alt Hacker NewsThis is a lot of words to describe rent seeking. Google, Amazon, Instagram/Meta, ultimately all of these are earning their outsized margins through market-dominance enabled intermediation of commerce. I search for 'foo' and the top result is either Foo paying through the nose for what should really should be organic traffic or Bar 'buying' the click instead. In the absence of anti-trust the only winning move is to buy stock in the monopolists, their ability to extract these rents from an ever-growing proportion of the economy is only getting stronger.
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Now show Seth’s audience (which has been accumulated for a long time) your explanation and theirs. I’d wager most people would be scratching their heads and rereading yours, while they’d breeze through Seth’s. In other words, your take may be shorter, but it’s not clearer or necessarily faster to read when aiming for comprehension. Seth doesn’t write for people who visit HN everyday.
There is no rent seeking or monopolistic or technofeudal or enshittifying aspect of Amazon at all. The people who made their names beginning twenty years ago by marketing these expressions are losers who have simply been proven wrong. It is monotonous middle brow repetition See eg the left wing expose of the above mentioned brain death in Maher Aquanno https://archive.ph/YJaZr better in their academic papers like Monopoly or Competition? Unraveling the Amazon Paradox https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/04866134261415639
It was only 600 words. I understand there is a push against AI bloated slop here, but I don't think we should discourage good prose.
I just wanted to share that I find Seth's daily blog consistently excellent.