I enjoyed Patrick Mckenzie's take on fraud--that we should accept more-than-zero fraud. It took me some time to grasp that what he's saying is that accepting zero fraud (and not even a little more) means raising transaction costs and increasing ecommerce friction, which would break down consumerism--a worse outcome than the current one. The piece also sparked off a tangential thought. I think society's norms around fraud depends on the perceived marginal cost of replication of whatever it is being stolen. Someone stealing a car is worse than stealing software. Because somewhere the fraudster and society understand that every new car (or any hardware) has to be built from scratch, whereas software doesn't. Plus, the consumption of hardware and software is different. Hardware use is exclusive; software is non-exclusive. On both production and consumption fronts, fraudsters tell themselves that stealing software is not nearly as bad as stealing hardware. Some kinds of fraud are more acceptable than others.
Yes. That tradeoff between fraud prevention and creating friction for genuine user is the key challenge for any business.
This take on software-hardware is sort of continuation. It's the impact of the action that defines the need to prevent fraud, isn't it? Stealing someone's account access vs stealing the milk packet on their doorstep. In case of software as well, because the supply can expand and not affect experience of other users, it can be ignored. But when the load on server increases, you may want to stop the frauds.
I kind of had known and heard and seen robots.txt but did not know its real intent. Thx for sharing the article Pritesh 🙏
That's what! Even I had 'known' about it, but never really understood why it is there and how it works.
I enjoyed Patrick Mckenzie's take on fraud--that we should accept more-than-zero fraud. It took me some time to grasp that what he's saying is that accepting zero fraud (and not even a little more) means raising transaction costs and increasing ecommerce friction, which would break down consumerism--a worse outcome than the current one. The piece also sparked off a tangential thought. I think society's norms around fraud depends on the perceived marginal cost of replication of whatever it is being stolen. Someone stealing a car is worse than stealing software. Because somewhere the fraudster and society understand that every new car (or any hardware) has to be built from scratch, whereas software doesn't. Plus, the consumption of hardware and software is different. Hardware use is exclusive; software is non-exclusive. On both production and consumption fronts, fraudsters tell themselves that stealing software is not nearly as bad as stealing hardware. Some kinds of fraud are more acceptable than others.
Yes. That tradeoff between fraud prevention and creating friction for genuine user is the key challenge for any business.
This take on software-hardware is sort of continuation. It's the impact of the action that defines the need to prevent fraud, isn't it? Stealing someone's account access vs stealing the milk packet on their doorstep. In case of software as well, because the supply can expand and not affect experience of other users, it can be ignored. But when the load on server increases, you may want to stop the frauds.