Ok, this is a fantastic piece that says a lot of useful and thoughtful things, some of them critical about the priorities of the SF startup scene. And what are a nontrivial portion of the HN comments doing? Complaining that he was unfair to Elon freaking Musk!!<p>This is exactly the sort of techno-douchebaggery that the author is writing about, so way to prove his point, nimrods.<p>The one redeeming quality of such comments is that they fall into the category of "HN comments that are best read in Comic Book Guy voice", and when read that way they're good for a chuckle.
The correct answer is to never use programmatic ads.<p>Ever.<p>If you own a site, just curate a set of ads on your site that actually enhances your sites appeal. A fashion site should have matching fashion ads. A tech site should have matching tech ads. A local site should have matching local ads. Reach out to advertisers to get these ads. Never use an algorithm. You, as an editor, should be better than the algorithms. Ads are supposed to be useful to your audience, instead of being annoying. People buy fashion magazines - filled with 600 pages of ads- and Sunday newspapers BECAUSE of the ads. They should want to visit your website as well because of your ads.<p>The worst thing you can do for your site is to place out-of-context ads in the middle of your site. Can you imaging if Vogue.com decided to place Flash SSD ads on their site? This is how you destroy an audience, and as a publisher, your number one concern should be to grow your audience.<p>Once you curate a set of ads for your site, you'll find that click-through rates and conversion are far higher than random programmatic ads. You should know your audience, and the kind of ads that would appeal to them. Mark ads as content in your CMS. This avoids ad-blockers.<p>Curating ads is how advertising has always worked, and will continue to work, after all these programmatic garbage goes away.
The company I work for is going to pivot towards re-targeting (we're making recommendation engines, now). So, I've come to explore a bit this new industry, and I am under the impression that it's completely rotten to the core. The reason? I have been in meetings where no one would blinked an eye (even, sometimes, applaud the idea) when people would ask if we could turn on a laptop's webcam, and read if a visitor have seen ads or not. If internet needs tighter regulatory control, please, let's begin with advertisers.<p>I don't think I can withstand working with that kind of people in the long term, this is really soul-destroying.
Let me start by saying I love idlewords writing and largely agree with his proposed rules (even if he did demonize something like 1/3 of my working life with 1 sentence).<p>> Ban on Third-Party Ad Tracking<p>My experience in finance makes me skeptical that this will play out the way that he hopes. Most of the financial regulation in the world started with laws "average people can understand". Things like Banks should have enough risk free capital to cover outstanding deposits and banks shouldn't make "speculative investments". But it turns out that the devil is in the details with these sorts of things. What is a "speculative investment" etc? And there are dramatic financial mismatches between the people trying to work around the laws and the people trying to enforce them.<p>So when I hear "information the site has about the visitor" being the only thing a publisher can share with the ad network, I have to wonder<p>a) can publishers share data with each other? If not how does that impact things like open ids, publisher networks etc.<p>b) doesn't this rule simply give even more of a stranglehold to giant companies like facebook and google? How does having a couple of giant extra-governmental tracking agencies make our lives better than having a huge network of them? If advertisers can only serve the ads they want on facebook/google, won't that mean that publishers will be levered into only using those sources for publishing? How do you break out of that cycle?
Thank you for this talk.<p>Especially the part about fighting against the tobacco industry. It really made me realize that this is a fight that can be won. I honestly thought this was a lost battle.<p>It will, however, be a more subtle battle as the advertising industry (Big Ads ?) cannot be linked to something as clearly detremental as lung cancer and will be quick to point out that the technology developped can help fight terrorism (a winning buzzword bingo if ther's ever been one) by identifying behavior on the internet, including so-called dangerous ones.
Don't tell us here on hackernews or any other geek forum. Go to a RNC or DNC event. Go convince Trump and/or Hillary that corporations and rich people should pay 1950s-style tax rates. Go sit in front of wealthy old people and suggest socialism for the benefit of the young. Go tell the afraid and well-armed that they need to spend less money being so afraid and well-armed. Make sure to bring your running shoes.
> I don't believe there's a technology bubble, but there is absolutely an advertising bubble. When it bursts, companies are going to be more desperate and will unload all the personal data they have on us to absolutely any willing buyer. And then we'll see if all these dire warnings about the dangers of surveillance were right.<p>If you read this paragraph critically, it is easy to find the problem with the argument in this article.<p>There is a fundamental failure to explain how the privacy concerns are having a negative impact right now.<p>The cigarette comparison is ridiculous, because cancer is an obvious problem. Cancer is bad. Cigarettes cause cancer. It's is very easy to understand that.<p>What is the "cancer" correlation with online ads?<p>Something that might happen in the future <i>if</i> the advertising bubble bursts?<p>I'm not saying that there isn't a serious problem. It's just that the negative affects are not clearly stated. And that is a problem -- especially if you want to cause change.<p>People don't want cancer. That's why cigarettes are almost universally seen as bad. With online advertising, what is the correlation? I don't see one.<p>edit: I want to add, that in my experience as a small publisher and a small advertiser, I have no problem with click fraud. The robots are not winning. (I spend around $30-40k a year in ads, generate significantly more in ad revenue.)
I liked this article's start but its finish went in a very different direction. Denmark has a ton of things right about it and it's an amazing place - but mostly due to social conditions that don't exist elsewhere in the world.<p>Denmark was almost entirely homogeneous until the 1990s and is slowly becoming less so - but in a very racially charged way. Their fastest growing political party, the Danish People's Party, is heavily anti-immigration and anti-non-danish folks. It's also has an incredibly well educated population due to decisions made 50+ years ago that would take a massive effort and timescale to implement in the US - even if it would work.<p>Also the definition of rich in Denmark is equivalent to lower-middle class in the US (with healthcare added). Homes are smaller, cars are fewer, people spend more of their take home salary on food and other basics... The main difference being it is less costly to screw up in Denmark.<p>Things are overwhelmingly getting better for everyone and even the poorest in America... <a href="http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2015/09/were-living-through-the-greatest-period-in-world-history/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2015/09/were-living-through-the...</a><p>...and the value of improving computers, technology, biology, space travel on a universal time scale is huge on a utilitarian scale. Things have never improved so quickly in so many ways.<p>Finally - "be the change you wish to see" applies here more than ever. No one is stopping individuals from donating large swaths of their money to causes - in fact almost all of those donations come out of taxable income. Targeting individuals to do great things rather than vague policy points may be a better option when policy has overwhelmingly worked in most areas.
"San Francisco is filthy and has a homeless problem it refuses to take care of and does its best to either ignore or address indirectly. It is full of tech elite who are completely disconnected from the world around them. ... I live in San Francisco."<p>I thought this was a little hilarious. For so many people who live in the Bay Area, a favorite way to pass the time is to complain about how terrible it is. I too thought it was terrible, so I made the irrational decision to no longer live there.<p>Everything else in the piece was pretty solid, as usual.<p>I want to hijack the bit on the EU cookie law to bring up a recent annoyance though: does anyone else here have their browser configured to block cookies by default? I do, on my main browser. Have you got any idea just how many sites completely fail to work at all with cookies turned off? I don't just mean sites that require a login or paywalled sites like NYTimes, and I don't mean sites where some functionality is crippled. I mean sites like Washington Post, which (apparently intermittently) fail to render any content at all. For those of us that are actively taking some steps to protect our privacy, the web is gradually becoming outright hostile.
From the article:<p>> In a television interview this week, Musk said: "I'm trying to do useful things." Then he outlined his plan to detonate nuclear weapons on Mars.<p>> These people are the face of our industry.<p>It's hard to take the rest of the article seriously when the author is purposely misquoting people to make them look bad. The comment in question was said on Late Night with Stephen Colbert, when asked what the fast way to heat up Mars would be, as he posited several methods to do it. He later indicated that nuclear bombs would not be the preferred method.
This is a great piece, but I have to post a correction for this: "It boils down to this: fake websites serving real ads to fake traffic for real money."<p>There are, in fact, also real websites serving real ads to fake traffic for real money. When publishers promise an advertiser impressions or downloads or some other metric on a campaign, and then the traffic fails to materialize, the marketing department can always call in the bots. It happens at some of the biggest and most reputable sites out there, and what's crazy is the agencies (middlemen who buy ads on behalf of publishers) know it and don't care because hey, the metrics got met and they got paid their cut!
> The tech industry is not responsible for any of these problems. But it's revealing that through forty years of unimaginable growth, and eleven years of the greatest boom times we've ever seen, we've done nothing to fix them.<p>This bothers me. This bothers me a lot. There are two problems with this.<p>First, it's not tech's problem to fix. It's a city-wide problem. Faulting tech for not solving problems that are not tech's to solve is at best dishonest.<p>Second, this ignores the way that these problems have been codified as unsolvable by the city. For instance, you'll find a lot of support for housing first approaches among the tech community. You'll find virtually zero real support in the city, because that approach requires building housing. We all know how well <i>that</i> goes over. Pretty much any change encounters similar entrenched resistance.<p>So we wind up with a tech community that finds itself incapable of solving problems for everyone. We cannot contribute to our neighborhoods because our neighbors blow their tops when we try. We do the next best thing - we solve problems for ourselves. It's very far from ideal, but at least we can make ourselves a bit less miserable. We're going to get yelled at either way, so we might as well do so in comfort.<p>Want to see this change? Start by looking at why we stop caring about the communities we're in. I know I can't be bothered to care about people who have done their best to make me feel unwelcome from day one. "We don't want your kind here" does not move me to empathy - or funding local artists.
When websites become regulated web developers will be like the general contractors of today. Only licensed web developers will be able to legally build websites, keeping everything up to the regulatory code. There will be inspectors and red tape.<p>I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
This seemed a bit uncalled for:<p>"Here's Elon Musk.<p>In a television interview this week, Musk said: "I'm trying to do useful things." <i>Then he outlined his plan to detonate nuclear weapons on Mars</i>.<p>These people are the face of our industry."<p>Italics mine.
Very interesting and thought provoking piece. Some pretty strong points being made. I'm on board with the "valuation-crazy" criticism and the "San Francisco sucks" part was also interesting.<p>I really like the suggested "creative commons type licenses for websites" or promises. I have doubts that it'll work but its a reasonable instrument that I'd like to see. There's already ways of promising these things but I like the idea of having nice icons and solid branding for it like you get with CC.<p>I disagree with some points, most notably the "money sitting offshore doing nothing" one. It's not hoarded it's saved to be spent later (which is actually a good thing). The central planning argument also seems contradictory. He rails against big VC making decisions about what to do but then it seems that his suggestion for a fix is letting some other elite (himself?) decide. I'd much rather have the people that invest their money make the decisions than some social norm that says "space flight/immortality is not a desireable/realistic goal"
Of all the recommendations in this piece, I think the right to be offline is by far the most necessary. I simply do not trust my devices not to track me without permission. I have no way of knowing whether or not my mic and webcam are on at any time and if someone in Maryland is staring at my bloodshot eyes staring at the New York Times.<p>Every Internet-connected device should have a hardware off switch, same for cameras and microphones. I would be interested to hear the opinions of people who disagree.
<i>>I've also met people on the YouTube ads team, and they hate their lives and want to die.</i><p>Maybe those informational widgets that pop up when you Google suicide-related terms didn't actually arise from a sense of humanity or civic duty, but from a desire to reduce employee turnover in their ad divisions. <i>/s</i><p>Macabre humor aside, I actually wonder if there's any organizations out there funding ads targeted at suicidal individuals. Search terms can only go so far, and ad networks have the ability to gain a far more complete picture. You'd almost think it's something ad networks would partner up on <i>pro bono</i>.<p>Moreover, it's not hard to imagine imperfect targeting being beneficial, <i>e.g.</i> a family member being alerted to a loved one's state of mind via receiving the ads themselves. Obviously there's quite a few ways such a scheme could backfire or otherwise have adverse effects, though it is interesting to contemplate.
I'm so glad someone finally has courage to comment so poignantly on what San Francisco has become. This sentence will stay with me: "But we expect that people will trust us to reinvent their world with software even though we can't make our own city livable"
>Eighty years of effective technical regulation (and massive penalties for fraud) have made commercial aviation the safest form of transportation in the world.<p>De Havilland comet crashes and the ensuing bankruptcy probably is the real reason why flying is safe.<p>Usually when regulating succeeds, the industry is with the government trying to get loose guns back in the line.
> If they could get away with it, they would demand that you have webcam turned on, to make sure you are human. And to track your eye movements, and your facial expression, and round and round we go.<p>The window of acceptability needs to shift a couple of times (just a couple) before this happens.<p>The next few years should amaze indeed.
I only sort of get it. What does the idea of reining in advertisers run amok have to do with accepting socialism as the one true government? The connection seems tenuous.
These advertising proposals are actually surprisingly reasonable and acceptable. It's nice to see someone admitting that eliminating advertising entirely, or eliminating all JavaScript, is not a tenable goal.<p>Having worked at several publishers, this is actually an advertising model we could support. It would work better for users, publishers, <i>and</i> most advertisers. The only people who would lose out are the AdTech firms.<p>Unfortunately, I think getting there requires that the people who want this sort of thing start acting reasonable. Instead of constantly demanding the death of all JavaScript, or an end to a century-old business model, demand measured change like this.
I don't understand the disdain for technically literate people shown a few times in the article. Solving the problems is the better solution but in the face of how impossible it is due to the changing landscape maybe it would be a good idea to educate tech illiterate people instead. I think it's a viable alternative with possible positive side-effects of getting enough momentum to make legal solutions possible as well.<p>Additionally, sad news is that there a lot of people who don't care about their privacy or the homeless however hard <i>you</i> find that to believe.
I just have to take issue with his claim about privacy being a luxury good:<p><pre><code> In this world, privacy becomes a luxury good. Mark Zuckerberg
buys the four houses around his house in Palo Alto, to keep
hidden what the rest of us must share with him.
</code></pre>
What nonsense! The neighbors still live there and pay him instead of a bank. He did it to prevent a developer from forcing him to move, essentially.<p>And no one forces us to give our data to him. Don't abuse language. Only the state can legally use force, and they often do it illegally as well.<p>I don't exactly have warm and fuzzies about Mark, but there's enough truthful appalling material out there to support your claims about the lack of privacy.
<i>Here is Bill Maris, of Google Ventures. This year alone Bill gets to invest $425 million of Google's money, and his stated goal is to live forever.<p>He's explained that the worst part of being a billionaire is going to the grave with everyone else. “I just hope to live long enough not to die.”</i><p>This is my FAVORITE example of SV silliness. "Waah death! But I'm TOO RICH to die!"
><i>The people in 1973 were no more happy to live in that smoky world than we would be, but changing it seemed unachievable.</i><p>Not even remotely true. "some" people were no more happy. Most were not just used to it, but enjoying it.
Oh, and these idealistic socialists you want to take over and transform San Francisco? Good luck dealing with them once they're in power. Oh, wait, doesn't SF already have a fairly socialistic city government? It's done so well for the quality of life...<p>The real problem is crony capitalism, where large corporations have captured government regulatory processes, and effectively work hand-in-glove to maintain control of world processes that only benefit the "elite".
So we're now at the point where Douglas Adams' Electric Monk[1], [2] idea becomes viable, except for watching ads, not for believing in things for you...<p>Someone should start an "advertising consumption as a service" company where we can pay a subscription to a 3rd party to provide software to consume all of the ads that would otherwise be targeted at the user! Some of that fee can then be sent to the original advertisers as a return on otherwise-lost advertising revenue!<p>Please note, that this in <i>no way</i> resembles a protection racket.<p><removes tongue from cheek><p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirk_Gently%27s_Holistic_Detective_Agency#Characters_in_Dirk_Gently.27s_Holistic_Detective_Agency" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirk_Gently%27s_Holistic_Detec...</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://theelectricmonk.com/ElectricMonk.html" rel="nofollow">http://theelectricmonk.com/ElectricMonk.html</a>
I suspect it won't be long before ad networks supply self-hosted proxies in multiple languages for sites owners to use. Or, since ad blockers primarily use DNS names, ad networks could simply add CNAME support to their infrastructure. Granted, either approach would injure the ad networks' ability to track you, and expose those cookies to the site owner, but I would suggest that fingerprinting tech is mature enough that proxying the request won't prevent the ad networks from correlating identities.<p>It's cat-and-mouse. We're enjoying the benefits of a faster, safer and cheaper web (as are the developers behind those content sites using the ads, I reckon), but my prediction is that those benefits will be short lived. There are cleverer people than the browsing masses, they will find a way.
Love how his use of humor, like the red/pirate/danish flag just go right over the head of commenters here. HN stereotypes in full effect.<p>It's a talk by someone of European origin in Europe. It is not a science talk, it is meant to provoke thought and yes, entertain.<p>geez.
It's unfortunate how this piece goes off the rails towards the end, because it's so well-written and elegantly persuasive.<p>a) The parlous state of San Francisco does not strike me as relevant to the issue of how advertising violates privacy on the Internet.<p>b) And then when he does get on the topic he exhibits the same blind spot he's decrying in other techies -- ignoring the role of decades of foolish ideological governance and one-party rule of the city leading to its terrible social stratification, and instead deciding to blame techies for not inventing more comfortable park benches for the victims of those policies to sleep on.
Read the text, and find it rather troublesome that the author is constrained to thinking of advertising and invasions of privacy as such a new phenomenon. Yes, I get that it has advanced significantly. New players, etc.<p>However, I did a CTRL+F of both the article and these comments and don't see one mention of Acxiom.<p>The social pressure comparison to tobacco might be workable, but until there's significant "sin taxes" put on web ads, I don't think there's quite the same motivation for change.
Really interesting, thanks for sharing.<p>I guess my reluctance to raise any hopes here is caused by two things;<p>a) Unless I'm missing a trick this is a legislative issue, and fighting for privacy isn't on the political agenda (except maybe in Iceland because those folks are phenomenal). What's more, until the ERMAGHERD TERRRRRSM narrative changes it won't get a look in, and even then you'd need to get enough people interested in privacy to make it a fair fight against all the lobby groups who'd want to shut you down.<p>b) Some of these proposals seem overly privacy-centric to me, which I guess is fair in the early stages of an idea, but it makes me worry that it won't be taken any further. The example that comes to my mind is limiting behavioural data to 90 days. Some insights from behavioural data might take a year or more to come to light. While as a consumer I might shrug at 90 days, as someone trying to understand how people use new types of products I personally would push back against that as being unreasonable (and a hinderance to innnovation).
Advertisers will get their wish (crawlerbots don't have a pulse) when wearable tech becomes more mainstream. A quote from <i>The Diamond Age</i> by Neal Stephenson:<p><i>You could get a phantascopic system planted directly on your
retinas, just as Bud's sound system lived on his eardrums. You could
even get telæsthetics patched into your spinal column at various key
vertebrae. But this was said to have its drawbacks: some concerns
about long-term nerve damage, plus it was rumored that hackers for
big media companies had figured out a way to get through the
defenses that were built into such systems, and run junk
advertisements in your peripheral vision (or even spang in the
fucking middle) all the time—even when your eyes were closed.
Bud knew a guy like that who'd somehow gotten infected with a
meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi,
superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field,
twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself</i>
Brilliant - I am starting to draft the regulations as a test of the viability (please see <a href="http://blog.paul-Brian.com" rel="nofollow">http://blog.paul-Brian.com</a>) but the one I really want to try is the GPL version of privacy law.<p>"You can have my data if these conditions apply".<p>Love it
This will probably get me hellbanned here, but here's a bit of gold:<p>"The companies that come out of [venture capital funding] are no longer pursuing profit, or even revenue. Instead, the measure of their success is valuation—how much money they've convinced people to tell them they're worth."<p>I yearn now for a modern day Ambrose Bierce to write up something clever and cutting, with entries like:<p>_valuation_: how much money you've convinced people to tell you you're worth
> The losers are small publishers and small advertisers. Universal click fraud drives down the value of all advertising, making it harder for niche publishers to make ends meet.<p>This is absolutely not true in my case. I'm both a small publisher and a small advertiser. I have absolutely no trouble making ends meet. Perhaps I will in the future, but it is very unlikely that click fraud or or privacy concerns will be to blame.
"When it bursts companies are going to be more desperate and will unload all the personal data they have... to any willing buyer."<p>I have long predicted this outcome and always thought I was being a bit too realistic. It's nice to see someone else making the same forecast.<p>Of course, only time will tell.
This is the best story I've seen on HN in a long time. I wish I could upvote again.<p>I'm also totally onboard with a new, anarchistic alternative to the internet. I think about this idea all the time, but I don't have anywhere close to the knowledge needed to start figuring it out.
But the point I made with the story is what the end user has in his hands. Although a handful of website owners can change their own perspective to use valid ads in their own house but for the end user. .? Should be made with some better solutions for the end user.
The big difference between VCs and state central planners is that VCs are voluntarily given the money that they use. In Poland it was taken under threat of force.<p>And the homeless problem in San Francisco, and the other problems it faces, are mostly due to poor governance rather than Facebook or Google.