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We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [video]

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Re: We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [video]

#41

Post by nelblu »

lukev wrote: post #33

Half the comments here are just pointing out that ad blockers exist, which is missing the point. 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.

Interesting you say "seeing ads", because lately when I am volunteering with legally blind population as their "tech-mate", I can't explain them why technology isn't doing what they want it to do. It's a million times worse when we put ourselves into their shoes.... My strategy has changed from helping them learn technology, to helping them avoid how to use technology. One of the person I help, who is legally blind but can see font size 50+, asked me to teach him how to search for lyrics of songs so that he can play his guitar. I tried to teach him, but it was pointless because of how the websites were full of ads. I did install an ad blocker which helped a bit but in the end, I gave up and now I just print out lyrics for him.

Re: We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [video]

#42

Post by skygazer »

_cenw wrote: post #32
antfarm wrote: post #28

My way to circumvent most of this: I am using Safari with AdBlock Pro and AdBlock and see zero ads when browsing the web. 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 h…

You are using the inferior way to block ads, which will continue to degrade as advertisers take advantage of Google killing synchronous blocking of web requests with Manifest v2. https://ublockorigin.com/#manifest-v3-section

I'm like the parent, on Safari – apparently also using an "inferior" way to block ads that, somehow, inexplicably, works 100% of the time and has never let an ad slip through. Is it supposed to be inferior because it's brittle and requires constant work on the side of the developer? Is it blocking too much and I'm just not aware of it? Is there some new ad tech that it's not prepared for, and can't adapt to, and will fail in the near future?

Re: We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [video]

#43

Post by bigyabai »

antfarm wrote: post #28

My way to circumvent most of this: I am using Safari with AdBlock Pro and AdBlock and see zero ads when browsing the web. 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 h…

> bought an extension called UnTrap for YouTube

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.

Re: We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [video]

#44

Post by bigyabai »

antfarm wrote: post #35
lukev wrote: post #33

Half the comments here are just pointing out that ad blockers exist, which is missing the point. 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.

But how are you going to change that?

Couple choices:

1. Switch to cryptocurrency, let small-time criminals control the web.

2. Switch to micropayments, let criminal corporations control the web.

Re: We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [video]

#45

Post by wizzwizz4 »

bigyabai wrote: post #43
antfarm wrote: post #28

My way to circumvent most of this: I am using Safari with AdBlock Pro and AdBlock and see zero ads when browsing the web. 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 h…

> bought an extension called UnTrap for YouTube 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 tha…

In a capitalist society, paying for software is good, actually.

Re: We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [video]

#46

Post by nathan_compton »

notpushkin wrote: post #17
everdrive wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a good use of energy. Waste tons of energy sending ads to everyone, and waste even more energy defeating them with an energy-expensive LLM.

Sadly, we can’t just trust everybody else not to try and pull one over us. (Fortunately, uBlock Origin still works and is fairly lightweight, and hopefully we won’t see native ads so indistinguishable from content that it can’t detect those for a while.)

I don't know man, 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? And like we could vote periodically to make sure that our rules continue to be useful and relevant.

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.

Re: We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [video]

#47

Post by pavel_lishin »

bigyabai wrote: post #43
antfarm wrote: post #28

My way to circumvent most of this: I am using Safari with AdBlock Pro and AdBlock and see zero ads when browsing the web. 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 h…

> bought an extension called UnTrap for YouTube 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 tha…

Isn't that like being wowed by people who pay to have their car oil changed, instead of doing it themselves?

Re: We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [video]

#48

Post by knome »

_cenw wrote: post #32
antfarm wrote: post #28

My way to circumvent most of this: I am using Safari with AdBlock Pro and AdBlock and see zero ads when browsing the web. 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 h…

You are using the inferior way to block ads, which will continue to degrade as advertisers take advantage of Google killing synchronous blocking of web requests with Manifest v2. https://ublockorigin.com/#manifest-v3-section

Only for chrome.

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.

Re: We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [video]

#50

Post by prinny_ »

lukev wrote: post #33

Half the comments here are just pointing out that ad blockers exist, which is missing the point. 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.

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." - Jeff Hammerbacher
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