load bearing inefficiency“ is the perfect description for something I have struggled to describe to people. I am going to use this phrase so much.
This is a stupid Bluesky post, but I think this is it: capitalism wants as little friction and as much predictability as possible, and the more of those goals it achieves, the deeper into a waking nightmare everybody plunges.
I think you are conflating "rich people" with "capitalists". Rich people have no interest in capitalism as they seek to institutionalize their wealth and power. Consequently, gov'ts must impose rules and regs to ensure that markets are free and fair, so that the rich do not get what they want.
I mean in Marx’s conception of capitalism, capital (rich people) are the ones wielding power and making decisions, so they generally get what they want.
Is the corrupting influence of capital on the levers of power inevitable, as Marx believed, or can democratic limits be imposed and maintained?
I prefer to believe the latter, that the most effective system is a free market system with vigorous regulation, including anti-trust, and a robust safety net, but the last couple decades do not seem to support this view.
Question is how to eliminate the gravity well of venture capital into essentialist rent seeking plays.
Every network SaaS play is ultimately a monopolistic rent seeking play under the interface. Without scaling friction against that behavior all eventually turn on the users/"contractors"/etc.
You are basically referring to enshittification, and yet, that is one of the big questions.
Historically, the US accomplished this w/ high corporate taxes, which pushed corps to spend money on themselves & their workers to, reducing their tax burden, instead of using money to gin up more money.
Some kinda of scaling rights on the user/contractor side against the dictatorial ToS regimes, or growing liabilities to their users on the SaaS, as networks scale could provide the necessary braking mechanism to rebalancing the final shift to total platform capriciousness.
Do you know many “rich people” that are not “capitalists”?
I’d argue all rich people are capitalists, not the other way around. You seem to suggest they’re mutually exclusive, and that just doesn’t make any sense at all.
“Rich people have no interest in capitalism…”
Perfectly illogical statement.
Wealthy people only support free markets *and democracy* to the extent that such systems enhance their wealth. When competition or self-governance interferes with profit-making, they begin meddling in politics to rig power structures against market freedom and democratic rule.
There are undoubtedly a few who believe in free markets, but the vast majority do not. Institutionalization of their wealth and power by definition is anti-capitalist. It is in essence the establishment of neo-feudalism or divine right. Those who have amassed capital wish to enjoy it, not reinvest.
“Those who have amassed capital…”
This statement is where I disagree. You acknowledge it’s capitalism that allowed that wealth to be amassed.
Also, I have never heard of a “rich man” who doesn’t want to make more wealth, so claiming they don’t want to invest their wealth is counterintuitive.
yes, but the actual market being made more efficient is advertising†. goog, facbook effectively cornered that market and stole the revenue base of the media.
†at least, they successfully convinced the market that they did. still not convinced there isn't a massive information imbalance problem.
i think this is true in some places (newspapers, most notably) but i don't think the framing is quite right
like i have trouble looking at the TV streaming environment, where everyone except netflix has lost billions of dollars, and calling it more efficient than cable
The entire world economy collapsing under COVID because every production process everywhere is built on just-in-time delivery with no margins for error, which means any delay propagates throughout the entire system at an exponential rate.
makes me think how valuable having centralized “news” sources was, back when people watched the nightly news.
these days, most people are getting media only through their own personalized feed, whatever version of “the news” that the algorithm thinks you will engage with the most.
Biology professor said that 'inefficient' fishing is vastly better for ecology *and* fishing than 'efficient' fishing. So much of 'efficiency' seems kinda geared towards exhausting the resource you're aiming to exploit!
More like 'Stupid MBAs failed to recognize that "inefficiency" was load-bearing'
And it's not just legacy media where this has been a thing. The last 30 years has been a ceaseless turning the ratchet of wringing out slack from workers' lives
I sort of get what you're saying, and yet, I can't see what online tech has made more efficient, except delivery and payment, which are hardly big tech innovations. I think it's changed journos and that's what was load bearing.
That’s a good way to put it. I wonder how we can fix this. If it’s even possible to fix going forward to something new instead of back to what worked better (but didn’t work super well) before
Amazon worked at a loss for years as $$$ were flowing in anyway 🔥 💰
Uber carried for less than their cost as $$$ were flowing in anyway 🔥 💰
Meta worked for years at a loss as $$$ were flowing in anyway 🔥 💰
More & more 💰 all going to 🇺🇸 seeking revenue as 💵 is reference money
Capitalism is no way to run a human society. Good thing techbros and the ultra wealthy are trying to get rid of all living things so capital can thrive and they can try to realize their fantasies of existing as eternal machines.
They also screwed up by making every channel the same. Why am I paying a cable bill when the old niche channels aren't even those anymore? No history on The History Channel (but you can get it if you sub to History Vault), no sci-fi on Sci-Fi (I refuse to call it Syfy), etc.
“We all want a la carte cable!” Ok here it is turns out when you subscribe to each channel independently the channels come close to putting themselves out of business churning out content to chase a limited pool of subscribers. Funny how that works.
YES. I’ve been saying this for years, since back when Netflix was the only game in town. A-la-carte cable was something we all thought we wanted because the cable companies sucked that much, even though there was a damn good reason bundles existed.
Most cable networks were loss leaders for the cable company to entice subscribers with “hundreds of channels!” even though most people only watched twenty at most.
At root it’s the same thing that allowed record labels to pay a bunch of smaller bands, because they didn’t know exactly what was gonna hit. So fund a bunch of talent, and pay them with the proceeds from the one out of a hundred that hits big.
But a bunch of those smaller bands don’t have big enough fan bases to be able to fund themselves directly, and streaming per play doesn’t really do shit for them.
At this point the thing I like streaming for is its ease of consumption on tablets and laptops+I can always watch on demand, because I need to watch with headphones while my kid is elsewhere at whatever time. For a while cable just didn’t have my demographic in mind and now we’re here.
Cable has kind of figured it out *now* but now Paramount+ has a bunch of content I love that they don’t. (As just one example). It’s all disrupted only in the sense of being “a hot mess no one likes.”
Remember when Netflix had everything and it only cost $6 a month because the cost of setting up a streaming service was still prohibitively expensive and studios sold streaming rights for cheap because it was an afterthought? Fuck Netflix for not freezing that time in amber.
I'm old enough to still be pissed at Netflix for ditching their monopoly on DVDs by mail. That was a much harder model for others to move in on and with right of first sale, they were not beholden to the license holders.
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I know times have moved on, but no one will ever make it as easy to access such a huge library of hard to find movies as they did back in the day. I lot of things I rented from them are still not available on any streaming service. Grumble grumble and get offa my lawn ya damn kids!
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netflix unironically worked better as a monopoly, which is kind of insane. there should def be competition but for the reasons you said every fucking network having a pay service doesn't work.
Was it really a monopoly though? Back in the day streaming was just one of several popular ways to watch movies.
Movie theaters, DVD rental in stores, DVD rental by mail, buying DVDs, cable channels, etc all had bigger market shares that have been eaten away by streaming
Yup, and the streamer bundles that are gonna become more and more popular are functionally an oligopoly and it’s gonna be the thing that allows costs and revenues to stabilize.
I briefly relived that time this year, when my mom said "oh I don't watch it anymore", I removed her account, downgraded mine to two devices with ads and just like that, $6.99/mo!
Then my son asked for an account and it turned out I had to upgrade mine in order to be able to add one for him.. $25😭
When I quit cable it was $160/mo and went up since, while I pay less than $40 for the channels I want. I have niche interests and little interest in live sports or live TV in general.
I literally can't watch enough hours of TV a day to get my money's worth out of the channels I have.
On the old site I pitched the concept of a platform aggregator where you could buy various tiers of streaming services (Max, Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+, etc.) and subscribe to all of them at a single fee.
I called this Kaybl and we are still looking for angel investors.
Don't have cable, don't need it. I have too many channels to watch using rabbit ears! Only had free cable once back in 80s when renting. ABC, CBS, NBC & PBS local channels 99% of the time. FOX is blocked on my tv.
Cable, but I can choose when to watch shows instead of needing to be free for a specific hour every week, is still an upgrade. I think the convenience of streaming was at least as valuable as the price for early Netflix.
Yeah, efficiency has trade offs. Building a machine to help 1 person push a boulder up a hill that used to require 5 people to do the same also means that there’s only 1 person making sure a boulder doesn’t come crashing back down the hill
A lot of the scalper issues with limited demand items (e.g. Van Gogh Pokemon cards) comes down to really low transaction costs and information frictions creating a global market for goods.
Yes there’s a limit to how much line you need to keep if you don’t use it, no you shouldn’t pare your network down to the point where there’s no redundancy if your mile long unit train on a double track mainline needs to stop for repairs
I think @matt-levine.bsky.social made this point about local banks - used to be they’d give you a rate that’s half a point worse than optimal, then fund the July 4 parade, little league team, etc. Now we have better savings accounts but worse communities!
In the sense that the bank can solve coordination problems like “we’d like to fund community events and institutions”, yes, it’s nice for the bank to have money to do that. You could do it in other ways but historically local banks did a lot of this.
The biggest impact local banks have is financing local real estate and business. They go away when the economy crumbles and all their loans take a dive. Then their assets get gobbled up by some megabank.
The most listened-to radio station in the USA in the 1970s ran 18 minutes of commercials per hour, the maximum permitted by the voluntary industry advertising code.
Many stations today run 60 minutes of commercials per hour and have almost zero listenership.
The key is none of it was algorithmic. That's the actual problem here at the core of everything. When attention is the only measure being sought after (in the name of profit) you're just running a really bad sociology experiment on the world.
Yeah, just about every form of media for centuries has been someone willing to subsidize something interesting enough that you’ll be willing to pay attention to what they want to say as well.
Read once that classifieds, not big ads, were some of the real income streams for local newspapers and that going away was a major part of the problem w/the industry.
Inexpensive short text ads in the back of newspapers, classified by the type of ad, that people would run to advertise things like job openings, yard sales, and the like. Basically, what Craigslist was copying.
When I came to So. Cal we also had Pennysaver and Autotrader that did the same. You just had tons more available to choose from than local classifieds. I found my (beyond ideal) share rental from a Pennysaver ad.
there were also "personal ads", which were the Tinder-before-Tinder to classified ads's Craigslist-before-Craigslist (though maybe personal ads were a subset of classified ones, I don't know enough about the history)
This article says they date back to the 18th century and the advent of cheap printing, so it sounds like they developed alongside other types of what became classifieds
And as much as we like to bag on Nextdoor (rightfully!), they are good for lost and found pets. Finding a dog was the only reason I ever placed a classified ad. And way back, it was also a good way to find a used car.
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Expecting durable adequate funding to come from advertising was naive.
Consolidation was destructive as hell.
I was running/selling online media site in 1985.
This is true. The behind-the-scenes work at The Children’s Television Workshop is pretty under appreciated
And that is the only thing they made more “efficient”.
Modern capitalism is a parasite class that has sucked its host society dry, killing it.
When you kill jobs en masse in the name of saving 3% in an already profitable business you cause untold societal harm
Some bacterias, red algae, cancer cells, all things that have no impact.
Is the corrupting influence of capital on the levers of power inevitable, as Marx believed, or can democratic limits be imposed and maintained?
We don’t have enough guardrails on oligopolies & rent-seeking/rentier behavior (creating wealth w/o producing things).
Every network SaaS play is ultimately a monopolistic rent seeking play under the interface. Without scaling friction against that behavior all eventually turn on the users/"contractors"/etc.
Historically, the US accomplished this w/ high corporate taxes, which pushed corps to spend money on themselves & their workers to, reducing their tax burden, instead of using money to gin up more money.
Collecting wealth without creating any goods or services, you mean
I’d argue all rich people are capitalists, not the other way around. You seem to suggest they’re mutually exclusive, and that just doesn’t make any sense at all.
“Rich people have no interest in capitalism…”
Perfectly illogical statement.
This statement is where I disagree. You acknowledge it’s capitalism that allowed that wealth to be amassed.
Also, I have never heard of a “rich man” who doesn’t want to make more wealth, so claiming they don’t want to invest their wealth is counterintuitive.
https://medium.com/3streams/to-doge-or-not-to-doge-43c18646fdc4
†at least, they successfully convinced the market that they did. still not convinced there isn't a massive information imbalance problem.
Buy a local billboard, more people will see it. People who leave the house and might actually make a purchase.
like i have trouble looking at the TV streaming environment, where everyone except netflix has lost billions of dollars, and calling it more efficient than cable
these days, most people are getting media only through their own personalized feed, whatever version of “the news” that the algorithm thinks you will engage with the most.
The building code actually, and wisely, *requires* a minimum amount of redundancy.
And it's not just legacy media where this has been a thing. The last 30 years has been a ceaseless turning the ratchet of wringing out slack from workers' lives
Amazon worked at a loss for years as $$$ were flowing in anyway 🔥 💰
Uber carried for less than their cost as $$$ were flowing in anyway 🔥 💰
Meta worked for years at a loss as $$$ were flowing in anyway 🔥 💰
More & more 💰 all going to 🇺🇸 seeking revenue as 💵 is reference money
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Movie theaters, DVD rental in stores, DVD rental by mail, buying DVDs, cable channels, etc all had bigger market shares that have been eaten away by streaming
Then my son asked for an account and it turned out I had to upgrade mine in order to be able to add one for him.. $25😭
I literally can't watch enough hours of TV a day to get my money's worth out of the channels I have.
I called this Kaybl and we are still looking for angel investors.
You have got to be fucking trolling, this is MAGA philosophy
Whoops.
Many stations today run 60 minutes of commercials per hour and have almost zero listenership.
Video games became a cultural phenomenon via rapid word of mouth, facilitated by gaming magazines and later shows, both enabled by—you guessed it—ads.
Also, merchandising.
I don't remember stories like this being a constant of the TV era:
https://youtu.be/vc4yL3YTwWk?si=tg3mNvWg8Ruh0E9P
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/personal-ads-american-west