Social media. I feel like if it weren't for these algorithms that prioritize "engagement" over facts and polite content, my country would be a bit less polarized. I think that social media will turn out to be like cigarettes and someday we will discover that it has an extremely bad outcome; at least how it's implemented today. I have come to enjoy HN a bit more lately, as I just don't engage with the trolls or the horrible people that have opinions I disagree with vehemently. The people I think are horrible, at least, because it's a personal opinion, and other's might view me as a horrible person. I have also learned that it's best not to judge someone by one or two views overall, here, and that helps. I wish more social media could be like HN and allow a diverse set of opinions, but ban the name-calling and such that really take things into a bad place.

Most products today are less durable and are generally worse than "yesterday", in my opinion. Perhaps it's the old man in me coming out, with a rosy view of yesteryear, but I think that the quality of things are just lower, in general. I do think that things "look nicer" and are more consistent, but at a lower level of quality. 20 years ago, I had only 5 or so choices for any given product, maybe a curtain rod for example (because I just bought some). Today I can go down to several stores and pick from hundreds of curtain rod designs that look really nice, but half of them break after a few years or less. I still have some shitty looking but sturdy curtain rods from 20 years ago, no joke. Electronics are worse in some ways, but faster and more complex, so maybe that complexity is the source of the decrease in perceived quality. I can say that computers are way faster now, and it's easier to do many things, but I have less freedom than I had with older computers for sure.

This is just about the end of my old man rant. Thanks for listening.

"The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt..."

Anti-advertising was one of the pet causes of Generation X, back before more pressing things like "the war on terror" and a financial collapse and health care crisis took the stage. And those are bigger deals, but man, advertising is just awful too.

[1] https://www.kqed.org/news/11805469/why-arent-any-billboards-...

I'm not aware of any bill boards that are on public land (though some probably exist). Rather almost all bill boards are built on private land, or atop private buildings, as a revenue generator for the property owner. Anything within 500 feet of the road is viable, or even further away assuming a large sign. So for billboards to be prohibited there has to be land use regulation that says property owners can't build large signs.

That is actually less trivial to enforce than you might think, because the line between a straight up advertising billboard and, say, the sign that lets you know there's a McDonald's at the next exit, is a little fuzzy. There's enormous pressure from business owners to permit large "marquee" signs so that drivers can spot their business from far back enough that they can easily get in the right lane, slow down, turn, etc. without missing it.

I don't think most people have a problem with honest ads. The issue is the billboards that tell you "There's something amazing ahead!" and you pay $10 to get in and it's a stupid doll. Or the collections of a billion billboards for different things on a single building. Or the TV ads that use every trick in the book to try and manipulate you into buying a crappy product.

Sadly businesses seem to be moving more and more towards "just spend all our money on marketing" rather than "just spend all our money on the product". (I'm looking at you, Plex.)

Edit: actually... IDK. In some states they're just useless too (you get off the interstate and then you find the business that was on the sign is 10 miles down the road, away from the interstate). At least the "this far to <business>" and "this way to <business>" part on billboards is usually accurate ;)

It wasn't necessarily as good as a giant golden M visible from a mile or more away, but it was sufficient. I think the logo signs + small directional signs once you're off the highway would do a good job in most areas. Plus once you're on the main drags that hold most of these things you'll be hard pressed to miss them. It didn't take long to get used to looking for them when driving around either.

Signs on every mountain side, Line highways, stitching desert thread ... My soul goes with your logos, There's no place left to dream tonight

I think that I shall never see

A billboard lovely as a tree

Indeed, unless the billboards fall

I'll never see a tree at all.

Ogden Nash

Here where I live in Canada, billboards aren't allowed except on indigenous land. While I totally respect it, it's a horrible eyesore.

Is this a limit on property rights or an expansion of viewshed rights? It all depends on perspective.

I think the real difference is a whole generation who is used to linear TV has convinced themselves they can somehow tune it out. This isn’t true, but they’re much more likely to be against restrictions since it “doesn’t effect them” that much.

If not then I think it's reasonable to restrict (time, place, and manner restrictions are recognized as being consistent with 1st A).

But maybe you can think of some value I can't.

When I go down to the big smoke (Melbourne) I find the prevalence of billboards, side-of-bus ads, &c. physically distressing—and then they make it worse by using screens for them so they can change their contents, make them glary, &c. and it’s just awful. And it becomes ever more and more intrusive; Melbourne’s trains used to be safe spaces, then they put billboards on the platforms, then scrolling billboards, then ads in the carriages, then animated billboards on the platforms, then billboards with speakers on the platforms, and I wonder just what they’ll come up with next. I really dislike the city. There’s a reason I moved out into the country.

As for television ads, ugh! Maybe once every year or two I happen to be in the same room as a television that’s turned on, and how anyone can stand to watch the stuff when such ads are part of it, I don’t know. Maybe if you grow up with it you don’t realise quite how obnoxious it is?

I have concluded that display advertising is just fundamentally bad and that our society would be better if it were outright banned in all its forms. I would even sympathise with vigilantes that went round demolishing and vandalising billboards on principle.

The "economic value" of billboards shouldn't even be a question. It's self-evident that billboards benefit the owner of the billboard at the expense of everyone else. Nobody looks at an empty patch of sky and wishes there were an advertisement there instead.

Don’t know what you consider a normal product but for truckers and people coming from NY adult stores and fireworks are “normal”

You can escape online advertising by walking away from the computer.

There's nowhere you can walk to escape physical advertising. Maybe the desert.

No, it just means you need to not open a web browser, or install an ad blocker. Opting out of physical advertising literally means this. I'm not saying that online advertising isn't bad, but physical advertising is inescapable. Your very food packaging is covered in it. The real world has primacy here, because you live in it and can't turn it off.

I find it hard to believe that a better version isn't possible.

they've been so successful in their advertising they've just managed to get people to call them "tech".

tech would probably be untouched, and who knows, might even flourish a bit once people stop wasting their time and paycheques to make the world a worse place.

Product placements in TV and movies continues to grow each year, and an increasing proportion of seemingly organic social media posts are bought and paid for by companies, though never disclosed. I have a friend who has basically spent the last ten years helping brands to pay influencers to promote their stuff in subtle ways (first on YouTube, then Instagram, now TikTok), and her business has never been better.

The only ads I encounter are physical. Adblockers don't work for billboards. :D

> As for television ads, ugh! Maybe once every year or two I happen to be in the same room as a television that’s turned on, and how anyone can stand to watch the stuff when such ads are part of it, I don’t know.

This I realized when I was 19 while on LSD and it was a revelation. I put the TV in the closet and never had one since (or, well, one that I only used through HDMI so it was a monitor rather than a TV).

I think your view isn't too extreme enough, frankly. I feel like if I took the time I could compose a lengthy essay showing that we can directly blame advertising for a significant portion of societal ills. Advertising promotes narcissism, selfishness, and entitlement; it convinces you that you need things you don't need, happiness can be bought, you what you have isn't good enough; it lies to you, it lies to you about lying to you, and it makes you think this is normal. And that's all when it isn't trying to outright scam you.

> Social media.

Mostly bad because of advertising.

> Most products today are less durable and are generally worse than "yesterday", in my opinion.

A bit more of a stretch, but since advertisements lie and tell you the product costs less and is 'just as good', it leads to a race to the bottom.

On the social media thing, I find they are always better when they just show you the things you've asked to see, in chronological order. It's all this algorithmic "hey, your aunt's brother-in-law's gardener just commented on a post by someone you don't know" bullshit that causes the problem. If I just look at Twitter posts from the people I follow it's fine, it's just my friends talking about stuff, the moment I make the mistake of following a trending topic link it's a cesspit.

And yeah, a lot of things seem to be cost engineered to the point where they are designed to look ok, but not last or take much punishment. But that's less about tech, and more about us as consumers, we seek to minimise cost and so that's what manufacturers go for.

The problem with social media isn't "social media", it's advertising and the fact that money is made out of "engagement". You kill that disgusting industry and so many problems would disappear overnight.

We can't very easily ban advertising. Any regulation has to be lightweight because it's nearly impossible to enforce at internet scale (as we've seen again and again).

Curious if you've thought about any ways to fix the problem we're in.

Most of the time people think about how to stop corporate behavior they don't like, and it comes down to shutting off their cash flow by not buying their stuff, or by regulation. But workers are also required, and just based on numbers I'd say withholding talent is a lot more impactful than withholding cash.

B. find another website that offer the same thing.

C. give up and temporarily disable adblock for that website until you do what you need to do and enable it again

what I find really annoying is website that tangle login to their ads, so when you have adblock software enabled it just silently fails.

the most recent example I encountered is https://www.edf.fr/ a government owned company, I couldn't get electricity for my new house unless I disabled ublock.

As soon as AR Glasses start being usable and affordable, I want to buy an open-source model and try to develop a RL-Adblocker. I guess it would need AI, because I still have to see traffic signs and other actually useful things.

If AR Glasses allow me to replace every billboard with a picture of a family member or someting else, I will be happy. Hopefully we will get to use open-source ones to play around with.

[1] https://dot.ca.gov/programs/design/lap-landscape-architectur...

1) move to the countryside or at least outside a major city, or a place where billboards are banned

2) Don’t own a TV

3) use uBlock Origin/Adblock on all your devices

People forget how (relatively) expensive products used to be. Example: my family had a very early VHS video recorder. I believe it cost ~$1000 in the early 1980s. I may be misremembering. But that was a lot of money then. So of course it was worth repairing. Labour was considerably less expensive in terms of percentage of outlay costs. That's why it was justified.

Computers came along and you had a bunch of chips on a board, some of which were worth replacing. But each interconnect costs money. Each external package costs money. We've seen the rise of complicated SoC chips that basically do everything in one chip. These are overall cheaper to fab (compared to 2+ chips) and have lower build, integration and interconnection costs.

The downside? If it stops working, you just throw it away (or at least replace the entire SoC). And if the SoC is relatively cheap, it's not worth paying someone to order a replacement and replace it (with or without soldering).

So really what you're missing is tech being very expensive. Personally I prefer what we have now.

There are other downsides to modern tech (eg Internet-connected TVs to insert advertising) but durability just isn't one of them.

Buying a PC in parts is not that more expensive than buying than a box from a retailer. The framework laptop is completely competitively priced with laptops of equivalent specs. DIY audio enthusiasts can buy speaker kits that have amazing performance for one third of the price of the "ready" one, and if a speaker or the amp goes bad, they don't need to buy a whole new kit.

It's consumers themselves that got that into that mindset that is not worth to invest time into building and repairing things. We need to start attaching a cost to disposing of obsolete tech, and you can bet they will quickly remember that they too are capable of doing things.

In Germany, every recyclable (plastic/glass/aluminum) container has a surcharge of a few cents, which you get back by returning them to any supermarket. Imagine if we made something similar for consumer electronics. A tax on electronics products, it being higher in correlation with the level of integration, the difficulty to repair. Your chromebook would be taxed at 100% if sold as a whole package, but if Google decided to produce modules that are independently sold, the tax would drop.

Suddenly the whole equation changes for everyone. Manufacturers will have the incentive to produce less integrated products and consumers will have more choice to upgrade/replace only parts of their equipment. Your first-time cost is "higher", but onward you realize that you can upgrade the every three years and the board for $20, the screen last 5 years and costs $40, the battery is $15, etc.

Much of this, I feel, is survivor bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias) and I totally agree with your thoughts on it.

Anecdotal story from my grandfather which occurred circa 1955:

He purchased a "name brand" television in 1955, when TVs were still very new and rather expensive (I don't know the brand, sadly, and he's long since passed to ask him). Got the TV home, plugged it in, and almost immediately the vacuum tubes in the television burned out.

Called a repairman to service the television. Repairman came out, replaced all of the vacuum tubes, ran a few checks on the electronics to see if everything checked out. It did, and the serviceman took care of the billing and left--all the while, the television was on and operating.

As the serviceman was leaving the driveway, the tubes burned out again.

Hybrid engines and washing machines are far more efficient but significantly more complex. Prices are roughly the same +inflation but the added complexity reduces lifetime and repairability.

Lots of the less enthusiastic technology lovers still only had radios at that point.

Regardless of the electronics or the decade that spawned it, the unfortunate terminal behavior of that TV set was characteristic of what is known in electronic assembly as a "birth defect".

Quite possibly a single marginal key component or miswiring mistake, and from your account most likely not a vacuum tube itself and very much more unlikely the entire set of original tubes or replacements.

I wouldn't rule out a bad socket though.

Seems to have gone down in history as one of the most ridiculously premature failures people would always remember.

Anyway it did seem to perform normally for a short while before it just up and died, both times, and I think that modern electronics having an equivalent assembly goof-up probably would not even make it once.

So that may speak a bit about a preference for overly-robust engineered electronics that could be lost for decades now.

Entirely unfulfilled with this fateful TV, I know the feeling well but I think it has gotten much worse in the 21st century.

Even if only one tube socket was the cause of the failure, those sockets were what made it much more possible from the beginning for users to keep their own electronics running if they were so inclined, simply taking their own tubes to Radio Shack for testing at a minimum could accomplish a lot.

Not everyone would do this back then but it would be kind of equivalent to those who would rather not add extra memory to their PCs themselves. Neither one should you be doing willy-nilly. More of an upgrade here than a repair but you're still putting components in sockets.

Well a good bit of user repairability was once assumed because there was not any ingrained kind of disposable society, and the devastatingly senseless losses and massive-scale waste of World War II had still not dampened the spirit of Americans for things that last.

Then in the 21st century when digital TV broadcasts took over from analog using the same proven radio frequencies, power levels, and antennae, this was the first time a higher resolution picture was possible since way back when analog TV was standardized by NTSC. The picture's capable of being as perfect as cable when you have an interference-free signal, but that's a certain additional requirement for near-perfection that was however not met often enough.

Seems engineers "forgot" that analog TV was based on radio and the further you got from the broadcast station the worse your picture got until there was nothing but audio for a number of additional miles away from the antenna.

With digital you lost it all, abruptly, beyond a much smaller range.

Ever since.

And TV channels take a lot longer to change, the difference between zero latency and some latency is most uncanny. Like many things defying the type of expectations people had for progress after 1955, that were futuristically anticipated to be realized during the 21st century.

I was watching a movie on the Roku Channel. Because the channel is free, it's got commercials. The more I watched, the longer the commercials got. At some point I gave up and turned it off. The movie is 132 minutes long and there are 10 stops for commercials. The last commercial was 2 minutes.

I'd rather pay for a subscription than watch commercials and I will definitely not pay for a channel AND watch commercials.

Maybe we should mock friends and acquaintances that purchase things that are advertised in annoying or manipulative ways.

Ads are stupid, and being influenced by them should be socially embarrassing in the same way that participating in MLMs is.

Maybe sending activist investors to company meetings would get headlines, but I dunno if anything substantive would come of it.

It's not an extreme view at all; some cities (like São Paulo) have essentially banned billboards, for example, with decidedly positive effects.

I'm quite confident that we'll eventually come to see rabid, out-of-control advertising (which is about 90 percent of it) as akin to smoking, leaded gas or asbestos - and that eventually it will be regulated accordingly.

One of the biggest downsides is that these type of things contribute to pollute our world twice: when they are made, when they need to be trashed away. Brands that have products that in average break after a very short time should be banned or shouldn't be sold at all.

The collaboration between suppliers and customers is the bedrock of how the world works. Without some form of advertising, it would be stagnant, dysfunctional and basically dead with vendor lock-ins and monopolies. Advertising allows exposure and enables a free market economy.

That said, most consumer advertising is toxic and pushed down the throat. But it works otherwise Google wouldn’t exist.

Non-targeted advertising is still distracting.

Why not ban it completely? Or perhaps allow dedicated advertising places, so everybody can be happy.

Really what is the purpose of advertising in an ideal world? I'd say it's local, and lets people know what your business is and what services you offer. So if you run an inn in a small town, having a sign hanging outside of your business to let visitors know you're an inn and open for business seems pretty good. People have been doing that for hundreds of years.

The current model though is, as you say, at a minimum distracting. But I think we can grab some low-hanging fruit. If I were dictator I'd ban targeted advertising in any form. No collecting personal data. And I'd ban billboards and other large signs. Idk if this is exactly a good thing to do but I'd also explore banning in advertising in which you're not paying for the service. So if I pay for cable TV and they want to advertise to me, that's fine because I'm engaging in an interaction with the company. I shouldn't have to be subjected to ads that I don't agree to see. It's kind of a form of mind-violence IMO. Question is just where do you draw the line.

>I'd ban targeted advertising in any form.

Aren't these at odds? Genuine question, I just don't see how you can ban targeted advertising in any form while allowing people to advertise locally on the Internet for one thing. Then, similarly to TV ads, no targeting skews the advertising pool to huge players that can overspend (I swear half the ads on TV are car companies) and companies whose product are used by everyone (consumer products, restaurant chains, etc).

I don't have a mind made up with what's the solution. I too see clear problems with targeted ads when it comes to privacy and manipulation, I also have expunged ads from my Internet, but an outright ban has other issues. If you are an SMB with a niche or local product you simply can't afford advertising to everyone and hope the 1% subset you are aiming converts enough to make it viable. Maybe I'm wrong but I think there's a large amount of SMBs and self-employed jobs that would straight up not exist if it wasn't for targeted advertising, that has societal value in and of itself.

I'm ambivalent overall. On one hand I wouldn't mourn the death of all advertisement, on the other I'm not sure how you make a product, service or SMB known without it and I doubt most of my friends' product, service or SMB would exist without online targeted advertising for finding customers. IMO the solution is more akin to giving more privacy rights and options than an outright ban, granted I have no clue if that is enforceable or how to implement.

I so far haven't seen any benefit to me personally from targeted advertising. A lot of companies take information about me and my activities without a true way to consent and then use that to send me ads or try and find ways to make me addicted to their products. If they got rid of targeted ads I think there'd be 0 detriment to my own life and lots of benefits. Certainly open to other arguments though.

> on the other I'm not sure how you make a product, service or SMB known without it and I doubt most of my friends' product, service or SMB would exist without online targeted advertising for finding customers

Yea personally I wouldn't care at all. It's like if you made a business that depended on selling nicotine or selling cigarette filters and then we banned cigarettes. I'm not saying we should or shouldn't here, just that if as a society we decided X was bad and shouldn't be sold, then people who sell products related to X I mean we shouldn't keep something bad around just for that reason.

> IMO the solution is more akin to giving more privacy rights and options than an outright ban, granted I have no clue if that is enforceable or how to implement.

I think this can work on the web or Internet technologies, but I'm also concerned about things like billboards, or the newspaper ad section that even when I call and ask them to stop I still get tossed into my yard or on the sidewalk. I don't want to see the billboard yet I'm forced to. I don't want people to throw newspaper ads on my front yard but I'm forced to. At least with the web though I can just turn on ad blockers and use technology to fight it. I can't do anything about the newspaper stuff. I fantasize about saving them for a year or something and then giving them back. It pisses me off because these things end up all over the street and get washed into and clog up sewer drains too.

>It's like if you made a business that depended on selling nicotine

Targeted advertising is not the reason why the modern Internet is addictive so the nicotine argument is irrelevant as far as I'm concerned, those are separate issues. You could say, IMO rightfully, that profit motives are the incentive that pushed Internet companies towards addiction-optimization, but it would be equally true if you couldn't target-advertise.

>I'm also concerned about things like billboards, or the newspaper ad section that even when I call and ask them to stop I still get tossed into my yard or on the sidewalk. I don't want to see the billboard yet I'm forced to.

Not saying this is a good or bad idea, but if you ban targeted advertising and then all forms of IRL advertising, how do you even develop a new product or make your service known if you don't have access to a lot of capital to spam ads on TV, carpet bomb untargetted ads or buy/rent prime real estate for a store-front (assuming you have a store-business in the first place)? As much as I dislike both online and IRL ads too, arguably the latter more as I can't block it out of my eyesight, but I recognize/believe they are useful to foster SMBs and self-employment which seems, in my book, crucial for social mobility and a democratized capitalism.

Where I'm getting at is that I think (could be wrong, I'm no expert and am speaking from intuition) that expunging advertisement from our lives or making it extremely prohibitive (which I think would be the result of the rules you'd set) would simply further concentrate capital in the hands of large corporations or individuals with high means. I'm not saying your take is invalid but I'd be more inclined towards regulating the deleterious effects of advertising (privacy, advertising drugs or toys, intrusive or excessive panels, height and location limitations, ban some manipulative behaviors, false advertisement, right to opt-out or opt-in by default, etc) than outright banning them all, as much as I hate being advertised to.

Yea it's like so many things a cost/benefit analysis. But do we want to rely on selling ads to fund entrepreneurial endeavors? Idk. I think someone could argue that if you can't survive without selling ads then you shouldn't start that business. (Let me know if that's not what you were getting at with that comment). I also advise a lot of college age students looking to start companies and whenever they talk about ads I make them create a business model that doesn't involve ads. It's a good test and if nothing else gets them thinking about alternative business models (ads are lazy thinking in this space).

> Targeted advertising is not the reason why the modern Internet is addictive so the nicotine argument is irrelevant as far as I'm concerned, those are separate issues. You could say, IMO rightfully, that profit motives are the incentive that pushed Internet companies towards addiction-optimization, but it would be equally true if you couldn't target-advertise.

Sorry my point wasn't to draw a comparison between nicotine and addictiveness of ads on the Internet but to draw a comparison between a potentially harmful product (cigarettes or targeted ads) and then downstream industries or businesses that rely on those harmful products. It's like saying "well don't ban cigarettes, how am I going to sell Nicotine patches".

> Not saying this is a good or bad idea, but if you ban targeted advertising and then all forms of IRL advertising, how do you even develop a new product or make your service known if you don't have access to a lot of capital to spam ads on TV, carpet bomb untargetted ads or buy/rent prime real estate for a store-front (assuming you have a store-business in the first place)? As much as I dislike both online and IRL ads too, arguably the latter more as I can't block it out of my eyesight, but I recognize/believe they are useful to foster SMBs and self-employment which seems, in my book, crucial for social mobility and a democratized capitalism.

Yea it's easy to pontificate as I'm doing and then like you said you get some company they just plaster ads all over storefronts and we're just dealing with other negative externalities. The thing I see though is that we're kind of in a somewhat neutral equilibrium with advertising, but if it starts to "get real" we're going to be in big trouble because companies like Facebook, Google, others aren't just going to sit around and watch their business collapse as people fight against tracking and ads. Long story short it's not that big of a problem right now, but it could be.

> I'm not saying your take is invalid but I'd be more inclined towards regulating the deleterious effects of advertising (privacy, advertising drugs or toys, intrusive or excessive panels, height and location limitations, ban some manipulative behaviors, false advertisement, right to opt-out or opt-in by default, etc) than outright banning them all, as much as I hate being advertised to.

Yea totally and I get where you're going. The thing I worry about is like so many regulations the more we add the more we have to maintain and the more like tech debt they are.

With respect to your question about how to develop a new product or make your service known I'd just say tons of small businesses really do that right now with 0 capital for ads on TV or anything. Almost all of the best products or services I have used have been from word-of-mouth, research and trying to find just good and unbiased product reviews, and just seeing stuff. I think in America in particular we're so used to so many ads and we're subjected to so much advertising because we live in suburban homes, don't walk past any coffee shops or small businesses on the way to anywhere, and we drive so they have to create these giant billboards and McDonalds signs off the highway. It's hard to imagine a world where those things exist because we're just so used to them, but all of the best places I've ever visited weren't filled with ads. Becoming "touristy" is a manifestation of the advertising and consumerist culture creeping in.

If I could, I think just banning billboards and highway signs, and making junk mail and all of that stuff illegal is a good place to start.

I appreciate your thoughts and perspectives here btw. Interesting discussion!

One of my previous employers (international mega company) spent millions on advertisements each month, with no clear way to measure their direct impact. But they did it for the impressions.

From https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h...

There is the issue. "I." You may be one in 100,000. Also there is a trickle-down effect. A brand will spend enough dollars to attract a certain number of fans, then those fans attract others organically. Many will say you "Ads do not work on me," but unless you know exactly why you choose product X or Y, it is difficult to say with confidence.

I'm stunned when I see it but I agree that the average person is heavily influenced by advertisement. Influencers and ads can implant ideas in the minds of people that they replicate with absolute naturalness without thinking about it ever. Like: "X is the best Y". Which reminds me of Venus Inc.

As a consumer I spend more time than I should thinking about what I buy. I'm heavily influenced by reviews and opinions which I know to be biased and not always authentic but is still the best way to discover hidden issues in a product. I frequently think about the characteristics that I like to see in the product and compare it with similar products. But sincerely, trying to approach a rational decision has become time costly if not counter-productive due to lack of reliable information and strong noise. Pay and pray might be a better strategy.

I get a lot out of using Search, Youtube, Maps, Gmail, Drive and all of Google's other services for free. Advertising probably comes out as a net positive for me if you take all of those into account.

For maps in particular, it seems to me providing high-quality mapping and traffic data should be a government service, with any competition being mainly over interfaces or add-ons to that. The basics of it seem like infrastructure—and also something the government should have already, in one form or another—and not something it's helpful to have lots of companies competing to achieve, or smaller companies being locked out of doing something cool with it because they don't have the resources to generate all that themselves and can't afford to license it.

I find it so frustrating that I struggle or fail find quality products - for everything from forzen pizza to jeans. For some cases (frozen pizza) I just opt out. Others, I just give up and accept that I'll have to replace my jeans every 2-3 years. I try to buy recommendations from Wirecutter and do slightly better, but still so annoyed that everything is made so damn cheaply.

Planned obsolescence is pervasive - it's hard to have endless growth when you've reached market saturation. It's also incredibly hard to go against the grain here, as it's really difficult to judge how long something will last without intimate knowledge of the product.

Doesn't mean it's wrong!

https://www.jonstokes.com/p/web3-the-rise-of-the-aligned-web

Furthermore, truly durable items still exist. One of my favorites are my Osprey packs, which I have had for nearly a decade and expect to last for another few decades.

90% of products are created to fill an artificial demand manufactured by advertising in the first place.

these products and their manufacturing comes at a massive carbon cost for meaningless gain.

i also worked in digital advertising. for some of the biggest brands out there. i quit.

I doubt it has the effectiveness that people say it has when they are everywhere.

Eg maybe being environmentally friendly is super important to you. You don’t even realize that today the detergent you’re using isn’t as such. Advertising allows for someone to educate you that products exist that you’re not aware of that align to your needs/wants/desires.

This thin edge of a wedge doesn't justify more than the tiniest fraction of what the advertising industry does.

You don't need to hold onto these stock answers for quieting cognitive dissonance. I've found it a huge mental relief to stop lying to myself and just admit to anyone who asks that I'm morally complicit in abusing the worlds collective psyche for money.

Opt-in advertising is another option, I have no problem receiving advertising I've specifically agreed to receive.

If this is important, subscribe to something like Consumer Reports or join a community group of environmentally concerned citizens who share recommendations with each other, which I suppose will work until the group members start getting sponsored by vendors to give paid recommendations.

Outside of that, the tried and true age old method is trusted third parties. Friends, family, people you share hobbies with and have known for a long time, will give word of mouth recommendations when they know you're interesting in something and have knowledge of products you don't. It's like Ask Hacker News, but instead of asking random anonymous people on a website, ask people you know.

Examples:

Car controls:

  pre: direct taps and gauges plumbed into engine parts and such, real switches and levers. 
  optimum: does what it should, not more, not less, more reliable than the old stuff, easy to fix and relatively cheap to fabricate
  too much: touchscreens. For everything.

  pre: carburettors, bad winter starts, bad fuel consumption, pollution
  optimum: EFI, highly reliable, aftermarket parts interchangeable between brands
  too much: DRM on everything, parts won't even fit same model a year older, are ridiculously expensive and unreliable to boot

  pre: two channels, black and white, bad image quality, crappy small screens
  optimum: 20 channels or so, in a way already more than you can consume, good quality color image, fairly easy to see screens (say, up to 3' across).
  too much: wall-to-wall screens that intrude on your privacy every chance they can, inability to build up your own collection of content (DRM), pay *for ever* for the same stuff
  way too much: youtube.

  pre: 8 bits, too slow for many applications, nice and better than an abacus though
  optimum: 1990s OS, very little eye candy, just enough to take the edge off, fast, and enough horsepower to do meaningful work
  too much: 2020 OS, nothing but eye candy, reduced functionality, telemetry, spyware, forced updates that are just as likely to improve things as they are to leave you stranded

Technology has and always will have a place in my life. But my car is a 1997 model that doesn't phone home to the factory, has buttons instead of menus, my phone is a Nokia, and so on. Technology is my slave, not my master.

Hypothesis 1: The 90s-00s really were the peak and it's not just a generational effect

Hypothesis 2: The nostalgia I currently feel is bad enough but oh god it's just going to get worse isn't it?

What we do with that tech is another story. Tech is weaponised against us in every way, but that's not the tech's fault.

Yes, it is. Because the tech was specifically designed for it.

Unlikely both would blow, but I'm a little surprised more fuss hasn't been made about it from a safety standpoint; considering being able to see where you're going tends to be important - I believe in France you can get a ticket for having no washer fluid.

Then again, everything else about it is dated, especially the engine.

Search r/JustRolledIntoTheShop for "headlights".

Some of the first few matches:

Ford Fusion: https://reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/pw1n0e/t...

Tesla: https://reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/pvyq3u/y...

On the other hand, taking off a tire takes perhaps a minute.

I doubt there's a big list somewhere as it isn't something the manufacturers are proud about

I just looked it up and seems like you have to remove the entire headlight from the car, so maybe he took one look at it and decided it could be someone else's problem

But I will see the front page of crap in my peripheral vision and wonder about the millions of people who click on that garbage. Sometimes I'll even look at the names for a second and think how it's the same few names always, and how crazy that they somehow get all the attention in the world for some nonsense.

For that matter, now I see people use the word "influencer" as if it sounds perfectly respectable to them, and it shocks me every time.

I would prefer TV to Youtube any day, if I had a TV ad-blocker, simply because the content is far more likely to be reasonable quality rather than a 20 minute clickbait video with 30 seconds of actual content.

There's a ton of really good Youtube channels, and the level of information density is astounding.

Basically, for the first 50 years, airplane technology advanced at an amazing pace. And people thought it would go on to supersonic aircraft and space travel, and they tried to make that happen, but it just didn't make practical sense, and today we use jumbo jets very similar to what was introduced 50 years ago, and they still work better than the more advanced alternatives.

We have essentially reached a plateau in terms of energy costs and available energy; sending a rocket to space or making a car go round are limited by fuel consumption. Technological advancements in those areas are now devoted to either fuel efficiency, safety, and rent-seeking.

IMO, the real problem is the number of abstractions we've created, not the nice graphical stuff. The tech companies would be wise to start throwing truckloads of money at hiring game engine people and get help with the performance problems we have everywhere.

I'm not denying that things are more complicated now than in the 1990s, (unicode, high DPI displays, etc.), but we've completely abstracted over hardware to where it is no longer a concern of software developers.

I agree there is too much eye candy, especially in phones.

And then we did new technology to “fix” the old technology. Kind of a ponzi scheme if you ask me.

I wish. Clearly you missed the early 2010s, with skeuomorphic/glass design everywhere. I would have preferred that over the flat/featureless designs we have today.

you can pry my 16 core Threadripper and its 64GB of RAM from my cold dead hand.

Some of us use computers for things where more CPU cycles per second and more RAM are always good things.

Of course there’s some things that modern tech really isn’t better at. Is a Ryzen 5950X RTX 3090 tower any better than a Dell Dimension 4100 running Word 2000 or even a Mac Plus running MacWrite for writing a novel? Probably not, but people aren’t buying top end machines for those tasks, and some stick to their old machines where they can.

Now I can do a ton of it, though not enough to represent a full orchestra.

And I could not compile 600k lines of C++ in 4 minutes on any processor of that era.

Now I can.

The fact that desktop environments have gotten "heavy" has essentially zero impact on the compute-heavy tasks that are important to me. If I was a video editor (I'm not), the same "progress" would apply there too.

Every time I interact with a remotely "clever" system, I keep thinking how my input will feed some machine. How fast do I scroll, what is in my viewport. What do I listen to and when. Is this an A/B test? Will something I do on a whim affect that machine to predict something incredibly stupid tomorrow?

It only became obvious recently, as I was readying an actual, physical book. The relief to realise that the publisher won't optimise the font based on how fast I turn the pages. And the disgust at that aspect of tech.

And to what end?

As a backend engineer, I had no idea that frontend monitoring was this advanced, but apparently it is. So now we all have to be extra paranoid, because _any_ website could be using this tool to "spy" on everybody.

Of course, it _was_ very helpful to us in tracking down some issues (ever tried to tell a customer how to send you a HAR?). And I assume that operating with an adblocker and blocking nonessential cookies will prevent or hamper the output for us more technical types. Even so...

Okay, wow, that sounds rough...so in a way, phishing attacks don't even require you to login anymore, just typing the password or maybe 75% of it is enough to get you.

The Internet has generated in me an habit of information hoarding. At the beginning I would bookmark useful information and then take notes on paper of the useful things; with the passing of time distraction has started to creep in: more and more useless information, more and more FOMO.

2. Omnipresence of tech and privacy concerns

An increasing number of actions require emails to get done, this rises privacy concerns. When I was 14 enrolling in high-school meant filling a form in pen and paper and bring it to the administrative office. 11 years later, my sister needed an email and personal information on the net. I really don't like it.

3. Affliction due to envy

I haven't used social media since I was 19 but HN and reddit are not really better: there are a lot of thing that I just wish I could forget and fill me with envy that I would have never felt if I had never read about that particular thing. It is obviously irrational being envious of something that you didn't event wanted in the first place, but the irrationality of that feeling do not make it less real and painful. Sometimes I do a 30 day diet and I do not visit HN or reddit, but the feelings never really go away.

4. Ephemerality

I still have some books passed by my great-grandmother belonging to my great-grandfather during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. I still have all my books from middle- and high-school. These required passive maintenance: just put them on the shelves far from fire and done. On the other hand I've lost entire years of data (photos, books, notes) during a single incident that rendered my physical back-ups useless.

You know, I used to jump from one thing to the next never giving anything enough time. I would attend digital conferences, watch PARTS of courses on Pluralsight, LinuxAcademy (RIP) and youtube, hoard books, bookmark websites etc.

Something happened a few years ago where I was able to just turn it all off. I deleted all my pdfs and removed all my bookmarks. I began focusing on single thing at a time (usually in reference to certifications or new skills), and it made such a difference.

It's peace of mind that I have the material, but I've noticed that various items in there are either old or not as good/useful as I had thought prior. Your comment has given me a bit more impetus to try to focus on deleting stuff (pdfs, ebooks, bookmarks).

Used to hoard data, bookmarks, pdfs, etc.

Then I put all my data on an external drive and into some bin in the garage, deleted all my bookmarks and stopped saving them. And then realized... I don't need any of it. It's all just mental baggage.

Nowadays if I find an interesting article and don't have time to read it I might leave it open for a day, but then I just close it. I discover new interesting things to read every day, no need to bookmark something I probably won't ever get to.

Everything is becoming touch based these days. As a blind person, this means a lot of devices are unusable or almost unusable for me. As long as it's something in my own place, I can find alternatives, but that's not possible for devices I don't own. PIN pads on POS systems are the most egregious example here. Since I live in Europe, I can either use Apple Pay or give out my PIN to whoever is nearby.

Apart from that, tech has improved my life massively. It's impossible to overstate how much assistive technology has improved in the last 15 or so years. Most smartphones and computers now have a great and free screen reader, can read print, recognize currency, allow us to communicate with the sighted world, let us read almost any book in existence and watch most contemporary movies, at least the popular ones for which they made a special audio description track. None of that was possible 15 years ago, definitely not for the price of a normal smartphone.

First I need to make an account for nearly everything.

Then I need to link that account to a phone number or email.

Then every time I use the service I need to wait for them to text or email me a password.

If they email me the password then I have to log in to my email, which means getting another password texted to me.

Alternatively if it's work related I have a physical key card, a physical password generator, and a slew of personal passwords I just memorize. I have to keep all of these on me just to log in: regular keys, cell phone with service, email, key card, password generator, and ideally a different password memorized for every service which need to be changed every 60-180 days.

Maybe an example is needed, this is a typical day: I want to use the building's front door, so I use the key card. I want to use my office door so I use my regular key. I want to use my laptop so I use a memorized password. I want to connect to the network so I use my physical password generator with a memorized password. I want to read an encrypted email so I use a memorized password. I want to download a file from a document share with another company so I use a memorized password and get texted a password. I want to use the computer lab so I use a key card and a memorized password and another key card and another memorized password. I want to buy something online so I create a new account with a memorized password and get emailed a password so I log into my phone with my thumbprint and my email with a memorized password and get texted a password. Then I buy the thing with a credit card number and code which I've memorized since I get so much practice memorizing things now. I probably verify my identity a hundred times every single day, and businesses seem to be adding more and more ways to do it, making it more and more difficult.

I remember being impressed by my grandfather's keychain when I was a child, thinking "wow, how can someone need this many keys?" ...

There’s like a Murphy’s Law of Logins: Whatever frustration can be caused, will be.

Also, for many people they re-use the same password for everything, so enforcing 2FA makes sense for them as well

Now an email (with verification) is required and you'll still get insta-shadow-banned.

There are also some subs that hide vote counts for a period of time. I assumed this was just a more aggressive way to stop the spam votes.

Subscriptions for almost anything: "I don't want to subscribe to your service, I want to buy a product and never hear from you ever again"

Still WAY too much "white background" everywhere -> it hurts my eyes...how are we still having WHITE backgrounds???

Spending WAY too much time charging devices.

France and many places in Europe still NOT equipped with decent fast access to Internet

Mobile phones: Spending time with people without having them or myself scrolling their phone is difficult to obtain

Planned obsolescence:Phones are full of proprietary/encrypted stuff on a hardware or a software level making them useless after some years...

We still don't have a fully Free (as in Free software) and viable operating system for mobile platforms -> which leads to a pile of Android versions...not even mentioning Apple.

The fact that phones are still nowadays closed-object that we do not control at all.

Job Market: After more than 10 years of career, two master's degrees and a PhD being asked for a tech job whether I know how to code is annoying. Biologists, Physicists, etc. hired as "computer people" and ensuring the recruitment of programmers The creation of "DevOps" or "full stack developers" -> Being an actual admin sys, developper, network admin are separated things, with actual difference in skills and knowledge. Let everyone have their job, thinking you can have the perfect mix in one person is a myth.

Finally: The fact that private software, private platforms win everytime: TikTok, Facebook, Youtube, Discord, etc. -> all private, all preying on us.

I have 592 passwords in my password manager :-(

From my childhood, I have always loved to learn new stuff- all kinds of interesting stuff.

Before, when I became interested in something, I looked it up on the net, read books, and asked people about resources.

But with "feed"s, everything went downhill very quickly.

When more and more resources became available, I struggled to keep up with them.

There were not only too many resources I came to know about on topics that interested me, I also came to know about a lot of topics themselves.

There were not only too many things on things, but there were too many things!

I feel a lot more pressurized, a lot more agitated and anxious because I know about so many different kinds of things that I would be interested about and I am sure (at least in my mind) I would be good at.

These things range from a new programming language or a framework, to a new region and its culture that I suddenly came to know about.

The resources come as articles, essays to books, GH repos, MOOCs, and even diplomas.

I am so grateful because of the internet and specific kinds of social media because I got to know about a lot I otherwise would have missed, and my life would have been completely different. But after a certain amount, or velocity, things go to the dogs.

I believe there is a rising curve that plateaus after a certain distance in the X axis where Y is learning and acquiring knowledge and X is flow of information.

Before, learning was just super fun, and now I am often paralyzed in my free time and I do nothing so that I don't mourn not doing other things, and end up doing nothing.

I am thinking of ways to put a stop to this, and have so far come up with a few ways.

Despite everything, I manage to read 25-30 books each year.

And these books are always either very long novels or non-trivial, high-quality non-fiction.

I also manage to get immediate works done through time-blocking, and pomodoro (don't need pomodoro for stuff I really like).

But these techniques don't save you from being "reactive"- doing stuff that is needed right in the moment, and nothing else- behaving like primitive animals.

I can get hard, intensive work done, read books, learn hard concepts, but still lack very seriously in long-term action-taking (used to be good at this before).

Trying to solve these.

Now information is abundant, so abundant in fact that it's clearly impossible to fit even 1% of it into your head in one human lifetime.

So the meta-skill is figuring out which of the finite number of things you actually want to learn. I suggest going upstream as much as possible. Are there any topics where your interests converge before they split off to many disciplines? Read books about that. The more you can get upstream of stuff the eaiser it is to tell where real novelty and interesting information is (in my experience).

I had a lot of the same feelings you describe here. Reading this and actually making tangible changes to my habits helped me rediscover my love of learning. Ultimately, the solution for me was to force myself to be bored. I set artificial limits for myself when consuming content online (for instance, I use the procrastination features here on HN and I deleted all "feed" apps on my phone, like Reddit).

I found that once I was bored, my free time became so much more enjoyable and it was easier to deliberately work on something.

I have read two of Newport's books- Deep Work, and So Good They Can't Ignore You.

In Deep Work, he emphasizes on being comfortable being bored.

Actually the thing is, it is so easy when you have to choose between good and bad. Like- play that video game or read that research paper. Nothing hard about choices here, but when you have to choose between that research paper and some interesting non-fiction, or that great new blog and a conference video, that MOOC and that new language- it becomes paralyzing for me.

I am trying to figure out how to come out of this paralysis when you are choosing among many choices that are all good for you and going to benefit you.

I will give Digital Minimalism a try. Thanks for the suggestion.

The experience nowadays is more like:

    * Google for thing XYZ, wait for some seconds until the result page layout is final due to additional crap being loaded in the background
    * scrolling down while mentally hiding all the crap that big G is trying to sell you
    * finding something that looks interesting and clicking on it
    * being greeted with a cookie settings popup from hell, figuring out how to get it out of the way without becoming an advertising target for the rest of your life.
    * Trying to find the close button for the video that starts auto-playing in some corner of the screen.
    * looking at the site, scrolling, getting another full-screen pop-up reminding you to subscribe to their BS newsletter or their paid service
    * etc..

The way I could cure this a bit is by starting to read books again. Now when I'm in the train I just read a book instead of scrolling through Reddit.

I've also deleted Youtube and Reddit from my phone, which also helps. But brains adjust quickly, so now I start visiting Youtube via browser instead of the app. But I do feel better about that whole situation, now that I started reading again.

The problem is, that I only feel like reading while travelling to work or elsewhere. When I'm at home, the temptation to sit in front of my PC is just too high. While working from home, I'm in front of a screen for like 95% of the day...

I can only imagine the vicious circle of decreasing attention span it creates.

Watching places and people on instagram/youtube for the first time takes away the awe factor of what could have been possible in real life. Imagine seeing the Pyramids for the first time in person vs watching them through a travel vlogger. Or visiting Japan in pre-internet era vs now when you have already read hundreds of blogs on what cultural differences to expect even before landing in the country.

I know it's still a wonderful experience to see things in reality. But I am sure the experience is dampened due to the endless dopamine consumption we saturate ourselves with.

Imagine all the people who can now see these things who would never have been able to travel and see them in the past. I don't even think I could travel to half the places I want to see due to time constraints and my personal life choices (kids, etc.). I love being able to watch some videos of people walking in different cities or whatever, since I know I have maybe 2 overseas trips left in me.

Having been to plenty of places in my youth, though, I can say that seeing the Eiffel Tower on video and climbing to the top (twice in two consecutive days; man my legs hurt) is way way different, but for someone who couldn't go there, it's probably great to see the videos. Also, maybe if people saw the wonders in their own backyard, that would be a good idea, versus watching other wonders on video.

While there’s I saw no shortage of depictions of travel in movies and TV, the idea of traveling myself remained very abstract until I started reading on the internet about the country in question and what needed to be done to stay there long term back in the 2000s. While a vagueness remained until I actually did it, the internet helped a great deal to shape a faint idea into an actionable plan.

Could I have done that prior to the internet? Sure, if I had taken enough interest to make visits to the library and borrow books on the subject. That‘a a significantly higher bar to clear, though — the internet is much more whim-friendly. I could see myself never having traveled of this timeline took place a decade or two earlier.

I feel like something is always beeping at me across countless services and just stresses me out.

Windows beeps every time I click anything now, every app wants to spam notifications every our, Jira, countless chat apps, email, even the credit card machines at Target have gotten more aggressive...

A lot of people think they can't do it (OMG what if I miss that one important call out of thousands?), but I lost that anxiety after about a month. So nice to use my phone on my own terms and review my missed calls when it's convenient for me.

You should be issuing commands to your computer, not the other way around.

The problem is that people EXPECT an answer soon-ish. Otherwise, they assume the lack of goodwill. Furthermore, nowadays less and fewer people use longer emails.

In a few workplaces, I committed to answering emails. I clarified that I might not read Slack unless for a pre-arranged meeting. Each time they considered it bizarre yet accepted (since it was a hard requirement from my side).

I hope to set a path for other neurodiverse people who lack such chutzpah.

And, in the company I run, Basecamp is the primary communicator to create an email-like asynchronous communication culture.