Full disclosure, I'm an author who has self published a few things on Amazon and setup author stuff on amazon and goodreads.
>as demonstrated by the fact that it hasn't done anything.
There are links between the two. You can buy my books on amazon (the dropdown supports other vendors) from their Goodreads pages.
But to your point about anticompetitive, I completely agree.
Why are corporations even allowed to just buy other corporations, at all?
A shitty bank bought my bank and promptly made everything about it shittier. Why is this even allowed at all? Companies buying other companies is about the most fundamentally anti-competitive thing there is.
"Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience.
What should we do to stop that? I’m open to ideas."
2. The scraping orgs dgaf & mask their IPs through proxy servers or through orgs that appear legit. For example, a recent massive scraping operation originating from Oracle IP addresses was just using their servers as a laundromat.
3. We absolutely will take legal action against those who stole our data & look forward seeing them in court, which is (optimistically) 2 to 3 years from now."
> 3. We absolutely will take legal action against those who stole our data…
What does “our” refer to here? Does Twitter (i.e. musk) own the data in any sense? Or does he mean it as “we the people’s data”?
Very off-putting to read that sentence. Obviously he’s trying to monetize the user generated data in this LLM rush as other avenues to monetizations have flopped.
This also really sounds like he's trying to pretend his data is some kind of rare commodity, when the reality is that it's bottom of the barrel trash as far as text data for LLMs goes.
Unless I misunderstood, he might actually have a case.
> In a second ruling in April 2022 the Ninth Circuit affirmed its decision.[5][6] In a November 2022 ruling the Ninth Circuit ruled that hiQ had breached LinkedIn's User Agreement and a settlement agreement was reached between the two parties. [7]
They're doing another promotion for cosmetics too. And it's not even per sandwich, it's per purchase. So to get them all, you have to have 4 separate transactions.
I know this isn't exactly the same, but I used to work at an adtech startup and my boss was very savvy in the industry, and right in front of me did some quick napkin math showing that Hulu probably makes about $20 a month off of people in the free tier, and only $13 from their ad-free* subscription.
So by subscribing Hulu makes less money off of you.
The main reason is video ads pay the most, which doesn't apply to papers, but does apply to websites. So what's their excuse now?
I realized a truism years ago: Anytime there are 3 or more parties involved in a business deal, at least one of them is getting fucked. And it's usually the least powerful party, which 99% of the time is just the ordinary user/consumer/taxpayer. However, not always. And sometimes it's two parties getting screwed. This happens a lot with government contracts. Where the people paid for it, the government got garbage, and the contractor(s) got rich.
And advertising is almost always a 3 party business deal. The merchant. The advertiser. The unwitting public. Sometimes the merchant gets screwed. Sometimes it's the advertiser. But almost always the target audience.
So when it comes to adblocking, I have zero sympathy for the advertiser or the merchant. I want zero advertisements in my life. But I get them anyway.
Online advertising is even more fun than that: There's the merchant/website, the advertiser, the ad network, and the public. You can even add the advertiser's competitors! The public gets ads they don't want, the merchant can fake some of their traffic, or maybe it's the advertiser's competitors. The ad network is ultimately not all that interested in giving the advertiser that great a deal, or even if they are, they might still lose to those trying to steal ad revenue. You then see a company that was trying to sell ads to sports fans in indiana, that see that all their budget really went to ads placed in front of a bot farm from Philippines. I know of a failed alcohol startup who, after analysis, saw that 40% of their youtube marketing budget ended up attached to channels playing Peppa Pig.
So sure, adblock away, but don't think that the consumer is the sole loser in the ads race: It's far worse than that.
>To those men in their oddly similar dark suits, their cold eyes weighing and dismissing everything, the people of this valley were a foe to be defeated. As he thought of it, Dasein realized all customers were "The Enemy" to these men. Davidson and his kind were pitted against each other, yes, competitive, but among themselves they betrayed that they were pitted more against the masses who existed beyond that inner ring of knowledgeable financial operation.
>The alignment was apparent in everything they did, in their words as well as their actions. They spoke of "package grab level" and "container flash time" -- of "puff limit" and "acceptance threshold." It was an "in" language of militarylike maneuvering and combat. They knew which height on a shelf was most apt to make a customer grab an item. They knew the "flash time" -- the shelf width needed for certain containers. They knew how much empty air could be "puffed" into a package to make it appear a greater bargain. they knew how much price and package manipulation the customer would accept without jarring him into a "rejection pattern."
>And we're their spies, Dasein thought. the psychiatrists and psychologists - all the "social scientists" we're the espionage arm.
Publishing what was said is more "just the facts, please" than editorializing the response, as shitty PR-speak as it is.