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Naivity. The ads will be hidden in the content and articles/videos will be paid for by advertisers to shill their products with subtle mentions. Everything wi
by brador 11y ago
Naivity. The ads will be hidden in the content and articles/videos will be paid for by advertisers to shill their products with subtle mentions. Everything will be a PR piece, and you can't block that without blocking the content.
- natrius 11y agoYes, it's an arms race. We might lose, but until then, let's go faster.
- askafriend 11y agoWe've already lost
- dexterdog 11y agoWe have, but I haven't.
- tobltobs 11y agoSeriously?
- username223 11y agoWe seem to have reached a bearable truce with spam. I think well north of 90% of email people try to send is spam nowadays, but no more than 50% of what I actually see on any given day is PR junk, unsolicited or otherwise. Granted, messages I care about sometimes get lost, but it doesn't happen often enough to make email useless. ML-based "native advertising" blockers will eventually become as common as spam filters, and the war will become a slightly unpleasant stalemate. Maybe the end-state will be something like current product placement in movies and TV, which is usually either comically heavy-handed, or completely unobtrusive and ignorable.
- esolyt 11y agoBut PR pieces are not exactly spam. You might block "27 Thoughtful Wedding Gifts" because it has product links, but there is chance some of those links would actually be useful to people looking for wedding gifts. Such a blocker would have to block the entire Buzzfeed, for instance.
- takno 11y agoI'm pretty relaxed about that
- cfarre 11y agoMe too!
- niij 11y agoIf anyone thinks that this behavior is desirable, download BuzzOff [1], it blocks BuzzFeed and other click bait on the web. It is more than a simple DNS block, it removes entire elements that contain click bait from websites like Facebook, so that they never even appear. [1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/buzzoff/jhnikgadddmapihkfbadhpghihphphcb?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/buzzoff/jhnikgaddd...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- aninhumer 11y agoActually, I was quite interested to notice recently that I don't seem to get that much spam any more. There are apparently only 16 emails in my spam folder from the last 30 days. I'm not particularly careful with my email address either.
- cosarara97 11y agoYou must have a good filter. I get hundreds of chinese spam emails every month (which get moved to the spam folder automatically) since I made my address public on a couple mailing lists.
- aninhumer 11y agoNo, I mean I use gmail and that's apparently all the emails that have been caught by the filter in the past 30 days. That's why I'm so surprised. Unless Google is automatically deleting stuff it's really sure about straight away?
- tim333 11y agogmail is sufficiently good at blocking spam that a lot of spammers don't bother with it.
- jrnichols 11y agoI have fairly a boring Spamassassin configuration on my mail server, and I don't get a lot of spam reaching inbox. What I have noticed, however, is that I am now getting more and more telemarketing phone calls (robo calls) on my cell phone than I am spam hitting my inbox. It's reached the point where I keep my phone on silent all of the time because I get 5+ robo calls each day.
- Nullabillity 11y agoThere are laws about disclosing ads, no machine learning required.
- username223 11y agoThere is the CAN SPAM act, too, but it only works for legitimate organizations with reputations to preserve (politicians and legitimate retailers, mostly). SMTP-level blocking gets rid of most of the bottom-feeders, and ML targets the stuff in the middle. The web already has customer satisfaction and host-level blocking for the top and bottom, but ML will still be needed for the middle.
- Nullabillity 11y agoThe known sites aren't the one violating CANSPAM (and its ilk). There's a huge difference between websites that people choose to visit and an open inbox that anyone can ping.
- username223 11y agoGiven that even reputable/suable ad networks have been caught distributing malware, I don't see ad slots served by third parties as much better than open inboxes (though at least most mail clients don't load external resources or execute JS by default...). I think the web equivalent of CANSPAM-compliant mail is first-party advertising and third party networks who make a real effort to block malware and enforce some sort of design and privacy standards; maybe they would even obey do-not-track. The bottom-feeders are most of what currently shoves ads at people's faces.
- taneq 11y agoYou mean like product placement in movies and TV shows? Because honestly that's quite bearable.
- smt88 11y agoNo, much more insidious. Imagine that every article written about a company that isn't negative is actually a paid advertisement. As a reader, I don't care that much if an article is paid or not. If it convinces me to buy something, it'll usually be something I can return. As a citizen, it is terrifying that journalism and advertising may one day be indistinguishable.
- taneq 11y agoI actually amuse myself during movies / TV shows trying to pick which items are product placement and which are just necessary props. I'm a lot more cynical of articles, though, and like you I generally treat any positive piece (even down to forum posts if they smell fishy) with a degree of suspicion.
- lmm 11y agoAll journalism already has biases. Why does it matter whether someone's bias comes from their honest opinions or what they're being paid for?
- smt88 11y agoWhat is Theranos could have paid WSJ not to publish the article exposing them as frauds? They might still be pushing ineffective tests on people today. They might be raising another round. Large actors should never have too much control over the media.
- kriro 11y agoI disagree (until they do it better). The Microsoft PP is especially horrible. The way they force strange MS Branding onto laptops takes away quite a bit of immersion for me. I also hate forced dialogues that only serve PP (PlayStation in House of Cards comes to mind). But once they do it better it becomes rather problematic ethically. What good is a "this contains PP" label if it's the standard and you can't identify it. I guess once we cross that bridge my only recourse is non consumption. I guess there might be a disruption opportunity there somewhere where you can pay for content without the PP which requires shooting TV/movies/sports broadcasts in two different modes. Doubt there would be many customers for that though...maybe the other way around, dynamic programming with custom tailored PP.
- jlubawy 11y agoSounds exactly like the premise to this South Park episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Advertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Advertising
- louprado 11y agoIs there some truth to this episode ? An acquaintance of mine (picture a stereotypical MLM-type guy) recently added a P.S. to an e-mail suggesting I subscribe to 60 Minutes All Access. I found this bizarre since I had recently clicked on 60 Minutes All Access link. It felt like my friend was advertising to me based on my browsing history. But this would suggest Google monitors what I do in my Chrome browser then suggests an affiliate embed a casual link in an e-mail based on the friend he is writing. That sounds kind of evil and improbable. Anyone ?
- LoSboccacc 11y agoI don't know if this is the actual case but search re-targeting is surely a thing.
- tamana 11y agoMaybe they just had a recent big advertising push. Or the link is inserted after he sends it, before it is delivered to you?
- James001 11y agoI think you're missing the fact that everything already is a PR piece and has been forever
- mdpopescu 11y agoAgreed... I'm surprised that nobody linked http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html yet.
- yoz-y 11y agoI like native advertising in general. The one thing I do not like though is the growing prevalence of "un-advertising" i.e. blurring logos of brands that appear in the image for different reasons. I have not looked into this but I presume this is done because some sponsor earned exclusivity. Also, I absolutely hate the current trend in tv shows to put a sticker over a logo on _every single_ computer. Real world does not look like this, it is ridiculous.
- tracker1 11y agoOr the legal department is afraid of trademark case for showing the mark... or an advertising arrangement couldn't be reached before shooting was done.
- yoz-y 11y agoI don't know, it seems like a quite recent trend for me. For example in France they are now blurring the national railway company logo in news and tv shows. Which is a totally pointless action since it is on a railway station and there is (basically) only one railway company. Not to mention their logo is extremely recognisable even when blurred. More recently I saw a show about clothing where they put some duct tape over Nike logos on shoes. Are there laws that prohibit you from showing brands in videos shot in public places now? If Nike did not want to be recognised they would not put their giant logo on everything.
- mhurron 11y ago> Are there laws that prohibit you from showing brands in videos shot in public places now? No, but that doesn't stop the companies from filing lawsuits or threatening too if they don't like the context their brand was shown in.
- JetSpiegel 11y agoJust like Pattern Recognition.
- krzrak 11y agoI see an analogy with free/cheap IT conferences: you go there (naively) expecting content, but it turns out that almost every talk is an advertisement of the product or job openings.
- icebraining 11y agoNot so for FOSDEM, in my experience.
- Roritharr 11y agoI have the exact opposite experience. Most expensive conferences that i've been to had a majority of sales pitches as talks. The free cobbled together ones where you maybe get pizza and some soda are the ones where I learned the most.
- krzrak 11y agoYou're right, I should modify my statement: there are free/cheap conferences that are organised by some for-profit organisations - and they're mostly pitches. On the other hand, there are lots of meetups, confs, tech talks organised by non-profits, student groups, enthusiast, etc. which are really worth attending.
- sys_argv 11y agonaiveté