What We Have Now Is Not Advertising
nrempel.com
nrempel.com
I don't want to play the internet as if it were a video game. I remember the time before the net, and I want a tool that I use to drive my life narrative forward, not a tool that uses me to drain my attention span. After some thought, I really only need plain text for most everything I do -- but heck if anybody is going to serve that up.
I may be an outlier. I don't know. Perhaps people who don't remember the time before the net view their phones and information experience as just another form of video game, just with other real people involved. I'd love to read some more research in this area.
Looking at it from the outside, I wonder just how large the gap can become between what we need the net for -- and what we're getting.
What these companies seem to be doing isn't delivering value as much as it is preying on the ignorance of the average computer user. Even the innocuous-sounding "you get this for free, and all you have to do is see a commercial now and then, isn't that cool?" turns out to be a tracking system undreamed-of by any dystopian writer in the history of fiction.
Perhaps that situation of customer ignorance will change over time.
This is technically true, but in the same sense that "humans and cattle are responsible for climate change and deforestation" or "drug cartels and addicts are responsible for drug epidemics" are technically true as well.
It ignores the enormous power imbalances between the participating actors - more precisely that we have hierarchical, goal-driven organizations with clear objectives and vast resources in infrastructure, knowledge, manpower and money on the one hand and mostly clueless individuals on the other hand.
> We as a species seem unable to wean ourselves from sweet social nectar (Facebook, Instagram, etc.)
Nope, sorry. I've seen the excuse too often. If some Fortune-500 managers realize there is an enormous amount of money to be made by exploiting attention, that's not "we as a species".
What about text/markdown instead? Sure, having images means having banner ads, but I think it's naive to assume that a restriction to text would help combat ads.
Edit: HTML/JS/CSS et al. can keep existing and be used where it's actually needed, I'd just like my client to default to telling me I'm about to venture into that hellish landscape first and I'd like a more secure by default standard that doesn't let this stuff get so far out of hand.
I sometimes feel like the second internet is trying to replace the former, but I think -- hope -- that both can coexist (preferably without today's ubiquitous surveillance).
What's wrong with having two different physical devices, one that helps you accomplish stuff and one that entertains you? Seems like by splitting it up physically like this you'd be able to keep the two separate. If nothing else, it'd be unambiguous to all involved what your personal goals were.
since for the moment the internet approximates its initial goal of underlying ubiquitous connectivity, and the costs of running services is vanishingly small, doesn't it seem like well intentioned people with broader goals could create alternate content? (i.e. wikipedia, HN, LtU)
Existence and success of marketing and modern advertising is a stronger blow to the concept of free will. It turns out that people are very susceptible to manipulation, and in fact are being manipulated at scale.
(Also, even if humans had perfect free will, it wouldn't change much. If you see free will as a procedure taking in perceived world state, and putting out some decisions somewhat correlated with the input, you could still break it by poisoning the input. Which is precisely what most sales, marketing and advertising efforts are about.)
I know several startup founders who ended up managing their time better by having only one machine for work and one for play -- and the machine for play they kept in a separate room.
It wasn't a capabilities question, it was a mental discipline question. When they went into the other room they mentally switched gears to have some fun and recreation. Over time the physical separation allowed them to separate the goals in their minds as well. The machine or tech had nothing to do with it.
Likewise I've been fortunate to work with some higher-level folks in traditional work in the 90s and 00s. They had their emails printed and read to them. It wasn't because they lacked computer skill. The physical act of requiring that the emails be printed and read to them limited the flow and increased the time they spent considering each reply. By limiting the time they spent on correspondence, it then created a small amount of extremely high-value correspondence where otherwise they could have easily spent all day slacking or whatnot. (I have no idea if that strategy works or not, I was simply fascinated that what originally looked like some kind of weird, old-fashioned luddite philosophy was actually based on increasing quality.)
The physicality of how we accomplish various tasks can have a great amount of impact on how well we do them.
This is a perfect description of how I feel about the Internet today. Thank you.
AFAIR I'm much younger than you; the Internet I started using, in late 1990s, was already "rich" - though nowhere near as flashy as today. Yet I too find myself yearning for simplicity and plaintext. Your comparison to a videogame resonates on many different levels. The user experience of modern Web feels akin to interfaces common to videogames - optimized to look and feel nice, but not very functional nor accessible, and leading you through one carefully designed path. And when I reflect on my social media usage, I find the same phenomenon of "just one more level/mission/turn" that I find playing good games.
I'd definitely prefer a web - maybe a separate web - designed for helping me fulfill my goals. That would mean no shiny fluff in interfaces. Lightweight pages, high discoverability, both pages and underlying data available for automated processing. Alas, I believe commercial interests drive the web in exactly the opposite directions - as making a site too useful also makes it difficult to monetize users.
(Yes, monetize users. If this sounds like milking a cow, that's exactly how it should.)
I used RSS and a simple home brew page scraper to fetch the data and compile the document. However this was a pain to update and I found that news sites didn't always manage their feeds very well.
I wouldn't mind resurrecting this project so are there any recommendations for open source web scraping software that I could try, rather than rolling my own?
Also, if we ever see an actual "advertisement" on the internet, we should celebrate it, I've noticed maybe 2 in the past 10 years.
I'm generally okay with a sensible quantity of soundless, videoless ads. I'm never okay with tracking.
> uBlock Origin is NOT an "ad blocker": it is a wide-spectrum blocker -- which happens to be able to function as a mere "ad blocker". The default behavior of uBlock Origin when newly installed is to block ads, trackers and malware sites
Slatestarcodex has had Real Ads™ on the sidebar for a while now. Not coincidentally, they align so well with what I'm interested in that I've clicked every single one multiple times. I guess that's the difference between mass media and weird little niche blogs.
Long before the internet, people still bought things, and even before they paid for things with credit cards, they paid with cheques that had their home address on them. They inevitably filled out paperwork for various things, on which they complacently included their phone number, which could be cross-checked using the white pages(and other "deep" sources for those willing to pay). Most people strangely had few qualms about writing down their social security number on a piece of paper and giving that to their prospective employer. Grocery stores began offering free "club" cards for fake deals, which asked customers to provide personal contact information so they can "save" a buck on a head of lettuce.
Put simply, people have made their lives open books since before they took the internet seriously, and before advertising could be so closely tied to analytics and data harvesting. The retrieval of information is much, much more efficient, but in principle it's the same sort of transaction. You give out your phone number once and you can bet it's on lists for good. Actually, you don't even have to give it away.
Businesses have long existed to compile information on people, buying it from a variety of businesses, and selling back the aggregated data. Our means of giving them our data has become much more streamlined.
It's not just that, though. Our handing over of information has become seemingly more reciprocal in that we hand over our data in exchange for access to things that are very cheap or free. Facebook may be the prime example of this principle, since the business itself is based on data aggregation; there is no middle-person. And, for a long time, people liked Facebook. People actually like things that are cheap or free in exchange for handing over their phone number, turning off or not installing an ad blocker, linking their Facebook profile, enabling GPS tracking on their phone, and allowing apps access to their contacts, or making their purchase history public(Venmo), etc.
For the average person, it's really hard to beat cheap or free.
I personally wouldn’t mind giving some personal information away to a corner shop if it would allow them to serve me better (as in have more relevant products for me - even though technically they’d be making more money off me because I would be shopping there more frequently).
I do however mind giving out personal information when I know it’s gonna be leaked to thousands of shitty companies including Facebook and Equifax and be offered to the highest bidder, including those with nefarious motives.
Catalog sales, mail order and direct mail businesses have been doing for the last century all of the same things we do today online.
The only thing that changed is the speed and access of information. The same way we didnt hear about conflicts two continents away, we didnt hear about the stores reselling our data.
Im not saying we dont have a privacy problem today, but its far from something new.
It is by no means a paranoid rant. It is a piece of common sense.
To quote a random person from the internet: "Why are there commercials for toilet paper, who is NOT buying it?"
The last time I saw an ad on the internet for toilet paper was yesterday.
There is a wide range in the price of toilet paper, and presumably profitability. Advertising it is motivated by this differentiation.
Besides personal preference, presumably many people are or can be induced to be, afraid of guests and SOs judging them if they buy the cheapest 1-ply.
I don't think the principles are much different from automobiles or a lot of other things, where apparently excessive choices are a means to try to present a Hobson's choice between a cheap low quality option and an expensive, differentiated option. The eternal struggle in marketing is to avoid having to sell a mid-range product for a fair price that maximizes value to the consumer.
I’m actually wondering, would the record-breaking DDoS attacks we had a year ago thanks to the Mirai botnet be enough to take down Shitbook if all the attack traffic was directed at them? What if instead of pure bandwidth-exhaustion, this capacity was used to flood them with ad clicks or fake page views to poison their spying with fake data?
Google selling ad space on brand searches to competitors unless you outbid them. Ad networks selling you in market audiences based on intent to buy from you anyways...if you dont buy that data, your competitors will... than you need to use first party data to compete and you spend to remarket to customers who would buy from you anyways if the ad networks were selling that other signal driven data to your competitors. Startups and publishers whose entire business model is ranking in google for your brand name and selling data... than they all have the chutzpah to claim their targeting and ad network should get credit for the sale...
Its one big protection racket driven by publishers and ad networks to skim from businesses...
If the targeting didnt exist for everbody, the cream would still rise to the top... 80% of online advertising today is only necessary because those same predators would sell your customers to your competitors if you dont pay to play!!!
The only solution is to take advertising out of the hands of publishers and put it into the hands of businesses and consumers...
The incentives are all wrong because publishers and middlemen control the monetization!
Google, Facebook and others are SV darlings and large employers. HN is read mainly by software or startup folks, basic pragmatism means people will want to keep options open and not close doors.
People have made their choice, shaming and endless debate is not going to work. Regulations may - personalized advertising especially social or political is unethical and destructive. But these debates have to happen in other places where the focus is more on ethics and society and not startups and making money.
I don't actually use Twitter for anything social, but it is the way I often find out recent events. For example I commute by njtransit, which has delays twice a week or so. They provide almost no information via official channels (announcements or posted on boards), but often you can find details on twitter...
So I bring up twitter on my phone and search for njtransit, and invariably it decides to show me a joke some user posted a week ago, or yesterday's delays -- which is completely useless.
I feel like there used to be a way to show it chronologically. Is that gone now?
Also: thesis #74 of The Cluetrain Manifesto says: "We are immune to advertising. Just forget it."
I don't know what they're referring to here, but this isn't really 100% true in any case. I'm running Firefox with uBlock Origin on mobile. You can set it as default browser and it can even be set to replace Chrome inside of other applications.
When it comes to Android apps, it's true that you would need root to block ads, but that's more due to application level sandboxing. Of course, I would not really expect Google to implement hooks for intercepting and blocking traffic or content in applications.
Its a huge irony that Android allows you to block advertising more than the Apple ecosystem. In fact developers adore iOS because its an OS used by paypigs.
Most popular operating system, PERIOD.
I do everything the author does and I also don't use "assistants" on any mobile device or PC. If you're going to write an article about privacy and post it in HN, you should probably back that up with full action, not just convenient action.
(I don’t know what to think about Microsoft. I don’t even know if I’m being unfair by not counting them as an equal of the other three).
Honestly considering the opacity of their privacy rules, it's all about marketing and how receptive you are to it. Apple does communicate a lot more about privacy of its users, but it is unclear whether they actually are objectively better than the others big names.
From a business model point of view however, I agree that it's clear Amazon, Facebook and Google make most of their revenue out of users tracking. It is not true for Apple.
The other three (Google, Amazon, and MS) are straight-up spyware/surveillance and barely even bother putting a pretty face on it.
I'm moderately cautious about privacy, to the point that i use a free OS and software, encrypted messaging, no smartphone, etc., and I'm evaluating my options on what to do about the Intel ME. Using an adblocker and Apple stuff is like the tip of the iceberg.
It is not quite blind faith. Apple have made a stand for privacy, even confronting over-zealous law enforcement over it. And nothing in their business model requires stealing a user's personal data. It would be blind faith to observe a company whose business model is entirely based on personal data and still trust them.
To play devil's advocate, both google and apple's business model involves making you buy stuff. Neither requires stealing your personal data (google could provide a significant amount of value without tracking simply by acting as a centralised, trusted marketplace for ads), but both are helped by it significantly. But I do agree that given the current state of affairs, google has a lot more incentive to steal your data than apple.
>>This might sound innocuous but the tracking efforts of these companies are so accurate that many people believe that Facebook listens to their conversations to serve them relevant ads.