I used to be very anti-advertising. I believed that in addition to being annoying, it was unnecessary—that if for some reason advertising became infeasible, sure, some companies would go out of business, but they'd be replaced by better companies with other business models, and the rest of us would be better off for it.
I really liked this post. And, even without getting into its content, I like any time someone admits they have changed their mind about something and explains why.
Your ‘attention as a currency for exchange’ principle really made me think; but I think it falls down after scrutiny. In your scenario, you are striving to generate ‘attention currency’ that you can then exchange for ‘dollars currency’. Isn’t this just another way of saying you’re trying to generate a product - i.e. the ‘attention currency’ - that you can monetise by selling to your client - i.e. the advertiser. That is, the user of the service/app, or more specifically the user’s attention, is the product being sold. That is, if you’re paying with your attention, you are the product being sold and not the customer.
It seems like what you’re getting at in your post is the idea that providing your attention to a creator is just another way of paying for the creator’s service - that you’re paying with attention instead of dollars. And so, who cares, it’s all just a form of currency, right? But I don’t think that works because the creator isn’t actually chasing currency in the form of attention they want dollarydoos. Which means, like you hint at, the creator is incentivised to behave in a way that is inconsistent with the person ‘paying’ with their attention. Which is the whole point of the ‘you’re not the customer you’re the product’ principle?
I might have misunderstood or gotten the wrong end of the stick. I really enjoyed your post though and I hope you write more about it.
I really liked this post. And, even without getting into its content, I like any time someone admits they have changed their mind about something and explains why.
I’m glad! Hacker News’s reaction was… different 
.
I think it’s just a matter of definitions–you could think of attention as a currency or as a product. Though even with attention-as-a-product, the phrase “you’re the product, not the customer” still isn’t literally correct: you are not the product, your attention is the product. You have agency; you can decide whether spending some of your attention on viewing ads is worth getting access to the website/article/whatever it is (I’d say “the product”, and that’s what it is, but it’d be nice to have a way to distinguish it from the attention-product. There are two products).
Instead of using an analogy to products and currencies, we could just call everything a “resource.” You, the company, create resource A. You want resource C. The advertiser has resource C and wants resource B. The user has resource B and wants resource A. So you trade A to the user and receive B, then you trade B to the advertiser and receive C. It just so happens that there are certain types of products, err, resources, that are more amenable to a three-way transaction like this; I don’t see any reason that a two-party transaction has to be morally superior to a three-party transaction, which is what “if you’re not the customer, you’re the product” seems to imply.
At the end of the day, I think your final point is the really the main question:
Which means, like you hint at, the creator is incentivised to behave in a way that is inconsistent with the person ‘paying’ with their attention. Which is the whole point of the ‘you’re not the customer you’re the product’ principle?
There are ways for incentives to be misaligned, but that’s true for all parties in all types of transactions. e.g. some people say subscription models are better than ad models because ads make companies optimize for engagement… but clearly Netflix optimizes for engagement despite using a subscription model. In general I think incentive alignment is a really hard problem and any company that claims to be perfectly aligned should be viewed with suspicion (ask me about my wife’s experience with Lambda School some time ). Better to be up front about the potential misalignments and describe how you plan to mitigate them.
So the fact that there are ways for ad models to have potential misalignments isn’t sufficient evidence to say that ads should be abandoned altogether, and my personal opinion is that in some cases, ad models can in fact be a net positive for all parties involved. This post didn’t quite make that argument–it sort of laid the foundations and then ended on a cliffhanger. I guess it was mainly a description of the changes in my mental model that allowed me to even consider the question of can-ads-be-good in the first place.
If I were to write a followup, I might start by emphasizing that “ads” doesn’t have to mean banner ads, which is what I think a lot of people on HN discussing this article tended to think of. e.g. newsletter ads seem to be pretty user-friendly.