This sounds exactly like what Google used to say about search results. Just a few ads, clearly separated from organic results, never detracting from the core mission of providing the most effective access to all the world’s information. (And certainly not driven by a secret profile of you based on pervasive surveillance of your internet activity.)
It often seems that beginning advertising is not the first step on a slipperly slope. Not having a plan to avoid advertising is the first slipperly step.
This is due to having so many examples that not having advertising is the first step to having advertising, and that having advertising will be optimized for profit, and frustrate users.
I think the problem is that advertising is one of the few areas where you can scale revenue without the user’s permission. Once you start depending on it, there’s always pressure to beat last quarter’s numbers and it’s easy to tell yourself that users don’t care, and the heat if any arrives years later.
Are you defining "evil" as "has an ad-supported product"?
In every tech generation, for good or bad, mainstream consumers choose the ad-based product over the paid product.
So every company that wants scale in the long-term ends up adopting an ad-based free tier to avoid becoming niche, it seems. Even the majority of HN users now appear to use gmail despite paid email hosts being incredibly cheap.
Edit: Not sure why the downvotes. Would you prefer that OpenAI leaves Google (who is ad-supported) to win the general public? I'm saying the above as someone who does purchase the ad-free plan when available, and uses paid email.
I think I was writing something about "gmail" to something and my train of thought just went on going until I hit a jackpoint (I think) and I'd like to share that, It took me an hour of just talking to myself
I tried to evaluate Gmail alternatives (Mxroute, Cranemail) and some VPS costs and just about something that most people might use for their use cases and actually "own" it (in sort of sometimes as much autonomy as Google might because I am sure that Google sometimes partners up with datacenters as well, technically being similar to colocation) but usually they are autonomous and give you far far more freedom than the arbitrary terms and conditions set by say google for gmail
If we do some cost analysis, I feel like these are gonna be cheap (for a frugal person like me who will try to cut extreme corners while still evaluating everything) or to a much more average person who might join a particular forum during black friday and just know one of the best ones or running deals everyday to even using one provider itself. The costs on average I feel like shouldn't exist 25/30$ per month for mail,domain & vps to host open source in, so in essense this is the cost of their privacy
For countries with a strong currency, this is such a great deal and they benefit greatly from something like this and they spend much more on far fewer impactful things than say one's privacy.
The problem isn't the pricing model, contary to that, the problem feels to me something deeper.
It feels something psychological. I observed that people buy twitter blue stars and discord nitros etc. (which can probably cost the same as if not more expensive than running one owns matrix/xmpp servers & mastodon which could provide unlimited freedom of modification instead)
The problem to me feels like people pay in this context, not because of the real value but of the apparent value instead.
For them the value of buying a checkmark and getting part of say 1 million or 100_000 members out of 100_000_000 (think twitter) would feel better than say being 1 out of 25_000/50_000 (mastodon running)
Why is that the case? Because I think what they are feeling is that they aren't thinking in percentages but they are thinking in numbers, they "beat" 90_000_000 people than being one out of a unique but small community (once again mastodon example where one would feel less satisfied if they recognize that they are 100 out of 50_000 or similar), Not unless the goal of privacy is something that they assign more value than the apparent other psychological value.
So coming back to the twitter example, People would be likely and willing to pay more money not owning anything on a platform where the deal should suck in real value and just about everything combined but just because of numbers/psychology effect, the deal can make sense. (Of course, there is also the fact of influence which is once again introduced by the fact that these websites create an artificial scarcity (of something unlimited) & fulfill it and the people who get that feel more rare and they get more influence, that's how people feel in discord, for the very least part)
Another issue with this system is that since it relies on having massive amounts of people & people wanting to pay in a weird deal after masses, they have to offset costs till then and mostly the scope of influence of these companies grow and this attracts the type of people notorious in the VC industry and thus this is linked to VC industry which I feel like causes it to focus on growth and then maximally renting out profit almost being a landlord something which I feel like even Adam Smith wouldn't really appreciate but that's another point for another day.
My point is, that evil becomes an emergent property out of such system even if better opinions arise because better opinions still require some friction in start but they are predictable and the definition of "evil" has in this case the definition of starting out smooth and ending roughly (Take Google company as an example, reddit), this is "enshittenification"
So people are more likely to support evil if other people support evil as well and the definition of evil is somehow based on common morals and our morals have simply not catched up to these technological advancements in the sense that most people also aren't aware of the extent of damage/privacy breaches and since these companies now gain influence/power, lobbying efforts and lack of information regarding it themselves feels easier because they themselves are becoming the landlords of information.
So Is this path Inevitable, No, not really. Previously I mentioned the 30$ but what if I tell you that companies like proton can have deals where you still get privacy without the tech know-how so it kmight be good for the average person and people are backlashing but only because if they know all things I said prior (in their own way) and the value of privacy starts to rise
I definitely feel like there is some psychological effect to this following the mass and I am sure that these companies deploy other psychologists as well and in a way, our brains still run on primordial hardware thinking we are in jungles hunting today or we might die tomorrow if we don't get food but now we have to think for 10-20 years ahead.
So I feel like as much as we Hackernews might like to admit we are smart. I feel like admitting that the amount of psychological research I feel like put into algorithms is also precisely the reason why even we of all people might use gmail.
I don't believe the answer is because its a superior product but rather the psychological and all the other reasons I mentioned and this is also precisely why the small computing movement or indie computing movement (where Individuals like you and me create computing businesses/services where once again you and me can play a part of) as ompared to the large tech behemoths
Honestly thinking about it, like we say to combat fire with fire, should we need to combat psychology with psychology. Effectively creating a movement which can be "viral" using these social media as their hosts to spread a positive idea instead of a negative one which could effectively limit the influence of algorithm itself.
In fact the anger against such system is so much that even just a well intentioned idea like just "clippy" became a movement which amassed atleast millions in a similar fashion.
So I guess we need more Clippy like movements and we need psychologists to help us develop it so that we can move our collective energy into it instead of diversifying it and going nowhere.
Pardon me if this might feel a little off topic since I haven't re-read the post and I have just went with the flow of just writing whatever came in my head after talking to myself once about it in my head as well as the idea of an indie tech movment is something that I deeply think about from time to time.
Indeed. Let's look at Google's launch of Adwords in October 2000:
> Google’s quick-loading AdWords text ads appear to the right of the Google search results and are highlighted as sponsored links, clearly separate from the search results.
I think the word doesn't have a good analogue, so I support it. I wish it sounded a bit less sophomoric, but the concept is sound, because it's the intentional worsening of a product to extract more revenue, not just by charging more, but by being worse for the intended purpose.
I don't think degradation or decay capture this...those are more associated with a process in nature, or due to the laws of physics, but especially something unintentional (like "bit rot").
I like Cory Doctorow, so I might be a bit biased here. Would be interested in alternatives that capture the intentional aspect.
I don't know, I like that it somehow implies it is caused by humans. Decay is a natural process, sometimes unavoidable. Degredation is often used in the same sense. But human and organisational decisions are driving this.
To be fair the open with a big lie about how useful agents and AI in general are, which helps to set the tone for what comes next. Part of me wonders if it’s intentional, a way to weed out the non-marks before getting to the punchline that they’re rolling out the most predictable attempt at monetizing ever.
Google is googley. Very different than any other company ever. You can trust us. With Search results. Your private emails. Your private documents. Remember our motto, do no evil. We will never change.
I mean, Google Ads are still clearly separated and are labeled as such (there's even a "hide sponsored results" button. Not sure why people even click on the ads when the actual result is right below but that's not usually me.
This is not how most users perceive it. To us techies, sure. Whenever I watch any regular person using Google though they invariably always click whatever the top result is (usually sponsored) and don't see any distinction.
Sure, but then the advertising model is working then, at least for Google and the companies that pay them. If people don't want to read a big heading literally called sponsored results [0] then I don't know what to tell them. Or they just don't care because they're not paying anything to click.
Good screenshot! Ads take up the majority of the space on that page, and are styled to look almost identical to search results. That's a problem for people like me that expect a search engine to primary deliver search results, not ads.
It looks especially bad if you are someone who has left google behind for awhile. Guess its the whole slowly boiled thing. I feel the same way when I accidentally see television commercials. Cannot believe how bad they are now.
While true, it's still a user-hostile move. You kinda have to meet your customers where they are. If people are clicking ads without knowing it, that's a serious design problem. Yes, people should learn to read, but the risk of placing too much burden on users is that all it takes is one ambitious product manager to push an A/B test that generates huge revenue wins while enshittifying the product for everyone else.
I'm not sure it is a problem, as it's Google's page, they can do whatever they want with it, and they'll of course do the profit maximizing action. Who is anyone to say it's a serious design problem?
Occasionally I have to help someone find something through Google. The hardest part is getting them to not impulsively click the first link, which is invariably an ad instead of the right thing. The second hardest is helping then navigate back to the search results. The third, of course, is stopping them from clicking the second link. Also an ad for the wrong thing.
I stopped trying to help people with computer stuff unless I can take over and trust them to not blame me when some random, unrelated thing breaks down the line.
That's why it makes a cool 100 billion in profit every year. It's one of the best money printers ever conceived, because it controls the distribution. We'll see how OpenAI does.
Do they? I haven't seen any research. My non-scientific experience watching people use Google tells me they mostly cycle through the ads at the top until they get to the right thing, or forget what they were doing and follow the first advertiser's funnel.
