The Onion
1 HN recommender · recommended in 7 months, 2013–2024
3:46 · 434K views · Dec 12, 2012
A satirical Onion Talks episode in which a startup founder explains making money by selling his users' data to oppressive governments. It parodies tech conference talks and monetization of communities.
Posted as a joke or satire whenever a company sells out its users or surveillance comes up.
7 comments from Hacker News
One of the problems with for-profit is that the company is likely to sell its community out if they think that'll make them more money. See: Elsevier buying Mendeley and the backlash from that: [LINK] This Onion talk put it really well: this video
Words on their own are not worth much in the long run. It's easy to pursue well-meaning plans on good days when everything is working like it's supposed to and everywhere you go people seem to be talking about the amazing stuff your "unicorn trajectory" will create. Cory Doctorow had a useful analogy[1]: if you're trying to lose weight, most of the time it isn't very difficult to resist tempting siren's call from the box of cookies in your pantry. Obviously not buying the tempting snack would have been a better (and simpler) idea, but willpower is plentiful on good days. Obviously that's a poor risk assessment: of course it's easy to make the annoying-bug-beneficial choice when it doesn't cost much. The actual test is what happens on a very bad day when you're exhausted and worried about other problems. Most people eventually end up caving and "cheating" on their diet, simply because we're terrible at judging risks and overestimate our ability to resist temptation when it isn't actually being tested. The solution to this problem is to have the humility to admit our weaknesses in assessing risks and how easy it can be to overestimate our own abilities. From that point of views, prudence suggests a good idea might be using the benefits available on good days to prepare for the bad days and moments of weakness. Don't allow the temptation into the house so succumbing to temptation isn't possible or involves a much higher cost. Words that promise that you won't fall to temptation
Paying directly changes the relationship significantly - a business is generally going to pay attention to their customers that produce their revenue than the "free" accounts that are the merely the product being sold to advertisers. The Onion was right[1]. In the rush to sell out their "users" to to whomever is willing to pay, a lot of people seem to have come to believe that advertising is the only way to the internet can work. The internet enabled many new ways of publishing due it removing most of the per-transaction costs. I suspect we haven't even seen most of these methods. While "Kickstarter" style funding and Wikipedia's "public television style" requests for donations, while interesting experiments, are only the first generation of what is enabled by the internet. Unfortunately, untested and unproven (by somebody else) ideas do imply some amount of risk, which scares a lot of people back into the traditional method where the advertisers get to paint over everything. edit: forgot URL [1] this video
The Onion was also prescient about the end game for surveillance based companies: this video (this video is especially interesting in light of Google's recent involvement in Chinese censorship)
Oh yes one my favourite ~~TED~~ Onion talk business case studies: "The Power Of Selling Out: Your Customers As Political Capital - Onion Talks - Ep. 9" - this video