Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14 • Hacker News Board

Re: Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14

#301

Post by criddell » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 11:24 AM UTC

dialtone wrote: post #249

jkubicek wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why you don't pay per click or impression. The newspaper/magazine model has worked fine for 100 years. I fully understand why advertising companies would be opposed to this, it's in direct opposition to their value prop. As a consumer, though, I don't want anyone who is not the entity I'm interacting with to know anything about me.

There is a reason why the news paper industry moved in the direction that they did. Or do you think they were forced to move this way? Measurement on the web can be more precise and allows to understand the impact of revenue, it's also vastly more distributed than magazines and TV channels of which there's only thousands or so for each while there are literally millions of websites. There's too much noise and fraud o…

> There's too much noise and fraud on the web to be able to make marketing decisions with little tracking.

I think you give too little credit to the intelligence of ad buyers. They can figure out if a web ad is working the same way they can figure out if a billboard ad is working.

Re: Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14

#302

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 11:39 AM UTC

Ensorceled wrote: post #299

pjmlp wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As European it is hard to grasp the US hate on unions. I love our European unions, which support anyone across the company, including software developers. Want to make a slave out of me? Talk to the hand.

Plenty of hate for unions here in Canada too. Some how, in North America, we've convinced a large percentage of people who should belong to unions that unions will destroy society.

Which is quite sad, given how relevant both countries were in giving birth to them during the early days of industrial revolution.

Re: Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14

#303

Post by dang » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 3:57 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #122

The abuser playbook really is pretty standard. I'm kind of surprised we don't have classes on how to avoid being on the receiving end. Push the person until they crack, then call for discretion and dialog about the 'problem' so you don't get what's coming to you. But that would probably conflict tremendously with the corporate interests that inform our public education system.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24284891.

Re: Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14

#304

Post by dialtone » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 4:27 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #301

dialtone wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a reason why the news paper industry moved in the direction that they did. Or do you think they were forced to move this way? Measurement on the web can be more precise and allows to understand the impact of revenue, it's also vastly more distributed than magazines and TV channels of which there's only thousands or so for each while there are literally millions of websites. There's too much noise and fraud o…

> There's too much noise and fraud on the web to be able to make marketing decisions with little tracking. I think you give too little credit to the intelligence of ad buyers. They can figure out if a web ad is working the same way they can figure out if a billboard ad is working.

I've been working with tens of thousands of them for 15 years. To name one area: last click attribution being the primary way people measure web performance is a prime sign that they are at least confused with how performance works. Advertising measured with last click tends to focus towards people that have visited your site less than 4 hours earlier, hardly something that is incremental to the sales of a business, and basically all research and experiments that you can run point to this, but it doesn't change the fact ad buyers all believe last click is the one true way. And to show that it's not just me saying this: https://research.netflix.com/business-area/marketing-and-gro... .

Re: Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14

#305

Post by WorldMaker » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 5:36 PM UTC

renewiltord wrote: post #289

m463 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> users don't care about this stuff we do.

Right, should clarify that I mean "Users do not act in a manner that reveals they care about this". I.e. the majority of users won't use a product that's more compliant with the spec over one that does an extra thing they'd like.

Users don't have much choice in which ad streams they see. Publishers had the choice and seemed indifferent, but it feels weird to blame users for turning on a feature and not noticing a difference when that feature didn't work because most publishers failed to act on that feature / make it a requirement of their ad buys.

Re: Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14

#306

Post by cactus2093 » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 5:55 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #294

reaperducer wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. Or unions. While teachers unions have been great for teachers, they've been lousy for teaching.

As European it is hard to grasp the US hate on unions. I love our European unions, which support anyone across the company, including software developers. Want to make a slave out of me? Talk to the hand.

As an American, I think it is just decades of seeing the problems caused by unions. In the worst case look at our police unions, it is now pretty well accepted that they are a large part of the problem with police brutality and killings here. It's now a growing mainstream belief that they should be disbanded, and after seeing time and time again how they protect murderers and abusers it's hard not to agree.

In other industries the stakes are not life and death in the same way, but it seems like the same principles hold. If a small percentage of employees in an industry are corrupt or negligent, and the unions defend them and prevent them from ever being fired or facing any negative consequences, they can do a lot of damage.

Also, in the US a lot of benefits that unions provide for their members go against the interests of broader society. Unions are some of the biggest opponents of nationalized healthcare, for example.

As far as the upsides, I think unions were more useful when governments were much smaller and weaker than they are today. In that world, the upsides outweighed the downsides because people had no other protections. With how incredibly wealthy the US is now, a functioning government should be able to provide the benefits for every citizen that unions provide for their members, while avoiding the downsides of the fierce "us vs them" dynamic that unions can create which has ended up dividing society in many instances.

(Obviously there's a big asterisk there on "functioning" government, but many unions don't seem to be functioning very well either as I mentioned earlier, so it's a tie on that front. If we can't get our large bodies to function better than they are these days, we're screwed no matter what).

Re: Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14

#307

Post by laksdjfkasljdf » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 6:01 PM UTC

easton wrote: post #23

laksdjfkasljdf wrote: post #20

Apple pushed an OSX update (10.15.6) just to demand acceptance to their data-sharing practices from all their user. The forced-to-accept "welcome" screen (which shows up before the main desktop and disregard every single accessibility option the user might have (even the mouse scrolling direction!) starts with: > "Apple's ad platform is designed to protect your information ..." A few interesting things. First, I doub…

When did this happen? Accessibility options have always been available for me in Setup Assistant (which usually does the post-login after update setup).

i mention the version on the now-downvoted-to-oblivion post

Re: Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14

#308

Post by WoohDang » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 9:13 PM UTC

miki123211 wrote: post #146

snowwrestler wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, at one time you could build apps on Facebook that basically downloaded all of a user's data when they used it. The Obama campaign built an app that you could use to find your Facebook friends who hadn't been contacted by the campaign yet, so you could call them on the campaign's behalf. I heard of other political operations that built a "wish [famous person] happy birthday" app solely so they could grow their…

This is a perfect example of the tradeoffs between openness and privacy. If you give dangerous tools to users, you will have a few cool things and lots of tech-illiterate users screwed over. Privacy advocates often preach solutions like the fediverse, without understanding that the fediverse is a privacy disaster for the tech illiterate. Cambridge Analytica wouldn't even be preventable on Mastodon, and it would have…

what's your opinion of Scuttlebutt and if poor, do you see any progress towards alternatives on the horizon?

Re: Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14

#309

Post by criddell » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 2:43 PM UTC

dialtone wrote: post #304

criddell wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's too much noise and fraud on the web to be able to make marketing decisions with little tracking. I think you give too little credit to the intelligence of ad buyers. They can figure out if a web ad is working the same way they can figure out if a billboard ad is working.

I've been working with tens of thousands of them for 15 years. To name one area: last click attribution being the primary way people measure web performance is a prime sign that they are at least confused with how performance works. Advertising measured with last click tends to focus towards people that have visited your site less than 4 hours earlier, hardly something that is incremental to the sales of a business,…

I understand that they want more information, but they don't need it. Ask your clients how they evaluate the performance of offline ads. Those same analytical techniques work online as well.

I think super-precise attribution would actually kill the advertising industry. The uncertainty is what allows ad-buyers to purchase spots well below their value. The uncertainty is what leads to money being spread around and supporting the most things.

It's a little like insurance. If insurance companies could precisely target rates, you would end up paying basically exactly what your health care costs are and maybe a little more. Insurance works because of uncertainty and large pools of customers.

Re: Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14

#310

Post by kspacewalk2 » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 3:01 PM UTC

baddox wrote: post #90

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. As long as the flip side of that argument is equally appreciated - ad revenue pays for the apps, so less revenue will necessarily lead to fewer "free" apps and/or fewer "free" features and/or worse quality. It's a rational response of the intermediary (i.e. app makers) to the customers (i.e. advertisers) having less access to the product (i.e. us).

> less revenue will necessarily lead to fewer "free" apps and/or fewer "free" features and/or worse quality I agree with "fewer" and strongly disagree with "worse quality."

What's the incentive to spend money to constantly improve, fix bugs and update the features on every OS release? If you consider the entire development lifecycle, quality costs developer money every bit just as much as new features.