And now, thanks to the hobby of one developer, my phone blocks ads in /etc/hosts, preventing even in-app ads from appearing. My web browser on my laptop does just as well with a plugin.
All that's left in my browsing experience to hint that sites are trying to maintain themselves on advertising are reels of clickbait stories that come at the side and bottom of every traditional media article. I can't help but hope they are only a technocultural shift away from the abyss of anachronism.
The technology can be used to target us, but in the end machines do the work and they are very predictable. We also have machines, and knowledge, and can stand up against the bullshit.
> Paid Hulu has ads. Windows Solitaire has ads now. Movie theatres have been showing ads since forever. Cable TV is showing ads.
The problem with my idealistic vision of the near future is that we are just as likely to accept this as normal. We habitually pay for stuff and still get ads. We have the tools to block the crap but it's much more important that we decide to.
Millions of people gave up eating gluten because they learned about celiac disease. I'd like to imagine that we are just a few headline-grabbing research papers away from swaying the public about the healthiness of exposing ourselves to psychological bombardment.
I find it impressive that a basic feature of the interface that makes HN usable is completely avoided on Twitter. The platform provides absolutely no way to follow the thread of a conversation! To ensure that this mistake is permanent, they've made it practically impossible to use third-party interfaces on top of their API, so no one else could develop and distribute a solution to this.
It didn't help improve the interface much. For example, on this site the interface shows me quickly who is replying to whom. A billion dollars in and Twitter still can't do this. They tried to be the world's largest chat room and basically came up AOL.
All that's left in my browsing experience to hint that sites are trying to maintain themselves on advertising are reels of clickbait stories that come at the side and bottom of every traditional media article. I can't help but hope they are only a technocultural shift away from the abyss of anachronism.
The technology can be used to target us, but in the end machines do the work and they are very predictable. We also have machines, and knowledge, and can stand up against the bullshit.
> Paid Hulu has ads. Windows Solitaire has ads now. Movie theatres have been showing ads since forever. Cable TV is showing ads.
The problem with my idealistic vision of the near future is that we are just as likely to accept this as normal. We habitually pay for stuff and still get ads. We have the tools to block the crap but it's much more important that we decide to.
Millions of people gave up eating gluten because they learned about celiac disease. I'd like to imagine that we are just a few headline-grabbing research papers away from swaying the public about the healthiness of exposing ourselves to psychological bombardment.