This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
(Does this count as CW? Happy to post it somewhere else if that would be more appropriate.)
I really liked the idea of banning advertising from this blog post (though the post itself is somewhat poorly written and light on the details). HN has a lively discussion of it. I've seen some mentions of this idea here and there but never a really good analysis on it. And I want to change that!
The first step is of course to tighten up the definitions. The most important is to define advertising. I would define it as:
(Maybe the resident lawyers here could have a crack at cleaning this up?)
The underlying theory of harm is that party C is getting inaccurate information designed (often very well designed) to manipulate them into a decision not in their interests. Note that crowding out good information is also very much part of the harm. If C is getting good information from sources not paid for it, it is reasonable that these unpaid sources won't put as much effort into disseminating information as sources paid to spread information (which presumably won't be as truthful due to the conflicting interests from party A).
To clean up potential fuzzy boundaries (I'm sure I've missed a bunch):
So, what is illegal?
Why do I want this?
Possible objections?
Any thoughts?
There is no way this is feasible to implement in a well-defined way. There are too many incredibly powerful incentives to find loopholes that the only way you'll close them down is by being so strict and draconian that you prohibit regular behavior. You won't be able to tighten the definitions without strangling the life out of them. Just taking what you've defined here, off the top of my head:
-What if party A advertises their own product on their own website without involving "Party B"? If that's not allowed you'll strangle all sorts of regular behavior. But if they are then now you have an incentive for companies to share ownership of streaming websites and create monopolies under one umbrella. Amazon owns Twitch, can they advertise Amazon products on Twitch? Because then everyone selling anything is going to want to use Amazon to list their products so that it can be advertised there. If you try to prohibit that by saying Twitch streamers count as "Party B" because they aren't official Amazon employees then Amazon will hire them as official employees. If you try to prohibit that by saying "Twitch and Amazon marketplace are different websites" then Amazon will merge them and annoyingly integrate them together enough to loophole whatever your law is. If you say "Amazon can't have their employees advertise for them" then nobody can do anything unless they're privately owned and the CEO designs their own website without hiring any employees, which is ridiculous.
The spirit of the law is clear, but you can't enforce the spirit of the law. You can only enforce the letter, and anything where a company is allowed to do their own advertising on their own platforms just encourages consolidation and rewards megacorps at the expense of all the small people. I suspect that if you try to add epicycles to close these loopholes then the megacorps will pay thousands of dollars to clever people who will work harder than the 5 minutes I spent here and find cleverer loopholes. Lobbying, free gifts and perks, wink wink nudge nudge, favors traded between supposed rivals, etc. We can't even keep money out of politics, we're not going to keep money out of advertising. Any attempts to do so are inevitably going to be 10% intended benefit and 90% collateral damage.
This seems unnecessarily defeatist. The law is ultimately semi-formalised human judgements, and humans are perfectly capable of making judgements without rigid rubrics. You just need a 'safe zone' of examples that are fine, a 'lawless zone' of examples that are not fine, and a 'here be dragons' zone in between. The reason that megacorps frolic so happily is that lawyers are too lawyer-brained to actually apply the spirit of the law when working out loopholes in the letter of it is so much more fun and rewarding, and because governments don't actually want to apply it. When they do want to apply it, suddenly the corps fall in line.
But if you make any mistake in your 'safe zone' that's still effectively a loophole. How do you let Coca Cola link you to their shop with a bunch of products and merchandise on their own website (which I expect you intend since it's "opt in") but not allow Amazon to link you to their shop and products during a Twitch stream on their own website? (which I expect you don't intend, because even though you've opted into a Twitch stream you didn't intend to opt into the Amazon store)
Keeping in mind that you can't just take the state of the world as it exists right now this very instant, you have to draw the categories in a way that fundamentally cannot be worked around? If the law says "you can only advertise your own products on your own website" then the Lawyers don't need to do anything, they've already won because you forgot the websites are owned by the same company (and they could just as easily have made them the same website). There's no infraction of the law for the government to enforce because they're not breaking the law, it's just badly written.
How do you make it stronger without accidentally crushing normal people just trying to honestly sell things?
That's how. Like, Amazon and Twitch are separate brands and people use them for separate things, and everybody with eyes can see that. It's not a grand political dilemma like the Minneapolis car incident.
The 'safe zone' is 'you make cola and you advertise your own cola'. The bad zone is 'you run an advertising agency'. 'you make cola but you advertise life insurance from your life insurance subsidiary' is well within 'here be dragons' and you're risking serious issues. It's like when you threaten massive fines for disinformation and everyone bans anything that could even possibly look like something government might consider disinfo. You don't actually have to tolerate autistic winkling out of loopholes.
Could you give some examples? My model of the world is broadly 'if people want what you are trying to sell, they will go looking for it'. If people buy something and they like it, they tell their friends or they write reviews (I am okay with free samples to review sites etc.). But the idea that 'no, you don't know you want this yet' is IMO a lie that advertisers and salesmen tell themselves and deserves very short thrift.
https://www.twitch.amazon.com
Whose brand does such a website fall under? Does it change if we switch the word order?
The convention is that it's www.subnet.host.com. So you might have
maps.google.comorauth.google.comorsearch.alphabet.com. If Amazon is acting as a large supercorp providing many services, and Twitch is a provider of streaming, then people ontwitch.amazon.comoramazon.twitch.comare on that site for streaming. If they were there to be sold things they would be onshopping.amazon.comor the reverse.(In today's internet you pay for the xxx.com domain name, but you can subdivide that domain into as many yyy.xxx.com subnets as you want. Doing it the other way round would be incredibly expensive.)
If Twitch and Amazon are both big messy things full of subsidiaries and you are advertising everything everywhere then you are in the realm of 'play stupid games, win stupid prizes' and you should fix your org chart.
The host/domain ordering has always struck me as backwards from pretty much everything else, like file system paths. In fact, URLs are frequently
https://specific.to.general/general/to/specific?veryspecific. I wish I knew why they thought that made sense.I imagine because the practice of selling domains as domain.com came in long before people used subdomains.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link