#platform economics

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Everything advertised on social media is overpriced junk

In “Behavioral Advertising and Consumer Welfare: An Empirical Investigation,” a trio of business researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Pamplin College investigate the difference between the goods purchased through highly targeted online ads and just plain web-searches, and conclude social media ads push overpriced junk:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4398428

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/08/late-stage-sea-monkeys/#jeremys-razors

Specifically, stuff that’s pushed to you via targeted ads costs an average of 10 percent more, and it significantly more likely to come from a vendor with a poor rating from the Better Business Bureau. This may seem trivial and obvious, but it’s got profound implications for media, commercial surveillance, and the future of the internet.

Writing in the New York Times, Julia Angwin — a legendary, muckraking data journalist — breaks down those implications. Angwin builds a case study around Jeremy’s Razors, a business that advertises itself as a “woke-free” shaving solution for manly men:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/opinion/online-advertising-privacy-data-surveillance-consumer-quality.html

Jeremy’s Razors spends a fucking fortune on ads. According to Facebook’s Ad Library, the company spent $800,000 on FB ads in March, targeting fathers of school-age kids who like Hershey’s, ultimate fighting, hunting or Johnny Cash:

https://pluralistic.net/jeremys-targeting

Anti-woke razors are an objectively, hilariously stupid idea, but that’s not the point here. The point is that Jeremy’s has to spend $800K/month to reach its customers, which means that it either has to accept $800K less in profits, or make it up by charging more and/or skimping on quality.

Targeted advertising is incredibly expensive, and incredibly lucrative — for the ad-tech platforms that sit between creative workers and media companies on one side, and audiences on the other. In order to target ads, ad-tech companies have to collect deep, nonconsensual dossiers on every internet user, full of personal, sensitive and potentially compromising information.

The switch to targeted ads was part of the enshittification cycle, whereby companies like Facebook and Google lured in end-users by offering high-quality services — Facebook showed you the things the people you asked to hear from posted, and Google returned the best search results it could find.

Eventually, those users became locked in. Once all our friends were on Facebook, we held each other hostage, each unable to leave because the others were there. Google used its access to the capital markets to snuff out any rival search companies, spending tens of billions every year to be the default on Apple devices, for example.

Once we were locked in, the tech giants made life worse for us in order to make life better for media companies and advertisers. Facebook violated its promise to be the privacy-centric alternative to Myspace, where our data would never be harvested; it switched on mass surveillance and created cheap, accurate ad-targeting:

https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1128876?ln=en

Google fulfilled the prophecy in its founding technical document, the Pagerank paper: “advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” They, too, offered cheap, highly targeted ads:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Facebook and Google weren’t just kind to advertisers — they also gave media companies and creative workers a great deal, funneling vast quantities of traffic to both. Facebook did this by cramming media content into the feeds of people who hadn’t asked to see it, displacing the friends’ posts they had asked to see. Google did it by upranking media posts in search results.

Then we came to the final stage of the enshittification cycle: having hooked both end-users and business customers, Facebook and Google withdrew the surpluses from both groups and handed them to their own shareholders. Advertising costs went up. The share of ad income paid to media companies went down. Users got more ads in their feeds and search results.

Facebook and Google illegally colluded to rig the ad-market with a program called Jedi Blue that let the companies steal from both advertisers and media companies:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/11/google-meta-jedi-blue-eu-uk-antitrust-probes/

Apple blocked Facebook’s surveillance on its mobile devices, but increased its own surveillance of Iphone and Ipad users in order to target ads to them, even when those users explicitly opted out of spying:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Today, we live in the enshittification end-times, red of tooth and claw, where media companies’ revenues are dwindling and advertisers’ costs are soaring, and the tech giants are raking in hundreds of billions, firing hundreds of thousands of workers, and pissing away tens of billions on stock buybacks:

https://doctorow.medium.com/mass-tech-worker-layoffs-and-the-soft-landing-1ddbb442e608

As Angwin points out, in the era before behavioral advertising, Jeremy’s might have bought an ad in Deer & Deer Hunting or another magazine that caters to he-man types who don’t want woke razors; the same is true for all products and publications. Before mass, non-consensual surveillance, ads were based on content and context, not on the reader’s prior behavior.

There’s no reason that ads today couldn’t return to that regime. Contextual ads operate without surveillance, using the same “real-time bidding” mechanism to place ads based on the content of the article and some basic parameters about the user (rough location based on IP address, time of day, device type):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#contextual-ads

Context ads perform about as well as behavioral ads — but they have a radically different power-structure. No media company will ever know as much about a given user as an ad-tech giant practicing dragnet surveillance and buying purchase, location and finance data from data-brokers. But no ad-tech giant knows as much about the context and content of an article as the media company that published it.

Context ads are, by definition, centered on the media company or creative worker whose work they appear alongside of. They are much harder for tech giants to enshittify, because enshittification requires lock-in and it’s hard to lock in a publication who knows better than anyone what they’re publishing and what it means.

We should ban surveillance advertising. Period. Companies should not be allowed to collect our data without our meaningful opt-in consent, and if that was the standard, there would be no data-collection:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/22/myob/#adtech-considered-harmful

Remember when Apple created an opt out button for tracking, more than 94 percent of users clicked it (the people who clicked “yes” to “can Facebook spy on you?” were either Facebook employees, or confused):

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/facebook-says-apple-ios-privacy-change-will-cost-10-billion-this-year.html

Ad-targeting enables a host of evils, like paid political disinformation. It also leads to more expensive, lower-quality goods. “A Raw Deal For Consumers,” Sumit Sharma’s new Consumer Reports paper, catalogs the many other costs imposed on Americans due to the lack of tech regulation:

https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/A-Raw-Deal-for-US-Consumers_March-2023.pdf

Sharma describes the benefits that Europeans will shortly enjoy thanks to the EU’s Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, from lower prices to more privacy to more choice, from cloud gaming on mobile devices to competing app stores.

However, both the EU and the US — as well as Canada and Australia — have focused their news industry legislating on misguided “link taxes,” where tech giants are required to pay license fees to link to and excerpt the news. This is an approach grounded in the mistaken idea that tech giants are stealing media companies’ content — when really, tech giants are stealing their money:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/18/news-isnt-secret/#bid-shading

Creating a new pseudocopyright to control who can discuss the news is a terrible idea, one that will make the media companies beholden to the tech giants at a time when we desperately need deep, critical reporting on the tech sector. In Canada, where Bill C-18 is the latest link tax proposal in the running to become law, we’re already seeing that conflict of interest come into play.

As Jesse Brown and Paula Simons — a veteran reporter turned senator — discuss on the latest Canadaland podcast, the Toronto Star’s sharp and well-reported critical series on the tech giants died a swift and unexplained death immediately after the Star began receiving license fees for tech users’ links and excerpts from its reporting:

https://www.canadaland.com/paula-simons-bill-c-18/

Meanwhile, in Australia, the proposed “news bargaining code” stampeded the tech giants into agreeing to enter into “voluntary” negotiations with the media companies, allowing Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp to claim the lion’s share of the money, and then conduct layoffs across its newsrooms.

While in France, the link tax depends on publishers integrating with Google Showcase, a product that makes Google more money from news content and makes news publishers more dependent on Google:

https://www.politico.eu/article/french-competition-authority-greenlights-google-pledges-over-paying-news-publishers/

A link tax only pays for so long as the tech giants remain dominant and continue to extract the massive profits that make them capable of paying the tax. But legislative action to fix the ad-tech markets, like Senator Mike Lee’s ad-tech breakup bill (cosponsored by both Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren!) would shift power to publishers, and with it, money:

https://www.lee.senate.gov/2023/3/the-america-act

With ad-tech intermediaries scooping up 50% or more of every advertising dollar, there is plenty of potential to save news without the need for a link tax. If unrigging the ad-tech market drops the platforms’ share of advertising dollars to a more reasonable 10%, then the advertisers and publishers could split the remainder, with advertisers spending 20% less and publishers netting 20% more.

Passing a federal privacy law would end surveillance advertising at the stroke of a pen, shifting the market to context ads that let publishers, not platforms, call the shots. As an added bonus, the law would stop Tiktok from spying on Americans, and also end Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft’s spying to boot:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/30/tik-tok-tow/#good-politics-for-electoral-victories

Mandating competition in app stores — as the Europeans are poised to do — would kill Google and Apple’s 30% “app store tax” — the percentage they rake off of every transaction from every app on Android and Ios. Drop that down to the 2–5% that the credit cards charge, and every media outlet’s revenue-per-subscriber would jump by 25%.

Add to that an end-to-end rule for tech giants requiring them to deliver updates from willing receivers to willing senders, so every newsletter you subscribed to would stay out of your spam folder and every post by every media company or creator you followed would show up in your feed:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

That would make it impossible for tech giants to use the sleazy enshittification gambit of forcing creative workers and media companies to pay to “boost” their content (or pay $8/month for a blue tick) just to get it in front of the people who asked to see it:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

The point of enshittification is that it’s bad for everyone except the shareholders of tech monopolists. Jeremy’s Razors are bad, winning a 2.7 star rating out of five:

https://www.facebook.com/JeremysRazors/reviews

The company charges more for these substandard razors, and you are more likely to find out about them, because of targeted, behavioral ads. These ads starve media companies and creative workers and make social media and search results terrible.

A link tax is predicated on the idea that we need Big Tech to stay big, and to dribble a few crumbs for media companies, compromising their ability to report on their deep-pocketed beneficiaries, in a way that advantages the biggest media companies and leaves small, local and independent press in the cold.

By contrast, a privacy law, ad-tech breakups, app-store competition and end-to-end delivery would shatter the power of Big Tech and shift power to users, creative workers and media companies. These are solutions that don’t just keep working if Big Tech goes away — they actually hasten that demise! What’s more, they work just as well for big companies as they do for independents.

Whether you’re the New York Times or you’re an ex-Times reporter who’s quit your job and now crowdfunds to cover your local school board and town council meetings, shifting control and the share of income is will benefit you, whether or not Big Tech is still in the picture.

Have you ever wanted to say thank you for these posts? Here’s how you can: I’m kickstarting the audiobook for my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

Image: freeimageslive.co.uk (modified) http://www.freeimageslive.co.uk/free_stock_image/using-mobile-phone-jpg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

[Image ID: A man's hand holds a mobile phone. Its screen displays an Instagram ad. The ad has been replaced with a slice of a vintage comic book 'small ads' page.]

#pluralistic #ad-tech #ads #surveillance ads #commercial surveillance #behavioral ads #contextual ads #link taxes #platform economics #enshittification #instagram #julia angwin #end to end

[myblogspro]

Platform Economics

Platform Economics is based on a series of contributions the author made to the new field of multisided platform economics, and its application to business strategy and antitrust economics, between 2002 and 2011. After presenting the general framework and empirical evidence on the scope of platform businesses in the economy the book presents detailed applications to the digital economy, payment systems, and software platforms.

#Platform economics #multisided economics #antitrust economics #Antitrust and platforms #Two-sided markets #economics digital platforms

[oatbugs]

oh my god ! haha . anyway a bit buzzed perhaps. anyway here's what happened on the date

#at some point i took the earrings off. the metal clanging was screaming their name too loud and it #was 6 knives to the throat and he confirmed it so. here's the kicker. you can be taught a lot and you can have their hands on your thighs #and you can kiss them but even if they pray even if they tell you about the bible looking into you like really they lost what they believed #in a pennsylvania countryside catholic schools with a protestant family since joining the london school of economics #even if they pray for you to stay the whole way even though their hair was softer than hers you think of her and he thinks of someone else #and be tells you none of it will make sense. they smile and they say what a shame you might miss the train but they hold onto you #the entirety of you - like a religion or a polite insistence or something to keep. #you learned they were used to losing everyone they felt bound to love. they said they got really good at letting go. you were told #you think he's being epistemologically #irresponsible and he tells you he carries a massive task. he tells you the responsibility is monumental #and he feels responsible for defining responsibility. he shows you songs and his poetry. my eyes feel on fire. #she doesnt know this. this is marylebone. the next station is edgeware road. everyone here looks happy and high and clear of the doors. #he says tell me when you get to the station and very especially tell me if you don't. the next station is paddington. please mind the gap #between the train and the platform. you say this to him. he says i minds the gap between you and i. i mind it so much that i need you to #come back. he says this because you kissed him briefly but you kissed him well. she says you're a good kisser but he says you have him #stunned. he asks you who decides the truth. he tells you you decide the truth without his mouth. you're fast enough to make it there before #the wheels do. this world is lit by glass and light and people with a pact to fall in love with the abstractions more than each other. #he tells you to be committed to your various intangible loves more than anyone. you both have to be. they love each other anyway. #i was supposed to find a persian poetry book with her on our fourth date except she was hours late. i found it with him. he didnt give up #he should be perfect and i should really like him.

[elbiotipo]

this is more of a musing rather than a take, but this whole US vs. TikTok thing is rather revealing to me as of why all the major social media and tech companies are US based. Because if competitors arise elsewhere, they do their best to choke them.

It's interesting that in a supposed global and decentralized internet, we are all beholden to US companies and laws.

#I am not a fan of TikTok model and I dislike interacting with it #but do notice that all other major internet platforms are US based and virtual monopolies #the moment a Chinese company tries to break it it is singled out #cosas mias #oh and also they are aiming for Japanese companies too (which didn't even happen in the 80s at the height of Japanese economic power) #it's incredible the power that US big tech has right now

[gigantic-spider]

November 2023 TTRPG Crowdfunding Retrospective

I recently became curious about the state of TTRPG crowdfunding (full transparency, it's partially because I am gearing up for a ZineMonth 2024 project *shameless plug*). How much money is actually being made? Who's making it? What are they making? And how many people are backing?

I know that this information is tracked for ZiMo by a variety of people (scroll down for the credits), but what about the rest of the year? What about bigger projects?

Essentially: what about the real money being made?

Well here's the quick stats:

175 campaigns

10 Backerkit

1 Crowdfundr

164 Kickstarter

$10,275,932.48 raised

$1,256,857.98 on Backerkit

$455.00 on Crowdfundr

$9,018,619.50 on Kickstarter

Types of campaigns

7 accessories

2 Actual Play shows

41 adventures

2 advice books

8 campaign settings

1 magazine

58 supplements/expansions

56 systems

39 distinct systems used across all campaigns

66 campaigns (37.71%) used D&D 5e and raised $5,621,468.60 (54.71% of all money raised in November)

43 campaigns (24.57%) developed original systems and raised $751,587.43 (7.31% of all money raised in November)

To read the rest, check out my latest blog post (yes, on a different blog lol) or look at the raw data here.

#ttrpg #ttrpg stuff #indie ttrpg #tabletop role playing games #tabletop roleplaying #crowdfunding #ttrpg economics #kickstarter #crowdfundr #backerkit #platform economy

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

A quick read of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Wall Street Journal op-ed touting his recent elimination of the Walt Disney Co.’s self-governing status might leave you with the impression that the Florida Republican is a stout defender of the free market and the impartial rule of law.

The legislation he signed took down “an indefensible example of corporate welfare,” DeSantis wrote. It put an end to unfair state favoritism secured by “the company’s unrivaled political power,” broke with “old-guard corporate Republicanism” that “confer[red] special benefits on entrenched corporate interests” at the expense of the public, and will force Disney “to live under the same laws as… every other company in our state.”

But a closer look reveals that freeing Florida’s markets and leveling the legal playing field—as his defenders have framed the change—are not DeSantis’ concern here. By his own account, this isn’t a principled stand against corporatism, nor is his move against Disney primarily an economic project. His ends are explicitly political, and his means create market conditions just as unfair as the old corporatist dispensation he’s undone.

Disney’s previous arrangement, called the Reedy Creek Improvement District, began in 1967—a date whose relevance will become apparent momentarily. It let the company function as its own county government, administering local services (like road maintenance and sewage) and regulations (like zoning decisions and building codes) for roughly 39 square miles consisting mostly (but, technically, not entirely) of Disney properties. The district has the power to tax (which generally means levying taxes on Disney itself) and even to use eminent domain outside its own boundaries.

The bill DeSantis signed did make some substantive changes to how this district will function. It “ends Disney’s exemption from state regulatory reviews and approvals that other companies must go through,” as a Journal report summarized. “It also eliminates the company’s ability, under existing law, to build nuclear facilities, airports and toll roads, as well as to unilaterally make boundary changes to the company’s property.”

Some of this won’t matter much—Disney never exercised its right to build a nuclear reactor, and it retains the right “to build a fifth theme park, two additional water parks, and thousands of hotel rooms on 850 acres” between now and 2032. But after the law takes effect in June, the company will face higher costs and a greater regulatory burden. And local taxpayers will have to pay for infrastructure maintenance and other local government services like policing that previously went on the company’s tab.

But the most significant part of this legislation isn’t about infrastructure or economics. It’s about political power.

The new law doesn’t eliminate Disney’s special district. It renames it, and it takes authority to appoint the district’s five-member board of directors away from Disney—and gives it to Ron DeSantis.

Predictably, DeSantis promptly populated the board with political allies, and though their legal purview is mundane local services stuff, he openly envisioned them using the power they now wield over Disney to coerce the company into culture war concessions. “When you lose your way, you’ve got to have people that are going to tell you the truth,” DeSantis said. “I think all of these board members very much would like to see the type of entertainment that all families can appreciate.”

He emphasized that political logic in his op-ed, too. The “woke ascendancy” in American corporations is what forced him to reject the old GOP corporatism, DeSantis explained. “When corporations try to use their economic power to advance a woke agenda, they become political” actors, he said, and must be fought with political weapons.

The details of the new legislation reiterate how little this has to do with freedom or equality before the law despite DeSantis’ lip service to those ideas. When he first floated the idea of changing Disney’s status last year, he spoke of the state legislature terminating “all special districts that were enacted in Florida prior to 1968”—and Reedy Creek, recall, dates to 1967.

But as it turns out, terminating all pre-1968 special districts would affect a lot more than Disney.

As DeSantis acknowledged in the Journal op-ed, “special districts are common in Florida.” In fact, the state has more than 1,900 active special districts per the list currently available from the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity. Around 300 of them were created in 1967 or earlier, which is likely part of why the final legislation didn’t proceed along the lines DeSantis initially sketched.

On the contrary, the new law terminated exactly zero special districts, not even Disney’s. “Reedy Creek Improvement District shall continue to be a public corporation of this state and have perpetual existence,” the legislation declared. It simply reapportioned power away from Disney and to the state of Florida.

This isn’t a shift from bigger government to smaller, from control to freedom, from special privileges to fair play.

Maybe it’s accurate to say it’s a step away from corporatism, as Disney does seem to have enjoyed an easier path to development than nearby competitors. But it’s not a step toward any clear principle of liberty—the chosen solution wasn’t to give those competitors the same right to self-regulate—nor even toward meaningfully unmaking this weird public-private amalgam which half a century of Disney-Florida relations has birthed. If anything, should the new board successfully use its power of the purse to manipulate Disney programming, the state-corporate link will be stronger than ever.

You don’t have to disagree with DeSantis on culture war issues, or care about free markets, or, in the Governor’s phrase, return to “reflexively deferring to big business” to see the risk that entails.

As another GOP Governor, New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu, warned, if Republicans are “trying to beat the Democrats at being big-government authoritarians, remember what’s going to happen. Eventually, [Democrats will] have power… and then they’ll start penalizing conservative businesses and conservative nonprofits and conservative ideas.”

So they will. And nothing in this episode suggests DeSantis has real qualms about big, authoritarian government. He just wants it to do his bidding.

#us politics #news #the daily beast #2023 #gov. ron desantis #florida #free market capitalism #republicans #conservatives #gop #gop platform #gop policy #the wall street journal #op eds #Disney #reedy creek improvement district #Florida Department of Economic Opportunity #gov. Chris Sununu

[ladychlo]

x

#yk these type of cis men that takes on platforms making these alpha males podcasts or just talking when no one asked them too #and trying to preach a model of masculinity that is by no means revolutionary or extraordinarily extincted #like one of the biggest myths ever is believing that 'a crisis of masculinity' exists #they go on talking about bringing back 'real men' #oh honey this speech exists for so fucking long its not even new 😭 #huge part of it comes from the believe that masculinity is homogeneous which uter bullshit like any form of gender #it is so very heterogeneous #the speech of masculinity crisis is a product of the idea that masculinity is hierarchical and superior #like there is no crisis of masculinity all there is #is speeches about it #that society is deteriorating or men is having it hard with modern time or whatevs gosh its always been like this lol #its always been the case #cis men were always in a crisis bc simply they cant fathom that their gender well its a gender #instable and can't resist social /historical/ economical changes #its so susceptible to be contested by other models of masculinities yk #the colonizer will look down on indigenous people' models of masculinity #the cis will not tolerate the trans men masculinity expression #etc etc etc #the changement in the order of gender is so dynamic but they can't handle it lol #if you see men complaining about a masculinity crisis just know they were never having one lol #loosing your privileges or seeing others havinv different gender expressions of masculinities doesn't threaten yours just makes you look #like a fucktwit bc you are actually

[random2908]

#don't like sharing stuff across platforms #but this perfectly encapsulates what I feel about America and civic duty #I believe in America's ideals and I love America for it #I'm the child of an immigrant and the descendant of refugees! #of course I love America because it gave my family a chance to survive and thrive! #but I also know that in a lot of ways America comes nowhere close to living up to those ideals #so it's my civic duty to push in that direction #by agitating for social and economic justice

[eelhound]

"The most basic problem is that the terms on which we meet our [online dating] partners, serious or otherwise, are increasingly being dictated arbitrarily and opaquely by corporate actors whose motivation is very different from that of users. We want love, they want money.

Don’t we want to understand how this crucial aspect of our experience is being shaped? And shouldn’t we have some say in how it’s shaped? If you think so, then we should work toward socializing the dating apps: bringing them under collective, democratic ownership.

What might that look like?

It doesn’t necessarily mean establishing a government-run National Dating Service or taking Tinder under state control. Digital platform scholar James Muldoon has argued that many digital platforms ought to be democratized and liberated from the profit motive, but what exactly this 'platform socialism' looks like will differ from platform to platform.

We could democratize dating through the creation of online dating co-ops, in which users and workers would collectively own and control their platforms. This approach would allow users to take control back from unaccountable investors and CEOs, while preserving the diversity of the dating-app ecosystem and avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy.

An app’s users and developers could become the app’s co-owners as well, with the size of one’s ownership share being adjusted, for example, to the length of time one has been a user or developer. These shares would entitle users to votes of a certain weight in making decisions about the app’s function and management. That would include important choices about what sort of information users provide in their profiles, for instance, and how the algorithm deals with ethically fraught preferences. Users could collectively deliberate about the possible impacts of different choices, from the perspectives of social justice as well as users’ individual well-being.

Each user-owner could pay a subscription fee to fund the app and pay its employees; users and developers could democratically decide how high to set the subscription fee, with the goal being not to maximize profits but to raise enough revenue to invest in creating the best possible dating experience.

Freed from the imperative to deliver value for shareholders, cooperatively run apps could do away with premium subscriptions, add-on purchases (like paying to 'boost' your profile’s visibility or paying for extra 'likes'), and annoying in-app advertisements. The co-ops could also institute collectively agreed-upon policies around privacy and data sharing; they would no longer need to exploit user data to sell to third-party companies.

But without the lure of lucrative profits drawing large investments, these dating cooperatives may find it hard to raise adequate funds from subscriptions alone. Here’s where the state would have an important role to play: in providing public funding for the development of cooperatively owned dating apps.

This idea isn’t as outlandish as it might seem: after all, even in the United States, governments already fund many cultural institutions for the benefit of their citizens’ quality of life: museums, the arts, research in the humanities, public parks, even nightlife. Dating apps are an increasingly important avenue for a central experience of being human. It makes sense for the government to devote public resources to them.

In fact, some countries are already paying to set up their own dating services. The Singaporean government’s Ministry of Social and Family Development has a webpage devoted to helping the uncoupled find partners; it advertises a government-run online dating portal, officially accredited dating agencies, and a 'Partnership Fund' which 'supports ideas and initiatives that you are passionate about to create opportunities to bring singles together.'

These government initiatives admittedly do have an ulterior motive — they’re trying to reverse sharply declining birth rates. Still, these programs show that there is nothing particularly strange or novel about publicly funded dating.

Corey Robin once wrote that 'the point of socialism is to convert hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness.' That goes for socializing online dating, too. It wouldn’t do away with the frustration or disappointment that many people experience on the apps or in dating more generally. But it could be an important step toward making a dating experience that’s about people instead of profit. Then we could swipe, not to create wealth for the capitalist class, but for the simple and essential purpose of finding a date." - Nick French, from "Tinder Wants Money. We Want Love. The Solution: Socialize Dating Apps." Jacobin, 10 June 2022.

#nick french #quote #quotations #online dating #democratic socialism #collective ownership #public funding #co ops #social media #digital platforms #dating apps #economics #capitalism

[mortallynervousfart]

Project Serenity - 33% Life-time Commissions Digital - membership area

#Finding Financial Peace with Project Serenity: A Membership Worth Exploring #Financial planning can be a daunting task #especially in today's ever-changing economic landscape. For years #I felt overwhelmed by investment options and unsure of how to navigate the complexities of the financial world. This is where Project Sere #A Curated Approach to Financial Education #Project Serenity is a digital membership area designed to empower individuals to take control of their financial futures. The platform pro #including insightful articles #informative webinars #and interactive workshops. These resources cover a wide range of topics #from investment fundamentals and portfolio diversification to wealth-building strategies and navigating the ever-evolving world of finance. #Expert Guidance for Informed Decisions #What truly sets Project Serenity apart is its focus on expert guidance. The platform offers insights from seasoned financial professionals #wealth managers #and experienced investors. Their knowledge and experience provide members with a valuable framework to make informed financial decisions #A Supportive Community for Shared Growth #Project Serenity fosters a supportive and collaborative environment. Members can connect with each other through online forums and discuss #ask questions #and learn from one another's financial journeys. The sense of community is valuable #especially for those who might feel lost in the world of finance. #Building a Brighter Financial Future #Since joining Project Serenity #I've gained a newfound confidence in managing my finances. The platform's educational resources have equipped me with the knowledge and too #Important Disclaimer: This review is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. It's crucial to condu #Overall #Project Serenity offers a valuable resource for anyone seeking to improve their financial literacy and build a secure financial future. I #expert guidance #and a supportive community make it an excellent choice for individuals at any stage of their financial journey.

[bitnest]

In the current rapidly evolving digital currency market, decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms are redefining the shape of financial services with their unique advantages. Bit Loop, as a leading decentralized lending platform, not only provides a safe and transparent lending environment, but also opens up new passive income channels for users through its innovative sharing reward system.

Personal links and permanent ties: Create a stable revenue stream One of the core parts of Bit Loop is its recommendation system, which allows any user to generate a unique sharing link when they join the platform. This link is not only a “key” for users to join the Bit Loop, but also a tool for them to establish an offline network. It is worth noting that offline partners who join through this link are permanently tied to the recommender, ensuring that the sharer can continue to receive rewards from the offline partner’s activities.

Unalterable referral relationships: Ensure fairness and transparency A significant advantage of blockchain technology is the immutability of its data. In Bit Loop, this means that once a referral link and live partnership is established, the relationship is fixed and cannot be changed. This design not only protects the interests of recommenders, but also brings a stable user base and activity to the platform, while ensuring the fairness and transparency of transactions.

Automatically distribute rewards: Simplify the revenue process Another highlight of the Bit Loop platform is the ability for smart contracts to automatically distribute rewards. When the partner completes the circulation cycle, such as investment returns or loan payments, the smart contract automatically calculates and sends the corresponding percentage of rewards directly to the recommender’s wallet. This automatic reward distribution mechanism not only simplifies the process of receiving benefits, but also greatly improves the efficiency of capital circulation.

Privacy protection and security: A security barrier for funds All transactions and money flows are carried out on the blockchain, guaranteeing transparency and traceability of every operation. In addition, the use of smart contracts significantly reduces the risk of fraud and misoperation, providing a solid security barrier for user funds. Users can confidently invest and promote boldly, and enjoy the various conveniences brought by decentralized finance.

conclusion As decentralized finance continues to evolve, Bit Loop offers a new economic model through its unique recommendation system that enables users to enjoy highly secure and transparent financial services while also earning passive income by building and maintaining a personal network. Whether for investors seeking stable passive income or innovators looking to explore new financial possibilities through blockchain technology, Bit Loop provides a platform not to be missed.

#In the current rapidly evolving digital currency market #decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms are redefining the shape of financial services with their unique advantages. Bit Loop #as a leading decentralized lending platform #not only provides a safe and transparent lending environment #but also opens up new passive income channels for users through its innovative sharing reward system. #Personal links and permanent ties: Create a stable revenue stream #One of the core parts of Bit Loop is its recommendation system #which allows any user to generate a unique sharing link when they join the platform. This link is not only a “key” for users to join the Bi #but also a tool for them to establish an offline network. It is worth noting that offline partners who join through this link are permanent #ensuring that the sharer can continue to receive rewards from the offline partner’s activities. #Unalterable referral relationships: Ensure fairness and transparency #A significant advantage of blockchain technology is the immutability of its data. In Bit Loop #this means that once a referral link and live partnership is established #the relationship is fixed and cannot be changed. This design not only protects the interests of recommenders #but also brings a stable user base and activity to the platform #while ensuring the fairness and transparency of transactions. #Automatically distribute rewards: Simplify the revenue process #Another highlight of the Bit Loop platform is the ability for smart contracts to automatically distribute rewards. When the partner complet #such as investment returns or loan payments #the smart contract automatically calculates and sends the corresponding percentage of rewards directly to the recommender’s wallet. This au #but also greatly improves the efficiency of capital circulation. #Privacy protection and security: A security barrier for funds #All transactions and money flows are carried out on the blockchain #guaranteeing transparency and traceability of every operation. In addition #the use of smart contracts significantly reduces the risk of fraud and misoperation #providing a solid security barrier for user funds. Users can confidently invest and promote boldly #and enjoy the various conveniences brought by decentralized finance. #conclusion #As decentralized finance continues to evolve #Bit Loop offers a new economic model through its unique recommendation system that enables users to enjoy highly secure and transparent fin

[internationalyouthday]

Youth Forum 2024 (Opening) | United Nations.

The Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Youth Forum will take place from 16 to 18 April 2024 at the United Nations headquarters in New York. The 2024 Forum’s discussions will be guided by the overall theme of the 2024 ECOSOC and HLPF on "Reinforcing the 2030 Agenda and eradicating poverty in times of multiple crises: the effective delivery of sustainable, resilient and innovative solutions".        

    - Opening session: Statements by UN High-level officials and a youth keynote speaker. 

- Moderated conversation: Youth for Solutions and Innovation (Discussions with young leaders around the world). 

- Spotlight session - Youth in a world without poverty. 

- Progressing from poverty to prosperity: Youth as agents of change. 

The Forum provides a global among Member States and young leaders from around the world on solutions to challenges affecting youth well-being. It also serves as a unique space for young people to share their vision and actions as well as provide an opportunity to advance youth solutions to accelerate  the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs. The three-day event will feature plenary sessions, interactive thematic and regionally-based discussions, and provide an opportunity for a rich exchange of views and ideas on innovative solutions to issues of relevance to young people on the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. 

#United Nations Economic and Social Council #ecosoc youth forum #2030 Agenda #global goals #sdgs #share your vision and actions #young people #young leaders #advance youth solutions #plenary sessions #United Nations headquarters #Youth as agents of change #interactive thematic #regionally-based discussions #platform for dialogue #youth well-being #poverty #homelessness #Youtube

[easterneyenews]

#India #Pakistan #UN Human Rights Council #Right of Reply #Turkiye #Kashmir #human rights violations #Jammu and Kashmir #internal affairs #Anupama Singh #Geneva #Council's platform #false allegations #constitutional measures #socio-economic development #good governance #Union Territory #Pakistan's human rights record #persecution against minorities #attacks on Christian community #Jaranwala city #2023 #UNSC-sanctioned terrorists #Lashkar-e-Taiba #Hafiz Saeed #Jaish-e-Mohammed #Masood Azhar #government support #pluralistic India #democratic India

[jcmarchi]

Challenge: Hardware Device Design for IoT Energy Monitoring - Technology Org

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/challenge-hardware-device-design-for-iot-energy-monitoring-technology-org/

Challenge: Hardware Device Design for IoT Energy Monitoring - Technology Org

A2A, the Seeker for this Wazoku Crowd Challenge, is looking to design a hardware receiving device that unlocks the ability to take real-time corrective action to adjust energy consumption for users.

Image credit: Unsplash, free license

Our energy habits have economic and environmental impacts on ourselves and the world around us. Developing a device capable of receiving real-time data sent by a household energy meter and sharing it to the cloud will allow users to immediately become aware of consumption via an app, encouraging them to reduce waste.

Solvers are asked to describe in detail the hardware of a receiving device that A2A can utilize to revolutionize household energy footprint monitoring and correction. While not mandatory for the award, Solvers are encouraged to indicate steps to prototyping or include prototype results in their submissions, though no experimental validation will occur in this Challenge. The receiving device will act as an Internet of Things (IoT) gateway, collecting information from the meter and forwarding it to a cloud platform that end users can access.

This is a Prize Challenge, which requires a written proposal to be submitted. Awards will be contingent upon the theoretical evaluation of the proposal by A2A. For this Prize Challenge, Solvers must transfer all rights to the Intellectual Property (IP) in their proposed solution to be awarded. 

Submissions to this Challenge must be received by 11:59 PM (US Eastern Time) on March 4th, 2024.

Source: Wazoku

You can offer your link to a page which is relevant to the topic of this post.

#2024 #app #challenge #Cloud #cloud platform #Competitions #data #Design #economic #energy #Energy & fuel news #energy consumption #Environmental #experimental #Hardware #Hardware & gadgets #household #Impacts #intellectual property #Internet #Internet of Things #IoT #IoT (Internet of Things) #it #Link #monitoring #pm #prototype #prototyping #real-time data

[lavender-w4ters]

decided to look at the #enshittification tag on tumblr, and apparently it’s a great way to feel desolate and hate capitalism. i need a detox in the form of wholesome content now

for those who don’t know what enshittification is:

short answer- it’s how every platform gets more and more greedy as it gets bigger and slowly makes the user experience worse and worse in favor of squeezing more and more money out of everyone, until they go too far and collapse. very useful term.

long answer- read the wikipedia article, or better yet, cory doctorow’s post coining the term. it’s a long post, but it’s worth your time imo!

#enshittification #platform decay #economics

[fastlane-freedom]

Unveiling Profit Paradox: Freemium Model of Global Business Success

In the dynamic landscape of the business world, the conventional wisdom dictates that profit is generated through the exchange of goods or services for monetary compensation. However, a fascinating paradox has emerged in recent years – businesses providing free services to users while still reaping substantial annual profits. This freemium model challenges traditional business model and raises…

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#cloud computing profitability #customer data value #digital media monetization #e-commerce platforms #e-learning platforms #free cloud services business #freemium business models #freemium model #gaming industry strategies #grow business #mobile app monetization #online advertising strategies #online marketplace models #open source collaboration #open source software revenue #search engine monetization #social media profitability #streaming service economics #technology business innovations #user data analytics