Thanks @aschrijver and hello @cjs, and thank you for your feedback.
The offerbot concept has been developed in isolation, not by choice but because I struggled to communicate it clearly to people in the past and, in particular, to explain why offer processing is the key to everything else. In the past I have contacted many people asking for input and help, from TBL to linked data experts and back again. So I did it on my own. Now that I have a website which explains my understanding of the problem, I am sharing that with people and will hopefully make more progress, aided by people like @aschrijver, thank you.
My concern with other research on the attention economy (e.g. Tim Wu) was that it focused primarily on privacy and legislation-based remedies, not the distortion of markets and the replacement of the mechanism for making and receiving offers, which was my primary focus. What research would you suggest that I consider?
I’m a little confused by this.
Firstly my sentence about harm is merely an intro and hook into the next article (where I make further arguments).
Secondly, I’m confused about your (apparent) acceptance of the Techno-Kleptocracy model but rejection of the harm of acting like a Techno-Kleptocrat? Consider that Google, for instance, ranks every product and service by popularity (a single heuristic) and is therefore a kingmaker, blessing popular vendors with more trade. It also creates an underclass of unpopular vendors who must compete in an AdWord’s auction for Google’s blessing, allowing Google to act as a rentier. Google is, over the long term, making the rich richer and the poor poorer (and Google the richest of all). Is there no harm in doing this?
Offerbots are not an ‘aggregator’ as defined by the website, where I am using the term to refer to companies who aggregate. Certainly offerbots aggregate offers, but where FAANG aggregators do that to capture attention and sell it to the highest bidder (by selfishly selecting the set of offers displayed to users to maximise the likelihood of payment to the aggregator and maximising the amount paid by the vendor), offerbots give their owner control over which offers they see and consider. It’s an information economy, not an attention economy.
The harms to privacy are well documented elsewhere. What I am bringing to people’s attention is the harms to our economy, society and information (which are ignored elsewhere).
On the technology, in recent years I have become a full-stack developer but I am not a technologist. For me technology is a means to an end. I am happy to consider any technology, noting that the distributed systems have thus far failed to capture the imagination of the public and, therefore, we should not presume that simply building it in adherence with existing standards will make the public come.
[Edit: It’s worth noting that offerbots must be highly efficient at sending, receiving, processing and representing offers in a generalised manner at a reasonable scale. It may not be possible, much less desirable, to shoehorn offerbots into technologies which are designed primarily around storing personal data if doing so compromises the core function of the offerbot.]
Thanks again.