Probably not exactly what you're looking for, but Warp (a new terminal client) has "AI Code Search" built in that's powered by GPT-3. Quite useful for someone like me who tends to avoid the terminal when I can.
Integrating into a shell, for immediate execution, seems very very dangerous. You still need to carefully test/scrutinize everything that comes from copilot.
Please stop assuming everyone shares your values and beliefs. Personally, I think that while there is some mismanagement at Facebook (that can be fixed) most of the issues brought up can probably be expected from anyone in this problem space at this scale. Facebook has allowed me to discover a lot of opportunities and connect with some long lost friends, so I would say the cost is worth it.
I do agree with this part of the statement from the company:
"If any research had identified an exact solution to these complex challenges, the tech industry, governments, and society would have solved them a long time ago." The social costs of social media are complex, and solutions are not obvious. Unfortunately it's likely that if the companies can't meaningfully address these problems on their own, congress will attempt to, and the results of that the companies may not find to their liking.
If you're trying to optimize for engagement AND avoid rewarding divisive content or misinformation, then yeah, that's complex and maybe impossible.
But as Haugen points out in her 60 Minutes interview, they don't _have_ to optimize for engagement above all else. They have tools to drive down divisiveness and disinformation. They just choose to leave them turned off most of the time.
There is no need for any unified Point of View. From UX changes ( stop showing like/view counts) there are a ton of things a platform can do if they don't want to optimize for engagement, it will be financially damaging to do so, their revenue and stock price will drop no company will do it, but it not a hard problem technically.
Optimizing for engagement inevitably leads to toxic and unhealthy ecosystem sooner or later.
Issues with facebook and the right wing becoming more extreme long before Trump became mainstream ( perhaps it was always there). There was lot of concern noise during the early Tea Party movement in 2010s. There was a lot of toxic content when Obama became president.
Facebook started as tool to rate looks of female students in Harvard , I don't think there was ever a time when Facebook was not toxic.
The ecosystem seems pretty healthy... are users leaving?
It seems that there is a subset of the populace whose opinions you disagree with and want FB to stop serving those users. If female users didn't want to be rated, why would they post photos and encourage people to 'like' them? It seems FB/IG has found a set of users who want to rate photos and a set of users who want to upload photos to be rated. How is this 'toxic'?
healthy in the context emotionally/ mentally for the user.
It is toxic when said users are teenagers and pre-teens, that is the whole point of all the Instagram / Facebook public discourse recently .
At that age as a society we have decided they cannot take certain decisions on their own, which is why Sex, Alcohol, Marriage , Content with Rating PG/R, admission to certain venues, etc are all regulated.
idk. If you found out that your product is harmful, I would expect you to stop producing it. This is the case for every other consumer products except maybe cigarettes and alcohol. For example, if they find out a car is not safe, they pull it of the market at the very least, sometimes they even issue a recall. Why do we not hold social media products to the same standards?
Cars and Social Media is pretty hard to compare, but I’ll give it a shot:
The equivalent here is not that a company produces cars, and that cars are dangerous. The equivalence is more in the line of a specific car manufacturer makes a car which they know is more dangerous to a subset of their customers, but still continue to push it to them.
Nissan knows that the Versa is more dangerous to their customers than, let's say, a Mercedes S500. Should Nissan then stop pushing the Versa in order to protect customers?
I'm sure this argument is along the lines of what Facebook employees must tell each other so they can sleep at night.
But let's be clear, Nissan is making a car that is as safe as they can make it for consumers at a certain price point. Safer than riding a small motorbike. Safer than crossing a road. Or many other alternatives. They're enabling and empowering consumers that can't afford better cars to have some measure of mobility and safety.
Facebook, on the other hand, designs features to manipulate emotions and harm consumers. Make them feel bad, stay engaged, worry more, buy more. They ran the numbers. As long as the increase in suicide count is under a certain threshold, it's not a big deal for them.
>allowed me to discover a lot of opportunities and connect with some long lost friends, so I would say the cost is worth it.
This value that they are providing should not necessitate the wholesale pillaging of user data. My data is worth way more to me than a simple weblog service. These thieves are trading trinkets for land and the natives just don't realize how valuable their land actually is. (hint - it is worth way more than FB charges their advertisers)
Facebook was awesome in the first few years, when the feed was merely a chronological timeline of your friends’ status updates and photos. Then, they started putting crap in the News Feed that users didn’t explicitly subscribe to, down-ranked updates by actual friends, and made it far too easy for people to amplify garbage via the Share button.
The problem is not that Facebook exists; it’s that they wrested control from their users and assigned it to themselves and their advertisers.
I think the point is that if it's that expensive, some other alternative is likely to win. There are other meat substitutes, which are already having some success.
Expensive technologies win a lot of market share only if no other alternative can work, and even then their use will be minimized.
It's actually smarter than the slavery statement. Slavery wasn't just cruel and sick; it was also economic insanity, the biggest waste of potential in at least America's history. People, educated, free and motivated to innovate, are our greatest asset.
(Innovations do break through, of course, even from people denied those things. But even the richest elites would be better of if nobody had to overcome those barriers.)
Such drama. We've evolved over millions of years brains so large that we now think that eating food is murder. Our "monkey" ancestors are laughing at us.
I am so glad this exists, and take every opportunity to encourage friends and family to switch to it and avoid alternatives from companies with exploitative and unfair business models (like Adobe.)
Presumably the verification that these false matches are not problematic is manual?
That's not good enough given how our media currently works. Imagine articles published when information about such a check leaks that say "celebrity X's phone checked by police for suspected CSAM." While that is the truth ("suspected") no one cares about that nuance and such a person would get cancelled very quickly, even if there was no evidence of wrongdoing.
As soon as ad supported free services start shutting down because of ad blocking and lowered clickthrough rates on ads because of targeting being blocked, most people will probably start changing their minds. (The alternative being maintaining 10-20+ paid subscriptions.) For now, all this change means is that users who are opted-in to tracking are subsidising those who aren't.
How about tracking back to content related advertising rather than tracking based advertising? All related studies are showing that the latter isn't working anyway. And, as these metrics (and ethics) suggest, it has been an illegitimate invasion, right from the beginning. The fancy "conversion rate" dashboards are just not worth it.
Bonus: Maybe this will be an opportunity for content providers to reset the decline of advertising prices that has happened over the last decade. (Remember the blooming blogger scene in the 2000s, when you could still make substantial revenues? Remember the thriving online news papers? We could get back there, if advertising became less invasive and less aggressive and also more profitable for content providers, e.g., how it had been in print.)
> All related studies are showing that the latter isn't working anyway.
This is very common on HN these days - stating something with a lot of confidence that turns out to be some self-constructed mental model that has nothing to do with reality. Then, add the obligatory "all related studies are showing it" and you have met the publishing standards.
Legally or illegally, morally or immorally, for better or worse, Facebook has created the most sophisticated ad targeting engine the world has ever seen. You want proof? Look at their financial statements. You want more proof? Look at all the companies that went public on the back of Facebook's ad targeting engine. Again, perhaps it shouldn't exist in the first place, but trust me, it works.
Disclaimer: I studied media theory and publishing, but well before the Web became the all-decisive factor. Meaning, I have some idea about those things and have still an interest in them. (Also, I actually programmed ad embedding mechanisms for ad networks, but quit this field, when things became too invasive and ads too aggressive and I couldn't justify this any longer. – At this time, tracking was commonly done for multistage campaigns only.)
That said, I've never come upon a study that showed significant gains due to targeting, rather to the contrary. – So, after a decade, I'm still waiting for any proof in favor of targeting. (The suspicion must be still that targeting is rather a lazy alternative to media analysis and its perceived advantage is rather rooted in minimising efforts than in effectiveness.)
Regarding "Facebook has created the most sophisticated ad targeting engine", this is a rather biased proposition. It has enforced Facebook as a broker, made advertising cheap, while less effective, and has driven ad revenues for content providers downhill. (Google is to blame, as well.)
* There is a pervasive belief on HN that marketing teams are making easy errors, i.e. there is low hanging fruit
* Consultancies that improve marketing campaign efficacy make lots of money
* HN users are making small fractions of that money and constantly complaining about it
* Any HN user capable of picking this low hanging fruit could do this for two years and retire for life
* They are not
* Conclusion: Either there is no low hanging fruit, or the HN users observing this are making millions of dollars, or these HN users do not care for money at all and get greater utility from complaining about money.
Maybe, there's a biased view in ad business and some of the perceived benefits and effects are rather tautological? (This is why we have studies.)
You could also conclude from your remarks that there is a pervasive idea around ad teams that former generations (in the times of media analysis) were just delivering complete failures. However, this model had delivered for more than a century. How could this model perform with todays instruments and data?
The best thing about startups is that they test questions like that in a way that these studies can't. Because the participants have a very real and strong incentive to succeed they will perform that continuous search and hypothesis adjustment till they hit gold or die. If you truly have a Thiel hypothesis, you're going to get very rich.
In software, we call this "talk is cheap; show me the code", but of course here you don't need to show me the code. It's just that you're letting this golden opportunity go to waste. Up to you, I guess.
The problem being only that these startups are still acting in the bubble of common beliefs of the field. So these are actually testing the beliefs, not their real-world effectiveness. (Also, at this stage, you have to comply and conform to the delivery networks right from the very beginning with little chance of competing with the big, established ones.)
Edit: Moreover, you had to compete with the paradigm of low effort, high interchangeability and big data. (Meaning: interchangeable code, interchangeable users, interchangeable professionals, interchangeable clients, and lean know-how stack as it's "all in the data". While this adheres to criteria of optimization, it doesn't necessarily mean that it represents an optimum of effectiveness, as well.)
Alternative conclusion: as with all things in a capitalist society, there is a small minority of people that is killing it, and they are not making it easy for everyone else to discover their playbooks.
That doesn’t work because we’re assuming that most marketers are making easy mistakes. The playbook is so simple that people on HN could write it, supposedly.
> That doesn’t work because we’re assuming that most marketers are making easy mistakes. The playbook is so simple that people on HN could write it, supposedly.
Those are someone else's words, not mine. I never argued that winning on Facebook is "easy" (and for the record, neither is it on Google). It's not easy, it's just doable. And for those who have the skills and resources to do it, it's massively profitable. I would even argue that if you're letting an agency run your Google or Facebook account, you're lacking the resources to do it right. What you need is top-level talent competing against your nearest competitors, and winning battles inch by inch. An agency will never give you the talent you need to go up against a company that just raised $100m and is running their performance marketing in-house (and if you don't have such a competitor, then you're either smarter than anyone else in the world, or simply not pursuing a VC-investable market).
So no, it's not easy at all. But it's doable and totally worth it.
Call it what you want, the outcome is the same. You want to say [A], but before you say it, you have to start with [B] just not to get the conversation derailed by call-it-what-you-wants. And it turns out, the call-it-what-you-wants are still going to do their thing, pretending this is Reddit.
Would you mind to elaborate? I am genuinely wondering if you're a troll or if I am mistaken in my argument. To summarize, I responded to the claim below that Facebook's ad platform is ineffective:
> All related studies are showing that the latter isn't working anyway.
I pointed out that Facebook wouldn't be profitable if the ad platform is ineffective, and you called that argument fallacious. I am really curious to hear what's fallacious about it.
I guess we have to define effective. Is it effective from the consumer point of view? That might be a long discussion, and we might assume that a world without advertising might be the most effective way to live your life, etc. But is it effective from the advertisers' point of view? Unless you want to call 5+ million marketing teams around the world total idiots, you have to assume that they are meeting or exceeding their ROAS targets and therefore pouring a lot of money into Facebook.
> It just means that Facebook is good at selling ads, whether they are effective or not.
Facebook doesn't sell ads. Marketers choose to sign up and spend money, because their jobs depend on being able to achieve ROAS targets. Contrary to popular belief, the world of marketing is very quantified and apart from experimental budgets, most of the money is spent on channels that are proven to work.
But without getting any deeper into all of this, I think I found my answer - it appears that at least a subsegment of people on HN believe that over 100BN of ad dollars (25% of overall digital ad market) is spent on Facebook in an unprofitable way, and that 5 million marketing teams get away with it, year after year. Hence, it's possible for Facebook to achieve great financial results without their ad platform being effective.
If that's your takeaway, then I think you need to read this thread again.
1) Nobody is saying that ads aren't profitable or that marketers are throwing money out the window because they are stupid. The discussion is about whether invasive user tracking is effective. Ads can be profitable even though user tracking is ineffective.
2) This thread also is mostly about your very weak argument. You wrote:
> Facebook has created the most sophisticated ad targeting engine the world has ever seen. You want proof? Look at their financial statements.
That's just not a good argument. Who knows, maybe Facebooks tracking really is the best thing in the world, but the fact that Facebook is raking in loads of cash on its own tells us very little about how effective their user tracking is.
You're just confused about how marketing works. The fact that you're dissociating tracking sophistication from performance tells me all I need to know. To learn more, dig a bit into the iOS14 impact on the Facebook performance results.
Indeed, maybe it's about time advertisers got back to sponsoring quality content their target audience enjoys, rather than direct marketing through the back door on the lowest common denominator.
Still not sure why that didn't become predominant. Dynamic content based ads seemed to be the new fad in late 00's, then it kinda disappeared, with user tracking becoming the norm.
Tracking is necessary for the advertising economy to control bad behavior on the part of publishers and advertisers, not just to serve targeted ads.
No matter what there would be discrepancies in the numbers (publisher says it sent 75 clicks, advertiser says it got 70) and that breeds mistrust. Participants have a reason to lie. Having multiple third party watch the whole thing helps them trust each other.
This has been possible before. Google was built around content based advertising. Also, maybe click-through rates are not that important? Maybe exposure is a more decisive metric? As a side-effect, we may reduce social bubble effects and maybe even return to a shared reality? (Many of the unwanted effects of the Web are really due to targeted advertising and its consequences.)
You're clearly under the impression that all that Facebook does is get you good click-through rates and low conversion rates. Similarly, you're under the impression that Google's conversion rates are through the roof. Did you ever stop to ask yourself if your world view might be limited to a small sample size (eg: your own experiences)? I know plenty of businesses where the conversion rates are exactly the opposite of what you described. It turns out, the right marketing platform is related to the product you're selling. For example, if you want to buy a vacuum, Google will do a great job in connecting you with the right advertiser. But what if you just started a new hobby and don't yet know what it is that you need in that hobby? Eg, you started racing, but have no idea that upgrading your suspension will get you more performance than upgrading your exhaust? The advertiser selling suspension components will use Facebook to share this information with you (and Facebook will do a much better job than Google of identifying the person who needs that component but doesn't know it yet), and they will also advertise on Google as well, but Google will only be relevant once the buyer starts researching suspension solutions. Kind of nice to be the first one to pitch a suspension solution to a willing buyer, don't you think?
On the other hand, if I'm not on FB, I probably miss those vendors of suspension components all together. Advertising "in the bubble", as opposed to "in the world", comes with its disadvantages. With content based advertising (media analysis), you'll probably catch me at the related watering holes and communities. Also, excluding non-targeted audiences doesn't exactly benefit a shared world view.
P.S.: The general idea of targeted advertising misses the concepts of state of mind and focus of interest entirely. There's a (significant) difference in delivering a message in context and out of context. (The latter may have even adversarial effects.)
> Advertising "in the bubble", as opposed to "in the world"
Is this an argument for the open web, or is this an argument for Google being more popular than Facebook? If the former, I am with you. If the latter, the gap is not as big as you might think - 4 billion worldwide users of Google Search vs 2.85 for Facebook [1]. Slight advantage to Google, but how many US advertisers really care about international buyers? When it comes to advertising, you want people with money burning holes in their pockets. Facebook's financial results show that they plenty of access to this demographic.
> The general idea of targeted advertising misses the concepts of state of mind and focus of interest entirely. There's a (significant) difference in delivering a message in context and out of context.
You're slightly lagging with this argument. This exact reason was why Google was so dismissive of paid social back in the formative years of Facebook ("who gives a shit about what college students talk about on social networks?"). And then the oh shit moment happened in 2011. Eric Schmidt had to step down and Larry Page tied bonus payouts to the success of Google Plus. You have to give Larry some credit here - while a bit slower than Zuck, he did see the writing on the wall before the rest of the world did. If you tried advertising on both platform in 2011, Google would just crush you with their results. By 2016, Facebook was already competitive with their interest and lookalike targeting for a large group of advertisers (and even enabled Trump to win the presidency), and by 2018 the game had advanced to the new concept of "creative targeting" which is basically entirely driven by the algorithm and takes minimal targeting input from advertisers. At that point, paid social became so good that it got creepy and turned the public sentiment to negative and incentivized Apple to jump on the band wagon with iOS 14.
So I wouldn't agree with your argument that Facebook has a fundamental problem with recognizing intent. If anything, they are too good at it for their own sake.
I wouldn't pose this as FB vs Google. Google is dealing intrinsic conversion metrics, as well, which are highly problematic regarding the total impact. (So, Google is yet another, while maybe broader bubble.)
On a historical note, as it turned out G+ was soon scrapped and quite a loss, while we're dealing still with the fallout of Google's uniform platform strategy, which was put in place to provide for G+.
Some kind of verification is necessary for impression-based advertising too.
For instance, there are discontents around Nielsen (they've had scandals in India, and I infuriate people in the TV industry with the suggestion that a Nielsen home got bribed to blast MTV in an empty room) but the participants believe in Nielsen: people know probability-based sampling basically works.
P.S.: An interesting experiment may be an ad-blocker with an option "block animated ads and tracking only" (or rather, "show static ads only"). And maybe another option "filter ads to greyscale".
I guess, reducing distraction and moving towards a client-based and user-controlled "ads manager" may have a decisive impact on overall blocking habits.
This is not destroying the whole concept of ads, it is only pushing back against awful variants.
It is definitely possible to have “nice” ads, like simple text or images, with no creepy or CPU-draining elements in them. Nothing is preventing those ads from supporting free services.
However, the reason companies looking to place ads, will choose modern-adtech-platform-X (Google, Facebook, etc.) over traditional advertising medium Y (billboards, TV, etc.) is that the former promises to be more targeted (using the ad”tech”) than the latter, such that there’s higher value-per-click or value-per-impression.
Without that promise, there’s no reason to favor advertising on these platforms over other platforms. Which, if you flip it around, means that there’s no reason that these platforms should be valued in excess of the traditional-advertising-impression-value of their MAU. (Which is, to be clear, a lot lower than the value these companies currently have!)
Many companies are prohibited from doing stuff that they would profit from. I am sure soda companies would love to be able to add heroin to their products etc. However, maximizing random companies profits isn’t societies only concern.
My point wasn't so much about maximizing profits; it was more that these free-service companies might not even be tenable (at least at their current scales, or anything like them) with the drastically lower profit-margins of traditional ad impressions.
The GP comment said:
> Nothing is preventing those ads from supporting free services.
And my thought is, a zero-or-negative profit margin might very well be. It costs a lot to run Google/Facebook/etc. — probably a lot more than it costs to run the types of services they compete with. For the companies to not go bankrupt, their ad clicks/impressions need to be of at least as much value as their CapEx+OpEx. With adtech type ads, they certainly are at least that valuable. With only traditional type ads, would they still be?
I'm not arguing that these companies should be allowed to do this because they have some fundamental right to exist, mind you. Just pointing out that taking adtech out of the equation could "pop the bubble" drive margins negative, and just erase the whole free-ad-supported-services market entirely.
(Consider: why don't traditional-ads companies offer free web services supported by said traditional ads? Is it only because nobody cares about buying placement with them when targeted placements are available from Google/Facebook/etc.? Or is it because, even with full dealflow, it's still negative-margin?)
Tracking doesn’t actually add that much to how much they can sell advertising for. As to traditional advertising companies it’s simply a question of competence, you may as well ask why they don’t sell vacuum cleaners.
> Without that promise, there’s no reason to favor advertising on these platforms over other platforms.
Precisely. Instead, there will (again) be reason to favor advertising on high quality content.
Redistribution of income away from ad platforms and content spam mills to original journalism and high-quality entertainment would be an unambiguous win for society.
Yes! So money will flow back to magazine ads, billboards, radio, tv, and other media that has seen money flow away the last decades. Because their untargeted ad model is now not much worse.
Consider how much profit a company like facebook makes. Ad value could take drop a lot and they'd still be a viable company. They's lose, but from a societal perspective I'd argue that probably a positive.
That used to be all they did. You'd see a lot of "of course I block all ads—except Google's, they're fine".
They also didn't used to trick unsophisticated or distracted users into clicking ads by putting them inline with search results.
Both changed, I assume, when someone was allowed to run an experiment and the projected profit trend line went from "exceptionally good" to "holy shit, it's all the money in the world". And all it took was being evil. Go figure.
Some tie this to internal fallout from the the DoubleClick acquisition, which checks out pretty well timeline-wise.
And we don't even know if their measurement is right--they probably got a high rate at first because people weren't used to them and were deceived. As people wise up the effectiveness will drop.
All the non-tech-nerds I see use phones or computers hit the inline ads at a very high rate. As in, on most searches. They do not realize they are ads, mostly, or do but aren't paying attention.
I think the OP meant AdSense (now Google Ads), which is when publishers display ads from Google's advertiser inventory. Those are a combination of text-only or banner ads. Although I mostly see banner ads on the rare occasions I turn off my adblocker.
Actually your sibling's comment made me realise that you were talking about the old style of ads in web pages.
Within the Google search itself, I was surprised by the number of ads that are disguised as search results. It's grown significantly. Now I have to scroll to get real results...
I've thought about this a lot, but the stumbling block for me is getting services onboard.
The problem is that subscription services make billions annually on forgotten subscriptions. None of them want an easy "disable" slider next to their name in a convenient app. It also makes à la carte subing easy, where you sub for a month every few months to "catch up".
Basically, good luck getting an API with an easy unsubscribe command from any subscription based service.
I think that this happens to be the case now, but is not an intrinsic property of humans. I think that we're living in an age where most consumers have been "programmed" to expect things for no financial cost and only a privacy cost.
The key word here is "programmed" - and what has been programmed can be deprogrammed. I honestly believe that we can re-rehabilitate people to no longer automatically give away their privacy for a service, and instead consciously and carefully assess the financial cost vs. utility of a service.
This could lead to both a reduction in the amount of available services (as smaller ones go out of business because people realized that it wasn't really worth it for them) and an increase in the number of services people are actually willing to pay real money for.
Also, if the subscriptions were far cheaper (say, $2/month), I think that 20 concurrent subscriptions would be acceptable to many people.
If sites can’t fund their content with ads based information I’m willing to give up, then they can beg me for money, or charge for the content, or beg me to look at ads or whatever. But I want that transaction to be transparent and deliberate. And I don’t care if 90% of content online just disappears because we click the privacy button. Then it was never a viable business model to begin with.
> Then it was never a viable business model to begin with.
I think there's much more evidence to the contrary than there is for your position.
Facebook is absurdly, staggeringly profitable. Uber and WeWork by comparison are the BS business models, needing to break local laws and requiring nation-state levels of VC backing and still nowhere near profitability.
I didn’t mean “it doesn’t work” I mean it only works because one end of the transaction doesn’t really understand what they are paying, and if they did - they wouldn’t. That’s not viable. It’s similar to a business model that relies on people mistyping a search term or forgetting to cancel a subscription. It only “works” (is profitable) because of the lack of transparency
Ad account managers do not care about impressions that the FB application reports (unless they're Coca-Cola or J&J). They care about the actual conversions, i.e. sales. Those are happening on their internal ecommerce platform, so those aren't stats FB can juice. You can see where the converting traffic is coming from.
If FB's targeting wasn't working, then nobody would have a reason to move away from paying Google and Bing to post ads on search results. FB and Google now own the online ads market, and FB got there in well under a decade.
It seems that the news is only appealing to people when it's free. In part that's because it's competing with a lot of other things that are free -- including "news" subsidized by those who want to influence what news you consume.
People really like free. When it's there, it will tend to suck the air out of almost everything else. Including things that are almost-but-not-quite-free.
I don't know. I think when ad supported free services start shutting down people will move on with their lives. We'll find out instead how really unimportant Facebook, etc. was in people's lives. Put another way, how on earth did people get along without Facebook before there was a Facebook?
I'm reminded of a comment from the guy that created the TV-B-Gone. He would turn off TV's in public places like self-service laundromats, etc. He said he was surprised by the general reaction of those that had just recently been transfixed by the flickering 60Hz cathode glow. Mostly they just turned away form the TV and went back to quiet thoughts or whatever.
It was like the TV could go away and people would be like, "okay".
This might just be me, but I've always found that TVs in public have this weird pull to them. Even if I have no feelings at all about what's on the screen (a soap opera I've never seen?) my gaze is still repeatedly drawn to it. If there's one around I generally try to position myself so it's not in my peripheral vision or I have to spend some effort ignoring it. It feels like whatever it is that keeps kids, as we say, "glued to the screen" doesn't always go away in adulthood.
I would definitely find it relieving if someone showed up with a TV-B-Gone and clicked it off.
You seem to think it’s a bad thing. I’d argue “Free” products destroy innovation. It’s extremely hard to beat gmail or Facebook without massive VC funding.
Yes, and just to underline your use of quote marks there, those "free" products aren't even remotely free. You're just paying with a different currency, and -- in my view -- it's absurdly expensive.
1) People want the services more than they value their privacy. Maybe they'll just not use the service if they can't use it without tracking
2) That invasive tracking is required to sell ads. The media industry made billions (trillions?) of revenue from ads before tracking became a thing.
3) That platform ads are the only way to make services that are free for consumers. For example, Vimeo offers an ad free video delivery service that the content creator pays for. If Youtube was no longer free, maybe content creators would just pay for content delivery instead of having consumers indirectly pay for deliver with ads. Content creators have no issue selling ads / sponsorships without any tracking whatsoever. The result would be the same as now (content free for consumers) only that now non-targeted ads would pay for everything.
4) And finally, you are assuming that targeting via tracking actually works well enough to make it worthwhile. From what I've read, ad targeting is nowhere near as good as Facebook et al would have advertisers believe. Maybe invading your users privcy just doesn't make such a big difference in the end.
Mark my words: as soon as the world starts to turn their back on advertisement, there will be several micropayement unicorns flourishing in the next 6 months.
20+ paid subscriptions make no sense, but checking a box with your ISP to get a 2 USD monthly credit to use on the articles you click on, could work.
> As soon as ad supported free services start shutting down because of ad blocking and lowered clickthrough rates on ads because of targeting being blocked, most people will probably start changing their minds.
Or they'll just go outside and find better uses for their time.
Or these ad companies could come up with ways of making money that people don't want to block.
I despise ads, and generally approve of anything that makes ad companies sweat, but it didn't have to be that way. We are where we are because those ad companies have a sociopathically disrespectful attitude towards the people whose attention they need. With tactics like auto-playing videos, popovers, animated ads, and hideously obtrusive design, it was simply inevitable that people would try to get rid of that garbage. That approach to advertising is borne of greed and laziness, and it deserves to fail.
But there are tech blogs I read that do not adopt that approach. They have small, tasteful, non-animated ads. They don't need to violate my privacy to have a good idea of the kinds of things I'd be interested in; the fact that I'm on a tech blog means I'm more receptive to ads for tech-related tools and services. The people who run these sites have more respect for their visitors, so they choose a more respectful approach to ads.
Like I said: most companies' approach to ads is rooted in abject contempt for the people they need. If your business strategy is based on treating people badly, you have no grounds to complain when they decide not to put up with that anymore. You can either whine about how unfair it is and fail, or you can identify an approach that is appealing enough to be sustainable.
This could be a chance for that much-vaunted market-force-shaped innovation. Facebook's current strategy—whining—suggests they're still stuck in the old way of thinking: greed and laziness.
This sums up my thoughts perfectly. I would add a comment--all of the anti-apple voices in the article talk only about the poor business that will be hurt. The never talk about the benefit or drawback to the people being tracked. Their approach can be summed up as "we have a right to this data and telling people about our tracking and asking if it is alright with them is not alright." So businesses have rights but individuals don't.
Personally, I hope things like this start to kill off the "free internet." I'd much rather pay for the things that I use.
Or people will realize the service isn't as valuable as what's being charged. No one asked for 80% of facebooks features, it could be run/maintained by a much smaller team.
So much this. All I wanted was a simple way to share pics and updates with family and friends. Instead, I got an anal probe and mind control. Seriously, it is harder and harder to actually find my family and friends on their convoluted mess of a site.
It's hard to know what the Web, social media, and tech generally might look like if the spyvertising money-spigot gets shut off. Paid and fully-free-and-open alternatives to spying-paid "free" services & content are nearly impossible in the former case, and discouraging to participate or work on in the latter, in the current environment. There may be other models, too, that are in some sense better or preferable, or at least acceptable or sufficient, but currently not viable.
I loose no sleep if these products go paid only and facebook loses its influence massively and with it their ability to censor and manipulate information and our elections.
The problem with this kind of thinking is that if Cable TV is any indication, things that start as subscription services will slowly begin to double-dip and you'll be paying money upfront and watching ads anyway.
