Your analogies are facile. Spam, telegraph operators ... It's the big media that arranges the generation of content. The foreign correspondents? The investigative journalists? The months spent on assignment abroad? The beat writers that follow a neighbourhood for years? If you think the echo chamber of inter-referencing bloggers will be a substitute, you've got another thing coming. Commenting on content is nice. Tagging it is great. Searching through it is wonderful. But someone's got to go and spent hundreds of hours on creating it first. And someone else has got to pay for it. At the moment, the guys who had the settled models in place are being driven out of business by outfits ultimately burning through venture capitalist money; eventually, they too will get around to charging for their services, and the era of "free" (i.e. subsidised) lunch will be over, but the damage will be done. Read up on what's happened to the staffs of LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, etc., count the Pulitzers those papers had won, and compare that to the output of even the most precocious blog.

Spam is irrelevant to this matter. AdBlock is indeed a good analogue. You did note that I prefaced the second paragraph with "follow your choice to its logical conclusion", right? Yes: if a large enough fraction of New York Times' site's visitors use AdBlock (or ignore the ads using more old-fashioned means ;)), the company won't be able to provide it to them anymore. Now, I do not claim that this is incontrovertible evidence, because there are lots of factors at play, but it is notable that "big media" is going through an absolutely brutal time in the past 10 years trying to figure out how to make ends meet.

It's a simple bargain, at the end of the day. You can think the content is useless, and not allow the owner to sell your attention to advertisers; or you may like the content, and then you either must put up with ads, or pay for it. Liking the content, but then proceeding to pay someone else to circumvent the ads is just perverse. If everyone does it, Pandora is gone. If just you do it, you're a free-loader.

Listening to music sans ads has value to you. You are naturally willing to pay up for the privilege. What baffles me is that you prefer to hand the resources over to a third party, which would filter the ads, rather than to the *content providers*, who would then be able to eschew the ads in the first place, and continue the service you enjoy!

Follow your choice to its logical conclusion. Pandora has costs and a perfectly legitimate desire to earn a rate of return on time and capital. They persuade advertisers that people who listen to their streams will buy the shilled products. You say, "bite me", and use a filter. Advertisers realise no one pays attention to their message on Pandora, and terminate their contracts. Pandora folds. You are left with a license for an ad blocker, and static in your headphones. ... profit?

The presentation is light on details, and I haven't had time to poke around the researchers' websites, but, at first blush, I wonder whether the results have much to do with psychology per se? Rather, these guys have shown, in a round-about way, that the AoM "AI" is not very strong; in particular, that it's overly cautious and "leaves a lot on the table": given available resources, it could go on the offensive sooner than it does. That's why the "aggressive" and "neurotic" agents do so well against it. Playing AoM is a very complex dynamic programming problem, and it's anyone's guess what sort of objective function its authors have constructed, but now we can see that a fairly coarse re-weighting could significantly improve it. I don't think that the general take-way here ought to be that "neurotic" agents do well in strategic games (contract to the classic "tit-for-tat" repeated-games result).

That said, from the introduction of the presentation one can see that the real goal of this effort is to create bots that *people enjoy playing against*. That's probably only loosely related to the absolute strength of the opponent, and it makes complete sense that it would be thrilling to be up against an AI that can suddenly just "take a flyer" and surprise you.