You're missing the classic game theory element. If everyone is working hard, everyone gets X. But if I decide to slack off, everyone gets X minus some tiny fraction, including me.
Game theory tells us this kind of system will fall apart practically instantly.
I forget the details, but I think Marx tried to dismiss that problem through an appeal to nationalism.
Is it fair to say we have abolished child labor, instituted universal education and created universal health care when our economy relies on manufactured goods made by uneducated children with no health care?
I would imagine aspiring actors want fame more than fortune.
How does an entertainment world not dominated by Hollywood threaten this?
Answer: It doesn't.
What we have with Hollywood is execs who obsessively control marketing and distribution channels and thereby get to determine who becomes famous and who does not.
For many people it's just impossible to imagine things any other way. But that does not mean it is actually impossible for things to be another way. Hollywood is a very recent development in the history of entertainment.
We could take the execs out of the system, and the audience would still be able to decide who becomes famous and who does not.
Exactly. You get content only. Do you want to read, or do you want to click on stuff? Most ads (stuff you click on) are javascript driven. Most content (e.g. text, like what you're reading now) is not. Articles on news sites like HN or other similar sites render just fine without javascript. Converting them to nicley formatted text is easy once the effects of javascript are eliminated. Let the downvotes begin!
So many issues with the internet seem to devolve into the same thing: a fight over who gets to show ads to the naive user.
Eventually Google itself will be showing "too many ads above the fold". Does anyone doubt it?
Gaming the search engine to be numero uno on the SERP is one thing. But proclaming a penalty for websites that have "too many ads"? That seems like it's for users to decide, not Google. Not to mention hypocritical. Can we penalise Google for "too many ads"?
Huh? That's why you go to a search engine -- so that it decides what good content is and the user doesn't have to (or at least they only have to do so in a dramatically-reduced-dimensional space).
When Google sends me to the worst of these kinds of sites, I become extremely annoyed...at Google. So yes, we can and should "penalize" Google, but on metrics like quality of results (which includes the ads being shown). In an ideal world I'm replacing having to separate the wheat from the chaff of the entire internet with having to separate the wheat from the chaff of the search engine market, and I'm going to favor a search engine that does a better job.
In other words, as a user, "since Google is a website that uses ads, and they're going to favor websites that use fewer ads, aren't they hypocritical?" is not a question I care about even a little.
What I do care about, among other things, is having a search engine that doesn't show me useless crap.
The fact that they have to make changes to their system in order to not have useless crap appear at the top of the results tells us something: either people are searching for crap or the portion of the web Googlebot is crawling is full of crap.
Neither is something the search engine can fix for you.
With respect to the later idea, the search engine may in fact be contributing to it by encouraging more crap to be created, because it easily percolates to the top of their "intelligent" results and users blindly click on result #1. And no doubt many users see these results as equivalent to "the web". Whatever Google returns, to them, that's "the web".
You can think about the web through the lense of "search engine results" and evaluate the web based on whatever is returned from your search engine queries.
Or you can think of the web as a huge mess of websites some of which are useful, most of which are crap and many of which an aggressive search engine might index.
Are you evaluating search results, or websites?
I'm evaluating websites, individually. Because that is what the web is. To me, Google is not the web. Google might give me some clues about some sites. They do an enormous amount of grunt work crawling them.
But it's up to me to do the final evaluation. To decide whether a site is useful or whether it is crap.
And there are other ways to discover websites besides using Google. How do you think Google learns about existing and new websites? Voluntary disclosure by the webmasters?
It sounds like you want someone to evaluate websites for you.
I doubt you are alone in that regard.
This is not a new problem.
However, unlike you, I do not see Google as providing any viable solution.
The fact that they have to make changes to their system in order to not have useless crap appear at the top of the results tells us something: either people are searching for crap or the portion of the web Googlebot is crawling is full of crap.
No, it means the ranking algorithm is evaluating the results wrongly. Which is what they're trying to fix.
With respect to the later idea, the search engine may in fact be contributing to it by encouraging more crap to be created, because it easily percolates to the top of their "intelligent" results and users blindly click on result #1. And no doubt many users see these results as equivalent to "the web". Whatever Google returns, to them, that's "the web".
But that's the point, isn't it? It shouldn't easily percolate to the top. That's what their algorithms are for. If it does, they need to be fixed.
Are you evaluating search results, or websites?
I'm evaluating websites, individually. Because that is what the web is. To me, Google is not the web. Google might give me some clues about some sites. They do an enormous amount of grunt work crawling them.
But it's up to me to do the final evaluation. To decide whether a site is useful or whether it is crap.
I don't get what you mean by "Google being the web". Of course the final evaluation is up to the user. But if Google can rank the results more like you would, you're wasting less time clicking through the crap to get what you want.
And there are other ways to discover websites besides using Google. How do you think Google learns about existing and new websites? Voluntary disclosure by the webmasters?
Actually, they do that too. But mostly by painstakingly loading every link recursively, something which is obviously impossible for a person to do unless they want to be limited to 0.0...01% of the web.
Give me the programmers, UI geeks, the money to pay them to do as they are told, and I will build it. I have the idea, and it's actually a proven winner, among a smaller segment of users. Like most other internet phenomena, it's something that was once only done amongst computer nerds only to be later done by the general public as if it was just another usual day-to-day practice. And it actually involves more friends and family and ideally less mass market products.
Pitches don't work like that. If you want other people's time or other people's money, you better throw some more skin into the game. The most simple thing to imagine is creating a small prototype. But there are other ways.
It's a platform not an application. Nothing needs to be reinvented. We simply reuse what's already been invented and tested. But we do it in a "new" and useful way.
A while ago I found myself accidentally reading about the origins of Hollywood on the web. There is a surprising amount of writing posted about it. I'm wondering if others are aware where Hollywood "came from". Specifically, who brought it to the US. And why does it have the rules it does, e.g., about what are good or bad characters and themes, about carefully crafted endings, etc.
This might provide some insight about Hollywood is going in the future. As the generations pass from one to another.
I'll let the curious reader chase up the history on their own. But what I gathered is Hollywood was founded by outcasts, refugees, young men who came from difficult circumstances and were faced with growing up without role models.
Are there parallels to today's young hacker crowd?
The point that he raises by stating the fact that for most of the history of human art, people have not been paid to create art is not one to be overlooked. Mick Jagger has also said this of the music business specifically.
Looking back on art over the centuries I would not say that today's art is necessarily "better" because people are paid to create it.
Yet I've read statements by entertainment industry people that if we don't spend heaps of money on motion pictures, their quality will plummet to the likes of "reality TV".
Not only do I think this is complete rubbish -- it's not the budget that makes the quality of the film -- but all I can think rgarding the reality TV comment is, "Then why the heck are we bombarded with crappy reality TV?" The reasonable conslusion is because the stuff gets watched. So even if there was a drop in quality, it isn't going to affect their profits. People will still consume this stuff.
"The point that he raises by stating the fact that for most of the history of human art, people have not been paid to create art is not one to be overlooked."
I find this point meaningless. For most of human history a lot of things happened - for example
1) Slavery was normal
2) People were ruled by monarchies
3) Countries were constantly fighting each other
More to the point, we simply lacked the mechanism for 'normal people' (ie not nobles) to pay a small percent of their disposable income for art. Instead church & rich people picked up the slack and employed artists.
I think the point here is not so much about Intellectual Property as such, but about modes of distribution. Writers have been selling books for a couple hundred years - and nobody is complaining. We are comfortable buying books. But for media content the model is just not there yet. But let's talk about that - instead of attacking IP as such.
Perhaps every worker has a different threshhold for what they will settle for in terms of what amount of the harvest they would like to retain.
All the HR people reading HN know exactly what I'm talking about.