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Instagram Has Become SkyMall

clivethompson.medium.com

271–280 of 341 posts

Re: Instagram Has Become SkyMall

#271

What's tragic here is that the author is complaining about one ad-infested, tracker-infested piece of trash of a product, on another ad-infested, tracker-infested piece of trash that is Medium. Why the the fuck people still write on Medium even though it prevents people from reading content after a few times without either paying or logging in is beyond me.

Where do you see the author complaining?? He's celebrating the tracker-induced trashiness of the ads!

Re: Instagram Has Become SkyMall

#272

What's tragic here is that the author is complaining about one ad-infested, tracker-infested piece of trash of a product, on another ad-infested, tracker-infested piece of trash that is Medium. Why the the fuck people still write on Medium even though it prevents people from reading content after a few times without either paying or logging in is beyond me.

What are some good alternatives? I’m not a fan of Medium either. Their user experience is very disrespectful. Edit: alternatives for a reader

I'm pretty biased myself, but I always recommend folks publish to their own sites (https://www.jvt.me/posts/2019/07/22/why-website/)

If discoverability is lacking there's quite a few aggregate platforms that can boost readership / visibility of your site, but always publishing on your own site first!

Re: Instagram Has Become SkyMall

#273
post #31
post #7

The app itself can quickly turn into a never-ending scroll of infomercials from ads and accounts if you go beyond your social circle. Even if said accounts are not directly selling a product through the store feature, it's often advertising a desirable lifestyle not your own and general consumerism. How many photos are staged versus candid? This type of content-as-ad imagery is what the app lends itself best to versu…

I really dislike the suggestion "just have better self control". It's you versus an army of machine learning experts all tuning algorithm on personal data about you to learn your weaknesses and bait you into spending more time on the app. Blaming the consumer ignores the adversarial role that the apps play in our lives.

Delete the app and the army goes puff.

Re: Instagram Has Become SkyMall

#274

What's tragic here is that the author is complaining about one ad-infested, tracker-infested piece of trash of a product, on another ad-infested, tracker-infested piece of trash that is Medium. Why the the fuck people still write on Medium even though it prevents people from reading content after a few times without either paying or logging in is beyond me.

What are some good alternatives? I’m not a fan of Medium either. Their user experience is very disrespectful. Edit: alternatives for a reader

Github Pages

Re: Instagram Has Become SkyMall

#275

My biggest problem with both Facebook and Instagram is that I feel completely out of control over what I see. There is neither a way to avoid what I don't want, nor a way to ensure I see my friends' posts. The timeline shows me the same handful of people in mystery sort order mixed with ads, and then I later find out I haven't seen months' worth of someone's content when I happen to visit their profile. The only half…

Nah, it’s not because they think you’re an idiot but because this way they can keep you longer in the website.

One clear example for me was when YouTube changed the homepage to show random videos instead of the subscriptions. My subscription videos run out, but random videos don’t. Same goes with unrelated sh*t every other social media companies show you.

Related: Twitter literally suggested a post under the topic: Hot dogs. [1] You can’t make this stuff up.

1: https://ibb.co/WpCXCxt

Re: Instagram Has Become SkyMall

#276

What's tragic here is that the author is complaining about one ad-infested, tracker-infested piece of trash of a product, on another ad-infested, tracker-infested piece of trash that is Medium. Why the the fuck people still write on Medium even though it prevents people from reading content after a few times without either paying or logging in is beyond me.

What are some good alternatives? I’m not a fan of Medium either. Their user experience is very disrespectful. Edit: alternatives for a reader

If the author is willing to spend 30 to 60 minutes (depending on technical skills) to learn how to set things up, nothing beats static websites. My current favorite is Zola, but there literally hundreds of options with varying pros and cons.

Otherwise, substack seems to have a better business model imo. I wouldn't use it myself because I don't trust them to stay as they are when/if they corner the market, but for the time being I think Substack is what Medium pretends to be/

Re: Instagram Has Become SkyMall

#277
post #240

Maybe it's just me, but I dislike the whole concept of advertising in places that aren't related to shopping. I go to Instagram to look at my friends' pictures, not to be sold something I don't actually need. If I were to shop, I'd go to a mall, thank you very much. Anyway, at some point Instagram ads (especially the autoplaying video kind, with sound) drove me crazy enough that out came jadx and apktool and I found…

Can you share the modified apk or any tutorial to make similar modified Instagram apk?

I did a thread on xda a while ago: https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/app-mod-4-4-instagram-wit...

Re: Instagram Has Become SkyMall

#278
post #271

What's tragic here is that the author is complaining about one ad-infested, tracker-infested piece of trash of a product, on another ad-infested, tracker-infested piece of trash that is Medium. Why the the fuck people still write on Medium even though it prevents people from reading content after a few times without either paying or logging in is beyond me.

Where do you see the author complaining ?? He's celebrating the tracker-induced trashiness of the ads!

I have to admit that I didn't read it since it's on that trash website, but I just guessed. I block Medium on my network.

Re: Instagram Has Become SkyMall

#279
post #34

Is there anyone else out there who refuses to buy something if they first learned about it from an ad?

Advertising works at a subconscious level. The more you see a product, the more you subconsciously learn to like and trust the product, especially if you are being exposed to that product in a trusted context (popular celebrity posing with it, etc). I wish I had saved the link, but I read a study that showed people consistently underestimated how likely they were to buy a product after seeing an ad. They would buy it…

>I read a study that showed people consistently underestimated how likely they were to buy a product after seeing an ad. They would buy it at much higher rates than the control group yet still assert that they were aware of the ad and not allowing it to influence their decisions.

How frequently must these people be buying things for this to even be noticeable.

If I think about regular day to day purchases, I'm not sure how influence plays a part at all. There is no branding or advertising for fruit/vegetables/meat from the local store. Even with household goods, I don't speak the local language so brand names are not easily noticeable.

Maybe bigger purchases? But those are rarer and usually involve some kind of research. I'll happily buy from brands I have never heard of if they show good results in independent tests. It just never feels accurate when people tell me I'm being subconsciously manipulated by ads when I see so few and buy so little.

Re: Instagram Has Become SkyMall

#280

Maybe it's just me, but I dislike the whole concept of advertising in places that aren't related to shopping. I go to Instagram to look at my friends' pictures, not to be sold something I don't actually need. If I were to shop, I'd go to a mall, thank you very much. Anyway, at some point Instagram ads (especially the autoplaying video kind, with sound) drove me crazy enough that out came jadx and apktool and I found…

I’d love to read a write up on how you did that. I wonder if it’s possible that one endpoint returns a chronological feed whereas another endpoint returns an algorithmic field?

In short. The HTTP client Instagram uses (Proxygen) is written in C++, which means it needs JNI bindings, which means those classes are necessarily excluded from obfuscation. I decompiled the dexes into human-readable bytecode (smali) using apktool, compiled my own class with additional code to strip ads, converted it to dex, decompiled that into smali, added that to instagram smali files, added calls into my class in the JNI classes, and, finally, put it all back together with apktool. I didn't want to touch the obfuscated parts because that would make the patch break with every version. Though I did have to touch them to enable the debug menu.

I should also probably make this in the form of an Xposed module. Do people even use Xposed any more?

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