I hope I won’t be faulted for not “reading” the OP, but it’s a 17 minute video. I watched a little, but I don’t understand the thesis.
It does seem ironic though that on a video about the ad-based internet dying, there are several ads in the page, the video maker in the first segment has a lengthy ad where he praises whatever he is advertising, probably VPN stuff, there is a bunch of begging for paid subscribers in the summary, and comments in the comment section from third party ad spammers directing people to what appears to be MLMs.
YouTube has pretty decent transcriptions with timestamps, especially for channels that bother implementing actual subtitles. They're hidden by default and not searchable on every platform, but they're excellent for skipping to the important parts.
Independent websites need to get working on something similar. Whisper is pretty good but extremely CPU intensive, but there are lower cost implementations with acceptable transcriptions out there.
I usually watch the introduction and then skip to the 66% mark, those seem to be the places the actual interesting information is stored on YouTube and its competitors.
YouTube can be used with youtubetranscript.com (free) which will turn a video into a clickable transcript that takes you to the corresponding section of the video when clicked to see the corresponding visuals. It uses the Google auto transcription so not sure about whether the accuracy will be acceptable for you.
It's gotta be ironic that the most recent comment on a video about ads is some spam advertising a get-rich-quick scheme.
The sad fact is that there still seem to be more than enough utterly braindead marks on the Internet that fall for these scams and thus make the spam campaigns, scare ads and other crap "worth the effort".
> The sad fact is that there still seem to be more than enough utterly braindead marks on the Internet that fall for these scams
Defense is a game of resource exhaustion. Even security experts get tired/drunk/overwhelmed and make errors in judgment. I almost fell for a recent phishing exercise myself.
A growing number of these "utterly braindead marks" are people like your own parents and grandparents, whose brains are in fact degrading. Meanwhile the threats continue to evolve and new vectors arise. It's like applying for jobs. The more scammers try, the higher the chances an attempt will eventually succeed.
PSA: Expecting an inheritance? Keep your parents out of trouble or you'll never see it. The power-of-attorney scam is alive and well.
> Defense is a game of resource exhaustion. Even security experts get tired/drunk/overwhelmed and make errors in judgment. I almost fell for a recent phishing exercise myself.
It's also a game of numbers. I once did fall for a phishing exercise, because by pure coincidence, the email looked perfectly legitimate in context of my unusual, specific and temporary circumstances. There were some minor red flags, but I missed those as I got the email while waiting in the airport. Basically, a one in a million lottery win. Fortunately, it was a company exercise, so all I lost was a bit of self-esteem and a lot of self-confidence.
But that's the thing: when you can send a message like this to a couple million people for approximately $0, then "one in a million chance" turns into a guaranteed win.
> The sad fact is that there still seem to be more than enough utterly braindead marks on the Internet that fall for these scams and thus make the spam campaigns, scare ads and other crap "worth the effort".
And that despite the size of Google, modern advancements in technology such as large processing power, AI and LLMs, all the tracking and anti-abuse mechanisms (that often misfire and ban legitimate accounts with no recourse), this shit still manages to get through while being super obvious.
We used to filter this crap out on forums back in the good old days with much more primitive tools (regexes and basic keyword matching + queuing for moderator's manual approval), but Google wants us to believe they can't while in reality they just don't care because they're not liable, have a monopoly and those spammers still contribute towards "engagement".
His two examples are Twitter and Reddit whose ad revenue is dying because those two companies have made huge blunders. Elon seems to almost actively be killing Twitter (which the poster even states). Reddit screwed Apollo and then many of the most popular subreddits protested and did things like show porn on otherwise usually SFW content to prevent Reddit from showing ads and thus killing their profits. Those are big sites, but those are definitely attributable to other obvious confounding factors. I would definitely argue they should be the first data points thrown out in asking "is the ad biz on the internet dying?". I do think ads have gotten worse but I definitely don't think it's going anywhere for a long long time. Way too many companies have built their whole revenue model around them. And companies may spend less to post ads but they definitely still will because there really aren't that many alternatives.
I recently googled some random topic (drag race engines I think) and got some fairly-decent article from 5 years ago that satisfied my curiosity.
The website was actively user-hostile. Multiple things popping up all over the place, the works.
Is there any other destiny for content like that? Long since written, but owned and served. Why not enshittify as much as possible, one performance review cycle at a time?
Interesting thought that for content where no competition exists, the owner can maximize profit by drowning it in ads. Doesn’t seem like there is much of an alternative outside of legislation or action from google to enforce stricter ad standards(like how pop ups got killed)
The YouTube channel Second Thought recently put out a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gSzzuY1Yw0) whose thesis was that even being cheaper than fossil fuels is not / will not be enough for green energy to win, because under capitalism a cheap thing that also has low profit margin will not attract investment compared to a bit more expensive thing which can be exploited for more profit. I wonder if a similar effect affects sites like Twitter and Reddit: the more efficient they are at connecting users and providing value for user's efforts, the less room there is for profit margin. As a coworker once pointed out to me, the parameter which represents "profit" in an economic system would correspond to "inefficiency" in an engineering context.
We ship fruit from Argentina where it is grown, to Thailand to be packaged, to the United States to be consumed.
While it may be efficient from the perspective of a spreadsheet, its inefficient due to the external costs, ie pollution from shipping, the delicate nature of just-in-time shipments, etc.
Your fruit cup might cost a bit more if it was to be done all in one place, but I would call that a cost for a less fragile system.
That’s economic profits that approach 0. You can still run an accounting profit, it’s just not bigger than it would be if you invested your money somewhere else, like land or mining or coffeeshops or whatever.
Economic profit is still there, it's abnormal profits that would go to zero. With zero EP the opportunity cost of staying in business would be to high.
With 0 AP, the industry is in equilibrium, with no companies dropping out, and no companies entering the market.
The economic profit is literally defined as the accounting-type profits, minus the opportunity costs. When the opportunity cost is large like that you are describing negative economic profit.
True until it can be "monopolized". I guess in the near future govt will regulate green energy to some model that can give enough profit margin for corporates, and that will increase green energyp price to near fossil fuel, with bigger margin. Subscription based solar panel and electric vehicles come to mind.
As for reddit and twitter it's not the efficiency and room for profit, it's the cost to provide said content outweigh the revenue gained from ads. Hosting and maintaining global social media is expensive, which is there's no many players in that field.
You don't need a monopoly, you need competition. Renewables sell into the same energy market as fossil fuels, and get paid the same price. So you end up with low cost renewables making higher profits than high cost fossil fuels, and so attract more investment.
Long term, when renewables have displaced fossil fuels, then profits will fall. But that only happens after the renewables get investment.
I'm not sure what you mean by efficient, that Reddit gets people to the information they wanted as fast as possible?
I thought the whole idea behind Reddit and other sites was to keep people browsing with algorithms that keep them interested. Wouldn't that be what makes them efficient?
There's plenty of other investors. Like utilities, NGOs, govts, and customers. Here's the list of projects in Bhadla Solar Park. https://cms.mercomindia.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/List-... Where's Big Oil, Vanguard, Blackrock? Scanning some dozen other marque projects tells a similar story.
Further, IIRC, the ROI for mega projects are largely predetermined via PPAs and such. Think of them as bonds. There seems to be no shortage of investors (for feasible projects).
Okay, back to my theory...
Big Oil knows this is the end game. But they want to compensated for all their soon-to-be stranded assets, real and (more likely) imaginary.
So this is a hostage negotiation. They've redoubled their efforts to up the stakes. "Pay us! Or we kill the planet!"
It's just straight up extortion.
I have no sense for how it'll play out.
My vote is for nationalizing all the fossil fuel companies. Then put all their execs (say Director on up) and board members in solitary confinement for life. Stage some show trials at The Hague for ecocide or whatever, to add a veneer of legitimacy.
Though I recognize opinions may differ.
--
0/ I prefer my socialism to be advocacy-oriented, vs whinging, but tastes differ.
1/ Separately, post IRA, the billionaire funded reactionary astroturf campaign is now in full swing. For instance, every single offshore wind farm has been opposed, farmers adopting solar are being harassed, ad nauseum. So even as permitting is reformed, brain worms will likely slow our transition.
2/ Early reports post-IRA suggest new investment, in everything, has gone bonkers. With potential for even more as the Biden Admin firms up the implementation. David Roberts' Volts podcast is one of my primary sources, highest recommendation. https://www.volts.wtf/podcast/archive?sort=new
Well it used to be "Pay us! And we kill the planet!"
My opinion is that the "or" operator is an improvement over the old. It implies that there is a chance to save the planet.
>My vote is for nationalizing all the fossil fuel companies
This will have exactly the opposite effect as you are envisioning. Having every citizen benefit from fossil fuels will make them much harder to keep in the ground.
> ...will have exactly the opposite effect as you are envisioning.
Sure.
Or not.
At some point, like with coal before it, oil's price will fall thru the floor. What then?
The fate of the countries listed will vary.
Foreseeing the inevitable, some of the Gulf States and Norway have been diversifying for a while. China is racing to create the post carbon future, hoping to outrun the bear. Russia is choosing oblivion. The others will fall somewhere in between. Or in the schizophrenic USA, somewhere(s).
> read Kim Stanley Robinson's article
Ok, have done. Meh.
Aside: "The Ministry for the Future" presents an absolutely best case scenario, in all its terribleness. Pretty unconvincing.
There's no reactionary movement actively thwarting progress, no emergent right wing eco-fascism.
Technological progress always begets social upheaval. Globe spanning wars were fought over much lower stakes (than climate crisis).
That said, I have no idea how any of this will play out. Can't even guess. But I expect the worse.
Same. That KSR article just made me more pessimistic about fossil fuels. Politicians in the West need to quickly show some leadership towards a carbon tax.
That video makes no sense. If renewables are cheaper, then fossil fuels have even worse margins. The video claims for some reason that fossil fuels are "more exploitable" and more profitable, but assuming you're baking storage into cost, a lot of energy is fungible. Furthermore, solar can easily be installed on prem and many energy users have plenty of unused roof space, so even if all energy providers conspired to keep energy prices high, energy users can install their own solar.
It's worth noting that a decent portion of the value/products generated by by the fossil fuels industry isn't gasoline or diesel.
Tons of products are made with byproducts from the refining process, much of the research done by these companies over the last century was focused on inventing new products and creating markets to sell them to.
Replacing transportation use of fossil fuels with renewables doesn't actually replace all of the profits in the fossil fuel industry, and doesn't explain how those products we've now grown to expect will be created if we aren't refining oil for gasoline and diesel.
> Tons of products are made with byproducts from the refining process
Fun fact: Gasoline only became the fuel for cars because it was a refinery byproduct that had no real economic value, and so was very cheap. Before that, cars ran on alcohol or electricity, but oil refining was still a pretty large business anyway.
If we stopped fueling cars with gas, refineries would still operate to provide all of the other products we need, just as they did before gas was a thing.
Having worked for the upstream research arm of a major US oil company, I can confidently say this is no longer the case regardless of what the industry may have looked like when Esso was still a business.
Modern oil companies are extremely proud of the additional revenue streams they have invested to consume oil byproducts. The most disgusting of which, in my opinion, was the humble bragging that Hershey's chocolate includes petroleum products in the chocolate bars.
If we stopped consuming oil for gasoline today massive industries would collapse, both due to the loss of byproduct inputs and the transportation required to move products across the country. It wouldn't be the world returning back to a nineteenth century era where trains all ran on coal and lamps were fueled by whale blubber.
I wasn't claiming that there wouldn't be a large economic upset. There obviously would. I was only claiming that oil refining would remain as an industry. Probably a much smaller industry.
Meta also took a dive, and while it was from a sharp turn of the business focus, I'd argue it comes from an attempt to avoid staying on a stagnating market.
I still dont know how IG hasnt stopped the very obvious bot spam.
[1] This recent post on @bloombergbusiness for instance, it just takes 1 fold of comments to be all scammers, multiple accounts, same or near same message, pointing to the same account.
Sometimes in app its swipe up to go to the next thing, sometimes its swipe left, sometimes i have no clue and trigger an ad event.
And then the "game" ads I get, cant seem to tell IG the ad irrelevant enough times.
At the scale of Google/Meta plateauing could just mean market saturation, not that ads aren’t working anymore. I’d be interested to see data showing that RoI has also been decreasing for advertisers or that advertisers have started to pay less because they don’t find ads worthwhile.
I think the two biggest players plateauing is in itself an interesting indicator.
For instance sister comments are mentionning TikTok growing in revenue, but if Google/Meta were already saturating the market, it means that growth is eating from the other less successful players (Twitter/Reddit ?), and at some point Google and Meta will also see dramatic decreases or TikTok's growth will stop.
I read that the new cheaper ad based Netflix tier was really successful. So maybe a future of all paid products but a cheaper option for a worst experience with ads?
Unfortunately, ad revenue is a poisoned well. Even if you are paying for the ad-free tier, you will be limited to content that was developed with a mind toward advertisements. Once you serve any ads, everything is under pressure to be optimized for ads.
Even if you don't mind the changes to the content, there's a constant pressure driving up costs and driving down convenience to continue avoiding ads. If you're paying for an ad-free experience then you have money, and you're willing to spend it. You are essentially forced into a bidding war for your own attention.
YouTube has its own internal micro economy of channels, networks of channels, etc that is thriving from ad revenue. Binging with Babish was “a guy cooking food from tv” a few years ago and is now an entire platform of channels. I think those companies can all be considered separately from the operator of the marketplace.
That's just syndication, though, is it different from having a bunch of blogs that cross-promote content but are ultimately reliant on Google Search and Google Ads to bring in traffic and revenue?
You typically won't see rising ad revenues during a recession. When times are hard, or look like they could get hard, advertising is the first thing cut. Its a well established pattern. Eg, from https://www.createwithnova.com/blog/the-history-of-advertisi... :
> After the last recession in 2008, the US ad market declined by 13%. Newspaper ad spend fell 27%, radio spend 22%, magazine spend 18%, outdoor spend 11%, TV spend 5% and digital 2%.
> Digiday published a recent overview of media earnings reports, and while earnings overall were a mixed bag, nearly every single company reported a significant dip in advertising revenue:
> Publishers reported declines in digital ad revenue from about 9% to 30% — worse than the 3% to 27% drop in ad revenue year over year reported for the fourth quarter of 2022. Executives continued to cite macroeconomic conditions and a soft ad market as major challenges to their businesses.
But nominal growth is huge unlike back in 2008/9, most of that is eaten by inflation but it should still result in meaningful revenue growth in many sectors.
Google and Meta each have something like half the world as users in any given month? And most of the people who aren't using them are not on the internet?
At some point, you literally have no more people you can get in your service.
Most of them overlap pretty heavily though. Assuming 2B people, minus the 1.3B that China has (rough calculations), there's still room for them to grow user-wise. The issue is revenue though - having 1.5 B Indian users is not the same as having 330 million American users.
some of the decline is attributed to companies pulling back on marketing spend due to declines in consumer spending and also because of iOS changes that has led to decreased efficiency in targeting.
This gets to one big confusion I have, with ad revenue and volume decreasing why are the ad platforms selling more ad spots? When demand for ad spots falls, the supply of spots should fal as fast or slightly faster to avoid a price collapse.
Attempting to shore up revenue by trying to show even more ads is begging for your business to crumble and die a quick, painful death.
In economics there is a concept, profit maximization, where it is determined at which prices the products will, well maximize profits, by taking into account marginal changes in supply and demand. I would be very surprised if the big ad companies didnt have a few economists do the calculations.
I'd be even more suprised if the profit maximization point when prices and the demand for ad spots were both down involved an even higher supply of ad spots for sale.
Finding the right level to decrease supply by would be a tricky calculation to get right, but in no way could the right move be to further flood the market with supply.
You have to remember economics is a model and not exactly how reality works, there are many examples where you will find the supply demand curves arent linear and there are also other things to take into account. Companies can artificially move the demand curves, for example the ad companies can change the quality requirements of what ads they allow, creating more demand. These calculations are best done with real numbers and experiments, kinda like A/B testing and I would guess that the ad companies have such infrastructure
> His two examples are Twitter and Reddit whose ad revenue is dying because those two companies have made huge blunders. Elon seems to almost actively be killing Twitter
I disagree. Elon doesn't care about ad revenue. He stated multiple times that the goal is to make Twitter a superapp.
That was a sarcasm. I should have stated that he doesn't care as much as other companies. Elon, being the richest person on the planet, is uniquely positioned and has a competitive advantage. He can risk losing ad revenue to achieve his goals - minimize censorship and create a super-app.
Yes. Elon is still the richest person on the planet. If you thought otherwise, you might want to reconsider your understanding of how wealth is both preserved and accumulated ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
To verify your information, I did a search on Twitter with the keyword threads. The search returned thousands of tweets. In fact, the very first tweet is a WSJ article describing how Threads may kill Twitter soon. Further, I searched for the hashtag #threads. The search returned all the tweets hashtagged with #threads.
As someone who works for an asian "superapp", the grass is always greener.
Superapps are self-limiting, because the app-size is too large for many user's phones (Uber has famously had this problem too, and thus split up their apps [0]).
The UX also tends to be a bit weird. Everyone wants to use the superapp differently and so the interface ends up being the lowest common denominator across all product families.
Have adds been getting worse? Adds I get in the last 3 years have been way too good for me, so my personal experience has been the opposite (or maybe not? Definitely makes me want to buy more stuff). I guess I’m easily targetable
It's possible that the density of ads has increased (gotten worse) thus leading to you buying more items. And some bias in your recall makes you think they've gotten more effective at targeting you, instead of the same conversion rate but far more
opportunities to convert.
Driving away lucrative advertising, replacing with much less sustainable premium subscriptions. Then there's cutting the moderation and safety teams to the bone.
I thought everybody hates advertising, no? Let's do a thought experiment and imagine Elon brought more advertising on Twitter. Everyone would bullshit on him for that. In reality, we have the opposite situation. There is less advertising. On top of that, ad revenue is now being shared with creators. What's bad about it?
My day job is helping sell ad-free, subscriptions, so I'm a fan of the idea. That said, Elon is driving away the lucrative advertisers and not dropping ads entirely. Even Blue subscribers still get ads, albeit fewer.
At their scale and in their market the premium subscriptions model doesn't appear to work, unless their costs can be reduced much, much further.
Sharing revenue with creators is great. Not everything being done is bad. On the whole it just doesn't seem sustainable and sometimes even petty and foolish. Almost appears as if he's trying to bankrupt the company.
The Twitter acquisition happened 7 months ago, on October 27, 2022 to be precise. 7 months is effectively 3 quarters. Let's take "Elon Musk" name out of the equation for a moment. How much do you think is possible to do with one of the largest social network companies in the world within 3 quarters? I work at AWS and I must say everything is really slow here.
What I'm trying to say is it seems like the world is "demanding" too much from Elon. Additionally, there is a weird trend of people rooting for his failure. This is something I strongly stand against.
Why would I want to live in a world where "a superapp" is needed?
Why would I want to live in a world where you have one company in control of the "town square"?
Personally, I just wanted Twitter to fail because I think that any ad-funded business is bad for us. But if you tell me that Elon's long term game is to make it something even more dystopian than it ever was, then yes I will do everything in my power to see him fail and fail catastrophically.
Rooting for someone's success is not about personal preferences or endorsing their actions. It's about fostering a positive and supportive environment that encourages growth and achievement.
> Why would I want to live in a world where "a superapp" is needed?
Super-apps already exist in other markets. Entrepreneurs want to create ones in the US market to foster the diversity of options. This is a healthy process. You live in the world with wars, but you want to do everything in your power to see Twitter fail. That's strange. A world catered only to your preferences is unlikely, so you have to be realistic.
> Why would I want to live in a world where you have one company in control of the "town square"?
I don't know. You don't have to live in that town.
> Personally, I just wanted Twitter to fail because I think that any ad-funded business is bad for us.
Pretty much every business in the world is driven by ads, one way or another. However, as I said, Musk doesn't care about ads. In fact, he wants even fewer ads on Twitter. That being said, his goals kinda align with what you want.
> It's about fostering a positive and supportive environment that encourages growth and achievement.
Not when this "growth" and "achievement" is something that affects part of the society negatively, or when there might be unknown consequences.
> Super-apps already exist in other markets.
And they are enablers of authoritarian states and continuous centralized power over a handful of corporations.
> You don't have to live in that town.
Just on another thread I was being accused of being "socially inept" for refusing to use WhatsApp.
If we live in a world where so much power is centralized into a few corporations, they affect everyone's lives, even if they don't participate directly on it.
> Pretty much every business in the world is driven by ads
Does it help you sleep at night to be telling yourself this kind of bullshit, or are you just apathetic?
> It's about fostering a positive and supportive environment that encourages growth and achievement.
That honestly sounds more like the goal for an elementary school class than the goal for an adult society.
We don't necessarily need to support and encourage development that we don't agree worth, or even see as dangerous. And the idea that growth and achievement are always good things and should be wholly supported and encouraged sounds lovely on the surface, but there are plenty of things that could be considered achievement that we are better off without.
>What I'm trying to say is it seems like the world is "demanding" too much from Elon.
Like, common he set expectations by himself. He was the one bragging and running his mouth how everyone before him was an idiot while he is going to clean and fix the place.
> Additionally, there is a weird trend of people rooting for his failure. This is something I strongly stand against.
I really really hope for failure of his, quite apparent, political project.
Also, Paul, if you think Elon is doing something completely wrong, I encourage you to jump on Twitter Spaces and explain your concerns directly to him. He is live from time to time and happily chimes into a conversation with mere mortals.
There's way more ads. Now every blue checkmark tweet is an ad, paid for placement. So I click on a tweet and all I get are pages of ads with the real tweets buried at the bottom.
Ads aside, there are host of other ways he's ruined twitter from censorship to blocking anon access to amplifying his own terrible tweets.
One thing he has done is push the paid replies to the top of every tweet. So now every tweet is full of low quality replies at the top and you have to scroll to find the higher quality ones below.
I don't personally agree with your observation, but setting that aside, would you consider that (pushing the paid replies to the top) the definition of "killing" Twitter?
I actually think it might. My experience is that the people who pay to get their replies to the top do it either because they have something to sell, or because they agree with Elon's politics. So the result is that every tweet I view have pretty much the same low quality answers on the top. That has made the experience much worse for me, and I personally would quit if there were a good enough alternative.
It also depends on how you define "killed". I dont think twitter will be gone, but there is a chance it will become a lot more similar to truth social or parler.
Do you think Hackernews would do better or worse if they introduced a paid tier that put your comment above others every time?
> Do you think Hackernews would do better or worse if they introduced a paid tier that put your comment above others every time?
If a paid tier alone puts your comment above others, then the result is negative. However, I do not believe Twitter's algorithm simply ranks by the presence of a blue checkmark. It is a signal amongst other signals and not a sole criteria. My feed has improved after all the changes, which is why I could not share your observation.
Truth social exists because of a censorship. The idea of a social network with high censorship results in a state of content being a walled garden. While the intention behind censorship may be to create a safer and more controlled environment, it often comes at the cost of limiting diversity of thought, stifling creativity, and hindering the progress of society.
Censorship, when implemented excessively, can lead to a state where only certain viewpoints and information are allowed, effectively creating an echo chamber that reinforces existing beliefs and discourages critical thinking.
Twitter has the potential to become the next Truth Social. If Meta enforces excessive censorship in Threads, people might perceive it as a more "positive" social network, offering the illusion of a better alternative. With media support, people could gradually migrate towards Threads, leaving Twitter in decline. However, if Elon achieves his super-app goal, Twitter's current form will no longer exist, rendering these social media-related issues irrelevant. Consequently, Twitter and Threads would evolve into a completely distinct applications.
I'm not saying or asking what Truth social is doing today (this is subjective), I'm explaining what was the driving force to create Truth social in the first place.
It might depend on who you follow. For the small number of people I follow who also have a small number of followers, it means that people who are more invested in Twitter show up at the top of the replies. So it hasn't made it any worse...if anything it is better. However, I could see that happening more if you are following people with millions of followers. (Though their replies have always been a mess.)
Due to an excessive censorship prior to the acquisition, Twitter was a far left cesspool. All these users are still active after the acquisition, however many right-wing accounts were reinstated. Consequently, from the political perspective, Twitter is now more balanced than ever. One can be sure of this by tuning their feed – follow a politically diverse groups of people.
> Most people i know don't use it anymore.
Twitter hasn't really changed much. If you know people who no longer want to use the platform, then their decision is likely driven by the propaganda. In a way, it's not their personal decision, but the result of influence from elsewhere.
This is a lie. Not even manipulation or twisting the truth, but clear unambiguous lie. If anything, after Musk takeover, it became clear how good decisions twitter made before.
In addition, Must is not even trying to stand up to regimes and such. It became completely meek.
Also, twitter is not "balanced". It is right-wing in the sense of "we use right-wing as euphemism for nazi and such".
If anything, it's just become more centered, now that people aren't getting banned for not conforming to the political whims of the flow of information.
Not sure why you're downvoted, as your observations are completely correct. In fact, there's so much more activity that they've been trying different ways to keep the UX efficient and stable. But, of course, some of the things they've tried haven't worked out so well, so people just like to cherrypick those to make incorrect arguments against Twitters newfound viablity.
1) fake/shell drop shipping companies dominate the ads with nonsense names and computer generated logos. An endless stream of low quality ads as opposed to real companies that used to advertise there.
2) Low effort facebook style posts have began to dominate any reply section, as users who typically had bad posts that saw no engagement, now pay to force people to look at their low effort/hateful/uneducated opinions. (still not gaining many followers but users are now forced to see it over higher quality users).
3) Bot issues are still very much there, every time I make a post with more than a dozen likes, I get 2-3 bot follows that are always a vaguely feminine name and a single post, following hundreds of accounts.
4) API cost increases have hurt positive bot accounts(ie OpossumEveryHour, various "every lot in x" accounts) while tons of crypto scam accounts, tshirt bots, etc have taken over.
5) The general changes to the checkmark system has destroyed the meaning behind the check, it used to serve to ensure accounts were not imposters. Now its simply every guy who watches self help entrepreneur videos has a check.
Just a handful of aspects of the overall degraded experience. Every day the site becomes more hateful and zenophobic, looking more and more like low effort boomer facebook groups every day. Regardless of opinion, the site used to be a place that you could get news from verified sources, follow public figures, and not be inundated literal Nazis. If you own a bar and a couple Nazis are made to feel welcome, you now have a Nazi bar.
Only from bots. I mean, this is not even disputable, saying that twitter has more genuine activity now or somehow better content is in the reals of fan fiction.
The real issue IMO is that users do not understand that ads pay for their apps. They don't want to see ads and the ads they do see they want them to be uninformed and general. They want everything free. This just encourages subscriptions. Which we're seeing become more and more common.
Depending on where one lives, but many people have access to "free" government services, ranging from roads, education, unemployment security, healthcare, and more. The costs of these services are payed by taxes.
Some "free" services are sustained via donations. Wikipedia is a good example of this.
Some people might say that those are not examples of "for free", because someone is paying for those things, either via taxes or donations. They do have a cost for society. Yes, but in that case then ad-based services are not free either: the advertisers are putting the money to run those services, and the society is also paying a huge cost in thousand of hours of people's lives wasted down the drain, promotion of harmful products, scams, etc.
Linux, github, open source games/office suites/tools/etc, fediverse, irc, free cloud compute... You can live comfortably online for free without adds if you stick to the free/os world.
Flip side: Why doesn't YouTube pay users for the work they perform on their platform, re- impressions, interactions, training? The more often and "better" someone interacts with their services, the more "free minutes" without ads they earn. If someone is a big producer of value, they earn access to tiered UHD/4K/8K or "premium" content, or they're cut a check / given credits.
YoutTube is making money, somehow, off of us. Is it not our right to reclaim the excess value we are creating for them? Why is only okay for trillion dollar companies to have free lunch?
Good lord, no. "Excess value" is a frankly pants-on-head stupid notion that should have died in the 19th century. It assumes businesses should operate with not only zero profit but zero margin for expenses or growth. It is beyond stupid and I find it unbelievable that there are so many followers who really should know better on several level.
Conversely, profit now is less used for expenses or growth, and redirected to stock buy-backs and shareholders.
Excess value is real, measured not from the margin, or even money that goes back into the org, but value that is 100% extracted from the organization, often at the detriment of the org for the sake of shareholders. Its very often just parasitic.
People are so entitled now, "nooo i need my investments doubled at all costs". I have little sympathy for professional investors that have tied the global economy to short term private gain over long term sustainable growth. Its a rich child's game.
There are all kinds of reasons for professional investors to be in a position when they need an investment to double in the short term. Sometimes thats greed, other times it's to cover existing bets that are losing and could cause their entire fund to collapse.
Say, for example, a certain bank where to listen to the Fed and invest massive piles of cash deposited after currency debasement into federal notes and bonds. If those notes where purchased when the story was interest would remain zero only to face 4-6% interest months later, the investor could well need a quick win to dig out from those now toxic assets that can't be sold at face value.
Right, the example I was attempting to give was a scenario where a professional investor may legitimately need to have a quick windfall from am investment. They couldn't sell their bonds that are currently worth less than they paid for them so the investor may legitimately need another investment to double their money.
So I understand there is a lot of nuance in this space, but:
> other times it's to cover existing bets
This is my issue. Our economy has become a casino for these professional investment firms with lots of capital to try to strike it rich. This is not a healthy way to run a system that determines who lives or dies in a big picture sense.
The economy has become a game for people with connections. It no longer matters if a business is healthy or profitable, if it does not work within this grand casino. The search for constant growth is killing us all.
Well I completely agree here, constant steady growth is a terrible, unsustainable model. There's no way around it, eventually we'll either fail or have to adjust course and give up on this idea that we can continue to consume more raw materials to create a steady growth of output value.
> The real issue IMO is that users do not understand that ads pay for their apps
Because it does not make any sense. No one wants to be shown something he does not find interesting or important, even if they say that they will. So if you believe people should watch, read, or listen to your ads, you've been living in a bubble.
> They want everything free.
It would be nice if everything were free, but only small children believe that. People know they got to pay for cars, houses, clothes, and education. And they do because it's valuable. They also pay for apps that are valuable to them. If they don't use something unless it's free, that's because its value is 0.
> This just encourages subscriptions.
There are subscriptions in the real world, like phone, internet, and electricity. I do not mind subscriptions, for music streaming, or apps that require continuous maintenance (support fees). But most apps are done (or should be, apart from the bugs) and they should just provide a license. New feature requests should be added to the backlog for the new version.
Take Duolingo, I could have paid $3 a month for the service (that's their value to me). But no way, I'm paying $7 a month. However, they say: "Hey, you can use it for free". So, I do. And the ads are just so ugly that they bring the whole app down to their level. So now, I'm even less appreciative of their service. And when the ads will get too irritating, I will just stop using their "free" service. And I've paid the 273 dollars for a Michel Thomas course. Because no ads, just good content.
> The real issue IMO is that users do not understand that ads pay for their apps. Because it does not make any sense. No one wants to be shown something he does not find interesting or important, even if they say that they will. So if you believe people should watch, read, or listen to your ads, you've been living in a bubble.
It's either watch some ads, or work slightly harder to make slightly more money, to afford a subscribtion (or forgo some other pleasure, and reallocate that money to subscribtion instead). Both options are unpleasant, but of the two, majority of people seem to prefer ads.
To the downvoters: YouTube has been, for a couple years now, conducting a natural experiment that my confirms my claim. People can either buy a subscribtion or suffer the ads. Most prefer the ads.
I don't think that's a good experiment, though. Regardless of people's overall preference on this, I would expect the existing YouTube audience to mostly stay with the ad-supported stuff, because that's what they're used to with YouTube and people who really, really hate ads weren't using YouTube to begin with. All of that makes YouTube users a biased sample.
A more valid experiment would require all users to be new to the platform.
Most of the apps I use are in fact free, and do not have ads to pay for them. Someone wanted something to exist, so they made it, and then they gave it away for free to everyone because computers are magical and there's no marginal cost to do that. The ad based Internet dying would leave hobby and academic content, significantly cleaning up the signal:noise ratio on the web, which would be great. As a bonus, you wouldn't need to be Google to index it all if it weren't filled with AI generated SEOd blogspam garbage trying to make money from ads.
Some of the best content I've found on the internet was a result of someone's hobby and desire to share, typically paired with a complete lack of ads on the page.
Personal blogs, passion sites filled with resources where they might sell a couple products, open source resources built by a community, etc.
I can say its almost rare I get the answer I need on a commercial platform besides reddit, but that's only because reddit replaced forums where ads were generally small and unobtrusive.
> Some of the best content I've found on the internet was a result of someone's hobby and desire to share, typically paired with a complete lack of ads on the page.
Yes! I would say 90% of the useful stuff I find on the web is this sort of site.
I would love to see a search engine which only indexes ad free websites. Would probably beat Google in many things without any algorithm. Even as blockers don't solve the problem of only getting SEO ad pages, but a search engine which doesn't show any website with ads will automatically filter all the trash.
I've thought something similar for a while now. People say that Google has a harder problem with the SEO industry being so large now and that AI will make it a difficult cat-and-mouse game, but I suspect a decent amount of the problem is just misaligned incentives; if they aggressively penalized sites for having ads, tracking, and affiliate links, they'd be striking directly at the way blogspam funds itself, and there's no need for a cat-and-mouse game.
Of course Google's business is those ads, so they cannot fix the problem. They are the problem. Google's raison d'être is spam, so of course they're going to return a bunch of spam to you. Same deal with email. I get plenty of spam to my gmail inbox with things like, literally, "THIS MESSAGE CONTAINS ADVERTISING". Obviously, Google is not even slightly trying to filter spam from emails, even the spam that labels itself as such.
I would personally prefer to pay for a service with my money as opposed to my information and ads being shoved in my face. Unfortunately many services don't even give an option to pay with money, so I've been trying to find alternatives, for example I've been starting to migrate away from Gmail to Protonmail. I understand things cost money, so let me pay you for your services. I just despise ads with a passion.
> I would personally prefer to pay for a service with my money as opposed to my information and ads being shoved in my face.
You might prefer to, but Google and others know better when it comes to B2C pricing.
Look at Netflix, Youtube Premium, HBO etc. The price increases every year, consumers get pissed. That's because:
a) these companies are bad at forecasting their margins
b) the real cost of pricing these services is MUCH higher than consumers would tolerate, and is thus heavily subsidized at the early stages ($10/mo), in the hope that future revenue deals (cable TV syndication, IP rights etc) will offset those losses later. The subscriber base isn't part of that equation here.
This is much easier to accomplish with a B2B model, i.e. ads. That's because advertisers and companies have budgets available, and aren't as sensitive to price changes.
There was a comic (an Oatmeal comic, IIRC) where the guy goes into Starbucks and orders a $5.00 coffee, and then while drinking it picks up his phone and it asks him to pay $1.00 to access a news article and he says, "$1.00! Who do they think I am, Mark Zuckerberg?" (or something like that).
While I get the _sentiment_ behind it (especially from a webcomic guy who's producing entertaining content and not getting anything back from it), it misses a lot of the subtext of why paying for things on the internet is such a hassle. Yes, I'd probably pay $1.00 to read a news article - I pay $5.00 to buy a print magazine when I get on a plane after all - small transactions on the internet are a huge hassle. There's a lot of friction around tracking down my credit card, typing in the number, typing in all my personal info, hoping that the site doesn't store it stupidly and leak it... I don't know what the solution is there, but the way it works now ain't it.
I think another, bigger, piece is that people have more issue paying for upfront costs than marginal costs. Most people will have some sort of outrage that their medication costs the manufacturer 30c to produce when they're told it'll cost $30 to buy. Sure, there was the whole discovery process that had an upfront cost, but to most people's intuition, the cost of goods should be "cost to make + some small markup".
For a webpage, the marginal cost is approximately zero. Certainly there was an upfront cost, in that somebody had to write the thing, but the cost to pass it from the server to my phone looks like rounding error.
> the guy goes into Starbucks and orders a $5.00 coffee, and then while drinking it picks up his phone and it asks him to pay $1.00 to access a news article and he says, "$1.00! Who do they think I am, Mark Zuckerberg?"
I'd be one of those people. $1 for a single news article is outrageously overpriced, where the coffee is only moderately overpriced.
Reasonable ads are fine. Its when we go to websites that have ads that make the website load 100x slower, roll video content, and other shitty behaviors made people go to ad blocker. Simple ads really didn't bother anyone. Advertisers destroyed the ad economy themselves by allowing really shitty behavior. Even google search is a joke with the number of ads you get with a single search. Sometimes i see more adds than results.
They want a tax funded internet and shareholder companies gone after the worst bath in history. All it takes is one state to start and give it's citizens the chance to distribute the tax anonymously and the whole advertising industry dies.
> The real issue IMO is that users do not understand that ads pay for their apps.
Users understand this just fine. They pay for Netflix, Disney and others.
It's Google that has failed to position Youtube as something worth paying for. Youtube is free because it is basically a public access tv channel full of amateur content --- consumers don't pay for public access, so they're not going to pay for Youtube. It's on Google to change people's minds about that.
Google could have carved out obviously premium content and put that behind a paywall, but instead they built this ad-based revenue system, thereby positioning its content library as commoditized and interchangeable. The only upsell they provide is to pay to get rid of the ads. It's a terrible offering.
It’s interesting we hear a lot about how engineers need to understand ethics, but nobody says a peep about the field of marketing which focuses on psychological manipulation and deception.
I think that's because everyone already knows that the marketing field is slimy and don't expect differently from it. There is still hope for devs, though.
I don't even have a problem with what ads I'm shown being based on some information about me. I'd happily provide additional information which I think would, if it were used, result in less ads being wasted on me (showing me ads for horror movies/game is never going to benefit the movie/game company, and I find the ads unpleasant. Not showing me ads for horror content, and showing other ads instead, should be a win-win. But the only topics google lets me restrict ads for are "gambling", "alcohol", "dating", and like one or two others that I don't remember. Maybe "parenting"?)
I'm not supporting any ads anymore ever again.
My trust in the industry has been eroded so much that I can't imagine them going the right thing even when they claim to do so.
Even the pre Apollo saga, reddit ad revenue was nowhere close to facebook. Same with twitter, before Musk its ad revenue is not good. And both platforms are now trying to emulate facebook with heavy control on the app and the API.
Both of the blunders you mention are recent no? (Elon / Apollo). And these companies were never making money so blunders can be considered errors forced by the need to monetize quickly.
In addition to which - they were never that solid in the first place. They (and Facebook) are mostly just "dumb hosting" for other people's content - if the content producers leave, they don't have anything to offer. They don't even really own the content that was produced on their platform and it wouldn't have any value even if they did. There's a weak value proposition there: "we'll let you put your stuff up for people to see and even sort of promote it, but we'll run ads next to it to offset our hosting costs", but neither seemed to realize just how precarious their position is/was.
One can suggest that recent decisions were "blunders" due to the problems they have encountered, but maybe there just was no path forward for them simply because there's not much value to be extracted from this business. Now we just see the entire house of cards collapsing around them.
There were many obviously lucrative paths Reddit could have taken. They have incredible amounts of data on users who self-select their own interests. They were making money selling subscriptions even. They could have monetized all sorts of things in non-annoying ways, like secret santa (pay to verify users or have direct anonymous shipping?), subreddit sponsorships (want to own /r/steam, Valve pays for it), etc.
Instead they wanted to be Facebook Jr, killed all of their interesting and niche aspects, ignored the things users and mods were asking for, and hamfisted general ads in people's faces while adding expensive, unneeded (unwanted!) features like live chat and video hosting.
Reddit is an example of what happens when you put people in charge of a business who are both greedy and stupid.
> Reddit is an example of what happens when you put people in charge of a business who are both greedy and stupid.
No, it's what happens when your investors are VCs who need to 10x on their wins because most of their investments fail. As a result, stable, long-term profitability isn't the goal; big IPOs are, or at least explosive growth. There's no room for a company which is moderately successful when VCs are involved.
They didn't need to take money from VCs. They would have been fine as they were -- they were making enough money from Reddit premium subscriptions to pay hosting costs (before they pivoted to hosting all their own media instead of just text). All they had to do was monetize the subreddits, license branding, and do some event stuff. All of the founders would have been 10millionaires. They got greedy and took VC money and every decision since then has been objectively terrible for anything but engagement metrics.
Oh slow & proper growth is frowned upon - taking other people’s money & trying to grow fast isn’t sadly. I’ve been in that situation w/ a business partner & the moment I realized my partner was trying to push me out I was like f* this & you - I’m out. I have no tolerance for bs & I saw it early enough to check out before having invested more than 2-3k of my own money. Sadly a good bit of my time but I was furious & done w/ it.
This would be true if Reddit was ever profitable, which it was not. Hosting images was an expensive decision, and they weren't making much money before then.
I think this is just the way of the world. Usenet -> Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit -> Discord -> ???
the real value for them is in knowing your preferences and building a profile on you where they can categorize you with people who have similar interests.
Look at the facebook ads platform from the perspective of a small business looking to advertise. It is incredibly effective in how it can target people.
Elon is such a good guy. Spending $43B to rid society of the trash fire that is twitter. It's a sacrifice not many could make. I am incredibly thankful to him for that and I hope he succeeds at running it into the ground.
I think we really need microtransactions. Pay $0.05 to read this article? Sure. Whoever figures out the infrastructure for that (seems like it would be right up Stripe’s alley) is going to make trillions.
Content farms work right now because ad views can't be refunded; by the time you've loaded the page (and realized you got tricked by clickbait/spam), it's too late and they already got paid.
A micropayment system where you are able to request refunds/dispute payments will break that model.
You joke, but this is exactly what I was hoping Brave was doing:
- become the gateway for advertisement money
- make it opt-in and share the revenue with users that see the ads.
- make it easy for the users to redistribute this earned money with the content creators they like.
Yeah, you are going to tell me that this could be done without crypto, and I will respond that micropayments are still not solved.
I will accept a criticism about Brave sticking with the token, though - they could've gone with a stabletoken and their business model would seem a lot more legit.
This is sort of a thing now with Bitcoin Lightning. You already can listen to podcasts and “stream” them a certain amount of money of your choosing. Called Value For Value and part of podcasting 2.0 spec. Whether this scales to entire internet I don’t know, but kindling is there.
I know one of the goals for Lightning Network was to cut transaction fees. Did that actually work out - is it realistic to pay someone $0.05 USD-equivalent in Bitcoin using Lightning? Or do I need to use an exchange/intermediary still?
Lightning is a bit of a difficult system to host yourself. But point is you set up something akin to a running total between you and your friends. The nice thing here is that, you only lose money when you total up at the end, like clearing all transactions and merging them into one. You are becoming your own Visa/Mastercard/ACH essentially.
You can certainly use a hosted wallet with lighting which is a sane alternative. There are still fees but only on cash ins and cash outs on the total amount tallied up between you and your friends when you chose to settle up in the form of BTC transaction fees. As far as I understand there are pretty much no transfer fees.
But I am just a novice interested in this tech. So correct me if I am wrong.
15 years ago I worked at Radio Shack in a mall. A woman and her daughter were looking for a cell phone.
We sold Verizon cell phone them with a 2 year contract which got you around 400 off the price. The cheapest phone with a contract was $29.00
In the mall were kiosks that sold a slight lower model phone with a tmobile contract but it was free. She asked me if we had any free phones, I said no, and she made a noise and walked out.
$30 for something you'll have for two years and we had a better service (verizon coverage) vs free
I don't want to drag this on. I didn't provide enough information because I was trying to keep it simple.
We were the only store that sold Verizon, the mall kiosks had ATT. The other variables weren't fixed and she was simply cross shopping phones. However you're right I am making assumptions, I took her huff to mean that she was focusing on the price of the phone and nothing else
The reason why ads work is consumers do not want to spend money now that they are conditioned to get stuff on the internet for free. Every time an article on here is posted the first comment is a link to archive.is.
I agree this would be a better model, but I don’t think it will ever happen. Maybe the Web3 stuff will catch on and this will become sustainable.
> Every time an article on here is posted the first comment is a link to archive.is.
Friction matters. Making an online payment is a slow 10 step procedure currently. If it was a single effortless click it would certinaly be used more. Kind of how arcade machines worked
That’s actually a really good point. I think I would be much more open to loading $100/mo or whatever into some account and then just one click “show me this article”. It could even use the same ad tech we already have with impression pixels. The impression is fired and on the backend it is deducted from your account.
I guess the issue becomes you will never have one solution and each website will integrate with different payment providers. Honestly sounds like something Apple could solve with ApplePay.
I think consumers are not reluctant to spend money. They are just averse to the friction of doing the paying. If nanopayments for e.g. reading a news article could become totally automated and transparent, I think this would work.
We are also conditioned that the stuff on the internet is an eyes-seeking bullshit nine times out of ten and there’s no way to mark a site, a blog or a section as “never again” so that you could know it next time. All this interaction of a user with the web is monopolized by few players who fuck them up in return. So it’s hard to blame a user for their reluctance.
I don't think it will ever be feasible to be charged directly, transaction fees are just way too high (and it's only marginally better on the crypto side). A postpaid system would work I suppose, ie you pay your total at the end of the month. But postpaid usually involves a credit check (in north america at least), so prepaid is really the only universal option.
A bigger problem with paying directly is taxes. Sales taxes and VAT for online sales are often required to be collected by the seller for the buyer’s jurisdiction. If you sell your online content directly to consumers you potentially have to deal with taxes in hundreds of different jurisdictions.
Going through third parties can make it so they are the ones that handle the tax nightmare.
Even infamous telco billing is more palatable than microtransactions. France’s Minitel system let services bill based on time spent on a page. That’s easy to use compared with having to type in your Apple password once again to pay $0.99 or even approve a $0 app because some parents blamed their kid for buying thousands of dollars of virtual game currency.
This won't work, because it requires the user to build a mental budget each time they go online. That is the exact opposite of how internet use has worked since its inception.
Secondly, if there really was a big opportunity in enabling micro transactions, the main players (PayPal, Visa, etc) would already have some offering available after ~25 years of paying for stuff online.
This guy's conception of The Google's role in the history of the ad-based internet is totally out of touch, which is strange because he appears to be about as old as I am, maybe even a bit older than that.
The Google didn't prove that "ads could work" to make content free. They may have become a big player, if not the biggest player in the ad space, but the proliferation of ad-supported content had more to do with timing than anything else. YouTube was born at a time where video content embedded in webpages could actually work for most users (without downloading something like RealPlayer) and be scaled up. The Google simply bought this business because it was clear to most people that YouTube represented the future, and they had the cash to do it. Not only did they have that cash, but even more cash to throw at it to create their Buffetean moat. There's nothing genius about it. Before YouTube and even Web 2.0, there was not only plenty of free written content but there were other video sites, few if any had anything to do with The Google.
If anything, The Google is responsible for demolishing the ad-based internet. The quality control of their ads used to be so atrocious that of course people started ignoring most of them. Thus, traditional ads became nearly worthless. Their conclusion wasn't to turn away business from outright scams hawking B.S., but that people aren't clicking on ads because the ads aren't relevant to them! A good theory on paper, except it turns out people don't actually like feeling like they're being followed everywhere they go, and it also turns out that when they regularly buy Huggies diapers out of necessity, that doesn't mean they want to immediately see another 100 ads telling them to buy more Huggies.
All that said, I don't think ads have very much to do with the current decline in the quality of the web as a whole. The recent push to shove lots of ads in front of users, namely those that appear frequently within YouTube videos, is just a symptom of companies like The Google struggling to maintain growth when Silicon Valley isn't living life on the fast lane in Easy Street. There's also other factors like search engines failing to scale along with the web, as well as deranking or outright censorship; this is done both at the behest of advertisers but also to chase the widest possible audience.
I agree that ads aren’t the cause. In fact I think they’re a downstream result. The root cause is that the Web doesn’t support any currency but attention. People on social media can cash in attention for self-esteem, but serious content can only really trade it for advertising dollars.
Those of us who remember when Google first started might even remember that part of it's early success was precisely that it didn't have tons of banner ads like the search engines that came before it. In no way was it the first to prove that "ads could work", the ad-driven model was already bananas before it came out.
It's only much later that Google went full on awful ads. Few and unobtrusive ads were a huge early selling point for Google.
I'm not going to watch this entire video. I just want to ask, what the fuck is going on with those disgusting body horror ads we see all over the internet? Close ups of pimples and wounds and bizzare diagrams of human anatomy that all appear designed specifically to draw the eye (at any cost) but personally just repulse me. There's a whole cross section of websites I won't visit, including some major news sites, because apparently the best they can attract are these garbage advertisers.
I've seen those before but haven't in awhile. I assume they are eye-catching. Holes in hand, hand pulling wet cloth, jellyfish on hand, spider, hair, etc.
Super low cost ads that lead to super low cost horrible clickbait content.
You can blame companies like outbrain and taboola for purposefully having horrible advertiser quality standards, and websites who are willing to have that junk on their site. The cycle repeats endlessly, as the horrible sites have.. horrible ads.
I looked further and the key thing that viewers are doing (based on 600k app store reviews which seem to be mostly real) is trying to "give the girl a chance for once" "help her cause nobody else is" etc...
In this critical scenario, are you saying welfare shouldn’t exist or that only believe who are unquestioning of a system are allowed to use it? I don’t think you are making the point you think you are.
Not the original commenter, but I agree with them. To me, it shows that the entire basis of Ayn Rand's philosophy was wrong. She goes on about how amazing capitalism is and the dangers of welfare states, yet the fact that she had to crawl back to the government for that very same welfare shows how necessary it is. It is simply hypocrisy, and I find it infects many of similar libertarian beliefs. This idea that it shouldn't be your responsibility or duty to help others and that everyone should fend for themselves, yet when it is THEM that are disadvantaged, or struggling, suddenly they see how important help can be? It is always rooted in selfishness and egoism. And just because Ayn Rand was a proud egoist doesn't make it right or impressive. Her very life proved her ideology wrong. I don't think there's anything more beautiful than that, really.
Payingt tax for welfare and then using it is not hypocrisy though. (I don't know who Aynd Rand was really. People just seems to name-drop her alot so I guess she was some famous 'thinker')
I think that actually makes total sense in the context of her philosophy. Her objection to welfare comes from the "non-aggression principle," e.g. that she felt it was immoral to use any type of force, violence, or aggression to make other people participate in something they don't agree with. To her, any type of taxes backed by legal penalties was "aggression."
In her view, it would actually be helping right the wrong to accept welfare, especially if you had ever had to pay taxes in the past against your will.
To be clear, I am not trying to argue for, or convince you of her position, but to argue that I believe she faithfully lived by the principles she espoused. In fact, I think much of the problems in her personal life make a pretty strong argument against her philosophy.
I don't know what Ayn Rand thing you're referring to, but I'd be a lot more concerned about the beginning of the ad where she's poking holes in a condom...
Usually those types of display ads show up when targeting isn't possible, or your anonymized such that the CPMs for your session are low enough that it's cheap enough for these types of ads to make money.
There are really only 3 buyers of banner/display ads when no targeting is available:
2) Scams, body horror, YMYL, click-trick, etc. This is what you're seeing. Info products, garbage cosmetics and scam courses have such huge margins that they can spend on broad-targeted placements for very cheap CPMs, with aggressive creatives that are A/B tested to death to get people to click. As long as the CPM is cheap, and the CTRs are high enough, the numbers work.
3) "Inexperienced" ad buyers
I'm not commenting or interested in debating the ethics of tracking and the internet data economy, but a side effect of removing 3rd party targeting is that as attribution goes away, buyers of ads pay less since they can't attribute dollars to campaigns, so you have to move to attribution methods more common in radio and TV. And as costs fall, it gives opportunities to the slimey shit you've been seeing.
Yes, what the fuck!? Facebook has started to show this filth in their shorts, that are un-blockable. I have to access Facebook for work and this is just repulsive. I guess if anybody still had any doubt wether the people at Facebook were degenerated perverts, at least there is no such doubt anymore.
These companies want clicks and views. They used to lure you in with curiosity, then with distracting colours and animations, and now with other emotions. Outrage ads and disgust ads get clicks. Any strong emotion that will get your eye drawn to their crap is worth exploiting.
They're also experts at using psychological warfare like well-positioned faces and expressions to trick your eyes into looking at their general area. That's why every clickbait thumbnail has some form of a face with an extreme expression in it.
Adblockers are the only solution. Whether you go with uBlock or AdNauseam, the only way to make this stuff go away is to make their business model unviable.
> what the f is going on with those disgusting ads we see all over the internet?
"we see" ? Who is "we" ? Your feed is not my feed, and I don't know what you're talking about.
What's up is an algorithm is taking a guess at what engages _you_. It may be failing badly. Although, you noticed enough to comment, and that's engagement! Rage clicks are still clicks. Understand that and you're closer to knowing what's wrong with all VC-funded social media.
But it's not what "we" see. Ad-wise, there is no such thing.
When I used Facebook I was spammed these "people falling and hurt themself" or car accident videos.
I hate those videos but I got more and more. I think it was because I stopped scrolling and tried to figure out what user was posting those to mute them which the algorithm maybe counted as "engagement".
Or maybe I was more likely to stop scroll the feed and switch tab when those came up, which maybe also counted as engagement.
Etc.
I don't think the algorithm can distinguish like and distaste that good.
Didn't watch the video but I've had the opposite experience from the title. All the ad-driven sites have forced my hand by now.
Most of the ad-driven social media site drove me far away, a long time ago. Reddit was the most recent and last, I'm never going to join another ad-drive social media platform again. I'm strictly on Mastodon, Lemmy and, for now, HN (I think lemmy might replace it). I've only been seriously using the fedivers stuff for about a week, I can feel a _major_ difference. I'm already trying to figure out exactly where I should start funneling my "Patreon budget" to be most effective at helping keep it's spirit alive.
Ad-driven media platforms have mostly gotten me to buy into the ad-free tier. YouTube being the most expensive and, by far, most used. The family plan is, I think, 22 a month and it's the last subscription I'd ever end. The channels I really like, I join the Patreon. I know YouTube has something similar now but I will never use it. That separation of paid subscribers from the platform the content creator currently uses to post, I think, is really, really important. Sacred even. I think, for example, the Breaking Points business model is something every channel should strive for. Channels structured in a similar manor tend to make incredible content. Even when they opt for sponsor ads, they're usually very tasteful about it. It doesn't bother me a bit to pay something and still get an ad like that.
Most of the movie/show streaming platforms just have me on that line of "doesn't cost much but they don't really have anything I like at the moment". When things get tight, they're the first to get cancelled.
I've found a better internet over the past year or so. It's nice again. I'm sure the majority of people aren't seeing it, but it's kind of back to how it used to be, if you try.
Good. The internet was really fun before the ads and monetization came.
We had forums and personal web sites. Weird blogs everywhere you looked. Some semblance of anonymity. A sense of community that wasn't about growing a following.
This sentiment reads pretty much like auto enthusiasts musing about how good things were when every car owner knew how to fix his car and things were more simple. The world has moved on, the Internet is not a hobby or specialization anymore, just like reading and writing used to be and no longer is.
Modern cars are about as easy to fix as old ones. The engine room is more cramped now so a bit more annoying though and you are often out of luck if the computers need replacements and be programmed for the car.
But most problems are fixed just like before.
I feel it is mostly an exuse to not bother doing it the "manly way" but paying a pro to do it.
The initial batch of professional "influencers" (they were called bloggers) where I live were ordinary bloggers before they started to shill products. I think it was around 2006 sometime?
They had normal blogs before profits entered the picture.
Good. I don't have a problem with subscriptions that provide content. That said, currently ad supported content stuffed behind a pay wall which still has ads, or even things like Hulu which have "ad free" yet still show ads, there is an imbalance toward shoving ads down peoples throats. The sooner that goes away, the better.
I work in the ad industry. I have some expertise both on witnessing the alleged decline and counter-acting it. Before anyone asks about my moral compass I do not like ads, I never have, but they're an inevitability. The problems big ad tech face are unique and very hard especially w.r.t. to data.
Anyway, ads are not dying. By and large ad quality is getting better. There are several companies that exist now to pre-screen ads for major websites (youtube being one of them) that specialize specifically in making sure not only the ads are relevant but also safe. You may see niche (gross) ads on places like 4chan. But on any major site you can be sure the ads have gone through several reviews not only for quality, but accuracy, and relevancy. As for the counter-acting part several companies specialize in guerilla advertising and this business is BOOMING. The author probably has no idea they are constantly being advertised on nearly every popular youtube video. There are so many ways we can slip ads in to someone's feed that you will not avoid it no matter what you do.
What bothers me is the author of this video seems to think the internet can exist without ads. In it's current form it cannot. Every free service you use, every video you watch, etc would have to be paid in full otherwise. This is the definition of an information economy. The video goes on to whine and cry about how many ads are being shown on youtube, or how reddit torpedo'd stuff in the name of ads. The ONLY ALTERNATIVE is a paid solution. The author seems to be channeling the levels of undeserved hubris only Stallman can achieve. This is the fundamental problem of open source software only marginally reframed. A bunch of ivory tower morons talking about how software should be free but unwilling to help/donate/code to make it happen. Users of ad-powered websites are legitimately no different.
So you have a fork in the road. Watch a couple ads occasionally to help fund the website you're leeching from or pay for the service. The video frustrates me especially because the industry itself is doing a lot of very hard work to drive relevant content to users. For example, you won't see an ad for clorox bleach on a sysop video.
Nothing is getting worse. You are watching a system built on advertising revenue to provide a "free" experience degrading because the revenue is getting smaller. If you like the service turn your ad blocker off. If you cannot do that, you legitimately have no place to complain. You do not have to use these services. In the case of Youtube you can pay for the ad-free experience.
I guess what I'm saying is: if you're a content leech watch a couple ads. If you're an OSS leech, consider donating :).
To be fair, there is a dramatic difference between the free you are talking about and the free that youtube, facebook, etc are. It's one thing to offer a small website or something for free. It's another thing to power a million, or even billion, dollar infrastructure and the supporting staff on charity. It's part of the reason I drew a parallel to OSS. The "free" it is isn't free in the charitable sense. It's free in the sense, ideally, you should contribute something. In the case of ads - it's your eyes.
The excluded group you are talking about would've been excluded anyway. Anything that isn't a charity and held up with volunteers and a lot of hard work will not be able to sustain them. That doesn't make it okay, necessarily, but rather that luxury services (of which youtube for example is one) are just that - a luxury. It's an take-a-penny-leave-a-penny but there are more takers than leavers.
Something more familiar to us might be the Linux kernel. Without the support of all of the billions of dollars pouring in via corporations, support contracts, etc the free Linux kernel would likely either be dead or not free anymore. Even something with an army of volunteers at that caliber cannot sustain the poor people who benefit from their charity and contribute nothing in return. A tragedy, but the value producers have to eat, too.
> It's free in the sense, ideally, you should contribute something. In the case of ads - it's your eyes.
No, it's not. Either something is free or is not. Either I chose to pay or I don't. If it's not free and I choose to pay, I can enjoy the service. If I choose not to pay, they can refuse me. If it's free, and I pay (donate), good. If I decide not to pay, it's on you to bear the cost. I don't have any obligation to you.
It's not mandatory to read, watch and listen to ads. And most people choose not to, or they tune out, especially when it's not related in any way to their current activity.
> If I decide not to pay, it's on you to bear the cost. I don't have any obligation to you.
That is not how the actual world functions. This sort of anarcho-primitivism does not lead itself to large scale, widely available, systems. In society you pay taxes for services you perceive as (locally) free. On the internet you pay with ads (at least for now).
You are correct that you can exploit a free service. In some services, the taker to giver (leecher/seeder, whatever ratio you prefer) is high enough that service can maintain equilibrium. This is largely not true for all but the most used services. Even food banks shut down because the seeder to leecher ratio is unsustainable. Nothing is stopping you from driving these services into the ground. And you will.
I really hate how smug your post comes off. Do you know what this absurd smugness gets us? A centralized internet owned by 4 companies that can afford the seeder/leecher ratio. The 4 companies that will come to own the internet also hate net neutrality. Buckle up...because then we all pay. Even Stallman encourages people to contribute back to things they use. When your attitude is so smug that not even Stallman, the king of smug nonsense, agrees with you...that says something.
> In society you pay taxes for services you perceive as (locally) free. On the internet you pay with ads (at least for now).
The government also knows that it's the working part of society that pays taxes. And it has the incentive to make that part the biggest percentage of the population. I don't see the same trend with these big platforms. They don't want to provide a service, they want to sell ads. And as such, I'm not their clientele.
If you really wish to provide something for free, but you don't have the means to do so, you can ask for donations or provide extra benefits for people that are willing to pay for it. If no one is willing, then that just means it's not valuable for anyone at the price it costs.
The moment you start selling ads, your priority is to grow your audience, so you can sell more ads. Not to provide a better service or product, in exchange for money. Because the former is easy (add dark patterns) while the latter is more difficult.
IMO, Apple has the right strategy. Provide a good ecosystem, that you can use by buying the hardware. If you don't and try to use other means of access (Hackintosh) don't blame them for stuff not working. Microsoft could have done the same and only supported valid Windows licenses, but they wanted to capture the market. And now they're showing ads driving down the quality.
> Nothing is stopping you from driving these services into the ground. And you will.
Nothing is eternal. If you grow beyond what is sustainable because of investors' money and then find out your product is not so valuable, and you pivot to dark patterns and ads, then yes, it's a failure. And if YouTube did not exist, maybe we would have something similar to Wikipedia for videos, with a drastic improvement in quality.
> I do not like ads, I never have, but they're an inevitability.
Drinking water is inevitable. 99% percent of the web being monetized by ads is not.
"Ads are inevitable" has become a mantra repeated by every ad-tech executive to keep them relevant.
> What bothers me is the author of this video seems to think the internet can exist without ads. In it's current form it cannot.
The current form of internet is an intelligence insulting, attention-seeking, malicious, privacy-invading monster exactly because it has been using ads as its primary monetization vehicle for the last two decades. Losing it would actually be a good thing for humanity.
> The ONLY ALTERNATIVE is a paid solution.
This is quite a good solution. Yes, it would instantly kill 99% of 'content creation', vast majority of which is low quality, but this is exactly what is making current form of internet horrible in the first place (paired with ad monetization).
The 1% remaining content creation is what would pass a bar of 'worth paying for'. This immediately creates the right incentive structure for all parties involved, including for the author of this video. They will be given a choice - do they go 'pro' and try to make their content great and worth paying for or do they look for a new job? Seems like they are already half-way there, and with a bit more effort they could be making a living from a paid model.
This is what I'm expecting to be coming soon, a barrage of articles blaming and shaming users for not wanting to be bombarded by ads.
> if you're a content leech watch a couple ads
No. Never. Sorry, your industry has destroyed any goodwill it ever had. I'm not just an ad blocker, I'm hostile to ads. I hate them and I hate the industry.
My Ad-Antibodies have become stronger with time, even as the click baits proliferate. Anything that shows a morsel = click for next = I am gone.
Some ads are tolerable - I endure, some throw up such a ticket = gone. Any site that asks me = gone...
When I am presented with an obtrusive popup to sign up for some website, I've been in the habit of just filling it in with a random email address pointed at the site's own domain. Funnily enough, some sites will stop you from submitting an email address associated with the current domain because even they know how annoying and unpleasant they are
Some people, besides the ones who read HN, believe the success of online advertising service providers, including so-called "Big Tech" and "adtech", is based on fraud. Please distinguish the success of online advertising service providers, e.g., Google, versus the success of online advertisers, e.g., Joe's Pizza.
One example is Bob Hoffman. Hoffman is an ad industry veteran who suggests that despite all the advances in computing, advertising has gotten worse, not better. That is, ads today are, for various reasons, less effective at creating brands than in the past. (If so, then one might ask "Why pay for them?" There are multiple answers, none of them satisfactory. IMHO. Yours may differ.)
I think it's pretty obvious just as a consumer that banner ads don't work. No one deliberately clicks on them, and meanwhile every major site has obvious scam ads on it. Magazines always had scam ads, but they were in the back pages in small print. Now the scam ads are quite prominent (and disgusting). People in general like ads: they sing jingles, they talk about funny Super Bowl ads, they buy the mattress their podcast host recommends, they cut out magazine ads as mini-posters, they follow Instagram influencers (glamorous product placement), etc. No one likes banner ads. They have had no impact on pop culture since "punch the monkey" and "one weird trick" (both scams, btw), and in general, they are worthless, so the whole market for them is rotten.
I am eternally grateful to the hippies who created the Internet, open protocols and all that, but I think making everything free was a mistake, which opened the door for advertising (and the tracking that goes with it) to step in and fill the gap.
If Google search was subscription from day one, how different would the world be now?
I think fiat is dying and all the bond values are going to zero which will prevent the big megacorps from paying their bills. That collapse is a better explanation of the curious, brand-destroying things these companies have done recently.
I noticed recently YouTube made it REALLY hard for me to download an mp4 for a video using VLC.
Now if I were a betting man, and the collapse of Google were imminent, I'd bet that in liquidation, they'd want to charge to get an offline copy of the videos they store. Soooo, in the meantime before the collapse, they're making it painful/time consuming to download their videos so they can max out their post-meltdown profits.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] threadIt does seem ironic though that on a video about the ad-based internet dying, there are several ads in the page, the video maker in the first segment has a lengthy ad where he praises whatever he is advertising, probably VPN stuff, there is a bunch of begging for paid subscribers in the summary, and comments in the comment section from third party ad spammers directing people to what appears to be MLMs.
Independent websites need to get working on something similar. Whisper is pretty good but extremely CPU intensive, but there are lower cost implementations with acceptable transcriptions out there.
I usually watch the introduction and then skip to the 66% mark, those seem to be the places the actual interesting information is stored on YouTube and its competitors.
The sad fact is that there still seem to be more than enough utterly braindead marks on the Internet that fall for these scams and thus make the spam campaigns, scare ads and other crap "worth the effort".
Defense is a game of resource exhaustion. Even security experts get tired/drunk/overwhelmed and make errors in judgment. I almost fell for a recent phishing exercise myself.
A growing number of these "utterly braindead marks" are people like your own parents and grandparents, whose brains are in fact degrading. Meanwhile the threats continue to evolve and new vectors arise. It's like applying for jobs. The more scammers try, the higher the chances an attempt will eventually succeed.
PSA: Expecting an inheritance? Keep your parents out of trouble or you'll never see it. The power-of-attorney scam is alive and well.
It's also a game of numbers. I once did fall for a phishing exercise, because by pure coincidence, the email looked perfectly legitimate in context of my unusual, specific and temporary circumstances. There were some minor red flags, but I missed those as I got the email while waiting in the airport. Basically, a one in a million lottery win. Fortunately, it was a company exercise, so all I lost was a bit of self-esteem and a lot of self-confidence.
But that's the thing: when you can send a message like this to a couple million people for approximately $0, then "one in a million chance" turns into a guaranteed win.
And that despite the size of Google, modern advancements in technology such as large processing power, AI and LLMs, all the tracking and anti-abuse mechanisms (that often misfire and ban legitimate accounts with no recourse), this shit still manages to get through while being super obvious.
We used to filter this crap out on forums back in the good old days with much more primitive tools (regexes and basic keyword matching + queuing for moderator's manual approval), but Google wants us to believe they can't while in reality they just don't care because they're not liable, have a monopoly and those spammers still contribute towards "engagement".
The website was actively user-hostile. Multiple things popping up all over the place, the works.
Is there any other destiny for content like that? Long since written, but owned and served. Why not enshittify as much as possible, one performance review cycle at a time?
Even worse - they never had good ad revenue.
If ad revenue model is dying it would suggest companies like facebook and google see ad revenue dying.
While it may be efficient from the perspective of a spreadsheet, its inefficient due to the external costs, ie pollution from shipping, the delicate nature of just-in-time shipments, etc.
Your fruit cup might cost a bit more if it was to be done all in one place, but I would call that a cost for a less fragile system.
With 0 AP, the industry is in equilibrium, with no companies dropping out, and no companies entering the market.
Junk bonds have high yields, why don't why all buy them?
As for reddit and twitter it's not the efficiency and room for profit, it's the cost to provide said content outweigh the revenue gained from ads. Hosting and maintaining global social media is expensive, which is there's no many players in that field.
Long term, when renewables have displaced fossil fuels, then profits will fall. But that only happens after the renewables get investment.
I thought the whole idea behind Reddit and other sites was to keep people browsing with algorithms that keep them interested. Wouldn't that be what makes them efficient?
I have a different theory.
But first...
New projects have stalled because of permitting bottlenecks. 1/
Investment in '22 was $1.1 trillion dollars. Another record. https://about.bnef.com/new-energy-outlook/ 2/
There's plenty of other investors. Like utilities, NGOs, govts, and customers. Here's the list of projects in Bhadla Solar Park. https://cms.mercomindia.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/List-... Where's Big Oil, Vanguard, Blackrock? Scanning some dozen other marque projects tells a similar story.
Further, IIRC, the ROI for mega projects are largely predetermined via PPAs and such. Think of them as bonds. There seems to be no shortage of investors (for feasible projects).
Okay, back to my theory...
Big Oil knows this is the end game. But they want to compensated for all their soon-to-be stranded assets, real and (more likely) imaginary.
So this is a hostage negotiation. They've redoubled their efforts to up the stakes. "Pay us! Or we kill the planet!"
It's just straight up extortion.
I have no sense for how it'll play out.
My vote is for nationalizing all the fossil fuel companies. Then put all their execs (say Director on up) and board members in solitary confinement for life. Stage some show trials at The Hague for ecocide or whatever, to add a veneer of legitimacy.
Though I recognize opinions may differ.
--
0/ I prefer my socialism to be advocacy-oriented, vs whinging, but tastes differ.
1/ Separately, post IRA, the billionaire funded reactionary astroturf campaign is now in full swing. For instance, every single offshore wind farm has been opposed, farmers adopting solar are being harassed, ad nauseum. So even as permitting is reformed, brain worms will likely slow our transition.
2/ Early reports post-IRA suggest new investment, in everything, has gone bonkers. With potential for even more as the Biden Admin firms up the implementation. David Roberts' Volts podcast is one of my primary sources, highest recommendation. https://www.volts.wtf/podcast/archive?sort=new
Well it used to be "Pay us! And we kill the planet!"
My opinion is that the "or" operator is an improvement over the old. It implies that there is a chance to save the planet.
>My vote is for nationalizing all the fossil fuel companies
This will have exactly the opposite effect as you are envisioning. Having every citizen benefit from fossil fuels will make them much harder to keep in the ground.
If you haven't already done so, read Kim Stanley Robinson's article on this topic: https://www.noemamag.com/paying-ourselves-to-decarbonize/
Sure.
Or not.
At some point, like with coal before it, oil's price will fall thru the floor. What then?
The fate of the countries listed will vary.
Foreseeing the inevitable, some of the Gulf States and Norway have been diversifying for a while. China is racing to create the post carbon future, hoping to outrun the bear. Russia is choosing oblivion. The others will fall somewhere in between. Or in the schizophrenic USA, somewhere(s).
> read Kim Stanley Robinson's article
Ok, have done. Meh.
Aside: "The Ministry for the Future" presents an absolutely best case scenario, in all its terribleness. Pretty unconvincing.
There's no reactionary movement actively thwarting progress, no emergent right wing eco-fascism.
Technological progress always begets social upheaval. Globe spanning wars were fought over much lower stakes (than climate crisis).
That said, I have no idea how any of this will play out. Can't even guess. But I expect the worse.
And I'm an optimist.
Same. That KSR article just made me more pessimistic about fossil fuels. Politicians in the West need to quickly show some leadership towards a carbon tax.
Tons of products are made with byproducts from the refining process, much of the research done by these companies over the last century was focused on inventing new products and creating markets to sell them to.
Replacing transportation use of fossil fuels with renewables doesn't actually replace all of the profits in the fossil fuel industry, and doesn't explain how those products we've now grown to expect will be created if we aren't refining oil for gasoline and diesel.
Fun fact: Gasoline only became the fuel for cars because it was a refinery byproduct that had no real economic value, and so was very cheap. Before that, cars ran on alcohol or electricity, but oil refining was still a pretty large business anyway.
If we stopped fueling cars with gas, refineries would still operate to provide all of the other products we need, just as they did before gas was a thing.
Modern oil companies are extremely proud of the additional revenue streams they have invested to consume oil byproducts. The most disgusting of which, in my opinion, was the humble bragging that Hershey's chocolate includes petroleum products in the chocolate bars.
If we stopped consuming oil for gasoline today massive industries would collapse, both due to the loss of byproduct inputs and the transportation required to move products across the country. It wouldn't be the world returning back to a nineteenth century era where trains all ran on coal and lamps were fueled by whale blubber.
But all of that would only be for the good.
My first thought was Google, and it's started to plateau in the recent years:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/rev....
Meta also took a dive, and while it was from a sharp turn of the business focus, I'd argue it comes from an attempt to avoid staying on a stagnating market.
[1] This recent post on @bloombergbusiness for instance, it just takes 1 fold of comments to be all scammers, multiple accounts, same or near same message, pointing to the same account.
Sometimes in app its swipe up to go to the next thing, sometimes its swipe left, sometimes i have no clue and trigger an ad event.
And then the "game" ads I get, cant seem to tell IG the ad irrelevant enough times.
1. https://www.instagram.com/p/Cuk_35AMXeE/
For instance sister comments are mentionning TikTok growing in revenue, but if Google/Meta were already saturating the market, it means that growth is eating from the other less successful players (Twitter/Reddit ?), and at some point Google and Meta will also see dramatic decreases or TikTok's growth will stop.
That also
Even if you don't mind the changes to the content, there's a constant pressure driving up costs and driving down convenience to continue avoiding ads. If you're paying for an ad-free experience then you have money, and you're willing to spend it. You are essentially forced into a bidding war for your own attention.
> After the last recession in 2008, the US ad market declined by 13%. Newspaper ad spend fell 27%, radio spend 22%, magazine spend 18%, outdoor spend 11%, TV spend 5% and digital 2%.
And yes, it happened this time too. From https://simonowens.substack.com/p/the-advertising-recession-... :
> Digiday published a recent overview of media earnings reports, and while earnings overall were a mixed bag, nearly every single company reported a significant dip in advertising revenue:
> Publishers reported declines in digital ad revenue from about 9% to 30% — worse than the 3% to 27% drop in ad revenue year over year reported for the fourth quarter of 2022. Executives continued to cite macroeconomic conditions and a soft ad market as major challenges to their businesses.
[1] https://www.ibisworld.com/us/bed/total-advertising-expenditu...
At some point, you literally have no more people you can get in your service.
Attempting to shore up revenue by trying to show even more ads is begging for your business to crumble and die a quick, painful death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_maximization?wprov=sfla...
Finding the right level to decrease supply by would be a tricky calculation to get right, but in no way could the right move be to further flood the market with supply.
I disagree. Elon doesn't care about ad revenue. He stated multiple times that the goal is to make Twitter a superapp.
All the shit you do on the web, but controlled by one company, in their app, so they can rent-seek the hell out of everyone else's business.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-name-shame-adverti...
By shifting your debts on the company you bought with that debt, so other people take the risks of his failures.
https://i.redd.it/6m0sgmktewab1.jpg
Yeah, sounds super focused on free speech.
And Threads censored from Twitter search and before that Mastodon?
Where did you get that conspiracy theory from?
To verify your information, I did a search on Twitter with the keyword threads. The search returned thousands of tweets. In fact, the very first tweet is a WSJ article describing how Threads may kill Twitter soon. Further, I searched for the hashtag #threads. The search returned all the tweets hashtagged with #threads.
Superapps are self-limiting, because the app-size is too large for many user's phones (Uber has famously had this problem too, and thus split up their apps [0]).
The UX also tends to be a bit weird. Everyone wants to use the superapp differently and so the interface ends up being the lowest common denominator across all product families.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/in/developer/uber-technologies-inc/id...
I’ve frankly not seen any difference, at all. If anything there’s slightly more activity
At their scale and in their market the premium subscriptions model doesn't appear to work, unless their costs can be reduced much, much further.
Sharing revenue with creators is great. Not everything being done is bad. On the whole it just doesn't seem sustainable and sometimes even petty and foolish. Almost appears as if he's trying to bankrupt the company.
What I'm trying to say is it seems like the world is "demanding" too much from Elon. Additionally, there is a weird trend of people rooting for his failure. This is something I strongly stand against.
Why would I want to live in a world where "a superapp" is needed?
Why would I want to live in a world where you have one company in control of the "town square"?
Personally, I just wanted Twitter to fail because I think that any ad-funded business is bad for us. But if you tell me that Elon's long term game is to make it something even more dystopian than it ever was, then yes I will do everything in my power to see him fail and fail catastrophically.
Rooting for someone's success is not about personal preferences or endorsing their actions. It's about fostering a positive and supportive environment that encourages growth and achievement.
> Why would I want to live in a world where "a superapp" is needed?
Super-apps already exist in other markets. Entrepreneurs want to create ones in the US market to foster the diversity of options. This is a healthy process. You live in the world with wars, but you want to do everything in your power to see Twitter fail. That's strange. A world catered only to your preferences is unlikely, so you have to be realistic.
> Why would I want to live in a world where you have one company in control of the "town square"?
I don't know. You don't have to live in that town.
> Personally, I just wanted Twitter to fail because I think that any ad-funded business is bad for us.
Pretty much every business in the world is driven by ads, one way or another. However, as I said, Musk doesn't care about ads. In fact, he wants even fewer ads on Twitter. That being said, his goals kinda align with what you want.
Not when this "growth" and "achievement" is something that affects part of the society negatively, or when there might be unknown consequences.
> Super-apps already exist in other markets.
And they are enablers of authoritarian states and continuous centralized power over a handful of corporations.
> You don't have to live in that town.
Just on another thread I was being accused of being "socially inept" for refusing to use WhatsApp.
If we live in a world where so much power is centralized into a few corporations, they affect everyone's lives, even if they don't participate directly on it.
> Pretty much every business in the world is driven by ads
Does it help you sleep at night to be telling yourself this kind of bullshit, or are you just apathetic?
> he wants even fewer ads on Twitter.
You forgot to capitalize your Lord's name.
Emotions are the enemy of a constructive dialogue. I bail.
That honestly sounds more like the goal for an elementary school class than the goal for an adult society.
We don't necessarily need to support and encourage development that we don't agree worth, or even see as dangerous. And the idea that growth and achievement are always good things and should be wholly supported and encouraged sounds lovely on the surface, but there are plenty of things that could be considered achievement that we are better off without.
Like, common he set expectations by himself. He was the one bragging and running his mouth how everyone before him was an idiot while he is going to clean and fix the place.
> Additionally, there is a weird trend of people rooting for his failure. This is something I strongly stand against.
I really really hope for failure of his, quite apparent, political project.
There's way more ads. Now every blue checkmark tweet is an ad, paid for placement. So I click on a tweet and all I get are pages of ads with the real tweets buried at the bottom.
Ads aside, there are host of other ways he's ruined twitter from censorship to blocking anon access to amplifying his own terrible tweets.
It's not "opinions I disagree with," I hope. Because labeling that "unsafe" is a new level of Orwellian.
It also depends on how you define "killed". I dont think twitter will be gone, but there is a chance it will become a lot more similar to truth social or parler.
Do you think Hackernews would do better or worse if they introduced a paid tier that put your comment above others every time?
If a paid tier alone puts your comment above others, then the result is negative. However, I do not believe Twitter's algorithm simply ranks by the presence of a blue checkmark. It is a signal amongst other signals and not a sole criteria. My feed has improved after all the changes, which is why I could not share your observation.
Truth social exists because of a censorship. The idea of a social network with high censorship results in a state of content being a walled garden. While the intention behind censorship may be to create a safer and more controlled environment, it often comes at the cost of limiting diversity of thought, stifling creativity, and hindering the progress of society.
Censorship, when implemented excessively, can lead to a state where only certain viewpoints and information are allowed, effectively creating an echo chamber that reinforces existing beliefs and discourages critical thinking.
Twitter has the potential to become the next Truth Social. If Meta enforces excessive censorship in Threads, people might perceive it as a more "positive" social network, offering the illusion of a better alternative. With media support, people could gradually migrate towards Threads, leaving Twitter in decline. However, if Elon achieves his super-app goal, Twitter's current form will no longer exist, rendering these social media-related issues irrelevant. Consequently, Twitter and Threads would evolve into a completely distinct applications.
The only good thing about it is that I spend more time reading books now.
> Most people i know don't use it anymore.
Twitter hasn't really changed much. If you know people who no longer want to use the platform, then their decision is likely driven by the propaganda. In a way, it's not their personal decision, but the result of influence from elsewhere.
In addition, Must is not even trying to stand up to regimes and such. It became completely meek.
Also, twitter is not "balanced". It is right-wing in the sense of "we use right-wing as euphemism for nazi and such".
1) fake/shell drop shipping companies dominate the ads with nonsense names and computer generated logos. An endless stream of low quality ads as opposed to real companies that used to advertise there.
2) Low effort facebook style posts have began to dominate any reply section, as users who typically had bad posts that saw no engagement, now pay to force people to look at their low effort/hateful/uneducated opinions. (still not gaining many followers but users are now forced to see it over higher quality users).
3) Bot issues are still very much there, every time I make a post with more than a dozen likes, I get 2-3 bot follows that are always a vaguely feminine name and a single post, following hundreds of accounts.
4) API cost increases have hurt positive bot accounts(ie OpossumEveryHour, various "every lot in x" accounts) while tons of crypto scam accounts, tshirt bots, etc have taken over.
5) The general changes to the checkmark system has destroyed the meaning behind the check, it used to serve to ensure accounts were not imposters. Now its simply every guy who watches self help entrepreneur videos has a check.
Just a handful of aspects of the overall degraded experience. Every day the site becomes more hateful and zenophobic, looking more and more like low effort boomer facebook groups every day. Regardless of opinion, the site used to be a place that you could get news from verified sources, follow public figures, and not be inundated literal Nazis. If you own a bar and a couple Nazis are made to feel welcome, you now have a Nazi bar.
Only from bots. I mean, this is not even disputable, saying that twitter has more genuine activity now or somehow better content is in the reals of fan fiction.
For more than a decade the fed has spoiled VC to expect that money could just be borrowed for nearly free.
Depending on where one lives, but many people have access to "free" government services, ranging from roads, education, unemployment security, healthcare, and more. The costs of these services are payed by taxes.
Some "free" services are sustained via donations. Wikipedia is a good example of this.
Some people might say that those are not examples of "for free", because someone is paying for those things, either via taxes or donations. They do have a cost for society. Yes, but in that case then ad-based services are not free either: the advertisers are putting the money to run those services, and the society is also paying a huge cost in thousand of hours of people's lives wasted down the drain, promotion of harmful products, scams, etc.
Require something in return.
Flightradar24 gives ad-free subscriptions to users who pay $20 or so for an RTL dongle and feed it data.
YoutTube is making money, somehow, off of us. Is it not our right to reclaim the excess value we are creating for them? Why is only okay for trillion dollar companies to have free lunch?
Excess value is real, measured not from the margin, or even money that goes back into the org, but value that is 100% extracted from the organization, often at the detriment of the org for the sake of shareholders. Its very often just parasitic.
People are so entitled now, "nooo i need my investments doubled at all costs". I have little sympathy for professional investors that have tied the global economy to short term private gain over long term sustainable growth. Its a rich child's game.
Say, for example, a certain bank where to listen to the Fed and invest massive piles of cash deposited after currency debasement into federal notes and bonds. If those notes where purchased when the story was interest would remain zero only to face 4-6% interest months later, the investor could well need a quick win to dig out from those now toxic assets that can't be sold at face value.
> other times it's to cover existing bets
This is my issue. Our economy has become a casino for these professional investment firms with lots of capital to try to strike it rich. This is not a healthy way to run a system that determines who lives or dies in a big picture sense.
The economy has become a game for people with connections. It no longer matters if a business is healthy or profitable, if it does not work within this grand casino. The search for constant growth is killing us all.
Because it does not make any sense. No one wants to be shown something he does not find interesting or important, even if they say that they will. So if you believe people should watch, read, or listen to your ads, you've been living in a bubble.
> They want everything free.
It would be nice if everything were free, but only small children believe that. People know they got to pay for cars, houses, clothes, and education. And they do because it's valuable. They also pay for apps that are valuable to them. If they don't use something unless it's free, that's because its value is 0.
> This just encourages subscriptions.
There are subscriptions in the real world, like phone, internet, and electricity. I do not mind subscriptions, for music streaming, or apps that require continuous maintenance (support fees). But most apps are done (or should be, apart from the bugs) and they should just provide a license. New feature requests should be added to the backlog for the new version.
Take Duolingo, I could have paid $3 a month for the service (that's their value to me). But no way, I'm paying $7 a month. However, they say: "Hey, you can use it for free". So, I do. And the ads are just so ugly that they bring the whole app down to their level. So now, I'm even less appreciative of their service. And when the ads will get too irritating, I will just stop using their "free" service. And I've paid the 273 dollars for a Michel Thomas course. Because no ads, just good content.
I'd say that it is because the value is less than the transaction cost of any payment, not zero.
It's either watch some ads, or work slightly harder to make slightly more money, to afford a subscribtion (or forgo some other pleasure, and reallocate that money to subscribtion instead). Both options are unpleasant, but of the two, majority of people seem to prefer ads.
A more valid experiment would require all users to be new to the platform.
Or using it with an ad blocker
Personal blogs, passion sites filled with resources where they might sell a couple products, open source resources built by a community, etc.
I can say its almost rare I get the answer I need on a commercial platform besides reddit, but that's only because reddit replaced forums where ads were generally small and unobtrusive.
Yes! I would say 90% of the useful stuff I find on the web is this sort of site.
YES. Not only would I find more pleasant sites, but they'd likely be of higher information quality.
Of course Google's business is those ads, so they cannot fix the problem. They are the problem. Google's raison d'être is spam, so of course they're going to return a bunch of spam to you. Same deal with email. I get plenty of spam to my gmail inbox with things like, literally, "THIS MESSAGE CONTAINS ADVERTISING". Obviously, Google is not even slightly trying to filter spam from emails, even the spam that labels itself as such.
You might prefer to, but Google and others know better when it comes to B2C pricing.
Look at Netflix, Youtube Premium, HBO etc. The price increases every year, consumers get pissed. That's because:
a) these companies are bad at forecasting their margins
b) the real cost of pricing these services is MUCH higher than consumers would tolerate, and is thus heavily subsidized at the early stages ($10/mo), in the hope that future revenue deals (cable TV syndication, IP rights etc) will offset those losses later. The subscriber base isn't part of that equation here.
This is much easier to accomplish with a B2B model, i.e. ads. That's because advertisers and companies have budgets available, and aren't as sensitive to price changes.
There was a comic (an Oatmeal comic, IIRC) where the guy goes into Starbucks and orders a $5.00 coffee, and then while drinking it picks up his phone and it asks him to pay $1.00 to access a news article and he says, "$1.00! Who do they think I am, Mark Zuckerberg?" (or something like that).
While I get the _sentiment_ behind it (especially from a webcomic guy who's producing entertaining content and not getting anything back from it), it misses a lot of the subtext of why paying for things on the internet is such a hassle. Yes, I'd probably pay $1.00 to read a news article - I pay $5.00 to buy a print magazine when I get on a plane after all - small transactions on the internet are a huge hassle. There's a lot of friction around tracking down my credit card, typing in the number, typing in all my personal info, hoping that the site doesn't store it stupidly and leak it... I don't know what the solution is there, but the way it works now ain't it.
I wouldn’t exactly say he’s not getting anything from it. Per Wikipedia,
>Inman said in 2012 that The Oatmeal had a revenue of $500,000 a year.
For a webpage, the marginal cost is approximately zero. Certainly there was an upfront cost, in that somebody had to write the thing, but the cost to pass it from the server to my phone looks like rounding error.
I'd be one of those people. $1 for a single news article is outrageously overpriced, where the coffee is only moderately overpriced.
https://workspace.google.com/products/gmail/
No ads in workspace, they don't mine your data for advertising.
Users understand this just fine. They pay for Netflix, Disney and others.
It's Google that has failed to position Youtube as something worth paying for. Youtube is free because it is basically a public access tv channel full of amateur content --- consumers don't pay for public access, so they're not going to pay for Youtube. It's on Google to change people's minds about that.
Google could have carved out obviously premium content and put that behind a paywall, but instead they built this ad-based revenue system, thereby positioning its content library as commoditized and interchangeable. The only upsell they provide is to pay to get rid of the ads. It's a terrible offering.
Why do you think that people don't understand this?
> This just encourages subscriptions.
Which is the lesser of the two evils.
I dont have a problem with ads, just dont sell my data to everyone who knocks on your companies doors. Happy to support ethical ads.
Twitter ads are aweful, showing unknown, click bait ads on its platform.
In addition to which - they were never that solid in the first place. They (and Facebook) are mostly just "dumb hosting" for other people's content - if the content producers leave, they don't have anything to offer. They don't even really own the content that was produced on their platform and it wouldn't have any value even if they did. There's a weak value proposition there: "we'll let you put your stuff up for people to see and even sort of promote it, but we'll run ads next to it to offset our hosting costs", but neither seemed to realize just how precarious their position is/was.
One can suggest that recent decisions were "blunders" due to the problems they have encountered, but maybe there just was no path forward for them simply because there's not much value to be extracted from this business. Now we just see the entire house of cards collapsing around them.
Instead they wanted to be Facebook Jr, killed all of their interesting and niche aspects, ignored the things users and mods were asking for, and hamfisted general ads in people's faces while adding expensive, unneeded (unwanted!) features like live chat and video hosting.
Reddit is an example of what happens when you put people in charge of a business who are both greedy and stupid.
No, it's what happens when your investors are VCs who need to 10x on their wins because most of their investments fail. As a result, stable, long-term profitability isn't the goal; big IPOs are, or at least explosive growth. There's no room for a company which is moderately successful when VCs are involved.
I think this is just the way of the world. Usenet -> Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit -> Discord -> ???
Look at the facebook ads platform from the perspective of a small business looking to advertise. It is incredibly effective in how it can target people.
(I have no particular love for YouTube but at least sponsorblock works there!)
A micropayment system where you are able to request refunds/dispute payments will break that model.
- become the gateway for advertisement money
- make it opt-in and share the revenue with users that see the ads.
- make it easy for the users to redistribute this earned money with the content creators they like.
Yeah, you are going to tell me that this could be done without crypto, and I will respond that micropayments are still not solved.
I will accept a criticism about Brave sticking with the token, though - they could've gone with a stabletoken and their business model would seem a lot more legit.
You can certainly use a hosted wallet with lighting which is a sane alternative. There are still fees but only on cash ins and cash outs on the total amount tallied up between you and your friends when you chose to settle up in the form of BTC transaction fees. As far as I understand there are pretty much no transfer fees.
But I am just a novice interested in this tech. So correct me if I am wrong.
I personally use it sometimes to pay for some services with minimal transfer fee, but BCH can't seem to win the branding game against Bitcoin.
We sold Verizon cell phone them with a 2 year contract which got you around 400 off the price. The cheapest phone with a contract was $29.00
In the mall were kiosks that sold a slight lower model phone with a tmobile contract but it was free. She asked me if we had any free phones, I said no, and she made a noise and walked out.
$30 for something you'll have for two years and we had a better service (verizon coverage) vs free
She didn't ask about what service we had, the benefits, etc
Maybe she already knew and wasn't as clueless and uninformed as you assumed.
We were the only store that sold Verizon, the mall kiosks had ATT. The other variables weren't fixed and she was simply cross shopping phones. However you're right I am making assumptions, I took her huff to mean that she was focusing on the price of the phone and nothing else
I agree this would be a better model, but I don’t think it will ever happen. Maybe the Web3 stuff will catch on and this will become sustainable.
Friction matters. Making an online payment is a slow 10 step procedure currently. If it was a single effortless click it would certinaly be used more. Kind of how arcade machines worked
I guess the issue becomes you will never have one solution and each website will integrate with different payment providers. Honestly sounds like something Apple could solve with ApplePay.
Also "Which sites are using Axate?", I don't recognize any of the sites on that list.
Going through third parties can make it so they are the ones that handle the tax nightmare.
Secondly, if there really was a big opportunity in enabling micro transactions, the main players (PayPal, Visa, etc) would already have some offering available after ~25 years of paying for stuff online.
The Google didn't prove that "ads could work" to make content free. They may have become a big player, if not the biggest player in the ad space, but the proliferation of ad-supported content had more to do with timing than anything else. YouTube was born at a time where video content embedded in webpages could actually work for most users (without downloading something like RealPlayer) and be scaled up. The Google simply bought this business because it was clear to most people that YouTube represented the future, and they had the cash to do it. Not only did they have that cash, but even more cash to throw at it to create their Buffetean moat. There's nothing genius about it. Before YouTube and even Web 2.0, there was not only plenty of free written content but there were other video sites, few if any had anything to do with The Google.
If anything, The Google is responsible for demolishing the ad-based internet. The quality control of their ads used to be so atrocious that of course people started ignoring most of them. Thus, traditional ads became nearly worthless. Their conclusion wasn't to turn away business from outright scams hawking B.S., but that people aren't clicking on ads because the ads aren't relevant to them! A good theory on paper, except it turns out people don't actually like feeling like they're being followed everywhere they go, and it also turns out that when they regularly buy Huggies diapers out of necessity, that doesn't mean they want to immediately see another 100 ads telling them to buy more Huggies.
All that said, I don't think ads have very much to do with the current decline in the quality of the web as a whole. The recent push to shove lots of ads in front of users, namely those that appear frequently within YouTube videos, is just a symptom of companies like The Google struggling to maintain growth when Silicon Valley isn't living life on the fast lane in Easy Street. There's also other factors like search engines failing to scale along with the web, as well as deranking or outright censorship; this is done both at the behest of advertisers but also to chase the widest possible audience.
It's only much later that Google went full on awful ads. Few and unobtrusive ads were a huge early selling point for Google.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumbox
(I.e., the icky health ads are a major category of it.)
https://www.fastcompany.com/90843502/the-chumbox-is-still-th...
https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-intern...
You can blame companies like outbrain and taboola for purposefully having horrible advertiser quality standards, and websites who are willing to have that junk on their site. The cycle repeats endlessly, as the horrible sites have.. horrible ads.
I have done a reasonable job at fooling Instagram to the extent where they think I'm a woman and I see horrifying ads all the time like the following:
https://twitter.com/AndrewKemendo/status/1676597672667381773
I looked further and the key thing that viewers are doing (based on 600k app store reviews which seem to be mostly real) is trying to "give the girl a chance for once" "help her cause nobody else is" etc...
https://twitter.com/AndrewKemendo/status/1676631706818805771
There are software engineers and designers working full time making this stuff and they should be horrified.
The older I get, the more I can see what Ayn Rand was getting at.
Genuinely, and I’m horrified of all of this, but it’s really something we can change, it’s not hopeless don’t give up humanity.
Why wouldn’t I think that that Rand considered it volume problem?
You are confusing the art for the artist. Don’t do that, you’ll be better for it.
In her view, it would actually be helping right the wrong to accept welfare, especially if you had ever had to pay taxes in the past against your will.
To be clear, I am not trying to argue for, or convince you of her position, but to argue that I believe she faithfully lived by the principles she espoused. In fact, I think much of the problems in her personal life make a pretty strong argument against her philosophy.
Yea, that didn’t register at first because she threw it at him, but I get it now. Wow, that’s pretty low class.
Do something intentionally wrong to goad a smart alec into trying to do it right.
There are really only 3 buyers of banner/display ads when no targeting is available:
1) Huge multinationals - think geico, coke, etc. Broad awareness campaigns
2) Scams, body horror, YMYL, click-trick, etc. This is what you're seeing. Info products, garbage cosmetics and scam courses have such huge margins that they can spend on broad-targeted placements for very cheap CPMs, with aggressive creatives that are A/B tested to death to get people to click. As long as the CPM is cheap, and the CTRs are high enough, the numbers work.
3) "Inexperienced" ad buyers
I'm not commenting or interested in debating the ethics of tracking and the internet data economy, but a side effect of removing 3rd party targeting is that as attribution goes away, buyers of ads pay less since they can't attribute dollars to campaigns, so you have to move to attribution methods more common in radio and TV. And as costs fall, it gives opportunities to the slimey shit you've been seeing.
They're also experts at using psychological warfare like well-positioned faces and expressions to trick your eyes into looking at their general area. That's why every clickbait thumbnail has some form of a face with an extreme expression in it.
Adblockers are the only solution. Whether you go with uBlock or AdNauseam, the only way to make this stuff go away is to make their business model unviable.
"we see" ? Who is "we" ? Your feed is not my feed, and I don't know what you're talking about.
What's up is an algorithm is taking a guess at what engages _you_. It may be failing badly. Although, you noticed enough to comment, and that's engagement! Rage clicks are still clicks. Understand that and you're closer to knowing what's wrong with all VC-funded social media.
But it's not what "we" see. Ad-wise, there is no such thing.
I hate those videos but I got more and more. I think it was because I stopped scrolling and tried to figure out what user was posting those to mute them which the algorithm maybe counted as "engagement".
Or maybe I was more likely to stop scroll the feed and switch tab when those came up, which maybe also counted as engagement.
Etc.
I don't think the algorithm can distinguish like and distaste that good.
Nope, it can not distinguish. It can measure how long you viewed, but not emotional state, It's all "engagement".
If Coke stopped advertising (and I think they, or Pepsi did), they would have no significant reduction in sales.
Ads should be for new interesting products, not things people have already made their decisions on.
This fake advertising economy is one of the ways the first world keeps money cycling internally, stopping it from being distributed globally.
Most of the ad-driven social media site drove me far away, a long time ago. Reddit was the most recent and last, I'm never going to join another ad-drive social media platform again. I'm strictly on Mastodon, Lemmy and, for now, HN (I think lemmy might replace it). I've only been seriously using the fedivers stuff for about a week, I can feel a _major_ difference. I'm already trying to figure out exactly where I should start funneling my "Patreon budget" to be most effective at helping keep it's spirit alive.
Ad-driven media platforms have mostly gotten me to buy into the ad-free tier. YouTube being the most expensive and, by far, most used. The family plan is, I think, 22 a month and it's the last subscription I'd ever end. The channels I really like, I join the Patreon. I know YouTube has something similar now but I will never use it. That separation of paid subscribers from the platform the content creator currently uses to post, I think, is really, really important. Sacred even. I think, for example, the Breaking Points business model is something every channel should strive for. Channels structured in a similar manor tend to make incredible content. Even when they opt for sponsor ads, they're usually very tasteful about it. It doesn't bother me a bit to pay something and still get an ad like that.
Most of the movie/show streaming platforms just have me on that line of "doesn't cost much but they don't really have anything I like at the moment". When things get tight, they're the first to get cancelled.
I've found a better internet over the past year or so. It's nice again. I'm sure the majority of people aren't seeing it, but it's kind of back to how it used to be, if you try.
We had forums and personal web sites. Weird blogs everywhere you looked. Some semblance of anonymity. A sense of community that wasn't about growing a following.
It was peaceful.
But most problems are fixed just like before.
I feel it is mostly an exuse to not bother doing it the "manly way" but paying a pro to do it.
They had normal blogs before profits entered the picture.
They are all ad platforms now.
Some always have been.
Anyway, ads are not dying. By and large ad quality is getting better. There are several companies that exist now to pre-screen ads for major websites (youtube being one of them) that specialize specifically in making sure not only the ads are relevant but also safe. You may see niche (gross) ads on places like 4chan. But on any major site you can be sure the ads have gone through several reviews not only for quality, but accuracy, and relevancy. As for the counter-acting part several companies specialize in guerilla advertising and this business is BOOMING. The author probably has no idea they are constantly being advertised on nearly every popular youtube video. There are so many ways we can slip ads in to someone's feed that you will not avoid it no matter what you do.
What bothers me is the author of this video seems to think the internet can exist without ads. In it's current form it cannot. Every free service you use, every video you watch, etc would have to be paid in full otherwise. This is the definition of an information economy. The video goes on to whine and cry about how many ads are being shown on youtube, or how reddit torpedo'd stuff in the name of ads. The ONLY ALTERNATIVE is a paid solution. The author seems to be channeling the levels of undeserved hubris only Stallman can achieve. This is the fundamental problem of open source software only marginally reframed. A bunch of ivory tower morons talking about how software should be free but unwilling to help/donate/code to make it happen. Users of ad-powered websites are legitimately no different.
So you have a fork in the road. Watch a couple ads occasionally to help fund the website you're leeching from or pay for the service. The video frustrates me especially because the industry itself is doing a lot of very hard work to drive relevant content to users. For example, you won't see an ad for clorox bleach on a sysop video.
Nothing is getting worse. You are watching a system built on advertising revenue to provide a "free" experience degrading because the revenue is getting smaller. If you like the service turn your ad blocker off. If you cannot do that, you legitimately have no place to complain. You do not have to use these services. In the case of Youtube you can pay for the ad-free experience.
I guess what I'm saying is: if you're a content leech watch a couple ads. If you're an OSS leech, consider donating :).
Each person has to evaluate their own costs and benefits, but services that don’t charge offer value to the most poor at an unbeatable price.
The excluded group you are talking about would've been excluded anyway. Anything that isn't a charity and held up with volunteers and a lot of hard work will not be able to sustain them. That doesn't make it okay, necessarily, but rather that luxury services (of which youtube for example is one) are just that - a luxury. It's an take-a-penny-leave-a-penny but there are more takers than leavers.
Something more familiar to us might be the Linux kernel. Without the support of all of the billions of dollars pouring in via corporations, support contracts, etc the free Linux kernel would likely either be dead or not free anymore. Even something with an army of volunteers at that caliber cannot sustain the poor people who benefit from their charity and contribute nothing in return. A tragedy, but the value producers have to eat, too.
No, it's not. Either something is free or is not. Either I chose to pay or I don't. If it's not free and I choose to pay, I can enjoy the service. If I choose not to pay, they can refuse me. If it's free, and I pay (donate), good. If I decide not to pay, it's on you to bear the cost. I don't have any obligation to you.
It's not mandatory to read, watch and listen to ads. And most people choose not to, or they tune out, especially when it's not related in any way to their current activity.
That is not how the actual world functions. This sort of anarcho-primitivism does not lead itself to large scale, widely available, systems. In society you pay taxes for services you perceive as (locally) free. On the internet you pay with ads (at least for now).
You are correct that you can exploit a free service. In some services, the taker to giver (leecher/seeder, whatever ratio you prefer) is high enough that service can maintain equilibrium. This is largely not true for all but the most used services. Even food banks shut down because the seeder to leecher ratio is unsustainable. Nothing is stopping you from driving these services into the ground. And you will.
I really hate how smug your post comes off. Do you know what this absurd smugness gets us? A centralized internet owned by 4 companies that can afford the seeder/leecher ratio. The 4 companies that will come to own the internet also hate net neutrality. Buckle up...because then we all pay. Even Stallman encourages people to contribute back to things they use. When your attitude is so smug that not even Stallman, the king of smug nonsense, agrees with you...that says something.
The government also knows that it's the working part of society that pays taxes. And it has the incentive to make that part the biggest percentage of the population. I don't see the same trend with these big platforms. They don't want to provide a service, they want to sell ads. And as such, I'm not their clientele.
If you really wish to provide something for free, but you don't have the means to do so, you can ask for donations or provide extra benefits for people that are willing to pay for it. If no one is willing, then that just means it's not valuable for anyone at the price it costs.
The moment you start selling ads, your priority is to grow your audience, so you can sell more ads. Not to provide a better service or product, in exchange for money. Because the former is easy (add dark patterns) while the latter is more difficult.
IMO, Apple has the right strategy. Provide a good ecosystem, that you can use by buying the hardware. If you don't and try to use other means of access (Hackintosh) don't blame them for stuff not working. Microsoft could have done the same and only supported valid Windows licenses, but they wanted to capture the market. And now they're showing ads driving down the quality.
> Nothing is stopping you from driving these services into the ground. And you will.
Nothing is eternal. If you grow beyond what is sustainable because of investors' money and then find out your product is not so valuable, and you pivot to dark patterns and ads, then yes, it's a failure. And if YouTube did not exist, maybe we would have something similar to Wikipedia for videos, with a drastic improvement in quality.
I thought he said the exact opposite: Without ads, the current Internet ceases to exist and he will likely have to get another job.
Drinking water is inevitable. 99% percent of the web being monetized by ads is not.
"Ads are inevitable" has become a mantra repeated by every ad-tech executive to keep them relevant.
> What bothers me is the author of this video seems to think the internet can exist without ads. In it's current form it cannot.
The current form of internet is an intelligence insulting, attention-seeking, malicious, privacy-invading monster exactly because it has been using ads as its primary monetization vehicle for the last two decades. Losing it would actually be a good thing for humanity.
> The ONLY ALTERNATIVE is a paid solution.
This is quite a good solution. Yes, it would instantly kill 99% of 'content creation', vast majority of which is low quality, but this is exactly what is making current form of internet horrible in the first place (paired with ad monetization).
The 1% remaining content creation is what would pass a bar of 'worth paying for'. This immediately creates the right incentive structure for all parties involved, including for the author of this video. They will be given a choice - do they go 'pro' and try to make their content great and worth paying for or do they look for a new job? Seems like they are already half-way there, and with a bit more effort they could be making a living from a paid model.
> if you're a content leech watch a couple ads
No. Never. Sorry, your industry has destroyed any goodwill it ever had. I'm not just an ad blocker, I'm hostile to ads. I hate them and I hate the industry.
One example is Bob Hoffman. Hoffman is an ad industry veteran who suggests that despite all the advances in computing, advertising has gotten worse, not better. That is, ads today are, for various reasons, less effective at creating brands than in the past. (If so, then one might ask "Why pay for them?" There are multiple answers, none of them satisfactory. IMHO. Yours may differ.)
https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B007W8R8H6/about
https://www.bobhoffmanswebsite.com
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/171361.Bob_Hoffman
https://www.marketingsociety.com/the-library/bob-hoffman-ind...
https://the-media-leader.com/making-sense-of-it-all-bob-hoff...
https://www.amazon.com/ADSCAM-Advertising-Historys-Greatest-...
https://www.amazon.com/Advertising-Skeptics-Bob-Hoffman/dp/0...
https://podcasts.marketingsociety.com/episode/dave-dye-talks...
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/businessofstory/BOB_HOFFMA...
https://www.moreaboutadvertising.com/2023/01/ad-contrarian-b...
https://stoppress.co.nz/stoppress-series/features/a-qa-with-...
If Google search was subscription from day one, how different would the world be now?
I noticed recently YouTube made it REALLY hard for me to download an mp4 for a video using VLC.
Now if I were a betting man, and the collapse of Google were imminent, I'd bet that in liquidation, they'd want to charge to get an offline copy of the videos they store. Soooo, in the meantime before the collapse, they're making it painful/time consuming to download their videos so they can max out their post-meltdown profits.
Make backups of your fav's while you can.