"OK guys, back to the drawing board. How can we market this better? How long do we wait until this WILL fly under the radar?"
GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash
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Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash
#72I understand "free services" eventually come to the conclusion of either charging or using ads to finance and even make money out of them. I believe there are two caveats on it: 1. Approach: to make the experience worth it, so that ads are not very intrusive , done correctly, which, over and over and over, it is proven contrarious to the interest of the user. 2. Relevance: if you are going to put ads onto your produc…
> I understand "free services" eventually come to the conclusion of either charging or using ads to finance and even make money out of them.
The endgame is not "or", it's "and": eventually come to the conclusion that, why choose between revenue streams when we could just have both?
Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash
#73Calling advertisements "product tips" as if everybody is too stupid to understand what that means. They created an amazing technology that oftentimes is indistinguishable from magic and then use it to deliver ads and - sorry about the tangent - kill people. This really is the quote of the century: > The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads What a waste.
I don’t think the quote is particularly fair. You could just as easily see it as the best minds are building huge amounts of amazing, free technology and need a way to pay for it. For every microsecond level ad auction broker there’s a free Android update, cat video platform enhancement, calendar app feature, or type checked scripting language release. HFT on the other hand — now there’s a tech black hole! [edited to…
> You could just as easily see it as the best minds are building huge amounts of amazing, free technology and need a way to pay for it.
That's a false dichotomy.
First of all, the technology is far from "free". It's easily accessible, perhaps, but users pay handsomely to use it, even if they're unaware of it, which most adtech companies go out of their way to ensure.
Secondly, advertising isn't the only business model companies can choose. Far from it. It may be the most profitable, and the easiest to deploy, simply because adtech companies have made it so. Companies can just as well choose to prioritize user experience, user privacy, and all the things they claim to care deeply about, over their revenues, which is what they actually care about.
Oh, and lastly, I would strongly argue that social media, web search, office suites, etc., are hardly "amazing" technology. There are very good alternatives to all of these that don't come with the drawbacks of ad-supported software. It's just that adtech companies are also unsurprisingly quite good at advertising themselves, and using their position and vast resources to dominate the market.
Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash
#74Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash
#75"OK guys, back to the drawing board. How can we market this better? How long do we wait until this WILL fly under the radar?"
Feels like you never worked at corporation it goes more like this:
"old employees who know the environment and are in tune with community are playing safe so they don't bring in immediate results, feels like progress stagnates, so they move those people to other tasks"
"new clueless manager joins, has to come up with a brilliant idea (that actually is bad across the board for someone who understands the environment) to get quarterly bonus, then convinces bunch of |out of touch suites| with power point presentation where numbers go up"
"he gets burned by community response, becomes more conservative - next quarters he is moved away or he moves away on his own - new clueless can come into his place"
Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think the quote is particularly fair. You could just as easily see it as the best minds are building huge amounts of amazing, free technology and need a way to pay for it. For every microsecond level ad auction broker there’s a free Android update, cat video platform enhancement, calendar app feature, or type checked scripting language release. HFT on the other hand — now there’s a tech black hole! [edited to…
If you don’t think that LLMs won’t result in an insurmountable volume of spam on all web foru Oh wait, your post was written by an LLM.
It was not! I don’t think it adds much to this thread to refute the accusation though, but I would add: if you’d tried to out me by asking me to write a haiku about buttons, you’d be reading a haiku about buttons right now. It’s as reliable a signal as looking to see if I use hyphens and dashes. (I love haiku!)
Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash
#77Calling advertisements "product tips" as if everybody is too stupid to understand what that means. They created an amazing technology that oftentimes is indistinguishable from magic and then use it to deliver ads and - sorry about the tangent - kill people. This really is the quote of the century: > The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads What a waste.
if its indistinguishable from magic please do some reading or refrain from using.
Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash
#78"You're just a bunch of fanatic, Linux obsessed Microsoft haters living in the past. Microsoft are the good guys now." -- ca. everyone here, during the GitHub acquisition
Oh, this is just the usual Microsoft Stockholm syndrome. I've been witnessing this for over 20 years now and have been told that it has been a thing for much longer than that.
"No, we can't switch to OpenOffice you weird Open Source hippie! I can't e-mail documents to other people anymore, nobody can open them. Besides, the UI is all different, I won't be able to find anything!"
Then Office 2007 happened, tossing out the waffle menu for the ribbon and people started receiving e-mails with strange docx/xlsx files that nobody could open. IIRC that was still an issue 3 years later.
But no, when Microsoft does it, it is different: "This is progress! Are you against progress, you weird Luddite?"
I remember by the time Windows 8 was released ("Kachelofen edition" - "hurr, your desktop is a tablet!"), I was discussing with a Unix graybeard friend in the cafeteria how long it will take until the complainers accept that "this is the way now". I think it was him who suggested that if Microsoft sent a sales rep around to shit on peoples lawns, it would take at most a year until they start defending it as the inevitable cost of technological progress.
No matter how slow and bloated the GitHub web UI gets, or how many nonsense anti-features Microsoft stuffs into it. People will accept it and find funny excuses (network effect will be the main one).
Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash
#79I wonder if the PM responsible for this will be held accountable. Who should resign?
I'm guessing the answers will be predictable and disappointing.
Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash
#80Calling advertisements "product tips" as if everybody is too stupid to understand what that means. They created an amazing technology that oftentimes is indistinguishable from magic and then use it to deliver ads and - sorry about the tangent - kill people. This really is the quote of the century: > The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads What a waste.
And nobody has ever bought anything just because of an ad. You either already knew about shit through some other way or you were going to buy it anyway. Only people downvoting this will be the ones who perpetuate this Emperor With No Clothes racket. It's just a thin veil for surveillance.
People buy things because of ads all the time. Probably you've done it too.
I go out of my way not to buy products advertised to me, but I've definitely fallen to the incessant brain-washing of brand advertising. Probably regular advertising too depending what you include as adverts.
I was surprised speaking to someone the other day, just out and about. They'd purposefully gone out to buy doughnuts they'd seen advertised. Kinda shook me. They seemed happy as Larry about it all though.