24 Comments

Extending on this, it's hard to imagine getting out of the equilibrium where pushing exceeds pulling. If too many people are pushing info, the return to pulling info decreases because search costs associated with finding the best info to pull become too high.

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A lot of nonfiction authors and bloggers don't support themselves by advertising but make money by public speaking or consulting. Pushing means you can give everyone the same product. You can do that for cheap. On the other hand you can charge good money for specific consulting.

I don't know exactly the business model of this blog but I see no ads even if I shut down my adblocker.

Google might make most of it's money via advertising but most of the time the user of Google still clicks on a authentic link instead of clicking on the advertised result.

Another huge trend that you missed is the switch from TV to Netflix. We see people subscribe to Spotify to replace radio consumption.

It might also be a problem to see everything in terms of money. Wikipedia provides content for people who pull articles that are relevant to what the people want. Wikipedia just isn't a commercial enterprise. Programmers who pull information about a problem that they have by asking a question on stackoverflow are also interacting with a complex system where money is only a side issue.

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If searches are 'pull', doesn't that imply there's an absolutely enormous amount of pull going on every day? Google doesn't have a market cap of $378b for nothing.

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That's what the ancient Greeks used to say about their youth. The truth is it wasn't that different in the past, nostalgia bias doesn't belong on this website.

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Several thoughts:

1) People really like attention, so that's an incentive to share interesting information you already have for free. And if most other people are sharing information for free, it's hard to compete unless you have far superior information.

2) If information is new, then there's no way for you to know you want to pull for it until somebody has already pushed it at you, is there? Finding worthwhile stories we haven't heard of is what we pay journalists for.

3) Trying to think of a pull-type service that's successful, Amazon comes to mind. You can choose what you want more information about and pay for a book about it.

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Can it be considered a pretty perfect way to boost the efficiency of the work. I think it really brings many benefits, not just a useless method

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It's unfortunate but that is how our generation has become. I would love for more people to seek out information and question every answer they receive but it seems that technology has made people lazy. What I find disturbing is that we live in a time where we have so many resources at our disposal that we chose not to use. Or what’s even more disturbing is that many people chose to ignore the issues. I wrote about this a year ago and it wasn't until recently that I posted my writing in a blog, http://unconventionalviews....

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Each person will have different views. Each student used the internet to search engines for inclusion in their thesis or to solve a homework question is "pull" information. Surely google support but some content overall and per unit effort one would easily be exposed to more independent sources of information and different viewpoints than if there is only a library or a book the only suggestion to go on. Very supportive and I thank you for your sharing this.

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If you bought access to a newspaper database and then searched that when you have a specific topic of interest, that is info pull. When you just read whatever articles they put on the front page every day, that is info push.

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Probably because I'm half-reading these comments on an iPad while finishing my breakfast in my building's coffee shop before I go upstairs to work for the day. Passivity and info push seem to pair well.

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I was thinking of individual blogs, magazines, etc as being sources of information that are deliberately "pulled" by audiences, with the ads being "pushed". Also, what Ronfar said about the cost of copying/distributing information.

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With newspapers at least you do often know their overall stances and they do name their sources, of course the same is true for the internet when you have a lot of experience with it.

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Magazines and newspapers are pretty unspecific as info sources. Buying access to them is more buying access to a channel that others will push stuff through.

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People do pay to pull information, and handsomely. If I require legal advice, I seek the council of a lawyer. If I require advice on a merger, I hire an investment banker. If I require about widgets, I hire a widget consultant. These services require expert humans who can understand their clients needs and guide their clients into asking the right questions*.

*and, far less importantly, answer those questions

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I'm not sure how exactly to quantify the comparison, but my sense is that more resources are spent pulling info than pushing it.

People spend an awful lot of money buying magazines, newspapers, books, college educations, etc., which I'd tend to classify as actively pulling.

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Distributing information has near-zero marginal cost. Of course there will be a huge supply of it.

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