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We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [video]
- esafak 1y ago(2017) Nobody is excited about ads in 2025.
- thomastjeffery 1y agoIt's less exciting when you've been living in the dystopia for a few years.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoThat is wild — that this video is 8 years old. I didn't realize until I read your comment.
- alganet 1y ago[flagged]
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago[flagged]
- tomhow 1y agoPlease don't claim victimhood (“censorship”) when your comments are flagged. The guidelines apply equally to everyone, and the flags on your comments are from good community members who have a track record of flagging responsibly, to help keep the discussions healthy. HN’s purpose is to be a place for intellectual curiosity, not ideological battle or railing against things you find disagreeable.
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoIf by "intelectual curiosity ' you mean groupthink and bias that flags opposing points of view members find uncomfortable, not the honest unbiased application of rules. Flag-bombing is a real issues on HN in case you didn't know. What's the point of a board that doesn't allow all viewpoints and just smells it's own farts?
- tomhow 1y agoWe routinely turn off flags and unkill comments that have been wrongly flagged. Anyone can email us and ask us to review a flagged comment. We work very hard to make HN a place where the spectrum of viewpoints can be expressed and debated. Just a few days ago via email support I made a special effort to persuade someone to stick with HN when they felt their views are too much in the minority. I would gladly do that daily to keep discussion on HN diverse and interesting. We'd happily have you share your views if you can present them in a way that's interesting and kind to other community members. But a clear line is crossed when people approach discussions with a hostile, aggressive mentality, and that's what's been apparent in too many of your comments. The guidelines, our stated goals, and expected behavioral standards on HN have been consistent for years. Everyone is expected to adhere to the guidelines, otherwise we have to ban them, to prevent the place from burning to the ground. It's only by consistently doing this that we keep HN a place that people want to visit to discover and discuss interesting topics.
- butterlettuce 1y ago“Your outie loves watching State Farm commercials.”
- alganet 1y agoMatrix XVIII: Let's try it again, why is kryptonite not working this time? Halp C'mon. You will need to grow up real fast. Learn to use the references, not just throw them around.
- AvAn12 1y agoIt’s fine for you if you like it. The problem is that ubiquitous ads pollute the attention of those of us who don’t like it. Would have been a much different (and better) world if the early web established micro-payments as a way of funding content and platforms. For example I’m happy to pay for YouTube premium to avoid the bloody ads, though I respect the preferences of those who enjoy the ads…
- 2099miles 1y ago^ Exactly Ads are 100% fine I just want the option to pay to avoid them. Like black mirror I think had an episode or some movie had it where you watch an ad instead of paying for a bus ticket and that’s totally fine, cuz right now there is no alternative to paying for a bus ticket.
- latency-guy2 1y agoSend a pitch to Meta's board or executive suite describing how much you and your cohort would like to pay in aggregate for an ad-free experience for social media, then the rest of the internet based business as you wish. There are absolutely alternatives, you won't use them because few others that you care about are on them. Similarly, free is the best price next to being paid.
- AvAn12 1y agoOpened and closed a FB account in 2012 - that's my customer lifetime journey with Meta products. Like I was saying, I have no interest in ad-supported products. And I would say that the burden would be on meta to persuade me why I should use a product I don't want - rather than for me to be so naive as to try to convince a massive corporate monolith to change its business model just for me. Also haven't watched ad-supported TV since paying for streaming became available. Those of you who like ads, please enjoy them - and the rest of us will do something else - this is what makes a market!
- alganet 1y ago[flagged]
- megous 1y agoI don't. I like reviews, datasheets, product selection guides and catalogues. Advertisements are at best nuissance.
- pjmlp 1y agoSo basically Demolition Man reality.
- speed_spread 1y agox Idiocracy where society's smartest people are affected to penis enlargement duties.
- facialwipe 1y ago“Now all restaurants are Taco Bell.”
- justanotheratom 1y agoI feel like these issues can be countered by a reasoning AI that runs locally and I can configure to operate in my best interest. e.g, Filter out political posts on X. Fact check opinion videos on the fly. I hope future computing devices will have neutal engine at the center, and CPU as secondary. And I should be able to teach it to take actions on my behalf.
- everdrive 1y agoSeems like a good use of energy. Waste tons of energy sending ads to everyone, and waste even more energy defeating them with an energy-expensive LLM.
- notpushkin 1y agoSadly, we can’t just trust everybody else not to try and pull one over us. (Fortunately, uBlock Origin still works and is fairly lightweight, and hopefully we won’t see native ads so indistinguishable from content that it can’t detect those for a while.)
- nathan_compton 1y agoI don't know man, I guess we could like try to build a sort of system where people get together and vote on what kinds of behaviors society should allow which we should discourage and then when a majority of people agree on that stuff we could like make people stop doing bad stuff by using force after some kind of process to make sure that its fair? And like we could vote periodically to make sure that our rules continue to be useful and relevant. You can't trust everyone, but that is basically the exact use case for government: to enforce basic standards of behavior so that we can all live more efficient, happy lives, rather than live in an arms race of personal methods to fuck eachother over and prevent ourselves from being fucked over. I don't think society could come up with a truly comprehensive way of eliminating the evil part of advertising but I think we could do a lot better than we are doing if people would just wake up and insist that the government actually do what it is supposed to do.
- eesmith 1y agoPohl and Kornbluth in 1952 wrote "The Space Merchants" - "a novel of the future when advertising agencies take over." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants
- 1oooqooq 1y agoyou will like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government also, the premise of the entire lore of shadow run, is corporations building armies and seeing they can get away with it and then just doubling down. but back to reality... everyone would buy stock of the ad-dystopia and since now their retirement is tired to it they will just normalize and promote it. just like today.
- eesmith 1y agoI did read it, but the books I read when I was a teen still learning the world sit deeper in me than something I read in my 30s. I don't think the last-name-is-the-company adapts well to the so-called "gig economy" where employment is structured as supposedly independent contractors, who in turn can be working for multiple organizations at the same time. "Corporations building armies", etc. describes the Dutch East India Company pretty well, yes? As I get now into my 50s, that goal seems more and more an intrinsic part of limited-liability joint-stock companies.
- hkgjjgjfjfjfjf 1y ago[dead]
- swayvil 1y agoIt's a funny little causal chain. Everybody just wants a peaceful, prosperous life. We serve a corporation, because the corporation promises that. The corporation just wants advertising. That is, clicks. So the universal desire for peace and prosperity is bringing about the clicky dystopia.
- Rhapso 1y agoHey, make an artificial intelligent entity significantly more capable than any individual human, then be surprised you have a goal misalignment with your superagent. We gave AI legal personhood in the 1800s and we were doomed from there
- antfarm 1y agoMy way to circumvent most of this: I am using Safari with AdBlock Pro and AdBlock and see zero ads when browsing the web. I spend more time on YouTube than I care to admit, so I got a Premium subscription, bought an extension called UnTrap for YouTube to hide most recommendations and turned off all YouTube history etc. I regularly visit BlueSky, Hacker News and YouTube, but not X, TikTok, Instagram or Facebook. The hardest thing is to not use Amazon, but I am working on it.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- _cenw 1y agoYou are using the inferior way to block ads, which will continue to degrade as advertisers take advantage of Google killing synchronous blocking of web requests with Manifest v2. https://ublockorigin.com/#manifest-v3-section https://ublockorigin.com/#manifest-v3-section
- antfarm 1y agoPlease excuse my ignorance, but what is the superior way? Pi-Hole?
- stefanfisk 1y agouBlock Origin as linked.
- lukev 1y agoHalf the comments here are just pointing out that ad blockers exist, which is missing the point. The damage of an advertising-based internet economy is not limited to just "seeing ads." The entire content and structure of the internet is warped around this economy. Search engines, SEO, content discovery mechanisms, types and variety of content... all could have been different and better.
- antfarm 1y agoBut how are you going to change that?
- lukev 1y agoYou're right: it's probably fine then. My bad.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- antfarm 1y agoThe comments you criticised describe a solution or at least a workaround, but you are just stating a problem, thus my honest question. No need to get snarky.
- bigyabai 1y agoCouple choices: 1. Switch to cryptocurrency, let small-time criminals control the web. 2. Switch to micropayments, let criminal corporations control the web.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ToucanLoucan 1y agoStep 1: remove Section 230 protection for algorithmically-elevated content. If you're going to have attention-mining addiction-creating software funnel people into rabbit holes, then those rabbit holes need to be verified, safe-to-consume stuff. Watching 5 hours of 5 minute crafts is at worst, going to make someone spend too much money at Hobby Lobby. Certainly not good, but a workable issue. Watching 5 hours of white supremacist propaganda is how you get our current sociopolitical climate.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoIf you updated this to today it would be that we're building a dystopia just to enable a too long; didn't read and too hard; won't work society.
- poetworrier 1y agoI accepted cookies, watched an ad, dismissed a popup for a newsletter to watch a video about ads. That really nails it.
- dijit 1y agoThe funny thing is that we fought so hard against pop-ups throughout the 90's and 2000's only to re-implement pop-ups in javascript as soon as we could.
- Nursie 1y agoAt least, generally, they no longer open hundreds of windows above or below the current window, which may or may not have browser control bars, may ‘warn’ on exit etc etc If a page wants to cover itself in noise and dialogues, sure it’s annoying but it’s not quite on the same level as back then.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoYeah sometimes you’d have to just powercycle the computer if they started cascading too fast and bogging down the system. People would make websites specifically to troll and do this.
- Buttons840 1y agoRemember how wild pop-ups on the early web could be: https://youtu.be/LSgk7ctw1HY https://youtu.be/LSgk7ctw1HY
- ryandrake 1y agoComputing history is rife with examples of APIs that would never have existed, had the API designer stepped back for a few seconds and asked himself "Why am I letting developers do this?" Someone deliberately added the ability to move the browser window around and pop up other browser windows, yet somehow never imagined this use case???
- sssilver 1y agoAm I right that the only truly systemic solution to the problem of ads is government regulation, with communism as its final degree?
- leereeves 1y agoI would say communism is the final degree of "government as provider" not of "government as regulator". The final degree of regulation could be any variety of authoritarianism.
- _DeadFred_ 1y agoMuch better to have capitalism replace political tyranny with economic tyranny. Where survival depends on serving someone else's profit with the requirement their margin grows every year. When markets control basic needs, capitalism becomes its own form of authoritarianism that forces everyone to self comply. But it's freedom because they voluntarily choose to not starve to death/be homeless.
- leereeves 1y agoIt doesn't have to be one extreme or the other.
- sdoering 1y agoWhy would communism be the end of the spectrum? I actually don’t understand the thinking process behind that inevitability. Mind to elaborate?
- sssilver 1y agoBecause when you're the sole owner and provider of goods, advertisement loses all meaning. I grew up in the Soviet Union. There was one type of milk on the shelf, it was called "Milk", and I don't remember the label saying anything else. Compare with "HORIZON ORGANIC DHA Omega-3 Supports the Brain Health organic Whole Milk" dressed in bright red and contrasting yellow, with typography that begs "please look at me, I'm the better option".
- balamatom 1y agoBack in the sticks we usta callit, um, a paperclip optimizer.
- blacklight 1y agoThe irony of watching this 2017 TED video in 2025, and find out that my NoScript extension reports half a dozen of JS trackers and ads providers on this page - including Google, doubleclick.net, sail-personalize and sail-track. Oh, and if you navigate to this page without NoScript, AdBlocker or a PiHole DNS you'll probably be presented with a cookie consent banner, a bunch of ads on the page and before watching the video, and your data being shared with at least half a dozen partners (a number that can increase dramatically if you visit the page of any news outlet instead of ted.com). So yeah, I guess that the message of this video aged like fine wine.
- joe_vanachi 1y agolol if you think this is about clicking on ads
- fracus 1y ago"We're"? Unabated capitalism.
- Y-bar 1y agoI suppose it means the "general we", as in society at large or at least a dominant section of, as opposed the "specific we".
- fracus 1y agoI think I was annoyed at the generalization when the specific cause was obvious. Using the royal "we" seems like an egregious misappropriation of responsibility given many people specifically vote against unabated capitalism.
- jorgesborges 1y agoIs it possible to launch an offensive against advertising by spoofing humans that consume ads so numbers increase so dramatically they’re meaningless?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- doctorpangloss 1y agoNo. If you know how to make prices move a certain direction, go become a billionaire.
- SpicyLemonZest 1y agoI don’t think so. Ads were still common and widespread back in the analog days when there was no such thing as a click through rate to measure.
- dest 1y agoCheck AdNauseam!
- genewitch 1y agoYes this works great. I wonder why chrome disabled it repeatedly?
- ujkhsjkdhf234 1y agoI have been groaning about income inequality a lot but it is amazing how much of this can be explained by it. People do not have the disposable income to spend on services so you make people pay with attention. Give them the carrot for free so they don't notice. On top of that, the product is free so there is no expectation of support for the end user. You're getting it for free so what are you complaining about?
- dilyevsky 1y agoWhat would be the point of showing an ad to someone without disposable income?
- tough 1y agoThey might not have enough disposable income to pay for software but enough to pay for whatever is on the ad. More generally, if the service is free, you're the product, and you're being sold to someone else
- dilyevsky 1y agoBoth yours and your sibling comments seem to be operating under the assumption that all advertisers are some kind of idiots
- tough 1y agoNo, I operate under the assumption that advertisers can scam gullible users. From casinos, to shady inexistent job offers, to malware, there's a whole world of -ads- targeting the final users as a victim
- ujkhsjkdhf234 1y agoThere are ads running on Youtube right now that deepfake some celebrity to sell crypto.
- 1y ago
- nickdothutton 1y agoI am actively moving as many of my workflows as possible to the terminal. I've always loved automation, but now it has become a quest.
- chairmansteve 1y agoThe terminal helps automation? How?
- aib 1y agoMost input is text, most output is text, commands are text. Vast majority of programming languages can process and produce text out-of-the-box. There are countless utilities for processing text. You can store, load, split and join text easily. Send and receive it through most channels. When everything is text, text files become libraries. Text editors become macro processors.
- codyvoda 1y agoyep if you can think in the terminal (scripts, files, pipes) you can automate anything + the minimalism in the age of ad-les enshittification is refreshing
- xyst 1y agoBlame corporate greed for this never ending cycle of (human/psychological/and physical) exploitation in the name of pRoFiT. A companion presentation to the OP is "Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming" by Nick Haneaur in 2014 —- https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocrats_the_pitchforks_are_coming?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocr... He has also been running a podcast called "Pitchfork Economics" which I have found to be very enlightening on the state of this world. From an economics point of view, it explains the enshittification of many services we once enjoyed, the destruction of the middle class. The past 40+ years of policy based on “reagonomics”/“trickle down economics”, neoclassical/neoliberal economicsc and psuedoscience from the Chicago School of Economics (ie, Milton Friedman) represents the worst era of America.
- Sophira 1y agoOne thing I've noticed is that Reddit is very, very aggressive about how it implements its telemetry. Not only is the endpoint that it uses for collecting events randomized each time you load a page, but it also happens that every event collector URL is a valid API endpoint that is used for other things. You can't block any of them with regular ad blocking tools unless you're okay with blocking the corresponding API endpoint. And given that the website itself uses the API, this can be difficult. It's evil and I hate it.
- ornornor 1y ago> It's evil and I hate it. That sums post-IPO Reddit up rather well
- genewitch 1y agoI don't see ads on reddit. Where are they? I use pi hole and ad nauseam extension. Everything is default. I also have RES I think, but I'm not even sure what that does anymore, I've just had it for a decade.
- Sophira 1y agoI'm not talking about ads, I'm talking about telemetry. It just happens to be that ad blockers can also block other resources as well - but not Reddit's telemetry, for the reasons I explained.
- genewitch 1y agoi thought i read your comment correctly, but apparently my brain short-circuited on reddit + ad-block in your comment and missed the telemetry part. Whoops.
- liendolucas 1y agoThe presenter confeses that uses Facebook. Disappointed.
- amelius 1y agoMaybe it's for the family pictures?
- lrvick 1y agoBan/block all ads always. Modern digital advertising cannot co-exist with privacy and without being abused for propaganda.
- buyucu 1y agoThe internet has ads? thanks to uBlock origin and pihole I don't see any of them.
- avipars 1y agoSame video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI The one on TED.com appears to have been removed.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago(2017) No Javascript: https://py.tedcdn.com/consus/projects/00/29/70/008/products/2017g-zeynep-tufekci-008-fallback-a8371f4d641eee7a051bf4bc77cafa91-1200k.mp4 https://py.tedcdn.com/consus/projects/00/29/70/008/products/...
- Dwedit 1y agoAnd if you resist, you are considered a scraper bot and are blocked from the site.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoI think the problem is, I feel like most ads are so empty,hollow & fraudful on the internet... I am okay with ads, if they aren't all the above. But I don't know what the Algorithm overlord serves me as an Ad, so I use Ublock Origin. I actually think ads should probably be changed from paid promotion to actually use that money on such a good level of ad that even if you release it as a standalone video for example, people would want to watch it. And I think people are doing it, I still listen to this Splendor Song Chalta rahe because of how great the music of this ad is. But Most ads are of frauds trying to sell you a get rich quick scheme etc. (atleast I feel like every ad wants to sell me a course?), and I don't want to be the fraud's shitty course's next victim, I hate such course sellers so much that I kind of want to punch them through the video just thinking how the whole economy of ads is generally revolving around these frauds..., and how they make money is by scamming innocent individuals. All of this while building a privacy nightmare, a dystopia. No thanks. I am going to keep ads off of any of my services to a higher level of degree though I do imagine that most people don't donate shit & I don't even think that in businesses, the real money are in normal clients because they require free tier and way too much hassle for like 10$?, but rather business clients (B2B). Though I also feel this moral obligation to open source whatever I build.. but then businesses can simply self host it, maybe I should probably only release it as fair source? IDK, the whole system boils down to money, I can be only so good a person as the constraint of money requires me to. If money is low, morality has a higher probability of being ignored... , IDK, there is too much competition, sometimes unworthy,sometimes not, but still too much competition on a lot of ideas and they have not much differences so they try to do ads...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- BobbyTables2 1y agoYou aren’t reversing type 2 diabetes and erectile dysfunction by drinking warm salt water? /s
- MichaelZuo 1y agoWhy would you spend any amount of time at all on a website that you’ve observed to serve known fraud ads for more than a week or two (and hasn’t sacked their advertising provider)?
- myvoiceismypass 1y agoOne of the things that drives me absolutely bonkers is websites popping up an ad or some modal to enter my email or subscribe to something… While I am in the middle of scrolling or entering text / interacting with a form. It’s so jarring and frustrating and usually results in me moving on. UX largely sucks and takes a backseat to the ad experience now.
- lawrenceyan 1y agoIf everyone had a Solana wallet, and ads were natively integrated, you'd receive $0.10 for every one you watch. Consumers right now only get monetized. They see zero return from their attention being taken away from them.
- genewitch 1y agoAnd who or what decides how many ads I can watch a day? What if I have 100 VMs running Firefox and all of them are just clicking ads all day? Will they still show me ads even if I've exhausted my "solana payments" for the day?
- lawrenceyan 1y agoSybil resistance while still conserving privacy and decentralization is definitely a worthy problem that needs addressing!
- dang 1y agoRelated: Zeynep Tufekci: We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026203 - Oct 2021 (2 comments) We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads (2017) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16684860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16684860 - March 2018 (170 comments) We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15891014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15891014 - Dec 2017 (50 comments) We're Building a Dystopia Just to Make People Click on Ads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15572578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15572578 - Oct 2017 (12 comments)
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago"We're building a dystopia to make people click on ads" Why not, "They're building a dystopia to make people click on ads" I'm not building this dystopia Are you
- stefap2 1y agoI'm using Adblock Browser on Android. Works pretty well also with youtube.
- p3rls 1y agoNo wonder the independent web is dead when even places like HN sound like this --everyone is referring to the same five websites, fb, twitter, etc. The few creators among us are stuck between google's bullshit and such retarded proudhonists that would like to see even more consumer-level content controlled by these monopolies.
- y42 1y agoHardest thing for me to understand is: No one really like ads or the current situation with some exceptions. To understand that let's break down all stake holders here: We have publishers who rely on the money stream to finance their online products. But they probably complain about how ads have overtaken their content. We have a couple of "wanna be publishers" that built a busines model around ads (who are the root cause of why ads fail in these times). They don't really complain about the current situation, but I'd say that's the minority here. We have advertisers who need ads to "advertise" (apparently). They also complain about "ad saturation". We have a HUGE ecosystem, which promises to improve advertising, mostly it's just bullshit buzzword bingo to make a busines out of it. (good read on that is https://chiefmartec.com/2024/05/2024-marketing-technology-landscape-supergraphic-14106-martech-products-27-8-growth-yoy/ https://chiefmartec.com/2024/05/2024-marketing-technology-la...) They probably complain about what they built themselfs: a complex ecosystem that no one understands anymore. And we have end users who most probably don't like ads. Most common users probably just ignore them, a couple of tech savvy users installed counter measures to avoid ads. This is the status quo. And there are so many posts and opinions and rants about ads and online marketing. Still we suffer from them. Why isn't it changing? I don't see even an aproach of someone who actually want's to change it. This is weird.