I understand the global economic climate and competition hasn't been great but I also feel like Netflix's original programming quality has dropped significantly too. Remember early seasons of Narcos, House of Cards,...? compared to the later seasons of the same shows or even new shows? I remember reading somewhere that the average IMDB scores of Netflix's original stuff have dropped too.
If major browsers were 100% user-centric they would've built ad-blocking into the browser. Maybe make it opt-in, but it should be there as a built-in feature.
All of the major browsers (except perhaps Safari?) are built to increase the control of the browser vendor (through profiles and tracking) and web developers (through increasingly intrusive hooks into the OS). All of this at the expense of the user. Users are _not_ given fine-grained control over what websites can do with their computer, and what control still remains is being slowly eroded by changes to APIs and intentional hiding/removal of important privacy settings under the guise of "not overwhelming users with too much choice."
Extensions _should_ be able to help here, but browsers keep slowly marching forward with changes that take away extensions' ability to perform meaningful actions on behalf of the user. Extensions these days are pretty much only useful for turning the browser into an application delivery platform, like the Apple App Store or Google Play. Firefox switched to "web extensions" some years ago, neutering many useful extensions. Google is now switching to Manifest V3 (which Firefox has stated they will adopt), which means the days of effective ad blocking will soon be over.
Well for all practical purposes, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and Twitter basically control what can or can not be said at this point. This is unlikely to end well.
Stephen Kotkin (briefly referenced in the article) is a history professor at Princeton University and known as the leading Stalin scholar. He's written amazing books and has long interviews on the subject on youtube. One thing that stood out from his talks/books is that he proposes that Stalin was no a psychopathic killer (unlike many other biographers/scholars) but a person who genuinely and deeply believed in communism and was willing to sacrifice anything and everything for it. He also describes Stalin as a super hard-working and pretty smart person.
Disclaimer: Kotkin is absolutely NOT a fan of Stalin, just trying to be thorough and impartial.
"Sacrifice" is a very dishonest way of referring to the mass murder Stalin routinely ordered.
You can look at the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 and argue about the real cause, and the Great Purge and crimes like the Katyn massacre had their own evil logic, but consider the Polish Operation of the NKVD -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Operation_of_the_NKVD. They randomly selected Soviet men with Polish-sounding names, arrested them, and executed 80% of them.
The only thing that separated Stalin from Hitler was that Stalin sent 20% of the men to the gulag and didn't murder their families.
John from the app team here, thanks for the question! I'd say most of the unexpected challenges came from building an app on top of a system that was primarily designed for emails and web. There's lots of tools in the publish email pipeline (queues, delays, retries, etc) that we don't really need to worry about with an app where we're directly querying for the posts for a user. Conversely there are functions like push notifications that apply to the app but not email. This led to plenty of refactors and some parallel backend code, although for the most part we were able to take advantage of the rest of the company's work.
Separately there's been some interesting challenges on the client side around caching posts, serving post content offline, and purging spam/copyright infringing content.
Unfortunately (and I mean it) there is barely any precedent for a regime like this turning around and the economy improving. In terms of economy, it's probably going to be downhill from here, companies will enter survival mode and innovation will be minimized. I really hope I'm wrong though :(
Putins regime was a massive economic improvement from Yeltsins regime though, which is one reason why he is (was? hard to gauge) so popular.
Also counter examples of more authoritarian regimes having economic resurgences - south korea, taiwan, to lesser extents china and vietnam... I'm sure there's more.
Right, I guess there's a lot of debate on why things improved so much economically around that time. But still people will tend to associate it with the administration it happened under - we do it in western countries as well.
What system do you envision for bringing awareness of your product to new customers? Or do you just mean traditional advertisement and not marketing in general (ex: paid or incentivized product reviews).
From the advertiser's perspective, if I can spend $x to acquire a user with an LTV (lifetime value) of $y, and $x < $y, why would I not? How would you prevent it?
I like to think that I'm immune to advertising, and I suspect a lot of people here think that way too, but the bottom line is that it does work well enough on enough people to yield a positive ROI in many, many situations.
Why do you think your new product deserves customer awareness? Why is it so important to impose yourself upon the awareness of others? How is doing that with a goal of acquiring money even slightly morally acceptable?
If I figured out how to do something for $1 and it provides $3 worth of utility, how is it immoral to pay some money to inform people so they can get that $2 of extra utility in their lives by making that trade? As far as I’m concerned, stopping me from running that ad is morally equivalent to destroying the mail sorting machines at USPS.
You don't need advertising if you have a useful product. You only need discoverability.
Advertising is an industry of mental pollution. It exists explicitly to convincing people they need to buy a product. If they don't know they need to buy it without being convinced, they don't actually need to buy it.
It is literally not worth $2 to me to have your junk injected into my brain. This isn't personal of course. I don't even know how useless your junk is. But the fact is, if you're selling a thing, I don't need it. I have more things than I need. I need less. I'd pay $2 to not own your thing specifically because I don't want more things. And that's not even getting into the real issues with advertising.
Advertising is a lot more than your argument claims. It isn't just notification of a product's existence. Advertising is specifically convincing people to buy your thing. Maybe informing people of your product's existence will get some sales. But you'll get a lot more sales if you convince people they want your product. And you'll succeed at that a lot more easily if you attack statistical psychological weaknesses than if you just list product features. This isn't an accident, and it isn't going off the rails. It's what advertising will always become, because it's effective.
Your argument is along the lines of "well I won't abuse it." That's completely irrelevant, unless you're the only person allowed to advertise in the whole world. It really doesn't matter what your goals are. It matters what the effect of the policies you recommend are, and advertising has well-documented negative societal impact. As long as you don't engage with the actual problems with advertising in your arguments, your arguments aren't addressing my point.
If you actually want to address my point, tell me how you can fix the negative societal impact while still allowing advertising.
It might be worth defining your point in more detail. Here's the spectrum as I see it with examples, from most invasive to least. I'm curious where you (and others) draw the line.
- TV / streaming ads that fully disrupt your content.
- Interstitial / popup ads that let you close them after some amount of time.
- Interstitial / popup ads that let you close them immediately.
- Banner ads that try to emulate your content. Ex: Sponsored search results that are specified as ads. Product placements in movies.
- Banner ads that clutter and introduce noise to your content but don't disrupt it directly. Ex: web banners, sports stadium billboards, highway billboards, store front signs, guidance signs ("yard sale down the block"), brand logos on products (esp. on athletes), "temporary" sale notifications.
- Subversive ads masquerading as content: UNDISCLOSED sponsored product reviews
- Ads masquerading as content: DISCLOSED sponsored product reviews
- Unintentional ads: genuine, un-incentivized product reviews. Answering your friend's question "what IDE do you use for X?".
- Indifferent and unconscious ads: your choice to use a product in public and not try to conceal that use.
Almost no one is going to argue against the first few being a net negative, and almost no one is going to argue that the last one is even worth thinking about. So where do you draw the line?
> I'd pay $2 to not own your thing specifically because I don't want more things.
You can do exactly that in many cases. Youtube Premium. Hulu tiers. I'm curious how many people nod at that quoted statement but don't actually do it. It's an easy choice for me to do it because I want to support content creators and the opportunity cost of my time is way higher than what these features cost.
Full Disclosure: My F2P multiplayer games get 75-90% of their revenue from advertisements, and most of that is interstitials. Whenever possible, I configure and experiment with close timers to find the right balance of UX and revenue. If I didn't have ads in my games, they would not feasibly exist. Unlike your home internet, most hosting providers charge per byte of data transfer.
That said, I also offer an ad removal in app purchase at a net loss to me. It's a net loss because what typically happens is players who spend the most time in the game are the ones that are significantly more likely to buy it. But the players who spend the most time in the game are also the ones who would be seeing the most ads if they didn't buy it. They are also producing the most data transfer (ie cost to me).
> What system do you envision for bringing awareness of your product to new customers?
Directories, with extensive search and filtering and opt-in recommendation systems. Powered by ML or what have you.
Personally, as a consumer who is always looking for new shit to spend my money on, I have yet to see any ad that showed me something I actually liked or purchased.
Some of the best things I have discovered have been through word-of-mouth, manual searching or sheer luck. For example the GamingSuggestions sub on Reddit. (Please don’t ruin it with subversive marketing if any of you adholes are thinking of that)
Sadly almost every major market platform actively hinders and cripples their search and filter features, except maybe Steam. I don’t know why. Maybe they are afraid of competitors combing through their data?
I search for X and I get almost completely unrelated results, often paid ads hijacking the search terms.
Why is it so hard to search for, for example, an iPhone 12 Mini Red with 64 GB, and not see results for any other models, Samsung, or cases and other accessories and shit?
Worse, as-based systems vary by region. So even if I’m often searching for anime and manga, Google can’t seem to infer that I would like to see such results near the top when searching for related things, unless my IP is from Japan.
Just. Stop. Guessing.
I literally told you what I am looking for to spend money on, so only show me that, until I specifically request other similar products.
If your business relies heavily on Google to get customers (Adwords) or for generating revenue (Adsense, youtube, extensions, search, …) You are doomed. Google will/has terminated accounts on a whim with no recourse: one day you wake up and your business is destroyed, all you have is a vague, automated email and no way to contact a human being.
"Oh you spent 4 years working on this extension and have thousands of paying customers? We removed it because, well… we can't tell you! And, no we won't bring it back."
"Oh sorry we have to suspend your Adsense account AND keep all the money because… well, we can't tell you!"
"Oh you composed an original song for your youtube video? we're going to suspend your channel with 3 million subscribers because our system wrongly flagged your song as copyright infringement. And, no, we won't bring your channel back! ever!"
"Oh you use our PAID email service for your company paying us thousands every month? Oops, you're locked out because we falsely flagged you. We might give you access again in 2 months, we'll see… In the meantime use pigeons to send messages"
To Google you are just a number, a statistic. They absolutely don't care about you or your business because they have market power.
This company is the worst partner you can ask for, a true monopoly abusing customers and users alike.
You are correct but staying away from Alphabet is a lot easier said then done. They are still the best way for a small to medium business to reach customers. Ever since the iOS changes that crushed Facebook's targeting capability Google has only become more dominant in the advertising space.
To me it seems like avoiding Alphabet basically means avoiding advertising and it is really hard to grow a business without it.
I’m kind of surprised we haven’t read about this kind of thing happen to something like a public school or hospital (surely they exist?) relying on Google services.
Yeah, but it won't take the algorithm long to figure out who you are and terminate/ban your new account. And, because you tried to circumvent controls, any personal accounts you have are also now banned forever. TBF I read about this on HN, not my personal experience.
