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Looks like the war against advertising is continuing to fail, predictably. Google Chrome is now
banningrestricting ad blockers starting as early as next year. (1) I am not convinced this model of: create a free, ad-free service to get users --> slowly pull in ads for $$$ --> eventually become an ad-riddled hell is the best model. I often balk at paying for services up front, but if a service as essential as google is now bowing to the pressure, when will it end?Advertising definitely has some uses in connecting buyers to sellers, and informing consumers about the market, but I'm convinced it's a bit of a 'tamed demon.' If we don't want to devolve into a horrid anarcho-capitalist future, we need to get serious about restricting what advertisers can do, and where they can advertise. I predict advertising will become far more ubiquitous with the rise of Dall-E and similar image producing AIs. The cost of creating extremely compelling, beautiful ads will plummet, and more and more of our daily visual space will become filled with non stop advertising.
On top of this, we have Meta and other tech oligarchs attempting to push us all into the Metaverse. I am no detractor of AR/VR, in fact I think utilized correctly it could solve many of our current problems. However if the Powers That Be take over the metaverse, we will soon have ads that engage all of our sense - not just vision and hearing.
Given how powerful advertising already is, can we really afford to let it run rampant in an age where we have such powerful technologies?
1 - https://developer.chrome.com/blog/mv2-transition/
I predict it won't, honestly. You currently a 20B parameter model to generate pictures with readable text, and then you need a marketing expert to filter for the best generated outputs, anyway. Maybe a year from now, Google will train a static ad generator based on their AdSense data, but those are still just static ads. They don't perform that well. You need animated visuals at the very least, or a video if possible, and that kind of technology just isn't here yet -- not to mention how expensive it'd be.
30s scripted ads on YouTube are not going to come from AI within the next 1-2 years. Maybe 5. But by the time text2YouTubeAd comes out, we'll have far more problems than more attractive advertisements.
Which problems do you think are worse? AGI alignment?
How about the fact that you could make a video about literally anything happening at all? Fake any event you want. Nudes, terrorism, declarations of war... ideally we would learn to just ignore all of the fake content, but if we could do that, why would ads be a problem anymore?
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The inevitable result is that all the smart money will move to Firefox, who has made it clear that they wouldn't be implementing anything to stymie ad blockers. Whether this means anything as far as Google's numbers are concerned is anyone's guess; with all the talk of the "Adpocalypse" in years past, nothing seems to have changed much. I'm guessing that everyone who was going to deploy an ad blocker has already done so by this point, and these people would find the ads themselves more irritating than persuasive.
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Web advertisement itself is a great thing. It solves a big, important problem - connecting businesses and customers, at low cost and awesome efficiency. Besides, the narrative about all-powerful, mind-controlling demonic ads really needs to go away, Dall-E or no Dall-E. I suggest anyone who takes this seriously to switch off the ad blocker for a few minutes and go watch some actual ads, "touch the grass" so to speak. What you'll most likely find is a picture of the product with a price sticker superimposed on it, and maybe some kind of a product description. If you're lucky you may stumble upon an ad that's a bit more creative. Either way, it's not a hypnotic pattern devised by a malicious AI superintelligence with the purpose of injecting irresistible desire to buy into your head.
The real value here is about matching the product ad with the people who actually want it to buy it. The ad networks collect all kinds of data from the user, then use it to decide what ads to show him. That kind of thing allows you to find a paying customer for a few dollars. It's a nice, valuable service that solves an important problem. Try it sometime. Build something useful and sell it on the internet - you'll grow to appreciate the ads. Improving ad network capabilities, that are by the way vastly overestimated by many people including yourself, would be awesome. It would mean that instead of garbage ads peddling things of no interest to you, you'd see ads for things you really need right now (also no, a facebook ad cannot make you buy something you don't want to buy). It would also mean that it'd be easier and cheaper to start or scale a business.
The sad thing about the advertisement industry, however, is that in all likelihood the ads aren't leading us into a capitalist paradise. The side effect of collecting user data for the purpose of serving better ads (the good), is that a whole lot of user data ends up centralised in an ad network's data centers (the bad), and then one way or another ends up in the hands of the state surveillance system (the ugly). The amount and nature of that data is such that it can be used to trace it back to you as a person. There isn't anything remotely "anarcho" about that.
Perhaps we can re-engineer the ad industry so that it doesn't have to collect that much data about the user. I don't think the ad companies would be against that, provided that the quality doesn't drop. That's not a problem that's going to be solved by regulation, though, for obvious reasons.
Is this true though? I can only speak anecdotally, but in my 20 years of using the Internet, I have never once been enticed by an ad. No ad has ever made me aware of any goods or services to fulfill my needs that I wasn't aware of already.
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That's not why I have an adblocker. That's not why I was forced, after years without using one, to get an adblocker.
It's the sheer, unrelenting volume and placement of ads. I couldn't read an online news story without banner ads, sidebar ads, popup ads, autoplay music/speech (which is very disconcerting when you open a page, a voice starts yapping, and you have no idea where it's coming from or how to shut it up), and ads shoved in between every paragraph on the page.
It made any service, be it a website or commercial site or media site, unusable. I literally could not read the news story I had searched for, because the ads crowded it out.
So therefore adblocker. And now I have a much, much better experience because if I really want to find out "six different ways to cut a tomato with our amazing super-sharp knife!", I can go look it up, if I need a super-sharp knife. If I don't want one right now, no annoying ads about it.
I wasn't getting sophisticated, subliminal, slip past your mental guard and persuade you, slick ads with great copywriting and cool visuals. I was getting the equivalent of having my rubbish bin dumped over my head every time I ventured online. That's why I use an adblocker.
I had to start using them because everything is just simply too slow without it. Sites now feel like they have trackers in every pixel of every, otherwise static, page.
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That’s a different concern.
Fair enough, however you should also see that using adblockers in that capacity is not sustainable - essentially you are using something that was supposed to be paid for by ads for free. Eventually as the ad blockers gain adoption, content creators are going switch to some other revenue model, like directly charging you for content e.g. what the news websites started to do. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but YMMV
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I wonder what this means for Mozilla and the folks behind Firefox. I understand why they made the choice they did, but I was very disappointed when Microsoft decided to base their browser development off of Chromium rather than Gecko: a well-supported alternate platform seems like it would be really helpful for consumers.
I certainly plan to switch to Mozilla if and when ad blocking becomes impossible/very difficult.
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Using ad-blockers is antisocial behavior and should be discouraged or banned wherever possible. If you don't want to consume content that contains ads, don't consume the content if it contains ads. Simple as.
Advertiser supported content makes it possible for a much broader array of content creators to make a living producing commercially viable products. A world without advertising is a world with more paywalls and fewer creators making a living. See the decline of the newspaper for what content creation looks like without advertising dollars: fewer writers making a decent living, higher prices for less content, increasingly desperate catering to a tiny demographic target.
If you don't want advertising on your TV, don't watch OTA TV, limit your viewing to paid streaming services that don't show ads. If you don't like youtube ads, subscribe to premium. If you don't like reading essays with pop up ads, pay for a newspaper subscription, or if you're too cheap for that go to the library and read it for free. If you expect to google "How to fix my sink when it gurgles" and find the answer for free, you have to expect that the ads on the side of the page are paying the guy to make it.
If you think that putting advertising in your face is wrong, vote with your feet/wallet/eyeballs: reward content producers that offer alternative models. If content producers find that they're losing customers when they put up obnoxious ads, they'll stop doing it.
Can anyone offer me an argument in favor of ad-blockers that doesn't amount to some kind of misanthropic "The system, man, it's broken; so whatever I do against the system is a-ok"? I really can't even create a steelman for the ad-block position. I can understand the logic of not liking to be tracked, sure, and I find that a somewhat reasonable ask; but not viewing any ads that pay for the content you consume is just expecting the world to provide you with something free of charge.
People are "voting with their feet", as they always have. As long as there have been ads people have been trying to escape them. When VCRs came out with a record function the first (only?) use I heard about from everyone was recording shows you want to watch and actually consuming them later so you could skip the ads.
Just because you like a certain financial model doesn't mean you have some right to it. I despise it, and given how much effort people are willing to invest to avoid ads, I think a strong argument can be made that it's simply incorrect. Content creators also don't have any right to making a living via their content. People do not want ads, for the most part, so if they can't find a way to sell their product without the ad model then it's just another business that failed like millions of others.
Paid news content indeed lost to free content. I don't think that proves the ad model is somehow superior. People were happy to read news when they could ignore the ads and pages loaded fast enough. I suspect people might be more open to paying for news again now if a reasonable micro-transaction model existed, except that the news has gotten so poor it's hard to justify paying anything for most of it.
I don't expect it. But they do it. Is your expectation truly that I sit there and try to concentrate on some advertisement which I've already seen (well, had playing in the background while I wait for my content to start again) dozens or even hundreds of times before because of... I don't know, some capitalism-reglious piety?
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If they stuck to ads on the side of the page, I could live with that. It was more ads than content, ads right in the page, ads ads and more ads that drove me to an adblocker. If they go back to "ads on the side of the page, and relevant to what you are interested in", then I'll drop the adblocker.
Plus, if a deluge of crappy ads annoys me, I am not going to buy your junk, even if it's not junk. If I want or need something I will look for it, and the ads for automated potato peelers and combination pot scrubbers can then fight it out for my attention, and I'm more likely to buy the Whizzo 9000 Spud-'N-Sparkle than if it's wedged in with a ton of spam online,
It's the same with junk mail that comes physically in through the letter box, the amount of waste and expense on that must be colossal for material that goes straight from letter box to recycle bin in my house.
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When I browse to a webpage, what I get in return is essentially a text file that contains the webpage, including lots of things like "hey, please load this file as well", or "download and run this script". But you know, I am executing this text file on my computer, using my bandwidth, and my cpu. If I think your header is ugly and decide to not render it, or dislike your choice of font and change it then that is my (technical) right. l.
Ads usually have a very disproportionate load (want to load this 20kB of text? Ok, here have 3 MB of images), or are outright distracting (I am trying to read text, and the visual explosions on every side are not helping) so I will just elect to have my computer not expend resources on them, thank you very much.
There's other reasons too: ads have historically often been vectors of malware, resource hijacking for bitcoin mining, etc. It is actually asking quite a lot that when I got to webpage.com, webpage.com says "hey also download these 30 pages which I have no affiliation with or responsibility for, and which increase your expenditure by several 100%".
If you don't like that I can do this then you can feel free to move from http into some other protocol. You don't get to call me immoral for using the tech stack as it was intended.
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I'm confused. If I make HTTP requests to server A, why am I obligated to make other requests to server B and render the content it returns?
Those writers are now free to do something more valuable with their time - e.g., drive for Uber or install heat pumps in homes (thereby reducing carbon emissions). Why is this bad?
This is not an argument. It's merely a statement of intent to reject any arguments, regardless of validity, in a certain category.
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The obvious answer is that ad-block block already exists. There are plenty of sites that simply do not work if you have an adblocker on, and you can't access them at all. I have no objection to adblocker-blocker - if you don't want me to consume your content on your terms, you can exclude the vast majority of adblock users (there are a small minority of a minority looking at things like adblocker-blocker-blocker but this is not a large number), and most people do not. Attention is still worth something even if it doesn't come with advertising attached, as it happens. That probably wouldn't be true if everyone used adblock, of course, but I'm not a Kantian to begin with. Your behaviour is worth examining in the context exists in more than it's worth examining under some hypothetical categorical imperative.
I accept this has vibes of 'well just because I'm not paying for security doesn't mean I can be stolen from', but I think it does reveal something about the victims of adblock. Most of them don't care enough to invest in anti-adblock technology, which makes me wonder how much harm is done, if any.
The other side of this is that why should it be up to me to examine every single content provider's advertisement policy and decide whether or not I'll read this piece of news based on whether Channel 5 in bumfuck Ohio has pop-unders? It's an unreasonable expectation in a world of content, especially in one where ads are sometimes malicious and often bloated to the point where they slow down my (admittedly older) laptop to a crawl. Why is it incumbent on me to wait for horrifically bloated ads to load and slow my computer down?
I think this argument proves too much. Imagine a counterfactual where some sites maxed out your computer mining bitcoin (wave away the technical problems for the moment) whenever you went onto them, lowering the lifespan of your machine and costing you some tiny amount more on your energy bill. Would that still be incumbent as a moral price of doing business for our hypothetical mining-supported sites? Would MineBlocker also be a moral negative? I feel intuitively that it wouldn't be and that impositions on your time and energy can be intuitively rejected (you have the right to request my browser load the ad, you don't have the right to make it actually load it) where this is no prior or implicit agreement between people.
Excellent discussion-provoking post by the way, it's frustrating to see it downvoted.
They also make it deliberately complicated and cumbersome to tailor your preferences, if they offer the option to "choose which ads you see" or "this is who we share our data with". You have to go through lists and lists, individually ticking each box, and not at all guaranteed that the next time you open the browser page it won't just re-populate it with the same things over again.
If the companies so desperate to scrape our data were more willing to act in good faith, it would be easier to trust them. As it is, I'm sticking with any method to throw them off.
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It's an interesting question. I haven't read all the comments here, but if I were to try to provide a steelman, it might be:
As others have argued here, the medium the ads are on are fundamentally being displayed on technology that the user is in control of. Therefore people have the capability to use ad blockers, and some portion, but not all, will
Companies that buy ad-space know point #1, and they factor it into the price they're willing to pay. Lots of market research goes into whether ads are worth it, how much to spend, where to spend it, and the expected ROI for ads.
So basically, it's sort of a free market solution to the problem, in that the market should balance itself out. No serious company would buy ad-space if it was going to get them nothing in return. So basically, the system still works, even despite the fact that some people use ad blockers. If it didn't work, like if everyone everywhere decided to install an ad blocker, then the system wouldn't still be ongoing, and a new system with a new model would take its place. This is very similar to how I may argue that it's okay to change the channel on TV when a commercial is on.
As a further argument that the system works as is, websites and web tech really could be doing a lot more if they felt that ad blockers were stepping on their business model and revenue. Chrome could ban the biggest ad blocker plugins. Some sites already don't let you view their content if they detect such plugins.
And then there are totally weird and sneaky ways that sites could get around your ad blockers. Ever watch just about any free internet porn past 2015-ish? All the porn sites all do weird things to make sure you get those ads. Like for example, when you first click the video, it redirects your tab to an ad, and makes a new tab for your content. I assume it does this to fool the adblocker plugin, since such plugins are mostly looking for popups, not site redirects.
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Advertisements provide immensely negative utility to society. They stifle competition (advertising budgets for megacorporations are huge, small companies can't compete with that) and prey on normies who are manipulated by ads into making irrational purchases that they otherwise wouldn't make (and into sharing the ad with their friends).
A lot of ads, even on major ad networks, are literally just for malicious scam websites. They're annoying by design, waste human attention, shit up websites, and degrade performance.
The utility that a company gets when you watch one of their ads was not produced out of thin air. No value is created by an ad. It's utility that's being stolen from the average consumer in aggregate. If all advertising was magically banned I think a lot of economic problems would disappear overnight.
The downsides you're describing of ad-blocking are real, but are the result of a race to the bottom. Anyone who stops showing ads on their site (or whose userbase blocks ads) is obviously going to get paid less money and might not be able to support their site. Anyone who does show ads on their website might benefit themselves, but will necessarily be hurting the world to a greater extent: something I'd describe as antisocial.
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To steelman the ad-block position, what if I believed ads should not exist at all? If I then block ads when possible and in general seek to deny advertisers as much revenue as I can, my policy, if universalized, gives me exactly the world I want.
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I bet some advertisers especially love targeting consumers who use ad-blockers because the use of an ad-blocker is correlated with some kinds of purchases. Google has probably figured out a way to monetize the premium value that its ad-blocking customers have. This system only works if using an ad-blocker is unusual enough so as to signal something special about you.
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Adblockers just make people free riders. People who use them don't deserve any greater shaming then any other time people (or groups of people) engage in such behavior. Do you muster the same sort of outrage when major companies incorporate in countries like Ireland to evade US taxes despite growing and benefiting from the services the US provided?
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If you don't offer me an ability to get the content without ads I'm going to find a way to get it without it. I do actually subscribe to premium youtube and a number of services, I think subscription models are nearly as bad as ads and would much prefer to just buy the content outright but we're going back in the direction of many shows/movies having no way to watch them without a service that has ads. Ads are awful and I won't apologize for avoiding them.
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I don't think there's anything misanthropic about this position at all. I feel that youtube is run by people actively antagonistic towards me and my interests(and, ultimately, humanity in general), so I use adblockers when browsing normally and purposefully run ads on ad-supported channels I like in a browser window muted and obscured in a way that the browser cannot detect in order to funnel money towards content creators I wish to support while making advertising on the platform a worse deal. I contribute more, and not just financially, to the content creators that I support and wish to endorse than the average user.
Additionally, I think that this kind of advertising supported model is bad for the internet and for society as a whole. It rewards clickbait, it rewards SEO and most damning of all it rewards content that explicitly encourages anger, hostility and division, because those emotions are excellent at drawing clicks. When possible I prefer to use Brave, because it has an advertising model that I'd actually support - it should be my choice who gets my advertising revenue. I fundamentally do not believe that websites targeting the lowest common denominator like Buzzfeed deserve to be financially rewarded for degrading the level of societal discourse, and while I do not consume their material if at all possible, enough people are susceptible to it that I want to make sure that they are not rewarded for what is effectively rerouting intellectual sewage into the public sphere.
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I'd gladly pay $0.003 to read a web page if they offered a convenient way to replace their advertising revenue. In fact, I am paying more than that because they created horrifically bloated sytems that pass through some of the most expensive data transfer in the Western world. My adblocker blocks about 10% of the requests and the cost of data is about 17x the benefit of the advertising, so running an adblocker is economically efficient even before you consider the cost of seeing them (at $20/GB, 2.5 MB/page, $3.00 CPM).
Aside from that, I can do what I want with the things they send me. I can channel surf or leave the room to avoid TV commercials, skip to the articles in magazines, or scrape the logos off of physical products. Do you think that those forms of ad-avoidance are immoral in the same way?
EDIT: fixed
strikethroughTumblr have done this, which I personally think is kind of sneaky, but others approve: if you want the ad-free experience, you can sign up to a subscription.
I'm sticking with my adblocker, but at least that option is there for people who don't want ads but do want to contribute to the expenses of running the site. Were it a smaller operation, I might consider a sub, but not for something that has been passed around like a hot potato in the hopes of making money out of it for big companies. They managed to flog it for $1 billion back in the day, if it went for only $3 million the last time its owners sold it on, that's on them.
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The fact that there's still no convenient tools to do nanotransactions like that (although the Brave Browser makes a try at it) when you just want to view a particular page but have zero interest in a subscription, membership, or indeed even registering an account makes me assume there are some major barriers to its functionality.
Seriously. I visit a site, they want to get paid for the pages I view, then prompt me with a box that has the option to either watch an Ad or pay .3 cents or hell, even 3 cents per page I view, and it can be instantly charged to my account, I'd do it. IF I don't have to go through the process of registering an account, connecting it to my bank, and managing a separate account for every individual site.
This is probably why Substack immediately swallowed the entire blogging industry, since it enables something close to this for supporting writers you like without having to jump through 10 hoops each time you want to contribute to one of them.
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"Antisocial behaviour" needs to be operationalized. What is the ill effect that you expect to come about as a result of this behaviour? If I say that littering is anti-social, I mean that if everyone litters, than there will be shit covering the ground, and everyone will be worse off. In the case of ad-blocking, there are limits that prevent horrific outcomes.
For one, most of the ad supported content I consume is not at all necessary, and arguably makes me worse off, in that my time would be better spent doing other things. This is largely why such content is ad supported, rather than paid: they know that people won't feel like they can justify paying money for it. If everyone ad blocked and the service died, I wouldn't be worse off.
Second, there are many people willing to spend their own money providing many of the services I use for free. Examples include this website, and several others of its ilk. Often such websites rely on donations, or the purchase of cosmetic or other non-gating features to generate revenue. So if advertising based websites were to go down, there would likely be many websites to replace them. Such websites would often be improvements over their predecessors; content websites that are funded by advertising often have poorly researched and written articles, and use SEO to push out better articles which don't profit from advertising or from gating payments.
Third, platforms make enough profit off of the people that do look at ads to support some number of users that don't. This may sound trite: someone littering might reasonably argue that there are enough people picking up litter to make up for their actions. The key difference is that advertising as a service model relies on a small number of profitable users to keep things afloat. If I never or rarely purchase anything as a result of being advertised to, than I am a net negative to the advertiser. Therefore, I am no different, at an ecosystem level, from someone who blocks ads. Since the system already requires others to make up for my behaviour, it makes no difference whether I also happen to block ads.
Fourth, suppose that all of the above wasn't true. That is, the content was necessary, or at least strongly desirable, there was no way to fund it via donations, and an advertising model would successfully derive revenue from an most every users (at a system level). In that case, if I weren't to block ads, I would be (by assumption) sacrificing some portion of my income to in order to fund the advertising, but I would also have to look at ads whenever I used the service. I dislike looking at ads, and would prefer, all else being equal (which, by assumption, they are), to pay for the service instead. So if the service stopped being supported by advertising, and moved to being a paid subscription, then I would be no worse off, and in fact better off than were I to have begun looking at ads instead.
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I generally agree with you and don't use adblocker plugins. However, let's examine some reasons people do.
General privacy/opsec: People are paranoid and don't want to be tracked by third parties while they travel the web. Every once in a while a targeted ad will out me as having browsed something potentially embarrassing or reveal shopping I might have wanted hidden. For example, if TheMotte ran ads, you'd start to get contrarian right wing political books hawked at you across the web-might be awkward if anyone is reading over your shoulder.
Security: Though this is less of a concern now, back when adblock was at peak popularity the perception was that ad networks were undisciplined and would let advertisers place malware on your machine (or even just got compromised.)
Performance: Back in the days of slow internet (or if you ever browse local newspaper sites or Fandom) advertisers would run horrendously inefficient ads and tank page performance. Adblock was popular when lots of people were still running windows-xp era machines after the release of Vista.
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The argument for adblock is the same as the argument for internet piracy, that our current system of intellectual property is non functional now that making copies is arbitrarily cheap.
I think a big part of your issue with this is the assumption that using adblock is something someone "does against the system". When infinite copies of a work can be made for no cost, taking a copy and not paying causes no harm to the system. If your worldview is strongly rooted in the old world where copies cost money to make, and taking one meant stealing a physical object from someone that they would then have to pay to replace, I can see where you would take issue, but that is no longer the case.
It is true that money needs to be made however. The current system does mean that the creator can make money, and if you use adblock to get around that without looking for some other way to supply money to the creator, their creations will stagnate. It will no longer be worthwhile to make things if nobody pays for them. If disabling adblock is your way of doing that, good for you. You should understand how little your attention is worth to advertisers, but if you are ok with that then I see no problem with that transaction. There are a great deal of reasons one might not be ok with that however, and denying people other payment options, while not immoral, is generally not a good idea if you want their money. So, in this situation, as a consumer; if you can't pay anyways, and taking a copy despite not paying does no harm to the creator, why not? It's not that you are owed the content, but more so that abstaining from consuming it does no good. If you would do so on principle, because you don't like taking things you feel you haven't earned, I can respect that. But don't force that ideal on everyone.
In addition, I would like to add that there are more reasons to use an adblocker than blocking ads and privacy. Adblockers allow you to easily create filters for any element on a webpage, not just ads. In fact, this is the primary use case for me, and I suspect a non-trivial amount of other people. Have you noticed when browsing the internet how many terrible, broken websites there are; with arbitrary content break up, excessive whitespace, autoplaying videos, and countless other obnoxious design elements made for the general audience using mobile phones? I can make the worst offenders usable with a few clicks, at no expense to the website. They can keep their awful design that caters to a general audience, and I can have a functional website, and everyone is happy. It is really just impossible to design a website that caters to everyone, and adding options takes development time, and can confuse less computer savvy users, so having a system where experienced users can customize the site with no input needed from the developer is ideal.
Do you assume that historically, books and newspapers were priced at the printing/distribution cost? Because you're not budgeting anything for the actual creators of the content.
As opposed to the constitutions view of the issue:
The current system violates the "limited times" part of that, even if the Supreme Court doesn't think so.
We arguably don't even need to look at the "limited times" part, we could even argue that it sure as hell isn't promoting "the progress of science and useful arts" now.
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I feel like I addressed this, but to reiterate; yes, the creator deserves pay, he will not work without it. However, when the only payment method is objectionable, there is no harm in taking a copy that is free to produce.
Also, why are you quoting the constitution? The founding fathers would have zero understanding of this unique, modern problem.
I don't think this is true, for reasons you yourself pointed out. Because by going around the only payment method, you are denying the creator the pay that he deserves (and produced the work under the expectation he would get). I am not embracing the position that ad blocking is immoral, but I think that to say there's no harm is also not true. The truth is more like: there is harm, but it's also harm that is partly caused by the creator's refusal to make their work available on reasonable terms. In other words, both parties are really kind of in the wrong here.
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But this isn’t sufficiently different from the given example of turnstile jumping, are you also okay with that? After all, the marginal cost of supporting one more person on the subway is negligible, likewise with hosting web content.
You know, I think I am, given equivalent circumstances. If the train is running anyway, and it's empty or nearly empty so you aren't taking space from paying customers, and the turnstile won't take your money.
Something tells me that there might be some other factor that makes these situations inequivalent, but I don't see what that is at the moment.
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My partial-view is that since there is no coordination mechanism/incentive, then there's little reason to start watching ads that outweighs the individual harm.
A classic free-rider problem, and my solution is that you either need to make a coordination mechanism or accept that people will defect.
A coordination mechanism like ''outlaw adblockers" seems to have a bunch of potential negative effects (especially as we get better/more-adversarially-optimized advertisements), and so isn't satisfactory. The proper mechanism is donating.
I would stop using YouTube for music entirely if I wasn't able to block ads. They're a waste of time. They take up time, and they also distract you from whatever you were doing (if you mute them then that's just another distraction, and if muting them was common then you'd eventually lose that ability). I also don't value having my mind adversarially messed with, even if we're not that great yet we are also getting better. The amount of negative value I get from YouTube ads is greater than the average benefit I get from a lot of YouTube (I think this is even more true for other people, because a lot of YouTube's content is bad).
However, I do agree that the better/more-ethical action is to then just not use the service. Download the music locally and listen to it locally, and so then I only have to pay a one-time advertisement/payment cost to the service I downloaded it from. Or nothing at all, because hosting a bunch of relatively small files is pretty cheap. The issue with this is that services like YouTube very much want you to stay on their service and continually watch advertisements. You can download from YouTube locally, but only through something like youtube-dl. This is a sort of platform lock-in. It isn't a hardcore one (though television/movie platforms use hardcore ones), but it is enough of an inconvenience to stop most people from bothering notably. I typically do bother downloading my music, especially since it allows me to listen to it offline, but it is also probably technically against their TOS or something (should I be respecting that?)
Most normal sites have this sort of light platform lock-in, partially just because it is the default but also because they want you to see their advertisements. Most sites don't allow me to easily download an article for local reading, though some do.
I think, also, that advertisements are the wrong method. They encourage making sites filled with garbage, of which there is an absolutely massive number, and putting ads on it. Sometimes this is actually useful content, but you could have gotten it from a less disgusting site. Sometimes it is just stuff they scraped from elsewhere. The best sites are ones where they care about the topic, and those are best incentivized by donating.
If I could 'reset' the internet and disallow advertising, then I would. This would kill off a ton of useful sites, but it would also make it easier for us to have a bunch of disparate smaller sites (which are then cheaper than a massive site like Reddit, and thus able to be ran by someone with some extra cash) which are ran by people who actually care about them. They can, if they get big enough, accept donations to allow their services to continue running. The best sites are those ran by people who actually care about them, and would try running them whether or not they were gaining a sizable profit.
So, I guess a summary of my view: I agree that it is defecting to use an adblocker. However without a coordination mechanism, there isn't a great reason to not defect. The best coordination mechanism is donation/patreon-like-donations, and it also has notable benefits over advertisement since it encourages less spam/garbage. We'll lose a bunch if advertisements disappear, but I think we can also gain a lot.
(I could mess with my argument to say it is actually moral to use an adblocker, since it means ads will be killed off faster, but I don't think I 100% believe that)
So, you're literally just going to ignore the idea of paying a fairly minor fee for Youtube premium?
I didn't even know it existed until earlier this year, so I was primarily capturing what I felt before it existed/was-common/they-started-advertising-it. It was also meant as describing the problem in general. I have been tempted by YouTube premium, though not overly much compared to other sources of media and I've been listening locally a lot. They apparently provide downloading (which I did not know until I looked it up), but it is limited downloading where you have to keep up your subscription otherwise you can't listen to it anymore. More platform lock-in, which I dislike.
Overall, I do actually agree it would be more ethical to buy YouTube premium if I'm going to continue using their service without advertisements. They don't provide all the value I want and they're google (I feel more intrinsically obligated - to move past automatic selfishness - to donate to smaller services where the individual contribution is more important, but that's basically the classic problem that voting has) so I'm unsure if I want to support them at all, but I do agree that it would be more ethical.
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I visit Youtube on my desktop PC, I very very rarely use it on my phone, precisely because of the ads and because I don't want to pay yet another subscription to yet another service for something I use occasionally. I don't use Spotify or similar items for music. I listen to music the dinosaur way, on the radio, and if I'm working on my computer, via the national broadcasting service streaming which I already pay for through the TV licence. So yeah, I am outside the mainstream of modern life, and Youtube can just go whistle if they want money out of me. Google owns 'em now, and Google gets its money's worth out of all the data it collects on me and sells on,
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If broadcast TV creators told you "give us an extra $5 a month and we'll agree that it's okay for you to skip the ads" it would still be okay to skip the ads without sending them $5 a month.
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First, tracking is in fact a big problem and ad blockers are a practical solution to it. The adoption of ad blockers, by crippling the ability to track users in browsers, incentivises the ad networks to develop other ways to deliver ads that don't rely on tracking to such extent. See for example https://www.ethicalads.io/ . Hopefully that reduces the amount of surveillance that's going on.
Second, ad-blockers may need to be discouraged, but definitely shouldn't be banned; the last thing we need are more regulations on what we are and aren't allowed to run on our hardware. If the content creators and other businesses want their users to engage with ads or otherwise bring revenue, that's great, and such businesses should ensure that by means of technology or by the choice of their business model. Consider what Apple is doing with iOS, they arguably imposed a greater restriction on the vast majority of their users (in that all the apps and purchases have to go through the App Store), meanwhile jailbreaking your iPhone is legal and always has been. Or, in fact, see the recent efforts by Google. No regulation is necessary here.
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Once I turn off the ad-blocker, am I also morally obligated to click on ads from time to time? After all, if I don't, I'm tanking the click-through rate and depriving the website author of his well-deserved reward.
And once I do that, am I also obligated to actually buy the advertised stuff? If I don't, I'm tanking the conversion rate and depriving the website author of his well-deserved reward. Am I then a misanthrope if I don't consoom more?
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I would say this is a bit of a strawman. Most privacy advocates I have spoken with tend to be quite reasonable, despite the portrayal of the media.
My steelman would go something like this: The system is good but has flaws, and needs individuals to take a stand to correct it. I am all for advocating against advertising models, and do vote with my feet/wallet/etc in many ways. However, I think that advertisers have far more money, capital, and influence than I could ever hope to achieve.
My basic issue is that people's attention, time, ability to focus, and overall mental state is a valuable commodity. It should have a much higher value than it does now, but there's been a market failure somewhere along the way in the 'attention market' so to speak.
While I don't advocate all actions against 'The System,' I do think that if you find a service to be severely corrupt, opting out of that service can be excused morally. I'm more of a utilitarian, so it may be easier for me to justify than many. That being said I would stop well short of for instance thinking political violence is legitimate.
This is certainly true, as I nodded to in my original post advertising is actually excellent for a market, but similar to banking, needs some sort of strong regulatory framework to be best used. To be clear I'm not advocating for full eradication of advertising, I'm advocating the position that advertisements are currently highly effective, and they will become far more effective in the future. We need to have a discussion about where we draw the line, preferably before the line gets crossed. That may be at the level of advertisement we have today, it may be at a different spot. But too few people know or care about how effective ads are.
Also, it seems to me that the general quality of writers/artists/etc has gone far down in recent years. Perhaps we need a higher bar for people making a living doing these things. This would also hopefully push more people into more economically useful fields.
Consider that your opposition to ads, is in fact precisely due to the ads being not as effective as they might be. The average CTR rate for an ad is in the ballpark of 1%. Average conversion rate in e-commerce is about 3%. It means that for 10,000 ads you see there are like 3 products you are going to buy. 9997 of them end up useless. 9900 of them you wouldn't even click on. The average ad ends up just cluttering visual space for you.
And then imagine a world where say at least 1 out of 10 ads actually suggests something you might want to buy.
This is untrue.
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I appreciate your reply.
Using AdBlock isn't opting out of the service, it's opting out of paying for it. I see no way to justify adblock that wouldn't also easily justify, say, turnstile jumping ("I should be able to move about the city without paying so much, the corrupt mta system shouldn't make me pay") or looting/shoplifting ("capitalism demands too much of 'people's attention, time, ability to focus, and overall mental state [, which] is a valuable commodity' be devoted to work, so I'm opting out of capitalism and just taking this TV"].
Moreover, AdBlock doesn't help create a conversation about advertising limits, it delays the necessary conversation. If everyone has to deal with ads or pay for paywalled content, the sooner it will become apparent you're better off with a freemium substack (Blocked and Reported) than trying to go free and ad supported (The Huberman Lab). Or whatever as the case may be.
I still see no grappling in your post with the question of property rights. Not to get all "you wouldn't download a car" but there's no justification for taking something, just an effort to claim that "the advertisers have more power than me." If you want great writing with no ads, go to your local library and read War and Peace.
I had no idea I was such a wild and crazy rebel and danger to society, and all achieved merely by sitting at my desk typing away on my keyboard and running an adblocker! Fight the Power! Death to da Man! Revolution now! Anarchy in the UK!
Is anyone else disappointed by how tamed punk became, with this doleful dirge all prettied-up in 2005 as the nadir? Punk and flowers in your hair? Who is she kidding?
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You seem to be arguing by analogy. Can you unpack the analogy?
Specifically, what arguments do you make against turnstile jumping and/or looting/shoplifting? And how do those arguments actually apply to making an HTTP request to server A but not to server B?
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We can make these analogies more direct.
Maybe the MTA is offered to anyone who wants to ride it so long as they watch the ads that play during the ride. Or maybe there are free items being offered so long as you sit and listen to a sales pitch from a sales rep.
And some subset of the people who ride for free or accept the free item and then close their eyes and cover their ears to avoid hearing the ad/sales pitch.
Still as bad as shoplifting or jumping the turnstile? Should they be forced to open their eyes and listen closely?
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Is your objection to the effect or the implimetation?
Many ad networks rely on specific domains. Some of these networks / domains have poor security practices and will periodically link to malicious sites or code. For variety of reasons I choose to have my firewall blackhole requests to these domains. The net effect is that ads in my network are dramatically reduced.
There is content I happily pay for. There's content I would pay for on an ad-hoc basis if there was a low friction mechanism. I'd be happier pay for content if it was priced more equivalently to my 'value' as an ad consumer. Typically you're asked to pay much more than your worth as a consumer of advertising.
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The service is being distributed for free. If the producers hope you're going to pay for the free service anyway, they can, but if their hope doesn't come true, there's nothing wrong with it, just like there's nothing wrong with going to a store and buying only the product that's priced under its cost as a loss leader, or skipping ads on a recorded broadcast TV program, or visiting the blog of someone with a tip jar and not putting anything in the tip jar. Or playing a free-to-play gacha game without spending any money on random rolls for gacha characters.
For that matter, the service is being paid for by the advertisers, but the advertisers only pay for the service because they hope the ads increase product revenue. By your reasoning, it's not watching the ad that you're obligated to do--it's buying the product advertised in the ad.
Just saying that the payment is mandatory doesn't make it so. Like the Supreme Court decided about gun laws, the only payment methods that are actually morally obligatory to pay are ones where there's a historical tradition of that sort of thing being an obligatory payment method.
See I think we have a strong historical tradition around this by analogy, the proverb: "You gotta dance with them what brung you"
Let's say a nice older lady acquaintance of mine I see at Republican party fundraisers asks me to the opera. "Well you see, I have this extra ticket to the gala, and no one to go with, and I know how you love Wagner..." Now I know she wants to sleep with me, and I don't want to sleep with her, do I have to turn down the tickets? No, that isn't the socially accepted opinion, I can accept the tickets. But neither am I obligated to sleep with her, that's a repugnant conclusion (sorry Blanche, nothing personal). At the same time, if I were to go to the Gala and ignore her, avoid her, and refuse to talk to her, most would see that as very rude. Rather, I'm obligated to give her a chance. You gotta dance with them what brung you, you don't gotta go home with them. By accepting the tickets, I agree to give Blanche a shot to pitch her product, I don't agree to purchase it. That's the social contract we agree to.
In the same way, an advertiser buys a fair shot to pitch.
But you know all along you are not going to seal the deal, as it were. So you're taking advantage of the free tickets while knowing you are not going to pay full price. Blanche may think that your acceptance means you are willing to go all the way. So it isn't just "a shot to pitch her product". If you go to the Gala. and are attentive and polite to Blanche but nothing more, and she keeps trying to get her hand into your trousers and kiss you, then I think you might change your mind about how much "dancing" you are willing to do.
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I already made the point about the strong historical tradition--this strong historical tradition includes the user not being obliged to look at the ads.
It was always okay to record a program on your VHS and skip the ads, or to otherwise skip ads in any way physically possible.
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This is a good point. I do take the free rider problem seriously, and try to opt in and support communities I genuinely believe in.
If truly pressed I would say that I find some systems to be so deeply flawed that abusing them is morally justified, which really just boils down to the fact that I have a strong visceral reaction to hate advertising for reasons I can't quite lay out in a logical argument yet.
The point of property rights is a good one. I'll have to think more deeply on this topic.
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I know plenty of folks that use the classic technique of changing the channel when commercials come on OTA/cable TV and radio. I suspect the same is true for skipping over ads within YouTube videos and podcasts (which seems like a serious fraction of runtime for even the NPR podcasts these days). Is this technique unethical? What about automating it?
If you think you're not going to get gaze detection ads in the future that make sure you're watching them, you are sorely mistaken. I'm sure there are already sites where your ad timer doesn't tick down if the tab isn't currently active or your device is muted.
People will find a way to game it. Ads are just one of the many cat/mouse games.
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I don't find the action particularly unethical because it's within the standard controls of the medium, but if a podcast host announced that from here on out he would only release content on a specially made app that would make skipping impossible, I don't see where one would have an argument against him that it was one's right to skip the ads and that he was doing something wrong by changing the rules. The content creator/owner has the right to set the terms as to how that content can be consumed.
If the content creator explicitly makes it pay-to-play, okay, we all know where we stand.
If a newspaper online site asks me to subscribe to read the rest of this article, then I skip that and go find another source for the same story that lets me read for free. Am I obligated to take out a subscription for a year just to read one or three stories? I don't feel that I am.
If the content-creator wants money for views, then I have to assess; is this something I enjoy or value enough to pay for, or can I do without it? If I can do without it, then I'm not paying by unskippable ads, I'm skipping the entire channel.
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That's a tricky line because they don't own or control the equipment being used to enjoy their product, the end-user/consumer does.
I've heard it said that the internet, as it currently exists, is a 'pull' medium, not a 'push' one. Which is to say, the user requests the content they want, can 'pull' it to them, and are able to filter out which parts of said content they receive and which they don't. Contrast this to, say, broadcast TV or even cable, where the content is mostly dictated by the provider and 'pushed' out to the consumers, who can select from the options that are on offer but can't specifically request what they want when they want it.
So the 'rules' of the internet are that the end-user doesn't have to receive any data they don't consent to receiving, under any conditions. And I think you'd dislike it if that rule were changed. Sure, the content provider can also decline to make their data available, can hide it behind paywalls, etc. etc., but there is simply no way they can control the end-user's environment enough to ensure that the ads are served.
So talking of rights in this context is implying that the end-user is supposed to, from the goodness of their heart, choose to receive ads or other content that they feel is wasteful, distracting, or even harmful in order to receive the content that they actually want?
Why would an end-user/consumer do this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universalizability
Because if all consumers/end-users use ad-block or skip ads, we don't get ad-supported content anymore. You can probably make an argument regarding rent-seeking with respect to, say, sports leagues. But to block ads from an ad-supported website and expect the content to stay up would be, well, silly.
If the site really, really needs ad revenue and will sink without it, and I use an adblocker, and it has to shut down because everyone is using adblockers, okay: we then have the choice of "if you want this content, you have to pay, at least by attention".
If it's still up and running even though I use an adblocker, then I'm presuming it's doing okay enough to pay its own way. Not everyone is using adblockers, or it's getting revenue some other way. So I don't feel guilty or obligated.
And if we take your argument to the logical conclusion: simply watching ads is not enough. If the business running the ads which give revenue to the site aren't selling products, then they go out of business, and can't pay the content creator, who then has to shut down. So I should buy their goods in order to prevent that. Which means I end up with expensive sneakers I don't want, or some other goods. Because if I don't purchase purchase purchase, then how will they stay in business? How will they pay the revenue to the content creator to keep their site operating?
The fact that not every single person buys something advertised rather undercuts the argument about "but you have to uninstall your adblockers!" If not everybody who watches an ad buys goods, or if people skip ads on TV by channel-surfing, or other methods of avoiding ads (not reading them in magazines, etc.) then adblockers are just one more way of not transacting due to advertisements. If I am not morally obliged to buy the goods after watching the ad, I don't see how I am morally obliged to watch the ad in the first place.
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Most people don't use ad blockers and many don't even understand ad blockers. Universalizing "should one person use ad blockers" into "should everyone use ad blockers" is like universalizing "should I move to Vermont" with "what would happen if everyone moved to Vermont".
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And if you let advertisers have free reign, we end up with sites which make you view the content through a tiny little window in the ads, frequently interrupted by an interstitial. (Check out accuweather.com or northjersey.com for some bad but not maximal examples). For a short while in the early 2000s there was a bit of a detente where the ads weren't terrible and people paid attention to them, but the race to the bottom inevitable continued. Demanding the targets of the race unilaterally disarm is not the answer.
At least random pop-up ads that make noise seem to have been roundly rejected.
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Sounds moral to me. Ad supported content is itself antisocial and has terrible externalities as the downfall of journalism should be enough to show.
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Sure. But I don't think that's really bugs people who use ad blockers. It sure doesn't bother me. The VAST majority of sites out there, including Facebook and Twitter, aren't really very valuable to me such that my life would be heavily disrupted if they were to close down. Therefore, I don't feel much need to support them via watching ads or anything else. I have so many things I can spend my time on online that any site that doesn't offer a truly unique service or experience, or a really useful function, never really strikes me as worth paying more than a nominal amount to access. Sorry not sorry, thems the breaks. Its a hypercompetitive market.
And we have proof by existence that not everybody does use adblock. In fact, last I checked it was still a fair majority who don't.
I mean, economics still apply. If the site doesn't produce enough revenue to pay its own expenses, and the owners aren't keeping it alive through charity or some alternate revenue stream, then the site goes down. If people value the content on the site enough, they will be sad about this and may seek to support the site monetarily. That just leaves a question of how this monetary support will be structured.
So if ad-support isn't a viable model, then people will seek workable models. And again, we have a proof by existence with Patreon, Substack, Onlyfans, and Kickstarter that there are viable methods of getting paid for content and NOT having to serve ads to the users.
So I don't see why you're implying (and please correct me if I misinterpret you) that our choices are either accept an ad-supported web environment or accept that nobody will be willing to produce or host content.
Exactly this. If the site is dependent on revenue, and it's not making revenue via ads, then it will seek some other means of raising revenue. If enough people like it and want the content, they'll pay for it in some way. If they don't want to pay, then it goes belly-up.
I might be vaguely sorry if your artisan cookie shop goes under due to lack of traffic even though it's on the high street, but that does not mean I feel obliged to buy your cookies just to keep you in business. If I want cookies, and your cookies are good, I'll buy them. I'm happy to support local business, but I do not take that to mean "every business that opens up in the locality".
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I don't think I even implied that. Rather I stated directly, if you don't like ads (or certain forms of ads) don't go on sites that use those ads. It's perfectly possible to avoid them.
I haven't used Facebook in years now (though I'll confess, my wife uses FB marketplace a lot and I pick up the furniture), because I didn't like the website. So I stopped using it. Yeah, Yeah I'm only one man Zuck didn't notice I was gone yadda yadda; but by that same logic it doesn't matter who you vote for or if anyone deserts from the army, there are so many other people your decision won't matter. Be the change you want to see. If you don't like the content, stop using the service.
Once again, this trivially justifies something like looting or turnstile jumping. "Not everyone will do it. Old people aren't athletic enough, others are squares or need to worry about getting arrested."
And that's what I do in the majority of cases. To conflate this with looting is absurd. The plethora of ads shoved into people's faces is a form of assault, if we're going to pearl-clutch about crimes. Why am I at fault if I use a burglar alarm so that my experience is safer online?
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It is indeed. It is also perfectly possible to manipulate my experience on the web to be very different than the ones the creators intended.
That's actually the lovely thing about the internet, I can format the incoming information any way I want to suit my preferences. I'm doing it right now with custom CSS for this website. The website I'm viewing is probably quite different than the one you are, in aesthetic ways, even if we read the same words.
So here's a question. If I'm accessing a given website and I'm running scripts to change the way the information is presented to me, why can't I do the same with the ads?
Would it be acceptable to, instead of blocking the ads, to reformat them so they are shrunk down to a 50x50 pixel square and shunted off to the right side of the screen so they don't interfere with my viewing the content? What if instead it saves every single ad that would have loaded, and then when I am ready to view them, I request that it play all of them at once for me so I can consume them more quickly in one sitting?
Both of these are fundamentally possible. How much can I screw around with the ads being served to me before it becomes an ethical breach?
I'm not trying to be a dick with this, I'm genuinely trying to see where you draw your line, because the internet, as a pull medium, lets me walk RIGHT UP to the line you draw and tickle it gently without going over it.
Am I obligated to accept every ad that is served to me in the exact format it is served? And if so, does this also apply to the rest of the content?
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I think it can be argued that being able to install an ad blocker is within the standard controls of a web browser as a medium.
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MV3 doesn't ban adblockers - it restricts them more, but they will still work, and the MV3 APIs have been adjusted a few times to make some adblocking use cases easier (idk if that was by intent or a coincidence)
Thanks for the clarification! I'll edit now.
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Can you give me a plausible narrative about how we will be "pushed" into the Metaverse?
Currently I have no plans to ever buy a VR helmet. I don't want one. What will make me change my mind?
The obvious business use-case is meetings and the like. As technology advances I expect the ability to do in-person meetings virtually to be a huge draw (though adoption will be incredibly slow as dealmakers and salespeople are rarely first adopters of technology - if we reach the ability to do this in 2040 it's only going to be a major thing in 2060-2070 and will probably only reach the majority of first world people by 2080 at least) especially with WFH offices.
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Because all the Cool Kids are doing it, and if you don't join them then you'll find all your friends have disappeared.
I've lately begun to realize that I don't actually need a phone for anything I do by myself. Sure, I sometimes need to provide a phone number for government forms, buying airplane tickets, etc. but that could easily be done through Google Voice or throwaway SMS receivers or something like that. I know my way around town well enough not to need map apps. If I want to listen to music I can use an MP3 player. Etc.
The only problem is social: the norm of making plans and sticking to them is long gone. If I make arrangements to meet someone at location X at time Y, about half the time I'll get a text message while en-route saying "Let's meet at location Z at time W instead". If I later complained that they didn't show up to X@Y as planned, they would accuse me of being unreasonable for not getting with the times and for deigning to leave home without an always-online communication device.
I got rid of Facebook years ago and never looked back, but I have been burned at least once, when I tried to go to an event at the time that had been conveyed to me by word-of-mouth but was later rescheduled via Facebook without my knowledge. Imagine my embarrassment when I was the only person who showed up at the original time!
When COVID began, I finally relented and signed up for Discord to stay in touch with my local friends. What else could I have done? Should I instead have been all alone through that time of crisis, because of my "weird insistence" that my social life should not be mediated by unfriendly third-parties?
Don't get me wrong; I know where you're coming from. But let's not delude ourselves that it's just a matter of our own individual choices. Resistance to the digitization of social life must take place collectively, or not at all.
The question is, would they still act that way if you didn't have (and they knew you didn't have) such a device? Certainly nobody in my life would. In my experience, the norm is that cell phones enable changing plans, but do not remove the requirement to stick to agreed-upon plans. If you propose a new time/place for a meeting and don't get a confirmation that the other party is OK with that, then you stick to the original agreed-upon plan (or you're a dick and nobody is going to associate with you).
I suspect that my amount of social activity would drop by about half if I tried to enforce this norm on my friends. I've had people no-show with no notice (text message or otherwise), and when I see them again later they seemingly have no memory of ever having made plans. Can I afford to cut all flaky people out of my life? It seems like a losing battle, but maybe I'll feel differently as I get older.
Yeah, to be blunt if I were you I wouldn't keep those people in my life. That sort of behavior just isn't acceptable, phones or no phones. Like, even if you have a phone, what if you don't see their message in time because you're driving to the meetup location? What if there's a technical glitch? What if they thought they sent a message but actually forgot to hit send? There are many sorts of reasons why one may not get a last minute change of plans like that, and in such cases the onus is on the other person to stick to the plan.
Flaky people have always existed. But I'm not personally convinced that the existence of phones has made it acceptable to be flaky when making social plans. Life happens, of course, and everyone is going to have times where they can't make it. But someone who does that regularly is being inconsiderate and is the one in the wrong, even by the standards of today (or at least as far as I've experienced them).
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Work and sex, presumably. When the metaverse has useful business cases (meetings, trainings, whatever) that are universally adopted, it will be impossible to interact with the economy without it.
Plenty of people in 1998 said they never planned to get a computer, no way no how, and if they still stuck to that today they'd be severely impacted day to day. Especially as services that were once analog (movie times in the local newspaper, applying for a mortgage) have moved purely online unless you are willing to undergo great inconvenience. I'm also pretty confident that smartphone adoption was driven by tinder as much as any other single app.
I'm not sure I know what that use-case is for the metaverse yet, but it's certainly possible it's either out there, or that a critical mass of corporate types think it's out there.
They're trying to push the metaverse as the everything verse, but I think the examples people are quoting are going to be the majority use: business and work. Virtual meetings (but you'll still have the trouble of trying to schedule a time that suits the guys in Europe, the guys in Asia, and the guys across the USA so that everyone is awake and it's not sparrowfart in one place and the middle of the night in another). Virtual training. The kind of HR videos we've all had to sit through, only with bells on.
Meet all your friends and interact for a fun time? Less so. Maybe gaming, if they get it to work without lag; imagine playing as your character in a virtual world. Somebody will figure out how to use it for porn.
But if we take the current introductory videos and Zuckerberg's idea of 'fun' (oh hey, here's a cool piece of art I saw today - but if you all want to see it, we'll have to pay the artist, yeah Mark, that's precisely how sharing cool things works with normal people, I regularly charge premium fees to any poor fool I can corner long enough to listen to my raving in order that they can see the piece of visual art, or music, or book I'm trying to push on them), then no. A guy who thinks this avatar is not creepy and soulless is not someone who can figure out how to make this fun.
Steve Jobs, now, were the man still alive or had it happened in his day - this would be jam for him. Zuckerberg? A guy who can't imagine a better avatar than "this one looks just like me" is not the inspirational creative genius the metaverse needs to sell it to the general public.
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That seems really out of touch. People were scrambling to get iphones the moment they came out and cost was the main barrier. People in third world countries have smart phones now, because they serve lots of useful functions outside of hook up apps. By the time Tinder came around smart phones were already ubiquitous. If you looked at a graph of smart phone ownership Tinder coming into existence wouldn't be noticeable.
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Create new services on that platform.
Discontinue ones off of it.
There's a simple line from yesteryear's standalone applications to today's always-on DRM/subscription services to tomorrow's Metaverse.
If you don't believe me about the previous transition, try to buy Adobe Photoshop.
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stereoscopic FPV drone piloting.
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Social engineering and shaming of those who push against the idea of moving to VR. The same pipeline that has successfully changed so much of our culture into a progressive direction, in such a relatively short (historically speaking) amount of time.
The same cultural mechanics that forced us to segregate our online community three times.
For better or worse we are currently sitting on a giant cultural engine dedicated to transforming what it means to be human in a time scale of decades. When I say pushed, I mean pushed.
You may never change your mind. In my experience Mottizens are a rare breed of folk who care about standing up to these cultural machines. Most people however have less resistance or knowledge of these cultural shifts. Slowly more and more of human society, from day to day communication, economic activity, religious activity, etc will shift to a virtual space, and if you don't like it, you will be left behind.
Whether this happens in the next 50 years or 150 years, I believe we need to put serious shackles on advertising before it does.
I think I'm fine with being left behind if that's the future.
As am I, but do you want that to be the future? I certainly don't.
Hell, if it means all the crazies of that other flavor lock themselves up in their pods and crazies of my flavor inherit the actual outdoors world, then yeah, bring it on.
That's a fair point. I'd actually think that would be the ideal future, people splitting off to whichever area they prefer. However I fear that the population in the 'real world' will slowly dwindle until it dies out.
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I am unconvinced targeted ads are worse for humanity than untargeted ads. (Cf. freedom torches). I watched some legacy TV a couple of years back and I was struck by how manipulative the ads were - ads for car companies weren't espousing the car's superior features, but making people feel bad for not having a nice car, ads for cosmetic products showing beautiful people, making people associate the product with beauty and making them feel bad for their own inadequacy, etc.
Not to mention faux-sponsorships and influencers and the like.
Targeted ads I received felt better than this, though I mostly browse with AdBlock on, so I don't get a lot of them. A friend of mine owns a small business and he says Google Ads are great, if a bit of a zero-sum game.
Consider that the next iteration of targeted ads is not to recommend you the product you 'genuinely are interested in', but to manipulate you in a more targeted way than generic manipulative ads.
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Manifest v3 doesn't ban adblockers. It imposes limitations on the way that adblockers can be implemented, but it doesn't eliminate them entirely. It is also the same model (as I understand) as is used by apple's safari in their extension system, notable for being the only adblocking system available on iphones. It is a much poorer model than we are used to, but it is not nothing. That apple chooses to implement a similar restriction suggests that the impetus behind this may be stronger than just making adblocking difficult. While apple makes money off of advertising, very little of it is on the web where content based ad blocking is used. DNS based blocking is still feasible under their and google's model. So the reason for apple to implement this restriction is plausibly the same reason for google to move to this model, with any effect on adblocking being a mere (perhaps beneficial) side effect. The reason given in both cases is that it prevents poorly designed or malicious extensions from consuming too many resources on the host device.
Ad blocking can be bypassed easily if you try. See examples like Facebook obfuscating sponsored posts. CSS classes can be randomized, etc. It's fundamentally an arms race, and it's only an even match when both sides are Turing complete.
Once ad blockers are restricted to a finite set of limited rules, the circumvention side will have the upper hand and we should expect it to win. Maybe not small providers, but large ad providers like Google have more than enough resources to beat suitably crippled ad blockers. It's already a lot harder to avoid ads on Youtube than it used to be.
What do you mean in this context?
I could be wrong, but my understanding is that "old-style" adblockers could run arbitrary code on every request to decide whether to filter or not. This also meant that they could potentially do malicious things like log all your requests, which is where the (stated) motivation came from to limit the API.
In the new API, adblockers are data-driven and can only specify a list of rules (probably regex-based?), and even that list is limited in size. So it may be able to filter divs where the class contains "ad", but obviously advertisers don't need to make things that easy. There is no corresponding limit on their end, and they can do whatever they want dynamically on the server side. In computing, if your enemy can write arbitrary code and you can write some regexes, you lose.
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