The correct answer is to never use programmatic ads.
Ever.
If you own a site, just curate a set of ads on your site that actually enhances your sites appeal. A fashion site should have matching fashion ads. A tech site should have matching tech ads. A local site should have matching local ads. Reach out to advertisers to get these ads. Never use an algorithm. You, as an editor, should be better than the algorithms. Ads are supposed to be useful to your audience, instead of being annoying. People buy fashion magazines - filled with 600 pages of ads- and Sunday newspapers BECAUSE of the ads. They should want to visit your website as well because of your ads.
The worst thing you can do for your site is to place out-of-context ads in the middle of your site. Can you imaging if Vogue.com decided to place Flash SSD ads on their site? This is how you destroy an audience, and as a publisher, your number one concern should be to grow your audience.
Once you curate a set of ads for your site, you'll find that click-through rates and conversion are far higher than random programmatic ads. You should know your audience, and the kind of ads that would appeal to them. Mark ads as content in your CMS. This avoids ad-blockers.
Curating ads is how advertising has always worked, and will continue to work, after all these programmatic garbage goes away.
This was actually my plan (sort of) for my online sci-fi strategy game Neptune's Pride when I ditched AdSense.
I was going to hand select things on Amazon that my players would be interested in. Science Fiction books, dvd box sets, that kind of thing. Then present them to the players with my affiliate code where I would normally show a google ad.
I didn't fully implement the idea because I think the affiliate rewards are so small I was worried the math didn't make it worthwhile. But I'd still like to try one day.
This method is not really for product affiliate ads (unless you have a whole shopping section of your site devoted for that...). Amazon links are for penny-chasers anyways.
You're really supposed to curate display ads. But, this means you'll have to make the call to your local advertisers to actually sell the ads. ("Hey do you want to place an ad on our site for 6 months for $500? I'll take you out for pizza & beer if you're interested so we can talk details.") You're not going to sell display ads to Amazon, but you might for your local gaming shop.
Depends on your product/service category. There are sole operators making $x0k/mo from Amazon's affiliate program because they picked an overlooked category and promoted big ticket items. 5% of a $15 book is a pittance, but 5% of something that's $x00 is a different story.
My company's blog does this for related products that we don't personally sell in our online shop. It's good to the tune for $10k/year without trying much, but you have to get good at writing the copy into real blog posts, not just random spam. It works pretty well. Conversion rate post-click of about 8.5% this month.
That would work for an independently wealthy individual blogger. Otherwise for a blog with a sales team with aspirational dreams, when the Flash SSD advertiser expresses interest in advertising, he'll go for the deal to make his commission. As the owner of the blog, you block enough such deals, and you'll have yourself a never ending sales exodus
That would be an idea for an alternate ad network. Simply let website owners select ads, every week, to be displayed. Or in order to scale better, create pre-agreements for some brands.
Ad networks work by letting you select categories, but not much more. Obviously that's because they want to keep control and maximize short-term revenues.
>> "That would be an idea for an alternate ad network. Simply let website owners select ads, every week, to be displayed. Or in order to scale better, create pre-agreements for some brands."
Unfortunately, you have just reinvented publisher-direct deals, a mainstay of many ad networks for the past decade.
Ah sweet, it's that one commenter who can prescribe the absolute correct answer to very complex situations with a couple of simple platitudes! Since you seem to be in a mood to drop the correct answer, maybe you can help me with some difficult decisions I'm facing:
what programming language should I use?
what should the next move of my business be?
is she really the one, or should I move on?
Regardless of how good your advice is, proscribing a thing for every possible complex situation with the wave of a hand is disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst.
I won't speak to the sarcasm-as-argument response, but I will say that there is a sentiment behind it that I do agree with.
I say - with differing commentary after the first 4-5 sentences - in every class I teach:
"I don't like the phrase 'best practice'. I won't use it. It's presumptuous and condescending. What's best for me might suck for you. Who am I to know your business requirements? There is only one true 'best practice', in my view, and that is simply to have practices that you and your team follow that serve to further your business goals and meet your business requirements. SharePoint isn't a best practice, but a system to support a corporate culture of collaboration or information sharing is a practice that many businesses can agree with. jQuery isn't a best practice, but using a framework that improves your team's productivity and helps it to meet your business' requirements - that's a good practice to follow."
We need a new phrase that gets the point across without the cognitive burden of being condescending and presumptuous. Consensus practice? Common practice? Popular practice? I don't know. But I know that "best" is a superlative that is too often used to disguise a marketing goal or to dazzle the listener/reader into accepting the superiority of the person using it.
Depending on how it's used, I find "idiomatic" to be useful. Built into the meaning is that it may not translate to other areas, and most people understand that while it is a useful shorthand to making something succinct and expressive, you fall back to other things when it doesn't match well.
Traditionally (at least I've first heard these phrases in a business context) "best practice" describes what very successful businesses do and "common practice" describes what the average business does.
I ignore this distinction and have just replaced "best practice" with "common practice" since I pretty much always want to say something along the lines of "this is how a lot of people do it, there's good reasons for it (list of reasons) but everything depends on context so critically reflect if it makes sense to follow these practices or not on an individual basis"
Not the comment parent, but I can also prescribe absolutely correct answers to complex situations via simple platitudes. There's a Udacity course on it, I highly advise taking it, but since it takes so little time I'll just answer these questions for you.
>what programming language should I use?
Haskell.
>what should the next move of my business be?
If you're not in a Series C, growth hack; if you've done your Series C, look into the Caymans.
>is she really the one, or should I move on?
Have a divorce attorney on retainer, be ready to delete your Facebook account at a moment's notice, and ideally start going to the gym now, but with those preparations in mind pursue her as if she's the one.
>Regardless of how good your advice is, proscribing a thing for every possible complex situation with the wave of a hand is disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst.
This isn't a question and I don't understand how to respond to it.
That's true, but I think in general if we had someone else making our decisions for us (obviously this is completely undesirable) they'd mostly be correct. Emotion plays a huge role in what we do, many times a negative role.
Intent-driven ads are far more relevant to a site's audience than hand-picked, static ones. They have much higher CTR and conversion rates, when done right. You're asking sites to remove sources of income that people find relevant in exchange for ads that some higher up in marketing thinks relates to its users.
Not all publishers subscribe to the low quality Google AdExchange. In fact, they typically have a variety of ad bids, and the highest bidding ads are chosen for placement programmatically.
Edit: I just visited vogue.com. Guess who served me my ad? doubleclick. It was relevant and I bet it was programmatic. Programmatic does not mean random. Ad placement programs have a lot more data to work with than any individual at the publisher. There's a lot more sense to it than manual prediction
> remove sources of income that people find relevant in exchange for ads that some higher up in marketing thinks relates to its users.
Yes, that's a move toward integrity and away from endangerment and excess income.
If "some higher up in marketing" doesn't understand their users, the problem is they're out-of-touch and that should be corrected, as opposed to endangering user's privacy.
Currently, my tiny site operates this way, with hand-chosen Amazon ads and no google Adwords.
If you have an interest in the 3rd party web, you should have an interest in a functional ad technology industry. The market might just drive small publishers out of business. Or drive them and their customers to walled-gardens, so we'll be reading their content on Facebook, being served Facebook ads.
And I'm not a fan of going back to AOL. But the ad tech industry and the "small publishing" industry is lazy and greedy. And I won't support them if they treat me like a product. If they don't I will support them.
I'd like to see Netflix for written content and I'd pay for it.
There are lots of automatic ways to make money like this, even more so on the cost side of a business. They are always going to look great on a spreadsheet but what you're missing is the opportunity cost of all the people that are turned off by the experience. They will fade away in a manner that's harder to measure than CTR.
I suppose that the decrease in daily / weekly / monthly audience is easily detectable.
Probably it's not very realistic to hand-pick individual ads, unless you run a very niche site. Probably it's still realistic to hand-pick the automatic ad streams you'd agree to show. I suspect the major ad networks allow you to be quite specific.
Does this become less true the more niche the website is? People who read my math blog should be served ads for technical things (math books, online courses, etc), regardless of recent search history.
In reality, I have a math blog with ads for Cap'n Crunch cereal and strange new yogurts which seem very distracting and poorly-targeted when compared to, say, ads for O'Reilly math/CS books or a MOOC on probability and statistics.
Podcasts do this very thing and it's lucrative enough for the lot of them to stay afloat while providing great content. The only thing I'd say sucks about it is the price for curated ads are probably prohibitively high compared to highly targeted, algorithmically picked ones.
> Intent-driven ads are far more relevant to a site's audience than hand-picked, static ones. They have much higher CTR and conversion rates, when done right.
Not in my experience. My hand-picked ads are alway at a higher CTR than programmatic. Intent-driven programmatic gives me a 2x CTR over random static ads. Hand tuned gives me about 10x more CTR.
You may be able to optimize down a set of hand-picked ads programmatically, but you still need that manual curation in the process.
More important is losing your audience to a bad user experience via programmatic ads when they visit your site.
Also, I'm pretty sure Vogue or the advertisers use DoubleClick as just the ad hosting network for analytic purposes. They are likely sold on a display basis in Vogue.
In my understading the author doesn´t have any problems with programmatic ads. He has a problem with tech companies using the same tech like programmatic ads, ignoring the laws and the right of users, helping goverments to bypass the laws and the right of users, camping billions abroad to avoid paying taxes but at the same time investing in important projects solving burning issues like the search for immortality or nuking other planets.
Why would Vogue show an SSD ad at all? What does Vogue know about SSDs? Nothing. Why would I think that an ad for SSDs on Vogue tells me anything about the quality of the SSD they're hocking? It's non-information and communicates nothing about the product beyond the fact that it exists. Anyone who knows what an SSD is knows where they can buy an SSD - what I really want to know is which SSD should I buy and an SSD ad on Vogue doesn't give me any information in that regard.
Your complaints have nothing to do with Vogue, but with the uselessness of an ad in general. Even if a site were talking about SSDs, you wouldn't need an ad to tell you about them, would you?
Ad networks at the moment seem to mostly provide the service of showing me pictures of things I have bought, just in case I forgot that I already own them.
Ads can also communicate something about the quality of a branch/product based on how much the ad cost to run and which publication chose to run the ad. This is no substitute for a review, but if I see a non-targeted ad for an SSD in a tech publication that chooses ads based on what it thinks is good (I'm describing The Deck basically) it at least assures me that this SSD is not a hunk of garbage. Again this is not a lot, but a targeted ad tells me nothing.
On the flip side of this, if Vogue let any old crap run as advertising in their magazine this would be a form of reputation mining - trading their good name (earned after years of operation) for some short-term profit, but no-one bats an eye when the same thing happens online even though it's subtly devaluing online properties that do the same.
I think that's precisely his point; even if Vogue has an ad network with highly accurate data that points you being interested in SSDs, Vogue is probably not the right place to put that ad. It's kind of a philosophical question - do you want to see ads that are relevant to your primary interests at ALL TIMES, or do you want to see ads that are relevant to the interests of where you are. There are, let's simplistically say, three classes of ads:
1. Old Internet - Pages curate and/or sell whatever ads they can possibly get. They are generally statically hosted assets.
2. Original Ad Networks - They don't know anything about you, but it removes the need for pages to individually make ad contracts. You'll get whatever ads are in the queue, possibly sorted by rough groupings; "technology" ads, etc.
3. Current Situation - Everywhere you go you are presented with ads relevant to your interests, regardless of your current site. Vogue might try to show SSD ads or car parts ads, even though that's not the kind of content you would go to Vogue to consume.
I think there's an interesting case to be made that clickthrough decreases can be at least partially attributed to the fact that as tracking increases the probability that the ad represents the content of the site decreases and becomes an even more unwelcome distraction. Sponsored content is a way to defeat this, and ad blocking, by making the advertising appear more in line with the content of the site (or is it making the content of the site more in line with the advertising?).
I would love to do this on my personal blog, but how? I'm just a guy with a niche Wordpress blog who doesn't have the time to negotiate and search for ad deals.
What I really want is a service that can match me with advertising firms based on the content of my site, and do the negotiations for me. And give me a means with which to contest ads if I find they're not appropriate, or the matching itself if I discover my matched company is doing something immoral.
There are a few minor, but significant differences between this and programmatic ads. Do those differences make it good, or at least neutral? Does such a company exist?
Maybe I can crowdsource some help from here then - My SO has a food blog [1] which it would be nice if it were self sustaining (so ~$30USD/month for domains/hosting). She's just put up Amazon affiliate links on select articles and is still working on building traffic.
Should I stay away from AdSense? Where am I going to find the ads to "hand-pick"?
A wise thing to do with sites like these is to procure the cheapest hosting you can (for a static or wordpress site, think $2 a month) and similarly cheap domain provision (although the prices don't vary so much for these). With the right provider the users will not think that the site is noticeably slower and you won't need such high monetisation targets to break even. Then, as the site gains traffic, simply scale the level of hosting accordingly.
Don't tell us here on hackernews or any other geek forum. Go to a RNC or DNC event. Go convince Trump and/or Hillary that corporations and rich people should pay 1950s-style tax rates. Go sit in front of wealthy old people and suggest socialism for the benefit of the young. Go tell the afraid and well-armed that they need to spend less money being so afraid and well-armed. Make sure to bring your running shoes.
You're forgetting that we do things that nobody understands and nobody else can do. We can't raise taxes on the rich, sure, but we're uniquely armed to provide technical feedback for legal decisions.
I have not found one yet; I do not believe one has been posted at the moment. But, I would love to see the actual talk and the Q&A as well. Here's hoping one gets posted.
> If they could get away with it, they would demand that you have webcam turned on, to make sure you are human. And to track your eye movements, and your facial expression, and round and round we go.
The window of acceptability needs to shift a couple of times (just a couple) before this happens.
The tech is already on the roadmap for set top boxes and roku-type devices to scan the room for wifi and Bluetooth devices in order to determine how many many people (and who) are in the room, and tailor the ads accordingly.
But the point I made with the story is what the end user has in his hands. Although a handful of website owners can change their own perspective to use valid ads in their own house but for the end user. .? Should be made with some better solutions for the end user.
I only sort of get it. What does the idea of reining in advertisers run amok have to do with accepting socialism as the one true government? The connection seems tenuous.
His point is that this is a larger symptom of Silicon Valley having a bad sense of how to improve peoples lives or what's important. This was my least favorite part of the talk and it was my least favorite part of the talk when he touched on the same theme in "Web Design: The First 100 Years"[0].
>But we expect that people will trust us to reinvent their world with software even though we can't make our own city livable.
Where does it propose "socialism as the one true government"?
>I would urge you to get back in touch with this side of yourselves, climb in the longboats, and impose modern, egalitarian, Scandinavian-style social democracy on the rest of us at the point of a sword.
It is only in the United States that "modern Scandinavian-style social democracy" is apparently indistinguishable from socialism.
Socialism means large-scale state ownership -- or some other kind of collective ownership by The People -- of "the means of production", in the hope of controlling production to match need. Scandinavian-style social democracy means high taxes, a generous welfare state, and quite a lot of government regulation, in the hope of keeping people safe, healthy, and adequately fed and housed. You might worry that there might be a slippery slope from the latter to the former, but they aren't at all the same.
Its kind of like how countries with "Democratic" in the name usually aren't democracies. Or "Peoples" in the name usually means the general public are not even remotely in charge. Politically, names don't mean much.
They do when everyone else agrees. They call themselves socialist, other people call them socialist, and their policies match most definitions of socialism.
Tell me again why you think we shouldn't rightfully classify many European parties as socialist?
Perhaps 'gjm11 is caught on Pinker's euphemism treadmill? If "socialist" is no longer a word we can use in polite company, how will we signify that political and economic arrangement?
I don't think I'm caught on the euphemism treadmill; I have no problem describing some systems and some people as socialist. (And, for the avoidance of doubt, I don't regard it as an insult to do so.) I just don't think it applies accurately to Scandinavian-style social democracy.
That's reasonable. If you wouldn't mind, you could help understanding by pointing to particular aspects of the Scandinavian style that disqualify the "socialist" classification. After all, there are some people on HN who unironically describe USA as "socialist".
Many European parties have things like "social democratic" in their name. They advocate social-democrat politics.
Some European parties have "socialist" in their name. They mostly advocate socialist politics.
The social democrats have typically had more electoral success than the socialists. That is why the nations of Europe frequently implement social democracy and less often implement socialism.
So, e.g., none of the parties currently represented in the Swedish parliament has "socialist" in its name, but the largest is the "Swedish Social Democratic Party". (There is a "Left Party", which I think is an actually socialist party.)
In Denmark there is a party called the "Social Democrats" which is, guess what?, a social democratic party; there is also a (much smaller) "Socialist People's Party" further to the left. I think that one is actually a leftier social democratic party, but then Denmark also has a centre-right party called "Left" :-).
Norway's main social-democrat party is called the Labour Party, but they also have a "Socialist Left Party" which is actually socialist.
It's the blog of Maciej Cegłowski, somewhat famous in certain circles for running successful one-man business Pinboard [1]. His blog posts end up on here pretty often too [2].
Personally, the title just told me that it's probably one of those "you won't believe what happens next" YouTube videos.
The URL told me that it's probably a talk (maybe about that category of videos?) using words that don't do anything.
Skimming the first screen worth of text led me to the conclusion that it must be about privacy or hacking.
And here I see comments about advertising?! Two or three words, one being "Talk", the other being whatever this is actually about, would have helped tremendously here.
I think you have been trolled. I was pleasantly surprised to skim this page and find that most of the threads were not devoted to the clickbaitedness of the title; most people got the joke. Yes buzzfeed-style titles are awful but most of us know that already.
When websites become regulated web developers will be like the general contractors of today. Only licensed web developers will be able to legally build websites, keeping everything up to the regulatory code. There will be inspectors and red tape.
I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
Building codes are there for a reason. Have we had our equivalent of Tacoma Narrows or Triangle Shirtwaist yet? The event that Schneier said would be the "privacy Exxon Valdez"? Possibly the OPM hack qualifies as the latter.
Provided we get codes that recognise the difference between personal, small business, and large business, it won't be so bad.
You cite two examples against privacy, but not the EU (mostly) pro-privacy data protection rulings. Or accessibility requirements.
In the long term trying to preserve privacy entirely through guerilla action isn't going to work (see China), and it certainly isn't going to work for everyone, so we need to take advantage of the normal democratic channels to achieve the right changes.
It's interesting you say this. My father-in-law has worked in a number of quite heavily regulated industries (heating and building, for the most part), and often refers to what I do as being "the wild west". I think he mostly views it as a positive and regularly talks about making hay whilst the sun is shining...
Well, in the US at least, there is a homeowner exemption, meaning that you can do the work unlicensed as the homeowner, it still has to be inspected though.
The effective inspection requirements vary. In rural areas outside of city limits (with the possible exception of really wealthy counties) no remodel is inspected ever. In suburban areas outside of city limits inspection is more likely if plumbing or electricity is involved, but is by no means universal. My impression is that most severe problems are caught by the home inspectors that mortgage lenders require.
Brilliant - I am starting to draft the regulations as a test of the viability (please see http://blog.paul-Brian.com) but the one I really want to try is the GPL version of privacy law.
I guess if we’re returning to a simpler age then all ads are display ads & rates are set by guesstimating website reach using old school methods: things like actually going out and surveying your target audience to see how many of them actually read the site in question.
If the new normal is “We've sold our customer’s privacy and personal data to the highest bidder and yet we’re still wasting 50% of our ad spend & have allowed a faceless Silicon Valley company to insert itself in between us and our customers.” then the old way of doing things suddenly looks quite attractive by comparison.
Especially the part about fighting against the tobacco industry. It really made me realize that this is a fight that can be won. I honestly thought this was a lost battle.
It will, however, be a more subtle battle as the advertising industry (Big Ads ?) cannot be linked to something as clearly detremental as lung cancer and will be quick to point out that the technology developped can help fight terrorism (a winning buzzword bingo if ther's ever been one) by identifying behavior on the internet, including so-called dangerous ones.
One of my biggest frustrations with the people working to improve politics (Lessig is probably most famous among tech crowd) is that their constant refrain of how "rigged" the system is, turns out to be highly counterproductive. Instead of mobilizing people to action, it instead sends most people--like you--into apathetic despair.
Why? Because it's easy to be apathetic. This is not a knock on you personally, it's a statement on the human condition. Most people just don't feel like they have the free bandwidth (time, money, energy) to take on a big ideological fight, particularly if they think they can't win anyway.
But the truth is that the last 100 years of history is chock full of amazing stories of victories in just such fights.
I'm most familiar with U.S. history so I'll just highlight a few:
- 100 years takes us back to the beginning of the modern labor movement. Viciously opposed by well-funded industry and government forces, it nevertheless succeeded in massively shifting social norms and installing numerous laws and regulations to protect workers. It is still a strong force today.
- 60 years takes us back to the births of the modern civil rights and environmental movements. Like labor, they were out funded by huge margins, but still changed the world through shifting social norms and numerous laws and regulations. Both are still powerful movements today.
- We only need to look back about 30 years to see the birth of the modern LGBT movement, whose victories are in our headlines today. That movement will undoubtedly continue to be a powerful force in American society for decades to come, at least.
Now take a look at those timelines... 30 years is the most recent. The tobacco victories were on a similar timeline. Nothing comes quick and easy when we're talking about moving the opinions and laws of an entire nation. But is the fight winnable? YES! The evidence says it is.
Damn those crazy fools wasting their millions making electric cars into a reality and trying to get to Mars.
We should just spend that money on like... I dunno. Better park benches or something. That'll solve everything.
I'm so tired of this shit. Aren't you tired of this shit?
Yes I am.
There are systemic problems causing the issues in San Francisco; what's your solution to that problem?
The only thing I don't want to do is to raise the white flag.
I refuse to believe that this cramped, stifling, stalkerish vision of the
commercial Internet is the best we can do.
> We should just spend that money on like... I dunno. Better park benches or something. That'll solve everything.
How about ending hunger worldwide? It's mostly a distribution problem nowadays. Or what about providing things like sanitation, electricity or some form of education for each and everyone on this planet?
I guess what I want to say is that there are much, much more elemental things to spend your money on than "better park benches", even if one does not see the need to go to Mars in the short way.
>How about ending hunger worldwide? It's mostly a distribution problem nowadays.
It's also incentives problem if you are not all in communist. If you simply send food from Europe to Africa, it disincentives food production in Africa. Which causes unemployment and hinders economic growth with it. And it also causes huge security of supply problem and might cause starvation if something happens to the shipping.
My best idea is to turn foreign aid into basic income. If you would send dollar/day/person to everybody in Africa, this would make African agriculture more profitable than ever before, security of supply would be good and hunger would end. Inflation would rise too, but with so much good money in circulation you would see booming private sector in no time despite this.
I'm sure this will work brilliantly, considering that no one who needs your money there has a bank account or credit card. Cash also won't work due to the tiny problem of all the warlords and corrupt government/police/military/paramilitary taking all this money away by force.
The only way to make a shit place better for people, is if some rich guy finds an investment opportunity there, that as a side effect, might directly benefit workers. Spoon feeding people, in the long run, does nothing good. No matter how much money you have to donate (it's finite).
So, the only way to improve the world is to wait for rich people to exploit something and try to pick up the scraps? I don't think I can agree with that one.
Cash has been invented. They also don't have mail addresses but still some people suggest sending food.
I supposed a way to give aid. No matter what way you choose the warlords and corrupt governments are going to be huge problem.
The best way to help so far has been private investing. But it doesn't matter if the investor is single rich guy or bunch of average westerners. That's how stock works. But the warlords are again a problem. During the past 50 years, western "help" has done probably more harm than good. But that doesn't mean we are unable to ever do any good. As far as I understand, that UBI idea has been only once for limited time, and it looked like it could be a success.
It would be great if we could incentivize the warlords to behave. We should start from a country that's relatively safe and where the locals can anonymously report if they got to keep the money. Despite such country not being the absolutely poorest one. This should turn out for the best once more restless countries figure out they could be collecting fat taxes from the imported goods. If they just settle down.
Western governments and corporations reinforce crony, incompetent governments in developing countries so that their resources can be exploited.
These crony governments then steal (literally) from the population who need it. Until the poor governance issues are resolved, a lot of foreign aid is wasted.
Part of the problem there is ironically that African cultures often look after each other. If somebody becomes a doctor, then it's expected that s/he feeds pretty big part of the extended family. This disincentives getting good salary, you want to get just slightly above average.
And that's why you get biggest impact by sharing the money as evenly as possible.
> Jean Ziegler, U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, alerted the more than 500 delegates that while 854 million people went without food in the world last year, enough food was produced to feed 12 billion people. "This is why a child that dies from famine is murder," Ziegler said.
> Food is being over-produced in industrialised countries where some 349 billion dollars have been spent on agricultural subsidies for a minority of people. Only 2.5 percent of the French and 4.9 percent of the Swiss population are farmers, said Ziegler.
> "You can go to the Dakar market (in Senegal) and find Spanish, French, German and Italian fruit and vegetables at half or one-third of the local prices. The African farmers work 15 hours a day but they cannot compete with subsidies. This is systematically destroying Africa's agriculture," he pointed out.
> "Nothing is being done about the dumping policy. The Third World is feeding us (Europeans). That is what is keeping this system in place."
> Ziegler called the International Monetary Fund (IMF) the "mercenary organisation of the financial oligarchies that dominate the world".
> Löpfe: Why is it that Africa is the continent where most people starve and which imports more than a quarter of its food supply?
> Ziegler: Because the colonial pact is still enforced.
> Löpfe: Isn't this a bit too simple? Colonialism has been over for more than half a century.
> Ziegler: But there still is a small upper class, dependent on rich countries, and extremely corrupt. Again Senegal: The country exports peanuts and at the same time imports three quarters of its food requirements.
> Löpfe: Why?
Ziegler: Because the colonial pact was never broken. The Senegalese farmers are forced to grow and exports peanuts because the revenue serves to pay for foreign debt. At the same time, Europe sells its food surplus at dumping prices on the African markets. How can a small farmer survive under these conditions?
> Löpfe: African farmers are not very productive. Their productivity is less than 10 percent of Europe's agriculture. Are they not just lazy?
> Ziegler: On the contrary. Nobody works harder than farmers in Africa. They just cannot thrive because they are not supported: no irrigation, no seed, no draft animals, no tractors, no fertilizer, nothing.
And there you finally get to the heart of it. African farmers cannot invest in capital improvements upon farmland and farming equipment because they cannot be certain they will be able to recoup that investment with greater productivity over time.
If you build a farm that is as productive as a European farm, you are still only one coup, rebellion, election, criminal-at-large, or corrupted official away from losing it. I don't know what the best solutions to that may be, because I'm not African, and therefore lack the necessary cultural knowledge to do anything productive. Anything I might suggest would be flawed by my expectations that Africans will behave somewhat like Americans.
> Armchair social commentary doesn't cut it for me.
If you'd consider to argue a bit less aggressive and just a but more nuanced, I would in turn consider a serious answer to your arguments. As it stands I am one of the people who can "categorically get lost" for you. Not because I criticize people who are changing the world, but the priorities of some of those people and social structures which ensure that mostly white, western men are in the position to change the world.
I'm not going to argue that there are problems in the world...
...but pointing to Elon Musk as one of those is ridiculous.
It's talking straight down the 'space, who needs it? We should spend that money on earth instead' trope, which has been, repeatedly, and in many many places, shown to be a completely hollow and invalid argument. We don't need to debate this. Go speak to the people at NASA; they've been having this conversation for the last 60 years.
When you taint the message you're trying to get across with this sort of trope, it actively harms your ability to convey a meaningful message.
There's truth in that, but in Musk's case, he's already done a great deal for the world with Tesla and SpaceX. If Mars is what he wants to do with the rest of his money, that is his choice. Certainly better than what certain other billionaires are doing with theirs.
Tesla has shown that electric cars can be both viable and cool. Even if if Tesla itself remains a niche car, Tesla should get the credit if/when in the future electric cars become the norm.
In addition Tesla is betting big on making better batteries. If they can pull that off then that will end up being their true legacy with the whole car thing becoming a neat historical footnote.
As for SpaceX they'll go down in history as pioneers of commercial space flight and wherever future commercial companies decide to take us, they'll all point back at SpaceX as the company that first showed that it could be done.
Well. If SpaceX succeeds in its goal of making putting things in space significantly cheaper, they could enable a lot of nasty things like weapons in space, global surveillance systems, increased use of military drones etc.
I guess that your opinion. The point is when you change the variables you change the outcome and it won't magically be for the better, especially since there's little precedence. It's pointless to loose karma over this on HN though when I can and regularly do talk about it with actual aerospace engineers.
I will certainly concede that there are scenarios where it works out to be for the worse. However I don't believe that any of those scenarios involve military weapon platforms. I am however more than happy to hear arguments as to why I am wrong.
If those "microwave weapons" end up enabling the killing of millions of people (like e.g. nuclear weapons can wipe out the whole earth), then those left will be right to say:
"Hmm, maybe we were better off without microwave technology after all. In fact, just because we can make something, probably doesn't mean that we should make it".
Sure, it's always a concern. Just because we make something doesn't mean that we should use it. So you've already got that ethical dilemma covered on the basis of usage, if not invention.
On the other hand, if you don't develop technology, you'll never know if it will be used for good, and you'll never see the advantages if it is. And failing to develop something does nothing to prevent someone else from developing it later. If something is possible, you want to be the one making it possible, not the one cowering in fear while someone else forges on ahead.
I don't see any problem in considering the good and bad of any technology, its implementation and its effects. I would say it's good engineering practice if anything.
More than anything I think premature, excessive and/or misguided credit is damaging to engineering and entrepreneurship. It shifts the focus from knowledge and creativity to adoration and exceptionalism. Quite opposite the mindset of Musk himself.
I don't think Musk has proven anything yet but has given people some hope that things are certainly possible.
I genuinely don't believe we need electric cars though at all. We need less travel and transport and redistribution of facilities and skills. That's a much bigger problem. At the moment, the hub/spoke and centralised model of society has no redundancy and providing ubiquitous cheap transport isn't going to solve that, just make the problem hang on longer by forcing people to remain sitting on their butts on a freeway in a slightly better car rolling into a job they could probably do at home or doesn't need it exist anyway.
Also batteries need to be filled up, recycled, disposed of still. We'll see how that goes shall we...
SpaceX isn't fundamentally changing the model of anything, just packaging the same turd differently. That might be to build capital (customers = capital) but there isn't anything fundamentally different to what they are doing at the 10,000ft level. ESA have had a similar model for a couple of decades.
> SpaceX isn't fundamentally changing the model of anything, just packaging the same turd differently. That might be to build capital (customers = capital) but there isn't anything fundamentally different to what they are doing at the 10,000ft level. ESA have had a similar model for a couple of decades.
Of course they are. The whole point of everything they do is to cut down the costs of launching things into space by 2-3 orders of magnitude, which itself is just a step towards their real goal, i.e. Mars. They're pretty straightforward about it.
As much as I'd love to own a Tesla car and it does show a lot of innovation in the right direction, it's still a luxury sports car that only few very rich people can own.
If he built an electric car for the masses, that would be a big deal for the world.
Of course he's pushing inovation, but he still hasn't done "a great deal for the world".
Maybe he caused some changes in the US, I'm not in a position to see that, but saying he changed the world is quite a stretch
> If he built an electric car for the masses, that would be a big deal for the world.
This is exactly Tesla's goal with the Model 3, targeted at $35,000.
I don't think you understand the amount of time and money required to reach mass production scale of affordable vehicles. Tesla was very wise to start with high-margin sports and luxury cars, because it gives them the capital needed to continue re-investing in production capacity and battery technology for more affordable cars in the future.
Tesla is playing a long game, and so far it's working. The popularity of Tesla alone has driven other auto makers to step up their electric car game, which is indeed a "great deal for the world" to help get us all off combustion engines.
Agreed that maybe the luxury car is the right way to start his attempt with a healthy cash flow.
In fact, I'm a big fan of people like him, who have the money and instead of just playing the markets to get more of it, he uses it to build something that can eventually help us.
The main reason for my comment was that some people idolize him like he has cured cancer or erradicated world hunger. These people should to take a step back :)
You could say the same thing about cellular telephones, which once upon a time were also luxury items that only very rich people could own. If they hadn't gone through the "here's a fancy thing for the rich" phase they never would have reached the "here's an affordable thing for everyone" phase.
> Billionaires are prescriptive. "I will solve this problem".
That's good, and that's sort of the point of getting money, is it not? We should encourage those who are rich to pursue goals beneficial to everyone. They have the ability to achieve things no "democratic" groups (and countries) can, because the latter are plagued with coordination problems.
Yes, I thought that both this line, and the Peter Thiel reference about giving women the vote, were intellectually dishonest.
"Then he outlined his plan to detonate nuclear weapons on Mars."
This deliberately takes the quote out of context to make it seem silly.
Thiel wasn't "complaining" about the extension of the franchise. He was simply making the historical observation that women are a hard constituency for libertarians to convince.
"Then he outlined his plan to detonate nuclear weapons on Mars."
This isn't a new idea - Kim Stanley Robinson mentions nukes being used to melt underground polar ice in his Mars trilogy.
After all, we'd all think using nukes to move an asteroid on a collision course with Earth was a good idea - so its not like a "harmless" use of a nuke is impossible.
Musk just said that there are 2 options how to warm up Mars: the fast way and the slow way, Colbert asked about the fast way so Musk mentioned Thermonuclear weapons.
IMO the quote in the presentation is not honest.
I don't think it was uncalled for. It takes into account that the target reader/listener is up on current events (the Musk quote from Colbert) and is in on the joke that it is an exaggeration, but one that parodies itself.
In the long run, writers (and presenters) must take the risk and assume that their audience is intelligent and informed, lest we be left with lowest common denominator dreck.
> In a television interview this week, Musk said: "I'm trying to do useful things." Then he outlined his plan to detonate nuclear weapons on Mars.
> These people are the face of our industry.
It's hard to take the rest of the article seriously when the author is purposely misquoting people to make them look bad. The comment in question was said on Late Night with Stephen Colbert, when asked what the fast way to heat up Mars would be, as he posited several methods to do it. He later indicated that nuclear bombs would not be the preferred method.
He makes the point that SF area technologists should prioritize fixing the city problems over space technology. You may disagree (I do), but it's not sufficient reason for dismissing the whole article (which is insightful IMO).
Musk is doing more for improving lives than most, with jumpstarting the transition to electric cars, and pushing solar power hard. And one of the complaints in the article is "you can't even get a decent internet connection" and guess what one of Musk's big projects with SpaceX is!
But he ignores all of that, and concentrates entirely on a single offhanded remark by the guy. That's incredibly dishonest.
And if he's that dishonest about Musk, what about the others he discusses? I don't know them well enough to say whether they're being fairly represented or not. But I do know that I can't trust the author to get it right.
Although the parent to your response has been deleted, your response is one of the most idlewords-ish shutdowns of a heckler I could ever hope to see. Bugs Bunny couldn't've said it better!
The entire article is written to be humorous, but that's doesn't mean he doesn't have a point here. Namely, this mindless pursuit of space is hilariously culture-deaf because in the end, if all these miracles somehow come to pass, we'll just bring our stupid problems with us to our colonies. In a few generations we'll have homeless people on Mars and a tech bubble exploding there as well.
If we can't fix these problems locally, how do we expect to fix them remotely?
The article most definitly does not have a (valid) point here. Idlewords is painting Elon as a bored billionaire who wants to nuke Mars because he has nothing better to do. It's completely ignoring both the reasons (and context) of the quote, and the fact that said 'bored billionaire' makes good and impactful progress in three important big problems of humanity - namely, energy safety, transportation and access to space.
Even what you call "mindless pursuit of space" isn't so; SpaceX aims for space for known, well-thought and well-defined reasons. It's not just fueled by imagination.
SpaceX is COTS welfare for LEO launches to the soon to be retired ISS. It is not on track for Mars colonization. Its utility is vastly exaggerated by the types of people who read HN and reddit. While it is impressive, it is just cheaper launches for certain edge cases. Colonization and terraforming other worlds is pure fiction right now and going on TV and yelling about dropping nukes to make Mars human safe looks absolutely crazy to even educated people.
The article paints Musk fairly, as an out of touch dreamer with crazy ideas. He steps over homeless people to rush to television producers to spout off the same canned futurism we've been hearing for decades. His version is slightly more plausible, but it, of course, ignores all social issues; issues that will only follow us into space. The same way futurists predicted a moon landing but never imagine women would get to vote, for example.
Criticizing Musk for putting the cart before the horse is valid. Futurist talk is cheap and historically wrong. Men like Musk are the face of tech and its a little embarrassing to see stuff like this. Not to mention his hysterical tirades about how AI will enslave humanity.
Lastly, whats my incentive to migrate to a new colony if its just going to have the same problems we have here on Earth?
> SpaceX is COTS welfare for LEO launches to the soon to be retired ISS. It is not on track for Mars colonization.
That's a very cynical view based on... I don't even know exactly. NASA is not the only customer of SpaceX, LEO doesn't end with ISS, and the path towards Mars was laid more-less explicitly since day one. They're on track, even if behind the schedule.
> The article paints Musk fairly, as an out of touch dreamer with crazy ideas. He steps over homeless people to rush to television producers to spout off the same canned futurism we've been hearing for decades. His version is slightly more plausible, but it, of course, ignores all social issues; issues that will only follow us into space. The same way futurists predicted a moon landing but never imagine women would get to vote, for example.
That smells strongly of copenhagen interpretation of ethics[0]. So Musk is trying to solve a problem (or three problems) for humanity, and suddenly he has to be responsible for all the problems? Why aren't we criticizing Bill Gates here for helping Africans fight malaria instead of helping Americans fight homelesness at home? Also; SpaceX, Tesla and Solar City are creating jobs. Which counts for doing something towards the problem. What exactly are people criticizing Musk here doing themselves for the homeless?
> If we can't fix these problems locally, how do we expect to fix them remotely?
That seems at odds with centuries of human existence. Nations, cultures, and people have migrated, immigrated, expanded, and contracted for a very long time. A hyper-local focus is (probably) just as toxic as a hyper-global focus, no?
>Eighty years of effective technical regulation (and massive penalties for fraud) have made commercial aviation the safest form of transportation in the world.
De Havilland comet crashes and the ensuing bankruptcy probably is the real reason why flying is safe.
Usually when regulating succeeds, the industry is with the government trying to get loose guns back in the line.
"The RSDLP later split into Majority and Minority factions, with the Majority (in Russian: "Bolshevik") faction eventually becoming the Communist Party of the Soviet Union."
The big difference between VCs and state central planners is that VCs are voluntarily given the money that they use. In Poland it was taken under threat of force.
And the homeless problem in San Francisco, and the other problems it faces, are mostly due to poor governance rather than Facebook or Google.
If you own a real or near monopoly on a service that I must use for work, school, my health, etc I'm not fucking voluntarily giving you money. There's this misconception in capitalism that everything is optional - just don't buy it if you don't like it. Its wrong. I buy a lot of things I prefer not to from companies that sicken me, but I have no choice in the matter. There's no green or ethical tablet or green or ethical car, for example.
>I've also met people on the YouTube ads team, and they hate their lives and want to die.
Maybe those informational widgets that pop up when you Google suicide-related terms didn't actually arise from a sense of humanity or civic duty, but from a desire to reduce employee turnover in their ad divisions. /s
Macabre humor aside, I actually wonder if there's any organizations out there funding ads targeted at suicidal individuals. Search terms can only go so far, and ad networks have the ability to gain a far more complete picture. You'd almost think it's something ad networks would partner up on pro bono.
Moreover, it's not hard to imagine imperfect targeting being beneficial, e.g. a family member being alerted to a loved one's state of mind via receiving the ads themselves. Obviously there's quite a few ways such a scheme could backfire or otherwise have adverse effects, though it is interesting to contemplate.
Asking google for suicide topics usually starts off with a big info box (non-ad unit) of:
Need help? United States:
1 (800) 273-8255
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
Hours: 24 hours, 7 days a week
Languages: English, Spanish
Website: www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org
As for YouTube ad engineers, pretty much everybody on the planet knows forced pre-roll youtube ads are a bad idea. Nobody wants to watch them. So, the engineers implementing these things must be under corporate (read: clueless) pressure to crapify the user experience solely to appease management.
(edit: It's also hilarious how ad tech people refuse to recognize how evil and backwards their entire business models are. They vehemently defend, downvote, and mob-mentality their way through the cognitive dissonance of hurting hundreds of millions of users in exchange for retaining their jobs. Because, after all, if I'm doing the work, it can't be bad, right? I'm not a bad person, so the people arguing against me must be the evil ones.
One comment theme that seems to get instant downvotes on HN: the concept you are not entitled to track and record every client-side user action. So many people assume invasive tracing and recording of all user behavior is "just how the world works" and "if we don't do it, we'll fall behind." Kinda military-oligarchy mindset, isn't it? If we don't have all the power, who knows what people will do!)
It seems like anti-suicide ads would be mostly funded by the Ad Council, religious organizations, and non-profits.
When I switched my evil bit on, I came up with a company that helps you make your suicide look like an accident, so that your life insurance pays out, and no one perpetuates hateful memories of you for taking the easy exit.
The premium service makes your suicide look like a civil offense against you, so that your family may also win an additional settlement from a large corporation or government entity.
The extra-evil service matches you up with a demolitions engineer from a terrorist organization that most closely shares your values.
The morally questionable service matches you up with rich people awaiting organ transplants, who don't pay you to kill yourself, per se, but rather to enjoy the final moments of your life in the vicinity of a particular hospital, without being burdened by worry about the future financial needs of your loved ones.
And that's where I turned my evil bit off, because I was starting to creep myself out.
I don't understand the disdain for technically literate people shown a few times in the article. Solving the problems is the better solution but in the face of how impossible it is due to the changing landscape maybe it would be a good idea to educate tech illiterate people instead. I think it's a viable alternative with possible positive side-effects of getting enough momentum to make legal solutions possible as well.
Additionally, sad news is that there a lot of people who don't care about their privacy or the homeless however hard you find that to believe.
Heck America is Socialist by American standards. Sure, after the Great Depression we got half a dozen Socialist institutions, but I'm not talking about that.
Every cooperative preschool; every farmers' coop; every social club in America operates on Socialist principle. In private we love Socialism; in public we resist. No idea why.
In Soviet Russia we tried vice versa: to operate farm as a state.
Even today every business entity has to have specific person responsible for accounting, fire defence, labor health, energy efficiency etc even if you have just 1 employee and he is business owner.
If you write customer name and birday somewhere (or name + almost anything), you have to sign with him additional agreement about personal data. There you have to specify how you will use it. If you get blood type or any other health info - you will have to certify your datacenter, use open crypto and have specific responsible employees.
I don't want to speak for him but from his other writing I think idlewords has a fair idea (from personal experience) of what old fashioned central planning communism looks like.
For the record, there are lots of places on the socialism spectrum and many of them haven't deteriorated at all, and some of them look quite lovely...
I do not mind central planing. I like Soviet culture far more than Hollywood and CocaCola. I even can see myself a soviet soldier ready to defend homeland.
I just do not want to bring a Red Flag to evey corner of the world on a bayonet of my rifle. And that's it. Even if I bring free cookies and right to privacy with it.
There is no "socialism in one dedicated country". Socialism needs whole planet. Lenin said that pretty clear.
Shorter lines are easier to read. Not like this -- https://aws.amazon.com/message/5467D2/ -- which is impossible to read without narrowing your browser.
The company I work for is going to pivot towards re-targeting (we're making recommendation engines, now). So, I've come to explore a bit this new industry, and I am under the impression that it's completely rotten to the core. The reason? I have been in meetings where no one would blinked an eye (even, sometimes, applaud the idea) when people would ask if we could turn on a laptop's webcam, and read if a visitor have seen ads or not. If internet needs tighter regulatory control, please, let's begin with advertisers.
I don't think I can withstand working with that kind of people in the long term, this is really soul-destroying.
Ugh—sounds miserable. Sorry to hear that you're going through that. Of course it's easy for me to say from here, but I'd suggest getting out as quickly as you can.
There probably wasn't any logic to it. It was probably the equivilant of when a PM or not technical person asks a developer, "Can't we just put in an IF statement?"
It wouldn't, but one can sense some logic behind that question in this context. Additionally, advertisers are very familiar with dealing with heaps of unreliable information.
It's not secret Machiavellian billionaires running around shoving ad tracking upon us, it's ourselves just trying to get a tiny glint of social approval for out thinking everybody else without regard for consequences at scale.
And it's so easy. At a past company we once decided we'd test some assumptions about one of our forms by capturing keyboard events. As in, we added a handler for keypresses that'd call back to the server, so we could capture and play back exactly how users interacted with the form.
It provided some useful insights (one thing that surprised me was how bad people were at recognising and operating drop downs), but we very quickly (we got the idea, pushed it out, started looking at data, decided to stop doing it within a day) recognised that we'd been too quick to jump at the "cool, we can do this" factor and that even though it was beneficial, it was way too invasive.
E.g. while we might think that "it doesn't matter, it's a form on our page so we'll see the data anyway", of course that wasn't true when we actually thought about it:
The keyboard events meant that e.g. if a user cut and pasted something by accident, we'd see it, and that might include things like passwords from other sites. Or they might write something, change their mind and enter something else; explicitly withholding the original information from us. We didn't capture anything particularly private in the short amount of time it was live, but we saw enough changes (e.g. people changing contact phone numbers) that we thankfully recognised the problem before it became a real problem.
Or they might write something, change their mind and enter something else
Facebook explicitly does that (log every field input even if never "submitted") and uses unsubmitted thoughts to build more detailed models of you.
The "trace-per-character" behavior terrified me when Google Suggest first launched. It's a neat tech example, but there's no way people can understand "everything I type, live, as I type, will be recorded forever." Then they made it default Chrome bar and default google search behavior. Average users (heck, even technical users) have little idea how much data internet services capture about them though non-explicit interactions.
At least with live suggestions, people explicitly see that their keypresses are acted on, whether or not all of them understand that this means it is transmitted somewhere.
With a form with a submit button and no feedback indicating what's going on, it's a lot more insidious.
Oh, this is so ripe for being gamed. How long before some enterprising person implements a simple Javascript bookmarklet that populates the field with random words and phrases, then erases it all before you type your actual comment?
> I don't think I can withstand working with that kind of people in the long term, this is really soul-destroying.
Why are you working with them now?
I realized before I was even in industry that I didn't ever want to work for a company that received their income from advertising, and I haven't worked for one in my entire career. It hasn't always been easy to find jobs, but the jobs I did find actually tended to be a bit higher-paying.
Ads are sucking up a lot of the intelligence in our society and the only people who can stop them from doing that are intelligent people. If we refuse to work with advertisers they will suffer from the incompetence of the people they do hire.
These advertising proposals are actually surprisingly reasonable and acceptable. It's nice to see someone admitting that eliminating advertising entirely, or eliminating all JavaScript, is not a tenable goal.
Having worked at several publishers, this is actually an advertising model we could support. It would work better for users, publishers, and most advertisers. The only people who would lose out are the AdTech firms.
Unfortunately, I think getting there requires that the people who want this sort of thing start acting reasonable. Instead of constantly demanding the death of all JavaScript, or an end to a century-old business model, demand measured change like this.
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If you own a site, just curate a set of ads on your site that actually enhances your sites appeal. A fashion site should have matching fashion ads. A tech site should have matching tech ads. A local site should have matching local ads. Reach out to advertisers to get these ads. Never use an algorithm. You, as an editor, should be better than the algorithms. Ads are supposed to be useful to your audience, instead of being annoying. People buy fashion magazines - filled with 600 pages of ads- and Sunday newspapers BECAUSE of the ads. They should want to visit your website as well because of your ads.
The worst thing you can do for your site is to place out-of-context ads in the middle of your site. Can you imaging if Vogue.com decided to place Flash SSD ads on their site? This is how you destroy an audience, and as a publisher, your number one concern should be to grow your audience.
Once you curate a set of ads for your site, you'll find that click-through rates and conversion are far higher than random programmatic ads. You should know your audience, and the kind of ads that would appeal to them. Mark ads as content in your CMS. This avoids ad-blockers.
Curating ads is how advertising has always worked, and will continue to work, after all these programmatic garbage goes away.
I was going to hand select things on Amazon that my players would be interested in. Science Fiction books, dvd box sets, that kind of thing. Then present them to the players with my affiliate code where I would normally show a google ad.
I didn't fully implement the idea because I think the affiliate rewards are so small I was worried the math didn't make it worthwhile. But I'd still like to try one day.
You're really supposed to curate display ads. But, this means you'll have to make the call to your local advertisers to actually sell the ads. ("Hey do you want to place an ad on our site for 6 months for $500? I'll take you out for pizza & beer if you're interested so we can talk details.") You're not going to sell display ads to Amazon, but you might for your local gaming shop.
Once you have your audience, it becomes easier to sell ads this way.
If you're a content farm then rock on
The only ads I see are native ones like you describe, and they're usually actually useful.
Ad networks work by letting you select categories, but not much more. Obviously that's because they want to keep control and maximize short-term revenues.
Unfortunately, you have just reinvented publisher-direct deals, a mainstay of many ad networks for the past decade.
Ah sweet, it's that one commenter who can prescribe the absolute correct answer to very complex situations with a couple of simple platitudes! Since you seem to be in a mood to drop the correct answer, maybe you can help me with some difficult decisions I'm facing:
what programming language should I use?
what should the next move of my business be?
is she really the one, or should I move on?
Regardless of how good your advice is, proscribing a thing for every possible complex situation with the wave of a hand is disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst.
I say - with differing commentary after the first 4-5 sentences - in every class I teach:
"I don't like the phrase 'best practice'. I won't use it. It's presumptuous and condescending. What's best for me might suck for you. Who am I to know your business requirements? There is only one true 'best practice', in my view, and that is simply to have practices that you and your team follow that serve to further your business goals and meet your business requirements. SharePoint isn't a best practice, but a system to support a corporate culture of collaboration or information sharing is a practice that many businesses can agree with. jQuery isn't a best practice, but using a framework that improves your team's productivity and helps it to meet your business' requirements - that's a good practice to follow."
We need a new phrase that gets the point across without the cognitive burden of being condescending and presumptuous. Consensus practice? Common practice? Popular practice? I don't know. But I know that "best" is a superlative that is too often used to disguise a marketing goal or to dazzle the listener/reader into accepting the superiority of the person using it.
I ignore this distinction and have just replaced "best practice" with "common practice" since I pretty much always want to say something along the lines of "this is how a lot of people do it, there's good reasons for it (list of reasons) but everything depends on context so critically reflect if it makes sense to follow these practices or not on an individual basis"
>what programming language should I use?
Haskell.
>what should the next move of my business be?
If you're not in a Series C, growth hack; if you've done your Series C, look into the Caymans.
>is she really the one, or should I move on?
Have a divorce attorney on retainer, be ready to delete your Facebook account at a moment's notice, and ideally start going to the gym now, but with those preparations in mind pursue her as if she's the one.
>Regardless of how good your advice is, proscribing a thing for every possible complex situation with the wave of a hand is disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst.
This isn't a question and I don't understand how to respond to it.
Not all publishers subscribe to the low quality Google AdExchange. In fact, they typically have a variety of ad bids, and the highest bidding ads are chosen for placement programmatically.
Edit: I just visited vogue.com. Guess who served me my ad? doubleclick. It was relevant and I bet it was programmatic. Programmatic does not mean random. Ad placement programs have a lot more data to work with than any individual at the publisher. There's a lot more sense to it than manual prediction
Yes, that's a move toward integrity and away from endangerment and excess income.
If "some higher up in marketing" doesn't understand their users, the problem is they're out-of-touch and that should be corrected, as opposed to endangering user's privacy.
Currently, my tiny site operates this way, with hand-chosen Amazon ads and no google Adwords.
I don't think this a problem most small publishers have.
If you provide a worse user experience with the same content as another, then income will dwindle altogether.
Innovate, move forward.
I'd like to see Netflix for written content and I'd pay for it.
Probably it's not very realistic to hand-pick individual ads, unless you run a very niche site. Probably it's still realistic to hand-pick the automatic ad streams you'd agree to show. I suspect the major ad networks allow you to be quite specific.
In reality, I have a math blog with ads for Cap'n Crunch cereal and strange new yogurts which seem very distracting and poorly-targeted when compared to, say, ads for O'Reilly math/CS books or a MOOC on probability and statistics.
Seems like to me the algorithm gods decided that your site was better suited to advertise to parents of toddlers.
Not in my experience. My hand-picked ads are alway at a higher CTR than programmatic. Intent-driven programmatic gives me a 2x CTR over random static ads. Hand tuned gives me about 10x more CTR.
You may be able to optimize down a set of hand-picked ads programmatically, but you still need that manual curation in the process.
More important is losing your audience to a bad user experience via programmatic ads when they visit your site.
Also, I'm pretty sure Vogue or the advertisers use DoubleClick as just the ad hosting network for analytic purposes. They are likely sold on a display basis in Vogue.
In that case you need reviews, not ads.
On the flip side of this, if Vogue let any old crap run as advertising in their magazine this would be a form of reputation mining - trading their good name (earned after years of operation) for some short-term profit, but no-one bats an eye when the same thing happens online even though it's subtly devaluing online properties that do the same.
1. Old Internet - Pages curate and/or sell whatever ads they can possibly get. They are generally statically hosted assets. 2. Original Ad Networks - They don't know anything about you, but it removes the need for pages to individually make ad contracts. You'll get whatever ads are in the queue, possibly sorted by rough groupings; "technology" ads, etc. 3. Current Situation - Everywhere you go you are presented with ads relevant to your interests, regardless of your current site. Vogue might try to show SSD ads or car parts ads, even though that's not the kind of content you would go to Vogue to consume.
I think there's an interesting case to be made that clickthrough decreases can be at least partially attributed to the fact that as tracking increases the probability that the ad represents the content of the site decreases and becomes an even more unwelcome distraction. Sponsored content is a way to defeat this, and ad blocking, by making the advertising appear more in line with the content of the site (or is it making the content of the site more in line with the advertising?).
What I really want is a service that can match me with advertising firms based on the content of my site, and do the negotiations for me. And give me a means with which to contest ads if I find they're not appropriate, or the matching itself if I discover my matched company is doing something immoral.
There are a few minor, but significant differences between this and programmatic ads. Do those differences make it good, or at least neutral? Does such a company exist?
Should I stay away from AdSense? Where am I going to find the ads to "hand-pick"?
[1]: http://thecinnamonscrolls.com
I hope this is of use! Sam
The window of acceptability needs to shift a couple of times (just a couple) before this happens.
The next few years should amaze indeed.
[0]: http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm
>But we expect that people will trust us to reinvent their world with software even though we can't make our own city livable.
Where does it propose "socialism as the one true government"?
>I would urge you to get back in touch with this side of yourselves, climb in the longboats, and impose modern, egalitarian, Scandinavian-style social democracy on the rest of us at the point of a sword.
Socialism means large-scale state ownership -- or some other kind of collective ownership by The People -- of "the means of production", in the hope of controlling production to match need. Scandinavian-style social democracy means high taxes, a generous welfare state, and quite a lot of government regulation, in the hope of keeping people safe, healthy, and adequately fed and housed. You might worry that there might be a slippery slope from the latter to the former, but they aren't at all the same.
It's the US that is confused with the notion that socialism == communism.
Tell me again why you think we shouldn't rightfully classify many European parties as socialist?
Many European parties have things like "social democratic" in their name. They advocate social-democrat politics.
Some European parties have "socialist" in their name. They mostly advocate socialist politics.
The social democrats have typically had more electoral success than the socialists. That is why the nations of Europe frequently implement social democracy and less often implement socialism.
So, e.g., none of the parties currently represented in the Swedish parliament has "socialist" in its name, but the largest is the "Swedish Social Democratic Party". (There is a "Left Party", which I think is an actually socialist party.)
In Denmark there is a party called the "Social Democrats" which is, guess what?, a social democratic party; there is also a (much smaller) "Socialist People's Party" further to the left. I think that one is actually a leftier social democratic party, but then Denmark also has a centre-right party called "Left" :-).
Norway's main social-democrat party is called the Labour Party, but they also have a "Socialist Left Party" which is actually socialist.
[1] http://pinboard.in/
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=idlewords.com&sort=byPopularit...
It's a terrible title...
The URL told me that it's probably a talk (maybe about that category of videos?) using words that don't do anything.
Skimming the first screen worth of text led me to the conclusion that it must be about privacy or hacking.
And here I see comments about advertising?! Two or three words, one being "Talk", the other being whatever this is actually about, would have helped tremendously here.
I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
Provided we get codes that recognise the difference between personal, small business, and large business, it won't be so bad.
http://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/features/deleting-a-whatsap...
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/08/421251662/...
In the long term trying to preserve privacy entirely through guerilla action isn't going to work (see China), and it certainly isn't going to work for everyone, so we need to take advantage of the normal democratic channels to achieve the right changes.
"You can have my data if these conditions apply".
Love it
If the new normal is “We've sold our customer’s privacy and personal data to the highest bidder and yet we’re still wasting 50% of our ad spend & have allowed a faceless Silicon Valley company to insert itself in between us and our customers.” then the old way of doing things suddenly looks quite attractive by comparison.
advertisement revenue and ads ROI calculations predates internet by a fair margin
Especially the part about fighting against the tobacco industry. It really made me realize that this is a fight that can be won. I honestly thought this was a lost battle.
It will, however, be a more subtle battle as the advertising industry (Big Ads ?) cannot be linked to something as clearly detremental as lung cancer and will be quick to point out that the technology developped can help fight terrorism (a winning buzzword bingo if ther's ever been one) by identifying behavior on the internet, including so-called dangerous ones.
Those top 5 agencies are the ones who can afford to do privacy-invading advertising, because they can do it at scale.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2013/12/12/study-fi...
Why? Because it's easy to be apathetic. This is not a knock on you personally, it's a statement on the human condition. Most people just don't feel like they have the free bandwidth (time, money, energy) to take on a big ideological fight, particularly if they think they can't win anyway.
But the truth is that the last 100 years of history is chock full of amazing stories of victories in just such fights.
I'm most familiar with U.S. history so I'll just highlight a few:
- 100 years takes us back to the beginning of the modern labor movement. Viciously opposed by well-funded industry and government forces, it nevertheless succeeded in massively shifting social norms and installing numerous laws and regulations to protect workers. It is still a strong force today.
- 60 years takes us back to the births of the modern civil rights and environmental movements. Like labor, they were out funded by huge margins, but still changed the world through shifting social norms and numerous laws and regulations. Both are still powerful movements today.
- We only need to look back about 30 years to see the birth of the modern LGBT movement, whose victories are in our headlines today. That movement will undoubtedly continue to be a powerful force in American society for decades to come, at least.
Now take a look at those timelines... 30 years is the most recent. The tobacco victories were on a similar timeline. Nothing comes quick and easy when we're talking about moving the opinions and laws of an entire nation. But is the fight winnable? YES! The evidence says it is.
Damn those crazy fools wasting their millions making electric cars into a reality and trying to get to Mars.
We should just spend that money on like... I dunno. Better park benches or something. That'll solve everything.
Yes I am.There are systemic problems causing the issues in San Francisco; what's your solution to that problem?
Oh, it's to use ad blocking.I'm moved to tears.
...
How about ending hunger worldwide? It's mostly a distribution problem nowadays. Or what about providing things like sanitation, electricity or some form of education for each and everyone on this planet?
I guess what I want to say is that there are much, much more elemental things to spend your money on than "better park benches", even if one does not see the need to go to Mars in the short way.
It's also incentives problem if you are not all in communist. If you simply send food from Europe to Africa, it disincentives food production in Africa. Which causes unemployment and hinders economic growth with it. And it also causes huge security of supply problem and might cause starvation if something happens to the shipping.
My best idea is to turn foreign aid into basic income. If you would send dollar/day/person to everybody in Africa, this would make African agriculture more profitable than ever before, security of supply would be good and hunger would end. Inflation would rise too, but with so much good money in circulation you would see booming private sector in no time despite this.
The only way to make a shit place better for people, is if some rich guy finds an investment opportunity there, that as a side effect, might directly benefit workers. Spoon feeding people, in the long run, does nothing good. No matter how much money you have to donate (it's finite).
Cash has been invented. They also don't have mail addresses but still some people suggest sending food.
I supposed a way to give aid. No matter what way you choose the warlords and corrupt governments are going to be huge problem.
The best way to help so far has been private investing. But it doesn't matter if the investor is single rich guy or bunch of average westerners. That's how stock works. But the warlords are again a problem. During the past 50 years, western "help" has done probably more harm than good. But that doesn't mean we are unable to ever do any good. As far as I understand, that UBI idea has been only once for limited time, and it looked like it could be a success.
It would be great if we could incentivize the warlords to behave. We should start from a country that's relatively safe and where the locals can anonymously report if they got to keep the money. Despite such country not being the absolutely poorest one. This should turn out for the best once more restless countries figure out they could be collecting fat taxes from the imported goods. If they just settle down.
Successful examples include Otjivero - Omitara, Namibia[1] and Madhya Pradesh, India[2]
[1]: http://www.bignam.org/BIG_pilot.html [2]: http://www.guystanding.com/files/documents/Basic_Income_Pilo...
Western governments and corporations reinforce crony, incompetent governments in developing countries so that their resources can be exploited.
These crony governments then steal (literally) from the population who need it. Until the poor governance issues are resolved, a lot of foreign aid is wasted.
And that's why you get biggest impact by sharing the money as evenly as possible.
That's already happening.
http://www.ipsnews.net/2007/06/africa-food-for-12-billion-so...
> Jean Ziegler, U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, alerted the more than 500 delegates that while 854 million people went without food in the world last year, enough food was produced to feed 12 billion people. "This is why a child that dies from famine is murder," Ziegler said.
> Food is being over-produced in industrialised countries where some 349 billion dollars have been spent on agricultural subsidies for a minority of people. Only 2.5 percent of the French and 4.9 percent of the Swiss population are farmers, said Ziegler.
> "You can go to the Dakar market (in Senegal) and find Spanish, French, German and Italian fruit and vegetables at half or one-third of the local prices. The African farmers work 15 hours a day but they cannot compete with subsidies. This is systematically destroying Africa's agriculture," he pointed out.
> "Nothing is being done about the dumping policy. The Third World is feeding us (Europeans). That is what is keeping this system in place."
> Ziegler called the International Monetary Fund (IMF) the "mercenary organisation of the financial oligarchies that dominate the world".
http://www.theguardian.com/world/poverty-matters/2012/oct/05...
> Löpfe: Why is it that Africa is the continent where most people starve and which imports more than a quarter of its food supply?
> Ziegler: Because the colonial pact is still enforced.
> Löpfe: Isn't this a bit too simple? Colonialism has been over for more than half a century.
> Ziegler: But there still is a small upper class, dependent on rich countries, and extremely corrupt. Again Senegal: The country exports peanuts and at the same time imports three quarters of its food requirements.
> Löpfe: Why?
Ziegler: Because the colonial pact was never broken. The Senegalese farmers are forced to grow and exports peanuts because the revenue serves to pay for foreign debt. At the same time, Europe sells its food surplus at dumping prices on the African markets. How can a small farmer survive under these conditions?
> Löpfe: African farmers are not very productive. Their productivity is less than 10 percent of Europe's agriculture. Are they not just lazy?
> Ziegler: On the contrary. Nobody works harder than farmers in Africa. They just cannot thrive because they are not supported: no irrigation, no seed, no draft animals, no tractors, no fertilizer, nothing.
If you build a farm that is as productive as a European farm, you are still only one coup, rebellion, election, criminal-at-large, or corrupted official away from losing it. I don't know what the best solutions to that may be, because I'm not African, and therefore lack the necessary cultural knowledge to do anything productive. Anything I might suggest would be flawed by my expectations that Africans will behave somewhat like Americans.
That's the issue here. Don't just complain. Actually suggest, tangibly, how to achieve that goal.
Installing ad blocks isn't it. A free internet; also not the solution.
Redistributing wealth? Ok; that's an idea, but how?
The Gates Foundation has spent billions, and achieved a great deal, but it's not visible for most people.
If someone tells me they're sick of people like Elon Musk, who is out there, actually changing the world, they can categorically Get Lost.
Armchair social commentary doesn't cut it for me.
If you'd consider to argue a bit less aggressive and just a but more nuanced, I would in turn consider a serious answer to your arguments. As it stands I am one of the people who can "categorically get lost" for you. Not because I criticize people who are changing the world, but the priorities of some of those people and social structures which ensure that mostly white, western men are in the position to change the world.
...but pointing to Elon Musk as one of those is ridiculous.
It's talking straight down the 'space, who needs it? We should spend that money on earth instead' trope, which has been, repeatedly, and in many many places, shown to be a completely hollow and invalid argument. We don't need to debate this. Go speak to the people at NASA; they've been having this conversation for the last 60 years.
When you taint the message you're trying to get across with this sort of trope, it actively harms your ability to convey a meaningful message.
"Here's Elon Musk.
In a television interview this week, Musk said: "I'm trying to do useful things." Then he outlined his plan to detonate nuclear weapons on Mars.
These people are the face of our industry."
Italics mine.
It doesn't hurt to ask what problems need solving.
Ultimately this just isn't altruism but it is promoted as whilst people are in deep shit all around him.
I'm not really sure what my point is but I suspect it is a new form of hypocrisy.
In addition Tesla is betting big on making better batteries. If they can pull that off then that will end up being their true legacy with the whole car thing becoming a neat historical footnote.
As for SpaceX they'll go down in history as pioneers of commercial space flight and wherever future commercial companies decide to take us, they'll all point back at SpaceX as the company that first showed that it could be done.
If those "microwave weapons" end up enabling the killing of millions of people (like e.g. nuclear weapons can wipe out the whole earth), then those left will be right to say:
"Hmm, maybe we were better off without microwave technology after all. In fact, just because we can make something, probably doesn't mean that we should make it".
On the other hand, if you don't develop technology, you'll never know if it will be used for good, and you'll never see the advantages if it is. And failing to develop something does nothing to prevent someone else from developing it later. If something is possible, you want to be the one making it possible, not the one cowering in fear while someone else forges on ahead.
Ever wonder why what comes out of Silicon Valley seems to augment the Military surveillance effort?
"The Secret History of Silicon Valley": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
More than anything I think premature, excessive and/or misguided credit is damaging to engineering and entrepreneurship. It shifts the focus from knowledge and creativity to adoration and exceptionalism. Quite opposite the mindset of Musk himself.
I genuinely don't believe we need electric cars though at all. We need less travel and transport and redistribution of facilities and skills. That's a much bigger problem. At the moment, the hub/spoke and centralised model of society has no redundancy and providing ubiquitous cheap transport isn't going to solve that, just make the problem hang on longer by forcing people to remain sitting on their butts on a freeway in a slightly better car rolling into a job they could probably do at home or doesn't need it exist anyway.
Also batteries need to be filled up, recycled, disposed of still. We'll see how that goes shall we...
SpaceX isn't fundamentally changing the model of anything, just packaging the same turd differently. That might be to build capital (customers = capital) but there isn't anything fundamentally different to what they are doing at the 10,000ft level. ESA have had a similar model for a couple of decades.
Of course they are. The whole point of everything they do is to cut down the costs of launching things into space by 2-3 orders of magnitude, which itself is just a step towards their real goal, i.e. Mars. They're pretty straightforward about it.
If he built an electric car for the masses, that would be a big deal for the world.
Of course he's pushing inovation, but he still hasn't done "a great deal for the world".
Maybe he caused some changes in the US, I'm not in a position to see that, but saying he changed the world is quite a stretch
This is exactly Tesla's goal with the Model 3, targeted at $35,000.
I don't think you understand the amount of time and money required to reach mass production scale of affordable vehicles. Tesla was very wise to start with high-margin sports and luxury cars, because it gives them the capital needed to continue re-investing in production capacity and battery technology for more affordable cars in the future.
Tesla is playing a long game, and so far it's working. The popularity of Tesla alone has driven other auto makers to step up their electric car game, which is indeed a "great deal for the world" to help get us all off combustion engines.
Agreed that maybe the luxury car is the right way to start his attempt with a healthy cash flow.
In fact, I'm a big fan of people like him, who have the money and instead of just playing the markets to get more of it, he uses it to build something that can eventually help us.
The main reason for my comment was that some people idolize him like he has cured cancer or erradicated world hunger. These people should to take a step back :)
That's good, and that's sort of the point of getting money, is it not? We should encourage those who are rich to pursue goals beneficial to everyone. They have the ability to achieve things no "democratic" groups (and countries) can, because the latter are plagued with coordination problems.
"Then he outlined his plan to detonate nuclear weapons on Mars."
This deliberately takes the quote out of context to make it seem silly.
Thiel wasn't "complaining" about the extension of the franchise. He was simply making the historical observation that women are a hard constituency for libertarians to convince.
This isn't a new idea - Kim Stanley Robinson mentions nukes being used to melt underground polar ice in his Mars trilogy.
After all, we'd all think using nukes to move an asteroid on a collision course with Earth was a good idea - so its not like a "harmless" use of a nuke is impossible.
Musk just said that there are 2 options how to warm up Mars: the fast way and the slow way, Colbert asked about the fast way so Musk mentioned Thermonuclear weapons. IMO the quote in the presentation is not honest.
In the long run, writers (and presenters) must take the risk and assume that their audience is intelligent and informed, lest we be left with lowest common denominator dreck.
> In a television interview this week, Musk said: "I'm trying to do useful things." Then he outlined his plan to detonate nuclear weapons on Mars.
> These people are the face of our industry.
It's hard to take the rest of the article seriously when the author is purposely misquoting people to make them look bad. The comment in question was said on Late Night with Stephen Colbert, when asked what the fast way to heat up Mars would be, as he posited several methods to do it. He later indicated that nuclear bombs would not be the preferred method.
But he ignores all of that, and concentrates entirely on a single offhanded remark by the guy. That's incredibly dishonest.
And if he's that dishonest about Musk, what about the others he discusses? I don't know them well enough to say whether they're being fairly represented or not. But I do know that I can't trust the author to get it right.
Wait, maybe he could've!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyxJ7GKGFG0
If we can't fix these problems locally, how do we expect to fix them remotely?
Even what you call "mindless pursuit of space" isn't so; SpaceX aims for space for known, well-thought and well-defined reasons. It's not just fueled by imagination.
The article paints Musk fairly, as an out of touch dreamer with crazy ideas. He steps over homeless people to rush to television producers to spout off the same canned futurism we've been hearing for decades. His version is slightly more plausible, but it, of course, ignores all social issues; issues that will only follow us into space. The same way futurists predicted a moon landing but never imagine women would get to vote, for example.
Criticizing Musk for putting the cart before the horse is valid. Futurist talk is cheap and historically wrong. Men like Musk are the face of tech and its a little embarrassing to see stuff like this. Not to mention his hysterical tirades about how AI will enslave humanity.
Lastly, whats my incentive to migrate to a new colony if its just going to have the same problems we have here on Earth?
That's a very cynical view based on... I don't even know exactly. NASA is not the only customer of SpaceX, LEO doesn't end with ISS, and the path towards Mars was laid more-less explicitly since day one. They're on track, even if behind the schedule.
> The article paints Musk fairly, as an out of touch dreamer with crazy ideas. He steps over homeless people to rush to television producers to spout off the same canned futurism we've been hearing for decades. His version is slightly more plausible, but it, of course, ignores all social issues; issues that will only follow us into space. The same way futurists predicted a moon landing but never imagine women would get to vote, for example.
That smells strongly of copenhagen interpretation of ethics[0]. So Musk is trying to solve a problem (or three problems) for humanity, and suddenly he has to be responsible for all the problems? Why aren't we criticizing Bill Gates here for helping Africans fight malaria instead of helping Americans fight homelesness at home? Also; SpaceX, Tesla and Solar City are creating jobs. Which counts for doing something towards the problem. What exactly are people criticizing Musk here doing themselves for the homeless?
[0] - http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethi...
That seems at odds with centuries of human existence. Nations, cultures, and people have migrated, immigrated, expanded, and contracted for a very long time. A hyper-local focus is (probably) just as toxic as a hyper-global focus, no?
De Havilland comet crashes and the ensuing bankruptcy probably is the real reason why flying is safe.
Usually when regulating succeeds, the industry is with the government trying to get loose guns back in the line.
"The RSDLP later split into Majority and Minority factions, with the Majority (in Russian: "Bolshevik") faction eventually becoming the Communist Party of the Soviet Union."
And the homeless problem in San Francisco, and the other problems it faces, are mostly due to poor governance rather than Facebook or Google.
Not even remotely true. "some" people were no more happy. Most were not just used to it, but enjoying it.
Maybe those informational widgets that pop up when you Google suicide-related terms didn't actually arise from a sense of humanity or civic duty, but from a desire to reduce employee turnover in their ad divisions. /s
Macabre humor aside, I actually wonder if there's any organizations out there funding ads targeted at suicidal individuals. Search terms can only go so far, and ad networks have the ability to gain a far more complete picture. You'd almost think it's something ad networks would partner up on pro bono.
Moreover, it's not hard to imagine imperfect targeting being beneficial, e.g. a family member being alerted to a loved one's state of mind via receiving the ads themselves. Obviously there's quite a few ways such a scheme could backfire or otherwise have adverse effects, though it is interesting to contemplate.
(edit: It's also hilarious how ad tech people refuse to recognize how evil and backwards their entire business models are. They vehemently defend, downvote, and mob-mentality their way through the cognitive dissonance of hurting hundreds of millions of users in exchange for retaining their jobs. Because, after all, if I'm doing the work, it can't be bad, right? I'm not a bad person, so the people arguing against me must be the evil ones.
One comment theme that seems to get instant downvotes on HN: the concept you are not entitled to track and record every client-side user action. So many people assume invasive tracing and recording of all user behavior is "just how the world works" and "if we don't do it, we'll fall behind." Kinda military-oligarchy mindset, isn't it? If we don't have all the power, who knows what people will do!)
What makes you say that?
Yeah, I wasn't suggesting those were ads.
> ... pretty much everybody on the planet knows forced pre-roll youtube ads are a bad idea. Nobody wants to watch them.
Totally agree. I'm amazed a better method hasn't been implemented.
When I switched my evil bit on, I came up with a company that helps you make your suicide look like an accident, so that your life insurance pays out, and no one perpetuates hateful memories of you for taking the easy exit.
The premium service makes your suicide look like a civil offense against you, so that your family may also win an additional settlement from a large corporation or government entity.
The extra-evil service matches you up with a demolitions engineer from a terrorist organization that most closely shares your values.
The morally questionable service matches you up with rich people awaiting organ transplants, who don't pay you to kill yourself, per se, but rather to enjoy the final moments of your life in the vicinity of a particular hospital, without being burdened by worry about the future financial needs of your loved ones.
And that's where I turned my evil bit off, because I was starting to creep myself out.
Additionally, sad news is that there a lot of people who don't care about their privacy or the homeless however hard you find that to believe.
I guess we're at a point now where todays 25 year-olds have never seen what socialism can deteriorate into.
You'll find that much of Europe is in some form of "socialism" by American standards. And we're doing quite well from it!
Every cooperative preschool; every farmers' coop; every social club in America operates on Socialist principle. In private we love Socialism; in public we resist. No idea why.
In Soviet Russia we tried vice versa: to operate farm as a state.
Even today every business entity has to have specific person responsible for accounting, fire defence, labor health, energy efficiency etc even if you have just 1 employee and he is business owner.
If you write customer name and birday somewhere (or name + almost anything), you have to sign with him additional agreement about personal data. There you have to specify how you will use it. If you get blood type or any other health info - you will have to certify your datacenter, use open crypto and have specific responsible employees.
For the record, there are lots of places on the socialism spectrum and many of them haven't deteriorated at all, and some of them look quite lovely...
I just do not want to bring a Red Flag to evey corner of the world on a bayonet of my rifle. And that's it. Even if I bring free cookies and right to privacy with it.
There is no "socialism in one dedicated country". Socialism needs whole planet. Lenin said that pretty clear.
I don't think I can withstand working with that kind of people in the long term, this is really soul-destroying.
Well, at a rough cut, it could verify that there was a client system with a person in front of it.
With more work you could maybe use eye-tracking, reflections, etc., to get a more reliable indication of whether the ad was visible to the user.
It's not secret Machiavellian billionaires running around shoving ad tracking upon us, it's ourselves just trying to get a tiny glint of social approval for out thinking everybody else without regard for consequences at scale.
It provided some useful insights (one thing that surprised me was how bad people were at recognising and operating drop downs), but we very quickly (we got the idea, pushed it out, started looking at data, decided to stop doing it within a day) recognised that we'd been too quick to jump at the "cool, we can do this" factor and that even though it was beneficial, it was way too invasive.
E.g. while we might think that "it doesn't matter, it's a form on our page so we'll see the data anyway", of course that wasn't true when we actually thought about it:
The keyboard events meant that e.g. if a user cut and pasted something by accident, we'd see it, and that might include things like passwords from other sites. Or they might write something, change their mind and enter something else; explicitly withholding the original information from us. We didn't capture anything particularly private in the short amount of time it was live, but we saw enough changes (e.g. people changing contact phone numbers) that we thankfully recognised the problem before it became a real problem.
Facebook explicitly does that (log every field input even if never "submitted") and uses unsubmitted thoughts to build more detailed models of you.
The "trace-per-character" behavior terrified me when Google Suggest first launched. It's a neat tech example, but there's no way people can understand "everything I type, live, as I type, will be recorded forever." Then they made it default Chrome bar and default google search behavior. Average users (heck, even technical users) have little idea how much data internet services capture about them though non-explicit interactions.
With a form with a submit button and no feedback indicating what's going on, it's a lot more insidious.
Why are you working with them now?
I realized before I was even in industry that I didn't ever want to work for a company that received their income from advertising, and I haven't worked for one in my entire career. It hasn't always been easy to find jobs, but the jobs I did find actually tended to be a bit higher-paying.
Ads are sucking up a lot of the intelligence in our society and the only people who can stop them from doing that are intelligent people. If we refuse to work with advertisers they will suffer from the incompetence of the people they do hire.
Having worked at several publishers, this is actually an advertising model we could support. It would work better for users, publishers, and most advertisers. The only people who would lose out are the AdTech firms.
Unfortunately, I think getting there requires that the people who want this sort of thing start acting reasonable. Instead of constantly demanding the death of all JavaScript, or an end to a century-old business model, demand measured change like this.