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I’ve realized something over the years: Remember how “cool” Google was in 2007!? I vividly remember. I have learned an important fact that Ad business is rotte

I’ve realized something over the years: Remember how “cool” Google was in 2007!? I vividly remember. I have learned an important fact that Ad business is rotten at the core - meaning it has direct conflicts with users. Therefore, I can never come to trust any Ads businesses: Facebook, Google, Snapchat, etc and recently Adobe and Microsoft. I’m disgusted at the state of advertisement in modern society. It ruined cable, radio, social media, road sides, magazines and the very fabric of society. Turns out that our attention has a huge price tag.

codezero 8y ago
Not to age myself I remember how cool Google was in 1999. The joy of actually finding what you wanted and not getting sucked into some ad sponsored portal. Now Google is the portal. I’m done with it.
- fermienrico 8y ago
  Google has invested billions into search and it is nearly impossible for a small startup to invade the search business. For example, imagine a company that allows you to search the internet without ads but charging say $2.99/month fee to use it. Even if I am willing to pay, the search accuracy and ability for a small company to compete with google is nearly impossible. So here we are. Perhaps I’ll switch to DuckDuckGo. They recently got funding and I feel like they’re “cool” right now until if they grow huge and we are back to square one. This is the endless corporate loop we are stuck with.
  - colordrops 8y ago
    The endless corporate loop is natural. Everything in this universe is on an endless loop and nothing lasts forever. Just get used to change and use whatever is legit at the moment.
    - millstone 8y ago
      Don't endless loops last forever by definition?
      - sjwright 8y ago
        I think it's more fair to say that endless loops would last forever given the chance but can be (and inevitably are) aborted by external forces. That's true of any endless loop or endless cycle—they could all be aborted by a sufficiently large asteroid.
  - snaky 8y ago
    Microsoft has invested billions into Internet Explorer and it is nearly impossible for a small startup to invade the browser business. IE Firefox 2009 Q4 66.42% 21.13% 2003 Q2 94.43% 2.22% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#TheCounter.com_%282000_to_2009%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Th...
    - saurik 8y ago
      Remember that we, the people, sued Microsoft and forced a settlement -- a scenario which also led to the CEO of Microsoft stepping down.
    - olliej 8y ago
      Firefox and Mozilla were not a small startup - they had (comparatively) boatloads of money (now they have even more) and a huge number of free developers :)
      - snaky 8y ago
        > and a huge number of free developers Why do you think the search engine is unable to build a model leveraging a huge number of free developers?
        greglindahl 8y ago
        Well, for one thing, search is a tightly-coupled problem that revolves around a big and expensive data store. That's quite different from a browser. Blekko did get volunteers to help edit our slashtags, and duckduckgo used to have volunteers help out with their duckduckhacks.
        snaky 8y ago
        I think the main point is to not try to copy Google. DDG is power users' search engine for now, and that's OK. You may leverage power users help in tags, and other features, that would minimize the overhead in hardware platform. To make an extreme example - imagine how many data about the particular user would you need to have and how many resources would you need to spend on AI models training to give the same result by guessing and AI that user would get from SQLite, having formulated simple request in SQL.
  - alasdair_ 8y ago
    >So here we are. Perhaps I’ll switch to DuckDuckGo. They recently got funding and I feel like they’re “cool” right now until if they grow huge and we are back to square one. DuckDuckGo's primary selling point is privacy. If they infringe on that, they die. Also, I just switched to an iPhone again after years of using Android, for similar reasons. Apple is scary but right now I want to distance myself from Google as much as possible.
    - fermienrico 8y ago
      If their selling point is privacy, it conflicts with target advertisement business model. I’m curious how they plan to be profitable? Perhaps just good ol’ non targeted advertisement without user profiling?
    - colordrops 8y ago
      Google's primary selling point was being the anti-microsoft, i.e. Don't Be Evil.
      - philliphaydon 8y ago
        And now the tables have turned.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    > For example, imagine a company that allows you to search the internet without ads but charging say $2.99/month fee to use it. Even if I am willing to pay, the search accuracy and ability for a small company to compete with google is nearly impossible. It doesn't even require payment. Even if you don't do any user targeting at all, insurance companies will transport a Scrooge McDuck money bin full of gold bullion to your location if you can show their car insurance ads to all the people who search for "car insurance" etc. Google itself operated this way for many years. What you need is some competitive advantage over the incumbent. I suspect a good way to do this is to make products for more technical users. Support powerful filters and scripting and regular expressions. Expose the internals of how it works to the user. Publish the source code and let people improve it -- do for search what Red Hat does for operating systems. It's a great model here because the cost of doing the indexing is still a moat even if the search code itself is completely open. Big companies concentrate on the mass market. They've gone so far in the direction of making things so simple and generic that literally everyone can use it that they're leaving open an opportunity for someone to capture the subset of the market willing to suffer the complexity that comes from a more powerful interface. You don't need 99% of the users, 5% is quite sufficient. If you make that you're worth a billion dollars and have the resources to make further improvements that allow you to compete in the wider market.
spectrum1234 8y ago
I generally agree. However without ads, how do you expect poor people to have (free) access to radio, magazines (well, cheaper), antenna tv?
- fermienrico 8y ago
  At this rate, the poor are better off without tv, radio and magazines. They’re largely just an entry portal into psychological extortion by these advertising firms. I’m a huge fan of publicly funded media such as NPR and your local public radio station.
  - sooheon 8y ago
    I'm also a fan of patronizing the media you enjoy. Content makers having a direct relationship with their consumers.
    - WoodenChair 8y ago
      Choosing to watch ads is a way of patronizing the media you enjoy.
  - throwaway8879 8y ago
    I'd rather have the poor decide what is good for them, and not you.
    - sjwright 8y ago
      That sounds like a good theory from our comfortable, affluent office chairs... until you think about it for approximately five seconds. Would you rather have the children decide what they should learn in school, or the injured decide how their wound should be dressed? A fundamental aspect of our society's advancement is that we have become specialists: we almost all wear socks but very few of us would know how to make them. And even if we could, we wouldn't be able to make them quite so efficiently. The poor—or the middle class, or the rich—shouldn't have to decide how they are being informed about the world any more than they should be expected to decide which type of stitching is used to assemble their socks.
dm8 8y ago
I work at an ad-tech startup, and I hear you. Ad-tech has lot of rotten apples. Advertising done right (aka unobtrusive, privacy conscious, and value additive) is a great for free information exchange. Bad ad is always bad, but ad may not always be bad. There are lot of people working on it (including my startup) to solve the problem that are fraught with ad-tech in general and we are making progress but there is lot of inertia in the industry when it comes to change.
- ajmurmann 8y ago
  How can an advertisement not be bad? Ultimately it's always the goal to get someone to buy something they otherwise wouldn't. Even if you catch someone when they are already are looking to buy a product from your category you are trying to get them to buy your product instead of the competitor's. What would be helpful to the user in that moment is a product comparison that's honest and unbiased and not an advertisement. The goals of the advertiser and the consumer are inherently at odds. I'd be genuinely excited to learn otherwise.
  - roenxi 8y ago
    A lot of advertising is either raising awareness that a product category exists at all, or comforting potential buyers that people won't laugh at them if they buy a thing and it turns out to be a bad idea. Consider the iPhone advertising campaign back in '07, modern smartphones would have taken another decade to take hold if Apple hadn't done such a masterful job telling people that a new category was being born. Sometimes people will advocate 'doing your own research'. That is at odds with the fact that most people are incapable (not just disinterested in, but incapable) of evaluating all the decisions they make daily basis. Research the decisions you understand, copy someone else for the rest is the best strategy. In that environment, even a good product needs some exposure to raise awareness that it exists. The game is more complicated than advertisers hypnotising an otherwise unwilling public.
  - throwaway8879 8y ago
    What exactly do you mean by "bad" here? If you're making a moral or value judgement about ads being bad, then I don't know how to respond to that. Animals of all types are evolved to acquire resources, at any cost. And humans have taken the social aspect of resource acquisition to an extreme level. I'm not a big fan of ads either, but people do what they do. And making moral or value judgements about primate behavior is extremely one-dimensional.
yuhong 8y ago
I wrote an essay with more detailed history for a reason. It is probably worth linking it here: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.com/2018/09/google-doubleclick-mozilla-overview_92.html http://yuhongbao.blogspot.com/2018/09/google-doubleclick-moz...
IvyMike 8y ago
Reminds me of Futurama's commentary on "Ads in the 20th century": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPGgTy5YJ-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPGgTy5YJ-g "Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky." (And that was in 1999. The 2018 version would have to be extended: "And in our email, and in the Windows start menu, and in our phones, and on shopping carts and subway turnstiles, and maps, and video games, and in photo albums, and even inside of other ads. And the ads watched you as much as you watched them. But not our dreams.")
- cjarrett 8y ago
  David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest as well: In the novel's world, each year is subsidized by a specific corporate sponsor for tax revenue. The years of Subsidized Time are: Year of the Whopper Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade for Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems for Home, Office or Mobile Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (Y.D.A.U.) Year of Glad
Jellebean 8y ago
How is this comment related to the article?
foxhop 8y ago
Yup, this is why I created Remarkbox (https://www.remarkbox.com https://www.remarkbox.com) as an alternative to Disqus who just got officially bought by an advertisement firm.

codezero 8y ago

Not to age myself I remember how cool Google was in 1999. The joy of actually finding what you wanted and not getting sucked into some ad sponsored portal. Now Google is the portal. I’m done with it.

fermienrico 8y ago
Google has invested billions into search and it is nearly impossible for a small startup to invade the search business. For example, imagine a company that allows you to search the internet without ads but charging say $2.99/month fee to use it. Even if I am willing to pay, the search accuracy and ability for a small company to compete with google is nearly impossible. So here we are. Perhaps I’ll switch to DuckDuckGo. They recently got funding and I feel like they’re “cool” right now until if they grow huge and we are back to square one. This is the endless corporate loop we are stuck with.
- colordrops 8y ago
  The endless corporate loop is natural. Everything in this universe is on an endless loop and nothing lasts forever. Just get used to change and use whatever is legit at the moment.
  - millstone 8y ago
    Don't endless loops last forever by definition?
    - sjwright 8y ago
      I think it's more fair to say that endless loops would last forever given the chance but can be (and inevitably are) aborted by external forces. That's true of any endless loop or endless cycle—they could all be aborted by a sufficiently large asteroid.
- snaky 8y ago
  Microsoft has invested billions into Internet Explorer and it is nearly impossible for a small startup to invade the browser business. IE Firefox 2009 Q4 66.42% 21.13% 2003 Q2 94.43% 2.22% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#TheCounter.com_%282000_to_2009%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Th...
  - saurik 8y ago
    Remember that we, the people, sued Microsoft and forced a settlement -- a scenario which also led to the CEO of Microsoft stepping down.
  - olliej 8y ago
    Firefox and Mozilla were not a small startup - they had (comparatively) boatloads of money (now they have even more) and a huge number of free developers :)
    - snaky 8y ago
      > and a huge number of free developers Why do you think the search engine is unable to build a model leveraging a huge number of free developers?
      - greglindahl 8y ago
        Well, for one thing, search is a tightly-coupled problem that revolves around a big and expensive data store. That's quite different from a browser. Blekko did get volunteers to help edit our slashtags, and duckduckgo used to have volunteers help out with their duckduckhacks.
        snaky 8y ago
        I think the main point is to not try to copy Google. DDG is power users' search engine for now, and that's OK. You may leverage power users help in tags, and other features, that would minimize the overhead in hardware platform. To make an extreme example - imagine how many data about the particular user would you need to have and how many resources would you need to spend on AI models training to give the same result by guessing and AI that user would get from SQLite, having formulated simple request in SQL.
- alasdair_ 8y ago
  >So here we are. Perhaps I’ll switch to DuckDuckGo. They recently got funding and I feel like they’re “cool” right now until if they grow huge and we are back to square one. DuckDuckGo's primary selling point is privacy. If they infringe on that, they die. Also, I just switched to an iPhone again after years of using Android, for similar reasons. Apple is scary but right now I want to distance myself from Google as much as possible.
  - fermienrico 8y ago
    If their selling point is privacy, it conflicts with target advertisement business model. I’m curious how they plan to be profitable? Perhaps just good ol’ non targeted advertisement without user profiling?
  - colordrops 8y ago
    Google's primary selling point was being the anti-microsoft, i.e. Don't Be Evil.
    - philliphaydon 8y ago
      And now the tables have turned.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > For example, imagine a company that allows you to search the internet without ads but charging say $2.99/month fee to use it. Even if I am willing to pay, the search accuracy and ability for a small company to compete with google is nearly impossible. It doesn't even require payment. Even if you don't do any user targeting at all, insurance companies will transport a Scrooge McDuck money bin full of gold bullion to your location if you can show their car insurance ads to all the people who search for "car insurance" etc. Google itself operated this way for many years. What you need is some competitive advantage over the incumbent. I suspect a good way to do this is to make products for more technical users. Support powerful filters and scripting and regular expressions. Expose the internals of how it works to the user. Publish the source code and let people improve it -- do for search what Red Hat does for operating systems. It's a great model here because the cost of doing the indexing is still a moat even if the search code itself is completely open. Big companies concentrate on the mass market. They've gone so far in the direction of making things so simple and generic that literally everyone can use it that they're leaving open an opportunity for someone to capture the subset of the market willing to suffer the complexity that comes from a more powerful interface. You don't need 99% of the users, 5% is quite sufficient. If you make that you're worth a billion dollars and have the resources to make further improvements that allow you to compete in the wider market.

spectrum1234 8y ago

I generally agree. However without ads, how do you expect poor people to have (free) access to radio, magazines (well, cheaper), antenna tv?

fermienrico 8y ago
At this rate, the poor are better off without tv, radio and magazines. They’re largely just an entry portal into psychological extortion by these advertising firms. I’m a huge fan of publicly funded media such as NPR and your local public radio station.
- sooheon 8y ago
  I'm also a fan of patronizing the media you enjoy. Content makers having a direct relationship with their consumers.
  - WoodenChair 8y ago
    Choosing to watch ads is a way of patronizing the media you enjoy.
- throwaway8879 8y ago
  I'd rather have the poor decide what is good for them, and not you.
  - sjwright 8y ago
    That sounds like a good theory from our comfortable, affluent office chairs... until you think about it for approximately five seconds. Would you rather have the children decide what they should learn in school, or the injured decide how their wound should be dressed? A fundamental aspect of our society's advancement is that we have become specialists: we almost all wear socks but very few of us would know how to make them. And even if we could, we wouldn't be able to make them quite so efficiently. The poor—or the middle class, or the rich—shouldn't have to decide how they are being informed about the world any more than they should be expected to decide which type of stitching is used to assemble their socks.

dm8 8y ago

I work at an ad-tech startup, and I hear you. Ad-tech has lot of rotten apples. Advertising done right (aka unobtrusive, privacy conscious, and value additive) is a great for free information exchange. Bad ad is always bad, but ad may not always be bad. There are lot of people working on it (including my startup) to solve the problem that are fraught with ad-tech in general and we are making progress but there is lot of inertia in the industry when it comes to change.

ajmurmann 8y ago
How can an advertisement not be bad? Ultimately it's always the goal to get someone to buy something they otherwise wouldn't. Even if you catch someone when they are already are looking to buy a product from your category you are trying to get them to buy your product instead of the competitor's. What would be helpful to the user in that moment is a product comparison that's honest and unbiased and not an advertisement. The goals of the advertiser and the consumer are inherently at odds. I'd be genuinely excited to learn otherwise.
- roenxi 8y ago
  A lot of advertising is either raising awareness that a product category exists at all, or comforting potential buyers that people won't laugh at them if they buy a thing and it turns out to be a bad idea. Consider the iPhone advertising campaign back in '07, modern smartphones would have taken another decade to take hold if Apple hadn't done such a masterful job telling people that a new category was being born. Sometimes people will advocate 'doing your own research'. That is at odds with the fact that most people are incapable (not just disinterested in, but incapable) of evaluating all the decisions they make daily basis. Research the decisions you understand, copy someone else for the rest is the best strategy. In that environment, even a good product needs some exposure to raise awareness that it exists. The game is more complicated than advertisers hypnotising an otherwise unwilling public.
- throwaway8879 8y ago
  What exactly do you mean by "bad" here? If you're making a moral or value judgement about ads being bad, then I don't know how to respond to that. Animals of all types are evolved to acquire resources, at any cost. And humans have taken the social aspect of resource acquisition to an extreme level. I'm not a big fan of ads either, but people do what they do. And making moral or value judgements about primate behavior is extremely one-dimensional.

yuhong 8y ago

I wrote an essay with more detailed history for a reason. It is probably worth linking it here: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.com/2018/09/google-doubleclick-mozilla-overview_92.html http://yuhongbao.blogspot.com/2018/09/google-doubleclick-moz...

IvyMike 8y ago

Reminds me of Futurama's commentary on "Ads in the 20th century": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPGgTy5YJ-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPGgTy5YJ-g "Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky." (And that was in 1999. The 2018 version would have to be extended: "And in our email, and in the Windows start menu, and in our phones, and on shopping carts and subway turnstiles, and maps, and video games, and in photo albums, and even inside of other ads. And the ads watched you as much as you watched them. But not our dreams.")

cjarrett 8y ago
David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest as well: In the novel's world, each year is subsidized by a specific corporate sponsor for tax revenue. The years of Subsidized Time are: Year of the Whopper Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade for Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems for Home, Office or Mobile Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (Y.D.A.U.) Year of Glad

Jellebean 8y ago

How is this comment related to the article?

foxhop 8y ago

Yup, this is why I created Remarkbox (https://www.remarkbox.com https://www.remarkbox.com) as an alternative to Disqus who just got officially bought by an advertisement firm.