I think people more or less understand that. Nobody likes ads. Everyone realizes that the ads they're seeing are targeted.
But I think every web designer knows that putting even the slightest barrier between the user and the content drives away vast numbers of people. Making them enter a credit card -- even if you told them it would never be charged -- would send enormous numbers away.
Many won't even create a free account. Tracking tech is so sneaky because just the effort of logging in is too much.
Maybe the world would be a better place if we bit the bullet, nuked the vast majority of web sites, and built a better web on what's left. But it's not going to be an instant, ad-free privacy paradise.
Listen I am all for these big tech companies losing the users but I don't think this was the reason why they wrote this comment or my understanding of it
My understanding of the parent comment and the comment above the parent comment was that the grand comment was frustrated on why things can't be subscription based internet instead of a sneaky ad tech which invades our privacy.
The comment responding to it basically said that it isn't profitable. Users just don't sign up and growth / stock profit matters to the company and so that is the reason why the world is the way it is right now with so privacy invasive ad spyware tech
Now, you want to pass laws to force the bloated companies to lose users, so deep down you are saying that losing users is unprofitable for them and that a subscription based model just wouldn't work for the internet which the grand parent comment wanted / preferred and many people do.
I might not be able to explain it but in just 3 different comments of different people, we might have gotten a justification as to why the internet is the way it is right now
Companies don't want to lose users or money :) which is why they turn to spyware. Now I am not for big tech at all but we need to understand them, we need to realize how this economy of privacy works to fix / liberate ourselves.
And also I think that a lot of these companies just pay fines when they do in fact breach any laws as for them its just a drop of bucket and there is very few amount of times that a company is genuinely punished reasonably and I am not even sure the last time that it happened...
but this is exactly why they spy on us, for profit and how we don't really pay for subscriptions or even let alone the idea of signing up or adding credit card details.
I feel somewhere somehow along the way, we got entitled to everything and we stopped paying for internet services and we started paying with our privacy. There is a point to be made that we live a world where evil adware no matter how much we might comment here is still more profitable sometimes than subscription for a lot of companies and so somehow I do think that its a bit of both on us and taking responsibility ourselves might help us too instead of just dunking them Completely on big tech.
I also think that open source is a good example of this, I just don't understand why people would much rather pay with their ads which might scam them or they might pay for subscription based software and not donate to an open source software.
We as a society complain about open source sometimes not being as good as closed source but why would it if we as a society don't fund it and open source is in a dire state of underfunding, how do we as a society then feel entitled of good quality open source...
The system is a bit broken and it starts from all of us I suppose.
Since the point of these comments on these websites to me seems to be to try to bring change imo otherwhere there is no point in discussing and I want to take it in that direction...
Like, The point I want to really ask is, do people care? Aside from the people here who might be passionate about it, but is there a way that the masses can be taught about such things in a way that they start caring?
Is there a way that we can show people how insane these companies track you all across the internet and how insane big tech is to the general public so that they might care and look at open source or any things like donations / subscriptions as a healthy medium and start taking part in it instead of being into yet another adware software part.
What are some mechanisms to help people share this knowledge I suppose?
Who will share this message of cutting the hand of algorithm when the algorithm is feeding the people the slop and people are eating it. The algorithm wouldn't listen, it wouldn't bother. We might need to think of something else and I just wanted to discuss it here if its alright.
I don't think it's that companies want the ad model, it's that they know they cannot compete with it if they have a subscription model.
Nebula, the "answer" to the shittyness of youtube that creators have been falling over themselves to promote for the last 5 years, still has a conversion rate under 1%.
People hate ads, but they really really hate subscriptions.
A good approach would be that usage means you gotta offer storage or bandwidth in some way. Very very difficult to implement, but say for a PeerTube: wanna watch it? Offer a small percentage of storage for storing chunks. Be a part of the system you use. Of course, the more services you use, the more resources you give up. Or you subscribe.
I can understand if people can't pay for subscriptions. I am not talking from first world citizen and I understand that, this is very real.
If I can be honest, in an ideal world we would have something like patreon and the likes and people sharing their videos on something like peertube and other mechanisms.
I don't want to gatekeep content behind a subscription so that people would be unable to access a community or content when the economy might be out of their hands and they don't want to pay for a subscription but I just wish if more people who do have the means to help and wouldn't be financially impacted much by donating actually do that more often / more as that would be the ideal world but maybe the question is if we can ever reach that or would that always remain an ideal and that we are just stuck with the things in current form.
Nebula just didn’t have enough content I cared about. I happily paid for it, but outside of one or two creators it was “meh.” Half of it felt like content specifically for elementary schoolers. So I, being childless, eventually canceled it. That said, I should probably give it another go, to see if that’s improved at all.
Personally, I really don’t think the problem is subscriptions at this point. I think it’s just having enough content to justify the subscription. Netflix probably costs 4x what Nebula does but certainly has at least that much more content.
I subscribe to Disney/Hulu, Netflix, and YouTube premium. I’ve tried others but there’s not enough content to justify the monthly expense unless I’m actively watching something. And Disney/Hulu is next on the chopping block because the content sort of sucks, there are large periods of time where nothing I want to watch is released, and the whole thing with Kimmel.
My feeling is that this arrangement is massively negative for people and since we ostensibly live in a democracy we should fix it and they can go fuck themselves.
I have edited a bit of the comment and can appreciate it if you read it again but as I have said in some other comments too, there is a social contract between the govt and the citizens and that the citizens should balance / check the govt's rights sometimes and vice versa with judiciary playing a big role too.
another issue which might be is that we are living in a democracy but our options are limited because of the money that flows into these elections.
Is it truly a democracy if its just two options and in my opinion, there is very little that both parties do to fundamentally drastically change the system because of both of them are funded by money donations from large corporations mostly...
They are just different flavours and one might be more preferred than the other for obvious options but even that is not enough and there might be a need for something radical if we truly want to call ourselves democracy and fight against an oligarchy and the sheer influence that big tech has.
I think that we definitely might need to do something as the rights of citizens if we feel like the govt is favouring the big tech or taking decisions that aren't in our interests but that takes real energy but that might be the best way moving forward I am just not sure.
We definitely need some radical change for the economy too and the influence that big tech has. In my opinion we have fought for less and won yet this things seems so hidden that nobody discusses it in real life except here and maybe its hidden because some people might be scared of having all people be educated about this topic as its not in their interests.
To me, I am not sure mate but a lot of the times, to me it seems that people have given hope on radical change, they have accepted things, they have accepted being spied upon so much that they don't even think about it. But as I said in my previous comment that there is definitely a scope of discussion / real change in this I suppose too.
> But I think every web designer knows that putting even the slightest barrier between the user and the content drives away vast numbers of people.
I have a pet theory that these business models paper over the vast worthlessness of many modern technologies. That the value of Facebook is not in it's technologies or network, but rather in the arbitrage of the value of data when combined. We pay for the nearly worthless service of facebook, with our nearly worthless data. Facebook combines that data with other data from other people, and create data that is extremely valuable for advertisers.
The important bit of this theory is that Facebook is presumed nearly worthless. What that means is that outlawing their combining or collection of data from users wouldn't cause their service to transition to a pay-per-user model, but rather would completely dissolve the product, which nobody would miss.
Entertainment is a value. People spend a lot of money on movies and video games, and I don't think we'd call them worthless even though they produce nothing.
Showing content to users that don't value watching the content is worthless. There's no inherent worth to showing content. My argument is that users consider the content worthless, and therefore any attempt to monetize the the showing of the content directly will end up failing.
The only reason the content works, at all, is because it's completely free and ad driven.
The truth is the content on Facebook is basically worthless and basically nobody wants to watch it. But humans are stupid. If you tell them something is free, they're gonna use it, even if they don't want to use it.
If Facebook cost even 1 dollar a month, I can garuantee those videos views would fall off a cliff.
> Everyone realizes that the ads they're seeing are targeted.
To an extent. I think if everyday users were shown just how much personal data follows them around from site to site I think they’d be horrified. Enough to change their habits? Possibly not. But I don’t think people have full understanding.
this is just the tech-person habit of assuming that users are less informed than they are. go ask an "everyday user" how much they think instagram tracks them. i think you'll be surprised at what their assumptions are. most people i know (including my extremely non-tech-savvy parents) understand that "the algorithm" knows everything they do on the computer, and that's how both ads and content get targeted to them. they don't necessarily understand that amazon, facebook, and google are different algorithms, or even different companies, but they know that there is an algorithm, and that it's train-able from their usage.
a huge number of people think their ads are targeted based on their phone microphone always listening to them. and they don't change any habits as a result of that assumption.
A surprising number of my friends even think their phone is constantly listening to their private conversations throughout the day in order to feed the algorithm. And yet they still keep their phone on them at all times, so they are seemingly okay with that much more draconian level of surveillance.
I also think that people don't have full understanding but I am also not sure how people can get that understanding.
us discussing things here won't reach those people and frankly I am not sure what would.
There is so much actual content about it that I am sure even I don't know 20% about, of all the ways these companies spy but I do know that there are some options to soften the blow by using things like librewolf etc. if you need privacy and ublock origin etc. too
We don't need people to have a full understanding imo, we just somehow need to show them enough and show them the alternatives somehow and hope that things change or try our best but I am not sure.
> putting even the slightest barrier between the user and the content drives away vast numbers of people
That's precisely why it should be done statutorily. People are known to be irrational about free things, so it's a fundamentally anti-competitive business model that disadvantages companies that want to actually charge for their services.
Ads can be done without tracking though. The main reason they're not is that Google and meta actively undermine them. They make it really difficult to buy ethical ads.
The reason is of course that tracking is their moat. Nobody else has tracking networks as pervasive as them. But everyone can sell context-based ads
> Everyone realizes that the ads they're seeing are targeted.
Really? It took me until like 2012-2013 to realize Google searches stalked me to other websites.
Then again much critics at that time of big tech was disregarded as lunatic crackpots. And nowadays your are a crackpot if you claim they are not spying on you. I guess that matters.
When I watch YouTube on an Apple TV the ads seem slightly relevant - when I watch on a mobile device they are completely awful, literally no idea why I'm being shown most of them.
It’s pretty obvious ads are targeted everywhere today, you search for Adidas running shoes and you expect to see running shoes ads in YouTube, Instagram, Amazon and pretty much every single platform with an ad revenue model. It’s not a subtle, subliminal thing buried into text nudging you into buying shoes, but very evident, pretty much your exact search query transformed into highly visual content. I would be shocked if I know someone under 60 that does not know this.
Yeah, the incident rate of this occurring is pretty high for randomness only.
It's easier to expect that your phone is always listening (because it is) and sending that data to apps for advertising than to force app providers to open source their code and prove they aren't collecting data on what the phone mic picks up.
But maybe you have more insight on a single provider's application that has been thus accused than other people in the thread.
Some sites do give you that option. But they're still going to track you everywhere else, so opting out of one doesn't really solve the privacy problem.
There's also an economic problem with the pay-or-ad model. The users who won't pay are the ones with the least money, so your remaining advertisers won't pay as much. They may not even break even with the ads, but persist just to annoy you into subscribing.
But I think every web designer knows that putting even the slightest barrier between the user and the content drives away vast numbers of people. Making them enter a credit card -- even if you told them it would never be charged -- would send enormous numbers away.
Many won't even create a free account. Tracking tech is so sneaky because just the effort of logging in is too much.
Maybe the world would be a better place if we bit the bullet, nuked the vast majority of web sites, and built a better web on what's left. But it's not going to be an instant, ad-free privacy paradise.