Doing the hermit-crab shuffle

[brin_bellway]

(If you, like Mom, have no idea what I'm referring to when I use that metaphor, you can read about the hermit-crab shuffle here.)

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I'm getting a new laptop!

What's happening to my current laptop, you ask? Why, it's becoming Mom's laptop!

What's happening to Mom's current laptop, you ask? Why, it's becoming the TV's prosthetic brain!

What's happening to the TV's current prosthetic brain, you ask? Why, it's becoming Dad's ad-mining rig!

What's happening to Dad's current ad-mining rig, you ask? Well, *that* one is going in the bag of stuff to be taken to the electronics recycling depot, as it is only very marginally functional. (It's slow enough and Windows-XP enough that nobody would want to use it as an emergency spare, and if we need a system like that for pretty much anything else, we could emulate one.)

Comments

[brin_bellway]

My current laptop has 8 GB of RAM and a 500 GB HDD (both starting to get noticeably tight, for an archiving hobbyist), and the trackpad's left mouse button is starting to get flicky. But the specs are plenty for Mom's needs, and she uses external mice almost exclusively.

Mom's current laptop runs virus-bait Windows 7 and has 3 GB of RAM, which is not enough to ad-mine *and* do much else at the same time. But with a Linux partition added (we'll probably keep the Windows 7 around just in case; it *did* come in handy for running the proctoring software), it should work fine as a dedicated video-watching machine.

The TV's current prosthetic brain runs Youtube only with ads and no Netflix at all, because both adblockers and Netflix have ceased support for 32-bit devices. But it might still run an ad-mining video or two (and Dad has nothing to lose by trying it, since his current ad-mining rig is pretty much unusable), and if not we'll keep it around in case we come up with another use for it.

Soon (estimated delivery time 9 - 19 days, plus setup time), we will all have bigger shells to call home.

[lunartulip]

What is 'ad-mining'? I haven't previously encountered the term, and Googling it isn't giving me any results which seem to fit in context.

[brin_bellway]

Yeah, sorry, that was an idiomatic phrasing and I should have included more context. It's getting paid to watch advertisement videos, with the implication being that you are actually paying very little attention to the videos and it's mostly just your computer running on its own. Slightly more societally useless than Bitcoin mining (that's saying something, I know), requires somewhat more maintenance, and doesn't scale nearly as high, but produces much more money per kWh: an ordinary person (non-specialist equipment, not stealing electricity from their landlord or anything) can turn a profit. Not a large profit--that $1.62 figure was from an unusually *good* day, and profits tend to go down over time as opportunities dry up and rules become more restrictive†--but if you're desperate enough it can be worth it.

When quarantine happened, the (already very low) bottom fell out of the markets for AFAIK every form of unskilled Internet labour, so there's not really any money to be had from Swagbucks right now anyway. But the extra rig might still come in handy eventually. Hell, the TV's current prosthetic brain gathered dust for a couple years after Dad stopped using it, until we realised that with a few extra adapters we could hook it up to our TV to provide smart-TV-like capabilities. (And now we're upgrading the smartness *without* having to replace the whole TV. Modularity!)

((And if you read through that last tag ramble and are now wondering: yes, we *have* now replaced the roof! \o/ ))

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†It's been degrading for decades: circa 2000, when the idea of Internet business was still shiny and new and nobody really knew how much things involving it were worth, you could make *ridiculous* quantities of money doing this kind of work. Mom paid for large portions of a trip to Disney World with it.

[contrarianarchon]

... what's even the business model here? "most of the people here are not making a principled rational decision to be here and so we make back on the people who watch ten things and then buy one thing and then lose than we lose on the people who make this into an hourly wage"?

[brin_bellway]

The polite fiction I forgot to mention, which I can only presume is actually true for the target audience, is that you're not here for the *ads*. No, you're here to watch recipe videos, or joke compilations, or puppies being cute, or travel vloggers, and there just *happen* to be ads in-between the *real* videos.

"Look," the ad-mines say to their target audience, "you were going to go on video-website wikiwalks anyway. Instead of wandering through Youtube, why not wander through *our* video website and get a few pennies while you're at it?"

(This pitch doesn't always work out even with the target audience. Mom *does* enjoy Youtube wikiwalks, but paying attention to *these* videos is still very much the exception for her rather than the rule. When she can scrounge up the RAM for it, she sometimes has an ad-mining tab or two running on tab-based mute† while the tab in focus plays the Youtube video she's *actually* watching.)

Many ad-mines hold so firmly to the polite fiction that they pay you *per "real" video* even if no ad ran before it††, and resort to weird and often rather counterproductive-looking kludges like "randomly blocking some people from accessing the videos at all that day" if there's an advertiser drought (it's often especially hard to get advertisers in January, apparently). These are usually more generic menial-Internet-labour providers that also have surveys and [Ebates-style affiliate kickbacks] and signup offers (subscription services; app games that think if they can lure you in they can convince you to buy microtransactions); video-specialist site Hideout is more overt, explicitly paying you *per ad* and simply rationing out the ads with more "real" videos in-between if they don't have enough to go around.

(It may or may not be relevant that Hideout doesn't run its own payout system: Hideout points can't be exchanged *directly* for money or money-like things like Amazon credit, only for the points of *other* menial-Internet-labour providers they have arrangements with. (And the exchange rates aren't consistent: you get a lot fewer cent-equivalents cashing out for Swagbucks than for GrabPoints, and sometimes it changes. "Current best method for optimising Hideout exchange rate" is a perennial topic of discussion in gathering places for people working the system.))

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In general, I think the target audience of a lot of this stuff is "middle- to upper-middle-class stay-at-home mothers who like the idea of financially contributing to the household but don't actually have the time to dedicate to a work-from-home career". There's a lot of emphasis on doing things you were at least supposedly going to do anyway (just doing it through them instead), and a lot of the subscription offers and online-shopping kickbacks are for places that [people desperate enough to think this wage is an attractive proposition] can't actually afford. And apparently there *are* still a lot of people partially paying for their Disney trips with this stuff, just to a lesser extent than during the dot-com bubble. I've occasionally seen glimpses in Swagbucks user-spotlight articles of this whole sub-community who specifically use it to help save for Disney. (It helps that the pay is better in America: bigger market to advertise in, I guess.)

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P.S. ...come to think of it, if surveys that pay in pocket change really *are* mostly getting housespouses of comfortably-off families, that would mean their sampling is actually biased *against* people who can't afford to save for retirement, making this survey result rather more horrifying than I thought.

(Though that's a rather big "if". Just because that's what they were aiming for doesn't mean that's what they got: incentives are a powerful thing.)

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†Many of them won't pay for videos watched with the *video's* mute setting on, but it seems they can't tell if you mute the entire tab.

††well, if it wasn't your fault: they won't give points to people using adblockers

[contrarianarchon]

Ah, I was modeling this like the thing that some mobile games I've seen people play would give you video-game-currency if you'd sit through ads voluntarily as an alternative to micro-transactions or compulsory ads (or, realistically, as a supplement to both those things) and was generalizing a kind of "uh, like that, but with real money and you don't actually have an attached game" but apparently the attached game is youtube, good to know.

> P.S. ...come to think of it, if surveys that pay in pocket change really *are* mostly getting housespouses of comfortably-off families, that would mean their sampling is actually biased *against* people who can't afford to save for retirement, making this survey result rather more horrifying than I thought.

Are the people who do this making good financial sense? In the context of upper-middle-class life there are generally about five hundred places where you're trading off money for time and could switch that back? So it's a very good choice from the perspective of "I want to be a fiscally responsible/productive member of this household". Being upper-middle-class often seems to mean you have a good job/good acculturation/good family, not any ability to manage money or stay out of debt whatsoever. I would still expect there to be a strong selection effect here.

(That said I'm not totally confident that your intuition about "ad-mining" generalizes to "taking surveys for cash"; the latter seems to be drifting into mechanical-turk territories moreso?)

[brin_bellway]

>>Are the people who do this making good financial sense?

To be fair, there is the matter of pleasure and personal preference. I found market-research surveys tedious and annoying and stopped the moment I had more valuable ways to spend my time, but another_normal_anomaly enjoys them and might as well get some money out of it if they're going to do them anyway. (I saw some of their Tumblr posts mentioning it a while back and my first thought was "holy shit, a Rich Person Who Takes Marketing Surveys Anyway! they really *do* exist!") Gwern thinks I'm a fool for putting effort into exploiting sales and loyalty points, but I enjoy bargain-hunting: the main thing bargain-hunting for real money funges against is bargain-hunting for play money, so I might as well prioritise the version with real-world benefits.

But yeah, you're very possibly right that this form of targeting moderate-to-high-income people mostly targets the subset who are bad at efficiently holding onto that money, and therefore doesn't say much about how large that subset is. The existence of people who financially *could* save for retirement but are too incompetent is, while disturbing, no more informative than the existence of Chinese robbers.

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>>(That said I'm not totally confident that your intuition about "ad-mining" generalizes to "taking surveys for cash"; the latter seems to be drifting into mechanical-turk territories moreso?)

FWIW, they tend to be run through the same websites.

[contrarianarchon]

>> FWIW, they tend to be run through the same websites.

Good evidence! Pretty much everything I know about surveys-for-money/rewards is dated - my mother says she used to do them when she was younger and enjoyed them then, but still stopped when the rewards got worse and she had other more important things to do.

(To be fair her job is "government social research consultant" so on some level she just switched to the other side of the equation.)

re: enjoyment - doing surveys might be fun but probably not *that* fun, and I make a point of not seeking out totally open-ended technically-constructive-but-not-contributing-to-core-life-plan activities because I need to either sink my effort into the important effort-sinks I already have (i.e. study, keeping my room clean, making sure I eat well, social life) or into fun things (the last two items on that list plus reading reading and more reading). There are many video games that I do not play for this reason or emotional reasons similar to it.