Futurama - Internet ads

Google and Meta seem to have no idea what's going on within their own advertising networks. Similarly to all the stories (with two currently in the front page of HN, eBay and PayPal) about algorithms that are just insufficient for the range of realistic scenarios these companies must deal with on a regular basis. It's merely the equation of profit outweighing customer service. Admittedly, they're working on a scale that's difficult to comprehend, but that shouldn't absolve them of aiding and abetting criminal use of their systems. Google's and Meta's profit motives are the base cause of this continuing escalation of the ubiquity and user-hostility (to put it mildly) of internet advertising. It's only been predictable for the last 20 years... [this video] (first aired in March 2000) [link] (April 1999)

An interesting idea. Fowler certainly deserves credit for her work. As the author correctly notes, it was not only a courageous thing to publish, but also an impressive piece of writing. On an unrelated note, the experience of reading this article for me was absolutely destroyed by the Forbes ad-block-blocker and the ad-first design of their article view. There were a couple of autoplaying video ads and one particularly pernicious scroll-locking ad on the sidebar to the right. Forbes is one of the very worst offenders in web monetization, as they demand you turn off AdBlock and then serve you a garbage reading experience (usually of a poorly written article by an unpaid or low-paid "contributor"). Every time I visit their website, I feel a sudden urge to start espousing Ev William's gospel that Something Must Be Done about content monetization on the internet, before Futurama becomes reality: [this video]

Behold, the Facebook Metaverse: [this video] “WE WILL EFFECTIVELY TRANSITION FROM PEOPLE SEEING US AS PRIMARILY BEING A SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANY TO BEING A METAVERSE COMPANY” But, Facebook already transitioned to being an advertising company. The social media aspect became a funnel to direct members towards advertising, changes to Facebook are not about the social aspect, they're about eyeballs on ads and more page views, which are actually distractions away from the social network roots of Facebook. Mark goes on about building an economy within this metaverse: "And this is something that I hope eventually millions of people will be working in and creating content for — whether it’s experiences, or spaces, or virtual goods, or virtual clothing, or doing work helping to curate and introduce people to spaces and keep it safe. I just think this is going to be a huge economy and frankly, I think that that needs to exist. This needs to be a rising tide that lifts a lot of boats. We can’t just think about this as a product that we’re building." I'm obviously very cynical, but this feels like Facebook's app store play: 30% please creators. In addition to the advertising dollars. What I hope comes out of this is an advancement of the technology for building a "metaverse" and that open source alternatives can keep up, or at least nip at the heels constantly.