Analytics - Fathom (https://usefathom.com), Plausible (https://plausible.io)

Project Management - Portabella (https://portabella.io) (disclaimer: I'm behind this one)

Chat - Signal (https://signal.org/en/), Matrix (https://matrix.org/)

I could absolutely go on and on, because I see new privacy focused products popping up in all sorts of industries every day.

The key is that these services are usually paid, which offsets the need for your data becoming the product.

More and more these days I have less trust in free lunches

Ad blockers do not protect you from the algorithms that make you more extreme to your side of social or political topic. People are paying and using social media to manipulate your opinion and that do not come just from ads.

Social media is very good at making us angry. A debate on starter pokemon can quickly turn into slurs being thrown around. I have a few social circles I remain engaged in via zoom, and pre Covid I was meeting people at alumni events, etc , left and right.

It's not particularly easy to re engage with the real world if your way deep in the rabbit whole of social media. Another way to look at it. Online you become the worst thing you've ever posted , once you identify with that negativity it feeds upon itself. You end up in a death spiral of your own self-hatred.

Why give others the right to rip you apart. Why rip yourself a part on a daily basis. I don't think I've ever convinced anyone to my point of view on social media.

I have been left feeling distraught over some of the toxic things said to me though. I'll even say people are outright meaner online. In real life your friends will just distance themselves if you aren't adding to them.

Online it's not uncommon to see users creating various accounts just to attack each other.

The only way to win is not to play.

I also suggest reading Lost Connections, it goes more into detail on the need for real community.

That said, once we start to talk about "manipulation", things get very relative. Human beings are social animals. I want to have contact with other people and so be influenced by them? At some point we can call some influence manipulation but there's a lot of gray areas. "Make my feed better" is a key grey area. Filtering crap from the Internet is one of the biggest jobs of both Facebook and Google. At some points that filtering becomes self-serving censorship but there are lots of gray areas. The biggest thing is that isn't a static problem - creators of viral manipulation products and ideologies get more and more sophisticated as methods evolve (articles on QAnon as gamification are worth reading). Not that Facebook and Google are blameless but it seems a ultra-networked worked, there's going to be multiple powerful forces and filters competing for influence and which one is "evil" is a difficult call.

Another way to think about it, a product is an output from the system, and you are just one of the inputs.

The flaw is the assumption that this is not possible without them. Consider what happens in the alternative.

The services would still exist, but they would charge a ridiculous amount of money, even more so because charging money means most people won't pay, but if only a minority of people are paying the prices have to be even higher.

So then a hobbyist starts their own free one, and it's terrible, because it's the effort of one person on a weekend instead of a full-time staff. But free-as-in-beer. So everyone who can't afford the pay service uses that one instead.

It ends up with many users, because it's free. And the users want it to be better, so they make improvements and submit patches, or donate money etc. You end up with Linux, BitTorrent, OpenStreetMap. Somebody tell me why you couldn't build a YouTube based on BitTorrent.

You could, over time, if you could get people to use it while it's still terrible and therefore improve it. Which you could do if it was the free one when all the others cost money, but you can't do when the existing YouTube is better funded and proprietary yet still doesn't require the user to pay money to use.

And then the dominant platforms become controlled by individual companies instead of being federated open standards, which suppresses innovation by creating a monoculture that only one entity has the ability to modify.

You don't need personal data in order to provide targeted advertising. The proper context of where the ad will be embedded is mostly enough for good targeting.

I am somewhat sensitive to data mining but I guess not as much as other people on HN, given I am almost anonymized on the internet.

The worst thing about ads is security, and that's why I block ads even if I am browsing with significantly anonymous profile. Performance is a nice bonus.

I don't think data-mining based ads work well in practice. User_analyze.py can't tell whether I have already purchased the product I searched an hour ago, or lost interest in it. I have yet to see a good recommendation system based on data collection. Blame the big data / machine learning hype.

Do you think youtube algorithms optimize for you learning and becoming a better human or to maximize ad revenue? Based on the answer the knowledge you gained is on average either deep and meaningful or shallow, bordering entertainment value.

That is not to say you can’t find deep structured knowledge on youtube, but the proper way to support its creation is to directly pay for it. Next best thing is paying for youtube premium.

Imagine two youtubes, one ran by ads only and one exclusively for paid subscribers. Which one of these is more likely to have funny cat videos and which one deep, meaningful knowledge and why? In which case the interest of the platform is aligned with the interest of the user?

When overdone, ad business models incentivize mass creation of low quality entertainment which is what most of internet including news has become. In no way ads help democratize the access to valuable information.

I’d argue the only reason subscription based platforms have a higher probability of offering quality is that the pay barrier creates a more filtered user base that prefers quality.

If a platform dependent on ad revenue had some other barrier to entry, like content only accessible to an audience that preferred that type of high quality content to low quality content, I don’t see ads having a negative effect.

So I think there is an argument that ad support, and attention focused platforms in general, do have a negative effect on the content.

Belief that collecting more data gives them an edge in targetting customers, with an assumption that user_analyze.py can think like humans and optimally target users.

Of course, I also don't like ads but of the choices of : Youtube ads - vs - Youtube Premium - vs -subscription/Patreon/Paypal/bitcoin/etc ... I prefer the ads. The other options of paid subscription are more anti-consumer to me personally.

I follow about ~30 Youtube channels but the churn rate is high so I'd rather not manage ~30 separate subscriptions/Patreons and then cancelling ~30 paid subscriptions when the quality goes down or I'm not interested anymore.

>Imagine two youtubes, one ran by ads only and one exclusively for paid subscribers. [...] In which case the interest of the platform is aligned with the interest of the user?

Netflix/HBO/Disney+ are subscriptions but they don't have any videos I'm interested in. (I'm not interested in tv shows.)

Instead, I need quick hits of topical information to learn from and Youtube videos with ads happens to be more aligned with me than the subscription services. I also don't bother with paying extra for Youtube Premium to avoid ads. I just manually skip them if they're not relevant.

>In no way ads help democratize the access to valuable information.

I disagree on this. For me, ads work better because I mostly engage with random topic first more so than a particular person. When a new Youtuber with no reputation creates brand new content, an ad-driven model (with algorithmic recommendations) can put that in front of me to consume. Subscription makes no sense in this case because I have no idea if this new person is worth subscribing to. Ads are less friction and thus, more consumer friendly.

E.g. My Samsung clothes dryer broke and I needed to replace a heating element. Instead of paying $300 for service, I just went to Youtube and several people happen to upload videos of how to disassemble the dryer and fix it. It was a timely topic that I needed and ads were the best way for me to "pay" for that content. I'm not interested in subscribing to anything! I just wanted some visual guidance to help me fix my dryer. Thanks Youtube for the ads and helping me save $300.

Another circumstance that reinforced my preference for ad-supported content creation was dealing with a family tragedy in my life. I had stopped watching Youtube for months and when I finally came back, I noticed I didn't have to "suspend" any paid subscriptions while I was gone. Again, I don't want to watch ads but I have to admit that the ad-supported business model is what gives me flexibility to dip in and out of Youtube without a lot of commitment.

To summarize...

Subscriptions/Patreon: more aligned with supporting particular creators

ads : more aligned with consumers to support a wide variety of topics that can come from any creators, especially unknown ones

Can I use maps to navigate?

Can I browse the Twitter feeds of a few favorite accounts?

Can I consume free video content on YouTube, or any free movies?

Can I make a reservation at a restaurant?

Then, for those activities that I cannot do, is there still a real-world analog method? I used to look up stock prices in the newspaper and buy and sell stocks by phoning by brokerage. Is that still possible?

As the activities of daily life have moved online, our ability to participate in society has attenuated. Has that attenuation yet reached a pathological state? If so, policy needs to provide a way any such activities that cannot be performed without paying with privacy still have a non-Internet method.

I wonder if you did this across multiple devices, you could start noticing differences based on what you used for what. A/B test them back.

Also, paywall: https://archive.is/TCa90

Smartphones, Android, Google, and well, I don't know about services/product used in China, all of them disagree with this statement.

The Internet has become an ad machine that throws a tantrum if anyone dares to block advertising or tracking (of yourself).

YouTube was meant for sharing videos but now "influencers", many channel owners, and YouTube itself balk at any attempt to block ads. The actual content of videos is now secondary to the ads which were heavily ramped-up recently with mid-roll ads. YouTube should create 100% advertisement videos and see how popular that is.

https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/edl-mpv.r...

Don't want to be the product ? Pay for your services then - the money has to come from somewhere.

I paid for netflix, lastpass and zoom. I still pay for dynalist, audible or for having my own email address.

However, I'm not OK with having a logged in google account that accumulates everything I do into their DB and AI while I use their services.

Even when you pay, they still milk your private life.

And they have proved time after time they cannot be trusted with it.

Netflix business is not to accumulate data on you and resell it, or to display ads.

Netflix was not part of the PRISM program.

Netflix is not Google.

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6139018?co=GENIE....

I don't believe one second there is a way to opt out of Google tracking you. At best, you can lower the settings on how much it displays the informations it has on you.

So ad blocking puts the user in a funny position. It let's them continue to look at things they don't value much. And I think content creaters looking for views probably would rather complain about ad blockers than give users an ultimatum that could result in them just going somewhere else.

I must admit I would only subscribe to a written publication if I get a printed copy occasionally, but anyway like youtube I don't find individual peaces of content worth it I might find the publication valuable.

I don't see myself paying for blog article access ever - if you write outside of some publication it should either be self-promotion, exercise, or a labor of love and desire for exposure - attempting to monetise that sucks with advertising or without it - don't write those kinds of things.

I feel the same about OSS projects.

A way to invert this is to do a lot of good content consistently so you become a consistent source of valuable material - then it could fit Patreon model but I must admit I've haven't encountered someone I would sponsor like this yet. I will think about it more in the future.

And what about OSS devs who have their stuff used by you but you won't pay?

> There is no indication that throwing money at companies decreases ads

Pocket change isn't "throwing money". But the converse is true, you don't pay, ads appear. If not, where - be specific - does the money to run the site come from?

Also as someone pointed out before at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25179379 "You can pay for YouTube premium and get rid of ads" so it seems paying does indeed decrease ads. There's the evidence.

If ads aren't a perfect fit then they'll still try to add other revenue models to things you've paid for -- smart TVs selling data about what you watch or which products your conversations are about, car diagnostic products shipping a patch to only work if you start shipping them location data, large companies like Garmin buying up smaller companies and cancelling any lifetime accounts in favor of a subscription model (and vehemently denying that it's a money-grab), needing a Facebook account to use your Oculus, and so on.

If they're able to extract more value from you without excessive negative repercussions then they will, independently of what's "right" or legal.

To try to answer you anyway, they've put a fair bit of engineering effort into making YT mildly painful to use without Premium -- things like not allowing sound to play when the screen is off (and covering your screen in ads for Premium if you wake up the phone to a running YT instance). I'm sure some people pay for Premium to improve that experience.

In a world where Facebook just makes up video impressions and neither they nor Google let you really audit their inventory, it is basically impossible to tell the difference between (1) seasonal effects, (2) data-enabled ad targeting, and (3) income-related effects. In other words, if you show an ad at the right time to a rich person, say by only targeting iPad users shortly after a new Apple product release, which is known from the user agent and does not require behavioral tracking at all, your ad will perform as well as a typical interest-targeted ad but with lower cost.

Which is to say, your data is valuable in the marketing sense that it gets people to spend more on targeted ads, but not necessarily in some secular sense that it actually increases returns. After fundamentals (like what you are selling) and the creative, most of the evidence points to trends in how rich (and poor) people use technology, like iPad users versus entry-level Android users, as being the greatest predictor of an ad's returns.

Ads customers don't really know if user profile information like their browsing behavior improves ROI because it is secularly important for the ad or because it is also correlated with greater income. It is unmeasurable for ad customers, so people claiming that they know are just lying.

At least among the ad tech companies I know, I'm told the user profile data gathering story is very valuable for ad buyers and investors, but fundamentally they do not use any behavioral data in ad targeting because they did not observe an increase in clicks - for their guaranteeably low income user channels.

To watch the videos, you can copy paste the url into VLC. No ads and very little tracking. Best of all no related videos so you won't waste tons of time there.

Good old society was a little less duplicit about how it operates. We live in a i-passive-aggresive land.

I don't know anyone who works at Facebook at high enough of a level to know if this checks out, but I'm curious if it does.

No, it is not.

The insurance business depends on getting money mass to hedge risks and invest into something else. Basically, this is what any semi good government does with taxes - hedges risks (healthcare, unemployment benefits, etc) and invests in projects that would boost the economy.

Insurance business model is evil if good government modus operandi is evil.

Now I will continue reading and will thoroughly watch my Gell-Mann amnesia.

>Plenty of companies, indeed entire industries, base their business model on being evil. The insurance business, for instance, depends on the fact that insurers charge customers more than their insurance is worth; that’s fair enough, since if they didn’t do that they wouldn’t be viable as businesses. What isn’t fair is the panoply of cynical techniques that many insurers use to avoid, as far as possible, paying out when the insured-against event happens. Just ask anyone who has had a property suffer a major mishap.

The article isn't saying that insurance companies are 'evil' for making a profit but instead for doing everything they can to withhold payment, not every insurance company does this of course but many of them know that customers are more likely to accept 50% blame in a 0% blame car accident or accept a reduced payout over minor technicalities because the alternative is going months without a car and spending a significant amount of time and money in court.

This analogy is entirely applicable to governments too where an 'evil' government might, at great cost, make benefit programs difficult or humiliating to obtain to discourage legitimate claimants from doing so, never mind straight up corruption or cronyism when it comes to allocating public funds.