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Comment by avian | Hacker News Reader

In some stupid meeting somewhere:

A: ...and in conclusion, it's a win-win situation. Users will benefit from ads and our revenue will go up.

B: People don't like ads on their TV.

A: But they do. I refer you to slides 18 through 25 where you can see engagement metrics for our ad rollout on the old model. If people wouldn't like ads they wouldn't be clicking on them so much .

B: I don't like ads. Do you like ads on your TV?

A: No.

B: Does anyone here like ads?

A: That's not the point. No-one here is in our target group or representative of our user behaviors.

C: Ok, if there are no more objections we're going with A's plan then. B, can I see you in my office after we finish here?

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I suspect that a large part of this ad- and marketing-driven economy is based on this.

The reason they predict their revenue will go up (which it will, at least in the short term until the market adjusts) is because they have a lot of customers already lined up to pay them to show ads on their TVs.

Those customers' marketing departments decided to pay money to include their ads on TVs because a similar process was followed and they (rightfully) predict that they will get "engagement" on those ads (which the marketing department will rely on to justify or increase their salaries).

The problem is that this "engagement" will mostly be just annoyed customers mis-clicking or trying whatever it takes to dismiss the ad and not actually intending to purchase the advertised product, thus not contributing to the company's end goal of selling more product.

I am not convinced that the majority of the advertising & marketing initiatives out there actually translate to more profit. Marketing departments will brag about "conversions" all day long but how many of those are either accidental clicks or people who were already determined to purchase your product anyway (looking at the companies who buy Google AdWords on their own brand - if someone's searching for your brand on Google your website will already be the top result - a click on the ad is not a true "conversion" in this case and is just wasted money).

Ultimately, people have a finite amount of time and disposable money, and throwing more ads at this "problem" won't solve it. Your conversions will go up because of accidental clicks (and your marketing department will capitalize on that to justify their salaries/raises), but that doesn't magically give the consumer more money to actually go and buy your product so your profits will not increase.

> The problem is that this "engagement" will mostly be just annoyed customers mis-clicking or trying whatever it takes to dismiss the ad and not actually intending to purchase the advertised product

"Amazing! The smaller we make the 'X' button, the more people love them!"

Or make the X button almost the same color as the background.

TuneIn does this.

I think this is also the psychology behind those pop-up like/share button bars at the bottom of web pages, that on mobile just so happen to sit exactly where your navigation bar hides, and if you tap one pixel too high you hit the share button instead of pulling up the navigation bar.

The best method I've found to increase positive engagement is actually to just have a fake 'x' such that clicking it just triggers the ad. I've noticed this more frequently on the web nowadays, and based on the click through rates, the target demographic is absolutely _obsessed_ over this feature.

> have a fake 'x' such that clicking it just triggers the ad.

I always, always thought this is what X buttons do, so I was simply closing the tab :))

Don't get me started on dialog boxes that put the "cancel" button on the wrong side. Much like toilet paper, there is one way to display it, all other methods are heresy worthy of nothing less than immediate exterminatus.

(partially kidding, but only partially.)

But there isn't only one way to order it. Some OS' (I forgot which) had convention dictate that the positive confirmation button was in the rightmost corner, with other lesser buttons to the left. In this order, "Cancel" appears first, but further from the corner.

As long as you're consistent.

Apps which lay their buttons out contrary to the conventions of their platform are evil. Apps which randomize the positions of their buttons are unspeakably worse.

If you have cats, the 'proper way' to hang the TP is the opposite way of what you absolutists think is the One True Way.

I'm starting to suspect that the loudest voices are cats who have either learned to type or to pay for lobbyists, trying to push your feline agenda on the rest of us.

Have had two generations of cats in our house, and always the toilet paper the proper way. Never had an issue.

On the other hand, we have to keep the toilet seat down or they'll try to drink toilet water.

Cats are the devil, and I have reasons to believe they've recently entered into an alliance with the human infant community.

I begun suspecting that one day when my wife was preparing dinner. Soon after she took the meat from the fridge to work on it, our baby started crying and making noise for absolutely no reason. My wife immediately dropped everything and went to investigate, and the cat used this opportunity to attempt to steal our dinner meat.

Ever since, I've been noticing many more cases where the baby and the cat are either simultaneously attempting to do things they're not allowed to, or the baby starts distracting us while the cat goes out to carry out some mischief. It's all coordinated too well to be happenstance.

My friend had a pug like this once. Dog was as old as father time. Needed help making it outside to relieve himself before he finally left us. But I SWEAR that dog moved like greased lightning if you left a plate on the table to go check on the kid, as he'd make it from one side of the living room to another in the time it took you to take three steps and check in on the other room, hop up on a chair and your dinner very rapidly became his dinner.

I thought our cats were generally stupid because they could never do the jigsaws I assigned to them, solve a Rubiks cube or see 2cm in front of their faces (they are long-sighted).

But I have come to believe they are far smarter than me, particularly with scheming methods of sneaking around to quietly appear when they can get food. One used to push donut boxes off the side so that they would burst open, and would then run off with a donut. I have no idea why he wanted to eat donuts. He also tried to eat bread through the wrapper. Or they fein illness. Our one cat had an operation on his leg so we put a little box as a stepping stone so that he could get onto the bed, and then onto the window sill. Turns out he didn't need it at all and could jump perfectly fine, but would still use the box all the time.

They're really clever, just not at jigsaws or sudoku.

>Our one cat had an operation on his leg so we put a little box as a stepping stone so that he could get onto the bed, and then onto the window sill. Turns out he didn't need it at all and could jump perfectly fine, but would still use the box all the time.

The problem is cats are really good at hiding pain - being physically able to jump doesn't mean it isn't uncomfortable or painful for him.

We have a pair of very senior cats (18/19ish years old) and make sure the house has little staircases dotted around to make getting on to their regular lounging spots easier, as we noticed they prefer to use a step if something happened to be available - while they are still fairly mobile, I suspect they are developing some level of arthritis. Given they've been good companions for nearly two decades it's the least we can do to make sure they're comfortable.

This is a good point. Sadly our fluffy friend had to be put down due to FIP and I hope we made him as comfortable as possible during his life - we didn't take away his step anyway. I still miss him and it has been years.

Try 3x water dishes, non chlorinated water, change them every day. Stopped mine drinking from the toilet.

Same goes for toddlers. It's harder to unspool the entire roll if it's "the wrong way". I hate it.

Reminds me of Zelda, Ocarina of Time. They switched up the cancel and repeat buttons for different dialogues just to mess with you.

Cancel button is obsolete, the customers want to be reminded later.

No! I detest the dialog boxes that ask a question and then the only options are "Yes" or "Skip for now"/"Set up later". I want to confirm "No".

impossible, statistics show that 0% of customers chose "No" when not given a choice. Ergo you do not exist.

Those stats explain everything! It certainly sums up my experience on the modern web - awful and slow!

I've seen a lot of clickbait pages where the next button shows up and 10 seconds later at the end of the page load there's reflow and then an ad is placed where the next button used to be! So you end up clicking through an add on every page unless you wait for a long and random amount of time!

That's the evilest thing I can imagine!

There are a ton of dark patterns in web design about this.

- same color background

- in the wrong corner (users expect the "X" in the upper right hand corner). I've seen the "X" in the wrong corner and some other icon in the right hand corner. People reflexive will click in the upper right hand corner and open the ad by mistake

- I've seen where you have to click on text instead of the "X", clicking on the "X" just opens the ad

- Also very small, 1-2 pixel "X" so literally one pixel off and you've opened the ad

- I don't remember what company did this, but they would pop the ad and after three seconds, it would reload, all but a few pixels higher so when you're in the process of closing the window, it would reload and then you'd open the ad by mistake because the "X" is in the wrong place now.

I've seen a lot more devious stuff but the sad thing is, I have decent vision. How do these dark patterns affect people who have impaired vision or other issues with their vision? How infuriating it is it for them to deal with this BS? I can't imagine.

An overlay that covers the whole area opening an add onClick. After some time the overlay is added again (incredibly annoying for video players you might want to pause)

If your ad blocker can't deal with these, set z-index on the main content with a userstyle, so it stays on top. Then you might also want to use a css style to just make everything else invisible:

``` *:not(.videoContainer){ background-color: black!important; color: black!important; } img { display:none!important; } ```

The god damned cookie consent popups do this. The "Decline" buttons are small and grey, the "Accept all and save" are big and green. They'd show empty checkboxes/iOS-style sliders at the off position that show that you won't be getting non-essential cookies, of course when you click "Accept all" these settings get overridden.

Not only an ad problem, but the sliders reminded me of a really bad UI feature I see everywhere: ambiguous highlighting when there are only two options.

I find some of the sliders for on/off are impossible to read. You can't work out what is on or off.

Windows 3.11 / 95 UI seems such a good idea by comparison to today's UIs - checkboxes with obvious tick marks or X marks in them, radio buttons, buttons that look like actual buttons, scrollbars you can see without having to flail the mouse around just for them to appear, scrollbars that go the right way when you use the mouse wheel (ok that was Windows 98), maximise buttons that actually maximised a window without having to hold alt like on macOS these days...

My dad is colorblind, and the red off/green on looks the same to him; the slight shadow showing the side the toggle is on often isn't dark enough to be obvious, especially when someone gets cute and makes the slider pill-style (the button part takes up exactly half the space, with a vertical line down the middle). I expect this to be less common with mobile OS downtime features that encourage users to get off their screens by going grayscale.

I don't know why everybody went to a flat design. Seriously Apple should have stuck with their it looks like things design.

What kills me is that the only app that I actually engage with ads is an app that has a voluntary button to see ads to support the developer. You click the 'watch ad' button, you watch a 15 second ad, or see a banner ad, and then return to the app when you close the screen.

The app asks once per month if I would consider seeing an ad to support the developer. I usually watch one ad a day, as a rule, because it's the best way to do this. I've clicked on those ads, and have actually made purchases from those ads (it was for a product I was already researching and probably going to buy, but I clicked through the ad when I finally purchased it).

More apps need that level of respect for their users' time.

> Also very small, 1-2 pixel "X" so literally one pixel off and you've opened the ad

Fact check. You cannot make an X with anything less than 3 pixels. ;)

> 1-2 pixel "X"

An x requires at least 3×3 pixels.

Not if it's rendered on subpixels :).

Actually the minimum number of pixels to render a close box is three times the number of close boxes (ie. 3x3 for 1 close box). Any fewer pixels will not allow a functional close box to be reconstructed. This is referered to as the 'Nah-quist limit'.

The fact that they include an X button at all seems like a concession that I'm not sure how long will last

For the moment, running a Pi-hole in the cloud and pointing your mobile devices to it works. As you say, how long? When the adholes start doing ads as part of the content, this may break, but I'm sure the Cold War between the adholes and the blockers will heat up. There is always a way. God bless all the creative programmers who help to keep this crap at bay.

Just this week I had an ad popup with no button. Before I gave up and left the site I tried clicking where the button was supposed to be. Sure enough it worked.

Of course now I'm part of the problem, because some asshole has a graph that shows that (a suspiciously small fraction of) users are able to opt-out so there's no legal liability for having the ads that way.

I got rid of TuneIn once they stripped the recording from the Pro version I paid for. Good riddance.

We like slider control to set precise value because we click many time to set correct value, isn't it?

> I am not convinced that the majority of the advertising & marketing initiatives out there actually translate to more profit.

That’s odd. You’ve never read a valley S-1, I take it?

The truth is noone buys anything from any ads... however brand awareness is a real thing. If you see a fancy ad from a company, they must be a profitable company that has a great product so you might be inclined to buy it or suggest it next time you're looking for this category of products.

I don't buy that for two reasons:

- Brand awareness is one thing, but it feels companies are more interested in saturating consumers with advertising. That saturation is something entirely different.

- Advertising can present information to base purchasing decisions upon, but rarely does in most media. While advertising should never be the sole source of that information, it would be far more effective for brand or product awareness.

I wonder how true the old saying about all publicity being good publicity really is any more. I can't speak for anyone else, but as I've become older, I've also become much less tolerant of unwanted interruptions and distractions. I don't mind a relevant ad that is tastefully integrated into whatever I'm looking at or listening to, but the patterns of behaviour I've developed online or when watching TV or listening to radio are definitely geared to minimising interruptions and disrupting the kinds of security- and privacy-threatening tracking that supports the big ad networks. Pushy ads that manage to break through tend to result in instant closing of browser, changing of channel, etc. so definitely aren't doing the host site/channel any favours, and they tend to leave a bad impression of whoever was advertising if they leave any impression at all.

The kinds of "feature" we are talking about with the Samsung TV here and other so-called smart devices will stop me from buying those products in the first place. But then I also don't use Windows 10 for my main PC because I think I should control my PC and not whoever happened to write the OS I'm running, so apparently I'm an outlier.

Oh, yes, brand awareness is a real thing. For example, a lot of people will avoid Samsung TVs right now.

I just bought an LG. I’m so glad I dodged this bullet. I would be furious.

How do you know LG won’t update the software later to include ads?

LG's already also have ads. They're not super obtrusive though, and I'm sure I shut personalization off.

That's who i bought a Panasonic. They cost more but don't have a shitty track record. In fact, my washing machine was the last Samsung here. It broke and got replaced by a German machine. These days I try to avoid the cheapest offering and try to buy quality instead. Upfront cost is higher but I really value my time too much to bother fighting with nonsense like ads on my tv.

I have a Panasonic TV too. Back like 8 years ago, it had an unremoveable ad/app square in it's app menu. Of course, they let me reorganize the apps, and I put it way back on a screen I'd never see, and I haven't noticed it since.

Also, as a side note, Vudu is like the one app from that era that still works.

Does your Panasonic stop loading any smart apps if their servers go down too? Mine refused to load anything (eg. Netflix) if it can't get in touch with Panasonic.

Check what network activity it is engaging in. You'll be disappointed, I am sure. Seems dialling home is the new thing to do on every single device these days. Data vacuuming the entire human population just because they can.

I’ve not seen any as yet. But then I disagreed with all of the tick boxes on setup. That may be why.

I agree, if we have to have ads for whatever reason, do it in an unobtrusive way that the user is asked about during setup. Now the ads in lg's smart home app are a different matter...

Why would I bother updating software for a TV if the TV is already working? Whats the motivation?

My Samsung TV auto-updates. It's infuriating as I cannot disable it.

Just disconnect it from your network (change the wifi password or remove the Ethernet cable) and it will be unable to auto-update.

You may want to get an external device (Roku, Chromecast, Apple TV, or other media server) and plug that into your HDMI if you use the network from apps on the TV.

But if some apps are used that isn’t possible. I’d suggest a few all rule forcing all port 53 traffic through a Pihole, then block Samsung traffic.

Then...don't use the apps?

What can the apps on your TV do that a $40 Amazon Fire stick ($50 if you want 4K) can't?

I'd rather hook up an old laptop to my TV and use that to watch media than use the apps on my TV and deal with all the bullshit that TV manufacturers are doing when you connect the TV to the network.

Just wait 'til they get a blanket connection to Amazon Sidewalk for their nefarious deeds, and the only way to disable it will involve a soldering iron.

Think of it as unpatched computer on your network, possibly with a built in microphone and camera.

Why put it on a network?

Are there any open networks in range? How do you know it's not jumping on those?

On my old Samsung TV, if I inadvertently push the "Smart Hub" button in the center of the remote, the bottom 20% of the screen gets overlaid with what looks similar to a MacOS Dock with the default apps from 2012. Worked OK in 2012 when I bought it and used Netflix a few times, but a month later I bough the original Google Chromecast, plugged that into HDMI 1, unplugged the Ethernet cable, and never intentionally pushed the Smart Hub button again.

I didn't push it again because in about 2015 I found that if you push it, it locks up for exactly 30s, which is how long it takes to hit the network timeout and say "Updates are available for your Samsung Smart TV." and then allow you to use the ancient web browser or Netflix or other smart apps. I did try a couple years ago, on a whim, but apparently the update servers have moved and even when plugged into Ethernet it can't actually update.

Everything currently runs through the Roku, the Blu-ray player, or a component-to-HDMI dongle for the Wii, but if I didn't have the Roku I'd have a motivation to update so that Netflix would work without a 30-second delay (and I'd be unsurprised if Netflix wasn't backwards compatible with their 2012 client from a Samsung TV). However, the picture is fine, so it keeps on chugging.

LGs have ads as well. I had to add a bunch of domains to a DNS blacklist in order to get my $2000 TV to stop spamming me.

Hmm. I shall keep an eye on it. I run Ubnt network gear at home, so if it needs to be taught a lesson I shall be happy to do so.

While I love my LG tvs, they have had ads on their smart tvs for nearly a decade.

The difference from Samsung is that the ads on the LGs are in the same place they've always been (on the smart tv menu overlay), they've never been obtrusive, and they're always in some way connected to video content (usually VOD movies that you can purchase through one of the streaming apps, or adds for streaming apps you can install on the TV).

I think I can accept that. I honestly don’t use it much. It was more for my better half, as our four year old Samsung killed itself the other day.

I’m more excited about the HDMI 2.1 and variable refresh for the new Nvidia cards.

I'm extremely happy with my HiSense - it runs Roku, so the "smart" stuff is actually maintained by a company that does a pretty good job of it. The only thing you could call ads are promos for shows. I think their revenue is kickbacks from subscriptions people get through Roku, rather than direct advertising.

My old LG "smart" TV would send a web request to LG every time I pressed ANY button on the remote control.

I took that stupid TV off the network as soon as I could.

I think the manufacturers are all as bad as each other. My current Panasonic TV will refuse to load any of the "smart" apps (even Netflix) if it cannot reach Panasonic's servers, which means the entire TV becomes useless as an Internet device (no Netflix or ANY streaming services) if Panasonic has a server issue (which they sometimes do).

Might revert to VHS at this rate.

My parents were thinking about getting a Samsung TV and I've always been under the impression they make great displays.

Instead I will recommend Sony or LG now

My 3-year-old Samsung TV is ad-free, because I don't give it network access and never accepted the TOC

Honestly, there are plenty of complaints about LG around, and I wouldn't trust Sony on about anything...

I have a Philips smart TV, so far it has no ads and just mildly annoying bugs, nothing really disruptive. But mine is an old model, it looks like the new ones aren't like that anymore.

A few years ago I brought some TVs to use as monitors because they were much better fit than the actual thing. Now it looks like the trends reversed, and I'll have to start buying monitors to use as TVs. Is there a good TV receptor that I can plug in a Raspberry Pi?

Or avoid Smart TVs altogether if you're a cord cutter anyway, and opt for what I believe is called a "public display".

Even those try to connect to a network now. Look at the spec sheets: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1573436-REG/samsung_l...

I mostyly agree, however i recently clicked on a beef jerky ad on instagram and bought a pack, but that is one purchase over the course of 20+ years of seeing online adds, so I think your point still stands.

Real as in has a real effect on consumers. NOT real as has being a significant predictor for quality of products.

We all know this, but we ignore it. Branding for brandings sake == lying to customers.

I've bought multiple products from mobile ads just this year.

Heck the yoga app I use I saw through a mobile ad. Same deal for the fitness app I use (BodBot, awesome app, check it out!)

I've gotten onboard Kickstarters from ads, and I've bought keto cereal from an ad I saw.

99.999% of most ads I ignore, but sometimes ads are really well targeted and actually show me something I want.

(None of these ads were on a tv in any way...)

OT question, but what the heck is a keto cereal? i tought keto means no/low carb. and I mean everything in cereals has carbs. I mean classic cereals use tons of oatmeal, fruits, differnt types of wheat, joghurt, etc.. like everything with carbs?! so basically the bread and butter ingrident of cereals is oatmeal which has like >60% carbs with other types of carbs?!

Probably made with alternatives like Almond flour.

Base on the ingredients, lots of whey protein.

The MyPillow / Snuggie / "As Seen On TV" people would probably disagree.

ordinarily would agree but i am about to buy an standing desk. never saw it before it popped up as an ad somewhere.

> looking at the companies who buy Google AdWords on their own brand - if someone's searching for your brand on Google your website will already be the top result - a click on the ad is not a true "conversion" in this case and is just wasted money

Could be a true conversion given that all competitors are paying adwords on your brand name search also. If you don't have them you will probably appear after a long list of competitors with really personalized clickbait titles prompting your customers to compare you with them

Agreed. This happened with my startup. Basecamp complains about this practice frequently too: https://mobile.twitter.com/jasonfried/status/116898696270498...

Pro tip: if the competitor uses your trademark in their ad copy, you can do a takedown notice and usually the ads will be removed.

It's incredibly sad that it's even possible to bid for the top spot above a competitors trademark. The worst blow to the health of the web was likely google's merger with doubleclick.net.

Google has devolved into a shitty search engine even ignoring the advertising. Someone please build a search engine comparable to google in the mid-2000s. No duckduckgo isn't it.

would you tell more about why you think ddg is not good? I'm not using it for some reasons so I'd like to know. Thanks

Not the original commenter, but before Google fully pivoted to their present focus on monetizing search, the results were often strikingly useful, even for obscure searches. DuckDuckGo can’t (yet) replicate this now-lost magic.

In my memory the quality of google searches peaked around 2009 or so I'm not sure I'd refer to it as a "present" effect....

There are a few good reasons to do this:

1. Competitors will bid on your brand name. Your ad for your own brand name will have a higher quality score and be very cheap, driving up the price for the competitors.

2. So much of a SERP is below the fold that there is value to being as close to the top of the page as possible.

This is all true, and likely necessary, but it's all negative value that Google created and you just have to buy your way back up to zero.

I assume Google cannibalizes more brand power than it actually creates.

> (looking at the companies who buy Google AdWords on their own brand - if someone's searching for your brand on Google your website will already be the top result - a click on the ad is not a true "conversion" in this case and is just wasted money)

Except that Google lets anyone else advertise in that slot above your brand. And as we've seen some companies can confuse the customers and steal them away in such an ad.

If we tacitly accept a search engine allowing such phishing expeditions in those ads, then this kind of spending is the necessary and only step companies can take.

This happened today to me. I searched for the “DigiD” app which is the 2FA app for your social services account with the Dutch government. The app was the second app. Even though it matched fully on the query. The first app was some other document scanning app from some vendor. I can imagine someone paying less intention would install the wrong app.

I’m actually considering whether it would be a good thing if the app stores would verify government applications and perhaps not even allow ads on queries which have results that include governmental apps...

That would be a nice and easy way for any government to censor TikTok.

"Hey, have you seen the new COVID-19 contact tracing app? It's named TikTok-19".

You would be dead on. From the marketers themselves:

https://www.adexchanger.com/ad-exchange-news/the-marketers-g...

The ad/marketing driven economy is based on something simpler: consumers don't have any money, but corporations do. So you don't sell to consumers. You sell stuff at break even or a loss or even give it away to consumers and then sell the consumers to those who actually will pay.

The dominance of this kind of surveillance capitalist or ad-saturated model everywhere is a side effect of extreme wealth inequality and a generally demand constrained economy.

You're right about most of it, but companies by AdWords on their own brand name so that competitors won't get that spot. Basically, the first 2 results listed by Google are paid ads. So if they don't buy AdWords for their own brand the top 2 displayed results could be any similar item. So that case isn't about increased conversion, it's about not letting competitors snipe their sales by offering a lower price for a comparable item even when searching by brand name.

I worked on a very popular free desktop product (BitTorrent/uTorrent) when a major revenue stream was the bundling of crapware in the install path, depending on people clicking the dialogs without reading them. I remember an executive announcing in a meeting that "search engine replacement" (reconfiguring your browser and/or system to a shadier alternative that made us money) was viable because the telemetry data showed that not very many people uninstalled in the 2-3 weeks after this was done to them, so, yay! another revenue stream people don't seem to totally hate! But they had read the tea leaves wrong and the backlash eventually caught up with them. It shows that reading mountains of data (100 million+ active monthly users) and reaching solid conclusions about user sentiment is a black art and numbers can be presented to show whatever point of view you want.

Either that, or the custom search was impossible to remove for non-technical crowd - AKA "the conduit business model"

> reaching solid conclusions about user sentiment is a black art and numbers can be presented to show whatever point of view you want.

Sounds like yet another case of, "Lies, damned lies, and statistics."

There is a sizable middle ground between "basic intuition" and "black art".

I think anyone with some experience in that type of software would intuitively understand the negative user experience described here.

Seems like a pretty straightforward case of the classic "Unless their salary depends on not understanding" rather than some opaque wall of unknowable unpredictable consequences.

Yeah, the sizable middle ground is I believe what props up most of the adtech industry. The sizable middle ground is occupied by people with minimum understanding of statistics, who bullshit themselves and each other with data - but as long as nobody can obviously tell they're wasting money, they're all happy and the money keeps flowing.

This is so true. It makes me lose faith in humanity, to be honest. My oh my do I detest adverts.

>I am not convinced that the majority of the advertising & marketing initiatives out there actually translate to more profit.

The big companies have people who check if the ads are working. Every have the clerk ask for your zip code? That is because they are checking if the ad sent to some zip codes worked. It is noisy data, but statistics is all about finding signal in noisy data.

> at least in the short term until the market adjusts

This sounds like customers will eventually choose less shady brands in a year or two, when in reality all brands will actual race to the bottom together.

Well it's more like "people hate ads, but next time they buy a new TV, the ads will make our TV $10 cheaper than the other guy and they'll buy it anyway"

It's the same thing in the airline industry - people will complain all day long about legroom and being treated as cattle, but the next time they buy a ticket they vote with their wallets when they sort the flight list by price and choose the cheapest option.

I don't know why this comment hasn't been upvoted more since it's absolutely spot on.

I'll bet the difference that my $50 projector was way cheaper than whatever TV this is and it doesn't have ads (although it also doesn't seem to have working DPMS but that might just be my Xorg config.)

Airlines are controlled and limited by regulation to where its no longer "free" and you can't vote with your dollar cause you are a guarantee. There are very few airlines that offer more legroom and even then it's not comfortable. Same with telecoms. TV industry lacks competition in this regard as well but largely due to the centralized manufacturing. I also blame modern ip law as many of these companies have rediculous protections increasing cost of entry.

>There are very few airlines that offer more legroom and even then it's not comfortable.

American tried. American failed. Nobody was willing to pay more.

https://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/04/business/american-air-to-...

Isn't that because most of the people that fly multiple times a year aren't the ones paying for the tickets? Instead their company has policies on getting the cheaper flights. And people that fly for a vacation once every few years, they may not have enough experience flying to realize the benefit (or, if they do want a better experience, they go all the way to first class).

I don't if that's true for most air travel, but it's definitely true for my business travel. Corporate policy is the ticket has to be within a reasonable range of price (average price +/- some amount, not sure exactly). This means I can usually select between 2-3 airlines, 2 airports, and plenty of times, but I am always limited to basic economy without prior approval (which has been granted for international travel and if I need to be on a specific flight for some reason).

Also true to my experience.

Back two jobs ago, we had international customers with somewhat high demand to ship our people all across the world on, sometimes on a moment's notice. I had to fly out 4 or 5 times in the span of two years, but some of my colleagues could do more than that in under a year. Somehow, the flights were almost always the cheapest airline available, and the cheapest seats available. The co-workers who flew frequently, including my boss, were all using the accumulating miles to bump themselves a class up.

American Airlines has a Premium Economy class: https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/experience/seats/premium...

At least in the states. Most airlines I fly have an option for a premium seat that costs more and has more leg room.

> There are very few airlines that offer more legroom

United Premium, United Premium Plus, Delta Premium Select, American Airlines Premium Economy, Lufthansa Premium Economy, Alaska Airlines Premium Class, Air France Premium Economy, Air China Premium Economy...

AFAIK, most of those aren't available on domestic US flights. If you're flying internationally, it's almost always been possible to spend more to get more space and service, sometimes up to rather eye-watering levels, but flights within the US tend to be limited to economy and first class. (Some economy seats do have more leg room than others and carry a premium charge, but the OP may still be technically correct based on the "very few" condition.)

I'm not sure I see the connection you're trying to draw between your first two sentences. Airlines are regulated, but their price and service are much less regulated now than they were about 40 years ago. Their prices are much lower, as perhaps expected, and their service is much worse, as perhaps less expected than easily predicted if you're a realist rather than an optimist. The vast majority of airlines nickel-and-dime customers on domestic flights, making virtually everything they can from baggage to legroom to boarding time into for-pay options, because they learned that no matter what customers say, they shop on base price. Since deregulation, various airlines have tried to offer better seating, service, etc., as all-inclusive and more expensive tickets, and time after time, customers just click on the cheapest thing they find on Priceline.

tl;dr: when it comes to crappy airline service, the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our regulators, but ourselves.

When I fly I definitely pay more to avoid certain airlines. For instance, when flying to the US, I avoid any US-based airline, as they all always have noticeably worse service and seats, and will pay maybe 10-20% more to fly a EU or asian airline.

But, do people actually know that when they purchase? If it were clearly stated anywhere on the box/sales copy that "you will see ads on this device" while the other one says "we won't shove ads on your device" I would wager the $10 more would be a bargain to nearly everyone.

But that information is never available at the point of purchase so most people get the surprise of see ads when they had no idea that was even a thing.

I’d have less of a problem with this if they went about it the way Amazon sells ads on their Kindle e-readers:

- You can buy the device for $X, and it’s marked as being sold “with special offers” (a euphemism for ads that would be more explicit in an ideal world)

- You can buy the device for $X + $Y, and it’s marked as being sold “without special offers”

- You can buy the device for $X “with special offers” today, but you can spend $Y once you have the device to “disable special offers”

This case is pretty terrible because Samsung isn’t giving buyers the ability to pay them the $10 directly to disable ads while not being up-front about whether or not ads will be served.

Turning off the ads should also turn off the surveillance.

The "Special Offers" also have the advantage of being super unobtrusive, especially when the device is actually in use. That's not really the case here.

One more option that was at least available on older Kindles

- You can buy the device for $X “with special offers” today, then hack it and remove the "special offers".

I don't know how prevalent this is, but wonder if it's a consideration in deciding on the "money to disable ads" strategy.

While it may not appear that way in the HN crowd, the number of users who actually jailbreak their devices is effectively zero when you're determining revenue models. Especially nowadays, when most of the features people care about have been implemented.

That depends on how easy it is to do the jailbreak. If you can package a self-contained solution, or provide simple to follow instructions, the word will spread, and a lot of people will be doing it.

When I was buying my Paperwhite, I just ordered the ad-free version from amazon (.com or .co.uk, don't remember which). And then a couple co-workers (agreed, computer people, but very much not the type that's into tinkering or cracking software) looked at me with surprise, because it turns out everyone does the "standard" route - order "special offers" from amazon.de, and save money while getting an ad-free Kindle, because AFAIR initially the special offers didn't even display in Poland, and when they did, apparently everyone knew how to jump some hoops to get rid of them.

In the Kindle case I did pay the extra for the advertising-free version and they happily advertise on it anyway, including push notifications in the middle of the night that make noise. Infuriating.

Do Amazon tablets and phones still show adverts on the lock screen? They seemed to sell a lot of them despite this being a "feature" of them back when they first launched.

This is true, I expect to be shafted unwillingly and the manufacturers will face no accountability or be required to show any transparency for a long time. Consumers need information symmetry guarantees.

> It's the same thing in the airline industry - people will complain all day long about legroom and being treated as cattle, but the next time they buy a ticket they vote with their wallets when they sort the flight list by price and choose the cheapest option.

Do any of the airfare search sites allow you to sort/filter by legroom? I would love that feature.

Isn't sorting by class effectively that?

On google flights, if you click into the individual flight segments in the search results, it shows the legroom alongside other features like WiFi.

If the flight-booking website offered a "sort by legroom", I'd click that. The trouble is there's no good way for me to know as a consumer which planes from which operators (and which affiliates) have which legroom, so it's not a meaningful choice I can make.

If someone would roll out such a feature, I'd use the hell out of just as soon as I feel like packing my butt into a petri-dish again.

United had economy plus which was exactly the same plane with more legroom. It was nice the one time I got it (my boss wouldn't pay, but I got an upgrade... otherwise I rarely take flights longer than an hour so it isn't worth $20 or whatever the difference was)

US mainline carriers unbundled the legroom for folks that didn't want it.

The three big mainline carriers offer coach seats with extra legroom on most domestic flights (branded as Delta Comfort+, United Economy Plus, and American Main Cabin Extra).

I think it’s a different reason. These products are perceived as commodities and the expectations are rather low in the first place. So why wouldn’t you try to spend as little as possible on a commodity when you know it’s likely to be borderline shitty or at best barely adequate? I have this strategy when buying cheapo China made crap on eBay or aliexpress: I expect it to be low quality, not last, or not even fit the purpose because the specs are fiction so I try and find the cheapest of these widgets I can buy.

Airline tickets are the same: I know I’ll be treated like shit, nickel and dimed, and have no legroom so why wouldn’t I be looking for the cheapest ticket?

We're in the middle of transitioning from making decisions based on pure intuition to being purely logical and data-driven... I wonder if that's such a good idea.

There was this article a while back I read that talked about how native peoples made poisonous foods edible. Some processes were extremely convoluted and unreasonable, but it worked, and efforts by a "reasonable" man to make the process more efficient would have certainly doomed the whole tribe.

Examples like that really make me question the idea that an efficient economy is the best economy (let alone if capitalism and free markets are ideal).

This is a general counterargument to anything different from the status quo. You should never trust general counterarguments.

There’s something rather extraordinary about this community, in particular, throwing a fit about advertising in products. This discussion has gone from “fuck that guy” — overlooking that almost every employer represented here has one and the larger employers have entire divisions of them — to “capitalism is bad” in three messages. That’s impressive. It’s almost as if the root cause of why these business models are horrible is slowly becoming more obvious to the people who engineer more clever ways to collect data and serve advertisements to enable those business models (or who work in a cost center orbiting such an organization).

Samsung learned from the industry represented here and it’s disconcerting to observe the lack of self-awareness in the vitriol being leveled at them from here. Equally disconcerting is that the same people rending their clothes over this probably overlook their Gmail messages being scanned and ads in their inbox, but a television, mein gott, a bridge too far.

This is your world, HN. We all live in it now. Sucks, no?

Fairly sure HN has been complaining about this for years. We're not a hivemind; it's not even the case that most posters work for FAANG, ycombinator or even "startups" per se.

"Samsung learned from the industry represented here"

Not everyone on HN works in adtech, and very likely none of the people in this thread do either.

Samsung positions themselves as a high end brand. These ads are appearing on higher end tv models.

If their $300 bargain basement basement tv was ads supported to keep the price low, eeh, maybe.

But that isn't the case here.

Consumer Gmail is free. If Office 365 premium ever starts showing ads, people will also become upset.

> If Office 365 premium ever starts showing ads, people will also become upset.

And Microsoft will do nothing about it because people will use it anyways.

Hm. Maybe. Maybe capitalism in its current form is bad nonetheless? Or an exploiting sham? How do you explain companies like BlackRock, Inc. and similar being on the boards of almost any important corporation? Isn't that a conflict of interest?

Or to put it another way, they are implementing communism by other means, with the same bad outcomes for the masses.

What difference is "Strategische Konzernentwicklung/corporate development/group development" to a Soviet 5-year plan, aggravated by quarterly reviews and HFT?

Gennadiy Gosplanovich would approve with a hysteric laugh.

I know. Been in several of them. Fortunately got out :)

edit: Of course you could call me a stoned hippie leftover from the 70ies, but that really was before my time. I'd counter that with management is on coke, crack or other medications which influence empathy in a bad way. Simple as that.

(Now playing "Ka-Ching!" with a pitchfork on the karmic harp)

Was this the essay you were referring to [1]? I think you’re bang on with this comparison. My dad and I have long complained how (for example) grocery stores seem to constantly cancel our favourite products. We know it’s not the manufacturer because the product is still on their website. My dad and I even have a term for the people in the head office who make the decision to phase out our favourite products: spreadsheet guys.

It really captures the inanity of a person who just sits around crunching numbers all day and killing off people’s beloved products and showing small percentage quarterly gains... while destroying goodwill and long term customer loyalty in the process.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...

Number driven vs. people driven is how I usually delineate these things. I find myself strongly in the people driven camp and dealing with purely numbers driven people is highly frustrating.

Hmm. I feel like there's a spiritual connection between your spreadsheet guys and the apocryphal product expert at Campbell's Soups or wherever that tried to focus-test "the perfect soup" that would optimize sales. In the story, they realized that there's no one "perfect soup" and they had to create different varieties.

Likewise, there's no such thing as "the best product" at a supermarket. Everyone has their own spread of products and if you cancel low-performing product lines, sometimes it has unexpected effects. (Anecdatum: We used to exclusively do grocery shopping at Woolworths until they stopped selling the cans of chilli beans that we use for nachos. Now we do maybe 1/4 of our grocery shopping at Coles instead, costing Woolworths thousands of dollars a year in lost sales, just because we needed some chilli beans and might as well get the rest of our groceries while we're there.)

> Likewise, there's no such thing as "the best product" at a supermarket.

I think the core observation behind the job of the spreadsheet guys is that, at scale, the choices within a family of products will approximate a normal distribution - so there will be a "best product" within each family; with a limited shelf space and a lot of different products to sell, this gives them a clear way to optimize for maximum revenue.

That's probably their thinking, but unless their aggregates include all of the other products that each customer who buys an item also buys (which it should, they have the data thanks to fly-buys schemes) they can't properly assess the overall impact of a given product.

As a trivial example, just looking at the profitability of individual items would lead them to discontinue selling milk (I mean, there's no profit in it so why bother?) because it's generally used as a loss leader.

That's a fair point. But I'd imagine it's a multi-step process. Step 1: group products into families, like "milk" or "ketchup". Step 2: optimize shelf space with whatever rules you have applied to product families. Within a product family, pick the N best-selling products.

The loss leader in this scenario is the "milk" family, not a particular brand of milk.

Supermarkets also need to stay open so they can sell you your beloved products, and you'd not believe how thin the margins of some supermarkets are: Having 8 kinds of lemon yogurt, each someone's favorite, while disposing of the products past the expiration date leads to either some of the highest prices in town, or closing down. Profitability in very small supermarket chains is small.

Now, the models that the somewhat sophisticated supermarkets use don't fit on a spreadsheet, and really try to guess which items really are people's favorites, look at profit margins, and risks of people just going to a different supermarket altogether because the competitor down the street still has your favorite, or charges 30% less for it. They check what happens when a product isn't in stock, or when a competitor has a significant discount. It's a difficult optimization problem, given all the differences among people's shopping lists.

Having a favorite product get discontinued sucks: It happens to me at least a couple of times a year, and sometimes straight from the manufacturer, so I can't even buy it online. But don't imagine that every supermarket out there is run by teams swimming in money. It's an extremely competitive business with many players, and there's not that much of a difference between the way the small chains run their operations today and having to close down because the lower prices of a larger competitor dropped sales just enough that they are losing money.

There is always a reason.

My corner grocery (run by a family that lives a couple blocks away) did the same thing - they dropped the soy milk brand I like. I asked about it, and they brought it back.

I think they do cost more on average than HugeCo (if you use the HugeCo surveillance/loyalty card), which also theoretically has a larger selection, etc.

But for some weird reason the store that sells me what I want gets my business.

Supermarkets also need to stay open so they can sell you your beloved products, and you'd not believe how thin the margins of some supermarkets are

Oh, no doubt. I'm not saying the spreadsheet guys aren't needed. They clearly are because competition is so stiff. So the reason store A needs spreadsheet guys is because store B has them. All of the spreadsheet guys, collectively, lock the grocery stores into a race to the bottom.

I'm complaining about the existence of spreadsheet guys in the first place. Pulling back a little bit, maybe we need to question whether technology is always beneficial to society? Maybe some technology is inherently worse for society but we can't get rid of it because it's now locked into the market.

I worked in a store in the early 90s with the registers set up that way. It is so much more efficient to pick directly from a cart so you can plan the best sequence of items for bagging. The IBM scanners of the era were much faster and more reliable than today's garbage. You could blast through, pulling items out with the right hand, tossing into the left, and blind scanning while reaching for the next item.

Seems to be a common thread in the past 20 years. The ergonomics of the product is garbage now. Partly because more compute is put into them, and with it comes bloated software that seems to be written by people who don't understand that their avoidance of "premature optimization" is just stealing people's lives by making the work go slower.

Where I live we are behind that point now, as in everything is OK and working fast again. Though sometimes it happens that when a cashier opens a new line, and the POS-thing boots for the first time that day, showing some update process running under Windows and makes my day, because I can't stop giggling.

Anyways, it's good for the cashier too, because time for smalltalk, maybe sipping some drink, or such.

To be up to date, it's your fate...to wait!

I met my wife through smalltalk at the cash register, so I can attest that some slack in these jobs serves an important function in society!

Lack of interest for speed is the problem, not premature optimization.

Some technologies would be better off not existing, but I think the root problem is just unrestricted market competition. Without something to keep the bottom from falling out (<cough> <cough> regulations), a competitive market is a fearsome optimization force. It will suck out all joy and happiness from any activity, as everyone gets increasingly more creative and willing to sacrifice to squeeze out just a little more marginal profit, for however brief a moment before the competitors catch up.

You've linked to SSC; Scott Alexander has a whole other essay on precisely this family of problems: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.

Those optimizations make it possible for prices to keep dropping, for food to be very cheap and plentiful. Global hunger has dropped to an all time low, since 1950 or so, because of that.

Yes, squeeze that marginal profit, please. I was born in communism, and guess what, we did not have 20 flavors of yogurt to choose from, or supermarkets for that matter. In Eastern Europe we counted ourselves very lucky to have plain yogurt, which was rationed.

Joy and happiness aren't the point, those are just nice to have. Putting food on the table is the point.

And having a flavor of yogurt discontinued, out of dozens, due to profit margins, is a first world problem and it affects only the rich.

There is more than one factor to consider. Food is already way past being cheap and plentiful. Further optimizations go into enabling variety. Meanwhile, some prices are way too low, which is a serious problem in the climate crisis. What's the point of dining on a dirt cheap meat and 15 different flavors of the same yogurt today, only for our grandchildren to starve on a devastated planet?

I was born at the tail end of communism in my region so I haven't experienced the worst parts, but the 20+ years of market optimization in the food space that I actually remember went primarily into variety. There was no point in those 20 years where quality food was scarce or even too expensive for most.

I have people in my family who worked in grocery stores some years ago, when the market managed to optimize these jobs to the point there were a step away from modern slavery. Fortunately, a few large scandals over events like a pregnant employee losing child due to workload made the regulators clean the space up. Today, a chain store employee in Poland earns a reasonable salary and has hard, but not backbreaking work conditions.

There is a point past which things get too optimized, and there is no loss in preventing or reversing that.

What if one brand of yogurt in some variety makes you sneeze and cough, while another brand of the same variety doesn't and that is discontinued?

Maybe independent grocery stores are the wrong model for a globally connected world? It's not that they are the producers of anything they offer, even if branded as such.

I often think that they are the source of endless waste and inefficiency, because they are working against each other and none of them stocks everything.

Personally I'd prefer fewer larger ones which stock really everything in every variety, instead of many smaller ones which don't.

This are really so called first world problems, it's still a cornucopia, though one could argue about the nutritional/health implications also. But again, 1st world problem.

There's a chain of supermarkets around here that are the size of a Super Walmart, but all groceries. They carry for example 15 flavors or more of PopTarts, just to give one example. And they have low prices, and have seemed to figure it out (they were even apparently mostly immune from the TP shortages earlier this summer). I wonder how they manage, yet other chains don't (not that they have a lot of stores in their chain, they are spread out to no more than 1 or 2 stores in any county).

They even have other customer-service oriented niceties, such as the fact that you don't have to put your groceries on a belt at checkout -- instead their carts are designed so that the cashier pulls directly from the cart, they go into bags that then get put into another cart for you to take out of the store. Little things like that make me wonder why these concepts haven't caught on. (Same with Aldi's letting their cashiers sit on a stool -- employee friendly, and doesn't interfere with the customer).

What chain is that?? Sounds amazing..

It's called Woodman's Market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodman%27s_Markets. Mostly in souteastern Wisconsin, and some in northeastern Illinois. My favorite part of it is the fact that you don't have to take the food out of your cart, put it on the belt, then take the bagged groceries and put it back in your cart again. The front of the cart flips down, and it gets pulled up in front of the cashier who can either bag it after ringing up the items, or typically there is a dedicated bagger.

It is really fun to take someone there who has never been in one before, and watch as they get overwhelmed. Just the fact that there are 3 aisles of frozen pizzas... and the cheese coolers run at least half way down the width of the store.

Oh, and the employees are friendly -- I wonder if the fact that it is employee owned helps there (or how the employee ownership works).

Edit: do a video search for Woodman's, someone has posted a video of traveling the store on a scooter, you can get a good idea of the size of it.

I was never impressed by their produce, though.

Keyword according to your link is employee-owned. Just sayin'.

Am I missing something, I thought big grocery stores where the normal in the states. the Krogers all around us is so big they actually started carrying clothes shoes and outpacing Walmart.

Sounds like the two of you may be "harbinger customers", the interesting economic phenomenon of people who tend to like products that flop.

That's exactly me! The reason I know that everyone else has bad taste is because all of my favourite products end up failing in the marketplace and getting pulled off the shelves.

- Sent from my Xperia Compact

oh god, I just broke my last xperia compact that stayed with me for years(x compact) and it's impossible to find something small again, not even getting into android updates and a cleanish android experience.

well. I'm a nokia 5.3 owner now. It's big, but ticks all the other boxes & is cheap...

Damn, am I a harbinger customer? I loved my Motorola Droid, Droid 4, and Droid Turbo, none of which saw nearly the success of the iPhones and Samsung Galaxies.

I just thought it was crappy that Motorola was actually providing phones with the features people were asking for (In the Droid days, people wanted physical keyboards, and the Droid Turbo offered insane battery life and a damn near bullet-proof screen), but they seemed to be commercial failures.

FWIW, I use a Pixel 3 now, which seems to be doing okay, but still not near the success of iPhone and Galaxy.

I've heard of that term before. But when looking at

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format_war

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_obsolete_technology

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fad

and so on, I fail to see a reason for some of those failures. Seems arbitrary/random to me.

So long as a human remains in the loop somewhere no decision is "purely logical and data-driven", although you make a good point about the risks of chasing efficiency over all else

in what world is removing poison to an acceptable level unreasonable? If the process is complicated and convoluted, but people don't die, then that seems reasonable to me.

I don't really follow this line of thinking.

I think he meant that the process wasn't explained as 'removing poison' but as 'this is how we do things' or 'it's to appease the spirits'. If the poison was something that's slowly acting (years) 'rational' way that would remove 'superstitions' would poison everyone.

Of course, knowing the real reason is preferable, but not always possible, especially in a premodern setting. Before the discovery of prions nobody really knew why cannibalism is dangerous, yet it was a taboo in most of the civilized world.

It would be more correct to say that today, decisions are being based on increasing short term gain. I think that's the issue more so than transitioning decision making to be based on logic and data and also supports your conclusion about the economy better.

This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes for understanding business and the modern world in general:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

—Upton Sinclair

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair

I think a better (less cynical) way of interpreting that is this:

Jobs which require a belief to perform sincerely, select people who hold that belief sincerely.

This principle should undo a lot of cynicism. Yes, eg., people in marketing often "really believe" their efforts are a net-positive, and no it isn't often, "mere cynicism" on their part.

Rather, what has happened, is that most who view marketing cynically, do not take a job in it.

We often misidentify this process of selecting for sincerity as a psychological-reality in those who are selected. Marketers "make money through cynical means" whilst sincerely believing they don't.

I've met marketers and product people of both kinds. The cynical ones seemed to half hate their jobs, and justify the SOP clickbait as keeping up with the negative sum game they have to play. The less cynical ones seemed to be kind of detached from externalities, and described their marketing copy as "standard marketing puffery" to justify it to legal.

It took seemingly forever, but eventually we (mostly) got HN commenters to stop saying "LOL Betteridge's law of headlines!", along with a Wikipedia link as if we hadn't heard it a hundred times before, to every article. Hopefully we can get to that point with this stupid quote too.

I guess I don't read HN enough that I don't recall ever seeing it here, but a quick Google search confirms your impression: this quote has been super prolific on the site. I hope I at least reached a few readers who hadn't seen it before.

I guess the next quote to axe will be Gell-Mann Amnesia. But hey, they all wouldn't be repeated so often if they weren't painfully accurate.

You have the last part of the conversation wrong:

B: I don't like ads. Do you like ads on your TV?

A: Yes of course I do. If you don't like ads on your TV why are you working here.

B: Does anyone here like ads?

A+group: yes of course we all like ads (lying in a meeting is not a crime, and occurs all over the world)

C: ok no objections, we love it! Ship it!

A, C gets a paycheck at the end of the day.

B gets fired if they don't change their mind.

I think the reason is slightly different. I worked for a web company that made most of its money on ads. Companies have an army of marketing "specialists" whose job it is to find "incremental revenue". Their performance is rated on how much revenue they can add to the company. The possibility that it may cost users in the long run is not part of their calculus. I learned to hate meetings where someone mentioned "incremental revenue".

Big companies need to have an ombudsman department who have the explicit job of reviewing all these schemes and nixing any that will likely lose customers.

There's a practically throw-away line in Ready Player One where the Bad Guy says, "And research has found that we can cover 49% of the screen before our customers begin to experience seizures."

Yep, sounds about right.

Sounds like Blipverts in Max Headroom.

Given that the story is full of 80's nerd culture references, that's probably not an accident, although they may have made it a little too subtle.

This is too real. I had discussions like this about a big fat cookie wall we needed to track users.

“Why do we need to track users?” “To give them recommendations!” “But this wall you’re using takes 4 seconds to load. Do you think this improves user experience?” “Yes, because the content is adjusted for the user. Besides, we did a test and 96% clicks accept, so the users don’t mind” “Where is the decline button?” “...” “There is no other option. You have accept, or you have to hse settings with 100 checkboxes. I’m surprised 4% even bothered to check these!” “Yeah but most just accept, so they don’t mind, and users really want the targeted content”

If I have to add it, I’ll at least make sure it won’t take freaking 4 seconds to load.

You forgot to add:

"We need to think of our devices as small hyper local billboards with untapped potential"

Absolutely. Can I have a few minutes before I come to your office in order to come up with a list of things I least like when I see an ad? This is a great opportunity to increase engagement from the likes of me by considering what improvement can be made in your ad campaign.

"No-one here is in our target group or representative of our user behaviors." is absolutely how marketing turns evil. Basically taking advantage of people that don't know how to avoid ads, etc.

It took a really long time but eventually Facebook ads started giving me things I actually wanted to buy and have bought.

Would be interesting to see how many of the people in that room would buy a Samsung TV for themselves.

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