This is a great article. I remember reading this a few years ago during my undergrad- my big takeaway from it was that sometimes you will encounter bugs which you can't solve alone. I always assumed any error I came across was my fault, but that's not good (it's also not good to just assume it's someone else's). Fixing problems in an organization is often a team effort that requires good communication and incentive for improvement- not just one genius coder that knows the whole source code.
True, but what does "writing code" mean? If it means learning some basic JavaScript syntax and writing a small text adventure, that isn't hard at all. Learning the mathematical fundamentals of CS on the other hand is a great deal harder, and getting up to speed with what technologies are considered standard is extremely difficult.
Many, if not most, software jobs require very little CS knowledge. At such jobs the ability to compare numbers and read a chart (a matrix of algorithms and data structures vs. time vs. space complexity) will cover almost every possible use case.
"Mid-level development as a skilled trade" jobs, for example.
Right. Most programming jobs aren't asking for 5+ years experience in <some language/framework/library> because they're looking for someone who knows how to balance a red-black tree, they're looking for someone who already knows all the workarounds and kludges you'll need to know to do the work they want you to do.
Learning a programming language is relatively easy. Knowing which of several libraries that offer similar features is the right one for your particular task takes time.
I think the immediate purpose of this article is not necessarily to mobilize the average joes to collectively demand better security law. Mobilizing the average joes is less a problem of theory and more a widespread organizational effort. To have that effort in the first place though, you need people willing to take a leadership role who deeply understand the theory behind their actions.
Probably not at all. Facebook's collective desire for higher engagement and profit will likely outweigh any concern for individual or collective users.
I hear what you're saying, but from a slightly different angle. I wonder if the profit motive creates a conflict of interest the same way that corporate news tends towards bias to satisfy advertisers.
I am thinking of exiting Facebook for at least a couple of months because my posts/shares (which tend to have a political slant or at least broader perspective to them) don't seem to get any reaction or be shared anymore. Neither do music, alternative culture, or sustainability/environmental posts.
If Facebook is unable to give people the dignity to fail at debating one another and be challenged by new ideas, then that may not be compatible with democracy. I hope they fix whatever is going on with their feed algorithm, and maybe 3000 people training AIs will help, but I wonder if the problem isn't technology.
I think some alternatives do exist, but I do not believe an near exact clone of Facebook with less of the problems of Facebook exists.
Maybe it's just infeasible to properly monitor such a massive social network? I don't know for sure, but I left Facebook long ago and have not regretted it at all.
I think this article doesn't go far enough with its championing of blocking certain ads. All ads should be blocked and web services which rely on them should find a better way of sustaining themselves profitably.
The malicious nature of ads is not new. Ads have always been infested with malware, tracking, and hideous graphics. Taken to their logical extreme (as Facebook has done), ads can also manipulate users to a degree far more dangerous than a TV or radio ad could. Ads are just the surface of a much deeper problem with the Internet, which is that most massive web services are paid for with user data rather than a mutually agreed upon price.
As far as I'm concerned, there is no reason to willingly view an advertisement to support a useful service. This amounts to a donation which you are not really in control of. Just circumvent the ad and buy from the company or send them money if you value their services.
So, say goodby to google? No thanks. I don't have money to pay for every service I want. Advertising allows people with no means to use the internet, and this value is worth more to society as a whole than ads. Yes let's kill malicious ads, but throwing the baby out with the bath water isn't good sense.
> Advertising allows people with no means to use the internet, and this value is worth more to society as a whole than ads.
Community efforts would step up in a big way if there weren't free spy-vertising services making them seem pointless. Or yeah, paid options. Maybe even profitable but non-behemoth businesses built on human-vetted static ads with minimal targeting, which might be valuable again if invasive targeting weren't an option and we stopped letting companies dodge responsibility for serving malware/scam ads just because waaaaaah paying humans to look at things is expensive and we don't wanna.
Google the massive company making enormous amounts of money abusing near-monopoly status and human dignity and throwing that money chaotically into dozens of sometimes-neat-but-destined-to-be-used-to-spy-on-people side projects? Yeah, that'd be gone.
That's a bit of a lofty statement with no accompanying argument whatsoever. I think current technology has been wholly negative on society.
>I don't have money to pay for every service I want
So you've decided to exchange your personal data and (in some cases) your computers safety to use them on credit? Maybe you should rethink that. Also, there are services you can use which exist which do not sustain themselves with advertisements.
That's a bit of a lofty statement with no accompanying argument whatsoever. I think current technology has been wholly negative on society.
In all fairness, you didn't provide any either. Most things have a mixed outcome, some good and some bad. It can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So you've decided to exchange your personal data and (in some cases) your computers safety to use them on credit? Maybe you should rethink that. Also, there are services you can use which exist which do not sustain themselves with advertisements.
The safety counts for very little if advertising-free web browsing means you aren't truly using the internet.Sure, those services exist, but the free ones are few. HN wouldn't be very usable, for example, if I refused to click on sites that happen to have advertisements.
So yes, between being short on cash and wanting to actually get use out of the internet - including being able to easily and cheaply talk to my family overseas - I'll deal with it. Something else might be right for you, and that's fine.
> So you've decided to exchange your personal data and (in some cases) your computers safety to use them on credit?
And in way too many cases, it's more than worth it!
We could have better ads, that don't require any privacy or safety loss from our side, and blocking ads does set things the way they need to be for those ads to appear. But no, I can't agree that ads are inherently bad.
I don't enjoy ads either, but we have decades of precedent at this point where the vast majority of things and services on the Internet are free. We've come to expect it. And the arms race between users and ad revenue has been going on nearly as long.
What it comes down to is people want it all for nothing. And that shapes the world we live in. The Internet is the way it is because that's the way we want it. We as a group of consumers have proven for decades we're not willing to pay for every sort of thing.
As a result we've shown ourselves more than willing to be the product and then grumble about it. But so long as things are still free we can just imagine a utopia where everyone pays enough to or enough people pay to keep things where we want them.
However the market has already shown us who we really are, like it or not. And if you disagree, well welcome to the high minded minority or the deluded minority(probably majority).
Most of us won't think twice about dropping $5 on a shitty Starbucks coffee, but won't pay $5 for something super useful like Google search which we use every day multiple times. But on the other hand, most of these services don't even try selling a service instead of monetizing via ads, as they have trained their users to expect everything for free on the internet. So maybe people would pay, if there is a choice?
What if there is a way to pay $5/month each for Facebook, Twitter, Google Search etc in return for no tracking, no ads, so selling of data etc. FB has one billion users, if just 50M of them pay $5 per month, that is $3B in revenue per year. This 50M people can subsidize the rest of the users, who can't/won't afford $5 and are willing to see ads.
It doesn't work like that. Companies have already tried (see: Google Contributor) with very limited success. The reality is that you're heavily in the minority of people who care about tracking and privacy and ads. There's no market for it, and the largest analogous service, YouTube Red, explicitly needs to offer exclusive content and access to streaming media just to entice people.
> there is no reason to willingly view an advertisement to support a useful service
How about when the service can not exist otherwise? Even if you were willing to pay for it, many others might not be. If the value of the service is heavily based on network effects, the result is a network too small to reach the break-even point. I'm not saying you should view ads you don't want to, but demanding that people provide a free service you find useful while denying them any realistic way to pay for that service seems bit too entitled for me.
>How about when the service can not exist otherwise?
Then maybe it shouldn't exist in the first place. If your business model relies on feeding users ad technology known to be unsafe, undesirable, and disrespectful to users' freedom, it's not worth patronizing. There are plenty of web services not supported by advertisement. This is not a case where "if it ain't broke don't fix it" is acceptable. The current system of sustaining webservices is broken and outdated.
> If your business model relies on feeding users ad technology known to be unsafe, undesirable, and disrespectful to users' freedom, it's not worth patronizing.
You are conflating specific negative aspects of the current advertising landscape with advertising in general.
"Advertising" covers a large spectrum of actions, from the sign above the corner store in a neighborhood saying its name to complex analysis of online behavior, personal traits and current disposition to influence your actions. There are both positive and negative aspects of online and offline advertising. Oversimplification of the description and overly broad statements based on that simplification aren't really useful to a beneficial change.
When I see evidence of the advertising industry working hard to eliminate dark patterns and junk I'll take that argument seriously. Advertising is not a benign or neutral commercial activity, it has huge externalities which most of its proponents prefer to ignore.
I'm not at all, because I'm not talking about advertising in general. I'm aware of what advertising is. I'm talking specifically about the same kind of advertising that the article posted is.
You responded to something about advertising in general ("How about when the service can not exist otherwise?") with something about specific negative advertising practices. Regardless of what the article is about, is seems the comment you replied to was talking about advertising in general (and was itself responding to a comment referring to advertising in general).
I don't think we're going to get very far if we aren't talking about the same thing.
> If your business model relies on feeding users ad technology known to be unsafe, undesirable, and disrespectful to users' freedom...
You're begging the question. The point of the article is saying that advertising should be fixed. You're saying advertising shouldn't be fixed because services shouldn't be using advertising because advertising is broken.
So how are you going to be able to determine when advertising is 'fixed'? It's already known that ad services track users and occasionally install malware on their machines. Will the ads simply become more pleasant-looking while becoming more nefarious, or will they actually be more respectful of users' freedoms? How will you know which is occurring? Also, are you seriously going to stop blocking ads periodically to see if you should keep blocking ads? I think asking or hoping the ad networks to be more polite is more than a little naive.
You put a lot of words in my mouth. I'm saying Internet advertising is broken to the point where there is no reasonable hope of fixing it. I'm saying even if advertising were "fixed", simply paying for services would be a better move. I'm not saying advertisement should not be fixed- I don't care. I'm saying all of this "fixing ads" nonsense is unreasonable and backwards thinking.
I don't want to seem like an old-timer telling the young whipersnappers soda pop used to be a nickel but I was involved in the internet before there was a web. So, I've sort of seen the growth over time and believe it or not there was a time before advertising. Most websites didn't have advertising. Nowadays your strange uncle has ads on his personal blog because someone told him about AdSense. Forget that fact that he earns $0.15 a year, he's a professional blogger.
For awhile, most of the content on the internet was non-commercial. People, myself included, posted stuff online because we wanted to share information. We had no expectation of ever receiving compensation for it.
Nowadays way too many people want to thumb their nose at boring jobs and travel the world writing blog posts and getting paid for it. Or they want to become Instagram stars so they pimp products for money.
I'm not saying that as a cranky old man. What I'm getting at is everybody is trying to monetize everybody else. It's not that you get annoying ads on CNN, it's that your cousin is trying to get you to watch his YouTube channel so he can quit the rat race and live in Thailand for $500 a month.
I know this is unrealistic but I would like to see things move back more towards how they used to be. Ad platforms used to actually have standards. You had to be doing pretty decent traffic to even be considered. The bar was set high enough that it limited the number of people who created websites as commercial ventures.
People used to create websites because they were passionate about a topic, not because they figured out that there was an SEO niche where they could rank #1 for a keyword and then slap ads all over the site.
And the way this relates back to services that could not exist otherwise, if they're valuable enough people will either pay to use them or advertisers will bid up the price for the limited advertising inventory and the provider can make a decent return.
Because the real problem is that the supply of content is virtually infinite while the money going into the advertising space is finite. Thus, supply of space to advertise exceeds demand willing to pay to advertise on it.
"...while denying them any realistic way to pay for that service seems bit too entitled for me..."
No realistic way that you can think of. Simply because you can't figure it out and nobody else has figured it out doesn't mean it's impossible. After all, why should anything change if there's no need to?
The ad model is broken. If you want to run ads, get on your content management system and hand-type in your own ads. Own them. Don't toss off the responsibility for what appears on your site to a bunch of third-party yahoos. If that's as much as you care about the user experience, why the hell shouldn't they block whatever tripe is coming down the line?
> Simply because you can't figure it out and nobody else has figured it out doesn't mean it's impossible
At my age I probably have even less patience with the "if I don't know how then nobody does" attitude than you do. Nonetheless, until an alternative solution to that problem is discovered, we're stuck with ads. We can make them better, but we can't realistically demand that they go away unless we also accept that everything currently funded by ads goes away too. I don't just mean Google and Facebook. I also mean the advertisers whose business models depend on those platforms and whose products would not be on the market otherwise. Ads don't just support big companies. They also support moms and pops, and BTW charities use ads too.
So you want that reality to change? Good for you. Seriously. But what are you contributing to that effort? What's your great idea for easing our dependence on ads? I would absolutely love to hear your thoughts.
There are exactly two possible outcomes of advertising.
1. You spend no more money on products that are advertised to you, and advertisers don't consider your view meaningful, and won't pay for it.
2. Advertisers make extra money from you, either by getting you to buy a thing that you would not have otherwise bought, or by getting you to buy a version of a thing that you would not have otherwise bought, and will pay less than that extra expected revenue for your view.
that revenue comes from your pocket. If you are in the latter category, then whether or not advertising is positive depends on whether or not you believe that advertising causes your decision making process to be more or less rational.
Free community and paid, privacy-respecting efforts get squashed by the very presence of the spy-vertisers in the market, usually in the idea phase. A world without those products wouldn't fail to have equivalents for most or all of them, and likely quite a few actually free ones (though probably a little less convenient).
[EDIT] I'd add that sensible governments might well consider something like mapping/route-finding to be basic infrastructure and worthy of funding, absent free commercial options. Especially now that we've seen what that's like. So the US might be screwed but much of Europe and Asia could well come out with tax-funded alternatives to nearly-universally-valuable but expensive/extensive services like that.
>Even if you were willing to pay for it, many others might not be.
I'm not convinced that there is a way that google maps could be as big as it is without ad revenue. Most people just wouldn't pay and the only reason that you would consider paying now is because the infrastructure that ad money has paid for has made it worthwhile.
a) Ads on google tend to be much less annoying than from other vendors because google maintains relatively high standards for how it displays ads. I consider it a reasonable trade-off and don't block ads on Google services - they are usually relevant and not overtly annoying or distracting.
b) the fastest possible growth isn't necessarily the highest good. You don't get a better plant by trying to pull it up out of the ground, and things that are grown fast don't always last that well. Wikipedia doesn't have advertising and while it's subject to many criticisms I would argue that its slower organic growth makes it more sustainable over the long term.
b) Not my area of expertise, but google doesn't fill half its website with a plea for donations once a year. As a layman it doesn't appear to be more sustainable than google. What is your argument for the sustainability of donations over ads, ignoring the obvious differences of these two companies?
And no longer... The market peaked and fell 10 years ago for both of those companies while google continues to grow. I'm not convinced that it would be a good strategy for google to follow their example.
To be clear, I agree that ads are not the ONLY way, just the most effective way for many companies. I think that there is no way that google could so easily steal market share from both Garmin and TomTom without ad revenue.
As a fellow ad-hater, I'd love to see a list of alternatives. I often hear "they should find a better way" but I don't know what that would be for the majority of "I'll use it if it's free" websites or services out there. Micropayments are a hassle most don't use, donations get forgotten about, and there's too many sites to have a subscription to each one.
We see the alternatives in the handful of cases in which spying on users isn't a viable model (or, at least, just doing that isn't viable). Typically it's directly paying money for services, maybe with a free tier (Github) or something Free with a capital F and community-driven (Wikimedia). Take away spying and serving deceptive/harmful ads as an option for e.g. search, mapping/route-finding, voice recognition, and so on, and we'd see alternatives pop up, probably under those models, or possibly under more traditional less-invasive (and less malware-spreading/scam-promoting) advertising models (like magazines, or the early ad-driven web but with way more eyeballs).
Most ads. I am OK with manufacturers, merchants and so on advertising the existence of their goods/ services/ pricing. Communicating the existence of your commercial offering to consumers is a legitimate business activity. But I agree that a great deal of advertising consists of psychological manipulation and that's bad, and the people who do it for a living should feel bad about themselves.
I was and am OK with Google's simple textual ads, although it's true that Google leverages them to push its own brand by controlling color schemes and so forth.
But any marketing that relies on interrupting people can fuck right off.
It's the article's raison d'être to advocate NOT blocking all ads, but to be discriminating so as to encourage better practices by the publishers/advertisers/ad networks.
As it is right now, with ad blockers usually defaulting to blocking all ads, there are no incentives for better practices: the 5MB video overlay on <whatever.com> may play a small part in convincing someone to install an ad blocker, but it plays a comparative larger part to keep <whatever.com> in business–it's the tragedy of the commons, basically.
It's somewhat irrelevant that you may be willing to pay money, because many schemes, from impermeable paywalls to voluntary micropayment have been tried, and users have generally been reluctant to adopt these.
I don't even agree with your first sentence. I don't see anything in this article about how we should collectively stop blocking ads in order to encourage better practices from publishers/advertisers/ad networks. The article is just a long rant about how bad ads are with the promise that "if they get better I will look at them".
How are you going to be able to make this judgment call? It's already known that ad services track users and occasionally install malware on their machines. Will the ads simply become more pleasant-looking while becoming more nefarious, or will they actually be more respectful of users' freedoms? How will you know which is occurring? Also, are you seriously going to stop blocking ads periodically to see if you should keep blocking ads? I think asking the ad networks to be more polite is more than a little naive.
Even if the article was actually encouraging people to work with the ad networks to find a reasonable common ground it would be severely misguided.
Being integrated with Microsoft and Google's infrastructure is not a benefit, in my opinion. I've seen these companies make a lot of impulsive, ham-handed decisions with their "environments" in recent years and I'd rather pay for a service that isn't going to mutate negatively in order to coerce me to buy more things from Microsoft and Google that I just do not want.
The problem is not 'fake news'. The problem is that it's impossible to have a discussion about the news at all since everyone is experiencing drastically different content directly catered to them on the internet. At least with Fox News we could all point to something Megyn Kelly said and debate whether we agreed or not. There's no way we can even agree upon an information set to talk about with interactive 'fake news' because it differs for everyone and changes rapidly. We also don't have any of the source for these repulsive services, where we at least have some evidence of how MSM outlets are biased.
The idea that services like Google and Facebook are going to use more algorithms to counter the tracking and ad servicing algorithms they developed in the first place is laughable. The solution (if they were actually trying to counter 'fake news') would be to get rid of this harmful technology entirely, but that's all these companies have to bring in revenue so I doubt that'd happen.
'Fake news' is not Breitbart or CNN or one news outlet. 'Fake news' is really the way these internet companies have distorted our collective reality for their own short-term gains. It is irresponsible, dangerous, and in my opinion, not profitable in the long run unless they completely usurp all our species' communication. Which they are actively trying to achieve.
you're putting much too much blame on internet distributors of media (i.e. Google, Facebokk, etc.). Conventional media organizations and their distribution networks have raced to the bottom very eagerly. Fox News created the media model which is now the only game in town because it was so successful.
I don't know if a shill-free alternative to Reddit could ever exist- I tend to think the openness and scale of Reddit (which is the whole point of it) is what allows shilling to occur. It really bums me out.
Sure, but I think that is actually a very difficult problem: how do we determine whether a comment is being sincere or not? Furthermore, assuming we had a foolproof method to do this, would the site have enough funds to use it routinely and ethically? I think this is the problem we're seeing now with a large number of tech companies.
