We accepted surveillance as default

I remember Andrei Sakharov

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Sakharov

in Russia writing that he thought there were 30 people in the house across the street from him.

  > but as long as advertising is how folks make money on the web

Then we make this impossible.

This isn't a forum of marketers, this is a forum of engineers and makers. So... how do we make the next version of the internet fully private and prevent it from becoming overly centralized. How do we prevent companies like Google dictating the design with their browser dominance (chromium, not just Chrome)?

We definitely have some solutions to some of these problems but also need to work on others. We can probably build something that is fully encrypted and peer to peer (example projects exist!) but maintaining decentralization is still an unsolved problem. There's also issues like how we get people to buy in. Most of the population doesn't understand the nuance but does recognize there is a problem. Hell, even more informed places like HN will bicker on about the problems in certain software yet not acknowledge that there exists no perfect solution[0]. We just end up arguing and nothing gets solved, things just stay the same. That's the absolute worst part! People that want the same things end up becoming divided simply because we're really bad at listening to one another[1].

I'm sure it'll continue to be a cat and mouse game, but it also feels like many have given up. I'm exhausted too. But I'm still angry and annoyed. I'm tired and exhausted of being so tired and exhausted. To constantly be dealing with dark patterns. To constantly have things that should take 30 seconds take 30 minutes because of absolutely unnecessary (and often intentional) roadblocks. I'm tired of everyone trying to move so fast that it makes everything move so slow. I don't know how we got to a place where we're just thickening the jell-o we're trying to run through. How every little shortcut we take just makes the jell-o thicker and we pat ourselves on the back.

As we advance as a society the problems we have to solve only become more nuanced and complex, yet for some reason we've come to believe the they are simpler and easier to solve. We may have more powerful tools at hand, but a better tool doesn't make the problem you're trying to solve any less complex, it only can enable solving it or make some parts easier. The complexity is still in the problem and if we abstract it away too much then we only make things worse. IDK but somehow we've come to believe there are no such things as experts, and that we're all experts in everything. This wasn't possible in the past and our world is only more complicated, not less.

[0] I mentioned chromium so I'll use Firefox vs Chromium as an example. Every time the comparison is brought up people say how Chromium is "more complete" while ignoring how "complete" is predominantly defined by Google. The reason they have this power is browser dominance. Can you use de-googled Chromium? I'm personally unconvinced. You might be able to use something which takes out all (known) trackers, but not a Chromium that is void of Google's influence nor a Chromium that doesn't perpetuate Google dominance. But does that mean Firefox is "better"? It all depends on how you define that, and that's where the conversation gets lost. There's no truthful answer to this question and it is all extremely complicated and nuanced. There's never going to be a browser that checks all the boxes. We must give some things up in the pursuit of other things. Arguing the way we currently do is absolutely nonsensical.

[1] And by that, of course, I mean I'm a perfect listener and "you're" the problem. There's no other way to interpret me, my words are absolutely and unambiguously clear. Of course.

To their credit I did get this message from them today:

    We reviewed the ad you reported and found that it goes against 
    our Advertising Standards. We let the advertiser know that we 
    removed the ad, but not who reported it.

    Thank you for letting us know. Reports like yours help us to 
    improve the integrity and relevance of advertising on Facebook.

But mine was an absolutely open and shut case.

Ads on the FB & goog network (this includes phys.org btw) are NOT paper tigers, in the sense that

  they are a reliable anti-signal

(to short, not to buy, to look at rising competitors, to look into reasons why a product might be failing, to sus out the lack of foresight in their investors, to extract other high cost channels/signals that they are still using ntless

As an example of the last one, I just learnt about an ISO standard.. )

YMMV depending on how much the network knows [it doesn't know] about you ofc ;)

I try to disable a lot of web tracking stuff, so I kinda understand if advertisers have trouble targeting me. But the information they should be able to use to target me just isn't getting used at all. Are other people getting well-targeted ads? because in my experience, ad companies suck at it.

I constantly receive ads on Youtube in languages I don't speak. I can kinda make out whats happening in some of the ads, I know a bit of Spanish for instance. But the ads entirely in Turkish, Vietnamese, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, etc, are completely lost on me. I often cannot even tell what the product is that they are advertising. My google account has language preferences set, my browser has them set, my device has them set. Google should *know* what languages I can speak. I'm not on a VPN, I'm pretty sure google knows my exact location. None of these languages are spoken particularly frequently in my area, I don't understand how I'm getting advertisements in these languages.

I used to have targeted advertisements turned off on youtube. I changed this several months ago, because the ads were literally 100% scams, deepfakes, and illegal products. I just got sick of it. I've intentionally turned on targeted ads, as it lets you have some control over the advertisements. Now I finally no longer get as many ads for pornography and illegal drugs, but its still mostly scams, and I still constantly receive ads that are completely and wildly outside of my demographic. Languages I can't speak, political ads for companies and politicians hundreds of miles away. I am shocked when i rarely receive an ad for a local restaurant or business, because it happens so incredibly rarely. When it happens, I wonder, did they actually target me to show me the local business? or was it luck? I'm convinced its the latter.