Criminal huggers
- Thread starter ELITEOFWARMAN8
- Start date
Benefactor
Beneficial
There are adverts on the site, someone paid to put them there and we look at them.
I don't see how I am a product, am I missing a step?
Edit: CFC hardly has the same level of detailed information about me to sell that say, Facebook, has.
I don't see how I am a product, am I missing a step?
Edit: CFC hardly has the same level of detailed information about me to sell that say, Facebook, has.
Symphony D.
Deity
I'll take this as your admission of defeat. You can passive-aggressive your way out of the thread now that you've given up on arguing. Bye.
Yes, you see, Google and Facebook became titanic multi-billion dollar companies by being totally free to use! Oh wait, no they didn't, they did it by advertising. The thing is, you're not paying for the service; the companies doing the advertising are. Guess what? That means that you are the product being sold to them by the site doing the advertising! Have some reading.
Benefactor
Beneficial
I do come here for the posts, yes. But the product is presumably advertising space, which is worth more when more people come here.
I guess that makes us the workers
.Edit: I am aware of how Google and Facebook make money Symphony, but they also have access to a lot of information that CFC doesn't.
Mise
isle of lucy
I'm a privacy advocate, and I'm rather serious about it: I use adblock and ghostery because I don't like my browsing habits monitored, I use a (paid) VPN at home to prevent ISP-level snooping, and I'm certainly no fan of the invasion of privacy that Google and Facebook (among many, many others) represent, but trite catchphrases like "you are the product!!!!" are not only annoying, they're misleading. When you watch commercial TV, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT!!!! When you read a free magazine, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT!!!! When you take a train with advertising in the carriage, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT!!!! It's as if these people are unfamiliar with the concept of advertising.
Symphony D.
Deity
Because CFC runs these advertisements itself, right? It's not like they're handled by a centralized advertising service or all integrated into the same systems or anything, nope, that's impossible! Websites never... oh, hey, I wonder what these Digg and Google buttons at the bottom of the page do.
Crezth
i knew you were a real man of the left
The comparison seems sound to me. Advertising consists of visibility, yeah? You're selling visibility. What is visibility, fundamentally? An audience. Thus you are selling an audience, an audience consists of "you," you are the product, QED.
Mise
isle of lucy
Yeah, but nobody claims that "you are the product!!!!" when you watch free-to-air commercial TV. It's shrill and stupid.
I agree that Google, Facebook, etc represent an unprecedented level of privacy invasion, but there is no need to make stupid, shrill claims about the fact that they are free and ad-supported. Their evilness vis-a-vis invasion of privacy has nothing to do with the fact that you are being served advertising: advertising and ad-supported free products have existed for decades without such invasions of privacy. One could easily imagine a google or facebook that was just as free and ad supported, but did not invade your privacy. Indeed, those things exist and have existed for a long time...
In the case of, for example, commercial TV, you are still the product, but there is nothing evil or wrong about that: your privacy is not invaded, and you are not made any worse off for it. So shouting that "you are the product!!!!", as if this is something uniquely and egregiously evil, is shrill and stupid.
Benefactor
Beneficial
Yeah yeah, frankly I don't really care. Facebook and Google and whoever gather up my information and use it to target ads, CFC makes a bit of cash by running these ads. Am I about right at that?
I'm not paying for CFC, I have spent zero dollars on this site. If my pageview counts towards whatever revenue CFC gets, then great, good for them.
Being a fraction of a percent of the "product" that CFC sells to advertisers won't keep me up at night.
Symphony D.
Deity
Except magazines, billboards, and TV ads can't monitor your activity and parse it to tailor their advertising to you in a more effective way. Not doing so would defeat the entire purpose of having the data at their disposal. The whole reason these companies are successful is precisely because they can datamine you, not in spite of it. You'd have as much success getting major corporate retailers like Target and Wal-Mart to drop Big Data based product correlation: i.e., none.
"You are the product" is mostly a result of the advertising being 1. "smart" and 2. being far more successful than "dumb" advertising as a result of it. If it wasn't more effective, they wouldn't invest in all the overhead necessary to pull it off.
Congratulations, you've deduced my point: that being whored out to corporate interests for entertainment and paying a nominal fee for the same thing are roughly the same deal, it's just a question of the particulars of how it's financed.
Farm Boy
I hope you dance
- Joined
- Sep 8, 2010
- Messages
- 28,269
Nah, I'll perhaps be interested when you actually post something which doesn't involve an insult or drama implied "BYEBYE."
Ok fine, actual response - whether or not you actually want it, here's the benefit of the doubt:
$10 doesn't have to be a princely sum to sort people socioeconomically. Really that was a direct response to Mr. C's post that this was the explicit goal of the registration fee, but it's still kind of true even if he's mistaken. The cost has to be just high enough that it filters out people who are unwilling to pay that price for the service rendered, not simply people who have no ability whatsoever to pay.
Your claim that there aren't many people who don't have $10 to burn on a forum board after they are paying for internet access is untrue from my observation. The Secretary of State in IL has mandated that public libraries provide free internet access to all who wish to use it. They get a lot a lot of business along these lines in small, medium, and large towns alike. If a $10 registration fee would effectively prevent such a free internet user from joining a community then yes, that is a socioeconomic filter. If costs are such that the board could not possibly sustain itself without such a fee, perhaps then that makes sense. If Mr. C is correct in the stated goal, or instead it functions as a $10 "fine stick" available to moderators anytime somebody expresses an opinion they don't like or deem "stupid" well - then that is exactly what I would be criticizing if true.
My past experience would indicate your likely response will be snide, but hey I like being surprised. Here's an opportunity.
sophie
Break My Heart
Well if you want to get technical, you may not have physically spent any dollars on the site, but you certainly have lost a lot of dollars in terms of trading time doing something more productive for spending time on here. And that's not to mention internet and electricity usage fees. So in reality you've spent a great deal of dollars on this site. A one-time fee of ten dollars for an account to a forum is a menial fee when taken into the larger picture.
Benefactor
Beneficial
.
holy king
Deity
actually, i dont see his post as all that passive.
Borachio
Way past lunacy
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2012
- Messages
- 26,698
Exactly. And the product is our posts. Which we buy with our subliminal attention to adverts.I guess that makes us the workers
But this is very strange, for then we're buying our own products, our posts, which in turn are part of our very selves.
As I say, neat.
Like living off biting your own finger nails. While paying someone to let you do so.
(Notice I don't subscribe to the "shrill and stupid" notion. (I am calm personified, with a kind of dark husky voice. Though certainly stupid.)
Symphony D.
Deity
It's full title is Something Awful LLC. That stands for Limited Liability Company. They sell a product (as opposed to selling you as a product; see previous discussion) which is essentially unlimited entertainment. You can buy it, or you can't. You seem to want to present this as some sort of social justice question, but you haven't yet demonstrated why it should be treated any differently than any other form of cost-based entertainment, like spending $9 on a 90-120 minute movie or spending $60 on a 4-120 hour video game. If you have disposable income and the desire, you can make the purchase. If you don't, you don't. Simple as that.
Now, it's certainly true that stupid behavior comes with financial costs, but that's true of any long-term service or membership, as pretty much any EULA will attest to. So, given that entertainment is a commodity in our capitalist utopia, will you please explain to me why paying for it is such a grievous social injustice?
Mise
isle of lucy
All of which is true, but that still doesn't mean that "you are the product" doesn't also apply to every other form of advertising. When you watch TV, the product is you, the audience, being sold to advertisers. They lure you in with their TV shows, but really they're just trying to serve you up to advertisers. "You are the product" applies to commercial TV just as much as it does to Google or Facebook.
As I said, G and FB represent huge and unprecedented invasions of privacy, but that is irrelevant to whether or not "you are the product".
Again, all true, but "you are the product" whenever you watch commercial TV too.
The reason people claim that "you are the product!!!!" is simply because it is a nice little catch-phrase. But it's nonetheless a dishonest one, because you "being the product" isn't actually that big a deal. What is a big deal is the massive, pervasive invasion of privacy that you were describing earlier; the reams and reams of personally identifiable information that G and FB have on you; and the complete lack of regulatory oversight thereof. Indeed, governments and regulators are complicit in this -- as part of "counter-terrorism" and "anti-piracy" initiatives, governments are themselves not only amassing giant databases on people's browsing habits, but tapping into private companies's databases, too. That's what's really scary here, not the trite and rather commonplace phenomenon that you are being use as an audience for advertisers to push products onto you...
Symphony D.
Deity
A value judgment if ever there was one. Ubiquity is not tantamount to irrelevance. Commercial advertising is psychologically insidious regardless of its datamining capabilities.
You hate the term and don't care about the broader picture; fair enough. I'm in the opposite boat, so we're probably not going to get anywhere together carrying on the subject.
Mise
isle of lucy
Well, if you go around shouting "you fool! don't you realise that if the product is free, then you are the product!!!!" whenever someone watches commercial TV or reads a free magazine, then you would at least be consistently crazy.
