Market structures on the internet (Spam Mail #29)

💩 Cool Shit

CoronaGame - A simulator game where you manage the COVID-19 outbreak in Czechia. Try different mitigation efforts to see how many deaths you prevent and how much it costs.

How long is my data? - Measure your data by how much shelving you’d need to store it in 3½″ floppy disks.

In B flat - A collection of videos you can play simultaneously and in harmony. I know next to nothing about music but this is cool!

Plane Food Simulator - This is harder than it looks. It’s the small touches - like the seatbelt sign noise - that really make this fantastic.

Bong - Simple, but fun.

Ransomwhere - An open, crowdsourced ransomware payment tracker.

Websites from hell - A list of websites that are nightmares - GIF riddled, frames, unnecessary java, and so on.

💎 Word gems

Inside Facebook’s Data Wars (New York Times / Kevin Roose)

This piece focuses on Facebook’s internal analytics tool, CrowdTangle. Kevin Roose outlines plainly how Facebook refuse to invest in anything that could ultimately harm their bottom line.

[T]he CrowdTangle story is important, because it illustrates the way that Facebook’s obsession with managing its reputation often gets in the way of its attempts to clean up its platform. And it gets to the heart of one of the central tensions confronting Facebook in the post-Trump era. The company, blamed for everything from election interference to vaccine hesitancy, badly wants to rebuild trust with a skeptical public. But the more it shares about what happens on its platform, the more it risks exposing uncomfortable truths that could further damage its image.

How Free to Play Video Games are Forced to Make Addicts (Napkin Math / Evan Armstrong)

This article dives into the business model of free to play games - outlining how it makes more sense to invest in the small percentage of users that will spend a large amount of money (dubbed “whales”) instead of relying on advertising revenue from all users.

Evan Armstrong’s central point here could also be used for the article above about Facebook - "It is the structure of the markets that is forcing these decisions”.

All industries are held subject to the power structure of their market. When you add competitive dynamics into the mix, it can mean that an organization sometimes has no choice but to make morally dubious decisions (assuming they want the business to survive). This is true of all companies, not just mobile games! At a certain scale, every product/organization will end up hurting someone. There is always a percentage of the population that will be the recipients of direct or indirect negative effects from an organization operating.

Concern trolls and power grabs: Inside Big Tech’s angry, geeky, often petty war for your privacy (Protocol / Issie Lapowsky)

A fascinating piece looking at where privacy standards (good or bad) form. If you’ve ever worried about your privacy online you should read this. It outlines how most of the privacy standards we know of - Do Not Track, Privacy Sandbox, etc. - are all voluntary. And, it’s the big tech companies pushing for standards that ultimately protect their businesses. Once again, Evan Armstrong’s quote is relevant here.

And with that controversy comes a cost. Longtime members of the organization said that at its best, the W3C is a place where some of the brightest minds in the industry get to come together to make technology work better for everyone.

But at its worst, they worry that dysfunction inside the W3C groups may send a dangerous and misleading message to the global regulators and lawmakers working on privacy issues — that if the brightest minds in the industry can't figure out how to make privacy protections work for everyone, maybe no one can.

Two economies. Two sets of rules (Tim O’Reilly)

This insightful article looks at the economy more broadly, focusing in on “one of the biggest unacknowledged drivers of inequality in America”.

Why is Musk so rich? The answer tells us something profound about our economy: he is wealthy because people are betting on him. But unlike a bet in a lottery or at a racetrack, in the vast betting economy of the stock market, people can cash out their winnings before the race has ended.

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