Yeah the extra frames do nothing in my text editor. The only part of your typical gaming display I want in a work/daily driver monitor is adaptive sync to reduce video judder and to allow the GPU to idle even more deeply when nothing is being redrawn (which is part of why M-series 14/16” MBPs get great battery life: their screens can go down as far as 1hz).
I won’t turn down a higher peak framerate if it comes without cost to the rest of the monitor’s functionality of course, but it’s not worth trading anything away for.
If so, yeah AppKit has some warts, and it isn’t all that well documented. That’s how it’s been since I got started with it back in the early-mid 2000s, where your best sources for learning were random blog posts or books (the latter of which I couldn’t afford as a teenager).
If you ever do iOS dev, UIKit is a lot nicer to use in almost every way. It’s been polished and modernized a great deal in comparison, and because iOS as a platform is so much more popular/important it’s throughly documented end to end.
Still, AppKit does have some advantages, like its batteries-included nature which allows one to build complex apps with few or no third party dependencies.
100% SwiftUI! As a new Apple developer, I wanted to use their latest and greatest. It does get restrictive sometimes, but compared to having to dive into AppKit/UIKit hackity-hack SwiftUI solutions here and there are a lesser evil IMO.
Ahh yeah, SwiftUI isn’t fully baked yet unfortunately, particularly on macOS. I’m just now starting to use it in significant capacities in iOS projects and haven’t yet started on Mac because of that.
It's been getting better in the past decade but similarly, one of the papercuts of the Linux desktop experience that used to bug me was how you could kinda feel the numerous layers it was composed of slipping around a bit. I think all modern OSes suffer this to at least a small extent today.
That "tightness" you mention is quite tangible on my 500Mhz PowerBook G3 when it's booted into OS 9. It would be nice to get that back in its entirety somehow.
The majority of my usage of ChatGPT as a dev has been to synthesize examples of APIs/tools/etc in usage when those aren't easy to find and/or when documentation is sparse/scarce.
Same to me so far, synthesise or summarise examples of tools I'm not familiar with to then explore the documentation.
Lately I've been using it quite a bit for Arduino on a ESP32 board, I had toyed around with Arduino previously but since I got this board for a small hobby project it's been great to ask ChatGPT to generate some examples of the kind of data I want to read from a few sensors. Even when it hallucinates something wrong it's been helpful for my learning.
Another way I've been using ChatGPT is to be a personal tutor to correct me when learning foreign languages, it's pretty easy to create a prompt asking ChatGPT to have a conversation with me in a given language while correcting any mistakes it believes I made, I've been getting feedback from these corrections from some native speakers and so far haven't got any case of "this is absurd and wrong", unsure why it works so well to correct my broken grammar but it does and without a fault.
I have noticed that there is a decent amount of regional (esp Salvadoran) slang that native Spanish speakers I know use that it doesn't recognize. This isn't a huge problem and it is still incredibly useful though, as learning a few random slang words isn't exactly a challenge.
I think what scares a lot of people is the prospect of maintaining a server, configuring it to be secure and keeping it up to speed with security updates. With a cloud product, the only concern becomes keeping your project's dependencies updated which is less intimidating.
It's something that's on my mind when I think about launching a site that's intended to draw a significant userbase. Back in the day I'd set up VPS instances with nginx+unicorn+rails and it was relatively smooth, but security has seemingly become so much more critical that I don't know I'd trust myself to get all the biggest holes patched up and more importantly, keep them patched.
Yes. It's the "servers should be cattle not pets" philosophy; then you realize that having one server necessarily makes it a "pet" that demands periodic care and feeding with occasional emergencies that cost money or wake you up at night.
Also: people use big services for discovery. If you write a blog, nobody's going to read it unless you get out there on the social media and promote it.
Discovey as a reason to spend money is another web ad fantasy. The old days discovery was by word of mouth. The trust deficit goes down when one doe t rely on discovery.
How important is it to discover a blog post no one is talking about?
It's important to the writer, surely? Why write if you have no readers? I mean, ultimately that's why we're writing these comments here to each other rather than each on our own web sites?
The attitude before discovery was if you build it they will come. I see most people pushing discovery/SEO becuase it is complex and people can be convinced it is needed.
A writer needing an audience is nothing new. I think it is just as valid to create no matter what comes.
Despite the major ground that AMD has gained in the CPU space in the past few years, I think it's still somewhat seen as the less mainstream of the two x86 CPUs, and I suspect that a userbase who has opted into an alternative OS is more likely to seek out alternative hardware as well, at least as far as is practical. Gamers in general have more freedom of choice in hardware compared to other segments of Linux users (fewer specific technical needs), so perhaps that's what's being expressed here.
The effectiveness of this sort of lockdown is questionable anyway, because the cat's already out of the bag and there's no getting it back in. Same for Reddit. The bulk of the data's already out there and nothing these companies can do will change that.
It's a bit surprising that something like this didn't start happening sooner. It's not as if one can expect to mosey through the territory of large intelligent land predators completely unassailed.
I thought territoriality was more a thing for "peer" sizes. Adult lions don't chase mice for invading territory. And while foxes may be highly territorial they aren't stupid enough to try to attack say a bear for invading.
The History Channel getting gutted was so disappointing. I loved shows like Modern Marvels that'd do deep dives into the history of various everyday things.
Listen, I love having William Shatner on there, but for the love of God I wish the content of the show was even half-decent. I’m quite partial to cryptids and other such paranormal happenings, but the History Channel never gets it right.
Besides, given his space adventure both on TV and real life, it makes far more sense to have him talk of weird/mysterious/beautiful things in the Universe. Not a very general tale of Mothman.
This doesn't really affect me since I subscribe to premium, but something that a lot of ad-based services don't seem to grasp is why people block ads.
It's because they've become increasingly obnoxious. Nobody blocked ads when they were a simple column of links in the gutter or maybe an animated GIF banner with 3 frames. No, adblockers became popular because ads kept getting more loud (both visually and audibly), in your face, and resource hungry (remember those flash ads that'd keep your CPU pegged?). The web became unusable if you didn't have a blocker installed.
Web advertisers seem like a classic case of taking miles when given an inch.
Compare it with TV though, which is what youtube is; nobody blocked ads because they couldn't, there was no escaping them unless you physically exit the room. In my country that worked, because ads were neat 5 minute blocks every 15 odd minutes, but in the US it seems every few minutes there's an ad interrupting - but they're too short to tune out / do something else. The news channels are even worse, where the energy levels of the ads overlap with the news so there's less of a clear boundary between the two.
Re: web ads, they were bad, but then Google came in and showed that they can be non-disruptive as well, their plain text ads took over the online ad market. For a while anyway.
Watching live TV is outright painful with the sheer amount of time spent on ads.
I mean, just watching a show on whatever streaming source...a "30 minute" show is typically more like 21:30 to 22:30 long. That means 7:30 to 8:30 of the time is ads. At least 25% of the time.
6 minutes of content, 2 minutes of ads. It's awful, and it feels so much worse when watching a movie. Movies are all about building tension for an hour or more, and that feeling of build-up is just destroyed by ad breaks.
And of course it's not 22 minutes of content and 8 minutes of ads, it's 1 minute of ads played 8 times, because that's more effective at brainwashing you than not buying up all the ad space to prevent anyone else from getting your attention.
And then the ads are designed to be seen one time, so when they get repetitive you start noticing things that you wouldn't care about after one showing but will drive you insane after you see it for the 50th time in a row. An actor flubbed their line and they didn't fix it, a laugh sounds a little awkward, a sound is out of place, all sorts of things that pique your subconscious and you can't tune out.
How many of you can sing an advertising jingle from your childhood decades later? That is clearly a crime against humanity.
VW has this really cute ad for one of their EVs. It was amusing the first few times I saw it. It airs about 20 times per game on MLB.tv, every game. I’ve probably seen that same ad 500 times now.
I own a VW. I like my VW. I will not be buying their EV product. Ever.
>there was no escaping them unless you physically exit the room.
I have no idea what you did when TV was still relevant, but when ads came on my family used to either change channel or mute the tv and talk about stuff until the show came back on. You got very good at feeling out how long ad blocks were and switching back at the right time.
Regardless though, there were strict laws on the ads that you could put on TV, the claims you could make, how you could master them (ie sound volume), and in what timeslots.
Based on the scams you endlessly see in YouTube ads, I'm pretty sure they don't bother with any of that.
I only ever watch TV when there's a sporting event on. But every time I've noticed two things:
- Just how many ads there are. And it's not even that there are a bunch of different ads, it's the same 3-4 ads played in a loop.
- The absurd number of drug commercials. The last time I was I was at a friends place to watch a football game we played a drinking came called "ask your doctor". Anytime a drug ad said "ask your doctor is X is right for you", you take a shot. We were all drunk by the end of the game.
I'm assuming you're not watching American football. That has become so much 'the game is filler between the ads' that they stop the live game in the stadium (TV timeout) so as not to annoy people being fed ads watching it on TV.
Maybe that’s why they won’t promote soccer in the US. 2x45 minutes of game separated by only 15 minutes. And I wish the NBA was like F1 where you pay a subscription and you have access to pretty much everything. I don’t mind sponsored labels and name drops.
Don't mean to go off on a rant here...but soccer will always struggle in the US until the refs start aggressively calling simulation aka 'diving' (and maybe changing some penalty kick rules to discourage it) on the Neymar wannabes flopping around and acting like they've been shot by a tazer at the slightest touch. I've played soccer since I was like 10, and I've been a season ticket holder at my local MLS team since they started, so love the game. But I'm often too embarrassed to even bring up soccer with lots of my US based, sports-mad friends because inevitably the conversation devolves into how games turn on eye-roll worthy acting on the field, refs buying into it, and I can't argue they're wrong (esp since I played rugby as well so have little sympathy for "fake ouchies").
And since we're on the topic...soccer also needs to adopt rugby's rule that only the team captain can talk to the ref and question calls, and respect is required. But, you know...baby steps.
Soccer will always struggle in the US because of culture. Outside of the US, soccer is the sport everyone gathers around the TV to watch, but here in the US that's usually the NFL. If American Football never came to existence and we played soccer like the rest of the world I bet that the US would have dominated and we would have clubs like PSG and Real Madrid. But because we have American Football here, all the money and attention is on that sport and soccer is just a niche sport.
The MLS can do alot to become more popular but it won't ever be what soccer in the rest of the world is because to do that they would have to dethrone American Football which is just never happening.
I wondered how this could reliably distinguish between a scene cut and a cut to commercial without content hashes and/or program schedules being shared through the network, then realized that 20 years ago was already 2003 and of course home internet was common by then.
Apparently one offline technique was checking for black frames inserted by local stations.
TV here is pure hell now. I turn it on in a hotel periodically and always regret it. There’s plenty to watch but the ads are louder and dumber and have naturally become saturated with insanely high margin / LTV scam products like testosterone pills, the worst pay-to-win game imaginable or literally just gambling.
Same. And then when I go to the homes of people I love, and their TVs are blaring commercials in the background of their lives, it's such this weird "I thought I knew you" feeling.
> Compare it with TV though, which is what youtube is; nobody blocked ads because they couldn't, there was no escaping them unless you physically exit the room.
VCR & fast forward.
> In my country that worked, because ads were neat 5 minute blocks every 15 odd minutes, but in the US it seems every few minutes there's an ad interrupting - but they're too short to tune out / do something else.
The US television ads switched to that format to make them more obnoxious and harder to fast forward over.
This battle between attention spam and users thinking that's obnoxious has been going on for decades.
Back when I still watched cable which was ~14 years ago at my parents' house, I used a TiVo to do so partially because it allowed me to skip ads (the other reason being so I could catch late night programs the next day).
After moving out I never subscribed to cable or satellite and don't watch terrestrial broadcasts either, partially because of the advertising. If I were to subscribe now it'd probably be contingent on my ability to use a modern TiVo-like DVR for the same reasons.
I pay for YT premium because the ads were getting ridiculous (I think this is partly their goal to push people to premium subscriptions) and I want to support the creators. However, now every video has a damn host read ad embedded in it. I find it incredibly frustrating that my $15/mo isn't enough. I watch on my TV mainly so I can't use one of those plugins that skips host read ads. I just manually skip them. Maybe that makes me an asshole and anti-creator, but I already pay for premium and its getting ridiculous when a 10-15 minute video as a 60 second host read ad in the middle of it.
In general, I don't mind sponsor reads in a video for a couple reasons:
1. They're produced much more mindfully in context of the video your watching. At their most basic, they're a small ad read at the beginning of a video, at their best, they're a much more likely to be relevant to me (the consumer) ad that doesn't cause me to lose focus on the video's original context. When a YouTube ad plays on my iPad while I'm listening to something during my daily shower, I don't really fear that a sponsor read is going to cause me to lose focus on the topic, largely because the automated ad inserter isn't going to accidentally cut out a second or two before a natural break, or even worse, in the middle of a sentence.
2. I know the proceeds of the ad are going directly to the creator, instead of to a machine that does ads in a way that myself, and a slough of psychologists, believe is damaging to a human.
I would much rather pay for YT Premium, or other services for ad free content viewing, however a lack of job security has lead me to sock away that and other funds that would go to paying for content like this to my rainy day fund. If it were a binary choice of pay for YT or not right now, I wouldn't, and I'd miss out on some fun, informative, and entertaining content, but in a way, I wish that was the case. It'd come with some awful consequences for an entire ecosystem of content creators, but ultimately that's the consequences of pedaling tech drugs, and that's a whole different conversation.
My first inclination is that embedded ads happen because individual creators are having difficulty wrestling the algorithm to funnel enough views and subscribers their way and because not enough of the Premium subscription fee goes to creators.
This isn't always true as there are a few giants that do embedded ads too, but most of the sponsor reads I see on YouTube are from smaller or more niche channels.
I’ve gotten the impression that for some creators, part of the reason is how easy it is to be demonetised on YouTube. The monetisation filter has become sensitive and puritanical that people even self-censor confronting words now, like “murder”, or “rape”, or “suicide”… I don’t know what TV news or current events shows are like today, but from what I remember watching when I was younger, I doubt any of that would be monetisable on YouTube today.
I don’t find live-read ads nearly as offensive. They at least have some personal touch to them and they often vary each time (they are live, after all). I tend to listen to those in podcasts when they are truly one-off live reads (TWiT has historically done pretty well at this, for example).
What are terrible are the tone-deaf pre-packed injected ads that blare out of your speakers into your skull.
> I tend to listen to those in podcasts when they are truly one-off live reads (TWiT has historically done pretty well at this, for example)
TWiT uses pre-recorded ads pretty often, and has admitted to trying AI-read ads which mimic the host. I prefer either to the meandering before and after banter that bookends the off-the-cuff ad reads. Thankfully it appears their paid Club TWiT excludes both ads and annoying wind up / wind down around them.
(Full disclosure, I work for a company that facilitates ad-free podcast offerings)
100%. A couple of the podcasts I'm listening to are moving more towards pre-packed ads and they are horrible. I think what advertisers don't realize is how much more the live ads are worth. I'm much more likely to listen through the hosts riff while doing an ad read vs someone who sounds like they are talking through a forced smile.
That's partially why I don't want to pay for YT Premium right now... The ads are getting really bad, always being placed at the worst moment of a video, and I don't want to reward YT for destroying my user experience. They made their product worse, just to force me to pay $15/mo because I'd get so frustrated with how bad it has gotten.
I recently unblocked ads on a website that I use semi frequently in an effort to contribute to them as they had crossed my threshold for something I feel I should pay for. The page erupted into animation and sound. I immediately turned my blocker back on. Sorry website, you're quite useful but I won't subject myself to that.
It would be one thing if it was just a little couple kb image banner ad but this stuff is just abusive to your local resources. Taking the moral high ground and unblocking ads like some HN users seem to do basically says "I will tolerate an underperformant computer and diminished battery life for the rest of this devices shortened lifespan, and contribute to the ewaste crisis ever sooner"
> It would be one thing if it was just a little couple kb image banner
I guarantee that if all ads were just a little couple kb image banner then the majority of the anti-ad people would decide that this was unacceptable to them for some new reason — or they’d rely on their stance that all advertising is immoral (see elsewhere in these comments for many examples of this).
My local newspaper is just unusable without a blocker. Multiple megabytes of ads and dozens of trackers all trying to load in a random sequence. You start reading a story and the site just loads something and moves the text.
My only ad blocker is the pi hole. So whenever I am away from home, I am always shocked and amazed at how bad ads have gotten. On many sites I feel like an archaeologist digging through layers of ads to find the one tiny morsel of actual content.
What you have to understand about the contemporary media industry is that their primary business objective is to sell advertisements. Your attention is the product now; the more of it they can sell to advertisers, the more profitable the business becomes. It's much easier to present positive quarterly earnings reports by selling eyeballs and clicks than it is selling pretty much anything else. In the before times, when media companies were primarily in the business of selling content for a monthly or yearly subscription fee, this was much less of an issue.
You can't block access to their most profitable raw material and expect them to just sit and take it.
Content is also advertisement. They benefit just as well from platform-specific content that, statistically, puts ads in front of a lot of people, and more relevantly, creates a market for people to pay YouTube to place their content in front of people.
I'm far from convinced this isn't relevant to YouTube history with controversial content. I think somebody is paying to do that, covertly or overtly. Sort of payola? I think there are ways to pay off YouTube to promote your content.
Heck, content is also advertisement in the sense that the show/film you're watching is an advertisement for all the related merchandise that will be on store shelves the same day as the media is published :) I wonder how many $millions Baby Yoda has brought in for Disney?
Well, content providers provide less consumable content now (while the raw amount explodes), that is for sure, we see it, we experience it. The result? We do not try consuming content since we see there is much less, but with much more garbage and adverse consequences.
We - wife, me, and some I know - cancels providers as they are not serving the consumer, and we feel that. Let them sell their service to ad companies then, when less and less consumers go to their site, good luck with that in the long run. They lost one customer for sure, and looking at the mood here there may be more, or will be more if they carry on like this.
What I don't understand is that the whole industry seems to be based on...lying?
If I trick the user into clicking on something that looks organic but it's not, I will be paid money.
Showing an ad full screen on youtube, forced, won't guarantee that is has any effect on the viewer, but the advertiser has to pay and on top of that, the user experience is ruined.
So based on lies, we ruin experience.
Isn't there a way to get incentives aligned?
The only ads that seem to work on me are Steam, because I open the platform on purpose to find new games. The other is costco giving free food. I'm hungry, I grab something from them and if it's tasty, I'll buy a bag to test if it's something we would like to buy on a recurring basis.
Lying is too often cheaper and more effective than honestly building something useful and compelling. There is also the background noise of so many competitors and other things, folks feel compelled to exaggerate to build name recognition.
Then there is the fact that we consumers struggle to maintain and communicate a blocklist of bad actors.
And even good actors can sell out or slide into mediocrity.
I've had adblockers installed for decades. I'm always amazed at how bad the internet is without them when occasionally I view a website on my phone. When there's one completely unrelated video ad playing, and then a second also unrelated video ad pops up on top of the first, I wonder if the first advertiser knows or cares that their ad is being covered by another ad. And then I have two or more audio streams playing simultaneously, so I can't understand any of them ... and I regret working in tech.
On this point, I realized recently is that at one time, auto-plying audio or video on a web site would have been a cause for torches and pitchforks. It was one of the most asshole things a site could do. Now a significant fraction of the websites I hit (esp anything 'news') immediately pop up an unrequested live video window with full audio, and even if I close it, as soon as you scroll over any media on the site, it auto-plays, and when you scroll past, the window pops back up playing video.
When did this become ok? Telling them to get off my lawn hasn't worked.
Let's not forget that so many advertisements are for things that are objectively damaging to you. "It's good for the economy and OK for you" school of advertising.
High interest loans, fast foods, cable channels (with more advertising), sports gambling, et cetra.
I still cannot understand why I paid to get a specific streaming service (Sportsnet) and had to sit through Wayne Gretzsky ruining his legacy by selling sports gambling to my 3 children.
Not sure why it's shocking. In the same space, you pay for cable and still are shown ads. Same for movies at the theater. Though most of the ads are for new shows/movies to encourage recurring usage/payment.
The ads could be worse: drugs that treat cancer, diabetes in 1 month, supplements that cure Hepatitis and so on. If YouTube can show fast food and gambling ads instead, that would be a nice improvement.
I assume because the ads are in language and region Google don't care as much, there's less priority or resource to filter them out. Maybe they should ask Meta how to do it since FB and Insta ads are way more "reasonable".
What good are ads for cancer drugs? If I have cancer then I'll go to a doctor who should know the relevant drugs. If I don't trust my doctor, I'll get second opinions from other doctors. If I don't trust any doctor, I'll hit the books and start doing searches of the academic literature. At no point is it rational for me to turn on the television and see what cancer drugs are being advertised on it.
I believe the GP is saying that in their language, they're getting advertisements for over-the-counter cancer "treatments".
Sure, if everyone is smart, well-educated, rational, and has access to affordable licensed doctors, there isn't much harm in such garbage advertising. However, the problem is that these advertisements are being displayed to people who live in the real world.
The Doctors are being privately lobbied behind the scenes. Then the patient comes in with the idea for the drug. A preemptive match is already made in heaven. It's capitalizing and profiteering off medical conditions. What they do to Doctors is probably far worse than their idiotic ads warning you of sudden heart failure, stroke, etc.
> I still cannot understand why I paid to get a specific streaming service (Sportsnet) and had to sit through Wayne Gretzsky ruining his legacy by selling sports gambling to my 3 children.
Why did they do it?
Money.
They wanted more money and you wouldn't stop watching your sport.
It's not a surprise. If given the option, people will actively shop to get the best bang for their buck. Given two options, they will opt for the one that gets them the most of what they value.
Why did you do it?
Because you valued your viewing habits over other things.
I had to turn off the sports. Used to love NHL (and TV), but it was not worth the dark destructive undercurrent in my life. It really robbed me of happiness and potential. It became much easier just to turn hockey off. If a service does not have an ad-free version, it is simply not available to me.
The irony is that, in Japan, the NHL offered a service with no advertising for a fair price.
I assume making a decent return off a large number of people is of less importance than fleecing true fans.
I used to think the Japanese baseball league was insanely commercial due to it using corporate sponsor names instead of the city name (Hanshin Tigers, Yomiuri Giants, etc..) but in retrospect, the commercialization was only skin deep while the NHL is completely and unapologetically corrupted.
You can’t. To believe that everything has to have some sort of grass root, personal choice-based solution, is a fallacy¹. You could not boycott your way out of Standard Oil.
Stop paying them anything. Get everyone you can to stop paying them anything.
The transphobic fiasco with bud light made it pretty clear that boycotts WORK, if only we had the balls to do them, and maybe endure minuscule """suffering""" to continue them.
Some ads also contain(ed) crypto miners and malware in general, in addition to all of what you said. My feeling is that Google should be free to do what they feel they have to, and ad-blockers should feel free to engage in an arms race with them.
The worst that happens is Google drives away a chunk of its user base, opening the door for competition.
Newspapers were never free of ads even with subscripts. Ads subsidized your subscription. $0.25 for a full news paper and $1.50 for the bigger sunday addition is never going to pay for everything on its own (assuming a subscription actually lowered the full rate).
The only thing that I recall that was ever advertised as free from ads with a subscription was premium cable like HBO. Even magazines were full of ads. Hell, certain magazines were bought more for the ads than the content (thinking fashion mags).
Back when newspapers involved paper, providing an ad-free experience for people that subscribe would have been extremely expensive: A very large part of a newspaper's footprint was actually setting the paper into pages in a sensible fashion, printing and distribution. Printing an extra copy of the paper that has no ads would have been quite expensive, regardless of advertiser revenue.
Today, it'd be quite simple, as most ad blockers prove every day. I'd argue that today, many small newspaper websites are virtually unreadable without an ad blocker. 2-3 videos playing all at once, plus regular banner ads, while trying to make close buttons invisible. The same number of ads appear in a mobile browser too, leaading to basically no space to read any of the actual content.
I'm not buying your premise. You seem to be implying that the cost of running the paper could have been sustained by subscription only foregoing any ad sales. I'm saying the exact opposite in that even if 100,000 people paid full price for the paper every day, that would not raise enough money to run the paper. This is why it is said subscriptions were subsidized by the ads. To eliminate ads, the subscription price would have to increase significantly beyond what people would accept.
You seem to only be coming from the expense of layout which is just not true. The world has increased in size from only paying attention to the local news with maybe a few specialty sources. Now, you can have access to news from any country at any time. Expecting people to pay for subscriptions to that is not realistic either. So since people are not paying for subscriptions, each company is depending on income for other places which has always been ads. The key difference today for me is that ads can now be malicious beyond their original purpose. Seeing an ad in print or tv or hearing one on the radio was never able to drain you of resources whether that be compute power or something much more nefarious. Because they cannot (or will not) control that, they have lost all sympathy from me about ads.
As someone who has worked with WSJ/NYT/LAT/Tribune on adtech in the past: that completely ad free subscription cost is significantly more expensive than you think.
Partially because those sponsored articles (native ads) pay a lot of money to be there.
Partially because they'd have to build and support a whole other version of the newspaper without ads, and if the subscriber count is low, that engineering/infrastructure cost isn't spread as much.
Those Google display ads do pretty much pay garbage though.
When we ran the numbers, it'd have to be a 3-5x increase in subscription cost to replace advertising completely. None of those newspapers think anyone would be willing to pay those costs.
The usual reason is people who are willing to pay to avoid ads are also the most valuable people for advertisers to advertise to. That decreases the value of their advertising business, which means they have to push the subscription prices up even further, which may make the business unviable. Especially because they have to compete with other businesses that will happily copy their content and put ads on it with no paywall.
I know this isn't exactly the same, but I used to work at an adtech startup and my boss was very savvy in the industry, and right in front of me did some quick napkin math showing that Hulu probably makes about $20 a month off of people in the free tier, and only $13 from their ad-free* subscription.
So by subscribing Hulu makes less money off of you.
The main reason is video ads pay the most, which doesn't apply to papers, but does apply to websites. So what's their excuse now?
Yeah but it's not against their TOS to buy the clothes and cut the logo out.
> Does your computer have an Intel Inside sticker on it?
Yeah but it's not against their TOS buy an Intel processor and take the sticker off.
> An Apple maybe?
Yeah but it's not against their TOS to buy an Apple laptop and put a sticker with a 4 pane window on top of the Apple sticker.
> Perhaps it's emblazoned with Lenovo.
Perhaps it is, but it's not against their TOS to put an IBM sticker over the Lenovo sticker.
> How about the car you drive? Does it not proudly display the manufacturer's logo? Did you ask the dealer to remove their stickers and plate surround?
I was being cheeky and besides, the person I was replying to didn't mention Terms of Service. So this is a new argument. But it's not against the TOS to block ads on WSJ, FT, or NYT either. Here's NYT:
Why are you being cheeky and muddying the waters in a serious discussion?
We're discussing more than if the WSJ, FT, and NYT allows ad blockers or not. We're discussing how stupid it is that a service shows ads in the first place for premium service people pay for. WSJ and NYT are only two examples.
We're discussing how there's precedent to pay for a service and still see ads and how it wouldn't be a shock if Google pulled the same stunt.
We're discussing concepts and ideas, not specific companies and their policies.
Furthermore, the link you provided has a section "4. PROHIBITED USE OF THE SERVICES" which is an overly broad section that reads exactly like Google's TOS and could be interpreted as banning ad blockers if NYT wanted to say that's its purpose.
If left uncontested, yes, yes, yes, and yes. All of those are ads, offensively and intolerably on things I paid for.
I don’t understand how everyone else seems to be okay with this norm. I dyed the advertisement on my rain jacket black to make it invisible. I disassembled my phone dock and ripped out the glowing advertisement. I sought out a foil-backed sticker to fully block the illuminated advertisement on the lid of my laptop. I ordered custom printed stickers to cover the advertisement on the frame of my bicycle. I ripped out the advertisements embroidered onto my shoes.
As I look around my house, I see sanctuary from our dystopia.
Slightly expanding on my previous comment, the only “individual billboard” logos that would seem justifiable in principle would b certain foss projects since the overall community benefits from greater awareness. With anything else, the increased brand awareness only serves to further enrich that company.
Is at least my quick assessment. Interested in your thoughts
Agreed, there’s a distinction between absentmindedly promoting commercial schemes and deliberately promoting causes that you think are worthwhile. I’m certainly not without agenda and several of the commercial ads I’ve covered are replaced by designs with socio-political purpose.
No, no and yes but also yes for me. I won't say it's particularly common, but there are absolutely some of us out there that will go out of our way to be a free walking billboard. For me personally, a manufacturer identifying their product is fine but anything else I will aggressively squash (e.g. My car manufacturer's logo is fine, but I absolutely make the dealer remove anything they've added with their name/logo on it for every car I buy).
Specifically that car point struck me the other day when I was walking on the street and took in how blatantly car manufacturer logos are plastered about. The subconscious brand awareness is a hell of a thing
I was a subscriber more than 10 years ago but gave up when they started to have pushy, navigation blocking ads. It was like being unable to turn page before some time passed on the ad. How hostile is that?! Very! Analogy: you see an ad in the street and you are not allowed to walk on for some period of time, forced to stay at the ad. I requested ad free subscription for elevated price or promising cancellation, it became a cancellation.
I still buy the paper format occasionally, I love their articles - it is also easy jumping over ads in the physical format -, but I will not subscribe for paper version due to the amount of paper used and my trust in their electronic version is gone. I did not try their app since (and my tablet use sinked too, I might need much more push now to give a second try).
> I requested ad free subscription for elevated price or promising cancellation, it became a cancellation.
I listen to the audio edition nowadays, that has no ads. Also, I haven't found any good alternatives to it. The weekly issues and the regional columns are a very convenient format for me to consume the news.
Whats even worse are the newsletters from news organizations imo. There's no ublock origin for Apple Mail content viewers. I either lose content like imagery or I have to go all in and load all their remote content, tracking pixels, the works. The ads will be for things like "pills the doctor doesn't want you to know about" and other phishy sounding stuff.
I listen to some podcasts to sleep and it is infuriating to get even 12-45 (!) min long ads! I wouldn't be that upset with 5-10s ads every 10 minutes (as long as the volume level doesn't kill me) but half a freaking hour? What the hell is this?
If there was a company with clear community intentions and sound morals, yeah I would consider paying for it and support the creators. But YT that treats me like trash with their dark patterns and algorithms showing me stuff to hijack my brain instead of stuff I am looking for? No way in hell.
I have seen ads that are OVER ONE HOUR LONG, often on long-form interviews. Am I really the demographic that "they"re trying to sell me late-night-infomercial bullshit?!? ...I guess so.
Don't remember since I browse random stuff that don't absorb me too much as I fall asleep. The only thing I know is it was some religion related crap... seriously. Like a protestant sermon or something.
>Web advertisers seem like a classic case of taking miles when given an inch.
I agree. And for me they're also two (!) good examples of tragedy of the commons.
From the side of the advertisers, your ads are only competitive if they're slightly more obnoxious than your competitors, but as you make your ads more obnoxious you're degrading a common resource - the willingness of the public to put up with your crap. Eventually the public says "this is too obnoxious, I'm going to block it".
And, from the side of the sites showing ads, you'll want (or need) the additional money brought by one more ad. But once you do it, you're creating yet another ad space - making the market value of ad spaces a tiny bit cheaper. And as everyone is doing this, the price of ad spaces drops down to the bottom, so you need to include more and more ads on your platform to stay competitive (or even to stay online).
I would expect governments to intervene in those situations. At the end of the day, a government should, among other things, prevent its citizens from making things worse for everyone, when seeking their own interests. Sadly governments aren't big fans of contradicting megacorps like the Ad Sense (from Alphabet) mafia.
>No, adblockers became popular because ads kept getting more loud (both visually and audibly),
Too bad the FCC's CALM act can't be applied to the internet as well: "The CALM Act applies only to commercials aired on television—it does not apply to radio commercials or commercials aired on the internet or via streaming services."
We can also look at pirating as another reasoning.
Music pirating happened because it was simply impossible to get a lot of music you wanted to. Then when you could find it, you'd pay a large amount. Maybe not even knowing if you liked the work. Napster and Limewire come in because they let you get whatever and even one song at a time. Music industry comes in with DRM and makes it harder to rip CDs, but the mouse always wins. Apple Music, Pandora, and Spotify killed a lot of music pirating because they offered most of the advantages that pirating had: access and portability. It made things easy.
Or look at movies. The "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" ad started in 2004, when a ticket cost under $10 (I think I paid around $6-$8). Now that same ticket is $18-$20, which is $11-$13 in 2004. Not to mention the crazy prices for refreshments. People didn't stop liking going to the movie theaters, they were priced out (along with the studios migrating towards international audiences and diverging from our cultural standards to theirs). Home streaming didn't fix that because they charged the same price or more for a ticket. Netflix killed a lot because people would rather wait (and especially after they started making their own content). Then more streaming services popped up and pirating is back because it re-simplified things. PopcornTime was incredibly popular for a bit and was simple enough for my grandma to use.
This is all really due to incredibly short sighted thinking. Chasing one marker to the next not realizing that they're veering away from the actual goal. I know this link isn't exactly the same thing, but we should be able to see the parallels here because it is the exact same game going on[0], just with profit maximization rather than policy making (we can formulate markets as a social choice theory problem).
And now some musicians are whining and saying that we should stop using spotify, because it doesn't pay them as much as they want - that it is as bad as piracy.
You can't win with those people.
> This doesn't really affect me since I subscribe to premium, but something that a lot of ad-based services don't seem to grasp is why people block ads.
As many services like Hulu, cable TV or even just premium hardware have shown, paying for a service doesn't mean a company will never succumb to the perceived revenue opportunity of showing ads to paying subscribers too. I also pay for premium, but it's very much a case of "Doesn't affect me.. yet"
People also block ads because they are worried about privacy and profiling.
I can’t pay google to stop profiling me, so there’s no way I’m paying for youtube premium.
[edit: honestly, the new three strikes for ad blockers policy looks like a usability improvement to me. It makes sure I don’t watch more than three videos without clearing cookies]
Exactly. I'm OK with ads on YouTube if they are placed in OK positions in the videos. For example, if they are placed in a natural break in the video. However, YouTube has decided to destroy their user experience by placing the ads to maximize "user engagement", aka, "where is the worst spot we could put an ad in the video?" For example, take a slow mo guys video. They will place the ads right as the interesting section of the video is happening, say when the water balloon is hitting the guy in the face. At that time, I'm definitely watching the video, so I see the ad, but holy cow do I hate YouTube and the advertiser for interrupting the best part of the video. I'm tempted to get Premium just because of this; however, I feel like I'm giving into YouTube making their product more shitty to make me want to get Premium. I don't want to reward them making their service worse causing me to give them money for the experience their product used to be.
Much longer than that! The first really user-hostile move was pop-up ads, then pop-UNDER ads, which were just offensively intrusive, so bad that all the browsers stopped them. Then the advertising industry started to innovate, and it became necessary to block everything. I've been blocking ads since the late 90s.
Once they lose you, once you get so pissed off that you go to the trouble to install and configure an adblocker, they NEVER get you back.
They do not understand this, and so they'll simply push more people to adblockers. Maybe Chrome's manifest v3 won't suffice, so people will move to Firefox or Brave to do it. Either way, Google loses.
> Web advertisers seem like a classic case of taking miles when given an inch.
Besides the sensory assault "ads" are also running arbitrary code in your browser and trying to track you individually across websites. I find it absurd when an ad block detector says something like "please support us". It's really "please support us...by letting AdTech track everything you do without informed consent and resell all of that information to innumerable downstream buyers also without consent by the way watch this blaring ad for something entirely unrelated to the topic of this webpage".
To make things even worse AdTech networks have ended up to be major malware vectors because they do effectively zero filtering or curation of uploaded content.
In principal I don't mind advertisements. Someone has a thing for sale they want to show me is for sale. It's not a big deal. I never really had issues with print advertisements, even a full page ad wasn't intrusive on my life and I could just turn the page if I was uninterested. But modern web "advertising" is just the worst fucking thing. The only sane option is to block it because it is so invasive and intrusive.
Ads also constitute a security and privacy threat and are frequently an attack vector for phishing schemes - even on Google search. I'm not going to disable my adblocker and risk becoming a crime victim.
There is a saying that goes something like this: It is difficult to get a man to understand something that his paycheck depends on his not understanding.
This annoyed me particularly because I pay for YouTube premium... but I can't sign into my Google account on my work computer. So if they block ad blockers, paying for YouTube isn't even enough to get rid of the ads for me.
While I totally get why people block ads, and I do so myself, I also totally understand antipathy toward adblockers on the part of websites. Making ads better is definitely one approach they can use. But preventing folks who block ads from using the site is also a viable approach! They don't need to care why people block ads, nor do they need to worry about making the site worse for such people. We who block ads are not economic stakeholders in the services.
> Nobody blocked ads when they were a simple column of links in the gutter
Not true. People are blocking ads whenever they have the chance. Even when they are just a lousy picture on the side, in the text or a banner at the top, they were always annoyed from all of them and found ways to remove them. And it makes sense, because Ads need to have a certain level of "in your face"ness to work, that's unavoidable.
The obnoxious ads generate more money though. Guess what gives YouTube (and creators) more money, an ad that can be skipped after 5 seconds or an unskippable 6 second ad followed by another unskippable 15 second ad?
Similarly, what gives the newspaper more money, the unpersonalized ad respecting your privacy or the personalized ad that first loads a fingerprinting framework to track you across the web and then show you more targeted ads?
> Nobody blocked ads when they were a simple column of links in the gutter or maybe an animated GIF banner with 3 frames
There were programs way back then that acted as a proxy server that would remove image tags that matched the size used by banner ads. See WebWasher or Proxomitron.
>Web advertisers seem like a classic case of taking miles when given an inch.
I think there's a distinction between that and the tragedy of the commons. Advertisers face a game theory scenario where they can increase the obnoxiousness of their individual ad, which will enrich themselves, but it hurts the industry as a whole because users are marginally more likely to figure out a way to block ads altogether after seeing an obnoxious ad.
But it is only fitting since advertising is an arms race regardless of the nature of online advertising or the ability to be obnoxious. All companies would be better off if they collectively decreased their marketing budgets, but that would require coordination and a way to guarantee no one defects.
I'm mostly blocking ads due to security and performance concerns.
those aren't static images, nor text anymore - but javascript trackers.
And i won't be turning off my adblocker ever. no matter how nicely someone asks. If you block me from your site, I'll find the content i want somewhere else. The risk is too high, and frankly - it's my device, and i can pick what software i want to run on it(for now).
side note about hostile sites: if you mess up with the scrolling in any way I'm immediately leaving the site.
But they do not take my second inch, let alone a mile. I simply avoid places with agressive ads, like youtube (and the products advertised), and TV in general long long ago. I stopped to care about the content, not least because the content thinned up with plethora of ad hungry nothing, uninteresting, deceiving, ad optimised nothing. Content pushed on me based on ad strategy and not my interest, navigating to something truely similar or favoured is obscured (just like in movie streaming services wich pushes trends and obfuscates navigation). Not to mention the shameless tracking. No point going to such places, there is plenty of life elsewhere.
One is that to pay more for an ad the advertiser wants to know which user explicitly interacted with it or saw it. So non-intrusive ads on the sides of a UI are by far lower in value during sales.
The other is that the one way to increase interaction and value is to prove that the ad is the only thing the user was exposed to, ie. eliminate everything else.
So what we get today is an entire aesthetic and de-cluttered look. Even when you pay for premium the design is still made so that the machine can read into what your eyeballs are up to.
Google was one of te first that served ads that were small, text based and didn't pop-up or do anything shitty (those were still the macromedia Flash times).
Oh how the turntables... shorts everywhere and ads longer than usable content.
Should also mention that on YT the situation is unbearable. I use pihole but was unable to use it properly for YT ads.
I have kids that sometimes get to watch something on YT. I can control what they watch but there were way too many bad surprises of gross or scary content in the ads (often by proxy, e.g. the ad of a cable TV company would showcase their explicit or horror offerings..). Using YT kids made no difference, really.
I have YT premium now, at least for the time being.
Its a vicious cycle. The more adblocking people do the worse that ads get since they need to be more agressive to make more money to make for the people who use AdBlock.
“You made me do it” is a standard gaslighting technique, common in abusive relationships. If they want compliance, they just have to be nice. A sequence of 3 ads, some of them uninterruptible, before a 10-minutes video, plus breaks in the middle is not being nice, particularly as they jump up the volume to painful levels every time.
No amount of content justifies subjecting ourselves to this brain washing. And I’m not even talking about malware in ads (not on YouTube, but since you mention Adblock…)
Part of it is justifying the ad load by comparison with American broadcast TV (up to 18 minutes of every hour), while not recognizing that that level of ad load is not well known in Europe, for one thing.
That’s a false equivalence, actual power is only on one side. I was personally affected by this; I used to watch YouTube regularly until their ever more obnoxious ads put me off for a couple of years. So yeah, my behaviour is the consequence of their abusive behaviour over the years. I did not start this and I am not trying to shame them into compliance.
Now I watch without ads, so sue me. I’d grant them the moral high ground the day they stop tracking me across the internet and put a reasonable amount of ads time before their videos (interrupting a video is a deal breaker, I cannot believe that so many years after TiVo some companies still think it’s a good idea). They want to play whack-a-mole, that’s their right. But then it is my right to control what’s running on my computer. In the end, if they persist to treat me as a nuisance even though I used to be a model consumer before their hostile behaviour put me off, then they’ll lose me for good and I’ll just send some money Nebula’s way. At least they seem to respect their users.
It's wrong. In a magical world with zero ad blocking, advertising is still multiple different players all competing with each other who will jump at ramping up effectiveness no matter how damaging it could be. It's a competition for a limited resource and there's a ratchet effect.
Adblocker use is not responsible for Google's need to constantly impress its shareholders every quarter.
Don't forget YouTube used to let you skip all ads, it wasn't even that long ago.
None of this is the result of blockers. It's the result of Alphabet needing to earn more money and becoming increasingly desperate to snatch up every little bit left on the table.
On the plus side, this is only making it easier to compete with them. They're increasingly turning YouTube into what broadcast television has become; a raging dumpster fire of advertising and propaganda.
While annoyance certainly plays a role, it's not the primary reason why I block ads.
No, I block ads because they are fucking malicious and dangerous. As far as I'm concerned, an ad in this day and age is literally malware. I am not going to even try and tolerate that bullshit. Adblockers are an anti-virus measure.
Ads are malvertisements and deserve to be blocked with the fury of a thousand suns.
Were you there, when pop-ups were a thing? Like, you opened a site, and there was this new window loaded? Ads has not got that much more obnoxious. For real.
It is mainly that the internets have become 'real life' instead of some hidden away tech thing for us. We can't be deprived alone anymore without society falling down in pieces around us ...
> This doesn't really affect me since I subscribe to premium, but something that a lot of ad-based services don't seem to grasp is why people block ads.
I am willing to give Youtube money just to get rid of the ads once and for all, especially on my TV ... But I can't because Premium isn't available in my country.
> This doesn't really affect me since I subscribe to premium...
I'm subscribed as well, but it's becoming less valuable as more and more content creators run sponsored ads in their videos and these play regardless of your subscription status.
I open the youtube app, search for something, click on the first result to see if it's what I want and I have to watch two 15 seconds ads. Thank you but no.
My list or reasons I go hard against ads, even though I can appreciate quality ads that can serve a legitimate purpose:
1) tracking me across in serval ways, only making me more fanatical about it by selling my information and activity to who know whom.
2) malware/virus injections … it still happens way too often.
3) garbage ads; for garbage products, products/services I just purchased, or the infamous scam ads to defraud people.
YouTube has gotten progressively worse with its ads over time, though. They're slowly turning up the heat to eventually boil the frog. Without opposition, YouTube ads will eventually be as bad as TV ads have become.
On that note, I haven't watched network TV in over a decade because to the ads. None of the content on offer on cable and satellite TV is worth the asking price of both a subscription fees and ads, especially when most of it can be found in other legitimate sources, usually in higher quality.
> YouTube ads will eventually be as bad as TV ads have become.
There's no evidence of that though. Users will easily close a tab because the preroll ad is too long, because there are plenty of other immediate things on the internet. In a way that TV viewers had no choice, because the other channels are just as bad.
Yes, YouTube ads have been getting a little longer from their previous almost-nothing. But YouTube has also been extremely conservative in that direction, as they know they're walking a fine line. The idea that ads will get as bad as broadcast TV seems exceedingly unlikely.
I have YouTube premium but sometimes I can't login to my Google account and have to use plain, ad-infested version of YouTube and it's really unusable.
I swear that listening to a 3 minutes content I am played at least 6 ads of at least 20 non-skippable seconds and in volleys of 2 or sometimes even 3 ads one after another.
It's not "getting terrible", they're already way past that.
I've watched YouTube for years and years and I've never in my life encountered more than 2 ads in a row. I've never encountered an unskippable ad longer than 15 seconds, and every ad that is skippable is skippable after just 5 seconds. And while ads are often included at the start, once they've played I've never seen ads get inserted before the 3-minute mark -- they're usually around minute 4 or 5.
(It's true that after a 3-minute video finishes playing they've started playing another set of ads, but you can just hit pause and navigate to your next video. You never need to watch them.)
I've never encountered anything even remotely close to 2 minutes of ads to watch 3 minutes of content as you're describing. It's usually 10 or 15 seconds total. But I'm in the US, maybe there are countries where it's different?
I'm particularly curious if there are objective stats around this. It's crazy to me that our experiences could be so completely opposite.
I don’t understand why this is top comment. Ads on youtube are skippable after a few seconds and you can pay to not watch them. It’s weird to conflate that with some adspam website, which may have a ton of flashy ads and a video.
However, more importantly, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Ads enable content creators to get paid. Frankly, youtube barely eeks out a profit. When you block ads instead of paying to remove them, you’re making it harder for Youtube to justify its existence.
Personally, I think it’s fine to block ads if you’re actually quite poor or if it makes the web unusable. But if you’re just doing it because “web advertisers deserve it” or some other kind of hare brained rationalization, then you should reconsider your position. It’s not rebellious or brave to use an adblocker when there are affordable paid ad free experiences, it’s simply theft.
I'm not sure how variable this is, but I've definitely experienced unwatchable levels of ads (mostly on mobile/Android). Having an ad before you even know if the content has interest is already a challenge (eg a how to video), and most that I see are in the 5-15sec range before watching and every 5-10min after that.
However, I have had a dual 30sec ad before starting a video that repeated every 2min on something I actually wanted to watch, but quickly stopped, because it was "unwatchable". I consider that level to be at about 10% of watch time (regular TV is about 25% 8/30 min in larger blocks).
I block ads by default and turn it on for the sites that I want to support. Main reason for blocking by default is privacy. I don't want super targeted ad. If I'm on a particular site consuming particular content, that should be sufficient context for choosing what ad to show me. Do not follow me around all over the internet trying to sell me on stuff.
I won’t turn down a higher peak framerate if it comes without cost to the rest of the monitor’s functionality of course, but it’s not worth trading anything away for.