16 ms·

Not paying for content (small games, blogs, vlogs, journalism, code, etc..) in the last 20 years, is now one of my biggest regrets. I remember back then I even

by zulgan 7y ago

Not paying for content (small games, blogs, vlogs, journalism, code, etc..) in the last 20 years, is now one of my biggest regrets. I remember back then I even had a small addon that was constantly showing me ads and I was getting money for doing nothing, I thought it was nothing. Now we have to suffer fake content, incredibly well researched click-baits, short term conversion optimized (good trailer, bad content) media and of course tracking to incredible extend. Every single machine learning algorithm trying to push us to more extreme world views so we stay on the platform to consume more contend and see more ads. Every time my young daughter is watching youtube, I can see how what it is recommending and how easy it is to manipulate her. Few weeks ago it hit me, that I sold her mind, because I did not pay, and now everything is beyond repair. PS: I just finished listening a great reading of 1984 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM3GFyuJwQ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM3GFyuJwQ8) and am in very dark place. /

kennyadam 7y ago
I feel exactly the same way. I now try to pay whenever I can to avoid ads. YouTube Premium, Slate Plus, etc. I also make sure I contribute to the Patreons of the content I enjoy, but often this results in the creator being greedy and running ads when they make more than enough from Patreon. When that happens, I usually stop my donations and just suffer the ads.
saw-lau 7y ago
'I remember back then I even had a small addon that was constantly showing me ads and I was getting money for doing nothing.' AllAdvantage? I got a few quid from them back in the day. Strange times... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllAdvantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllAdvantage
- taddevries 7y ago
  Wow that's a thing I had forgotten about. I had an original iMac at the time and built a mouse mover and random site loader to trick the system. I think I made about $25 total because they shutdown shortly after that.
anc84 7y ago
We suffer that garbage not because people like you and me did not think of _money_ as reward for other people's projects but because of advertising, tracking and click counts. There is absolutely nothing wrong with publishing things for free, doing things for free and consuming things for free. The best content on the web is done by people from their own interest in sharing. Personal contacts, exchange of information, feedback and community are so much more worth than money when it comes to motivating the production of good things.
- XorNot 7y ago
  Also paying for things has a low success rate in reducing advertising - a customer who will pay for something is a good target to advertise more too.
  - asdff 7y ago
    Paywalls are a great alternative to intrusive ads for a larger publisher. NYT has been doing very well the last couple of years on their digital subscription model. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/business/media/new-york-times-earnings-subscribers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/business/media/new-york-t...
    - runako 7y ago
      Your point may be valid, but the NYT is a poor example of paywalls as an alternative to intrusive ads. I'm a paying subscriber to the NYT. When I open their homepage now, the page is split horizontally with an ad taking up about 40%-50% of the entire screen. The "The New York Times" header is about halfway down the page, and the first actual content probably starts at 85% or even below that. Anecdotally, the NYT runs even more intrusive ads than this to paid subscribers. Off the top of my head, I would say their modal popup video ad is the worst.
      - inapis 7y ago
        For the past few days I’ve also been unable to read articles on the NYT app without the page jumping around to load ads as I scroll. And I’m a subscriber to boot. I’ve a Pihole on the network and it still isn’t a tolerable experience.
thunderbong 7y ago
I don't think that paying for content would have stopped the tracking. Or the advertising. In my opinion, there is no limit to man's greed. Whether that's a good or a bad thing for humanity, time will tell.
- ohithereyou 7y ago
  Look at what cable TV became. Originally ad free because you were paying for it, but 'amoral optimization for profits balanced on the knife edge of the frustration of your audience through advertising barrage' is what any media company feels it must now do to survive.
- m463 7y ago
  "How are you going to beat Joe's numbers from last quarter?" I think this is all emergent behavior coming from the self-interests of the many participants.
ACow_Adonis 7y ago
Ads are not avoided in the long run by paying for a service. Advertisers and businesses maximise revenue by expanding to the point where revenue = costs. This is why ads appeared on cable TV. Why ads appear in the economist magazine even though its a premium paid product. Why celebrities shill products and there's product placement even though you pay to see movies and they already recieve multi-million dollar pay-cheques. The only effective way to fight back against advertising is to go on the offensive: teach people to notice and avoid and react against advertising, produce content without it, switch off and do not use services that use it and support services that take a stand, destroy their tech or use it against them, change the relative cost of their activities so they retreat from various spheres, or use society and government to shame, ban or disrupt their activity. So if its worth anything, you don't have to feel bad about selling your daughter's mind by not paying. That's like the sheep thinking they can placate the wolf by just giving a taste of blood and hoping he'll be satiated... /apparently I'm in a radical place :P But having said that, I would also advocate paying people who do good things and produce good content for the world, assuming the market and your situation lets you...
- paulryanrogers 7y ago
  > destroy their tech or use it against them This seems ethically suspect, possibly illegal. Can you elaborate?
  - wsy 7y ago
    Not the OP, but I think ad blockers do 'destroy ad tech'. Not literally, but as outcome, if everybody would use them.
  - ACow_Adonis 7y ago
    the real world is complex, so I expect each person to think about the ethics of their actions for themselves. however, that being said, I personally would consider many forms of advertising ethically suspect today (without coming into the debate of what constitutes advertising). So all I'm saying is, if a mugger comes at you with a knife, or there's a dark alley, or someone places a GPS tracker on your car without your consent, or someone bombarded you with messages about how you're not sexy enough or your kids are stupid and you're a bad parent if you don't buy X because they profile you, then you can (and probably should) break or take the muggers arm/gun/ķnife, light the dark alleyway, smash the GPS tracker or reprogram it out send it fake signals, block their messages/throw them in the bin/destroy them respectively. You often hear messages about how people are obligated to watch/respect/load advertisements from advertisers, and this is just patently absurd, especially on the web and in public places. I have no ethical problems myself with using ad blockers or technology to waste the resources of advertisers, trackers and telemarketers. at what point you take to the streets and start defacing billboards, covering signs, tearing propaganda down, disabling severs, breaking screens etc, I can't say without context, but I would say from my perspective civil and active disobedience certainly isn't inherently non-ethical. private property rights do not trump all other rights or civil responsibilities in a reasonable and ethical society.
bocklund 7y ago
> Not paying for content (small games, blogs, vlogs, journalism, code, etc..) in the last 20 years, is now one of my biggest regrets. Just so you know, the audiobook of 1984 you linked to on YouTube is the same narration as the one I purchased from Audible.
- c0vfefe 7y ago
  "The best time to start respecting intellectual property rights is 20 years ago. The second best time is now."
vmurthy 7y ago
> Every time my young daughter is watching youtube, I can see how what it is recommending and how easy it is to manipulate her. I hear you. While it may be impossible to stop the tracking or the fingerprinting, I follow the steps below to somewhat limit the damage from the cesspool that is Youtube. - No Youtube Kids app - I use the iPhone app on which I have a setting to "Pause Watch History" and "Pause Search History" - Clear the watch history once my son is finished viewing( this is weird I know considering the above setting but I've found it helps ) - I stream the video to the TV so that my kid doesn't keep swiping on random crap - I and my wife have a plan to wean him off Youtube by making him watch something like NatGeo on TV. Edit: formatting.
- b_tterc_p 7y ago
  Why are you opposed to the YouTube Kids app? I haven’t seen it, nor do I have kids, but if your choice is YouTube or YouTube Kids, I would assume the latter is far preferable.
  - vmurthy 7y ago
    > if your choice is YouTube or YouTube Kids, I would assume the latter is far preferable. It is intuitive to think of it that way,yes but my friends have had bad experiences with what it recommends. In addition, reading articles like this[1] somewhat makes me feel wary about living with a false sense of security. I figure I'm better off with Youtube (I don't consume content on this. So no recommendations from my viewing habits) [1]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/28/parents-momo-scare-youtube-kids https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/28/parent...
    - lrem 7y ago
      I'm an SRE who never worked on YouTube and a parent of two. From what I gathered, YouTube Kids is made by passionate people, who are trying their best. But the question of "is this video good for kids" seems to be genuinely hard. Hence, I prefer to show my kids videos that I had a chance to curate myself. In a pinch I will let them watch YouTube, but only if I'm in range to preempt once they leave the range of sanity for their age group. I still strongly prefer YT to TV though.
whatever_dude 7y ago
I'd like a plan where I pay any amount of money I want a month and it donates to websites I visit proportionally to the time I spend on them. I do something similar with Patreon, donating $1/mo to several creators I support. The point is that while it's not much, it's great as a principle, and would work very well at scale. The Brave browser has something similar. I found it a bit subpar, but it's a good start.
- martin_a 7y ago
  This was/is the idea behind Flattr, I think. You have 10 € in your account at the beginning of the month which were automatically invoiced from your debit card. You now visit sites or articles or whatever and they have the Flattr button integrated. You like something? You click the Flattr button! In the end your balance will be split evenly among all Flattr buttons you clicked that month. If you visit NYT regularly and click their buttons often, they will get more money from you than others. I think you could also set that a single click was worth x cent and they invoiced you the total amount at the end of the month, but I'm not sure about that. All in all Flattr was/is a great idea, it just somehow did not take off.
- dual_basis 7y ago
  How do avoid the incentive of sites who pad their content in ways to make you spend longer on the site? Ideally the market would take care of this, where people would be more likely to visit articles which were more concise because they were more useful, but longer content also is generally a positive metric for search results and I feel like we often fall into this local sub-optimum.
DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
> PS: I just finished listening a great reading of 1984 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM3GFyuJwQ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM3GFyuJwQ8) and am in very dark place. / If you don't mind that dark place becoming even darker may I suggest: - Jacques Ellul "The Technological Society" https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSociety https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci... and his other book "Propaganda" https://archive.org/details/Propaganda_201512 https://archive.org/details/Propaganda_201512 this is basically what drove Ted Kaczynski to a place of no return https://archive.org/details/TechnologicalSlaveryTheCollectedWritingsOfTheodoreJ.KaczynskiA.k.a.TheUnabomber/page/n9 https://archive.org/details/TechnologicalSlaveryTheCollected...
- zulgan 7y ago
  thank you!
  - carapace 7y ago
    Or read Bucky Fuller and "Permaculture Designer's Manual" and cheer up.
- autoexec 7y ago
  Good stuff, thanks!
- sifar 7y ago
  I read Propaganda and got scared after realizing to what extend it engulfs your life, whether you know it or not, need it or not. That partly, States are helpless but to employ it, that partly it's the individual's need for it that drives them. Think about it for a moment, our craving to be "informed", drives it too. Then I started reading The Technological Society and it is very,very depressing. You start questioning your sanity that why is it that the rest of the world doesn't see it that way :). Read it half way and haven't had the courage to return to it. When almost everything you do comes within the realm of the inanimate process driving towards efficiency, it makes you wonder if there is any point to it. It becomes difficult to function. Like the other commentator said, one needs some antidote to this aspect of reality. I really wish something like that existed. Meditating on the Tao helped, Stoicism helps. Being with kids helps as they seem to be unaware of these things. But you feel helpless that they will grow into it and inherit it. But again, glad I read them. Ellul lays it out really well with such clarity. If 1984 feels like a rainy day, Ellul is being alone in the Arctic winter. The only way is to voluntarily, consciously, and simply reject it. Not to be a slave to efficiency, information. And start to rebuild again with this new understanding.
imgabe 7y ago
I make an effort to pay to remove ads wherever possible. Some apps I've paid for: Spotify, Weather Underground, DuoLinguo, a sudoku game on my phone, words with friends (back when I paid it was $5, now it's like $20 I think but would still be worth it IMO considering I play it every day). I firmly believe the only way out of this advertising dystopia is for us to start paying for things again. This will create more opportunities for people to run sustainable small business and spread wealth out more instead of concentrating it in a few advertising conglomerates.
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  > Weather Underground Weather data is already gathered by state authorities in most developed countries. It would be nice if taxpayers could have free and convenient access to the data they paid for. Giving money to a for-profit corporation’s weather app only rewards rentseeking.
  - apazzolini 7y ago
    Are you suggesting there's no extra effort involved in taking a raw data feed and presenting it in an actually usable app for user? I can get free weather details with the built-in iOS app, but I still bought Dark Sky because it's a better interface. I have no qualms with this purchase.
  - JaimeThompson 7y ago
    https://www.weather.gov/ https://www.weather.gov/ is free (paid for via tax dollars) and has a lot of useful information. The map of the US with all the alerts and warnings on it is rather useful.
  - tlavoie 7y ago
    In Canada, the federal government has released their own weather app (WeatherCAN), including alerts for significant weather in your area. It's basically replaced the commercial weather apps on my phones. I would pay for DarkSky if it was available here though; I quite appreciate their approach to location privacy: https://blog.darksky.net/location-privacy/ https://blog.darksky.net/location-privacy/
NetOpWibby 7y ago
Once you’re out of that dark place, figure out how to build something to make your daughter’s life better. The best we can do is defend against the Dark Arts.
- DaveWalk 7y ago
  Amen to this: once you get your feelings in a better place, be part of the solution.
bityard 7y ago
It is extremely likely that malicious advertisers would still exist today even if you had paid for content 20 years ago.
Tsubasachan 7y ago
I think thats a bit naive. Sites will track you even when you pay for it. Do you think anyone would ever give up such a lucrative technology?
carapace 7y ago
Sort of a tangent, I was visiting a friend with a young daughter. After seeing how she acts when watching a movie, and how she reacted when it was time to stop, I wouldn't let my (hypothetical) children be exposed to video, or really the Internet at all, until they were at least teenagers. I know, I would have to go live with the Amish or something, but daaaaamn... TV and Saturday morning cartoons were bad enough ~30-40 years ago. We're warping kids' minds.
- c0vfefe 7y ago
  How did she act when watching a movie, that's different from adults when we watch movies?
tsycho 7y ago
Do you pay for Youtube (Red)?
insulanus 7y ago
If you have kids, especially, get a browser add-on that disables recommendations and comments. eg. Youtube Unhooked, Distraction Free Youtube, etc.
8bitsrule 7y ago
Probably best to avoid Cormac McCarthy then. (Don't be fooled by the titles either, like 'All the Pretty Horses'.)
simonebrunozzi 7y ago
> PS: I just finished listening a great reading of 1984 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM3GFyuJwQ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM3GFyuJwQ8) and am in very dark place. / "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by a third party." Can you tell us more about the video? Why it was important for you?
c0vfefe 7y ago
You can find non-tracking & non-recommending Youtube apps like NewPipe on F-Droid.

by zulgan 7y ago

kennyadam 7y ago

I feel exactly the same way. I now try to pay whenever I can to avoid ads. YouTube Premium, Slate Plus, etc. I also make sure I contribute to the Patreons of the content I enjoy, but often this results in the creator being greedy and running ads when they make more than enough from Patreon. When that happens, I usually stop my donations and just suffer the ads.

saw-lau 7y ago

'I remember back then I even had a small addon that was constantly showing me ads and I was getting money for doing nothing.' AllAdvantage? I got a few quid from them back in the day. Strange times... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllAdvantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllAdvantage

taddevries 7y ago
Wow that's a thing I had forgotten about. I had an original iMac at the time and built a mouse mover and random site loader to trick the system. I think I made about $25 total because they shutdown shortly after that.

anc84 7y ago

We suffer that garbage not because people like you and me did not think of _money_ as reward for other people's projects but because of advertising, tracking and click counts. There is absolutely nothing wrong with publishing things for free, doing things for free and consuming things for free. The best content on the web is done by people from their own interest in sharing. Personal contacts, exchange of information, feedback and community are so much more worth than money when it comes to motivating the production of good things.

XorNot 7y ago
Also paying for things has a low success rate in reducing advertising - a customer who will pay for something is a good target to advertise more too.
- asdff 7y ago
  Paywalls are a great alternative to intrusive ads for a larger publisher. NYT has been doing very well the last couple of years on their digital subscription model. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/business/media/new-york-times-earnings-subscribers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/business/media/new-york-t...
  - runako 7y ago
    Your point may be valid, but the NYT is a poor example of paywalls as an alternative to intrusive ads. I'm a paying subscriber to the NYT. When I open their homepage now, the page is split horizontally with an ad taking up about 40%-50% of the entire screen. The "The New York Times" header is about halfway down the page, and the first actual content probably starts at 85% or even below that. Anecdotally, the NYT runs even more intrusive ads than this to paid subscribers. Off the top of my head, I would say their modal popup video ad is the worst.
    - inapis 7y ago
      For the past few days I’ve also been unable to read articles on the NYT app without the page jumping around to load ads as I scroll. And I’m a subscriber to boot. I’ve a Pihole on the network and it still isn’t a tolerable experience.

thunderbong 7y ago

I don't think that paying for content would have stopped the tracking. Or the advertising. In my opinion, there is no limit to man's greed. Whether that's a good or a bad thing for humanity, time will tell.

ohithereyou 7y ago
Look at what cable TV became. Originally ad free because you were paying for it, but 'amoral optimization for profits balanced on the knife edge of the frustration of your audience through advertising barrage' is what any media company feels it must now do to survive.
m463 7y ago
"How are you going to beat Joe's numbers from last quarter?" I think this is all emergent behavior coming from the self-interests of the many participants.

ACow_Adonis 7y ago

Ads are not avoided in the long run by paying for a service. Advertisers and businesses maximise revenue by expanding to the point where revenue = costs. This is why ads appeared on cable TV. Why ads appear in the economist magazine even though its a premium paid product. Why celebrities shill products and there's product placement even though you pay to see movies and they already recieve multi-million dollar pay-cheques. The only effective way to fight back against advertising is to go on the offensive: teach people to notice and avoid and react against advertising, produce content without it, switch off and do not use services that use it and support services that take a stand, destroy their tech or use it against them, change the relative cost of their activities so they retreat from various spheres, or use society and government to shame, ban or disrupt their activity. So if its worth anything, you don't have to feel bad about selling your daughter's mind by not paying. That's like the sheep thinking they can placate the wolf by just giving a taste of blood and hoping he'll be satiated... /apparently I'm in a radical place :P But having said that, I would also advocate paying people who do good things and produce good content for the world, assuming the market and your situation lets you...

paulryanrogers 7y ago
> destroy their tech or use it against them This seems ethically suspect, possibly illegal. Can you elaborate?
- wsy 7y ago
  Not the OP, but I think ad blockers do 'destroy ad tech'. Not literally, but as outcome, if everybody would use them.
- ACow_Adonis 7y ago
  the real world is complex, so I expect each person to think about the ethics of their actions for themselves. however, that being said, I personally would consider many forms of advertising ethically suspect today (without coming into the debate of what constitutes advertising). So all I'm saying is, if a mugger comes at you with a knife, or there's a dark alley, or someone places a GPS tracker on your car without your consent, or someone bombarded you with messages about how you're not sexy enough or your kids are stupid and you're a bad parent if you don't buy X because they profile you, then you can (and probably should) break or take the muggers arm/gun/ķnife, light the dark alleyway, smash the GPS tracker or reprogram it out send it fake signals, block their messages/throw them in the bin/destroy them respectively. You often hear messages about how people are obligated to watch/respect/load advertisements from advertisers, and this is just patently absurd, especially on the web and in public places. I have no ethical problems myself with using ad blockers or technology to waste the resources of advertisers, trackers and telemarketers. at what point you take to the streets and start defacing billboards, covering signs, tearing propaganda down, disabling severs, breaking screens etc, I can't say without context, but I would say from my perspective civil and active disobedience certainly isn't inherently non-ethical. private property rights do not trump all other rights or civil responsibilities in a reasonable and ethical society.

bocklund 7y ago

> Not paying for content (small games, blogs, vlogs, journalism, code, etc..) in the last 20 years, is now one of my biggest regrets. Just so you know, the audiobook of 1984 you linked to on YouTube is the same narration as the one I purchased from Audible.

c0vfefe 7y ago
"The best time to start respecting intellectual property rights is 20 years ago. The second best time is now."

vmurthy 7y ago

> Every time my young daughter is watching youtube, I can see how what it is recommending and how easy it is to manipulate her. I hear you. While it may be impossible to stop the tracking or the fingerprinting, I follow the steps below to somewhat limit the damage from the cesspool that is Youtube. - No Youtube Kids app - I use the iPhone app on which I have a setting to "Pause Watch History" and "Pause Search History" - Clear the watch history once my son is finished viewing( this is weird I know considering the above setting but I've found it helps ) - I stream the video to the TV so that my kid doesn't keep swiping on random crap - I and my wife have a plan to wean him off Youtube by making him watch something like NatGeo on TV. Edit: formatting.

b_tterc_p 7y ago
Why are you opposed to the YouTube Kids app? I haven’t seen it, nor do I have kids, but if your choice is YouTube or YouTube Kids, I would assume the latter is far preferable.
- vmurthy 7y ago
  > if your choice is YouTube or YouTube Kids, I would assume the latter is far preferable. It is intuitive to think of it that way,yes but my friends have had bad experiences with what it recommends. In addition, reading articles like this[1] somewhat makes me feel wary about living with a false sense of security. I figure I'm better off with Youtube (I don't consume content on this. So no recommendations from my viewing habits) [1]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/28/parents-momo-scare-youtube-kids https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/28/parent...
  - lrem 7y ago
    I'm an SRE who never worked on YouTube and a parent of two. From what I gathered, YouTube Kids is made by passionate people, who are trying their best. But the question of "is this video good for kids" seems to be genuinely hard. Hence, I prefer to show my kids videos that I had a chance to curate myself. In a pinch I will let them watch YouTube, but only if I'm in range to preempt once they leave the range of sanity for their age group. I still strongly prefer YT to TV though.

whatever_dude 7y ago

I'd like a plan where I pay any amount of money I want a month and it donates to websites I visit proportionally to the time I spend on them. I do something similar with Patreon, donating $1/mo to several creators I support. The point is that while it's not much, it's great as a principle, and would work very well at scale. The Brave browser has something similar. I found it a bit subpar, but it's a good start.

martin_a 7y ago
This was/is the idea behind Flattr, I think. You have 10 € in your account at the beginning of the month which were automatically invoiced from your debit card. You now visit sites or articles or whatever and they have the Flattr button integrated. You like something? You click the Flattr button! In the end your balance will be split evenly among all Flattr buttons you clicked that month. If you visit NYT regularly and click their buttons often, they will get more money from you than others. I think you could also set that a single click was worth x cent and they invoiced you the total amount at the end of the month, but I'm not sure about that. All in all Flattr was/is a great idea, it just somehow did not take off.
dual_basis 7y ago
How do avoid the incentive of sites who pad their content in ways to make you spend longer on the site? Ideally the market would take care of this, where people would be more likely to visit articles which were more concise because they were more useful, but longer content also is generally a positive metric for search results and I feel like we often fall into this local sub-optimum.

DyslexicAtheist 7y ago

> PS: I just finished listening a great reading of 1984 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM3GFyuJwQ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM3GFyuJwQ8) and am in very dark place. / If you don't mind that dark place becoming even darker may I suggest: - Jacques Ellul "The Technological Society" https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSociety https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci... and his other book "Propaganda" https://archive.org/details/Propaganda_201512 https://archive.org/details/Propaganda_201512 this is basically what drove Ted Kaczynski to a place of no return https://archive.org/details/TechnologicalSlaveryTheCollectedWritingsOfTheodoreJ.KaczynskiA.k.a.TheUnabomber/page/n9 https://archive.org/details/TechnologicalSlaveryTheCollected...

zulgan 7y ago
thank you!
- carapace 7y ago
  Or read Bucky Fuller and "Permaculture Designer's Manual" and cheer up.
autoexec 7y ago
Good stuff, thanks!
sifar 7y ago
I read Propaganda and got scared after realizing to what extend it engulfs your life, whether you know it or not, need it or not. That partly, States are helpless but to employ it, that partly it's the individual's need for it that drives them. Think about it for a moment, our craving to be "informed", drives it too. Then I started reading The Technological Society and it is very,very depressing. You start questioning your sanity that why is it that the rest of the world doesn't see it that way :). Read it half way and haven't had the courage to return to it. When almost everything you do comes within the realm of the inanimate process driving towards efficiency, it makes you wonder if there is any point to it. It becomes difficult to function. Like the other commentator said, one needs some antidote to this aspect of reality. I really wish something like that existed. Meditating on the Tao helped, Stoicism helps. Being with kids helps as they seem to be unaware of these things. But you feel helpless that they will grow into it and inherit it. But again, glad I read them. Ellul lays it out really well with such clarity. If 1984 feels like a rainy day, Ellul is being alone in the Arctic winter. The only way is to voluntarily, consciously, and simply reject it. Not to be a slave to efficiency, information. And start to rebuild again with this new understanding.

imgabe 7y ago

I make an effort to pay to remove ads wherever possible. Some apps I've paid for: Spotify, Weather Underground, DuoLinguo, a sudoku game on my phone, words with friends (back when I paid it was $5, now it's like $20 I think but would still be worth it IMO considering I play it every day). I firmly believe the only way out of this advertising dystopia is for us to start paying for things again. This will create more opportunities for people to run sustainable small business and spread wealth out more instead of concentrating it in a few advertising conglomerates.

Mediterraneo10 7y ago
> Weather Underground Weather data is already gathered by state authorities in most developed countries. It would be nice if taxpayers could have free and convenient access to the data they paid for. Giving money to a for-profit corporation’s weather app only rewards rentseeking.
- apazzolini 7y ago
  Are you suggesting there's no extra effort involved in taking a raw data feed and presenting it in an actually usable app for user? I can get free weather details with the built-in iOS app, but I still bought Dark Sky because it's a better interface. I have no qualms with this purchase.
- JaimeThompson 7y ago
  https://www.weather.gov/ https://www.weather.gov/ is free (paid for via tax dollars) and has a lot of useful information. The map of the US with all the alerts and warnings on it is rather useful.
- tlavoie 7y ago
  In Canada, the federal government has released their own weather app (WeatherCAN), including alerts for significant weather in your area. It's basically replaced the commercial weather apps on my phones. I would pay for DarkSky if it was available here though; I quite appreciate their approach to location privacy: https://blog.darksky.net/location-privacy/ https://blog.darksky.net/location-privacy/

NetOpWibby 7y ago

Once you’re out of that dark place, figure out how to build something to make your daughter’s life better. The best we can do is defend against the Dark Arts.

DaveWalk 7y ago
Amen to this: once you get your feelings in a better place, be part of the solution.

bityard 7y ago

It is extremely likely that malicious advertisers would still exist today even if you had paid for content 20 years ago.

Tsubasachan 7y ago

I think thats a bit naive. Sites will track you even when you pay for it. Do you think anyone would ever give up such a lucrative technology?

carapace 7y ago

Sort of a tangent, I was visiting a friend with a young daughter. After seeing how she acts when watching a movie, and how she reacted when it was time to stop, I wouldn't let my (hypothetical) children be exposed to video, or really the Internet at all, until they were at least teenagers. I know, I would have to go live with the Amish or something, but daaaaamn... TV and Saturday morning cartoons were bad enough ~30-40 years ago. We're warping kids' minds.

c0vfefe 7y ago
How did she act when watching a movie, that's different from adults when we watch movies?

tsycho 7y ago

Do you pay for Youtube (Red)?

insulanus 7y ago

If you have kids, especially, get a browser add-on that disables recommendations and comments. eg. Youtube Unhooked, Distraction Free Youtube, etc.

8bitsrule 7y ago

Probably best to avoid Cormac McCarthy then. (Don't be fooled by the titles either, like 'All the Pretty Horses'.)

simonebrunozzi 7y ago

> PS: I just finished listening a great reading of 1984 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM3GFyuJwQ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM3GFyuJwQ8) and am in very dark place. / "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by a third party." Can you tell us more about the video? Why it was important for you?

c0vfefe 7y ago

You can find non-tracking & non-recommending Youtube apps like NewPipe on F-Droid.