It's astounding how bad the web is without an ad blocker
twitter.com
twitter.com
(Use Firefox for Android, with uBlock Origin add-on.)
I have about a dozen sites I access on my phone outside home. I use pi-hole at home.
And then I have to look something up while we're camping, expecting the same experience as I get every other day of the week, and...I would seriously curtail most of my non-work-based Internet use in a major way if that's what I had to put up with every day.
Reddit is now completely unusable on a phone now unless you download the app, which I refuse to do. So I now spend far less time on Reddit, which has turned out to be a great choice.
Sometimes I wish that more of my favourite distractions had more friction, not less.
Online shopping could be considered useful for humanity.
I can see on LinkedIn right now there are jobs for a company that will identify and help you reduce your companies carbon footprint, there are a couple looking at Vision based Machine Learning for automated sorting of recycling. And then there is a university startup wanting software engineers to help them with their bio-scientists get going with some new cancer research.
I would agree with the grand parent post that most ad development has not been beneficial to society.
For the record, I am not, and have never been, an ad developer/product manager/anything of the sort.
>I can see on LinkedIn right now there are jobs for a company that will identify and help you reduce your companies carbon footprint, there are a couple looking at Vision based Machine Learning for automated sorting of recycling. And then there is a university startup wanting software engineers to help them with their bio-scientists get going with some new cancer research.
Online shopping could be considered useful, but ad development isn't useful? You do you realize what the online shopping business model is built upon, right?
And what is the revenue stream for Linkedin Jobs? What allows them to provide this product, for free, to you?
How does the B2B carbon footprint reduction company find its clients?
What business model does HN leverage in order to provide a discussion forum about how ad development is useless? (The irony here is especially amusing)
And surely you realize how the universities and CV researchers that you approve of are able to use Google to further their knowledge…
Kidding. But with a little research one finds a fairly widespread consensus about professions such as doctors, nurses, utilities engineers (energy/water), teachers, waste disposal, that sort of thing. That literally keep us alive, healthy, and in comfort.
https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=3316274&itype=CMSI...
Would anyone really argue that "provide a means of shopping in comfort and convenience from one's own home" is really less useful than "makes tiny incremental optimizations to the display and profitability of banner ads in a mind-boggingly complex ecosystem" though?
Another way of putting it - who would notice, friends and family aside, if all the ad engineers got Thanos-ed tomorrow?
Please keep this rationalization. If your justification is; I really want to connect people or some deriavative then you can f' right off.
a) WT ever living F. How many programmers are making that much. Like really. Discounting CTOs, VPs, etc.... like actual "i write code for a living" people.
Are there even 100?
b) even if there are _none_ of those people are writing freaking ad software, or anything even remotely close to it. They're prolly doing seriously brainiac next level AI and quantum computing stuff. Sure, some of them may work at google and thus get paid for it but.... no. just ... no.
Yes, programmers make ad software. Yes, programmers mostly use ad blocking software and are thus unaffected by their creations.
but WTF is with this perception of $750k/yr being anywhere even _remotely_ near what the average programmer gets? Like. that's not only not in the same neighborhood, it's not in the same planet.
They said "highest paid programmers", not "near average" programmers. This is fairly typical total comp for the senior staff level at a FAANG. Around 5-10% of engineers at these companies will make that much (and a smaller percentage make even more).
Not true at all, ad software pays a lot better than "next level AI and quantum computing", unless you're talking about AI for advertising
When I got there, he had a serious malware infection. Multiple spyware/hijacker browser extensions, a service running on the desktop that would pop open ads, the works.
He said it started doing this stuff after he installed an iTunes update. It took me way more effort than it should have to convince him that the ad that claimed to be an iTunes update was fraudulent and started the mess.
After I managed to clean up the mess, I installed uBlock Origin. It's been smooth for him ever since.
I use a combo of both and many custom filters but just DNS blocking isn't enough and work the rise of DoH and ads served on-domain it's only going to get worse.
Luckily most of the websites that are covered in intrusive ads are just tabloid/clickbait crap sites anyway, so I feel like I use ads as an indication of the site's quality.
I'm near the end of reading Blindsight[0] and coming around to the idea that they are also a necessary self-defence tool to try and stem the tide of things trying to take up real-estate in my brain.
You want to reference a Watts novel to make a point about adblocking software, wew buddy it's Maelstrom!
Without spoiling much of anything, the title refers to the contemporary name for the internet, given because the open net has become an insane jurassic-like free-for-all of digital virus on virus carnage. Basically people added genetic algorithms to their ad-blocker-blockers to make them be able to react in real time to updates in their opposition, and the result was the accidental creation of very dumb, very invasive-species-y digital life that is constantly infecting all the things. To point that people start training smart gels (think deep learning on synthetic neurons in a big cube of jello) to identify and destroy viruses. But that has its own drawbacks, of course!
While it is mostly crouched in terms of how marketing can exploit it, the discussion regarding the neurological ways your brain works is more interesting to me than the marketing aspects.
That does sound interesting; I'll check it out.
News is the worse, I rely on twitter for headlines or go straight to my paid app (NYT + WSJ) if I hope to read more than 140 character on any topic.
The people who made adtech what it is today are your (our) colleagues, friends, bosses, peers.
This didn't happen by itself.
It's fine. Really, it is.
I know this is an unpopular take around here but Ad blocker users are super paranoid and impatient I find, and again, why are you surfing so many sites that have ads where they're in the way? The general public could care less about installing ad blockers like freaks. They just need to learn how to choose better content sites.
Just terrible advice. You're saying I should train my grandma to get her news on just some "safer" website instead of giving the entire ad industry the middle finger and installing uBlock?
If we adblock users are paranoid, some of you go through some serious mental gymnastics not to admit the modern ad-riddled web is awful to use.
Grandma can stay in safe zones as they already do, Facebook what? And we can influence them to surf less ridiculous riddled sites (recipe sites? Instead of 500 page ad recipe sites, use NYT Cooking for example, no ads).
Installing add-ons to browsers like it's 2003 is not necessary.
One of the most helpful websites I've ever been to is trumpexcel.com (Excel tips, nothing to do with 45). It is absolutely ridden with ads however, so much so that it slows down my browser when I access it via the company computer.
So I just visit it now with adblock on. Perfect experience, everything still works. I'll likely sign up for one of their sold courses just to show my thanks, even though I really only get value for the articles.