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Vietnam bans unskippable ads

saigoneer.com

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Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no successful economies without ads. Ads are a necessary evil for effective market discovery. They should be heavily regulated but you can't effectively operate a market economy without one.

You're right, but I think this just highlights the issue with market economies. There is this capitalist lie that money is a stand-in for "value provided to society". So, when you provide value, society gives you money, and you can use this money to ask society for value back. Which sounds great. And truly, I do believe that people should have to contribute to society if they expect society to support them, but the p…

> instead we have imposed it onto the market after-the-fact in order to justify why the market is good and worth keeping around

Not sure about that, markets existed since forever and are still useful even without ads.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#362
So I really hate ads and either block them or avoid the product altogether. My tolerance is very close to zero.

But is it the government's job to regulate good user experience? Are unskippable ads a social problem that must be regulated away? I am the polar opposite of a libertarian, but to me ads are the alternative to other means of monetisation. They support things that are free to use but not free to operate. The transaction is consensual and not unavoidable.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#363
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better from whom? As a user, maybe. But if you're trying to compete, it's incredibly useful to get exposure. For instance, suppose you run a competitor to Salesforce and you want to buy the Salesforce keyword because you provide a better product. I don't know how you would bootstrap that otherwise. If anything the big businesses use advertising as a protection moat. As a small business, I would def prefer to be in a…

If I search for "Salesforce alternative" and something that isn't Salesforce shows up, great! That's what I want! If I search for Salesforce and something that isn't Salesforce shows up above Salesforce, the tool I'm using is wrong and I will assume that the promoted product is a scam. This happened to me yesterday when installing the mobile version of Brotato. Some other game appeared above Brotato in the Google Pla…

>Google already gets an unjustified cut of the money I'm paying for the game

Brotato is free to distribute their game outside the Play Store as well, Android isn't locked down. If the cut was unjustified why would they give money away to Google for free? The reasons are actually extremely similar to the reasons ads benefit society.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time is money. Ten minutes of daily YouTube ads adds up to 5 hours a month. Premium costs $14, roughly an hour's work at minimum wage. Trade one hour of labor for four hours of free time. That's 48 hours back each year for $168. It's a no brainer. Even if your wage is half of 14 dollars, you would still gain 24 hours back and it would still be worth it.

or install ublock origin and keep your money and the time! while depriving google of revenue AND costing them money win, win, win and WIN

Also decreasing the likelihood of content that you like watching gets made? The creator is being paid from that ad revenue too.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#365
post #86

I'm just wondering why governments think it's a good idea to regulate ads. IMO that is something the market (e.g. the users) should take care of.

They aren't even regulating the ads, they're mandating that video platforms show content without monetization.

Live TV had unskippable ads for like the last 80 years, and somehow YouTube is different? Why?

I hate ads, I block ads, and even I think this is stupid. Idk what Vietnam's constitution is like, but I think it's absurd from a free country perspective. If I'm paying to serve you videos, why don't I get to set the terms of that deal? Nobody is forcing you to go to a specific website. If you think they're crap because of all the ads, I likely would agree with you. I think blocking them can't be criminalized, because after all it is your device you're using to remove the ads. But how can you fine or punish a company for not explicitly letting you take the content without complying with their terms?

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#366
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is there not always some sort "marketplace" How exactly does that work for virtual products?

Not that I ever use it but there are apparently services like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_Hunt people use to seek out new products. But as sibling comment said, if it's really good, people will find it eventually.

Funny you mention Product Hunt because it's pay-to-play too, there was a whole controversy a decade ago exactly now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10739875

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what a fucking store is for . They have catalogs. You could ask for one. If they think people will want something they will try to sell it and will tell you about it if you go looking . I see this pro-ads argument all the time and it’s so obviously-stupid that I’m truly baffled. Is this the kind of lie ad folks tell themselves so they can sleep at night?

There are no successful economies without ads. Ads are a necessary evil for effective market discovery. They should be heavily regulated but you can't effectively operate a market economy without one.

Saying you want some sort of discovery mechanism is different than saying the current ad tech malware landscape is a "necessary evil." It certainly is not.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#368
post #13

I've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads. The incentive to create services (especially in social media) that strive to addict their users feels toxic to society. Often, it feels uncertain whether these services are providing actual value, and I suspect that whether a user would pay for a service in lieu of watching ads is incidentally a good barometer for whether real value is present. Don't…

Maybe, but on the otherside, ads make available a huge amount of media and services to people who would otherwise be unable to afford it. Like, I suspect a non-trivial percentage of people wouldn't have email if it weren't for gmail and other free w/ads services.

Probably not too popular of an opinion on HN but email in my opinion would be a great example of a service that could be run by the government. Just like postal service (at least in some parts of the world)

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, but I think this just highlights the issue with market economies. There is this capitalist lie that money is a stand-in for "value provided to society". So, when you provide value, society gives you money, and you can use this money to ask society for value back. Which sounds great. And truly, I do believe that people should have to contribute to society if they expect society to support them, but the p…

> instead we have imposed it onto the market after-the-fact in order to justify why the market is good and worth keeping around Not sure about that, markets existed since forever and are still useful even without ads.

I don't think very many people in this thread actually mean markets when they say that. Sounds like they might mean corporate controlled markets? Otherwise the comments are gibberish. Markets are just a group of people exchanging time and resources. Wanting that to go away is... Bizarre and nonsensical.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#370
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mr. Beast on youtube is guilty of that. Matt Parker of Standup Maths fame did an in-depth look at how that works. Whoever came up with that type of progress bar must hate people in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc0OU1yJD-c

MrBeast is a hack, but its worth pointing out that all "progress bars" are bad design. You could make the same complaint against most of the progress bars in MsDOS. There was never a consistency in timing so you can never really use them to gauge how much time is left.

The difference between a lot of OS/app progress bars for IO (and sometimes CPU) operations and these timers, is that the total length of time for a lot of IO operations is often unknown with any accuracy so you have to use a heuristic to guess the current % done.

For instance: when reading/writing/both many files of differing sizes on traditional drives there is an amount of latency per file which is significant and not always predictable. Whether you base progress on total size or number of files or some more complicated calc based on both, it will be inaccurate in most cases, sometimes badly so. Even when copying a single large file on a shared drive, or just on a dedicated system with multiple tasks running, the progress is inherently a bit random, the same for any network transfer. Worse are many database requests: you don't get any progress often because there is no progress output until the query processing is complete, and the last byte of the result might arrive in the same fraction of a second the first does¹. The same for network requests, though IE (at least as early as v3) and early versions of Edge did outright lie² there to try make themselves look faster than the competition.

The progress bars in videos are a different beast (ahem): the total time is absolutely known, any inaccuracy is either a deliberate lie or gross incompetence.

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[1] I once worked on a system that kept logs of certain types of query so it could display a guess of how long things were going to take and a progress bar to go with it, but this was actually more irritating to the users than no progress display as it would sometime jump from a few % directly to done or sit at 99% for ages (in the end the overly complicated guessing method was replaced by a simple spinner).

[2] It would creep up, getting as far as 80%, before the first byte of response is received. This also confused users who thought that something was actually happening when the action was in fact stalled and just going to time-out.

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