xatan_dank

This is a great article. I remember reading this a few years ago during my undergrad- my big takeaway from it was that sometimes you will encounter bugs which you can't solve alone. I always assumed any error I came across was my fault, but that's not good (it's also not good to just assume it's someone else's). Fixing problems in an organization is often a team effort that requires good communication and incentive for improvement- not just one genius coder that knows the whole source code.

True, but what does "writing code" mean? If it means learning some basic JavaScript syntax and writing a small text adventure, that isn't hard at all. Learning the mathematical fundamentals of CS on the other hand is a great deal harder, and getting up to speed with what technologies are considered standard is extremely difficult.

I think the immediate purpose of this article is not necessarily to mobilize the average joes to collectively demand better security law. Mobilizing the average joes is less a problem of theory and more a widespread organizational effort. To have that effort in the first place though, you need people willing to take a leadership role who deeply understand the theory behind their actions.

Probably not at all. Facebook's collective desire for higher engagement and profit will likely outweigh any concern for individual or collective users.

I think some alternatives do exist, but I do not believe an near exact clone of Facebook with less of the problems of Facebook exists.

Maybe it's just infeasible to properly monitor such a massive social network? I don't know for sure, but I left Facebook long ago and have not regretted it at all.

I'm glad someone was able to figure out what I meant.

So how are you going to be able to determine when advertising is 'fixed'? It's already known that ad services track users and occasionally install malware on their machines. Will the ads simply become more pleasant-looking while becoming more nefarious, or will they actually be more respectful of users' freedoms? How will you know which is occurring? Also, are you seriously going to stop blocking ads periodically to see if you should keep blocking ads? I think asking or hoping the ad networks to be more polite is more than a little naive.

You put a lot of words in my mouth. I'm saying Internet advertising is broken to the point where there is no reasonable hope of fixing it. I'm saying even if advertising were "fixed", simply paying for services would be a better move. I'm not saying advertisement should not be fixed- I don't care. I'm saying all of this "fixing ads" nonsense is unreasonable and backwards thinking.

I'm not at all, because I'm not talking about advertising in general. I'm aware of what advertising is. I'm talking specifically about the same kind of advertising that the article posted is.

I don't even agree with your first sentence. I don't see anything in this article about how we should collectively stop blocking ads in order to encourage better practices from publishers/advertisers/ad networks. The article is just a long rant about how bad ads are with the promise that "if they get better I will look at them".

How are you going to be able to make this judgment call? It's already known that ad services track users and occasionally install malware on their machines. Will the ads simply become more pleasant-looking while becoming more nefarious, or will they actually be more respectful of users' freedoms? How will you know which is occurring? Also, are you seriously going to stop blocking ads periodically to see if you should keep blocking ads? I think asking the ad networks to be more polite is more than a little naive.

Even if the article was actually encouraging people to work with the ad networks to find a reasonable common ground it would be severely misguided.

How about when the service can not exist otherwise?

Then maybe it shouldn't exist in the first place. If your business model relies on feeding users ad technology known to be unsafe, undesirable, and disrespectful to users' freedom, it's not worth patronizing. There are plenty of web services not supported by advertisement. This is not a case where "if it ain't broke don't fix it" is acceptable. The current system of sustaining webservices is broken and outdated.

this value is worth more to society than ads

That's a bit of a lofty statement with no accompanying argument whatsoever. I think current technology has been wholly negative on society.

I don't have money to pay for every service I want

So you've decided to exchange your personal data and (in some cases) your computers safety to use them on credit? Maybe you should rethink that. Also, there are services you can use which exist which do not sustain themselves with advertisements.

I think this article doesn't go far enough with its championing of blocking certain ads. All ads should be blocked and web services which rely on them should find a better way of sustaining themselves profitably.

The malicious nature of ads is not new. Ads have always been infested with malware, tracking, and hideous graphics. Taken to their logical extreme (as Facebook has done), ads can also manipulate users to a degree far more dangerous than a TV or radio ad could. Ads are just the surface of a much deeper problem with the Internet, which is that most massive web services are paid for with user data rather than a mutually agreed upon price.

As far as I'm concerned, there is no reason to willingly view an advertisement to support a useful service. This amounts to a donation which you are not really in control of. Just circumvent the ad and buy from the company or send them money if you value their services.

Being integrated with Microsoft and Google's infrastructure is not a benefit, in my opinion. I've seen these companies make a lot of impulsive, ham-handed decisions with their "environments" in recent years and I'd rather pay for a service that isn't going to mutate negatively in order to coerce me to buy more things from Microsoft and Google that I just do not want.

The problem is not 'fake news'. The problem is that it's impossible to have a discussion about the news at all since everyone is experiencing drastically different content directly catered to them on the internet. At least with Fox News we could all point to something Megyn Kelly said and debate whether we agreed or not. There's no way we can even agree upon an information set to talk about with interactive 'fake news' because it differs for everyone and changes rapidly. We also don't have any of the source for these repulsive services, where we at least have some evidence of how MSM outlets are biased.

The idea that services like Google and Facebook are going to use more algorithms to counter the tracking and ad servicing algorithms they developed in the first place is laughable. The solution (if they were actually trying to counter 'fake news') would be to get rid of this harmful technology entirely, but that's all these companies have to bring in revenue so I doubt that'd happen.

'Fake news' is not Breitbart or CNN or one news outlet. 'Fake news' is really the way these internet companies have distorted our collective reality for their own short-term gains. It is irresponsible, dangerous, and in my opinion, not profitable in the long run unless they completely usurp all our species' communication. Which they are actively trying to achieve.

Sure, but I think that is actually a very difficult problem: how do we determine whether a comment is being sincere or not? Furthermore, assuming we had a foolproof method to do this, would the site have enough funds to use it routinely and ethically? I think this is the problem we're seeing now with a large number of tech companies.

I don't know if a shill-free alternative to Reddit could ever exist- I tend to think the openness and scale of Reddit (which is the whole point of it) is what allows shilling to occur. It really bums me out.

The people wanted a change in leadership style and the Democratic party simply wasn't responsive to it. And here we are.

Yeah I think anyone who's been following Netflix should know that keeping content they didn't create available for streaming is actually quite difficult and not just because 'Netflix sucks' or something.

Sure, that makes sense, but as a consumer, all that matters to me is whether they have the content I want or not. If they don't, Amazon will gladly sell me the season DVD's that Netflix hasn't been able to host. I'm not personally interested in 'investing' in Netflix creating their own content (which I generally haven't been that into honestly).

Same. They dropped Peep Show and that was about the only show I Liked that was still on. Plus King of the Hill and Spongebob, but they took those off ages ago.

Besides the obvious lack of advertisements, most my the improvements would come from resolving my main issue with YouTube, which is how aggressively the service directs you towards content with ads. I feel that this was not the case many years ago and that YouTube has actually gone backwards in terms of having a reasonable interface for navigating through the vast amount of information it hosts. I feel channels, suggested videos, subscriptions, searching, and even monetization were more user-friendly back in the early 10's.

The problem is that, as far as I know, YouTube has not been wholly profitable for Google at this point, so they've really been trying to squeeze all the money they can out of it, and I feel it's come at the expense of the service itself. I spend far less time on YouTube these days.

I would be much happier spending money directly on a service which treated its users as customers rather than the product.

As far as other features, I think it's naive to say that YouTube has every feature someone could want a video hosting service to have. I feel YouTube could improve quite a bit in plenty of areas, particularly in how people 'watch' music there.

I should have been more specific- I meant to refer to their competitors in the analysis of lyrics, not just annotation. For this purpose, I feel that Genius is overall quite poor and that there are much better discussion boards and services.

With regards to annotation specifically, songfacts and lyricsmode are competitors in that they support the same kind of annotation Genius does. In this sense, they are certainly competitors, though Genius has far more annotations and is winning the competition.

My main point about the failure of Genius is that it's Jedi mind tricked people into thinking annotation, and not just annotation in general but Genius' specific implementation of it, is the 'best' way to discover the 'objective' meaning of individual songs. There is no objective meaning and Genius' annotation feature is hardly as powerful as people give it credit for. Genius is just a discussion board with annotations enabled- another iteration of the many discussion boards which VC's have foolishly pumped tons of money into and not received a payout from.

I'm someone with a lot of passion for music (especially rap/hip-hop) and its interpretation, and I can't stand Genius. I think that it isn't that people lack the depth of Ben Horowitz, it's that Ben's vision for sharing and cultivating that depth in others isn't very good. Interactive browser line by line annotations are not a silver bullet for achieving rap nirvana.

This is exactly what I've been thinking, thanks for sharing. For example, I've been so angry at how bad YouTube has gotten as of late and I feel that it's dominance is getting in the way of creating a better video service. I would gladly pay $20 a month for a more customizable and ad-free service which respects its users. It was my favorite website from around 2008-2011 and it's since become a disaster.

This doesn't come as any surprise to me. Over the years, I haven't found Genius to be significantly better at annotating lyrics than any of it's competitors. Genius takes longer to load and doesn't provide any more value in its annotations than does azlyrics, youtube comments, facebook, reddit, or anywhere else discussions are occurring. A lot of the time, its annotations are just straight up wrong or embarrassingly shallow, and attracting actual artists to write about their own lyrics didn't excite me. Furthermore, the lyrics themselves are often wrong.

The reason I'm complaining about this isn't to be a wet blanket- I just can't believe this service got the amount of funding it did. If their musical annotations are so cringeworthy and poor, what made investors think they could annotate other websites so well that a $58.9 million dollar investment would produce any reasonable return?

Genius reminds me quite a lot of last.fm in terms of what kind of service it was and how well it has fared as time has progressed. Both were reasonable ideas to begin with, but is there any reason these ideas needed millions of dollars in funding to operate? I am really getting the impression that these tech VC's are just out of ideas and are consistently trying to monetize internet toys which in reality should remain small web services for dedicated user-developer types.

Huh? Just see all the gmail ids.

That doesn't mean people are happy with the situation nor the product. In many situations, as I already mentioned, it doesn't even mean the product is successful. I'm well aware of all these near-monopolies and how many users they have- Gmail's monopoly over email, Google's monopoly over search, YouTube's monopoly over video, etc. Plenty of users are extremely dissatisfied with these services. Furthermore, your point doesn't address the "mono-culture", which is a separate issue from some specific corporations maintaining very high userbases.

Keeping products free is the distraction. People give away all sorts of things and start rationalizing in curious ways to get freebies.

This doesn't respond to what I said at all. I'm saying there is no evidence that software provided without a direct cost inevitably has an impact in deterring activism.

I worry that you don't understand what "free software" is. Facebook is free as in free beer, not as in freedom. There is a huge difference. You should read up on the definitions of free and proprietary software.

I don't know how many people are totally loving the mono-culture and many of the "free" social networks are not profitable at all. Very few of them are actually succeeding.

Also, you say activism is not the answer, and then say that the companies have succeeded in part because they have prevented activism from happening by 'distracting' people. I don't think any of this is true and that the argument you make here is self-contradictory.

I really just don't think your comment holds any water at all.

Regardless of whether they are malicious, their actions are causing significant societal harm. Zuckerberg retains almost complete control of the company and this is occurring under his guidance. He might not be malicious, but he is certainly at fault, as are the ridiculous and shameful engineers picking up paychecks to create a such an authoritarian product.

This is absolutely not true. There's so much wrong with that argument and how it applies to Facebook it's hard for me to provide decent criticism, but I'll try anyway.

Facebook is not provided 'for free'. Nothing is. Facebook is provided to users in exchange for their personal and social data. Facebook is also not really 'a thing'- it's much more complicated than that. The worst part of your argument is that this criticism of free software also holds true for proprietary software- there are plenty of nonfree services which do the same thing. More generally, 'free' software as you define and apply it is not a useful categorization of software to make. What about freemium services? Are those free or do you pay for those? Whether or not you pay in currency for a software license is not really meaningful in the discussion of user freedom. I recommend you actually do some reading on the topic of software freedom and Facebook before you go spouting completely unfounded aphorisms online again.

Thanks for the comment- I was hoping to hear about why you prefer using a 3rd party drum machine in a DAW. For the time being, I record or find all of my samples so I'm not particularly attracted to the kits. The interface looks great however. I probably won't use it anytime soon, but it does appear to be quite powerful.