Individually we can use browsers like firefox or brave and probably donate time or money to them, but I think it's not enough.
I think we would need something like a movement against those abuses, but probably the biggest win would be a business model that could win with them in the free market.
Is this possible? Has anyone tried something like this?
As long as there is this enormous pressure to sell you ever more things, nothing will change for the better… just change: More influencers, more product placements and sponsor guided “content“, more MLM type bullshit all around. Someone will figure out how to recruit your friends and family to explicitly advertise the next innovation in problem creation inside your last domain of unquestioned trust and honesty - mark my words! How about a gamified “hit” on your friends? Getting big-data intelligence briefings and some psychological guidance on someone you used to care about, and some shitty internet points as reward for their conversion: “Agent 1337biz, your next target is your colleague John Doe. The file is transmitted as we speak. Further our influence, your loyalty will be rewarded! Hail, Hydra”.
> Stop working for companies producing products nobody asked for
What is this in reference to? Nobody asked for Google to create their ad marketplace? No, there is huge demand for and complicity with targeted ads among millions of small businesses.
> huge demand
That’s my point.
Stop working for those small and big businesses in need of pushing solutions to problems they invented.
Tho, you seem to imply an ideological/apologetical take on the economy, which isn’t exactly helpful, in any case. The tautology “it exists because it exists” can comfortably offer absolution for anything and anyone, because no one is in control, no one has responsibility. I get the appeal for coping, but it’s a self-fulfilling-prophecy at best, religious glorification of apathy at worst. It is not, however, the inherent nature of things.
I've been trying to think of examples, but it's difficult.
Google originally thrived because its Search engine pushed a solution for a well-established problem. It's ad business solved a problem for advertisers - and site operators who wanted things simplified. Even Facebook offered a way for people to keep in touch using a medium more convenient than e-mail.
Landfills rapidly filling with last year’s “innovation“ and people getting increasingly dissatisfied with their jobs, because they lost touch with the actual product they are allegedly working on, should be an indication on a larger scale…
Apart from all those wonders of petrol-chemistry, like fast-fashion: Short smartphone cycles with minuscule improvements; Uber and food delivery services offering nothing, but minor convenience in exchange for a race to the bottom in worker exploitation (very genius. such innovation.); e-scooter sharing services disposing LiPo batteries in every larger city’s water bodies; X as a service; everyone having advice for sale; every fart commercially exploited…
Sorry, I really don’t believe you, if you tell me you haven’t noticed the economy getting high on its own supply. C’mon, whole sectors are “content creation” and engagement manufacturing for the sake of selling ads, or creating yet another f2p mobile game optimized for getting the kidz addicted.
I mean, just turn off adblock and see for yourself. Someone made all that shit!
Google's ads service is something those companies (the advertisers) want.
And at the same time, Google has been acting unethically.
And of course ‘wanting’ is ambiguous. There is a difference between impulsive desire and a cold-headed need. Heroin users also “want” the drug; gambling addicts “want” the gems in the f2p game’s store; people “want” the fantasy of beauty and success on social media, or fast-fashion’s first impression. People “want” sugar, love, attention, pleasure and safety/security in a way that’s disconnected to their modern actual needs. We are wired a certain way, adapted to natural scarcity and threat, and marketing and sales know this.
The abstraction of rational actors and beneficial, self-regulatory markets are evidently wrong for the most part, as we do know today. Everyone who says otherwise is driven by dogma and ideology, not scientific insights and recognition of our past’s experiments. Advertisement itself should make people question their ideas about the economy.
If no one bought useless shit (again what is that?) and just got say long lasting furniture, decent food, shelter etc, you’d have a situation where everyone could live based on fewer hours of work most likely. What to do with the time? If bored then volunteer? Talk to your family and friends? Hobbies?
There is plenty of economy outside of useless shit. I don’t see how we can get around needing police/fire/hospitals/defence/research/science etc.
The objective is to reduce the return on investment of advertisers as much as possible. This will only happen in significant enough numbers once a significant portion of the population is blocking ads. It's our moral imperative to spread ad blocking technology far and wide.
If you come across a site where the performance is noticeably worse than in Chrome, it may be worth notifying the owner. The alternative is to live in a Google-controlled dystopia.
There is an exception to this - G sites routinely run slower on FF, but this is very likely how Google wants it to be.
+1, i actually did this a couple times on some friends computer when i noticed they hadn't any blocker installed (although i did tell them afterwards).
Let's run a crowdfunding to rent some maleware on shady forum to install ublock origin without consent :)
The alternative business model is so simple and is already in place --- simply advertise based on expressed interest.
This is what DuckDuckGo is doing very effectively. Show ads based on search words. No global, privacy invading network required. Amazon is doing the same quite effectively. Their ad business is growing by leaps and bounds simply by showing ads based on search terms.
https://nypost.com/2021/10/19/i-found-an-amazon-folder-with-...
Had him 99% there. Payback is great on these users.
If a few really did buy already? Who cares, beats showing the ad to a room of 20,000 random people
It's because it creates a new profitable business model for BigTech.
Personalized ads require that the network collect as much data about you as possible. The idea is to use this data by trying to create some behaviour model to determine how and when a user purchases stuff. (Currently this doesn't really work as advertised, as you guessed).
But the US government, with PRISM, created a new revenue stream for BigTech - buying the raw data of the users directly. As with any government contract, this is actually way more profitable than serving ads to cheapskate internet users. Seeing how easily and successfully BigTech is able to get this data, the US has effectively decided to privatise spying (partially) to the BigTech. To sabotage the creation of regulation and privacy laws that may prevent such data harvesting, and to create an even more profitable market for the BigTech, they have also started to rope in other countries too. (See Five Eyes (FVEY) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes ).
I suppose a free-speech distributed search service could make a difference if it was actually better than google. Imagine with distributed hosting similar to mail/dns-servers, where ISP:s could redirect their traffic to local mirrors.
Really slick alternatives to walled-garden apps as interfaces to standard protocol services like imap/matrix/etc, and make sure the servers are reliable and painless to set up.
Do ad agencies care if x number of units sell, or do they care that a report cause the commission check to clear? I say the latter, more typically.
The Internet would offer so many different and better ways to keep consumers informative about new products.
Others spend a million dollars a month on whatever stupid idea a team of Account Managers in $6000 suits/outfits with $500 haircuts pitch to them. And then congratulate themselves when the Analytics Department produces graphs of whatever meaningless metrics they can find or make up that go "up and to the right" for each month. And the Regional Ad Buyer and the Digital Agency will convince themselves that attributing every single sale to that advertising spend is valid and acceptable accounting practice, when most of the client's product practically sells itself. And they'll do this for a decade or more, until Global Head Office notice, then they'll pull the plug with 3 or 4 months outstanding unpaid, leading to ~100 people getting laid off with zero notice and tens of thousands of dollars of unpaid monthly salary and entitlements.
At least, that's how it happened last time I got burnt by it...
Some people do.
The rest of my post stands.
and:
"But here’s the thing. You can’t help Uber build Greyball during the day, or help Palantir design databases to round up immigrants as your main gig, and then buy ethics offsets by doing a non-profit side hustle. We need you to work ethically during that day job much more than we need you working with that non-profit."
-- https://deardesignstudent.com/ethics-cant-be-a-side-hustle-b...
The entire point here is that the market is not, at least in this particular instance, "free". When a market is very explicitly being manipulated by a cartel who jointly hold a monopoly position over said market... they are in a position to prevent effective competition permanently.
Nothing. This can't be fixed. Where there is power, there will be abuse. This is an unfixable trait of humanity. What can be done is reducing the impact of abuse and regularly investigate and educate about them. Transparency is important here, and regulating individual power.
> I think we would need something like a movement against those abuses,
Those already exist. Just support them. Or do you mean specific cases like misusages in the ad-market?
> Is this possible? Has anyone tried something like this?
History is a constant battle of powers about abuse. Those problems are neither new, nor special. Abuse will always exist, and it's the daily struggle of humanity to find the balance between the benefits and losses for all the different groups around the world.
support politicians and lobbyists with your money / influence that are in favor of bringing robust anti-trust legislation to bear on the companies in question. The free market mythology is just one of the reasons we are in this situation to begin with.
If you browse HN from 10 years ago, you'll see exactly the same advice, except instead of "replace Chrome with Firefox" it was "replace IE with Chrome".
we are the ones building these tools, reading these articles / comments sections, and talking with our colleagues and friends working on developing these products
we just have to accept that our takehome might not be as large at the end of the pay-cycle. feels better spending it tho :)
Has there been a single case in history where this worked? has this been an issue for drug gangs, mafia, loan sharks, tobacco, alcohol or gun companies or any kind of evil organisation, ever? If not, maybe we should stop parroting it?
it is easier to come up with manageable solutions when you don't try to conflate the mafia with a search engine, or Beretta with a social network
don't search for a one-size-fits-all solution or it will seem impossible; focus on one at a time
They may have defrauded you.
Look at lichess.org, it’s possible.
If the company is already going down and someone wants the IP, whatever.
Promote a different browser when someone uses chrome with the possibility to get explanations about it. Contacting admins of sites that only works in chrome, this kind of thing.
Could this information be used to try to push chromium based browser like brave and edge to switch to another engine, lowering the influence of google on the web?
This will not adress the whole google service spectrum but chrome is the trojan horse for a lot of google strategies.
Yes; it worked. somehow, they blew the goodwill away.
/me still a Firefox user. I'll fly away if something better comes along - FF is very much a compromise.
Though I'd like to see Mozilla try more promotion channels like video sponsorships, maybe go heavier in regions where Google is not as dominant as in the US…
E.g. I didn't know how gross ad-tech was until I saw how the sausage was made.
None of this occurs if you just sit back and encourage people to get out of adtech and make it nice and easy. People will just decide to do it for "just a few years" so they can "make some money."
On top of all that, this sort of change doesn't happen instantly. It'll start slowing and the momentum will grow. People current in adtech will have a chance to see the writing on the wall and jump ship before it's more than a minor annoyance.
Median net worth in my state is ~$800,000. I'm worth quite a fair bit less than that, so I'm apparently not even in the upper half. (I'm a SWE, I've worked, at times, for large tech companies, include one in FAANG, who paid in line with about what I'm earning now, adjusted for experience.)
(Nationally, the median net worth is $121,000 (!) — so I'm upper half there, but still not 1%, since 20M Californias are worth far more.)
Reminds me that one of these days I should work out the day I became net-worth positive… (since, like many Americans, I started with a fair bit of college debt…)
Does "free market" mean there are no laws? Is so, start kidnapping their executives.
No, we have laws? Well then perhaps police and courts should do their jobs, but I guess harassing everyday joe is easier than holding megacorps to account.
But they decrease my taxes! Too bad pay up.
Well explained here - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Np5ri-KktNs
Go into politics.
Yes, that simple. Easy? No. Simple? Yes.