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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @jurraca 22 May \ parent \ on: The Death of the Ad-Supported Web - Stratechary post tech
ah thanks -- brain shortcut to the other ben (horowitz)
I suppose this is a predictable take from Silicon Valley, and it's interesting to see how they argue for a payments world where they can position themselves to take a cut. I think he's wrong on almost every point here so let me expand:
- There's nothing Lightning and Ecash can't do that Stablecoins can: programmable, instant, micro. Stablecoins are less private, and they're not even stable--they're defined by a fiat currency that loses value. They also perpetuate a model where your online activity can be tracked and resold in a data market.
- The advertising model wasn't a sin because it enabled commerce, it was a sin because it enabled surveillance-as-a-market and behavior modification at large scale, as a foundational primitive of the Web. Its externalities are the problem.
- The idea that advertising is a "micro-transaction in the background" is laughable: you had to invent a market to price "impressions" and "views" of content. You will be shocked to hear that this market is rife with fraud, as is the adjacent online survey market. There is no way to accurately price content if you're pricing it off metadata about the users that read it. A market requires the price to be "discovered" and the way to do that is to let users pay for stuff.
- Debatable, but I've never experienced the claim that micro-transactions put too much burden on the user, and therefore subscriptions make more sense. I don't want to subscribe to your newsletter and be wed to a recurring contract to subsidize your writing, and then read it to feel like I'm getting value. For some writers I would, but not most. I would instead happily pay you micro transactions to read individual articles when I fancy.
Overall I think this is some extensive mental gymnastics to hold on to a Silicon Valley model that will soon be obsolete. GLHF.
python, like javascript, has absorbed a lot of the functional fun of Lisp.
imo neither python or js have not inherited much from lisp at all, curious what you mean... i went from a functional lang back to python for a project and struggled to rewire my brain to OOP.
this riff from Jose Valim on inheritance in OOP was pretty funny imo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agkXUp0hCW8&t=1299s
obvs it's coming from a FP perspective.
yea fair. Just using nix doesnt make things reproducible, hope thats clear to everyone. NixOS the operating system, def not reproducible off the bat. My god is it hard to explain what Nix does ugh.
this is the kind of thing that's fun with this new format. Brest has never been to CL, generally not a great team even for the French league. They're 2-0 so far. Fans going nuts im sure.
The white pill is post-quantum cryptography is starting to be deployed, long before we get a working quantum computer. See Daniel Bernstein, Tanja Lange 's work.
And not fud, both n1ckler and Scott Aronson are v bright and high integrity ime.
What europe did to the internet—cookie banners on every website—is another example of a transaction cost. I have to negotiate with the banner and think "hmm do i want this website to track me, and/or to what extent". The UX alone is a mental transaction cost. This is a cost borne of the advertising model, and it has imo made the internet materially worse. Its unclear to me that a zap model is strictly worse.
it'll be interesting to watch tech culture shift if these new dynamics change the model that made Silicon Valley dominant.