One of my personal favorites: movie theatres.
You pay, a handsome amount of money, to see a movie, once, and if you happen to have the weird idea of not be just late enough to the movie, you get the wonderful, once in a lifetime opportunity… to get ads shoved in your face. Ads for food, ads for random stuff, and ads for other movies.
The best of both worlds, really.
Used to drive me crazy. Now I simply don’t go anymore.
Honestly I don't mind the pre-movie trailers. I like movies and they give me time to go pee and stuff.
* Relevant. You know I’m interested in movies, since I’m at one, so you don’t have to spy on me to do it. Some theaters might be spying on me, I dunno, but they don’t have to in principle.
* Not directly interfering with my original purpose. The movie hasn’t started yet. The only thing you might be showing me before the movie is, maybe, cartoon shorts? I guess that would be more fun than ads, but the ads aren’t going to give me malware or pretend to be from the FBI when they’re not, so it’s not as bad as internet ads.
* If the theater starts advertising scams, they have a brick-and-mortar address, they’re in the same legal jurisdiction as the visitors, and everyone sees the same ads, so suing them should be an option. Everybody who visited the movie saw the same set of ads, so if it’s a scam, there’s plenty of witnesses.
That’s something else that drives me crazy with both YouTube & Twitter. The number of scams that run in their ads.
Some falsely referring to some local celebrity only to sell some dodgy pseudo-financial product. Others selling medical products that would be heavily regulated if they did anything close to what they promise, sometimes vaguely citing "medical research" and "new discoveries".
Almost as if they didn’t review them before letting them go live!
But we never hear a word about that, no.
Governments try to have all our online chats preemptively monitored to chase after pedophiles[1] (and then it’ll be terrorists, and heck, after that, why not copyright infringements while they’re at it? ie Hadopi)…
The news and our Dear Leaders keep ranting about Facebook, Google and Twitter because of how they are used to spread disinformation to further some political goals…
They also all keeps bashing Facebook & Google for supposedly causing the ruin of the news media (all of which then rants on about it whenever given a chance, mostly spouting nonsense, even those I like).
But big, supposedly (and probably wrongly) trusted platforms spreading scams at scale all over the world? That’s apparently not worth any widespread effort, fine or headline.
Sorry for the rant. As I said; drives me crazy.
[1]: https://european-pirateparty.eu/parliament-approves-chatcont...
If that bullshit worked you could just throw yourself in the sea for free rather than paying some pillock on Facebook. No better connection to earth than that!
They got converted to pre-views pretty early on though because at the end of the movie people didn't stick around to watch them.
Pretty much the reason I scorned every single "smart tv"
LG ads: https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2021/3/10/22323790/lg-oled-tv-...
Samsung connecting to open WiFi: https://forum.developer.samsung.com/t/if-you-choose-to-not-c...
Samsung TV ads (you’ll find more sources, but adweek seemed a pretty ironic choice): https://www.adweek.com/convergent-tv/samsung-ads-debuts-thre...
Samsung, LG, Sony & others spying on what you watch: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/smarter-living/how-to-sto...
Quite a lot to avoid ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Or maybe skip straight to an LED projector, I hear those are nice.
Just glancing at Amazon, I see a 65-inch 4k digital signage display for under $1200 USD.
I wonder what would happen if you limited their bandwidth to a couple of kbps. Just enough to get the pings across but make any ad download excruciatingly slow. Or write some kind of DPI rule that drops packets to the internet above a certain size.
That's why I think experimenting with more advanced sabotage will pay off in the long run.
But buying a DVD to then be pestered with unskipable dire warnings for life and limb if I dare to pirate this DVD was really a bit rich.
Hello! I actually paid for this product. I'm really in the wrong target group for this shit. And moreover:
I think I'll pirate the next movie so that I'm not forced to endure such gunk.
Now when I moved to Canada: no numbered seats, and 20 (yeah, TWENTY) minutes of ads + trailers. WTF is wrong with you people? I just don't go anymore
Either you get a random seat, perhaps apart from your party, perhaps miss a bit of the movie (although unlikely), and get not to watch ads.
Or you arrive on time, perhaps slightly early, get to pick where you sit, together, and get a shit ton of ads shoved down your eyes and ears for nearly half an tour, in full IMAX & DolbyVision 20.8.
Edit: Oh, and you don’t know at what time the movie actually ends, because they tell you when the ads start, and how long the movie lasts. But you have to factor in the very important ad time.
But there’s also, before those, ~20 minutes of "regular" ads. Ads for M&Ms. Ads for cars. Ads for some pseudo-luxury perfumes. Ads, ads, ads… even ads for the company that places the ads in movie theatres!
"All institutions & organizations must shut the hell up. To all egregores: you do not speak unless spoken to, and I will NEVER speak to you. I do not want to hear 'thank you' from a corporation. I am a divine being : you are a construct. You have no right to speak in my holy tongue."
The business models that would become viable in that reality would be a better equilibrium and the incentives would be better aligned between software companies and their users.
Highly targeted advertising disproportionately benefits the little guy. I say this as a little guy, running a small dog treat e-commerce company. Almost all of my new customer acquisition is by way of Facebook ads.
If you get rid of Facebook ads and go back to the non-targeted, TV commercial and newspaper type ads, my company might not survive. Purina, though? They'd be fine. They can afford to spend enormous amounts, and they've got a range of products that means their potential customer base is much bigger than mine.
Your local vet can affordably reach pet owners in their area with targeted advertising. If it goes away, that will hurt them and greatly benefit VCA (huge, nationwide chain of vet hospitals).
You're right in the sense that my business model would become inviable, but the result is that you're going to concentrate power even more heavily among the largest corporations. Is that really a good thing?
That being said, if you are concerned about monopolies, there are better ways to fight them. Unfortunately they have been neglected in the last few decades. Perhaps channeling your money/influence towards that instead of ads would be better for everyone.
The world prior to 20 years ago was a very different one in terms of the scale and reach companies could achieve. Pretending as though the situation now is comparable is just naive on your part.
And honestly, the drama of calling it a cancer is just silly and dramatic. If you think this is all so terrible, go live in a commune instead of posting on a message board that is run by an organization that is deeply connected to big tech and all the things you're complaining about. I guess you probably can't see that connection all the way up there on your high horse, though.
Nobody said you should stop in this instant. I was criticizing how your approach to fighting your competitors inadvertently does a lot of damage to people that don't know any better.
>And honestly, the drama of calling it a cancer is just silly and dramatic. If you think this is all so terrible, go live in a commune instead of posting on a message board that is run by an organization that is deeply connected to big tech and all the things you're complaining about. I guess you probably can't see that connection all the way up there on your high horse, though.
This argument is basically the "yet you live in a society, curious" meme[0]. I work also work in tech(as an industrial automation contractor to be precise) so I enjoy the technical aspect of the conversations here. That being said I set a goal 5 years ago to not give SV gigacorps a single cent either directly or indirectly. It helps me keep a clean conscience in arguments like this.
Make no mistake I'm no leftie. I just find the direction the online world is heading deeply concerning. Social cooling[1] and all that. The fact that your means of making money is caught in this crossfire is not what I'm aiming for.
Doesn’t mean that Facebook isn’t a cancer on society, enabling a skyrocketing in polarization, setting groups up against each other against their best interests, giving megaphones to the most vile humans turds imaginable etc.
The nice and civil “Mount Pleasant baseball league” Facebook page that your ads run on and that make your business profitable are at best an unintended side effect of that.
I think on net the problems targeting creates are worse than the small business benefits, but that’s an easy position for me to hold because I don’t run a small business.
I also think in a world where advertising models are not really viable for supporting software companies (or media) - you get better models that have a better outcome for the group. Things like Substack.
I’d imagine in that world there’s still room for your company to succeed, but the model is probably different. Maybe niche community sites where people review high quality dog food? Someone from your company could be part of those communities in a genuine way. There’d still be advantages for little companies - it’s just hard for people to model what that kind of world would look like.
So I both agree with you that targeted advertising today helps the little guy, but I disagree that a world where that model isn’t viable is one where the little guy can’t exist.
Comments like the sister reply to mine don’t help because they make it seem like I don’t care about the trade offs - I do, I just think they’d be different and the costs today are pretty bad.
Facebook doesn’t give a rats ass about equity. If they did they’d copy a model like Apple’s App Store: as developer you pick a price tier for your app or subscription. That same tier translates into for example €2,99 per month in Europe, but the equivalent of €0,25 in less privileged markets. So the luckier people of the world subsidize the less fortunate, as it should be.
Not that long ago someone posted this beautiful Banksy quote about it on HN:
> “People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.” - Banksy
I’ll damn well block all shitty ads on every site.
You’re a newspaper site and want to block me for using an ad blocker? Feel free, I’ll leave your site.
You’re an advertiser who refuses to bid on ad space as too many people block the ads anyway? Please stop bidding then.
But don’t pretend that by offering your site for free and me using it for free somehow requires me to see shitty ads.
If you want my money, ask for it. If your content is worth it I’ll pay for it.