Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 498 posts

Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#61

Post by ok_dad »

caust1c wrote: post #26
ok_dad wrote: post #4

Advertising. I know this is an extreme view, but I think any advertising other than a spec sheet style ad (just facts) should be banned. I feel like it steals your attention and mindshare day after day. The ads I see on TV now (rarely, as I don't watch live TV much) are just so horrible. Dripping with emotions and trying to tug on your heartstrings to sell some toilet bowl cleaner or some other garbage. Social media.…

I've thought a lot about what plagues our modern world and I've come to the same conclusion. I'm at a loss for what can be done about it though. We can't very easily ban advertising. Any regulation has to be lightweight because it's nearly impossible to enforce at internet scale (as we've seen again and again). Curious if you've thought about any ways to fix the problem we're in.

Personally, I just "ignore" those big problems, as I have no authority to fix them. I focus on what I can do: help my family when they need it, teach my kid(s) to be good and intelligent people (for my and my wife's definition of good and intelligent), and work in industries or on technology that will have a positive effect on the world (like distributed energy resource/load controls, currently). I can only affect my little part of the world, so why worry about those big issues that are above my paygrade? I just vote for whom I think will help most (hard to find these days), raise my voice when I see something I don't like (like when someone is being rude to a clerk at a store), and the rest is up to fate/the universe/god(s)/whatever.

Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#62

Post by tiffanyh »

ok_dad wrote: post #4

Advertising. I know this is an extreme view, but I think any advertising other than a spec sheet style ad (just facts) should be banned. I feel like it steals your attention and mindshare day after day. The ads I see on TV now (rarely, as I don't watch live TV much) are just so horrible. Dripping with emotions and trying to tug on your heartstrings to sell some toilet bowl cleaner or some other garbage. Social media.…

How do you discover information you’re not actively looking for?

Eg maybe being environmentally friendly is super important to you. You don’t even realize that today the detergent you’re using isn’t as such. Advertising allows for someone to educate you that products exist that you’re not aware of that align to your needs/wants/desires.

Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#63

Post by thepete2 »

ok_dad wrote: post #4

Advertising. I know this is an extreme view, but I think any advertising other than a spec sheet style ad (just facts) should be banned. I feel like it steals your attention and mindshare day after day. The ads I see on TV now (rarely, as I don't watch live TV much) are just so horrible. Dripping with emotions and trying to tug on your heartstrings to sell some toilet bowl cleaner or some other garbage. Social media.…

Agree. I particularly hate advertisements in public spaces. I often consciously try to avert my eyes, it's like pollution to me, just visual/mental.

Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#64

Post by ufo »

Nextgrid wrote: post #58
chrismorgan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I basically don’t encounter any ads in my day-to-day life, digital or physical. I have no TV, and use uBlock Origin (including annoyances lists) on laptop and phone. I live in a tiny rural town so that practically the only advertising posters within a 35km radius are first-party advertising on two or three Telstra public phone booths, and in the decent-sized towns 40km away in either direction there’s barely any more…

Advertising is cancer and should die, but billboards and real-world display advertising is probably the least bad version of it. I'd prefer if online advertising (and the associated data collection and privacy violations) were nuked first.

I do agree that the privacy invading stuff is a more urgent problem. But I want to add a counterpoint about the physical ads. I remember when they banned all the billboards in São Paulo and the city ended up looking much better after it. The change ended up being highly regarded by the residents.

Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#65

Post by handrous »

pototo666 wrote: post #46

My sleep. I used to use smart phone before I lie on bed before bedtime. I know that I shouldn't use them. But the dopamine generated by digital devices and internet is too cheap. When I am unhappy or under pressure, I tend to use my smart phone. And I am always unhappy or under pressure recently. Then I use smart phone before sleep. Then I fall asleep very late. This creates some vicious circle. The worse my sleep is…

It's batshit crazy that we'd fill our houses with extremely bright nighttime lighting and entertainment that out classes the most lavish, exclusive medieval or Roman imperial festival, all available on-tap every single night in every room of our house and tunable to our every whim, and not expect it to completely ruin sleep patterns for a high percentage of the population.

"People have trouble sleeping. Could it be lack of sunlight? Stress? Personal moral failure?"

Hahaha, OK, yeah, maybe those things a little, but maybe let's start with the thing that's very obviously most of the problem if we're trying to solve this (which we aren't, because no-one can give up their infinite carnival)

Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#66

Post by cletus »

ok_dad wrote: post #4

Advertising. I know this is an extreme view, but I think any advertising other than a spec sheet style ad (just facts) should be banned. I feel like it steals your attention and mindshare day after day. The ads I see on TV now (rarely, as I don't watch live TV much) are just so horrible. Dripping with emotions and trying to tug on your heartstrings to sell some toilet bowl cleaner or some other garbage. Social media.…

> Most products today are less durable and are generally worse than "yesterday", in my opinion.

People forget how (relatively) expensive products used to be. Example: my family had a very early VHS video recorder. I believe it cost ~$1000 in the early 1980s. I may be misremembering. But that was a lot of money then. So of course it was worth repairing. Labour was considerably less expensive in terms of percentage of outlay costs. That's why it was justified.

Computers came along and you had a bunch of chips on a board, some of which were worth replacing. But each interconnect costs money. Each external package costs money. We've seen the rise of complicated SoC chips that basically do everything in one chip. These are overall cheaper to fab (compared to 2+ chips) and have lower build, integration and interconnection costs.

The downside? If it stops working, you just throw it away (or at least replace the entire SoC). And if the SoC is relatively cheap, it's not worth paying someone to order a replacement and replace it (with or without soldering).

So really what you're missing is tech being very expensive. Personally I prefer what we have now.

There are other downsides to modern tech (eg Internet-connected TVs to insert advertising) but durability just isn't one of them.

Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#70

Post by amelius »

ericmay wrote: post #20
ok_dad wrote: post #4

Advertising. I know this is an extreme view, but I think any advertising other than a spec sheet style ad (just facts) should be banned. I feel like it steals your attention and mindshare day after day. The ads I see on TV now (rarely, as I don't watch live TV much) are just so horrible. Dripping with emotions and trying to tug on your heartstrings to sell some toilet bowl cleaner or some other garbage. Social media.…

Maybe not advertising completely but at least targeted advertising. Many problems and borderline unethical business models stem from targeting .

> Maybe not advertising completely but at least targeted advertising.

Non-targeted advertising is still distracting.

Why not ban it completely? Or perhaps allow dedicated advertising places, so everybody can be happy.

Post reply on HN