Sigurd
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Sigurd has not written any posts yet.
Perhaps true in lesswrong's case (is it still under active development then?). You'll have to suffer me moving the goalposts again, because what I was getting at was websites that serve fairly static content. If lesswrong is actively developed and has taken a lot of effort to build, then take a random wordpress page instead.
No the aliens don't pay for developer time, for the same reason they don't pay the journalists.
This assumes users are well informed as to the cost/benefit of seeing ads. Whatever you think about ads, that assumption has proven false I believe. We can dive into how to prove that if you want to contest it. With that assumption gone, however, your position has to be reevaluated.
Thanks for the link to your earlier post, it makes your position a little more clear. I think we make different predictions, probably because (A) we are biased and (B) ads and the internet are so entangled by now that it is hard to make a predication like that. Any prediction will need to take into account a multitude of factors.
The line on aliens paying your salary was added because I wanted to preempt the response 'well if ads are no longer the payment model I'd need to find another job'. But you're right to ask that question you did, it is still a weird hypothetical. What I meant to do with it... (read more)
better ads than paywalls
Having worked in advertising for 4 years, I am not convinced. Citation is needed. It also implies these are the only two options, but consider the very webpage you are on currently: no ads, no paywall! What's going on?!
Which is only to say that there are other options to explore. That those two models are the most prevalent does not mean they are the only viable options (think of how easy it is to go with an ad-model if users have been trained to accept it as the status-quo, which is self-enforcing, and how viable some other models might be if we all magically agreed that ads=unacceptable).
I started writing... (read more)
That is correct, which is a crying shame. There's some videos to be found of people who were invited to visit at some point, but yeah there's very little to be found :(
Hi, there's two things I can recommend.
I am not sure what you are arguing here. First of all, I will completely agree with you that 'innovation' is not an explanation, and so we should be wary of it being used as such. I don't actually think the bucket analogy has much explanatory power (though I find the concept interesting and worthy of further exploration). Using the term 'unavoidable innovation' was my attempt to clarify the analogy in order to be able to point out where in my opinion it fails.
The model in fact attempts to explain why innovation happens, not use innovation as an explanation for progress (since as you point out, that seems merely tautological or at... (read more)
The narrow/wide bucket analogy is neat; it is a good thinking tool. That said, I am by no means a historian, and do not know how good of a model it actually is. Some scattered thoughts:
The metaphorical bucket overflowing means unavoidable innovation, not system collapse per se. It seems to me like the narrow bucket can overflow many times, and each time it does it gets wider. That completely changes the model: no longer does it explain this 'shift towards the north'.
As for Rome, it had long exhausted the surrounding lands before it collapsed. Its bucket overflowed many many times. One of the innovations they made is to cultivate grain in distant
Cheers for the encouragement! I share your intuition, it is what prompted me to post here. A quick sitewide search showed that Bret Victor's name has come up before in discussion on LW, but not as much as I would expect. Anyway I had totally missed Matuschak out of that list, so on the growing list of references he goes :)
Because I used to work for/with companies whose business model was mostly free access covered by ads. Costs of keeping those sites running were substantial and proportional to amount of visitors.