Please don't claim victimhood (“censorship”) when your comments are flagged. The guidelines apply equally to everyone, and the flags on your comments are from good community members who have a track record of flagging responsibly, to help keep the discussions healthy.
HN’s purpose is to be a place for intellectual curiosity, not ideological battle or railing against things you find disagreeable.
If by "intelectual curiosity ' you mean groupthink and bias that flags opposing points of view members find uncomfortable, not the honest unbiased application of rules.
Flag-bombing is a real issues on HN in case you didn't know.
What's the point of a board that doesn't allow all viewpoints and just smells it's own farts?
We routinely turn off flags and unkill comments that have been wrongly flagged. Anyone can email us and ask us to review a flagged comment.
We work very hard to make HN a place where the spectrum of viewpoints can be expressed and debated. Just a few days ago via email support I made a special effort to persuade someone to stick with HN when they felt their views are too much in the minority. I would gladly do that daily to keep discussion on HN diverse and interesting.
We'd happily have you share your views if you can present them in a way that's interesting and kind to other community members. But a clear line is crossed when people approach discussions with a hostile, aggressive mentality, and that's what's been apparent in too many of your comments.
The guidelines, our stated goals, and expected behavioral standards on HN have been consistent for years. Everyone is expected to adhere to the guidelines, otherwise we have to ban them, to prevent the place from burning to the ground.
It's only by consistently doing this that we keep HN a place that people want to visit to discover and discuss interesting topics.
It’s fine for you if you like it. The problem is that ubiquitous ads pollute the attention of those of us who don’t like it.
Would have been a much different (and better) world if the early web established micro-payments as a way of funding content and platforms. For example I’m happy to pay for YouTube premium to avoid the bloody ads, though I respect the preferences of those who enjoy the ads…
^
Exactly Ads are 100% fine I just want the option to pay to avoid them.
Like black mirror I think had an episode or some movie had it where you watch an ad instead of paying for a bus ticket and that’s totally fine, cuz right now there is no alternative to paying for a bus ticket.
Send a pitch to Meta's board or executive suite describing how much you and your cohort would like to pay in aggregate for an ad-free experience for social media, then the rest of the internet based business as you wish.
There are absolutely alternatives, you won't use them because few others that you care about are on them. Similarly, free is the best price next to being paid.
Opened and closed a FB account in 2012 - that's my customer lifetime journey with Meta products. Like I was saying, I have no interest in ad-supported products. And I would say that the burden would be on meta to persuade me why I should use a product I don't want - rather than for me to be so naive as to try to convince a massive corporate monolith to change its business model just for me. Also haven't watched ad-supported TV since paying for streaming became available. Those of you who like ads, please enjoy them - and the rest of us will do something else - this is what makes a market!
They don't sound upset at all to me. In fact, they are saying they are fine with you having your world view. To be fair, you acted upon your feelings enough to engage in discussion.
I feel like these issues can be countered by a reasoning AI that runs locally and I can configure to operate in my best interest.
e.g, Filter out political posts on X. Fact check opinion videos on the fly.
I hope future computing devices will have neutal engine at the center, and CPU as secondary. And I should be able to teach it to take actions on my behalf.
Sadly, we can’t just trust everybody else not to try and pull one over us. (Fortunately, uBlock Origin still works and is fairly lightweight, and hopefully we won’t see native ads so indistinguishable from content that it can’t detect those for a while.)
I don't know man, I guess we could like try to build a sort of system where people get together and vote on what kinds of behaviors society should allow which we should discourage and then when a majority of people agree on that stuff we could like make people stop doing bad stuff by using force after some kind of process to make sure that its fair? And like we could vote periodically to make sure that our rules continue to be useful and relevant.
You can't trust everyone, but that is basically the exact use case for government: to enforce basic standards of behavior so that we can all live more efficient, happy lives, rather than live in an arms race of personal methods to fuck eachother over and prevent ourselves from being fucked over.
I don't think society could come up with a truly comprehensive way of eliminating the evil part of advertising but I think we could do a lot better than we are doing if people would just wake up and insist that the government actually do what it is supposed to do.
> I guess we could like try to build a sort of system where people get together and vote on what kinds of behaviors society should allow which we should discourage and then when a majority of people agree on that stuff we could like make people stop doing bad stuff by using force after some kind of process to make sure that its fair?
you mean, like some kind of... democracy?
idk, one of our internet vulture-capital magnates was on cnn the other day proclaiming "thats not gonna happen"...
And yeah, I agree, except governments are slow and, most of the time, corrupt. I really, really wish it worked! (There are counterexamples, I’m sure.)
So while I’m waiting for a GDPR 2.0 that would outlaw the bullshit data collection altogether (and not just put it behind a cookie banner), I’m still going to install an adblocker on every of my friend’s computers – because it works today.
Forests are full of animals that hunt animals, and animals that spend tons of energy evading animals hunting them.
Life is a complex patterning phenomenon that dissipates energy, and as far as we understand it has no goal. Why should we expect complex human living systems to behave fundamentally differently? Individual human beings have goals, but huge collective systems like economies have either no consciousness or a kind of vegetable consciousness similar to a slime mold moving toward nutrients.
also, the premise of the entire lore of shadow run, is corporations building armies and seeing they can get away with it and then just doubling down.
but back to reality... everyone would buy stock of the ad-dystopia and since now their retirement is tired to it they will just normalize and promote it. just like today.
I did read it, but the books I read when I was a teen still learning the world sit deeper in me than something I read in my 30s.
I don't think the last-name-is-the-company adapts well to the so-called "gig economy" where employment is structured as supposedly independent contractors, who in turn can be working for multiple organizations at the same time.
"Corporations building armies", etc. describes the Dutch East India Company pretty well, yes? As I get now into my 50s, that goal seems more and more an intrinsic part of limited-liability joint-stock companies.
Hey, make an artificial intelligent entity significantly more capable than any individual human, then be surprised you have a goal misalignment with your superagent.
We gave AI legal personhood in the 1800s and we were doomed from there
My way to circumvent most of this: I am using Safari with AdBlock Pro and AdBlock and see zero ads when browsing the web.
I spend more time on YouTube than I care to admit, so I got a Premium subscription, bought an extension called UnTrap for YouTube to hide most recommendations and turned off all YouTube history etc.
I regularly visit BlueSky, Hacker News and YouTube, but not X, TikTok, Instagram or Facebook.
The hardest thing is to not use Amazon, but I am working on it.
You are using the inferior way to block ads, which will continue to degrade as advertisers take advantage of Google killing synchronous blocking of web requests with Manifest v2.
Safari is limited in the same way as Chrome manifest v3, allowing basically only a URL blacklist. They're crippled compared to uBlock Origin's various other blocking capabilities.
I’m also going to add for now you can still manually install ublock on the latest chrome by downloading it from GitHub and installing it under manage extensions. For now.
Also plugging Firefox mobile here if you do any web browsing from mobile. You can add uBlock Origin on Firefox mobile, which you can't do on Chrome mobile.
From a quick web search, while it supports installing firefox plugins they may not all work as expected due to limitations/differences in the browser APIs, and ublock origin fails to work properly as a result.
So IMHO mozilla are probably choosing "Let's not" rather than "Let's deliver a broken experience"
As one user on reddit said - "Orion supports Firefox and Chrome extensions. Yes. And you can install them. Yes. Do they work, though? No, most of them don't. Orion is lying about their extension support. "
I have found a really amazing way to block ads on websites. It's by not visiting them in the first place. Imagine how well this could work. It's sort of like abstinence and chastity rather than contraception. "Oh you know I love you, let me just have a little for free, and not worry so much about consequences, baby!"
Also I found this amazing hack for YouTube and YT Music. I am nearly hesitant to write it down here, lest everyone try it out. I figured out that if I pay them like $20/mo, all the ads disappear from both apps! Can you believe what suckers they are! I fear that this loophole may be closed soon, but for now I'm living high on the hog!
Nothing wrong with paying for a commercial service. I rather pay with money than indirectly by losing time and being annoyed in the best case and manipulated in the worst case.
With the sites that I choose to not visit (Facebook, X, TikTok, Instagram) this is not possible, as the attempted manipulation of users is an integral part of the business model.
Also, your attempt of being funny is not working, neither is your metaphor.
No, my friend, what is reprehensible to me is freeloaders who believe that they can just play cat-and-mouse wars by installing software and then scrape whatever web content they want, without giving the company their due expected revenue.
This is cheating of the cheapest cheapskate order. It's dishonest, it's disingenuous to say "please send me your web content but only the stuff I like". Perhaps you feel a little guilty, and needed to take a dig at my comment tone in turn?
I can understand needing to protect/defend yourself against malice and undue surprises. The web is wild and wooly. I can understand how intrusive and troublesome ads can become. But people with adblockers? They are ruining it for everyone -- raising prices, jacking up the cost to deliver and maintain sites, and in fact, you're to blame for ads becoming more intrusive and more ubiquitous, because how else are they going to get past your damn blockers???
But if you're going to visit a site, and you want to see/read their stuff, then I feel it would be ethical to engage with them on a level playing field. Because how badly do you want their stuff? If the ads turn you off so much, then don't go to the site. I simply find 98% of the Web is not worth my time after this calculus. News sites don't really report news anyway; why should I waste my time.
All this Hacker News ethic of cheating with ad blockers and yt-dlp and posting archive.is links to "help you bypass this evil paywall" is just ripping off companies. It is not a victimless crime. It is not working and it is most definitely not funny!
||It's dishonest, it's disingenuous to say "please send me your web content but only the stuff I like"||
It's MY metered bandwidth that I'm paying for - that a site loads 50MB of trash javascript when I merely clicked on a link for a 300kB PNG is an absolutely outrageous strain on my resources, not to mention a total waste for that site whose devs obviously know nothing about optimization.
Well that's awfully self-centered of you. It's their resources too, isn't it? It's them keeping the lights on; redundant reliable Internet connection; carrying insurance, rent; paying devs to write JS; data center storing that PNG you wanna get at so desperately. That PNG that belongs to them and they are choosing to give to you with whatever other collateral data belongs in the transaction?
If you feel that they're exploiting your resources then you have a right to decline to use theirs, right? You don't need to offer your resources to them. It was a voluntary click, a freewill request? Or just hack the shit out of them, and fuck your social contract?
If you disdain this provider so much that you criticize their developers and wish to connect to it on your own terms, then perhaps you're better off not doing it at all. In fact, anyone using adblockers or other "defensive ware" should carefully pore over all Terms of Service, EULAs and AUPs, because you could eventually be found in breach, and then perhaps they'll just nip you in the bud, at the Cloudflare level, and you won't have to worry much about ads at all!
Me personally, I think it's hilarious. It's only unfortunate that it doesn't translate to any significant economic harm to those companies, but every little bit helps, so do your part and help your neighbor block ads, as well.
> "please send me your web content but only the stuff I like".
That's the deal. Publishing something on the public internet does not entitle anyone to decide if/how I choose to consume that content. There's no reason to complain about people who choose to not download a bunch of ads, or those who replace fonts, or those who use custom CSS or userscripts, or those who use a screen reader, etc. If you publish something to the internet be grateful that anyone consumes any part of it. That's all you'd be due. "expected revenue" is not a right. It's not ripping off companies. It is not a victimless crime, because it isn't a crime at all.
> But people with adblockers? They are ruining it for everyone
Ads are "ruining it for everyone". If ads were all respectful, honest, safe, and non-obtrusive, ad blockers wouldn't have so many fans. The ads shot first. Blaming people now for making ads "worse" has strong "look at what you made me do!" vibes.
“Won’t somebody pleeease think of the billionaires!!” - you.
As a side note, your disdainful tone is incredibly grating and will likely convince others to ignore your points out of principle, which should go against your goal if your goal is to actually change people’s minds.
But I suspect your goal is to feel smug and fake morally superior, as you’re not acting in good faith. So congratulations, I’d suggest some personal introspection is in order.
Pi holes don't swallow everything, in stream ads like on Youtube and Twitch and served by the domain all make it through the Pi hole approach. It also doesn't allow you to turn it off for a particular page or site either, if you want to allow ads on Phronix you can't do it without enabling that advertiser everywhere since it lacks the context of the DNS calls.
The advantage is it works with every browser on every device, its network wide and it blocks a tonne of other calls that aren't made by the browser such as telemetry.
Use a third-party browser with integrated ad blocker - then all this Manifest v3 stuff doesn't matter even if the browser is Blink-based. One example is Vivaldi.
Pi-Hole (or better yet AdGuard) is still desirable because it will block ads for other apps and devices. Defense in depth.
I'm like the parent, on Safari – apparently also using an "inferior" way to block ads that, somehow, inexplicably, works 100% of the time and has never let an ad slip through. Is it supposed to be inferior because it's brittle and requires constant work on the side of the developer? Is it blocking too much and I'm just not aware of it? Is there some new ad tech that it's not prepared for, and can't adapt to, and will fail in the near future?
They adopted declarativeWebRequest as the exclusive option for "content blocking" years ago, which requires an actual extension update to change blocked URLs. It allows for some optimizations that look nice on benchmarks, but in reality uBO makes the web faster by getting rid of a lot of tracking requests and javascript. Nobody in the ad industry cared, because Safari's share is so small and plastering Safari users that use this basic adblocking in ads probably would've made them move elsewhere.
Chrome doing this however changes the value of working around adblockers, because they now lack the ability to rapidly respond or match with code (that's not regex) or even reading a bit of the response.
It’s inferior AFAICT because the API is more limited, and it looks an awful lot like the world’s biggest ad company (Google) has arranged that specifically to be less effective for ad and tracker blocking.
It's also inferior because the filter lists for requests must be hardcoded and can only be changed through extension updates, which Google (or whoever owns the browser's extension store) can delay or block at their discretion.
This also means users can't install their own filters, which was widely used when YouTube began aggressively bypassing adblockers.
>It's also inferior because the filter lists for requests must be hardcoded and can only be changed through extension updates, which Google (or whoever owns the browser's extension store) can delay or block at their discretion.
This thread is about safari, and its declarative ad blocking API doesn't have this issue.
Ublock origin is more than an adblocker. You can target entire site elements you don’t like loading. Screw it, delete the entire youtube recommendations sidebar and live in bliss. Is it possible to learn this power? Not from a Jedi.
You can roll your own filter regex to catch future similar elements as well in ublock origin. Way more powerful. I’d figure HN users would want the actual reigns.
I use 1Blocker with Safari, and I create custom regex/css blocking rules all the time, and as a bonus, they auto sync between desktop and mobile. Also, the rules update independent of the extension. I'm not aware of experiencing the purported downsides some folks dogmatically cite in this thread. I'm happy to learn the error of my ways, but only if it's real.
I finally went back to firefox, recently. I needed to update some of the flag defaults to turn on tab changing with mouse scroll and similar, but they are unlikely to break things like ublock any time soon.
I was a frequent profiles user under chrome, and still don't like firefoxes UI there, but just made a bookmark to the profile launching screen.
You may have reasons to require separate profiles. However, keep in mind that firefox multi-account containers [1] address many of the use cases for separate profiles in chrome with an IMHO better UX.
You all still use the web? I've been transpiling video game frame data into shader, geometry, lighting, color gradient data, and an agent system that mix-n-matches styles.
I got into software modding game engines, though. Never cared much for web apps, SaaS. Never much saw the use in paid software since it's just geometry. We made a lot of dumb busy work out of SWE with web apps.
DRY? Yes, let's not repeat ourselves still bothering with lame day jobs that obfuscate it's just physical statistics in a machine of known constraints.
Am really excited about the rest of the world flipping the US off, nVidia full-steam ahead on autonomously organizing distributed systems. Propping up SWEs props up a dangerous delusion.
I will never understand this. My ex bought tons of extensions to do stuff with Safari that other browsers do for free. He paid for a PiP extention for some websites, password managers, Tomagachi pets... dozens of trinket apps that would be depreciated in 2 or 3 major updates. I'm continually wowed by Mac users that insist on paying for a native solution to a problem that doesn't exist in any other ecosystem.
This is absurdly false. The serfs can become kings as evidenced by newly minted millionaires every year. However, the reverse is also true as there are plenty of fortunes lost as well.
That's about forty times my annual salary, ignoring expenses. Living like a miser for my entire working life, I could become a millionaire – though not a multimillionaire.
The odds of a poor person becoming a rich person in America is extremely low and socioeconomic mobility in the US is getting worse all the time. I'd guess that most poor people have better odds of getting hit by lightning. A lot of new millionaires are property owners. Anyone who gets their money from real estate is not a serf.
I mean that paying for software keeps the people who write the software from starving to death, or having to fall back on corrupt behaviour (e.g. accepting bribes from the advertising industry) to survive. It is, of course, not a guarantee of continued work quality, but it helps avert the material conditions that inevitably destroy it.
I am not entirely convinced that capitalism is the best system for producing software, especially established "infrastructure" software like OSes, web browsers, office suites, etc.
I'm open to the idea, and recognize there are problems with non-commercial software, too. But the critical difference between software and physical commodities is that replication of software, once written, has a marginal cost approaching zero.
I suspect that this difference significantly changes the calculus.
My personal feeling is we should really think outside the box here. I like some sort of hybrid system with government-funded software bureaus producing FOSS code to replicate successful and important "infrastructure" commercial products after five to ten years or so. People get cutting-edge software created by the market, and exploitative rent seeking on critical software is minimized.
Yes, plus I wonder how "responsibly" do people who replace their car oil, dispose the old oil. One of the reasons I don't do it myself, is.. 'what the hell do I do with the old oil?' I know someone that parks/aims right over a grill that is there for the rain water, and all the bad/old oil goes straight there. I ain't no angel, but that person is an absolute cunt.
So.. I really hope that the garages that throughout my car-ownership years do this, don't just flush them down the toilet, but do something proper about them.
For what it's worth, where I live in New Jersey, automotive shops have to accept used oil - precisely to avoid this sort of issue. (And I trust that someone, somewhere is making sure that all of their oil actually goes somewhere safe, instead of - as you point out - being dumped into the ocean.)
I still don't change my own oil, because I'm at the point in my life where I can afford to throw $100 at that particular problem, rather than spending a dirty and greasy hour+ under my car.
I do some maintenance myself but not oil changes - mostly from a time/cost perspective, I don’t really wish to go down that road and deal with spills in my driveway, etc. However the oil collection part isn’t particularly hard around here. I don’t know if there’s something similar in the US (or wherever you are located) but in Canada we have UOMA (Used Oil Management Association), a nonprofit which partners with garages to coordinate the recycling of used oil and related byproducts. They have a handy map which shows me 5+ garages in a 10min radius from my place which participates, including the shop I already go to - and I’m in a medium sized agricultural town, surrounded by corn fields, an hour from the nearest metropolitan area.
I was curious about what they did with oil when I drove my first car, so I asked my garage. They showed me the tank behind the shop, someone came to empty it once a week or so. I always assumed that was the usual practice, but I legitimately have no idea haha.
iOS/MacOS users are more predisposed to shell some bucks because of their walled garden upbringing.
Devs would usually prioritize iOS releases (early on, when no React Native nor Expo was as common place) only due to this fact that iOS users where much more likely to spend money than Android ones.
This might have equalized since the early days but i bet some of it still stands
I’m hopeful browsers with LLM support are the future of ad blocking for users. This enables robust and sophisticated control by users of their experience.
Don’t use their browser? Browsers existed before Perplexity, they will exist long after they’re gone. I’m advocating for deep LLM support in any browser engine, with the assumption of on device inference (but also supporting off device endpoints, as use case dictates).
Is there anyway to fully disable youtube shorts/reels/whatever that mess is called ...? I quite like youtube long form content but have found myself occasionally in short form rabbit holes (which are both very addicting and extremely unsatisfying and which motivated me to delete instagram to escape when i realized how much a time and emotion suck they are)
Turning off youtube watch history stops the shorts tab from working. And you can use a userscript to swap the "shorts" word to "watch" in the url to convert all shorts to normal videos.
For example:
// ==UserScript==
// @name Redirect YouTube Shorts to Regular Videos (Mobile-Friendly)
// @namespace https://example.com/
// @version 1.4
// @description Redirects YouTube Shorts URLs to regular video URLs on mobile
// @author YourName
// @match *://*.youtube.com/*
// @run-at document-end
// @grant none
// ==/UserScript==
//Written by GPT-4o Mini
(function () {
'use strict';
// Function to redirect Shorts to regular video URLs
function redirect() {
if (location.pathname.startsWith("/shorts")) {
const videoId = location.pathname.split("/")[2];
const newUrl = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=" + videoId;
window.location.replace(newUrl);
}
}
// Observe changes to the DOM and check for navigation
const observer = new MutationObserver(() => {
redirect();
});
// Start observing the body for changes
observer.observe(document.body, { childList: true, subtree: true });
// Initial check in case a Shorts URL is loaded directly
redirect();
})();
Untrap is amazing. On top of that, things like removing all apps from my home screen and turning of almost all notifications has improved my focus and my life a lot.
Yes. This is visible on news sites. The title and lede are rewritten as clickbait. The actual story may not be so bad. On some sites, the title on the home page may not match the article. Yesterday there was "(something happened) in Red State" on Fox News on the home page, but the actual article begins "(something happened) in Florida".
Half the comments here are just pointing out that ad blockers exist, which is missing the point.
The damage of an advertising-based internet economy is not limited to just "seeing ads." The entire content and structure of the internet is warped around this economy. Search engines, SEO, content discovery mechanisms, types and variety of content... all could have been different and better.
The comments you criticised describe a solution or at least a workaround, but you are just stating a problem, thus my honest question. No need to get snarky.
Step 1: remove Section 230 protection for algorithmically-elevated content.
If you're going to have attention-mining addiction-creating software funnel people into rabbit holes, then those rabbit holes need to be verified, safe-to-consume stuff. Watching 5 hours of 5 minute crafts is at worst, going to make someone spend too much money at Hobby Lobby. Certainly not good, but a workable issue. Watching 5 hours of white supremacist propaganda is how you get our current sociopolitical climate.
How is that a "step 1" when thats describing something else entirely?
How much would you pay to own an account on social media? If your answer is $0 then you're not addressing anything, you just want someone else to subsidize your entertainment and you want to call the shots on top.
I don't work for free, and I know damn well neither do you.
> How is that a "step 1" when thats describing something else entirely?
You asked "how do we change that" and I'm assuming the "that" referred to the subject of the PC: "The damage of an advertising-based internet economy" which in turn exists in the context of the linked video in the OP, which enunciates the consequences of machine learning being applied to creating hyper-addictive and extremist social media websites, in 2017 by the way, and the speakers broad hypothesis seems, in my eyes, broadly confirmed.
And the principle issue there is thus: an algorithm that consistently directs you to more concentrated and extreme versions of whatever you're consuming (vegetarian -> vegan, for example) can be utterly benign or perhaps annoying in that context, but gets notably darker when it's moving people from Donald Trump's rallies to The Jewish Question.
I have no issue at all with the former example, I have a LOT of issues with the latter.
> How much would you pay to own an account on social media? If your answer is $0 then you're not addressing anything, you just want someone else to subsidize your entertainment and you want to call the shots on top.
In that equation, I'm the product. I have every right to call the shots because the social media company only makes money by my participation in it, which is why I left Facebook and have only atrophied, ancient presences on most websites. I'm fine being shown ads for weird tech junk I might find cool. I'm not fine having the intricacies of my personal beliefs sanded off by weirdos trying to sell white supremacy like it's Pepsi.
He did not, you are ascribing another person's quote to them.
> And the principle issue there is thus: an algorithm
Section 230 does not stop people from using algorithms to enforce harmful content consumption loops for the purposes of selling advertisements. It specifically protects them from the consequences, but repeal that and now you've created a common incentive to sell Cocomelon for American adults.
We keep Section 230 because, even when it's retards like Elon Musk at the reigns, adults deserve to be treated with maturity and respect.
Would you support blocking BLM and black supremacist propaganda too? Essentially you are just proposing traditional government censorship. The good thing about Soviet TV is that it had only wholesome content - not that western capitalist stuff.
BLM content does not promote hate the way white nationalist content does and I'm immediately suspicious of your motives with you trying to make that equivalence. BLM is about justice and equality under the law. White supremacy is decidedly not, like, it's in the name. That's the supremacy part.
As for black supremacist content, yeah nix that shit too. It's corrosive for the exact same reasons. Was this supposed to be a hard question?
They aren't proposing blocking content. If a business-controlled algorithm recommends something, the company should be responsible for what it pushes because amplification falls outside what Section 230 protects. Hosting is protected. Deliberate, profit-driven curation is not.
Give every Internet user a domain name and routable IP for free with their Internet account.
That won't magically fix all the problems in an instant, but the core of everything wrong with the Internet starts with the Internet being separated into consumers and providers, instead of being a true peer2peer network.
Even in the olden days of the Internet when ISPs would give you free webspace with your Internet account, you still didn't get your own domain name, meaning all your Web presence would bust when you switched providers.
Alternatively, get Freenet, IPFS/IPNS or any of the other distributed alternatives working, but after 25 years of people trying, I kind of given up hope of it ever happening.
The same way we actually have been fixing problems for the past few hundred years: legislation.
Spooky, I know, but contrary to what armchair economists will tell you, the invisible hand doesn't do shit outside what it needs to. It's a lot like Natural Selection in that way. Yeah it works... to get the job done. And nothing more. Because it doesn't need to.
I don’t think we fully fathom how much everything on the Internet has degraded. And we and our children have degraded with it. Like frogs boiling alive in a pot, we never noticed it because of how gradually they increased the temperature.
Interesting you say "seeing ads", because lately when I am volunteering with legally blind population as their "tech-mate", I can't explain them why technology isn't doing what they want it to do. It's a million times worse when we put ourselves into their shoes.... My strategy has changed from helping them learn technology, to helping them avoid how to use technology. One of the person I help, who is legally blind but can see font size 50+, asked me to teach him how to search for lyrics of songs so that he can play his guitar. I tried to teach him, but it was pointless because of how the websites were full of ads. I did install an ad blocker which helped a bit but in the end, I gave up and now I just print out lyrics for him.
step 1: install & use Firefox
step 2: install and use adblockers (multiple)(I got ublock origin, adblock plus, noscript, privacy badger, privacy possum)(nothing gets through!!)
step 3: install "Open in Reader View" addon (not affiliated in any way). With this, when I DDG-search for something, especially lyrics or something for which I am interested in only the text, I right-click and "open in reader view" so it does exactly that.
step 4: set the Reader View (F9) in FF, to the font size, color, etc.
and the your 'friend' will Google for: Metallica enter sandman lyrics, and just right-click and pick the "Open in reader view", and presto! new tab with just the lyrics
EDIT: tip: tell your 'friend' to search for Band Song_title AZLyrics (not affiliated) so the first hit will be from "AZLyrics.com" which will have a standard format (I always search for ".... azlyrics" instead of just "..lyrics")
N.B., he is right on the Gen-X/Millenial border. So, we can now look retrospectively at a good chunk of his generation’s career. The tech industry we’ve built does, in fact, suck.
Although, Millenials seem to be pretty annoyed by all this, and aren’t really anywhere near retirement yet. So maybe we can figure out some way to apply the brakes.
That's such a copout quote. The people working on ads aren't the best minds, if they were they wouldn't be working on ads. We somehow bought into the lie that "maximize profit" has anything to do with intelligence. And that a bank account is a equivalent to an intelligence score.
No, the problem we find ourselves in is that we let ad companies buy the entire economy and infect it with anticompetitive behavior. The people working on Android aren't working on ads. Their work is being exploited by an ad company and twisted to serve ads.
I personally find my doctor infinitely more intelligent than any Google tech bro. I find the group of people making Little Kitty Big City infinitely more intelligent than some Facebook wanker.
The funny thing is that we fought so hard against pop-ups throughout the 90's and 2000's only to re-implement pop-ups in javascript as soon as we could.
At least, generally, they no longer open hundreds of windows above or below the current window, which may or may not have browser control bars, may ‘warn’ on exit etc etc
If a page wants to cover itself in noise and dialogues, sure it’s annoying but it’s not quite on the same level as back then.
Yeah sometimes you’d have to just powercycle the computer if they started cascading too fast and bogging down the system. People would make websites specifically to troll and do this.
Computing history is rife with examples of APIs that would never have existed, had the API designer stepped back for a few seconds and asked himself "Why am I letting developers do this?" Someone deliberately added the ability to move the browser window around and pop up other browser windows, yet somehow never imagined this use case???
Social dynamics in the digital world are completely different from anything known to man before the internet. Imagine someone from 2090 coming over and saying "aren't you afraid that your friend will literally take a knife and stab you in the back during your birthday party". Technically he's not wrong, but come on, it doesn't happen really. And then you learn that in 2080's something similar was a major societal problem.
Computing history is rife with examples of API designers who get attacked for building walled gardens and denying user power when they ask such questions. There was a time, for example, when "data portability" was widely understood to mean that Facebook should let Google programmatically extract your data and forward it to fourth parties (https://techcrunch.com/2008/05/15/he-said-she-said-in-google...).
Today we know that there's no genuine question of user control here, because virtually every user has a mental model that a "webpage" is something different and much more scope-limited than a "program". I don't expect that steampowered.com should be able to launch the game I just bought, even though that capability is easily available from a similar-looking interface by the same developers I have installed on my computer. In 1995 it wasn't so obvious that people in 2025 would think this way.
Thinking of all the possible ways some assholes could abuse a new functionality is an acquired skill, and one I believe eventually makes you stop coming up with any ideas.
After all, entrepreneurs can and will abuse anything and everything in this world.
It doesn't keep you from coming up with ideas, it just keeps you coming up with ideas to mitigate the harms. The obvious one that's usually neglected is giving users the power to disable/limit/control behaviors that are likely to be abused.
We wouldn't need to bother with installing addons to limit javascript and block ads if those were just part of the browser to start with. Every new feature added should have options that put users in control of if, when, and how it gets used. Right now, even the browsers that give users the most control usually don't go farther than an enable/disable flag in about:config
This is exactly right. The end user should be in the driver's seat, not the web developer. Often when I use computers today, I feel like a passenger, going wherever the developer is choosing to take me. So much browser development and innovation lately serves to empower the developer and enable them to do things to your computer, but with very little empowerment reserved for the user.
It's not a defense particularly, it's just that it's not the same sort of experience. The old popups were so bad I was regularly killing the browser process just to make them go away. Now there's a lot less they can do, thank god.
We have the browser (and extension) people to thank for this of course, not advertisers who would still be doing it if they could.
Google began as a search engine with a popup blocker extension for a competitor's browser. Now they're a display ad company with a browser that includes a built in popup blocker extension blocker.
I have always wondered what the web would be like if we added the scripting language later and only solidified CSS and HTML for the first 15 years or so.
I wonder if things would actually be better overall. I’m not going to argue that having a scripting language for the web was a mistake, it definitely isn’t on the whole, but I think having it come at a more mature point for the web might have helped stave off a lot of really bad decisions
I think what would have happened if the web didn't have scripting languages was that you would be forced to download java applets... which now can also run on javascript/wasm coming full circle.
Also, java's dominance I guess was the reason that javascript is named after inspiration of java.
What you are asking for are static pages which already exists and most people do use static pages due to it being very easy to deploy on github pages etc. , though I wonder we would've way more abundance of static pages as compared to non static pages, like there are some pages which could've been static but they aren't.
Though I still think the difference would've existed & it could've been net positive IDK, I just like to go create websites as apps which can be booted on any pc,device without worrying about anything, installing and running it would likely require a setup and it would've been a bigger hassle as well.
And well noone's stopping you from doing it right now. There's gopher and gemini if you are interested.
> Also, java's dominance I guess was the reason that javascript is named after inspiration of java.
Very loosely, was named that was as an marketing ploy as Java was the new language at the time.
JavaScript is actually ECMAScript or a v.close direlect of. Originally it was called Mocha, and then relabeled to LiveScript and during the NetScape / Sun Microsystems thing, changed itself to JavaScript and Oracle carried it on from there.
Kind of agree, maybe static pages wasn't the right word but rather static pages without js /minimal js that anybody can read and vet unlike those minified js that we get from frameworks...
I dunno, I think it was a net negative by a large margin. 1) html only Gmail shows that pretty advanced, well made apps are possible without scripting; 2) There are very few web apps that without JavaScript wouldn't just be implemented as native without loss of convenience; 3) OTOH for simple apps and sites JavaScript adds inconvenience (non standard links breaking browser features etc), security risks, compatibility issues, massive bloat and tracking.
Nothing like 3 paragraphs of text that requires downloading 2 megabytes of crap, runs code from 20 sketchy looking domains, takes 15 seconds to load, cannot be linked to, and demands you upgrade your browser. As a consolation you can have slightly slower maps in browser instead of downloading an app, once.
I think web scripting is probably THE worst technology ever invented in the IT field. "If I ruled the world", a full ban would be better than its current state; or some AMA on steroids (+Jones act) making JavaScript developers extremely rare and well paid, so that it was limited to the best (as determined by the market) uses with better quality.
You can't think about alternate web evolution without considering (1) the early browser wars (specifically Netscape vs IE) & (2) the need to decouple data transfer and re-rendering that led to AJAX (for network and compute performance reasons).
Folks forget that before js was front-end frameworks and libaries, it was enabling (as in, making impossible possible) async data requests and page updates without requiring a full round-trip and repaint.
It's difficult to conceptualize a present where that need was instead fully served by HTML+CSS, sans executable code sandbox.
What, ~2000 IE instead pushes for some direct linking of HTML with a async update-able data model behind the scenes? How are the two linked together? And how do developers control that?
You're correct that the main thing enabled by JS is partial updates, but the fact that it relies on JS is IMO itself in large part due to path dependent evolution (i.e. JS was there and could be used for that, so that's what we standardized on).
Imagine instead if HTML evolved more in the direction of enabling this exact scenario out of the box. So that e.g. you could declaratively mark a button or a link as triggering a request that updates only part of the page. DOM diffs implemented directly by the browser etc.
I was thinking more along the latter lines - i.e. the link/button would specify the ID of the element to update, and it would be replaced with the received HTML.
If we're unwinding back to early 00s though, it could also be fetching XML from the server and then running it through the XSLT stylesheet associated with the current document to convert it to HTML, to reduce the amount of data on the wire.
The specifics could be debated here. But I'm pretty sure that a generic mechanism could be devised that'd adequately cover many use cases that require JS today.
I wrote JavaScript before libraries, I remember when prototype.js came out and was a cool new thing and actually useful after "client side validation and snowflakes chasing mouse cursor" era. I think there was a short period when it was a positive development.
It seemed so at the time but I think it didn't work out... Why is interesting to speculate about... My pet theory that convenient frameworks lowering the barriers were part of the problem.
I think if at it's time JavaScript went the way of java applets and ActiveX controls (and yes I understand part of the reason these could be driven out is availability of JavaScript), web would be in a much better shape right now. 90% of the apps (banking, email, forums, travel, etc) and 100% of the pages would just be plain better. For the remainder you'd just install an app, something they nag you about anyway.
The modern web has successfully liberated applications from mostly vendor locked OS environments into mostly agnostic browser environments. I think this has been a good thing.
Otherwise, with just CSS and HTML, you'd have a web strictly dedicated to publishing. A read only experience curated by those who are willing to invest the time and tooling into being a publisher.
Even then with the advent of RSS and other data exchange formats it's arguable we didn't even need that part of the web. It would be far better for publishing to deliver headlines and summaries via RSS and then allow me to purchase full content and issues digitally.
I think the bigger complication in the creation of the web was the complete lack of payment systems and user trust in entering their payment information into these platforms. So only the large well moneyed entities like advertisers were willing to absorb that risk and built out the platform. Instead of us conveniently and safely paying creators for content we now have aggressive advertisers who litter the web so publishers can shake pennies out of the CPM tree.
We would have ended up with Flash and then Chrome, just as we did. Client-side programming is essential to creating certain experiences, and with all great powers comes the extractive shit, etc. This is typically where economists will claim the free market is producing an efficient outcome; regulation would be the only preventative, and that’s anathema to tech libertarians.
Everything is perfectly static and linear, and instead of popups we get full-page ads, double-full-page ads sometimes, and ad inserts in the rest of the pages, with stealth marketing for the content left.
The fundamental issue is not technology IMHO. Scripting can make it worse, but it wouldn't have been great in the first place.
Well, there are really only three things that form the aggregate of the world we see today.
There are accidents of history, money, and ideology.
These things fit squarely in the money category. The advertising industry was subsumed by adtech during that time, which was driven by government grant and fiat debt-based financing. Advertising fraud has never been harder to account for, and the justified use of analytics for that purpose has driven surveillance capitalism with governments being the customer.
Money printing is the role of the state, so technically if you remove all indirections its state apparatus which makes sense that an individual wouldn't be able to fight against it.
At least these popups are restricted to the page. It's one thing for a website to decide to block my use of it for some asinine reason. It's quite another for it to block my use of everything else on my computer.
> we fought so hard against pop-ups throughout the 90's and 2000's only to re-implement pop-ups in javascript as soon as we could
A group of people who thought that web users should not be abused may have won the first pop-up battle, but the businesses that made money from intrusive advertisements clearly won the war.
In hindsight maybe it wasn't a such a great idea for web users to switch en masse to a browser made by an advertising company.
The endgame is a probably a war between web sites that are endless mazes of advertising and user agents that try to navigate the maze and extract the non-advertising content.
I don’t know if hindsight is quite right. There were people raising alarms about this when Chrome initially came out and repeatedly as it grew in popularity. Especially when sites started requiring Chrome. It’s just they were dismissed as conspiracy theorists or brushed aside because right now Chrome is faster and the present is all that matters. This was 100% pushed by tech enthusiasts and web developers… the average person would’ve otherwise stuck with their OS default browser.
I’m not trying to correct you. It’s just a sequence of events I’ve seen play out repeatedly and I’m not sure if there’s a solution. Most recently I’ve seen it with Bambu Lab locking down their 3D printers. Prior to that Autodesk yanking the Fusion 360 enthusiast licenses.
Maybe there isn’t a solution. There’s a lot of UX work that isn’t fun to do and so it’s hard to get volunteers to do it. It’s hard to do product management in a distributed group of volunteers in general. So, companies that can afford to bankroll projects often gain traction with performance or usability gains and suck away attention and funding from open source options. Then when they amass enough of the user base they flip the switch and now folks are stuck. The cost of changing is often prohibitively high and the OSS option is generally far behind at that point.
I think people are bad at thinking longer term. Or maybe they just prefer immediate gratification. In any event, absent a shift in human behavior I expect we’ll see this sort of situation to continue to play out. It’d just be nice if folks were less antagonistic about it when those concerned raise that alarm.
Doesn't always work (sometimes it kills the website functionality), and I have no clue what it's actually doing (I'm not a coder)... but usually it gets rid of hover-overs.
For balance, I clicked the link and (after a moment of my browser imposing my will) the video started playing. Opera + Ghostery is quite a pleasant experience, at least when compared to mobile browsing (at the other end of the spectrum).
It's also been a long while since clicking "Manage cookie preferences" shows "Opt-out..." pre-checked and "Confirm choices" button, unlike the "Reject all" button also being shown these days. Then unchecking "Opt out..." dynamically shows a "Allow all" button.
I would say communism is the final degree of "government as provider" not of "government as regulator". The final degree of regulation could be any variety of authoritarianism.
Much better to have capitalism replace political tyranny with economic tyranny. Where survival depends on serving someone else's profit with the requirement their margin grows every year.
When markets control basic needs, capitalism becomes its own form of authoritarianism that forces everyone to self comply. But it's freedom because they voluntarily choose to not starve to death/be homeless.
Because when you're the sole owner and provider of goods, advertisement loses all meaning.
I grew up in the Soviet Union. There was one type of milk on the shelf, it was called "Milk", and I don't remember the label saying anything else.
Compare with "HORIZON ORGANIC DHA Omega-3 Supports the Brain Health organic Whole Milk" dressed in bright red and contrasting yellow, with typography that begs "please look at me, I'm the better option".
> There was one type of milk on the shelf, it was called "Milk"
I love this. And for me - as a 40 year old western european - it's so unthinkable, so unreal. I usually don't look at the milk packaging at home, but I remember reading on the packaging all kinds of stupid sh!te like names of the farmers where the cow grazes (which might be true, but I guess it's b0ll0cks) with some feel-good illustrations, all kinds of childish texts on the packaging as well. It's just 'milk', I don't need a fake story around how good your milk selling company is.
Maybe your soviet milk was unhealthy or not tasteful, I don't know. Maybe it's just the same kind of milk we have here. My milk is pretty good, but jeezz... that marketing on the packaging over here.
Yeah but dropping advertising (or regulating it) does not necessarily imply a monopoly in terms of who provides what.
That what I wanted to understand. I understand the other way around, that a socialist panned economy with monopolies in terms of who produces what is shit. And leads to advertising not being necessary. But the other way round is what still trips me off and what I am still not able to wrap my head around.
Something I believe but have no evidence for, and reality is continuing to, bafflingly, defy my expectations:
Ads are basically zero-sum in the sense that they mostly take customers that need something, and shift them to the brand that is advertised, instead of the one they would have heard of naturally (now, there is some element of ads actually increasing demand, but as people are quite cash-strapped or in debt nowadays, I guess it can only function up to some limit). Companies that advertise are engaging in an ever-increasing (more sophisticated, technical, and more expensive) competition to capture some allocation of this demand. Because we’re burning an increasing amount of money in a zero-sum competition, eventually the ecosystem must collapse under its own weight.
We can sort of see this, I think, in people becoming increasingly grumpy about how expensive everything is. But the system is very circuitous, so we misallocate blame all over the place.
Trying to regulate ads—I dunno, it seems hard to regulate without stepping on free-speech toes (US perspective, ymmv in other countries). I would rather regulate the collection of data, which doesn’t seem to be particularly protected in any sense other than that private entities can mostly just do whatever by default (it seems functionally similar to the sort of stuff that the 4’th amendment was intended to protect us against, except it is done by Facebook and Google so they get away with it) (but to be explicit, I think it is probably legal at the moment for companies to run vast surveillance networks, we need new laws).
More to the original point, Bern banned some outdoor advertising last year (!). https://www.iamexpat.ch/expat-info/swiss-news/bern-approves-... says "SVP councillor Alexander Feuz was the most strident [opponent], calling the change a “step towards Stone Age communism.”"
DPRK has been described as ad block for your life, but even under communism to have a consumer economy a limited number of regulated ads can be useful so ppl know products exist, but not this brand combat to the death oversaturation.
He expected the end state of capitalism to be business owners just constantly fighting the markets to stay still. On the one hand, they'd be constantly trying to figure out how to make sure they were paying bottom prices for goods and services on which they relied, and on the other they'd constantly be fighting to try and sell in a saturated market. Eventually, collapse would ensue.
This was one of the foundations for his thinking.
He couldn't have predicted information technology, or ad tech, but the premise seems to hold up.
Of course, where he ended up was workers owning the means of production and every business basically being a "lifestyle business", with no need - or ability - to scale. This, as you know, became corrupted into government ownership, central planning of the economy, and all the other nightmares of a non-free market.
The ideal state - and I think this is where Marx would have wanted it - is that you might not have had a gazillion milk brands all screaming for attention (and the consumer ultimately paying for that, as it being priced into the amount they pay), but there being a free market of worked-owned businesses.
The irony of watching this 2017 TED video in 2025, and find out that my NoScript extension reports half a dozen of JS trackers and ads providers on this page - including Google, doubleclick.net, sail-personalize and sail-track.
Oh, and if you navigate to this page without NoScript, AdBlocker or a PiHole DNS you'll probably be presented with a cookie consent banner, a bunch of ads on the page and before watching the video, and your data being shared with at least half a dozen partners (a number that can increase dramatically if you visit the page of any news outlet instead of ted.com).
So yeah, I guess that the message of this video aged like fine wine.
I think I was annoyed at the generalization when the specific cause was obvious. Using the royal "we" seems like an egregious misappropriation of responsibility given many people specifically vote against unabated capitalism.
I have been groaning about income inequality a lot but it is amazing how much of this can be explained by it. People do not have the disposable income to spend on services so you make people pay with attention. Give them the carrot for free so they don't notice. On top of that, the product is free so there is no expectation of support for the end user. You're getting it for free so what are you complaining about?
Advertisers have a perverse incentive to spend as much ad money as possible. I think this is one of the few scenarios where you can attribute something to malice.
Does the client know they lack disposable income? This is just as much an exercise about fleecing a client out of their adspend by giving shoddy metrics on your end.
An ad for Pampers shown to a family with a toddler; an ad for Tidy Cats shown to a cat owner; an ad for Reese’s shown to someone who exhibits poor impulse control; an ad for McDonald’s shown to someone who works two jobs and doesn’t have time to cook food for themselves; an ad for a gambling app shown to someone using a gambling app.
>an ad for McDonald’s shown to someone who works two jobs and doesn’t have time to cook food for themselves
You're presumably trying to imply it's predatory, but if the premise is that the person "doesn't have time to cook food", how is the ad making things worse? What's the person supposed to do? starve?
Not really trying to make a point about predatory ads here, though I probably should have left out the bit about predation to that point. I just didn’t want people to think they were all intended to be as bad as the gambling example. I agree the fast food example is not any more predatory than, say, Factor but it (and that, actually) is an example of an advertisement intended to capture someone’s regular spending.
In the ancient times there was an ISP selling Internet access where the catch is, you dial up via their program, and this program would have an always-on-top window showing ads...
Then again, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube started "You pay for it with your attention (and your data)" and only later have they implemented payment for being ad-free, although with Zuck's properties, the EU forced it.
Nothing to do with income equality, organizations will show whatever ads they can get away with. I paid Microsoft thousands of dollars for my Microsoft laptop. The hardware and form factor are admittedly pretty fantastic. But in spite of this, Microsoft is still determined to try (and fail) to show me ads.
Money alone wouldn't fix this, as a Web where every page has a paywall wouldn't be much better either. Which in turn would concentrate most of the Web in a few services just as it is today and enshittyfication would bring the ads back sooner or later, even if you pay for the service.
> bring the ads back sooner or later, even if you pay for the service.
This has already happened for subscription TV services. Your previously ad-free subscription now has ads, but you can get rid of them again by upgrading! It’s fucking gross. It’s also of course just going to work, and become the new normal.
Perhaps interesting anecdata - I have a close friend who has a great career, plenty of assets and income, etc., but doesn't pay to remove ads in their streaming services. Thus, together we watch unskippable ads on a brilliant 70" OLED TV while resting on plush leather sofa in their beautiful loft, haha.
Most input is text, most output is text, commands are text. Vast majority of programming languages can process and produce text out-of-the-box. There are countless utilities for processing text. You can store, load, split and join text easily. Send and receive it through most channels.
When everything is text, text files become libraries. Text editors become macro processors.
He has also been running a podcast called "Pitchfork Economics" which I have found to be very enlightening on the state of this world. From an economics point of view, it explains the enshittification of many services we once enjoyed, the destruction of the middle class.
The past 40+ years of policy based on “reagonomics”/“trickle down economics”, neoclassical/neoliberal economicsc and psuedoscience from
the Chicago School of Economics (ie, Milton Friedman) represents the worst era of America.
One thing I've noticed is that Reddit is very, very aggressive about how it implements its telemetry.
Not only is the endpoint that it uses for collecting events randomized each time you load a page, but it also happens that every event collector URL is a valid API endpoint that is used for other things. You can't block any of them with regular ad blocking tools unless you're okay with blocking the corresponding API endpoint. And given that the website itself uses the API, this can be difficult.
I don't see ads on reddit. Where are they? I use pi hole and ad nauseam extension. Everything is default. I also have RES I think, but I'm not even sure what that does anymore, I've just had it for a decade.
I'm not talking about ads, I'm talking about telemetry. It just happens to be that ad blockers can also block other resources as well - but not Reddit's telemetry, for the reasons I explained.
i thought i read your comment correctly, but apparently my brain short-circuited on reddit + ad-block in your comment and missed the telemetry part. Whoops.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadNobody is excited about ads in 2025.
HN’s purpose is to be a place for intellectual curiosity, not ideological battle or railing against things you find disagreeable.
Flag-bombing is a real issues on HN in case you didn't know.
What's the point of a board that doesn't allow all viewpoints and just smells it's own farts?
We work very hard to make HN a place where the spectrum of viewpoints can be expressed and debated. Just a few days ago via email support I made a special effort to persuade someone to stick with HN when they felt their views are too much in the minority. I would gladly do that daily to keep discussion on HN diverse and interesting.
We'd happily have you share your views if you can present them in a way that's interesting and kind to other community members. But a clear line is crossed when people approach discussions with a hostile, aggressive mentality, and that's what's been apparent in too many of your comments.
The guidelines, our stated goals, and expected behavioral standards on HN have been consistent for years. Everyone is expected to adhere to the guidelines, otherwise we have to ban them, to prevent the place from burning to the ground.
It's only by consistently doing this that we keep HN a place that people want to visit to discover and discuss interesting topics.
C'mon. You will need to grow up real fast. Learn to use the references, not just throw them around.
Would have been a much different (and better) world if the early web established micro-payments as a way of funding content and platforms. For example I’m happy to pay for YouTube premium to avoid the bloody ads, though I respect the preferences of those who enjoy the ads…
There are absolutely alternatives, you won't use them because few others that you care about are on them. Similarly, free is the best price next to being paid.
Advertisements are at best nuissance.
e.g, Filter out political posts on X. Fact check opinion videos on the fly.
I hope future computing devices will have neutal engine at the center, and CPU as secondary. And I should be able to teach it to take actions on my behalf.
You can't trust everyone, but that is basically the exact use case for government: to enforce basic standards of behavior so that we can all live more efficient, happy lives, rather than live in an arms race of personal methods to fuck eachother over and prevent ourselves from being fucked over.
I don't think society could come up with a truly comprehensive way of eliminating the evil part of advertising but I think we could do a lot better than we are doing if people would just wake up and insist that the government actually do what it is supposed to do.
idk, one of our internet vulture-capital magnates was on cnn the other day proclaiming "thats not gonna happen"...
Yeah, I think that was the point.
And yeah, I agree, except governments are slow and, most of the time, corrupt. I really, really wish it worked! (There are counterexamples, I’m sure.)
So while I’m waiting for a GDPR 2.0 that would outlaw the bullshit data collection altogether (and not just put it behind a cookie banner), I’m still going to install an adblocker on every of my friend’s computers – because it works today.
In fact most counties have laws saying that advertisements should be clearly identifiable as such. Not to an AI, but still.
Forests are full of animals that hunt animals, and animals that spend tons of energy evading animals hunting them.
Life is a complex patterning phenomenon that dissipates energy, and as far as we understand it has no goal. Why should we expect complex human living systems to behave fundamentally differently? Individual human beings have goals, but huge collective systems like economies have either no consciousness or a kind of vegetable consciousness similar to a slime mold moving toward nutrients.
also, the premise of the entire lore of shadow run, is corporations building armies and seeing they can get away with it and then just doubling down.
but back to reality... everyone would buy stock of the ad-dystopia and since now their retirement is tired to it they will just normalize and promote it. just like today.
I don't think the last-name-is-the-company adapts well to the so-called "gig economy" where employment is structured as supposedly independent contractors, who in turn can be working for multiple organizations at the same time.
"Corporations building armies", etc. describes the Dutch East India Company pretty well, yes? As I get now into my 50s, that goal seems more and more an intrinsic part of limited-liability joint-stock companies.
Everybody just wants a peaceful, prosperous life.
We serve a corporation, because the corporation promises that.
The corporation just wants advertising. That is, clicks.
So the universal desire for peace and prosperity is bringing about the clicky dystopia.
We gave AI legal personhood in the 1800s and we were doomed from there
I spend more time on YouTube than I care to admit, so I got a Premium subscription, bought an extension called UnTrap for YouTube to hide most recommendations and turned off all YouTube history etc.
I regularly visit BlueSky, Hacker News and YouTube, but not X, TikTok, Instagram or Facebook.
The hardest thing is to not use Amazon, but I am working on it.
https://ublockorigin.com/#manifest-v3-section
It’s a real shame Apple continues to block it from being full-fat.
So IMHO mozilla are probably choosing "Let's not" rather than "Let's deliver a broken experience"
As one user on reddit said - "Orion supports Firefox and Chrome extensions. Yes. And you can install them. Yes. Do they work, though? No, most of them don't. Orion is lying about their extension support. "
Also I found this amazing hack for YouTube and YT Music. I am nearly hesitant to write it down here, lest everyone try it out. I figured out that if I pay them like $20/mo, all the ads disappear from both apps! Can you believe what suckers they are! I fear that this loophole may be closed soon, but for now I'm living high on the hog!
With the sites that I choose to not visit (Facebook, X, TikTok, Instagram) this is not possible, as the attempted manipulation of users is an integral part of the business model.
Also, your attempt of being funny is not working, neither is your metaphor.
No, my friend, what is reprehensible to me is freeloaders who believe that they can just play cat-and-mouse wars by installing software and then scrape whatever web content they want, without giving the company their due expected revenue.
This is cheating of the cheapest cheapskate order. It's dishonest, it's disingenuous to say "please send me your web content but only the stuff I like". Perhaps you feel a little guilty, and needed to take a dig at my comment tone in turn?
I can understand needing to protect/defend yourself against malice and undue surprises. The web is wild and wooly. I can understand how intrusive and troublesome ads can become. But people with adblockers? They are ruining it for everyone -- raising prices, jacking up the cost to deliver and maintain sites, and in fact, you're to blame for ads becoming more intrusive and more ubiquitous, because how else are they going to get past your damn blockers???
But if you're going to visit a site, and you want to see/read their stuff, then I feel it would be ethical to engage with them on a level playing field. Because how badly do you want their stuff? If the ads turn you off so much, then don't go to the site. I simply find 98% of the Web is not worth my time after this calculus. News sites don't really report news anyway; why should I waste my time.
All this Hacker News ethic of cheating with ad blockers and yt-dlp and posting archive.is links to "help you bypass this evil paywall" is just ripping off companies. It is not a victimless crime. It is not working and it is most definitely not funny!
It's MY metered bandwidth that I'm paying for - that a site loads 50MB of trash javascript when I merely clicked on a link for a 300kB PNG is an absolutely outrageous strain on my resources, not to mention a total waste for that site whose devs obviously know nothing about optimization.
If you feel that they're exploiting your resources then you have a right to decline to use theirs, right? You don't need to offer your resources to them. It was a voluntary click, a freewill request? Or just hack the shit out of them, and fuck your social contract?
If you disdain this provider so much that you criticize their developers and wish to connect to it on your own terms, then perhaps you're better off not doing it at all. In fact, anyone using adblockers or other "defensive ware" should carefully pore over all Terms of Service, EULAs and AUPs, because you could eventually be found in breach, and then perhaps they'll just nip you in the bud, at the Cloudflare level, and you won't have to worry much about ads at all!
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/11/advert...
It also keeps track of estimated cost to advertisers from using it, mine shows ~$25k/yr in ads clicked.
Most stuff I do on the internet is "free", for everything else there's active jamming.
That's the deal. Publishing something on the public internet does not entitle anyone to decide if/how I choose to consume that content. There's no reason to complain about people who choose to not download a bunch of ads, or those who replace fonts, or those who use custom CSS or userscripts, or those who use a screen reader, etc. If you publish something to the internet be grateful that anyone consumes any part of it. That's all you'd be due. "expected revenue" is not a right. It's not ripping off companies. It is not a victimless crime, because it isn't a crime at all.
> But people with adblockers? They are ruining it for everyone
Ads are "ruining it for everyone". If ads were all respectful, honest, safe, and non-obtrusive, ad blockers wouldn't have so many fans. The ads shot first. Blaming people now for making ads "worse" has strong "look at what you made me do!" vibes.
As a side note, your disdainful tone is incredibly grating and will likely convince others to ignore your points out of principle, which should go against your goal if your goal is to actually change people’s minds.
But I suspect your goal is to feel smug and fake morally superior, as you’re not acting in good faith. So congratulations, I’d suggest some personal introspection is in order.
The advantage is it works with every browser on every device, its network wide and it blocks a tonne of other calls that aren't made by the browser such as telemetry.
Pi-Hole (or better yet AdGuard) is still desirable because it will block ads for other apps and devices. Defense in depth.
Chrome doing this however changes the value of working around adblockers, because they now lack the ability to rapidly respond or match with code (that's not regex) or even reading a bit of the response.
It’s a good reason to use Firefox.
This also means users can't install their own filters, which was widely used when YouTube began aggressively bypassing adblockers.
This thread is about safari, and its declarative ad blocking API doesn't have this issue.
There is a lot of talk about security but strategic security would mean to put flashing red warning signs on the manifest updates.
To neglect that is basically lying to users in my opinion.
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/120682
I finally went back to firefox, recently. I needed to update some of the flag defaults to turn on tab changing with mouse scroll and similar, but they are unlikely to break things like ublock any time soon.
I was a frequent profiles user under chrome, and still don't like firefoxes UI there, but just made a bookmark to the profile launching screen.
It's good enough.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/ca/kb/how-use-firefox-containers
I got into software modding game engines, though. Never cared much for web apps, SaaS. Never much saw the use in paid software since it's just geometry. We made a lot of dumb busy work out of SWE with web apps.
DRY? Yes, let's not repeat ourselves still bothering with lame day jobs that obfuscate it's just physical statistics in a machine of known constraints.
Am really excited about the rest of the world flipping the US off, nVidia full-steam ahead on autonomously organizing distributed systems. Propping up SWEs props up a dangerous delusion.
Because I haven't seen a YouTube ad in a looong time and I don't pay for premium.
I just use this combo.
I will never understand this. My ex bought tons of extensions to do stuff with Safari that other browsers do for free. He paid for a PiP extention for some websites, password managers, Tomagachi pets... dozens of trinket apps that would be depreciated in 2 or 3 major updates. I'm continually wowed by Mac users that insist on paying for a native solution to a problem that doesn't exist in any other ecosystem.
500k new millionaires in 2023 in the US. Why can't you be one of them in a coming year?
I know it's a rhetorical question, but the actual answer is "because I feel like it would require more work than it would be worth".
Of course, all the millionaires I personally know got there through 95% luck, so who knows! Maybe I'll personally be cursed to follow their path.
The odds of a poor person becoming a rich person in America is extremely low and socioeconomic mobility in the US is getting worse all the time. I'd guess that most poor people have better odds of getting hit by lightning. A lot of new millionaires are property owners. Anyone who gets their money from real estate is not a serf.
Also, the developer doesn't necesarily need to own the code to improve it, or build you a copy.
I'm open to the idea, and recognize there are problems with non-commercial software, too. But the critical difference between software and physical commodities is that replication of software, once written, has a marginal cost approaching zero.
I suspect that this difference significantly changes the calculus.
My personal feeling is we should really think outside the box here. I like some sort of hybrid system with government-funded software bureaus producing FOSS code to replicate successful and important "infrastructure" commercial products after five to ten years or so. People get cutting-edge software created by the market, and exploitative rent seeking on critical software is minimized.
So.. I really hope that the garages that throughout my car-ownership years do this, don't just flush them down the toilet, but do something proper about them.
I still don't change my own oil, because I'm at the point in my life where I can afford to throw $100 at that particular problem, rather than spending a dirty and greasy hour+ under my car.
I was curious about what they did with oil when I drove my first car, so I asked my garage. They showed me the tank behind the shop, someone came to empty it once a week or so. I always assumed that was the usual practice, but I legitimately have no idea haha.
I just leave it in the shed in the bottle until I have enough other stuff to get rid of and do it all at once.
Devs would usually prioritize iOS releases (early on, when no React Native nor Expo was as common place) only due to this fact that iOS users where much more likely to spend money than Android ones.
This might have equalized since the early days but i bet some of it still stands
iOS/Android hasn’t equalized. Depending on the segment, something like 80% of revenue is iOS.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-br...
For example:
NextDNS works very well on iOS for everything else.
Enhancer For YouTube.
Sponsorblock.
Dearrow.
I can't use YouTube without them anymore. It's so horrible.
I just use ublock Origin with Firefox on Mac/Pc and Orion on iOS.
The annoyance list takes care of the cookie banners.
Safari's vestigial "never auto-play" setting has never worked, and still doesn't.
The damage of an advertising-based internet economy is not limited to just "seeing ads." The entire content and structure of the internet is warped around this economy. Search engines, SEO, content discovery mechanisms, types and variety of content... all could have been different and better.
1. Switch to cryptocurrency, let small-time criminals control the web.
2. Switch to micropayments, let criminal corporations control the web.
If you're going to have attention-mining addiction-creating software funnel people into rabbit holes, then those rabbit holes need to be verified, safe-to-consume stuff. Watching 5 hours of 5 minute crafts is at worst, going to make someone spend too much money at Hobby Lobby. Certainly not good, but a workable issue. Watching 5 hours of white supremacist propaganda is how you get our current sociopolitical climate.
How much would you pay to own an account on social media? If your answer is $0 then you're not addressing anything, you just want someone else to subsidize your entertainment and you want to call the shots on top.
I don't work for free, and I know damn well neither do you.
You asked "how do we change that" and I'm assuming the "that" referred to the subject of the PC: "The damage of an advertising-based internet economy" which in turn exists in the context of the linked video in the OP, which enunciates the consequences of machine learning being applied to creating hyper-addictive and extremist social media websites, in 2017 by the way, and the speakers broad hypothesis seems, in my eyes, broadly confirmed.
And the principle issue there is thus: an algorithm that consistently directs you to more concentrated and extreme versions of whatever you're consuming (vegetarian -> vegan, for example) can be utterly benign or perhaps annoying in that context, but gets notably darker when it's moving people from Donald Trump's rallies to The Jewish Question.
I have no issue at all with the former example, I have a LOT of issues with the latter.
> How much would you pay to own an account on social media? If your answer is $0 then you're not addressing anything, you just want someone else to subsidize your entertainment and you want to call the shots on top.
In that equation, I'm the product. I have every right to call the shots because the social media company only makes money by my participation in it, which is why I left Facebook and have only atrophied, ancient presences on most websites. I'm fine being shown ads for weird tech junk I might find cool. I'm not fine having the intricacies of my personal beliefs sanded off by weirdos trying to sell white supremacy like it's Pepsi.
He did not, you are ascribing another person's quote to them.
> And the principle issue there is thus: an algorithm
Section 230 does not stop people from using algorithms to enforce harmful content consumption loops for the purposes of selling advertisements. It specifically protects them from the consequences, but repeal that and now you've created a common incentive to sell Cocomelon for American adults.
We keep Section 230 because, even when it's retards like Elon Musk at the reigns, adults deserve to be treated with maturity and respect.
As for black supremacist content, yeah nix that shit too. It's corrosive for the exact same reasons. Was this supposed to be a hard question?
That won't magically fix all the problems in an instant, but the core of everything wrong with the Internet starts with the Internet being separated into consumers and providers, instead of being a true peer2peer network.
Even in the olden days of the Internet when ISPs would give you free webspace with your Internet account, you still didn't get your own domain name, meaning all your Web presence would bust when you switched providers.
Alternatively, get Freenet, IPFS/IPNS or any of the other distributed alternatives working, but after 25 years of people trying, I kind of given up hope of it ever happening.
Spooky, I know, but contrary to what armchair economists will tell you, the invisible hand doesn't do shit outside what it needs to. It's a lot like Natural Selection in that way. Yeah it works... to get the job done. And nothing more. Because it doesn't need to.
I don’t think we fully fathom how much everything on the Internet has degraded. And we and our children have degraded with it. Like frogs boiling alive in a pot, we never noticed it because of how gradually they increased the temperature.
EDIT: tip: tell your 'friend' to search for Band Song_title AZLyrics (not affiliated) so the first hit will be from "AZLyrics.com" which will have a standard format (I always search for ".... azlyrics" instead of just "..lyrics")
Although, Millenials seem to be pretty annoyed by all this, and aren’t really anywhere near retirement yet. So maybe we can figure out some way to apply the brakes.
No, the problem we find ourselves in is that we let ad companies buy the entire economy and infect it with anticompetitive behavior. The people working on Android aren't working on ads. Their work is being exploited by an ad company and twisted to serve ads.
I personally find my doctor infinitely more intelligent than any Google tech bro. I find the group of people making Little Kitty Big City infinitely more intelligent than some Facebook wanker.
That really nails it.
If a page wants to cover itself in noise and dialogues, sure it’s annoying but it’s not quite on the same level as back then.
Today we know that there's no genuine question of user control here, because virtually every user has a mental model that a "webpage" is something different and much more scope-limited than a "program". I don't expect that steampowered.com should be able to launch the game I just bought, even though that capability is easily available from a similar-looking interface by the same developers I have installed on my computer. In 1995 it wasn't so obvious that people in 2025 would think this way.
After all, entrepreneurs can and will abuse anything and everything in this world.
We wouldn't need to bother with installing addons to limit javascript and block ads if those were just part of the browser to start with. Every new feature added should have options that put users in control of if, when, and how it gets used. Right now, even the browsers that give users the most control usually don't go farther than an enable/disable flag in about:config
We have the browser (and extension) people to thank for this of course, not advertisers who would still be doing it if they could.
I wonder if things would actually be better overall. I’m not going to argue that having a scripting language for the web was a mistake, it definitely isn’t on the whole, but I think having it come at a more mature point for the web might have helped stave off a lot of really bad decisions
I wish to think all these things exist in a alternative universe and we've just not constructed the time-portal yet.
Also, java's dominance I guess was the reason that javascript is named after inspiration of java.
What you are asking for are static pages which already exists and most people do use static pages due to it being very easy to deploy on github pages etc. , though I wonder we would've way more abundance of static pages as compared to non static pages, like there are some pages which could've been static but they aren't.
Though I still think the difference would've existed & it could've been net positive IDK, I just like to go create websites as apps which can be booted on any pc,device without worrying about anything, installing and running it would likely require a setup and it would've been a bigger hassle as well.
And well noone's stopping you from doing it right now. There's gopher and gemini if you are interested.
Very loosely, was named that was as an marketing ploy as Java was the new language at the time.
JavaScript is actually ECMAScript or a v.close direlect of. Originally it was called Mocha, and then relabeled to LiveScript and during the NetScape / Sun Microsystems thing, changed itself to JavaScript and Oracle carried it on from there.
It has some quite interesting history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#History
There’s nothing preventing me from adding globs of nightmare JavaScript to my static website to try and chase engagement.
What’s stopping the people making static pages is not technical, it’s cultural.
Nothing like 3 paragraphs of text that requires downloading 2 megabytes of crap, runs code from 20 sketchy looking domains, takes 15 seconds to load, cannot be linked to, and demands you upgrade your browser. As a consolation you can have slightly slower maps in browser instead of downloading an app, once.
I think web scripting is probably THE worst technology ever invented in the IT field. "If I ruled the world", a full ban would be better than its current state; or some AMA on steroids (+Jones act) making JavaScript developers extremely rare and well paid, so that it was limited to the best (as determined by the market) uses with better quality.
Folks forget that before js was front-end frameworks and libaries, it was enabling (as in, making impossible possible) async data requests and page updates without requiring a full round-trip and repaint.
It's difficult to conceptualize a present where that need was instead fully served by HTML+CSS, sans executable code sandbox.
What, ~2000 IE instead pushes for some direct linking of HTML with a async update-able data model behind the scenes? How are the two linked together? And how do developers control that?
Imagine instead if HTML evolved more in the direction of enabling this exact scenario out of the box. So that e.g. you could declaratively mark a button or a link as triggering a request that updates only part of the page. DOM diffs implemented directly by the browser etc.
Or in this hypothetical is the remote server always directly sending HTML?
If we're unwinding back to early 00s though, it could also be fetching XML from the server and then running it through the XSLT stylesheet associated with the current document to convert it to HTML, to reduce the amount of data on the wire.
The specifics could be debated here. But I'm pretty sure that a generic mechanism could be devised that'd adequately cover many use cases that require JS today.
It seemed so at the time but I think it didn't work out... Why is interesting to speculate about... My pet theory that convenient frameworks lowering the barriers were part of the problem.
I think if at it's time JavaScript went the way of java applets and ActiveX controls (and yes I understand part of the reason these could be driven out is availability of JavaScript), web would be in a much better shape right now. 90% of the apps (banking, email, forums, travel, etc) and 100% of the pages would just be plain better. For the remainder you'd just install an app, something they nag you about anyway.
Otherwise, with just CSS and HTML, you'd have a web strictly dedicated to publishing. A read only experience curated by those who are willing to invest the time and tooling into being a publisher.
Even then with the advent of RSS and other data exchange formats it's arguable we didn't even need that part of the web. It would be far better for publishing to deliver headlines and summaries via RSS and then allow me to purchase full content and issues digitally.
I think the bigger complication in the creation of the web was the complete lack of payment systems and user trust in entering their payment information into these platforms. So only the large well moneyed entities like advertisers were willing to absorb that risk and built out the platform. Instead of us conveniently and safely paying creators for content we now have aggressive advertisers who litter the web so publishers can shake pennies out of the CPM tree.
Everything is perfectly static and linear, and instead of popups we get full-page ads, double-full-page ads sometimes, and ad inserts in the rest of the pages, with stealth marketing for the content left.
The fundamental issue is not technology IMHO. Scripting can make it worse, but it wouldn't have been great in the first place.
There are accidents of history, money, and ideology.
These things fit squarely in the money category. The advertising industry was subsumed by adtech during that time, which was driven by government grant and fiat debt-based financing. Advertising fraud has never been harder to account for, and the justified use of analytics for that purpose has driven surveillance capitalism with governments being the customer.
Money printing is the role of the state, so technically if you remove all indirections its state apparatus which makes sense that an individual wouldn't be able to fight against it.
A group of people who thought that web users should not be abused may have won the first pop-up battle, but the businesses that made money from intrusive advertisements clearly won the war.
In hindsight maybe it wasn't a such a great idea for web users to switch en masse to a browser made by an advertising company.
The endgame is a probably a war between web sites that are endless mazes of advertising and user agents that try to navigate the maze and extract the non-advertising content.
I’m not trying to correct you. It’s just a sequence of events I’ve seen play out repeatedly and I’m not sure if there’s a solution. Most recently I’ve seen it with Bambu Lab locking down their 3D printers. Prior to that Autodesk yanking the Fusion 360 enthusiast licenses.
Maybe there isn’t a solution. There’s a lot of UX work that isn’t fun to do and so it’s hard to get volunteers to do it. It’s hard to do product management in a distributed group of volunteers in general. So, companies that can afford to bankroll projects often gain traction with performance or usability gains and suck away attention and funding from open source options. Then when they amass enough of the user base they flip the switch and now folks are stuck. The cost of changing is often prohibitively high and the OSS option is generally far behind at that point.
I think people are bad at thinking longer term. Or maybe they just prefer immediate gratification. In any event, absent a shift in human behavior I expect we’ll see this sort of situation to continue to play out. It’d just be nice if folks were less antagonistic about it when those concerned raise that alarm.
"I'm sorry Dave, but I am unable to accept requests that oppose Google's business interests."
"Well, send it to ChatGPT then!"
"Sure thing. Here is your... 5 second video:"
(Video) "Hey what's up? Be sure to like and subscribe." (end of video)
"I'm watching a video about procrastination... and I've got a test tomrrow! Lolol!"
Obviously your comment is the refined HN equivalent, but still.
When markets control basic needs, capitalism becomes its own form of authoritarianism that forces everyone to self comply. But it's freedom because they voluntarily choose to not starve to death/be homeless.
I actually don’t understand the thinking process behind that inevitability.
Mind to elaborate?
I grew up in the Soviet Union. There was one type of milk on the shelf, it was called "Milk", and I don't remember the label saying anything else.
Compare with "HORIZON ORGANIC DHA Omega-3 Supports the Brain Health organic Whole Milk" dressed in bright red and contrasting yellow, with typography that begs "please look at me, I'm the better option".
I love this. And for me - as a 40 year old western european - it's so unthinkable, so unreal. I usually don't look at the milk packaging at home, but I remember reading on the packaging all kinds of stupid sh!te like names of the farmers where the cow grazes (which might be true, but I guess it's b0ll0cks) with some feel-good illustrations, all kinds of childish texts on the packaging as well. It's just 'milk', I don't need a fake story around how good your milk selling company is.
Maybe your soviet milk was unhealthy or not tasteful, I don't know. Maybe it's just the same kind of milk we have here. My milk is pretty good, but jeezz... that marketing on the packaging over here.
That what I wanted to understand. I understand the other way around, that a socialist panned economy with monopolies in terms of who produces what is shit. And leads to advertising not being necessary. But the other way round is what still trips me off and what I am still not able to wrap my head around.
Communism seems like the only reasonable way — at least then you’re only restricting your own speech as the entity who produces these things.
Ads are basically zero-sum in the sense that they mostly take customers that need something, and shift them to the brand that is advertised, instead of the one they would have heard of naturally (now, there is some element of ads actually increasing demand, but as people are quite cash-strapped or in debt nowadays, I guess it can only function up to some limit). Companies that advertise are engaging in an ever-increasing (more sophisticated, technical, and more expensive) competition to capture some allocation of this demand. Because we’re burning an increasing amount of money in a zero-sum competition, eventually the ecosystem must collapse under its own weight.
We can sort of see this, I think, in people becoming increasingly grumpy about how expensive everything is. But the system is very circuitous, so we misallocate blame all over the place.
Trying to regulate ads—I dunno, it seems hard to regulate without stepping on free-speech toes (US perspective, ymmv in other countries). I would rather regulate the collection of data, which doesn’t seem to be particularly protected in any sense other than that private entities can mostly just do whatever by default (it seems functionally similar to the sort of stuff that the 4’th amendment was intended to protect us against, except it is done by Facebook and Google so they get away with it) (but to be explicit, I think it is probably legal at the moment for companies to run vast surveillance networks, we need new laws).
Edit: Now, I don't know if an ad exec actually said it, but I can find examples like:
> (2015) "Smoking ban is slippery slope toward communism" - https://eu.statesmanjournal.com/story/opinion/readers/2015/0...
> (1948) "Rep Flannagan told the House of Representatives that tobacco will also help in stopping communism." - https://www.brasscheck.com/seldes/tobac6.html
> (2007) "Smoking bans are an act of Communist aggression. " https://www.mesabitribune.com/news/smoking-bans-are-acts-of-...
More to the original point, Bern banned some outdoor advertising last year (!). https://www.iamexpat.ch/expat-info/swiss-news/bern-approves-... says "SVP councillor Alexander Feuz was the most strident [opponent], calling the change a “step towards Stone Age communism.”"
Looks like São Paolo has a widespread advertising ban since 2006(!!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
Bern and São Paolo don't seem all that communist.
The market for ads shown on web pages and user info tracked by pages will crash, so companies will have to find more direct ways to make money again.
He expected the end state of capitalism to be business owners just constantly fighting the markets to stay still. On the one hand, they'd be constantly trying to figure out how to make sure they were paying bottom prices for goods and services on which they relied, and on the other they'd constantly be fighting to try and sell in a saturated market. Eventually, collapse would ensue.
This was one of the foundations for his thinking.
He couldn't have predicted information technology, or ad tech, but the premise seems to hold up.
Of course, where he ended up was workers owning the means of production and every business basically being a "lifestyle business", with no need - or ability - to scale. This, as you know, became corrupted into government ownership, central planning of the economy, and all the other nightmares of a non-free market.
The ideal state - and I think this is where Marx would have wanted it - is that you might not have had a gazillion milk brands all screaming for attention (and the consumer ultimately paying for that, as it being priced into the amount they pay), but there being a free market of worked-owned businesses.
Oh, and if you navigate to this page without NoScript, AdBlocker or a PiHole DNS you'll probably be presented with a cookie consent banner, a bunch of ads on the page and before watching the video, and your data being shared with at least half a dozen partners (a number that can increase dramatically if you visit the page of any news outlet instead of ted.com).
So yeah, I guess that the message of this video aged like fine wine.
More generally, if the service is free, you're the product, and you're being sold to someone else
From casinos, to shady inexistent job offers, to malware, there's a whole world of -ads- targeting the final users as a victim
replying to myself bc i can't to @ujkhsjkdhf234
on x.com (formerly twitter) if you don't paid for premium you get ads for drainers and scams on crypto etc too
it's overall a mess tbh, I never trusted nor liked marketing or advertising, it's just lies in disguise.
An ad for Pampers shown to a family with a toddler; an ad for Tidy Cats shown to a cat owner; an ad for Reese’s shown to someone who exhibits poor impulse control; an ad for McDonald’s shown to someone who works two jobs and doesn’t have time to cook food for themselves; an ad for a gambling app shown to someone using a gambling app.
You're presumably trying to imply it's predatory, but if the premise is that the person "doesn't have time to cook food", how is the ad making things worse? What's the person supposed to do? starve?
The goal is extracting your portion of it via social engineering and other mechanisms available to you.
Then again, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube started "You pay for it with your attention (and your data)" and only later have they implemented payment for being ad-free, although with Zuck's properties, the EU forced it.
This has already happened for subscription TV services. Your previously ad-free subscription now has ads, but you can get rid of them again by upgrading! It’s fucking gross. It’s also of course just going to work, and become the new normal.
How?
When everything is text, text files become libraries. Text editors become macro processors.
+ the minimalism in the age of ad-les enshittification is refreshing
A companion presentation to the OP is "Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming" by Nick Haneaur in 2014 —- https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocr...
He has also been running a podcast called "Pitchfork Economics" which I have found to be very enlightening on the state of this world. From an economics point of view, it explains the enshittification of many services we once enjoyed, the destruction of the middle class.
The past 40+ years of policy based on “reagonomics”/“trickle down economics”, neoclassical/neoliberal economicsc and psuedoscience from the Chicago School of Economics (ie, Milton Friedman) represents the worst era of America.
Not only is the endpoint that it uses for collecting events randomized each time you load a page, but it also happens that every event collector URL is a valid API endpoint that is used for other things. You can't block any of them with regular ad blocking tools unless you're okay with blocking the corresponding API endpoint. And given that the website itself uses the API, this can be difficult.
It's evil and I hate it.
That sums post-IPO Reddit up rather well
thanks to uBlock origin and pihole I don't see any of them.
The one on TED.com appears to have been removed.