February 22, 2016

Techweasels Unmasked!

Over in the comments section at one of the cool blogs, Brett Bellmore appears to have worked out one of the many proprietary techniques in the repertoire  of Overton's Window Moving Service. 


 I'm convinced that the modern social media business model makes sense. It just doesn't make financial sense. 
The new business model is to build up a large customer base by being useful and reasonably impartial, and doing it at a loss to attract customers. Then, at some point, when you decide you have enough customers, you take your profit. 
But, not in the form of money. In the form of political influence. You've got eyeballs, you feed them a skewed version of reality designed to effect how they vote. You've got customers who are of the opposite political persuasion, you screw with them, and extract from them the opportunity cost of switching to a different platform right in the middle of an election campaign. 
Sure, your company tanks, customers eventually flee. But not before you've thrown an election. 
The big investors in companies like Twitter don't object to this, because this is the profit they were looking for. They weren't buying future income, they were buying a chance to push politics in a direction they like.

Yeah.
That's pretty much what's been going on


Damnit...If I'm going to live in a futuristic dystopia, I want flying cars. 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 09:02 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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1 I think the same thing is in operation in entertainment. They make tons of PC movies that are financial failures, but the investment is not about the money, but about "Moving the narrative".

The annoying part to them is that some of the rubes are resisting the message.

Posted by: Mauser at Tue Feb 23 01:18:21 2016 (5Ktpu)

2 I think part of why the left-wing is so keen on all forms of Internet regulation is that the public as been at least partially successful in subverting their efforts to date.  Remember when Dan Rather stared into the camera and lied about what the results of the forensic document examiners that CBS had hired?  That claim didn't stand up long enough to change the election, hence the "need" for things like Trust & Safety Councils...

Posted by: Siergen at Tue Feb 23 21:14:57 2016 (De/yN)

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