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Don't forget that for-profit companies tend to actually generate profit which means that the largest ones can do R&D for the ratchet of Science, as we are seeing with Google.
In response to
Google vs Wikipedia, for-profit vs not-for-profit
True. I think that Wikipedia should generate more revenue via ads, in order to be able to do more stuff.
gwern's argument for decline.
Interesting. However, one would also like to know the causes of why Wikipedia's leadership started to behave in this way. One possible explanation is that they didn't have enough monetary incentives. If they would have had stronger incentives to keep the number of revisions growing they would have implemented policies that made sure that happened. I think there could be something to that - that if Google's Knobe had outcompeted Wikipedia, it wouldn't have had the same problems, because it would have been more rationally governed.
Google vs Wikipedia, for-profit vs not-for-profit
When Wikipedia was new, there was much entusiasm over it's not-for-profit model. Recent years have seen a steady decline in the number of users, though. Meanwhile, companies such as Google and Amazon grow ever larger and are, arguably, besides making huge profits contributing to the growth of human knowledge and prosperity on a massive scale.
An important question in this regard is to what extent information should be generated and controlled by not-for-profits such as Wikipedia (or even the government) or by for-profit entities. What are the advantages and disadvantages of these different systems? To some extent they are the same as for any other economic activity, but producing and organizing information are of course quite different from producing cars in ways that are relevant to this question.
Advantages for the for-profit system:
The main advantage of the for-profit system is that has a tendency to make for more efficiency. The cut-throat competition among IT companies forces them to become more efficient and innovative. Meanwhile Wikipedia does not seem to be either very innovative or efficient, since an oligarchy of old wikipedians block most new ideas (according to the article above).
Advantages for the not-for-profit system:
The idea underpinning market economics is the "invisible hand" which is supposed to aggregate everybody's selfish behaviour into collective good (given a certain institutional set-up). When it works, it often does so brilliantly, but unfortunately companies often don't have an incentive to behave in a way that is beneficial for the community. For instance, many social media make it hard to delete accounts, do but a bare minimum to combat criminal activities on their sites, etc. In short they don't work in their users' interests, and hence fails to maximize the collective good. Another problem is that the massive amount of information they acquire isn't shared properly, as pointed out in an article in Science:
Google is a business, but it also holds in trust data on the desires, thoughts, and the connections of humanity. Making money “without doing evil” (paraphrasing Google's motto) is not enough when it is feasible to do so much good. It is also incumbent upon academia to build institutional models to facilitate collaborations with such big data projects—something that is too often missing now in universities.
Within the open-source movement, people argue that information is fundamentally different from other sorts of goods. Since sharing information essentially involves no costs, we should produce and organize information in a fundamentally different way. Companies shouldn't be able to monopolize information but to some extent be forced to share it, the argument would go.
Best of two worlds?
Could we somehow take the best out of both systems to create an optimal mix? One possibility would be to let for-profit-companies operate on a not-for-profit "platform". For instance, say that Google had been a not-for-profit. It would have allowed different for-profit-companies to make use of data concerning Google users, to construct apps connected to the other Google services, etc. However, the behaviour of these companies would be heavily monitored by the not-for-profit host. Any signs that they didn't serve their members interest would mean they were thrown out. They would be forced to share information deemed useful with scientists (if they requested that).
They would also have to pay hefty fees to the host, of course - possibly higher the greater they became, since low fees for startups would encourage innovation. In effect, such a system would amount to progressive taxation.
This system would thus make use of the power of greed, but harness it more efficiently than the present system. In order for selfishness to give rise to collectively good outcomes, we need to set up institutions accordingly. The invisible hand is no magic: if the regulations do not incentivize people to behave in a socially optimal way, they won't.
Edit: One thing I had thought to comment on but which is important is this. Lots of internet markets naturally develop into monopolies. If you want to sell/buy something online, you want to be on the website where most buyers/sellers are. Hence more people flock to the leader of the pack, which thereby becomes even more dominant, etc. The same goes for dating sites, both general (e.g. Facebook) and niched (e.g. LinkedIn) social networks, etc. As a result, they can make enormous profits. For instance, the Swedish site Blocket, which is the market leader consumer-to-consumer site in Sweden, has had a profit margin of more than 50 % in some recent years. Sites like Uber and Taskrabbit charge users 20 % which seems quite a lot for the service they provide (especially in Uber's case).
Markets for cars, clothes or what have you do not develop into monopolies as easily. Therefore it seems that this factor, too, speaks in favour of being a bit more suspicious of the notion that self-interested actions will give rise to collectively good outcomes within the present system when it comes to internet markets than when it comes to old-fashioned goods markets.
Thanks, that's very interesting. I was especially interested in this:
We can gauge each Superuser’s voting accuracy based on their performance on honeypots (proposed updates with known answers which are deliberately inserted into the updates queue). Measuring performance and using these probabilities correctly is the key to how we assign points to a Superuser’s vote.
So they measure voting accuracy based on some questions on which they know the true answer.
There is a difference between their votes and the kind of votes cast here, though; namely that on Less Wrong there is not in a strict sense a "true answer" to how good a post or comment is. So that tactics cannot be used.
On questions on which there is a true answer it is easier to track people's reliability and provide them with incentives to answer reliably. On questions which are more an issue of preference ("e.g. how good is this post?") that is harder.
In some comment some time earlier I proposed a voting/rating system (which I now can't find because "vote" occurs in every hit) which was intendend to be intuitive and provide the necessary information. The basic idea is to asynchroneously transport human emotion. Translating the emotion to/from a few well known words is trivial and if the set of words is sufficiently rich and the aggregation of these ratings (for sorting/filtering) follows some sensible rules then I think this system should be near optimum.
I'd add independent votes for the dichotomies love/hate, happy/sad, awed/pity, surprised/bored, funny/sick, (for comparison you can have a look at the Lojban attitudinals). Using such a system a great insightful post might get voted love+awe. And a rant hate and/or sick. Some unhelpful commonplace get 'bored'.
Adding a satisfied/dissatisfied attitudinal is problematic because it is prone to depend on the relationship to the poster. One could add an agreement/disagreement vote which votes the relation between both members and which isn't taken into account when ranking globally but in a personal view.
In a way the usual 'like' is an abstracted sum of the positive emotions. Whereas karma here is a sum of all emotions (because it allows downvotes).
Slashdot tries a different approach that tries to use some objective categories which I can't translate to simple emotions ('informative'=curiosity? 'insightful'=surprise+awe?, 'funny'=surprise+happyness?). But I do get little out of these tags and they are more difficult to translate.
ADDED: See Measuring Emotions
Interesting, and an interesting Slashdot link. I especially like the idea of "moderating the moderators". You do need to check whether people vote seriously in some way, it seems to me.
The only problem I see is Richard's concern below that multi-criterial systems, where you actually vote on all criteria, may turn out to be too cumbersome to use.
People apply wildly different criteria.
This is a feature.
If everyone had identical criteria for voting, we would see all postings having either large positive karma, karma near zero, or large negative karma. The more alike people are in their judgements, the less information the total score provides. It is because people vary in what they find voteworthy that the whole spectrum of scores is meaningful.
As someone pointed out somewere, there is also a bandwagon effect when it comes to voting, so that posts/comments with upvotes/downvotes are more likely to continue to be upvoted/downvoted.
If many people with different criteria all like a post, chances are that the next person to read it will like it also. I don't see a problem.
This means that a certain post which a lot of people would actually find interesting can get downvoted because of bad luck: the first voter uses non-standard criteria and his vote then influences subsequent voters.
I have often noticed the direction of karma on a post reversing after the first few votes. Sometimes I have voted on a post that I would not otherwise have done, just to oppose the trend of its karma when I thought it unmerited.
The main advantage of the present Karma system is its simplicity.
Yes! One click! A more complicated system would not be too complicated to use, but too complicated to be worth using. On Ebay, I'm happy to give feedback as positive/neutral/negative plus a few words of boilerplate, but I never use their 5-star scales for quality of packaging, promptness of delivery, etc. How do I rate a cardboard box out of 5?
In short, I think the karma system is excellent and sets a high bar for being improved on.
If everyone had identical criteria for voting, we would see all postings having either large positive karma, karma near zero, or large negative karma. The more alike people are in their judgements, the less information the total score provides.
If you only can give 1 plus vote, 1 negative vote, or no vote at all, that seems to follow. If you rather could give, say 1-5 positive or negative Karma, we would see a greater variety of scores.
Also, note that many posts and especially comments have very few votes. This means that the votes actually cast will often not be typical of the whole population of possible voters in a system where people's votes vary considerably. In a system where people's votes are more alike, this obviously happens less frequently.
Yes! One click! A more complicated system would not be too complicated to use, but too complicated to be worth using. On Ebay, I'm happy to give feedback as positive/neutral/negative plus a few words of boilerplate, but I never use their 5-star scales for quality of packaging, promptness of delivery, etc. How do I rate a cardboard box out of 5?
I agree that one shouldn't have to rate, e.g. comments on say five different criteria. The system could be be somewhat more complex to comprehend, but you're right that it shouldn't be significantly more complex to use.
I think one obvious improvement is, though, to separate the posts into different categories which are to be assessed on different criteria. You could have one "objective information/literature review" section, one "opinion piece/discussion" section, one "meetup" section, and possibly a few more. In each section, you'd be rated on different criteria. That way, original pieces wouldn't be downvoted because they're not literature reviews, which seems to be Gunnar's (justifiable) complaint.
This system would be superior to the present, and no more complicated. I think further improvements are also possible, but those should be separately discussed.
In response to
Controversy - Healthy or Harmful?
The Karma system is better than nothing, and also better than even simpler systems as Facebook's like system, but the main problem is that it is too simple.
Presumably the Karma system is supposed to at least do two things:
1) Influence posters' behaviour (e.g. if you get downvoted when writing in a certain way you're likely to change)
2) Inform readers which posts and comments to read
However, it does not perform these tasks very efficiently, the reason being that it is so very unclear what we are voting on. People apply wildly different criteria. For instance, I would guess that some have a much lower threshold for throwing a downvote than others. Also, some primarily reward people who write posts containing objective information (as pointed out above), whereas others also reward other sorts of posts.
As someone pointed out somewere, there is also a bandwagon effect when it comes to voting, so that posts/comments with upvotes/downvotes are more likely to continue to be upvoted/downvoted. This means that a certain post which a lot of people would actually find interesting can get downvoted because of bad luck: the first voter uses non-standard criteria and his vote then influences subsequent voters.
All this means that both posters and readers can't know exactly why it is that a certain post has got a certain amount of Karma. As a result, the present Karma system does not fulfil either task 1) or task 2) adequately. If you don't know why a certain post got a certain amount of Karma, how can you know how to change your writing, and how can you decide whether to read it or not?
Of course, the comments give both readers and posters a better picture of what people think of the post, but saying this is a bit beside the point. If it doesn't matter that the Karma system is less than satisfactory because you can read the comments, then why have the Karma system after all?
The main advantage of the present Karma system is its simplicity. It could be argued that more complex system would be too complicated for people to comprehend, etc. That is perhaps an argument that would be viable at Reddit and similar sites, but surely a site claiming to be "rationalist" should be able to assume that it's members can handle more complex systems.
Exactly how such a system is to be devised is an important question which should be discussed (suggestions are welcome) but I'll stop here for now.
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Why don't you make the obvious next step and just say that the society/state/government should control such things?
Good question. It is true that not-for-profits and the government have a lot in common. Most importantly, they're both supposed to work directly for the public good (rather than for their own profits). There are some important differences, though:
1) Not-for-profits do not have monopoly on violence. (Most of the below follow from that.) 2) People do not have the same sense of entitlement visavi not-for-profits 3) You normally can create more of a "community spirit" within a not-for-profit. In governmental organizations, users have more of a tendency to view the leadership as "parents" to whom one goes to request more stuff. People take more responsibility in not-for-profits, especially small ones (this is closely related to 2)). 4) We might want to have a dispersed distribution of power in society. If so, we should not give too much power to the government, but would be better off giving power to other entities, such as not-for-profits.
Not-for-profit organizations working either for the public good or for some interest group such as workers, farmers, etc, have always had lots of influence in democratic societies. Often they've taken or been assigned tasks that the government could have done, such as health care, education (e.g. in the case of churches), unemployment insurance (unions), etc. They have of course always been legally regulated, and some of them have been closely related to political parties (e.g. churches - Christian democrats, unions - social democrats). However, the distinction between non-governmental organizations and governmental organizations has, by and large, been upheld in democratic countries (though it wasn't in, e.g. Sovjet Union).