Argot Navis

This story is in the BBC News today. The gist of the piece is that web users are getting more “ruthless and selfish.” Apparently the definition of “selfish” is, uh, this:

'Instead of dawdling on websites many users want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave.'

I suppose this means that teenagers on MySpace are quite generous? This quote pretty much sums it up:

'Most ignore efforts to make them linger and are suspicious of promotions designed to hold their attention.'(Emphasis mine.)

So, basically, people are selfish because they aren't making it easy for advertising people to make money off of them? The sad thing is, I can actually imagine people thinking this. “Hey, they aren't giving us as much money as we want. So selfish!” And that's basically what it is. I mean, why else would someone be complaining about this? It's not like most people want people to stick around just to waste more of their bandwidth, so it must be the ad revenue they're thinking of.

I guess this strikes me as being similar to the Best Buy con. The reason they can sell that printer/camera/whatever so cheap during sales is because they know they can hook a lot of people into buying ridiculously overpriced cables or whatever (compare to, say, this). If the consumer just wants the cheap thing, they're clearly selfish for not allowing themselves to get ripped off on the cable. I guess that's true, but I'd rather be selfish than a sucker. The same thing applies here, I think. If I know what I want, why should I stick around longer just to let you selfishly and ruthlessly (did you all catch how I turned that around?) earn ad revenue on the way I waste my time online? If there's a site that I actually want to spend some time on, I will, but I don't think it would make me a better or more generous person if I stuck around for no reason.

I'll end on this note:

'Now, when people go online they know what they want and how to do it, he said.

This makes them very resistant to highlighted promotions or other editorial choices that try to distract them.'

The worst customer is a smart customer, right?