The most useful aspect of this service would be to prevent people from writing things that people don't want to read.
Effectively you are saying that you want to censor unpopular stuff and this seems to be an effective way of doing so.
Often times society advances precisely because someone writes something that people don't want to hear.
With technology you have to be careful what you wish for, because it measures what you tell it to measure and optimizes towards that goal.
Often times society advances precisely because someone writes something that people don't want to hear.
Often these are things that some people in power don't want to hear, not what people in general don't want to hear.
On HackerNews, this article was linked. The general idea is that companies are studying what people like to read, to help authors produce books that people like to read.
Now, for me, when I look at this idea, I see some down sides, but I certainly see some benefits as well.
Almost none of the commenters on NYTimes seemed to see any benefit whatsoever to studying reader behaviour. There were a few who saw the downsides as more mild than the other commenters. But most of the commenters basically saw this technology as some sort of 1984-esque idea that will turn all books into uninteresting, unimaginative pieces of paper that would better serve as a door stopper than as something for literary consumption. Out of 50 comments that I've read, only one person has said something along the lines of, 'This technology can possibly offer something to help authors improve their books'.
Is this just technophobia? Or am I missing something, and this really is a horrible, evil technology that should be avoided at all costs? [That's a rhetorical question -- I'd be surprised if even one LWian held that position]
I guess what I'm asking is, what are the psychological roots for the almost-unanimous aversion to this attempt at gathering and using information about what people want?