We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [video]
ted.com
ted.com
I am okay with ads, if they aren't all the above.
But I don't know what the Algorithm overlord serves me as an Ad, so I use Ublock Origin.
I actually think ads should probably be changed from paid promotion to actually use that money on such a good level of ad that even if you release it as a standalone video for example, people would want to watch it.
And I think people are doing it, I still listen to this Splendor Song Chalta rahe because of how great the music of this ad is.
But Most ads are of frauds trying to sell you a get rich quick scheme etc. (atleast I feel like every ad wants to sell me a course?), and I don't want to be the fraud's shitty course's next victim, I hate such course sellers so much that I kind of want to punch them through the video just thinking how the whole economy of ads is generally revolving around these frauds..., and how they make money is by scamming innocent individuals.
All of this while building a privacy nightmare, a dystopia.
No thanks. I am going to keep ads off of any of my services to a higher level of degree though I do imagine that most people don't donate shit & I don't even think that in businesses, the real money are in normal clients because they require free tier and way too much hassle for like 10$?, but rather business clients (B2B).
Though I also feel this moral obligation to open source whatever I build.. but then businesses can simply self host it, maybe I should probably only release it as fair source?
IDK, the whole system boils down to money, I can be only so good a person as the constraint of money requires me to. If money is low, morality has a higher probability of being ignored... , IDK, there is too much competition, sometimes unworthy,sometimes not, but still too much competition on a lot of ideas and they have not much differences so they try to do ads...
Its name is youtube.
And For the record, I am already using ad blockers but on some very rare occasions on when I don't somehow, its absolutely nightmare
Have you identified some way for youtube to lose it’s monopoly status?
I spend more time on YouTube than I care to admit, so I got a Premium subscription, bought an extension called UnTrap for YouTube to hide most recommendations and turned off all YouTube history etc.
I regularly visit BlueSky, Hacker News and YouTube, but not X, TikTok, Instagram or Facebook.
The hardest thing is to not use Amazon, but I am working on it.
It’s a real shame Apple continues to block it from being full-fat.
So IMHO mozilla are probably choosing "Let's not" rather than "Let's deliver a broken experience"
As one user on reddit said - "Orion supports Firefox and Chrome extensions. Yes. And you can install them. Yes. Do they work, though? No, most of them don't. Orion is lying about their extension support. "
Also I found this amazing hack for YouTube and YT Music. I am nearly hesitant to write it down here, lest everyone try it out. I figured out that if I pay them like $20/mo, all the ads disappear from both apps! Can you believe what suckers they are! I fear that this loophole may be closed soon, but for now I'm living high on the hog!
With the sites that I choose to not visit (Facebook, X, TikTok, Instagram) this is not possible, as the attempted manipulation of users is an integral part of the business model.
Also, your attempt of being funny is not working, neither is your metaphor.
No, my friend, what is reprehensible to me is freeloaders who believe that they can just play cat-and-mouse wars by installing software and then scrape whatever web content they want, without giving the company their due expected revenue.
This is cheating of the cheapest cheapskate order. It's dishonest, it's disingenuous to say "please send me your web content but only the stuff I like". Perhaps you feel a little guilty, and needed to take a dig at my comment tone in turn?
I can understand needing to protect/defend yourself against malice and undue surprises. The web is wild and wooly. I can understand how intrusive and troublesome ads can become. But people with adblockers? They are ruining it for everyone -- raising prices, jacking up the cost to deliver and maintain sites, and in fact, you're to blame for ads becoming more intrusive and more ubiquitous, because how else are they going to get past your damn blockers???
But if you're going to visit a site, and you want to see/read their stuff, then I feel it would be ethical to engage with them on a level playing field. Because how badly do you want their stuff? If the ads turn you off so much, then don't go to the site. I simply find 98% of the Web is not worth my time after this calculus. News sites don't really report news anyway; why should I waste my time.
All this Hacker News ethic of cheating with ad blockers and yt-dlp and posting archive.is links to "help you bypass this evil paywall" is just ripping off companies. It is not a victimless crime. It is not working and it is most definitely not funny!
It's MY metered bandwidth that I'm paying for - that a site loads 50MB of trash javascript when I merely clicked on a link for a 300kB PNG is an absolutely outrageous strain on my resources, not to mention a total waste for that site whose devs obviously know nothing about optimization.
If you feel that they're exploiting your resources then you have a right to decline to use theirs, right? You don't need to offer your resources to them. It was a voluntary click, a freewill request? Or just hack the shit out of them, and fuck your social contract?
If you disdain this provider so much that you criticize their developers and wish to connect to it on your own terms, then perhaps you're better off not doing it at all. In fact, anyone using adblockers or other "defensive ware" should carefully pore over all Terms of Service, EULAs and AUPs, because you could eventually be found in breach, and then perhaps they'll just nip you in the bud, at the Cloudflare level, and you won't have to worry much about ads at all!
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/11/advert...
It also keeps track of estimated cost to advertisers from using it, mine shows ~$25k/yr in ads clicked.
Most stuff I do on the internet is "free", for everything else there's active jamming.
That's the deal. Publishing something on the public internet does not entitle anyone to decide if/how I choose to consume that content. There's no reason to complain about people who choose to not download a bunch of ads, or those who replace fonts, or those who use custom CSS or userscripts, or those who use a screen reader, etc. If you publish something to the internet be grateful that anyone consumes any part of it. That's all you'd be due. "expected revenue" is not a right. It's not ripping off companies. It is not a victimless crime, because it isn't a crime at all.
> But people with adblockers? They are ruining it for everyone
Ads are "ruining it for everyone". If ads were all respectful, honest, safe, and non-obtrusive, ad blockers wouldn't have so many fans. The ads shot first. Blaming people now for making ads "worse" has strong "look at what you made me do!" vibes.
As a side note, your disdainful tone is incredibly grating and will likely convince others to ignore your points out of principle, which should go against your goal if your goal is to actually change people’s minds.
But I suspect your goal is to feel smug and fake morally superior, as you’re not acting in good faith. So congratulations, I’d suggest some personal introspection is in order.
The advantage is it works with every browser on every device, its network wide and it blocks a tonne of other calls that aren't made by the browser such as telemetry.
Pi-Hole (or better yet AdGuard) is still desirable because it will block ads for other apps and devices. Defense in depth.
Chrome doing this however changes the value of working around adblockers, because they now lack the ability to rapidly respond or match with code (that's not regex) or even reading a bit of the response.
It’s a good reason to use Firefox.
This also means users can't install their own filters, which was widely used when YouTube began aggressively bypassing adblockers.
This thread is about safari, and its declarative ad blocking API doesn't have this issue.
There is a lot of talk about security but strategic security would mean to put flashing red warning signs on the manifest updates.
To neglect that is basically lying to users in my opinion.
I finally went back to firefox, recently. I needed to update some of the flag defaults to turn on tab changing with mouse scroll and similar, but they are unlikely to break things like ublock any time soon.
I was a frequent profiles user under chrome, and still don't like firefoxes UI there, but just made a bookmark to the profile launching screen.
It's good enough.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/ca/kb/how-use-firefox-containers
I got into software modding game engines, though. Never cared much for web apps, SaaS. Never much saw the use in paid software since it's just geometry. We made a lot of dumb busy work out of SWE with web apps.
DRY? Yes, let's not repeat ourselves still bothering with lame day jobs that obfuscate it's just physical statistics in a machine of known constraints.
Am really excited about the rest of the world flipping the US off, nVidia full-steam ahead on autonomously organizing distributed systems. Propping up SWEs props up a dangerous delusion.
Because I haven't seen a YouTube ad in a looong time and I don't pay for premium.
I just use this combo.
I will never understand this. My ex bought tons of extensions to do stuff with Safari that other browsers do for free. He paid for a PiP extention for some websites, password managers, Tomagachi pets... dozens of trinket apps that would be depreciated in 2 or 3 major updates. I'm continually wowed by Mac users that insist on paying for a native solution to a problem that doesn't exist in any other ecosystem.
500k new millionaires in 2023 in the US. Why can't you be one of them in a coming year?
I know it's a rhetorical question, but the actual answer is "because I feel like it would require more work than it would be worth".
Of course, all the millionaires I personally know got there through 95% luck, so who knows! Maybe I'll personally be cursed to follow their path.
The odds of a poor person becoming a rich person in America is extremely low and socioeconomic mobility in the US is getting worse all the time. I'd guess that most poor people have better odds of getting hit by lightning. A lot of new millionaires are property owners. Anyone who gets their money from real estate is not a serf.
Also, the developer doesn't necesarily need to own the code to improve it, or build you a copy.
I'm open to the idea, and recognize there are problems with non-commercial software, too. But the critical difference between software and physical commodities is that replication of software, once written, has a marginal cost approaching zero.
I suspect that this difference significantly changes the calculus.
My personal feeling is we should really think outside the box here. I like some sort of hybrid system with government-funded software bureaus producing FOSS code to replicate successful and important "infrastructure" commercial products after five to ten years or so. People get cutting-edge software created by the market, and exploitative rent seeking on critical software is minimized.
So.. I really hope that the garages that throughout my car-ownership years do this, don't just flush them down the toilet, but do something proper about them.
I still don't change my own oil, because I'm at the point in my life where I can afford to throw $100 at that particular problem, rather than spending a dirty and greasy hour+ under my car.
I was curious about what they did with oil when I drove my first car, so I asked my garage. They showed me the tank behind the shop, someone came to empty it once a week or so. I always assumed that was the usual practice, but I legitimately have no idea haha.
I just leave it in the shed in the bottle until I have enough other stuff to get rid of and do it all at once.
Devs would usually prioritize iOS releases (early on, when no React Native nor Expo was as common place) only due to this fact that iOS users where much more likely to spend money than Android ones.
This might have equalized since the early days but i bet some of it still stands
iOS/Android hasn’t equalized. Depending on the segment, something like 80% of revenue is iOS.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-br...
For example:
// ==UserScript==
// @name Redirect YouTube Shorts to Regular Videos (Mobile-Friendly)
// @namespace https://example.com/
// @version 1.4
// @description Redirects YouTube Shorts URLs to regular video URLs on mobile
// @author YourName
// @match *://*.youtube.com/*
// @run-at document-end
// @grant none
// ==/UserScript==
//Written by GPT-4o Mini
(function () {
'use strict';
// Function to redirect Shorts to regular video URLs
function redirect() {
if (location.pathname.startsWith("/shorts")) {
const videoId = location.pathname.split("/")[2];
const newUrl = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=" + videoId;
window.location.replace(newUrl);
}
}
// Observe changes to the DOM and check for navigation
const observer = new MutationObserver(() => {
redirect();
});
// Start observing the body for changes
observer.observe(document.body, { childList: true, subtree: true });
// Initial check in case a Shorts URL is loaded directly
redirect();
})();NextDNS works very well on iOS for everything else.
Enhancer For YouTube.
Sponsorblock.
Dearrow.
I can't use YouTube without them anymore. It's so horrible.
I just use ublock Origin with Firefox on Mac/Pc and Orion on iOS.
The annoyance list takes care of the cookie banners.
Safari's vestigial "never auto-play" setting has never worked, and still doesn't.
More generally, if the service is free, you're the product, and you're being sold to someone else
From casinos, to shady inexistent job offers, to malware, there's a whole world of -ads- targeting the final users as a victim
replying to myself bc i can't to @ujkhsjkdhf234
on x.com (formerly twitter) if you don't paid for premium you get ads for drainers and scams on crypto etc too
it's overall a mess tbh, I never trusted nor liked marketing or advertising, it's just lies in disguise.
An ad for Pampers shown to a family with a toddler; an ad for Tidy Cats shown to a cat owner; an ad for Reese’s shown to someone who exhibits poor impulse control; an ad for McDonald’s shown to someone who works two jobs and doesn’t have time to cook food for themselves; an ad for a gambling app shown to someone using a gambling app.
You're presumably trying to imply it's predatory, but if the premise is that the person "doesn't have time to cook food", how is the ad making things worse? What's the person supposed to do? starve?
The goal is extracting your portion of it via social engineering and other mechanisms available to you.
Then again, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube started "You pay for it with your attention (and your data)" and only later have they implemented payment for being ad-free, although with Zuck's properties, the EU forced it.
This has already happened for subscription TV services. Your previously ad-free subscription now has ads, but you can get rid of them again by upgrading! It’s fucking gross. It’s also of course just going to work, and become the new normal.
Not only is the endpoint that it uses for collecting events randomized each time you load a page, but it also happens that every event collector URL is a valid API endpoint that is used for other things. You can't block any of them with regular ad blocking tools unless you're okay with blocking the corresponding API endpoint. And given that the website itself uses the API, this can be difficult.
It's evil and I hate it.
That sums post-IPO Reddit up rather well
Oh, and if you navigate to this page without NoScript, AdBlocker or a PiHole DNS you'll probably be presented with a cookie consent banner, a bunch of ads on the page and before watching the video, and your data being shared with at least half a dozen partners (a number that can increase dramatically if you visit the page of any news outlet instead of ted.com).
So yeah, I guess that the message of this video aged like fine wine.
That really nails it.
If a page wants to cover itself in noise and dialogues, sure it’s annoying but it’s not quite on the same level as back then.
Today we know that there's no genuine question of user control here, because virtually every user has a mental model that a "webpage" is something different and much more scope-limited than a "program". I don't expect that steampowered.com should be able to launch the game I just bought, even though that capability is easily available from a similar-looking interface by the same developers I have installed on my computer. In 1995 it wasn't so obvious that people in 2025 would think this way.
After all, entrepreneurs can and will abuse anything and everything in this world.
We wouldn't need to bother with installing addons to limit javascript and block ads if those were just part of the browser to start with. Every new feature added should have options that put users in control of if, when, and how it gets used. Right now, even the browsers that give users the most control usually don't go farther than an enable/disable flag in about:config
We have the browser (and extension) people to thank for this of course, not advertisers who would still be doing it if they could.
I wonder if things would actually be better overall. I’m not going to argue that having a scripting language for the web was a mistake, it definitely isn’t on the whole, but I think having it come at a more mature point for the web might have helped stave off a lot of really bad decisions
I wish to think all these things exist in a alternative universe and we've just not constructed the time-portal yet.
Also, java's dominance I guess was the reason that javascript is named after inspiration of java.
What you are asking for are static pages which already exists and most people do use static pages due to it being very easy to deploy on github pages etc. , though I wonder we would've way more abundance of static pages as compared to non static pages, like there are some pages which could've been static but they aren't.
Though I still think the difference would've existed & it could've been net positive IDK, I just like to go create websites as apps which can be booted on any pc,device without worrying about anything, installing and running it would likely require a setup and it would've been a bigger hassle as well.
And well noone's stopping you from doing it right now. There's gopher and gemini if you are interested.
Very loosely, was named that was as an marketing ploy as Java was the new language at the time.
JavaScript is actually ECMAScript or a v.close direlect of. Originally it was called Mocha, and then relabeled to LiveScript and during the NetScape / Sun Microsystems thing, changed itself to JavaScript and Oracle carried it on from there.
It has some quite interesting history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#History
There’s nothing preventing me from adding globs of nightmare JavaScript to my static website to try and chase engagement.
What’s stopping the people making static pages is not technical, it’s cultural.
Nothing like 3 paragraphs of text that requires downloading 2 megabytes of crap, runs code from 20 sketchy looking domains, takes 15 seconds to load, cannot be linked to, and demands you upgrade your browser. As a consolation you can have slightly slower maps in browser instead of downloading an app, once.
I think web scripting is probably THE worst technology ever invented in the IT field. "If I ruled the world", a full ban would be better than its current state; or some AMA on steroids (+Jones act) making JavaScript developers extremely rare and well paid, so that it was limited to the best (as determined by the market) uses with better quality.
Folks forget that before js was front-end frameworks and libaries, it was enabling (as in, making impossible possible) async data requests and page updates without requiring a full round-trip and repaint.
It's difficult to conceptualize a present where that need was instead fully served by HTML+CSS, sans executable code sandbox.
What, ~2000 IE instead pushes for some direct linking of HTML with a async update-able data model behind the scenes? How are the two linked together? And how do developers control that?
Imagine instead if HTML evolved more in the direction of enabling this exact scenario out of the box. So that e.g. you could declaratively mark a button or a link as triggering a request that updates only part of the page. DOM diffs implemented directly by the browser etc.
Or in this hypothetical is the remote server always directly sending HTML?
If we're unwinding back to early 00s though, it could also be fetching XML from the server and then running it through the XSLT stylesheet associated with the current document to convert it to HTML, to reduce the amount of data on the wire.
The specifics could be debated here. But I'm pretty sure that a generic mechanism could be devised that'd adequately cover many use cases that require JS today.
It seemed so at the time but I think it didn't work out... Why is interesting to speculate about... My pet theory that convenient frameworks lowering the barriers were part of the problem.
I think if at it's time JavaScript went the way of java applets and ActiveX controls (and yes I understand part of the reason these could be driven out is availability of JavaScript), web would be in a much better shape right now. 90% of the apps (banking, email, forums, travel, etc) and 100% of the pages would just be plain better. For the remainder you'd just install an app, something they nag you about anyway.
Otherwise, with just CSS and HTML, you'd have a web strictly dedicated to publishing. A read only experience curated by those who are willing to invest the time and tooling into being a publisher.
Even then with the advent of RSS and other data exchange formats it's arguable we didn't even need that part of the web. It would be far better for publishing to deliver headlines and summaries via RSS and then allow me to purchase full content and issues digitally.
I think the bigger complication in the creation of the web was the complete lack of payment systems and user trust in entering their payment information into these platforms. So only the large well moneyed entities like advertisers were willing to absorb that risk and built out the platform. Instead of us conveniently and safely paying creators for content we now have aggressive advertisers who litter the web so publishers can shake pennies out of the CPM tree.
Everything is perfectly static and linear, and instead of popups we get full-page ads, double-full-page ads sometimes, and ad inserts in the rest of the pages, with stealth marketing for the content left.
The fundamental issue is not technology IMHO. Scripting can make it worse, but it wouldn't have been great in the first place.
There are accidents of history, money, and ideology.
These things fit squarely in the money category. The advertising industry was subsumed by adtech during that time, which was driven by government grant and fiat debt-based financing. Advertising fraud has never been harder to account for, and the justified use of analytics for that purpose has driven surveillance capitalism with governments being the customer.
Money printing is the role of the state, so technically if you remove all indirections its state apparatus which makes sense that an individual wouldn't be able to fight against it.
A group of people who thought that web users should not be abused may have won the first pop-up battle, but the businesses that made money from intrusive advertisements clearly won the war.
In hindsight maybe it wasn't a such a great idea for web users to switch en masse to a browser made by an advertising company.
The endgame is a probably a war between web sites that are endless mazes of advertising and user agents that try to navigate the maze and extract the non-advertising content.
I’m not trying to correct you. It’s just a sequence of events I’ve seen play out repeatedly and I’m not sure if there’s a solution. Most recently I’ve seen it with Bambu Lab locking down their 3D printers. Prior to that Autodesk yanking the Fusion 360 enthusiast licenses.
Maybe there isn’t a solution. There’s a lot of UX work that isn’t fun to do and so it’s hard to get volunteers to do it. It’s hard to do product management in a distributed group of volunteers in general. So, companies that can afford to bankroll projects often gain traction with performance or usability gains and suck away attention and funding from open source options. Then when they amass enough of the user base they flip the switch and now folks are stuck. The cost of changing is often prohibitively high and the OSS option is generally far behind at that point.
I think people are bad at thinking longer term. Or maybe they just prefer immediate gratification. In any event, absent a shift in human behavior I expect we’ll see this sort of situation to continue to play out. It’d just be nice if folks were less antagonistic about it when those concerned raise that alarm.
"I'm sorry Dave, but I am unable to accept requests that oppose Google's business interests."
"Well, send it to ChatGPT then!"
"Sure thing. Here is your... 5 second video:"
(Video) "Hey what's up? Be sure to like and subscribe." (end of video)
javascript:/*https://bookmarkl.ink/ashtonmeuser/849a972686e1505093c6d4fc5c6e0b1a*/(()%3D%3E%7Bvar%20e%2Co%3Ddocument.querySelectorAll(%22body%20*%22)%3Bfor(e%3D0%3Be%3Co.length%3Be%2B%2B)getComputedStyle(o%5Be%5D).position%3D%3D%3D%22fixed%22%26%26o%5Be%5D.parentNode.removeChild(o%5Be%5D)%3B%7D)()%3B%0A
"I'm watching a video about procrastination... and I've got a test tomrrow! Lolol!"
Obviously your comment is the refined HN equivalent, but still.
The one on TED.com appears to have been removed.
also, the premise of the entire lore of shadow run, is corporations building armies and seeing they can get away with it and then just doubling down.
but back to reality... everyone would buy stock of the ad-dystopia and since now their retirement is tired to it they will just normalize and promote it. just like today.
I don't think the last-name-is-the-company adapts well to the so-called "gig economy" where employment is structured as supposedly independent contractors, who in turn can be working for multiple organizations at the same time.
"Corporations building armies", etc. describes the Dutch East India Company pretty well, yes? As I get now into my 50s, that goal seems more and more an intrinsic part of limited-liability joint-stock companies.
The damage of an advertising-based internet economy is not limited to just "seeing ads." The entire content and structure of the internet is warped around this economy. Search engines, SEO, content discovery mechanisms, types and variety of content... all could have been different and better.
1. Switch to cryptocurrency, let small-time criminals control the web.
2. Switch to micropayments, let criminal corporations control the web.
If you're going to have attention-mining addiction-creating software funnel people into rabbit holes, then those rabbit holes need to be verified, safe-to-consume stuff. Watching 5 hours of 5 minute crafts is at worst, going to make someone spend too much money at Hobby Lobby. Certainly not good, but a workable issue. Watching 5 hours of white supremacist propaganda is how you get our current sociopolitical climate.
How much would you pay to own an account on social media? If your answer is $0 then you're not addressing anything, you just want someone else to subsidize your entertainment and you want to call the shots on top.
I don't work for free, and I know damn well neither do you.
You asked "how do we change that" and I'm assuming the "that" referred to the subject of the PC: "The damage of an advertising-based internet economy" which in turn exists in the context of the linked video in the OP, which enunciates the consequences of machine learning being applied to creating hyper-addictive and extremist social media websites, in 2017 by the way, and the speakers broad hypothesis seems, in my eyes, broadly confirmed.
And the principle issue there is thus: an algorithm that consistently directs you to more concentrated and extreme versions of whatever you're consuming (vegetarian -> vegan, for example) can be utterly benign or perhaps annoying in that context, but gets notably darker when it's moving people from Donald Trump's rallies to The Jewish Question.
I have no issue at all with the former example, I have a LOT of issues with the latter.
> How much would you pay to own an account on social media? If your answer is $0 then you're not addressing anything, you just want someone else to subsidize your entertainment and you want to call the shots on top.
In that equation, I'm the product. I have every right to call the shots because the social media company only makes money by my participation in it, which is why I left Facebook and have only atrophied, ancient presences on most websites. I'm fine being shown ads for weird tech junk I might find cool. I'm not fine having the intricacies of my personal beliefs sanded off by weirdos trying to sell white supremacy like it's Pepsi.
He did not, you are ascribing another person's quote to them.
> And the principle issue there is thus: an algorithm
Section 230 does not stop people from using algorithms to enforce harmful content consumption loops for the purposes of selling advertisements. It specifically protects them from the consequences, but repeal that and now you've created a common incentive to sell Cocomelon for American adults.
We keep Section 230 because, even when it's retards like Elon Musk at the reigns, adults deserve to be treated with maturity and respect.
As for black supremacist content, yeah nix that shit too. It's corrosive for the exact same reasons. Was this supposed to be a hard question?
That won't magically fix all the problems in an instant, but the core of everything wrong with the Internet starts with the Internet being separated into consumers and providers, instead of being a true peer2peer network.
Even in the olden days of the Internet when ISPs would give you free webspace with your Internet account, you still didn't get your own domain name, meaning all your Web presence would bust when you switched providers.
Alternatively, get Freenet, IPFS/IPNS or any of the other distributed alternatives working, but after 25 years of people trying, I kind of given up hope of it ever happening.
Spooky, I know, but contrary to what armchair economists will tell you, the invisible hand doesn't do shit outside what it needs to. It's a lot like Natural Selection in that way. Yeah it works... to get the job done. And nothing more. Because it doesn't need to.
I don’t think we fully fathom how much everything on the Internet has degraded. And we and our children have degraded with it. Like frogs boiling alive in a pot, we never noticed it because of how gradually they increased the temperature.
step 1: install & use Firefox
step 2: install and use adblockers (multiple)(I got ublock origin, adblock plus, noscript, privacy badger, privacy possum)(nothing gets through!!)
step 3: install "Open in Reader View" addon (not affiliated in any way). With this, when I DDG-search for something, especially lyrics or something for which I am interested in only the text, I right-click and "open in reader view" so it does exactly that.
step 4: set the Reader View (F9) in FF, to the font size, color, etc.
EDIT: tip: tell your 'friend' to search for Band Song_title AZLyrics (not affiliated) so the first hit will be from "AZLyrics.com" which will have a standard format (I always search for ".... azlyrics" instead of just "..lyrics")
Although, Millenials seem to be pretty annoyed by all this, and aren’t really anywhere near retirement yet. So maybe we can figure out some way to apply the brakes.
No, the problem we find ourselves in is that we let ad companies buy the entire economy and infect it with anticompetitive behavior. The people working on Android aren't working on ads. Their work is being exploited by an ad company and twisted to serve ads.
I personally find my doctor infinitely more intelligent than any Google tech bro. I find the group of people making Little Kitty Big City infinitely more intelligent than some Facebook wanker.
UX largely sucks and takes a backseat to the ad experience now.
Why not, "They're building a dystopia to make people click on ads"
I'm not building this dystopia
Are you
Zeynep Tufekci: We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026203 - Oct 2021 (2 comments)
We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads (2017) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16684860 - March 2018 (170 comments)
We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15891014 - Dec 2017 (50 comments)
We're Building a Dystopia Just to Make People Click on Ads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15572578 - Oct 2017 (12 comments)
Nobody is excited about ads in 2025.
No Javascript:
https://py.tedcdn.com/consus/projects/00/29/70/008/products/...
Everybody just wants a peaceful, prosperous life.
We serve a corporation, because the corporation promises that.
The corporation just wants advertising. That is, clicks.
So the universal desire for peace and prosperity is bringing about the clicky dystopia.
We gave AI legal personhood in the 1800s and we were doomed from there
We have publishers who rely on the money stream to finance their online products. But they probably complain about how ads have overtaken their content. We have a couple of "wanna be publishers" that built a busines model around ads (who are the root cause of why ads fail in these times). They don't really complain about the current situation, but I'd say that's the minority here. We have advertisers who need ads to "advertise" (apparently). They also complain about "ad saturation".
We have a HUGE ecosystem, which promises to improve advertising, mostly it's just bullshit buzzword bingo to make a busines out of it. (good read on that is https://chiefmartec.com/2024/05/2024-marketing-technology-la...) They probably complain about what they built themselfs: a complex ecosystem that no one understands anymore.
And we have end users who most probably don't like ads. Most common users probably just ignore them, a couple of tech savvy users installed counter measures to avoid ads.
This is the status quo. And there are so many posts and opinions and rants about ads and online marketing. Still we suffer from them.
Why isn't it changing? I don't see even an aproach of someone who actually want's to change it. This is weird.
thanks to uBlock origin and pihole I don't see any of them.
Consumers right now only get monetized. They see zero return from their attention being taken away from them.
Will they still show me ads even if I've exhausted my "solana payments" for the day?
How?
When everything is text, text files become libraries. Text editors become macro processors.
+ the minimalism in the age of ad-les enshittification is refreshing
When markets control basic needs, capitalism becomes its own form of authoritarianism that forces everyone to self comply. But it's freedom because they voluntarily choose to not starve to death/be homeless.
I actually don’t understand the thinking process behind that inevitability.
Mind to elaborate?
I grew up in the Soviet Union. There was one type of milk on the shelf, it was called "Milk", and I don't remember the label saying anything else.
Compare with "HORIZON ORGANIC DHA Omega-3 Supports the Brain Health organic Whole Milk" dressed in bright red and contrasting yellow, with typography that begs "please look at me, I'm the better option".
I love this. And for me - as a 40 year old western european - it's so unthinkable, so unreal. I usually don't look at the milk packaging at home, but I remember reading on the packaging all kinds of stupid sh!te like names of the farmers where the cow grazes (which might be true, but I guess it's b0ll0cks) with some feel-good illustrations, all kinds of childish texts on the packaging as well. It's just 'milk', I don't need a fake story around how good your milk selling company is.
Maybe your soviet milk was unhealthy or not tasteful, I don't know. Maybe it's just the same kind of milk we have here. My milk is pretty good, but jeezz... that marketing on the packaging over here.
That what I wanted to understand. I understand the other way around, that a socialist panned economy with monopolies in terms of who produces what is shit. And leads to advertising not being necessary. But the other way round is what still trips me off and what I am still not able to wrap my head around.
Communism seems like the only reasonable way — at least then you’re only restricting your own speech as the entity who produces these things.
Ads are basically zero-sum in the sense that they mostly take customers that need something, and shift them to the brand that is advertised, instead of the one they would have heard of naturally (now, there is some element of ads actually increasing demand, but as people are quite cash-strapped or in debt nowadays, I guess it can only function up to some limit). Companies that advertise are engaging in an ever-increasing (more sophisticated, technical, and more expensive) competition to capture some allocation of this demand. Because we’re burning an increasing amount of money in a zero-sum competition, eventually the ecosystem must collapse under its own weight.
We can sort of see this, I think, in people becoming increasingly grumpy about how expensive everything is. But the system is very circuitous, so we misallocate blame all over the place.
Trying to regulate ads—I dunno, it seems hard to regulate without stepping on free-speech toes (US perspective, ymmv in other countries). I would rather regulate the collection of data, which doesn’t seem to be particularly protected in any sense other than that private entities can mostly just do whatever by default (it seems functionally similar to the sort of stuff that the 4’th amendment was intended to protect us against, except it is done by Facebook and Google so they get away with it) (but to be explicit, I think it is probably legal at the moment for companies to run vast surveillance networks, we need new laws).
Edit: Now, I don't know if an ad exec actually said it, but I can find examples like:
> (2015) "Smoking ban is slippery slope toward communism" - https://eu.statesmanjournal.com/story/opinion/readers/2015/0...
> (1948) "Rep Flannagan told the House of Representatives that tobacco will also help in stopping communism." - https://www.brasscheck.com/seldes/tobac6.html
> (2007) "Smoking bans are an act of Communist aggression. " https://www.mesabitribune.com/news/smoking-bans-are-acts-of-...
More to the original point, Bern banned some outdoor advertising last year (!). https://www.iamexpat.ch/expat-info/swiss-news/bern-approves-... says "SVP councillor Alexander Feuz was the most strident [opponent], calling the change a “step towards Stone Age communism.”"
Looks like São Paolo has a widespread advertising ban since 2006(!!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
Bern and São Paolo don't seem all that communist.
The market for ads shown on web pages and user info tracked by pages will crash, so companies will have to find more direct ways to make money again.
He expected the end state of capitalism to be business owners just constantly fighting the markets to stay still. On the one hand, they'd be constantly trying to figure out how to make sure they were paying bottom prices for goods and services on which they relied, and on the other they'd constantly be fighting to try and sell in a saturated market. Eventually, collapse would ensue.
This was one of the foundations for his thinking.
He couldn't have predicted information technology, or ad tech, but the premise seems to hold up.
Of course, where he ended up was workers owning the means of production and every business basically being a "lifestyle business", with no need - or ability - to scale. This, as you know, became corrupted into government ownership, central planning of the economy, and all the other nightmares of a non-free market.
The ideal state - and I think this is where Marx would have wanted it - is that you might not have had a gazillion milk brands all screaming for attention (and the consumer ultimately paying for that, as it being priced into the amount they pay), but there being a free market of worked-owned businesses.
A companion presentation to the OP is "Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming" by Nick Haneaur in 2014 —- https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocr...
He has also been running a podcast called "Pitchfork Economics" which I have found to be very enlightening on the state of this world. From an economics point of view, it explains the enshittification of many services we once enjoyed, the destruction of the middle class.
The past 40+ years of policy based on “reagonomics”/“trickle down economics”, neoclassical/neoliberal economicsc and psuedoscience from the Chicago School of Economics (ie, Milton Friedman) represents the worst era of America.
e.g, Filter out political posts on X. Fact check opinion videos on the fly.
I hope future computing devices will have neutal engine at the center, and CPU as secondary. And I should be able to teach it to take actions on my behalf.
You can't trust everyone, but that is basically the exact use case for government: to enforce basic standards of behavior so that we can all live more efficient, happy lives, rather than live in an arms race of personal methods to fuck eachother over and prevent ourselves from being fucked over.
I don't think society could come up with a truly comprehensive way of eliminating the evil part of advertising but I think we could do a lot better than we are doing if people would just wake up and insist that the government actually do what it is supposed to do.
> I guess we could like try to build a sort of system where people get together and vote on what kinds of behaviors society should allow which we should discourage and then when a majority of people agree on that stuff we could like make people stop doing bad stuff by using force after some kind of process to make sure that its fair?
idk, one of our internet vulture-capital magnates was on cnn the other day proclaiming "thats not gonna happen"...
Yeah, I think that was the point.
And yeah, I agree, except governments are slow and, most of the time, corrupt. I really, really wish it worked! (There are counterexamples, I’m sure.)
So while I’m waiting for a GDPR 2.0 that would outlaw the bullshit data collection altogether (and not just put it behind a cookie banner), I’m still going to install an adblocker on every of my friend’s computers – because it works today.
In fact most counties have laws saying that advertisements should be clearly identifiable as such. Not to an AI, but still.
Forests are full of animals that hunt animals, and animals that spend tons of energy evading animals hunting them.
Life is a complex patterning phenomenon that dissipates energy, and as far as we understand it has no goal. Why should we expect complex human living systems to behave fundamentally differently? Individual human beings have goals, but huge collective systems like economies have either no consciousness or a kind of vegetable consciousness similar to a slime mold moving toward nutrients.