With intense competition for enterprise contracts coming from Anthropic, I thought this was OpenAI's time to get _less_ memey, not more. What the hell are they thinking?
Between the rounded corners that don't reach the edges of the viewport, and the behavior when opening a new app for the first time, it feels like Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle.
Does anyone actually do this? Especially for heavy-duty applications like my web browser and IDE, this has always felt like a bizarre assumption to me.
> it feels like Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle
IMO, this has been their assumption for years, and it actually turned me off when I tried getting used to Mac circa 2006-2007. Coming from Windows at the time, I just couldn't get over a weird anxiety that my application window wasn't maximized, because it didn't look like it completely snapped into the screen corners.
Now, using 34-inch ultrawide monitors almost exclusively, I never maximize anything... it'd be unusable.
MacOS has a built in 4x4 window tiling which works for this purpose for me. I don’t find ever wanting more than 4 windows open on an ultrawide. Definitely not as powerful as something like xmonad but useful for the majority of my use cases.
You can, I believe, but I often need to move between computers so I try not to mess with shortcuts too much (or go down keyboard layout rabbit holes, etc).
While I don't maximize anything on a monitor that wide, I do appreciate Window's snap to half/quarter functionality for monitors that wide, and I wish Mac had the same ability natively.
Hover over the green button in the top left of the window. I recently found out about that menu for moving a window between screens, which is also an option it has. (I also just found them in the Window menu if you prefer that. I dont; the options take an extra level of hovering to get to.)
You can also long-click the button instead of hovering. Also, see the menu bar entries related to window management, which replicates these same functions but can be bound to keys in the system settings.
Option-clicking the green button maximizes it similarly to Windows, rather than going fullscreen. I never used fullscreen just because of the slow animation it used, and now it makes even less sense on my new MacBook with the notch. It basically replaces the menu bar with a blank bar.
I will wait for you to discover these Keyboard Shortcuts - Press the `fn + ^` (that globe key + control) and then try `c`, `f`, and all of the four arrow keys.
Vulgarity aside, I can sympathize. For years I've been told by designers that discoverability and intuitive interacting patterns are so important, yet every aspect of modern design focuses so much on minimizing "distractions" that features go undiscovered. We get forced into suboptimal workflows and usage patterns because everything gets over-fitted to the lowest common denominator.
This is the biggest reason I love Linux. I can choose my own desktop, or even forsake the desktop entirely for a simpler window manager, without changing operating systems. Some are hyper focused on a tailored experience (gnome) while others let you configure to your heart's content (kde).
There's sacrifices to be made, of course, but not having to live under the oppression of Apple's beneficiary dictator designers is absolutely worth it for me.
I’m pretty sure it does? I haven’t installed anything and it has the ability to do half and some other layouts through the window menu and snapping IIRC
You can hold the 'option' key while dragging a window in order to set it in mosaic mode (you may need to activate the mode in Settings > Finder and Dock > Windows)
This was added as built-in functionality in Sequoia, not Tahoe. Personally I still use Magnet, which has worked well for over a decade and has a few more options.
I just installed Kubuntu last week so I could get the additional shift-drag targets to split my 34" ultrawide into 3 sections, or bump to the edges for the half filled.
Something I realized after spending a few months in sway (i3) and then niri is that I only care about a few windows (code editor, terminal, browser, apps I use moment to moment).
All the rest I'd prefer to just summon as-needed and then dismiss without navigating away from the windows I care about.
sway/niri want me to tile every window into some top-level spot.
Took me a while to admit it, but the usual Windows/macOS/DE "stacking" method is what I want + a few hotkeys to arrange the few windows I care about.
Yeah, I came to the same conclusion a few months back. Sadly I had to ditch KDE for GNOME due to an issue[0] specific to NixOS but after going through the gauntlet of tiling window managers and PaperWM/Niri over the years I've also settled on a traditional DE.
I'm surprised to hear that niri didn't work for you, I feel like it's a really good middle ground between tiling and floating window managers. It handles a lot of window resizing and arranging for me, without being too rigid. Windows can have any width they need without having to evenly divide my monitor.
Makes sense I guess. I mostly work with a few long-lived applications, and I hate having to do any manual window management myself.
I'm fairly sure you could use scripting to come up with a Niri workflow that worked for your use case. Maybe something like niri-scratchpad (https://github.com/Vizkid04/niri-scratchpad). But I sympathize if you don't want to spend a ton of time experimenting with your tools when you already have something that works for you.
In sway, put the lower priority windows in another workspace, or the scratchpad, or in tabs/stacks. You can bind keys to focus specific programs by their appid/class also, so even if they're on another workspace or monitor it'll jump right there.
It sounds like the scratchpad may be especially close to what you want.
Your sway solutions are hacks around the MRU stack of a stacking desktop environment though.
I don't want to leave the workspace nor go find which tab/stack I've put Spotify just to use it. And scratchpad is no better since I'd have to do an explicit summon/dismiss cycle between workspace and scratchpad just to recreate behavior I already have on a normal desktop env.
macOS only recently got an option to make windows fill the screen. For most of history what most people would assume is a maximize button (the green one) was actually a zoom button. It sized the window to what the OS thought was appropriate for the content (to the best of my knowledge and experience with it).
Apple then made things go full screen, but in a special full screen mode, so macOS worked more like the iPad.
By the time they added a way to maximize windows in the way Windows does, the idea of maximizing an app has largely worked its way out of my workflow. It was always too much trouble, and I find very few apps where it provides much benefit. Web browsers, for example, often end up with a lot of useless whitespace on the sides of the page, so they work better as a smaller window on a widescreen display. In an IDE, it really depends on what’s being worked on and if text wrapping is something I want. Ideally lines wouldn’t get so long that this is a problem.
With the way macOS manages windows, I often find it easiest to have my windows mostly overlapped with various corners poking out, so I can move between app windows in one click. The alternative is bringing every window of an app to the front (with the Dock or cmd+tab), or using Mission Control for everything, neither of which feels efficient.
I could install some 3rd party window management utility, I suppose, but in the long run, it felt easier to just figure out a workflow that works on the stock OS, so I can use any system without going through a setup process to customize everything. It’s the same reason I never seriously got into alternative keyboard layouts.
Note that fullscreen breaks command tab. Create two safari windows (or FF, Chrome, doesn't matter - except that Apple shipped safari, so we'd expect that to be able to render a window to the screen correctly).
Full screen one. Switch to the other. Now, use just cmd-tab and cmd-` to get to the full screen safari window (cmd-` switches between windows in the same application, which is literally never the right thing, but I digress).
For what it's worth, the third party tool 'altTab' mostly fixes this.
Bonus MacOS UI bug: I had to exit altTab to confirm they still hadn't fixed cmd-`. When I re-opened it using cmd-space, finder defaulted to the version in ~/Downloads instead of /Applications, then read me the riot act about untrusted software trying to change accessibility settings.
One more thing: I'm still not using MacOS 26, so all my complaints are about the "last known good" release.
You can double click the grab handle area of a window (which is less obvious than ever in Tahoe) and it'll fill the window to the display.
Except Safari, which just fills out the window's height vertically. Kinda weird to make an exception like that but I don't hate it, because I generally use Safari for reading, and shrinking the browser's width forces lines of text to not get too long if the website's styling isn't setting that manually.
You can double click on any part of the top title bar (that doesn't have buttons in it) for example in Calendar you can double click beside the magnifying glass in the top right and it will maximize the window.
This is running "zoom". When I try it in Finder, it doesn't make the window full screen, it actually made it smaller.
When I use the Window menu, Zoom replicates what double-clicking the top title bar does, while Fill maximizes the window. This holds true with the behavior you describe in Safari as well.
It just seems like a lot of apps treat Zoom and Fill the same now (I tried Calendar, Notes, TextEdit, and NetNewsWire), which adds to the confusion.
I don't understand how we keep hearing so often here about Apple OSes being so amazingly simple, approachable and cleverly designed with a lot of attention paid to detail, while every practical productivity advice involves some undiscoverable trick, or combinations of tricks, that seems so arbitrary and obtuse. I don't like Mac, in large parts because of that. No amount of marketing and peer pressure will convince me of the superior elegance and sophistication of something that hates you for wanting windows maximised. Those hidden tricks only add insult to injury as pervasive reminders of your presumed inadequacy, that you need to suffer to have things your way, and that Apple is magnanimous to even let you have them.
Every system has its issues. It's really a question of which issues you can live with and which system ultimately fits your workflow best.
After I got used to working in windows instead of full screen all the time, I can't really go back. Even on Windows I find myself working the way I do on macOS. Full screening every app made more sense on a 1024x768 screen (or smaller). Once I moved to a widescreen display (which happened to coincide with getting my first mac) running full screen felt like the wrong move most of time.
> After I got used to working in windows instead of full screen all the time, I can't really go back.
Sorry if this comes across as disrespectful, but it smells like Stockholm Syndrome. You are choosing not to use the full extent of your screen estate, and that is your fine choice, but that is no excuse for making it hard. If you compound the whitespace, the thick borders and the generally oversized UI controls, not much of "productive space" remains available to get the work done. I am not interested in macOS as a content-consumption-first vehicle, though that's clearly where Apple is steering.
It is situational but I think on a modern wide screen(or screens) if it is a single text-like document(like a web page or a terminal) you want 2 or perhaps 3 side by side. if the app implements it's own window management(like blender) a single full screen is best. Overlapping windows are important to have, but almost never desirable, it usually happens because you ran out of room.
The problem I have with this is that I was using a 1600x1200 21" display in 2000, and got used to workflows for it back then.
I am currently running a 16" display at a similar fractional scaled resolution (because Apple stopped understanding DPI after shipping the first LaserWriter, apparently).
Over that time, my eyes have not gotten better to match display DPI, so I'd rather have web sites just adjust the font size so that there are a reasonable number of words per line instead of rendering whitespace.
Non-full-screen windows would make more sense if Apple supported tiling properly, like most Linux WMs and also modern Windows.
MacOS sort of supports tiling in a "program manager shipped it + got promoted" sort of way, but you have to hover over the window manager buttons, which is slower than just manually arranging stuff. If there are any keyboard shortcuts to invoke tiling, or a way to change the WM buttons to not suck, I have not found them.
1600x1200 is still a 4:3 aspect ratio, I think I agree that scaling that makes sense. Full screen really got problematic with 16:9 and 16:10 aspect ratios. That's when the empty gutters in most apps, and especially websites, became really pronounced.
As for tiling in macOS...
You can use the mouse to drag windows into tiled positions. Grab a window and when your cursor hits the side, corner, or top edge of the screen, it will indicate the tiling position, much like AeroSnap on Windows from some years back. You can also hold the Option key while holding the window to get the tiling regions to show up without moving all the way to the edge.
Keyboard shortcuts exist as well. Go to Settings -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts... In the dialog that opens, go to Windows. There you can see all the options and customize them if you'd like. Or set shortcuts for things that might not have one yet.
If for some reason dragging the windows around doesn't work, go to Settings -> Desktop & Dock -> the Windows heading. There are toggles to enable or disable dragging to tile, and the Option key trick. You can also turn off the margins on tiled Windows, which you'd probably want to do.
I've never been a big fan of window tiling myself. There was a time when I needed a lot of different windows visible at all times, but that hasn't been the case in a long time. I find tiling makes things too big or small, it's never what I actually want. I drag the window up to the top of the screen to invoke Fill from time to time, but that's about it.
Apple OSes being so amazingly simple, approachable and cleverly designed with a lot of attention paid to detail
That was the Mac in the 1990s. It was designed for, and highly usable with, a one-button mouse. It didn't have hidden context menus or obscure keyboard shortcuts. Everything was visible in the menu bar and discoverable. The Finder was spatially aware with a high degree of persistence that allowed you to develop muscle memory for where icons would appear onscreen every time you opened a folder.
There was almost nothing hidden or lurking in the background, unlike today (my modern Mac system has 500 running processes right now, despite having only 15 applications open). We've had decades of feature creep since the classic Mac OS, which has made modern Macs extremely hard to use (relatively speaking).
It's been more than 10+ years that I've been able to Option+Click the green button to fill the screen. Works for any app, and always has, unless that app explicitly disallows resizing. That's not recent.
Why is it that some of the most useful features in Apple products are impossible to find on your own? I recently also learned about "three finger swipe to undo" in iOS instead of shaking the damn thing like it owes me money.
rectangle [1] is pretty much essential for me because of this. I use only a few keypresses (maximize window, move to one of the halves of the screen horizontally) but that is enough. My mouse very rately interacts with the borders of any window, or those buttons. I had to click on the green one that you mentioned in order to see what it did (yuck).
Lion got Full screen, but Fill screen came later. Best I can tell, that was in Yosemite, 11 years ago. That still feels relatively recent, as it is in their current California landmarks era and no the big cats era.
I use a third party tool with shortcut keys that cycle between: full height, left half of screen; full height, right half of screen; full height, full width.
It works well for me, makes it easy to get two things side by side without wasting space.
Right, Macs always have had the premise of "spacial window management" (or that's what Siracusa called it), so that's probably how you are 'supposed to' do it.
Full Screen Mode was their answer to maximize, going back many years now (10.7).
The spatial Finder was something different: having each folder open a new window, and that particular folder's window always re-opening in the same position on screen, with the same window size and same layout of files inside. Having the position of each folder remain consistent and persistent allows you to remember a file's spatial location much as you would for a printed document on a physical desk (exactly where you left it), rather than having to recall its path in the file system hierarchy.
Obviously all of that works better if Finder windows don't usually fill the screen, but it's not a hard requirement.
With the classic OS, all the windows were supposed to work this way. And it seems most apps still do remember their window positions, making it easy to find them. (Expose even keeps the positions consistent when you 'zoom-out'.) Which is why Mac users tend to position their windows rather than relying on alt-tab or the dock or another app-switcher.
(IMO the spacial Finder was designed around floppies and small folders and didn't work so well with hierarchical folder views, so no big loss...)
Just wanted to note that this is how I work. I rarely have any window full screen/maximized and hate it when a website or application is built assuming a giant monitor with a maximized window.
I’ve never found a setup with multiple desktops or similar with a way to quickly switch between apps I’m using more than “editor slightly more left, browser slightly more right, …” and just clicking on a border I know brings that app to the front. I’m sure many think I’m crazy. That’s ok. :)
That said, I generally hate the new OSX UI. Every UI element that is non usable just became larger and wastes space I should be able to utilize. Likewise, it made some operations insanely frustrating (here’s looking at you, corner drag resize!).
Probably not the norm, but I use a large 4K monitor and no scaling.
I haven’t maximized a window in years. They look ridiculous like that. Especially web pages with their max width set so the content is 1/4 the screen and 3/4 whitespace.
Do you have the brightness on your monitor set really high or something?
I frequently use macOS on a projector, it doesn't quite fill my wall floor to ceiling but it comes close. I don't use full screen often, but I do it occasionally as a focusing strategy, and it's fine.
Doesn't bouncing off the wall just effectively make the "backlight" dimmer? The light reflected off the wall is hitting your face versus the light from the screen hitting your face. It's still light regardless.
If you're using a monitor in the dark the way you use a projector, you should turn the backlight down. If you're using it in a well lit room, the brighter backlight should have less of an effect.
> The light reflected off the wall is hitting your face versus the light from the screen hitting your face. It's still light regardless.
It sounds to me you've never actually looked at a monitor display large swaths of white before, it's brighter than light hitting a wall for sure, even with the brightness down, extra so when the ambient lightning is dark too.
I've definitely seen large monitors that are unpleasantly bright in the dark, but I've also seen an overly bright projector that was similarly unpleasant. I genuinely don't understand why changing the backlight wouldn't fix everything. A projector's image isn't diffuse like a lightbulb, if it was you wouldn't see an image.
A tiling window manager adds a bunch of keyboard shortcuts I can’t get used to. Not worth the mental load of having things change places on their own either.
It’s probably a me problem, but I’m going to open stuff and then leave it scattered around all day. It’s fine.
I don’t use more than a couple of virtual desktops either. Just one for current tasks and one for background apps.
I have three 27" screens (iMac in the center and two thunderbolt displays on each side) and I use most of my "daily driver" applications fullscreen (single monitor). So, things like Xcode, VSCode, web browsers, mail, Quicken, Spreadsheets and Word Processing, and so on. This gives me usually at most 3 things to do at once. Occasionally, for smaller apps, like calculator, messages and so on, I won't fullscreen them. But for my main workflows, it's fullscreen all the way.
My actual biggest pet peeve with this setup is the vast number of web sites that deliberately choose to limit their content to a tiny column centered horizontally in my browser, with 10cm of wasted whitespace on each side.
I've seen half a dozen Mac users and none of them maximized the window very often. They usually had a mishmash of like 12 windows open and randomly all over the screen. Then they used the Alt-Tab to get between them. Basically wherever it opened is where it stayed.
Window management is one thing that MacOS has long been weirdly bad at.
I think there's a conflict between the users who use it on studio displays and users who use it on 13 inch laptops. The Mac team at apple won't pick a side or come up with two solutions.
That's not completely true, they've been pushing swipe between fullscreen apps for a while.
But that doesn't make any sense on an iMac.
So the recommendation from pro users is to use Alfred to manage windows.
This is me. I tend to order projects onto their own desktops[0], each with several app windows open. With an external monitor there's plenty of space, and... Yeah: with command-tab thoroughly committed to muscle memory it usually doesn't matter much if they end up on top of each other. If it does, I'll put them next to each other. Stickies usually go out of my eye-line to the left side of the screen, so I'll keep that otherwise clear.
I sometimes maximize something - other than video calls: those are always full-size - on the laptop screen, but otherwise not at all.
I can see how a full-screen IDE makes sense, but I don't use one, so I always want a couple of terminal sessions running alongside my editor.
There are vanishingly few contexts in which I find full-screen helpful. Not criticizing anyone else, or recommending my way of working, but it's what works for me.
[0] I would like better support for desktop management: naming and shortcutting, particularly. Years ago I tried some (I think it was Alfred, or a predecessor) add-on that promised that, but it was super flaky. Does anything exist that works well?
This is me almost exactly. Windows pile up being whatever size feels appropriate, organized only by virtual desktop. If screen #2 is a laptop screen or the program in question is an IDE with a billion panes I might resize it to fill the screen, but otherwise it’s rare. I practically never use full-on fullscreen.
It’s so ingrained I tend to get frustrated on other desktops, which are nearly all built around the Windows mentality of keeping displays filled to the brim with tiled or maximized windows.
Even on the handful of times with maximize/tile on macOS, it’s with a gap of a few pixels of desktop peeking through so it doesn’t feel as “boxed in” and claustrophobic.
Maybe this explains some of the bizarre questions I've gotten from mac designers.
The other day I was explaining to one that their designs fixed width looks silly once it got up towards 4k resolutions. But the designers main concern was if people actually used full screen browsers on 4k monitors and if there was any point in thinking about the design at that resolution.
There are plenty of times I enjoy have 2 browsers side by side of even 4 browsers in a square, and being able to do that is one of the benefits of having a 4k monitor. But without a doubt the majority of my time is spent with a full size browser window open, and I observe the same from all the other windows/linux users I manage that use a 4k monitor.
In service of keeping this post simple, I've ignore system display/ui scaling. But still... the question/assumption from the mac designer completely blew my mind.
And actually typing that all out just unlocked a bunch of memories about how many times I've been:
1. On a screen share support call with a mac user
2. Asked them to pull up a webpage
3. They pull up a super tiny ass browser window to the point I can't really see anything
4. I ask them to full screen the browser so we can actually read shit
5. The mac user just straight up panics or acts like like I've spoken an alien language to them.
The same process happens when I need a mac user to get to an apps settings that on a windows/linux computer would normally be under something like File > Preferences/Settings. They have no idea what I'm talking about or know just barely enough to know they don't remember how to do it and panic.
Then I have to go google it and remember that CMD+comma(⌘+,) exists and reveal it to the mac user like it's actual black magic. And then I immediately forget about it until 6 months later when I need to support a mac user again and I repeat the whole cycle again.
there's iconography of a partially eaten fruit on the cases, and some of them glow.
eta: i'm just saying if i had a glowing half drank beer or partially eaten pizza on my laptop in a business meeting i am getting weird looks. Just because you all normalized glowing fruit doesn't mean the rest of us take you seriously.
> Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle
The assumption is that the window should be the size of the content of the document inside.
It turns out that this approach works well for many applications, especially what the mac was designed for in the 80s and 90s. And it's horrid for modern "pro" applications.
Yes! After many years of using only linux or windows machines, I was assigned an iMac at an internship and noticed the friction with fullscreening things. I decided not to fight it and spent the next year happily working in little windows and making frequent use of the "mission control" gesture.
However, after the internship I went right back to fullscreen/window tiling in linux, so I can't say I really preferred it. Even now as a Gnome user with a big monitor and magic trackpad on my desk - which gives me ~equal access to either approach - I fullscreen everything.
I don't know what it is, but fullscreen on Mac (even dock-showing "fullish screen") feels wrong in a way that fullscreen on Windows/Linux feels "right".
I think it’s partially because on Macs, the desktop has always been a more pivotal component of the OS thanks to ubiquitous drag and drop support and mounted volumes showing on the desktop, among other things. At least for me, it’s not unusual to grab images, text snippets, and other things from apps and drop them on my desktop, making it more of a workbench than it is on other platforms.
Another component is how ability to overlap windows is emphasized, allowing the currently relevant portion of them to be visible without taking center stage or stealing any space from your main window(s).
Both are part of a larger difference in mentality and workflow style.
I use Rectangle [1] for window management. I only use three shortcuts: full screen, left half of the screen, and right half of the screen. My editors and Chrome are always running in one of these modes.
But for other apps where interactions tend to be brief like Finder, Messages, Notes, Music, etc - yeah I don't usually expand them to full screen.
Yeah this is the assumption, even pre-OSX.
I won't claim to know the majority of mac users, especially not since the large uptick in the 2010's... but it seems, in my experience, very much the norm to not maximize windows and I wouldn't be surprised if people who do maximize are mostly Windows converts (not that there's anything wrong with that).
I know lots of people on laptop screens who don't maximize windows. It seems weird to me to only use like 80% of the screen's real estate, but sure, whatever.
On large external monitors, I think it makes total sense not to have every window maximized, though. Probably less usable that way.
It’s painful for me to watch senior engineers drag windows around and resize, hunt and peck for what they’re looking for. I suppose that’s what an emacs user may think of me when I move code around, but I suppose such things aren’t critical for overall productivity
I almost never use full screen windows on a Mac. Things like video are full screen, but that's a swipe to another workspace. Half-screen windows on a 27" screen are already bigger than a sheet of letter paper. Lots happens in terminal windows, which vary a bit, but are usually around 100x60, and maybe 1/6 of the screen.
I do have Rectangle installed, so apps generally get at most the left or right half of the screen, with a shortcut for badly behaved websites that need 2/3 to look right. Apps are usually pretty good about remembering window positions, so mostly you futz with it once and you're done.
Actually yes, I have all windows overlapping and none expanded to fill the screen, unless I'm really doing something very specific that needs as much space as possible. But the rounded edges are still slightly annoying.
Yes, all the time. I understand that if you have a setup where you do everything in your IDE you could reasonably leave it full screen all the time and I get why that works for some people. I'm not one of those folks and I use separate IDE, terminal, browsers, and other windows and use window management to allow myself to see multiple of them at the same time and switch between them by clicking on what I want.
Also just want to be 100% clear: Tahoe is bad and I hate the changes and I don't think the OS should prefer one way of working over the other. I just hope it's helpful to explain my perspective.
I've always disliked MacOS because it is so janky about maximizing windows.
I have a 39" ultrawide and I keep every window maximized. I have OCD about this. I can't stand things all layered on top of each other. I like to focus on one screen at a time.
Chromium browsers have been rolling out split tabs and I use that on a couple of tasks where I'm constantly cutting/pasting between sites, but that's about it.
Yeah, anything that has an MDI metaphor going on should be ran fullscreen. Otherwise, what's the point? If the idea is to use the OS desktop space as the application window organizational space, then don't let people make apps that have different document panes.
This goes towards something that I've felt for a little while: at some point in time around the early 2000s, operating system vendors abdicated their responsibility to innovate on interaction metaphors.
What I mean is, things like tabbed interfaces got popularized by Web browsers, not operating systems. Google Chrome and Firefox had to go out of their way to render tabs; there was no support built into the OS.
The OS interfaces we have now are not appreciably different from what we had in the early 2000s. It seems absurd that there has been almost no progress in the last 25 years. What change there has been feels like it could have been accomplished in user-space, plus it doesn't get applied consistently across applications, thus making it feel like not a core part of the OS.
MacOS in particular was supposed to an emphasis on the desktop environment being the space of window and document level manipulation, as exemplified by the fact that applications did not have their own menubars. All application menu bars were integrated together at the top of the screen. Why should it be any different with any other UI organizational feature? Should not apps merely be a single window pane, accomplishing a single thing, and you combine multiple apps together to get something akin to an IDE out of them?
Well, I don't know if they should be. But they can't. Because OS vendors never provided a good means to do it. Even after signalling they wanted it.
It did, but those were static tabs. It was pretty easy to create tabs as a form of sub-organization. But the treatment of tabs as documents was new-ish to Chrome/Firefox. Other applications treated multiple, concurrent document views as whole, resizable, sub windows inside of an "MDI" panel.
Look at how older versions of Word, Excel, and Visual Studio worked. The tool trays stay consistant as you move between document windows. The entire application is minimizable and quittable together as one.
Photoshop still uses this metaphor. In the ealry and mid-2000s, Photoshop on Windows had a window for the application separate from the documents, but on Apple OS9 and OSX, the only representation of the application itself was in the menu bar. Document windows and tooltray windows both floated in the same desktop space as every other window.
I haven't checked on the GNU Image Manipulation Program, but I seem to remember it retained the same "no application window, tooltrays and doc windows exist in the DE" metaphor for much longer than Photoshop.
There is also a difference in the way that Chrome renders tabs in the window title area. That's a part of the UI chrome that one would expect to be in the perview of the UI toolkit, but Google took it on themselves.
Virtual desktops in Unix predate Visual Studio. I'm pretty sure there was a concept of tabbed interfaces somewhere in the Amiga or BeOS or any other OS.
What does that have to do with my criticism of the two most popular operating system that they failed to innovate or adapt in areas that showed obvious need?
When I'm using my macbook's screen, I usually expand a browser window to fill the whole screen -- it's a 13" screen so not using the whole thing makes things feel small. But most of the time my computer is plugged into an larger external monitor (20-something inches, maybe 27?), and there I don't expand any windows to fill the whole screen. I like having separate not-full-screen windows which partially (or mostly) overlap.
Somewhat relatedly, we use Windows at work, and it drives me crazy when I hop on a computer after someone's been using it and they have every single thing maximized, even Windows Explorer, on 27" monitors. A maximized browser, I get... I don't do it myself but I understand how it can be useful, but maximizing Windows Explorer is just insane to me, and yet a lot of my coworkers do it.
I never have any window in the fullscreen/maximized mode. Some are pretty large, such as IDE, and they sometimes touch one or more edges of the screen/dock/panel, but never occupy the entire space. That was true even on my 14in MacBook with 125% DPI.
That said, I am a huge fan of manual window management.
I hever have any window in fullscreen, but I always have all windows maximized (obviously except the ones that can't be maximized, because of course settings couldn't possibly be made maximizable, what, that's crazy talk).
It depends very much on the size of the screen. On a small 13” laptop screen? Sure, you’re going to be running apps full-screen a lot of the time. On a big desktop monitor? No, except for games and playing movies, I’ll almost never expand an app to fill the entire screen.
Last time I had to work on just my laptop screen (16”), I actually found Stage Manager pretty useful. On a larger screen, or for more casual use, I do not.
I never understood running apps in full screen. Unless it's an IDE, Video Editor, or some other app with tools filling all nooks and crannies, I want windows that fit the content. I don't want to launch a text or document editor in full screen, read a PDF in full screen. Typically I don't even want to watch a video full screen. I also generally don't want tiling. I want to arrange windows with parts peeking out behind other windows to reference while I'm working on something else. I want some sense of "space" related to where I left a window.
“Maximising” windows full screen, apart from the genuinely-full-screen-takeover mode you can put windows in (where they take a virtual desktop slot too) has never been an idiomatic part of the Macintosh UI, since the beginning. The “zoom” button traditionally meant “toggle between a user defined window size, and a size that is just big enough to avoid scroll bars appearing, where possible”. It goes back to the spatial desktop metaphor.
Personally I try and work with that as much as possible, though it’s not always ideal.
It’s very rare that I maximize an application. I’m always stacking. However, I don’t think it’s an optimizing assumption: I am frequently fighting with the window manager as I rearrange my windows and it automatically maximizes them because I got too close to an edge of the screen
In general my browser is dead center or slightly to the right so I can access my other windows (terminal, throw away text editor, etc) easily where command tab is insufficient (when I have multiple terminal windows, eg)
> I am frequently fighting with the window manager as I rearrange my windows and it automatically maximizes them because I got too close to an edge of the screen
Strange, I constantly get annoyed by how slow and unresponsive the Mac's tiling is when dragging windows to the edge. At the top it has at least half a second delay for no reason. But at least the newest version now has caught up with Windows 7.
This has always been quintessential Mac for me. First thing I noticed people do on macs much more than PCs was not expanding the windows. Windows are always just floating around. There's no equivalent to the maximize button, it's funny but I don't even know anymore what that "maximize" button on macs does but I remember it's not what I would expect.
I almost never expand an application to be full-screen, even on my laptop. This despite the fact that I'll resize an application's window to fill the whole screen except for the dock. I think that's why I don't maximize it: I want the dock to remain accessible.
A lot of stupid things about Mac window management stems from the mistake of forcing all applications to share a single menu that's glued to the top of the screen. This essentially turns your entire desktop into ONE application's window, within which its actual windows float around.
Historically this led to the Mac's penchant for apps that spawned an irritating flotilla of windows that you had to herd around your screen. Not only did this deny users a way to minimize the whole app at once, but it also sucked because you could see everything on your desktop (or other apps' UIs) THROUGH the UI of the application you were trying to use. A dysfunctional mess.
Around 15 years ago, I estimate, the huge advantage of a single application window finally permeated the Apple mindset and things have gotten much better in that regard. But Apple should have abandoned the single menu in the transition to OS X, and put menus where they belong: on applications' main frames. That would make the desktop a truly unlimited workspace and eliminate the daily irritation of the menu changes its contents behind the user's back because he clicked on another application's window (perhaps to move it).
Multiple times a day I minimize an application and then attempt to do something in the application that's now filling the screen... only to find that the menu still belongs to the application that isn't even shown. It's just so dumb.
But then... this is the GUI that, for decades, would only let you resize windows from ONE corner and NO edges. Apple grudgingly, half-assedly, and unreliably addressed that in the 2000s, only now to make it even less reliable in the shambolic Tahoe UI.
The window management style of Mac OS is complete chaos imo
I have been using it for years and I just gave up entirely on managing anything and if I zoom out to see all my windows it looks like the freaking Milky Way from windows I forgot
In the office I have dual 24" monitors. At home I have a single 38" ultrawide. In desktop mode I almost never have one app taking up my full screen. In portable mode yeah, all full screen. The only exception is IDEs which get their own spaces and are basically self-contained tiling window managers anyway.
I use several non-fullscreen windows over desktop. Stage manager makes switching between them very convenient. But I do use full screen windows, they live in their separate spaces. I see no reason whatsoever to maximise any window without it going full screen mode
I rarely run my apps fullscreen. It's because I have multiple 4k monitors connected to the machine. Using an app even chrome or an IDE fullscreen would be too big.
But do use apps fullscreen when Im traveling. The laptop screen is too small to use chrome or vscode any other way.
Yes (but not for a browser). My terminal windows are 80x24, pretty much always. I do this today on Linux, I've done it through multiple versions of Windows, and I did it in my childhood on a 9" B&W "luggable" Mac screen.
for the longest time I never did this, but then I got a gigantic 4K screen, and I realized that it was almost giving me vertigo having apps like my IDE fullscreened, because I literally have to move my head in order to look everywhere.
so in response I changed my windowing strategy to having a set of windows floating around at exactly the size I want them, and then the advantage of the enormous screen is just how many windows I can have open at once
that being said, I use KDE not MacOS, and 90% of Mac users I'd guess are on laptops, so using this strategy sounds completely insane to me. On laptops I still default to fullscreening or "half-screening" most apps.
People do this, yeah. Even on Windows I've been over someone's shoulder walking them through something and it drives me nuts they work in a tiny window in a random part of the screen.
I’ve been using Macs for development for 20 years, and even on a small laptop screen I don’t expand windows to fill the screen. So I guess, yes, there are a few weirdos out there at least?
I exclusive use complete fullscreen mode for apps i'm actively using and on large screens connect the workspaces, on small screen swipe back and forth. So I you never actually use that.
I use a MacBook and a Mac mini personally, and I do not generally maximize any application that isn't implicitly a full-screen experience (e.g. a video player or a computer game).
Some users switch apps by dragging windows around the screen, like a messy stack. A friend of mine didn't even know about Cmd+Tab to cycle through open apps. Users are weird.
I use a mix of Cmd-Tab and a hot key to see all non-minimized apps (Mission Control?) to pick from. I’ve realized that that I’m faster at seeing the color of the window I’m looking for than remembering the app name.
I think it’s more of a carryover from the original Mac’s in the 80s.
Trying to maximize a window, even 23 years ago when I first moved to OS X, was a completely manual process. It was designed around windows, not walls. And screens were much smaller and lower res back then.
I actually feel the opposite? The current green button action not only makes the window fill the entire screen, it also hides the menu bar AND creates a new virtual desktop and hides all of my other apps. And it seems to me that's what the majority of people want.
Meanwhile, I want to use my graphical, mutli-window preemptive multitasking operating system to, you know, use multiple applications at the same time.
One issue with windows maximised with the green button is if you have more than 1 window of the same app: you might alt-tab to the app, but cmd-` is not switching to the other window of the same (while id does if not maximised.
I honestly can't say I've ever seen a non-techie expand a window to full screen using the green button on macOS. I'm not sure why, because in theory, I agree with you.
In my experience supporting Mac users, it's about 50/50. I think a lot of them have been conditioned to not maximize windows because it hides everything else, and they don't understand how to get back to their other windows.
I don't maximize windows because it means a 1 second delay, as for some reason Mac OS still does the hardcoded workspace switching animation even for that. Which means entering/leaving fullscreen in a video player is also delayed every time. I don't get it, not even the accessibility settings can disable this waste of time.
I hate maximized windows. I like it when my windows are not maximized but I usually do have significant overlap between windows. Then I switch between windows based on the sliver of window that’s visible even when other windows are in focus. It’s the spatial way of thinking; just like how Finder purists think each folder on your disk should remember its own window size and location so you use your spatial memory to locate Finder windows. I find that this is significantly faster for my brain to process compared to the Windows style where almost all windows are maximized and people use Alt-Tab to switch between windows.
I would in fact say that the culture of not maximizing windows was a small reason why I switched to Mac OS X in the early 2000s.
MacOS assumes you won’t full screen every app because all of them ship with large enough, high enough resolution monitors that full screening a single app is a waste of valuable space. Unlike on cheap laptops with 1080p screens.
I suppose you could splurge for a Mac desktop and then get the cheapest, smallest screen possible, but I hope it’s rare.
> full screening a single app is a waste of valuable space
Any space not used for the task I'm focused on is wasted. For me the actual problem is that switching apps/windows is too slow because of UI animations.
I run 27" 4k and a 34" ultra wide monitors on my desktops, and my main laptop is a P16S with a 16" 3840x2400 OLED typically docked to one of those screens when not on the go, and I almost never use windows that are not snapped to fullscreen or at the very least to halves or quarters. "Large enough" scarcely applies to a MacBook Air or Neo with a 13" display, and I bet a TON of those get docked to cheap 21, 24, and 27" 1080p screens.
I'd like to be able to snap things to the middle third, especially on the ultrawides.
Only little calculator widgets, property panels, and modal dialogs that get immediately closed after use don't get maximized or at least docked to fill some region. I hate the cluttered, layered feeling of having a bunch of non-full-screen windows overlapping, I want to have a dozen apps open and making optimal use of the available display area.
I’m not trying to defend because I don’t like it either. But the Mac workflow has always been much more alt-tab focused than windows. With alt-tab and alt-shift-tab (reverse order) I feel like I can fly through my apps at the speed of thought.
Lots of native applications also pop up multiple windows with the expectation that they kind of just float around. But at least in Mac you can scroll on an app that isn’t in focus…
Sure, but it's not as if the DoD was planning on using Anthropic to _collect_ the data either? I assume that the hypothetical DoD use case Anthropic shied away from dealt with the processing of surveillance data, just like what Palantir does.
> The military’s Maven Smart System, which is built by data mining company Palantir, is generating insights from an astonishing amount of classified data from satellites, surveillance and other intelligence, helping provide real-time targeting and target prioritization to military operations in Iran, according to three people familiar with the system...
> As planning for a potential strike in Iran was underway, Maven, powered by Claude, suggested hundreds of targets, issued precise location coordinates, and prioritized those targets according to importance, said two of the people.
I've found current-generation Macs so capable that I've switched to using a Macbook Air. Would strongly recommend - it's still a powerful machine and it's significantly lighter and cheaper.
I have a M3 Max and considering that when I upgrade in 5 years or so , I will go base Mac Studio and base MBA. If I need to compile something or run a local LLM , I would just run that on the Studio and SSH from the Air. Wouldn't be running these heavy workflows while on the go anyways
Crazier question: what’s wrong with a well-intentioned surveillance state? Preventing crime is a noble goal, and sometimes I just don’t think some vague notion of privacy is more important than that.
I sometimes feel that the tech community would find the above opinion far more outlandish than the general population would.
tl;dw: A well-intentioned surveillance state may, in fact, love the beings they are surveilling. They may fall in love so deeply, that they want to become like us. I know it's a revolutionary concept.
I'm pretty tempted to discredit this article on the basis of the author's lack of legal expertise, but to be honest I don't really have the expertise to properly comment here either.
But I don't think the author is correctly interpreting the principles of legal ethics, and their repeated questioning of attorney-client privilege, which I've considered to be one of the foundations of the American legal system, is hard to take seriously.
Also, I don't think their depiction of John Adams's representation of the British soldiers is accurate. From what I can tell, Adams sought only to give his clients as strong a legal defense as possible. In the trial, he called the American protestors a "mob", gave a racist depiction of one of the victims to justify the soldiers' panic, and ultimately saw all but two soldiers acquitted. Adams viewed this as a patriotic act, yes, but only insofar as he believed all accused of crimes in America deserved fair legal representation. He was a lawyer defending his clients, not the judge or jury trying to find the "truth" of the matter.
So, one of the things I have personally seen is where these companies have in-house counsel and then CC that person on emails that could be problematic if they were ever required to be produced in discovery. Then if something does happen, it is easy to claim privilege on these emails and hide what are essentially non-legal related emails from lawsuits. There is flimsy cover of keeping counsel informed so they can provide legal guidance if needed, but that essentially undermines the legal process during a lawsuit as the very emails verifying a plaintiff's claim may be in these privileged emails, or maybe not, but without seeing them only the company and their legal teams knows.
Yes, this is unethical and also can lead to things like we see in this case where the judge will pierce privilege because it was being abused. But......unless you can prove that is what is going on in the emails, judges are very reticent to pierce privilege.
>But I don't think the author is correctly interpreting the principles of legal ethics, and their repeated questioning of attorney-client privilege, which I've considered to be one of the foundations of the American legal system, is hard to take seriously.
Any particular reason why you think the author is incorrectly interpreting the principles of legal ethics, including attorney-client privilege?
>Adams viewed this as a patriotic act, yes, but only insofar as he believed all accused of crimes in America deserved fair legal representation. He was a lawyer defending his clients, not the judge or jury trying to find the "truth" of the matter.
I think you misunderstood the point, which was that if Adams had knowledge that the british soldier did have such an intent, he'd be violating his ethical obligations by withholding that information on the principal of attorney-client privilege.
I've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads. The incentive to create services (especially in social media) that strive to addict their users feels toxic to society. Often, it feels uncertain whether these services are providing actual value, and I suspect that whether a user would pay for a service in lieu of watching ads is incidentally a good barometer for whether real value is present.
Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's fun to think about sometimes.
The world would definitely be better without ads. All ads are poisonous. All of them first convince you that you and your life as it is is not good enough, and that in order to be happy again you need to spend money to buy a $product.
As much as I hate ads, I don’t know that it’s so simple.
There are products that do solve legitimate problems people have. Maybe there is less of that now, but in this past this was very true, and advertising helped make people aware that solutions to their problems have been developed. The first washing machine, for example.
The problem comes when the advertisement manufacturers problems that didn’t previously exist.
This is what a fucking store is for. They have catalogs. You could ask for one. If they think people will want something they will try to sell it and will tell you about it if you go looking.
I see this pro-ads argument all the time and it’s so obviously-stupid that I’m truly baffled. Is this the kind of lie ad folks tell themselves so they can sleep at night?
There are also ads for services. I used to be a photographer, and without my little Facebook/Instagram ads people would have had to largely rely on word of mouth, meaning the more established photographers would absolutely dominate my little rural market even when their photography was worse.
Also, I'm not sure we want a world where only the largest corporations get to sell things. That's what would happen if people could only find things through stores and catalogs, especially pre-internet.
If I go looking for a directory of [service, in my area] that’s hardly an ad! If those include, say, reviews and pricing info, great! Yes, please!
I definitely don’t want that directory to be skewed with ads in favor of those with the most money, or who have decided to burn the most of their limited resources on ads instead of improving their services, lowering their prices, or hell, just taking more profit. The ads were the biggest problem with the good ol’ yellow pages.
Your definition of ad is too narrow then, because those are all different types of ads. A store advertising its goods or even having billboard ads saying the store is at such and such street is, well, an ad.
Directories aren’t ads. The crucial feature would be that nobody would have to pay to get listed, or only a small nominal fee that anyone can afford. Like in a phonebook.
Paying for placement is what makes an ad. And that’s what would have to be prohibited.
> The crucial feature would be that nobody would have to pay to get listed, or only a small nominal fee that anyone can afford
You see the contradiction.
You’re essentially saying no bad ads, only good ads, without defunding the difference. (Anyone can afford a Google or Meta ad in the way they could a White Pages listing.)
I'd interpret this as a proposal for two new laws:
1. No non-invited display of paid messaging, period. If you go to a directory and ask for a list of people who paid to be part of that directory, it can show it. If you play a game, watch a movie, take the bus, or search a non-paid directory of sites they simply cannot show you things they were paid to show you. I think I'd call this making attention-theft a crime.
2. No payment for priority placement in paid directories. A paid directory has to charge the same (small, nominal) fee to everyone involved.
> No non-invited display of paid messaging, period. If you go to a directory and ask for a list of people who paid to be part of that directory, it can show it
How would you distinguish someone asking for the directory versus asking for something else with said directory (which are totally not ads, pinky promise) displayed alongside?
> I'd call this making attention-theft a crime
Someone standing up to make a political speech in a public square is now a criminal?
> A paid directory has to charge the same (small, nominal) fee to everyone involved
This is just ads with a uniform, "small, nominal" fee. Uniformity is objectively measurable. Smallness and nominalness is not. Presumably you mean these directories have to be published at cost?
> How would you distinguish someone asking for the directory versus asking for something else with said directory (which are totally not ads, pinky promise) displayed alongside?
You making sending the directory with something else unconditionally illegal, you either get the directory or the something else, not both at once. This is also necessary for the second part where you require everything in the directory paid the same amount.
> Someone standing up to make a political speech in a public square is now a criminal?
Only if they were paid to do so.
> This is just ads with a uniform, "small, nominal" fee. Uniformity is objectively measurable. Smallness and nominalness is not. Presumably you mean these directories have to be published at cost?
Personally I think uniform is more important than either small or nominal. It means that the person creating the directory can't be bribed to direct your attention to certain parts of the directory - i.e. steal it. Rather it's your choice to get the directory in the first place and pay attention to it, and everything inside it is at an equal playing level. I don't really care if it's at cost or if making directories is a profit making venture.
I'm not entirely sure what the original proposers intent was with the "small and nominal" part though. They might have wanted something more like "at cost".
Fixed fee highly favors big players. Not even sure why you want fixed fee. Either remove fee at all or charge higher for bigger players or charge based on sale rather than listing.
By the same I mean equal non-discriminatory pricing - not necessarily "fixed" rather than "by sale" or "by view" or what have you but that if it's "by view" then it's "x cents per view" with the same x everyone and if it's "3% of referred sale revenue" it's that for everyone.
The purpose being that because every item in any paid directory has paid the directory the same, the directory has no (monetary, at least) incentive to direct your attention towards sub-optimal listings. As an attempt at forcing the directory to sell itself as a useful directory of services, rather than as an object which sells its users attention to the highest bidder.
Rather than coverage being spend based, it’s a low, static price to be listed in the directory, with near zero extra differentiation other than what you choose to put in your little square/rectangle.
I see no contradiction. Google or Meta ads are not a catalog. They are imposed on people who didn’t decide to browse a catalog, and also you can’t browse all Google/Meta ads as a catalog. A catalog listing products or businesses doesn’t constitute ads, just as a phonebook doesn’t.
Even in the phone books of old, you had ads as part of the directories... Businesses paid for those listings... Even today's equivalent, yelp, etc. are trying to sell add-on services to the businesses and can harm your businss if you don't pay up for the features.
Right, and in this new ad-free world, those things works not be allowed, and all businesses would be on a level playing field, with none privileged over the others simply because they have a larger advertising budget.
I own ten thousand businesses, all of whom employ me as a contractor. All businesses being on a level playing field puts me at quite an advantage!
If people are using their advertising budget unethically, you should expect them to find new unethical ways to use their advertising budget once you've eliminated the existing ones. Rather than playing whack-a-mole, take a step back, and see if you can fundamentally change the rules of the game. Why is advertising bad? What do you want to happen? Fixing the "how" too firmly, too soon, is an effective way to produce bad policy, no matter how good your intentions.
You can make it more level, but in any system constrained by the physical world, you can never make it completely level.
Ever notice that there used to be a lot of businesses with names like "A+ Heating and Cooling" or "AAA Chimney Sweeps"? That was because being at the top of the phone book's alphabetical listing was more likely to get you business since a lot of people would open to a section, start at the top and start calling.
There's only so much shelf space to go around, eventually decisions will be made about who can put their products on a given shelf.
Any large business with the ability to produce multiple different products will inherently have the advantage of getting more shelf space assuming you want to display all products.
But even assuming you just wanted your shelf space to be a bunch of "per company" catalogs, businesses with more money to spend on glossier catalogs, or brighter inks, or more variations so thicker catalogs will have an advantage.
Then there's names and numbers. Hooked on Phonics gets a leg up on every other competing reading program because they got the phone number that is 1-800-ABC-DEFG, no one else can have that number. The lawyer who gets 1-800-555-5555 (or other similarly easy to remember number) has a leg up on anyone with a random number out of the phone company's inventory.
But I'm curious, what would this perfectly level field you envision look like? How would these sorts of problems be solved?
Until you try to grapple with real world problems like limited shelf space, limited directory space, how the ads (ahem sorry, directory entries) should be sorted, how to deal with setting boundaries around local directories, etc.
You convince the store owner in person, this was kinda the case throughout all of humanity until very recently.
It's not society's problem to ensure corporations are able to take prime real estate by abusing their customers.
They can meet with every shop owner and argue why their products should be sold, although if you ask me I bet the shop owner knows exactly what their customers want so once again where is the benefit for society here? That some greedy people aren't able to make a buck abusing human psychology?
It's absolutely wild to me that people can have experienced any amount of the Internet and not think "word of mouth" will absolutely wholly suffice to fill the role of informing people about products. Of course many, many people would create and maintain all kinds of lists and review all kinds of products without being paid to. We know this would happen because it has, and it does, even with the noise of advertising around. The early Web was mostly this, outside the academic stuff and, I guess, porn & media piracy. Without ads clogging everything up, it might even be possible to find these folks' websites!
The early web very quickly gave rise to curated directories of information and stopped working on word of mouth. Yahoo was a directory before it was a "search engine". AOL was a curated walled garden. Web rings were a thing, great for playful discovery, terrible for finding a specific thing. Heck for that matter, web ring banners are arguably just interactive "banners ads".
Word of mouth also requires a high degree of trust in the person spreading the word. Otherwise you get things like youtube "review" channels that are just paid reviews. Or the reddit bot farms where suddenly everyone in a given part of the web is suddenly dropping references to their new Bachelor Chow™ recipes. You can't even trust the news. We all know about submarine ads, but even without that, you can't ever be sure if you're hearing about some new thing on the news because it's really the best/popular, or because they just happen to know a lot of the reporters.
The directories? Ads were part of those pretty early given that they were modeled on real world directories like the Yellow Pages in the first place. Here's a webarchive of yahoo from 1996[1]. Note the big broken banner at the top with the link text "Click here for the Net Radio Promotion". AOL was pretty much always full of ads, and don't forget the old AOL "keyword" searches which were ads by another name.
> Aren't those literally word of mouth?
Sure, and they were pretty lousy at helping you find information, which is why people stopped using them in preference to search engines, even though search engines had ads. Heck one of the selling points of Google originally was that their ads would actually be relevant to you and the things you were searching for.
They won't. Notice that Angies list doesn't operate on the "customer pays for the list" model. That's because any directory service that depends on the searcher paying suffers from the problem that once you've found what you're looking for, you have no reason to keep paying for the directory. If I need a lawn guy, I only need to find one, and then I have their number. Why am I going to keep paying the "Lawn Guy Directory" $5 a month after I found someone?
And if you're going to charge on a per-query basis, I note that Kagi isn't nearly as well funded or well known as Google, and that's with them offering an "unlimited" tier. And a per-query model disincentivizes me from using the service in the first place. The more digging I do, the more it costs me, so the more likely I am to take the first result I get back.
Even the most classic "direct to the people who are most interested" advertising model where the consumer pays money for the ads (magazine ads) still is almost entirely subsidized by the advertisers, not the consumer.
If I need a photographer, I'm going to go and search for one. If no one is allowed to advertise to me, then both the small and large players in the space are on an even playing field. Your photography website or Facebook page will be just as searchable or indexable as before, as will business directory sites that can help people find services they need, along with reviews and testimonials.
Banning advertising could actually make it easier for new entrants.
Back then you'd have physical bulletin boards where you could either freely pin your handwritten note/"ad" onto or you'd have someone do it for you. Still technically an ad though.
It's the big players who have the most money for ads, buy up all billboards, internet and TV ads, etc. A small shop can't afford to do that. If ads were completely banned (in all forms including the bulletin boards) then everyone would have to rely on the word of mouth not just small businesses.
I also think that fields like photography are just highly competitive regardless of ads so it's then mostly a networking game.
Maybe every advanced social system has a propensity towards totalitarianism. Similar criticisms can easily be foisted on feudalism, mercantilism, socialism, anarchism, etc. I think in Western Liberal Capitalism there's still space for a middle class. More, it appears the peculiar features of this system have enabled it to unlock tremendous social vigor and provide for the People historic material wealth. Perhaps what's missing in this system isn't material...
I’m at a loss as to what these abstract to the heavens responses even mean to reply to. What I commented on was the propaganda tactics of capitalism. The topic in itself wasn’t even about the merits of it (but see the last sentence). What you get in response though are these chin-stroking platitudes about but maybe all social systems have their faults, and ah but look at how full and bountiful my fridge is because of this social system.
> I see this pro-ads argument all the time and it’s so obviously-stupid that I’m truly baffled.
If you're truly baffled by a view that many people share, you're probably missing something.
How do you solve discoverability, especially of a new type of product or category? I invented this new gadget call "luminexel". People don't know what it is yet, because it's new. How do people find it in a catalog?
Or the thing I sell is fairly technical and needs more space for descriptions / photos to communicate what it is. Do I get more space in the catalog?
> How do you solve discoverability, especially of a new type of product or category? I invented this new gadget call "luminexel". People don't know what it is yet, because it's new. How do people find it in a catalog?
You make a post on Hacker News titled “Show HN: I made this cool thing called Luminexel, check it out!” Some people will think it’s really cool and tell their friends about it. Eventually it will end up on some “curated list of awesome things” website.
So if I put up posters in my neighborhood for my PC fixing service, it's not considered ads, but if I pay someone else to put the same posters up, they're suddenly ads?
Ideally discoverability would be wholly solved by organic word-of-mouth recommendations. First from yourself as the only person who knows this product category exist then from the people who accepted your recommendation, had it solve their problem and finally saw fit to recommend it themselves.
I’ve yet to see a single product that isn’t related to domains existing products solve problems for. That is, I’m aware of any time in history a wholly new category emerged suddenly.
So your question seems like pure fantasy to me — like asking how we’ll slay dragons without ads. I don’t know, but I don’t think that’s a thing which actually needs doing, either.
New products within an existing category show up in catalogs, review articles, etc just fine without ads. As does your highly technical product, for which people in the relevant industry already know the information and/or are already used to narrowing their search to a few products and then requesting additional information.
Your pro-ad arguments seem to be solving problems that don’t actually exist.
I don’t think all ads are the same, and I feel like you are choosing to pretend the ads you don’t mind aren’t ads at all.
You say “that is what a store is for”… well, how would you even know a store exists to go check it out? In the physical world, you would walk by and see the store and be curious to check it out… well, what is a store front other than an ad for the store? Putting your name, product, and reasons you will want their product on the store front IS AN AD. You wouldn’t walk into a store front that was completely blank, with no information about what they are selling.
And even that simple advertising is impossible online. If I create a new online store, how will people ever know it exists? There is simply no answer that doesn’t in some way act as an ad. I would love to hear how you would let people know your store exists in a way that isn’t just an ad in another form.
The issue is that anti-ad zealots won’t acknowledge that advertising is a spectrum. You can go full blown horrendous dystopia or enter into a commerce-free hermit kingdom where private property is banned and resources aren’t traded efficiently, with the end result being that everyone is poor because nobody trades anything with anyone.
A sign for your store that identifies you is technically an ad. A brand logo printed on your product is technically an ad. A positive review is basically an ad. What lengths are we going to go to ban ads?
Be honest: you’ve never bought a single useful thing that you found out about via an ad and ended up glad you saw an ad for?
That is important because the wealth of nations is often predicated on the populace being able to trade their labor.
For example, in recent years North Korea has developed their own Amazon-like delivery website for food and goods and has expanded intranet smartphone service because, obviously, fast communication and ease of transmitting a desire to buy or sell is helpful for growing an economy and keeping the nation from starving. Otherwise, why would they adopt an imperial capitalist concept like that?
Just because something lies on a spectrum where some actors are totally doing the right thing (and others, well...), doesn't mean we shouldn't take a conservative approach to regulating that thing. No-one can legally exceed 70mph in their fancy new ADAS car with tiny stopping distance, just in case someone tries to do so in their beat-up 1950's Dodge.
It's important to strike a healthy balance, even if it inconveniences some honest people (although we're talking about people who work in advertising...). I don't think you can claim we have a healthy balance currently.
ETA: catalogs are not ads in this context; people seek out catalogs when they want to find something, which already makes a huge difference
Ads are a necessary evil for effective market discovery. They should be heavily regulated but you can't effectively operate a market economy without one.
I understand what you mean, but I would modify this statement a bit:
There are no successful economies without information exchange. Discovery can happen without advertising -- if you consider that the main feature of ads is that it's unwanted information distribution.
There is not any real-world economy that has implemented that information exchange in the absence of activities that would be accurately described as advertising.
Even thousands of years ago in illiterate societies people would advertise their goods/services via verbal campaigns, drawn pictures, songs, etc.
All that can be regulated though. In many jurisdictions, it's forbidden for lawyers or pharmaceutical companies to advertise their products with it being regulated what counts as an advertisement and putting oneself into the phone book or putting a big sign with “Lawyer” on one's practice is allowed but putting oneself into a magazine or on television is not.
There are no successful economies without blue paint, either. As far as I'm aware, there hasn't been enough testing to say much about the importance of ads.
And even if they're necessary at some level, what if the US had 90% less ads, etc.
> There are no successful economies without blue paint
I don't think that is true. The oldest known mass printed advertising is about 2000 years older than the oldest known blue pigment.
> As far as I'm aware, there hasn't been enough testing to say much about the importance of ads.
I think if you look at some early advertising (e.g. BCE), you'll see that most have a painfully obvious functional form of just simply announcing the existence of a product/service for the world to observe.
I mean even vaguely vaguely modern-style economy. And you know that's not the point. The point is there's a lot of things that are omnipresent but also not important to the economy.
> I think if you look at some early advertising (e.g. BCE), you'll see that most have a painfully obvious functional form of just simply announcing the existence of a product/service for the world to observe.
That doesn't tell us how important it is to have advertising.
And it doesn't tell us how important it is to have advertising anywhere near current levels.
Saying you want some sort of discovery mechanism is different than saying the current ad tech malware landscape is a "necessary evil." It certainly is not.
You're right, but I think this just highlights the issue with market economies.
There is this capitalist lie that money is a stand-in for "value provided to society". So, when you provide value, society gives you money, and you can use this money to ask society for value back.
Which sounds great. And truly, I do believe that people should have to contribute to society if they expect society to support them, but the problem with this lie is that, despite how capitalists make it sound, the market was not designed with this ideal in mind, instead we have imposed it onto the market after-the-fact in order to justify why the market is good and worth keeping around.
But the real truth is that money does not reward the person who contributes the most value, it simply rewards the person who makes the most money. Money is not "value", money is power. And the system rewards profit no matter how it's acquired.
This means that you can provide a good service that people want, but you still need to advertise and compete in order to be rewarded for your contribution.
It also means that you can do something valuable, like cleaning up all the trash off of a beach, but that doesn't mean that the market will reward you for your contribution.
And it also means that if you have a thing and you want to make profit selling it, you can run a manipulative ad campaign that convinces people that they truly need it, and the market will reward you.
I don't think very many people in this thread actually mean markets when they say that. Sounds like they might mean corporate controlled markets? Otherwise the comments are gibberish. Markets are just a group of people exchanging time and resources. Wanting that to go away is... Bizarre and nonsensical.
That would require regulation, as a catalog maker isn’t going to turn down what is effectively free money. This also doesn’t translate well to a physical store with more constraints on space.
I recently got a catalog where everything was on pretty even footing. There was the occasional photo with someone wearing stuff, but it was a smattering of random brands, big and small. Nothing in it looked paid for. It was a catalog of stuff made in the US. The meat of the catalog was text that listed 1 item in a category per brand, when the brand may have had hundreds. A brand with literally one product was indistinguishable from a major brand. I actually found this quite frustrating as a potential buyer. If I was interested in a category I had to manually go to every single website to see what they actually had and if it was something I was interested in. There was no way to cut through the noise, other than my own past experience with companies that had some brand recognition (from advertising elsewhere).
How do you sort the directory? Alphabetical can be gamed with names like A1 Locksmith. Chronological favors incumbents or spammers depending on direction.
Impossible to solve I’m sure. Probably lower priority than stopping them from putting lead in bread and selling cocaine snake-oil elixirs, or forcing them to list basic nutritional information on food packaging. Alas, we lack the tools to make businesses do or not do things.
Grocery stores are a low margin business. If you make selling shelf space illegal, they lose that revenue and will have to raise food prices to stay in business. This isn’t a good outcome. I also question if the shelves would even changes much. They will probably prioritize their high margin products, which doesn’t sound any better.
Not a counterpoint to the comment re: catalogs .. even less so in this modern age of ordering and shopping online.
I grew up 1,000 km+ from any significant stores and shopping - everything we wanted we got via browsing catalogs, building order lists, and either ordering in via road train or taking a few days off to travel > 2,000 km with car and double axle multi tonne capacity trailer.
The fix is actually fairly simple IMO, though will never be implemented. Make all ads passive, e.g. require people to explicitly ask to see them. For example, when I want to see what new video games are around, I go to review sites and forums. It's opt-in.
Making all ads only legal in bazar-like environments, banning all other forms of "forced" ad viewing, and also banning personalized ads completely, would go a very long way to fixing the issues. Hell, we can start with simply banning personalized ads, that alone would effectively destroy the surveillance economy by making it illegal to use that data for anything other than providing the service the customer purchases.
But you are buying into viewing ads when you use services that show you ads.
Also, ad bazaars sound great until you realize that every locality needs to have their own bazaar. Seeing ads for New York barbers is kind of useless when you're in Los Angeles. Now you have a million ad bazaars and that's the only advertisement allowed. A little bit of corruption and your ads outshine all your competitors in that locality and they go out of business, since signs are an ad too.
Also also non-personalized ads mean that the only things that can be advertised online are digital goods or things that are available globally. Basically, it will work for Amazon and AliExpress but that's about it. And adsls in Russian or Japanese or Korean or German or French or Swedish or Portuguese aren't going to be that useful for you, are they? Ads in English but for a product in another country might be even worse.
Magazines, phone books, friends, stores. You know you could go to a store (or call them on the phone!) and talk to a person. "Hello, I am trying to find a thing to help me with X."
Turns out that products that work well tend to get remembered, and ones that don't get forgotten.
Call what store? How do I know a store even exists to call it? How do I find out the store’s name and phone number? How do I find out where the store is located?
You say products that work tend to get remembered, and sure, for existing products with a market you might be right… people would continue buying those things even with no advertising.
But how did the FIRST person who bought the product find out about it? Someone has to try it once before you can even know the product works. How would a new product enter the market?
> Call what store? How do I know a store even exists to call it? How do I find out the store’s name and phone number? How do I find out where the store is located?
Maps exist. Search engines exist. Have you been stuck in a cave the last 50 years?
Go to any bookstore and open practically any paid magazine. Count how many pages are ads. It's far from a small percentage. Some I've looked at recently were practically 1/3 to 1/2 ads. This isn't far from how things were decades ago.
Yellow pages (phone books) were essentially entirely advertising. They didn't just list businesses out of the goodness of their heart, they took listing fees. This is a form of advertising!
Depends on the niche, really. I despise ads, but I can also admit to having learned about products from them that I have subsequently purchased and been pleased with.
Sometimes the ad lets me know about an entire type of product that I didn't know existed but found very useful, and I probably didn't even by the actual brand that was advertised.
If you consider the general concept of "letting people know what products are available for purchase", I think it's hard to disagree that it's a reasonable thing to do. That doesn't excuse the manner in which it is done today, of course, but that core functionality is not fundamentally evil.
Advertising isn't the general concept of letting people know what products are available for purchase. It's more specifically doing this for money and showing it to people who don't want to see it. One might quibble about exactly what the word "advertising" encompasses, but that description covers the bad stuff pretty well, whatever name you want to give it.
I'd boil it down to: if you added a "don't show this" option, would anyone use it?
A catalog that comes in the mail because you requested it is not advertising, since you requested it. Products mentioned on the front page of this site aren't advertising, because they're organic, and it's part of what I'm here for. Classified ads, despite the name, don't really qualify since they're in a separate section that nobody reads unless they're specifically seeking out those ads.
A useful product doesn't have "don't show this" buttons because it would be completely pointless. I seek it out because I want it. I don't get upset at the company that made my office chair foisting it on me, because they didn't. I ordered the chair and got what I wanted.
But ad companies don't resist "skip" buttons because they think they're pointless because everyone loves their products. They resist "skip" buttons because they know people don't want to see their shit. Their entire business model is based around forcing people to see things they don't want to see, but might accept as part of a package deal for seeing the stuff they do want to see.
That is the stuff that should be completely destroyed.
> and showing it to people who don't want to see it.
So, do superbowl ads not count as ads because a non-negligible portion of the viewership wants to see them? Or are you saying that there needs to be a non-negligible fraction of the viewers who don’t want to see it for it to be an ad?
In the end it doesn't really matter. That's under 0.1% of TV viewing and it's a unique situation. Yes edge cases exist, edge cases always exist, but that's a very tiny one.
If a definition can be changed in a way that makes it both simpler and removes an edge case, I think that is often (but not always) a sign that the change may be a good one.
(Though, that doesn’t imply that the best available definition won’t have any edge cases like this.)
I think it works better to define whether or not something is advertising based on, rather than whether the viewer wants to see it, instead by whether those putting the media where it is intend for viewing it to be (as far as they can make it) a requirement for something else.
Though, I’m not sure that even that should be considered a requirement.
It seems to me like the things businesses paid money to get put on the million dollar website, should count as “ads”. I don’t see why we should define “ads” to refer exclusively to objectionable ads.
Definitions aren't that important. What's important is figuring out what contributes to society and what ends up just looting our attention.
A good (but not perfect) guideline is that voluntary transactions are beneficial to both parties because otherwise they wouldn't participate, and transactions where one party doesn't actively agree to it are often bad because the other party has no incentive to make it otherwise.
That's why I focused on whether the viewer actually wants it. If I seek it out, then it's useful or at least entertaining. If I don't, then it's probably a net negative for me.
I agree that that the criteria you gave is probably more relevant for the issue at hand, sure.
And, while definitions may not be super important (as you say), and while it is often fine to redefine a word within some context, I do think the definition I gave is probably closer to how people usually use the word “advertisement”.
My inclination is to stick on an adjective though, and refer to, say, “unwanted ads”, rather than say that the ads in a classified section “aren’t ads”.
There's a spectrum. Movie trailers are closer to the "not ads" portion of the spectrum, although when shown in theaters they are much more ad-like than when made available online.
There are probably a decent number of football fans who would use a "skip ads" button if they had one for the Super Bowl, so they're still some way toward the "ads" end of the spectrum. But they're certainly less objectionable than most TV ads.
Even without being paid, unless someone is advertising the product somewhere the reviewer won't know it exists to review. And if the reviewer is being sent free product or solicited directly by the producer, that's still advertising. It may be more trustworthy if the reviewer is strict about not letting the producer have editorial control, but you better believe that the company is sending out free products to reviewers because that gets the product in front of eye-balls just like any other ad. The cost of the free review product is the price of the ad.
Sure, but that’s still not free. The company is spending time, money and resources on soliciting the reviews, sending units out, receiving units back and then scrapping or selling those units as refurbs/open box. They’re not spending that money unless they think it’s going to drive sales / awareness. It’s still advertising.
I haven't really, most of the products I've bought after advertising were low quality.
I do have some very high quality products that were recommended to me through friends. Like one local lady that makes really quality outfits. She doesn't advertise at all because she's already overwhelmed with orders as she's so good.
How does the first person find the product to recommend it, though? There has to be SOMEONE who tries the product without being recommended by a previous customer.
No, there are very few markets in which all of the buyers have perfect information.
It is extremely common in the science/technology sector that buyers aren't looking for a solution to a problem they have because they are under the impression that a solution doesn't exist.
If the implication is that the ad industry helps to address the problem of buyers having imperfect information, that couldn't be more wrong.
The entire point of the ad industry is to muddy the waters and psychologically manipulate consumers. It's not even remotely interested in informing, it's interested in propagandizing.
Obviously a gigantic industry has more than a singular impact on society. I only mentioned the one impact above because that was specifically the topic of discussion.
There are also many reasons that the ad industry needs to be tightly regulated, of which your point is one.
> No, there are very few markets in which all of the buyers have perfect information.
This is solved by 5 minute of searches on the web in 99% of cases really. I never in my life bought something because I've seen an ad about it, meanwhile I solved countless of my problems by thinking about the issue and looking for a solution online or talking to people about it
Having a problem and having a solution to that problem are two different things.
I occasionally get the hiccups. When it happens, it’s a problem. There are many home remedies that exist, but nothing has ever actually worked. I was watching Shark Tank one day, which is basically a bunch of ads, and there was a guy selling the Hiccaway. Several years after seeing this, I decided to give it a shot. I’ve used it 2 or 3 times now and it’s instantly stopped my hiccups. I feel a little weird for a while afterward, but at least the hiccups stop.
This was a legitimate problem and I waited for an ad to solve my problem, because nothing else I tried worked, and I didn’t know this thing existed until I saw the ad. I’ve also never heard anyone talk about it outside of Shark Tank, so word of mouth clearly isn’t doing much either (at least in my circles). The topic of hiccups doesn’t come up that often. Everyone gets hiccups, but they aren’t out there actively looking for solutions. It’s just something that happens, and it sucks.
Man if hiccups are a "legitimate problem" then indeed we are fucked... let's pollute everything irl and on the web with ads to solve these "problems"... where do we draw the line ? Because it sounds like we'll have an infinite amount of problems and we certainly don't have an infinite amount of resources
btw you can also try looking for solutions on your own, like going to a doctor, searching online ? type "hiccups solution" online and hiccaway is on the front page.
Humans are wired to have problems. If all your basic problems are solved (shelter, food, etc), you will start inventing problems. This finding and solving of problems has led to all the development in human society, for better or worse.
It has been this finding and solving of problems that led to our standards for what solves a problem increasing as well, for better or worse again.
I think everyone has looked for hiccups solutions at some point in their life, found them not to work, and gave up. That’s why I think this is a decent example. Adults aren’t actively searching for hiccup solutions. They gave up long ago, and most of the time, it isn’t something they think about. But when they happen, they kind of suck. Depending on when they happen, like before a big presentation, they can also be a major problem. People tend to overlook it, because they know there isn’t a real cure.
I’m not arguing for more advertisements or hiccup commercials 24x7. But there is value to some way of creating awareness of new things that are actually useful. Most advertising is trying to manufacture problems or just keep a product you already know about in the front of your mind. This is probably 95% of advertising. My argument is for a way to surface that 5%.
Why would I care then? If people lived until now without it it can't be that big of a problem. Electricity, a car, a fridge, &c. solve legitimate problems. 99% of things being advertised today create the problem they solve and trick you into thinking you really need to solve this problem in your life
> If people lived until now without it it can't be that big of a problem
That’s a very weak argument that can justify anything. Why do you need electricity, a car, a fridge? There have been people living without these for thousands of years. Of course there are bad ads and useless products (probably 99% of them), but not all ads are useless.
I sincerely do not believe this. I suspect that you have a very specific definition of ad that is far narrower than I do, but I do not believe you never once saw a movie trailer and decided to go see the film, or saw a billboard or sign for a restaurant while out on vacation and decided to check it out. Or that you never went to the grocery store to pick up the steak that was on sale this week. Or that every single tech purchase you have ever made in your life was exclusively and solely on the word of mouth recommendation of your close friends, all of whom had previously purchased identical products with their own money.
Look I'm not saying you can't live a low ad lifestyle. I don't have cable or network TV and run ad-blockers on every device I own. And yet I can look around my home and see numerous products purchased at least in part due to an ad. The Retroid Pocket sitting on my table, the M series laptop sitting in front of me. The Sony TV across the room, the game consoles under it. Heck the dog at my feet was the one I adopted because I went to an adoption event being sponsored at a local business. Even when I'm seeking a specific product out and then seeking out information, I'm looking for reviews and a lot of those reviews are given sample/free product for the purposes of making their review. That's an ad. I might be able to place more trust in that review if the reviewer doesn't give the product manufacturer editorial control they way they'd have in a sponsorship, but you can be damn sure if sending free product to independent reviewers wasn't paying off in terms of higher sales, the manufacturer wouldn't be doing it.
Not even movie advertisements like trailers? Or job ads? Housing ads?
I've definitely investigated and eventually purchased things I first learned about through an advertisement.
Mind, usually that was from print ads in things like magazines/newspapers, the occasional direct mail ad like the old Fry's electronics mailer or movie trailers. Online ads are overwhelmingly ugly attention grabbers for things I have zero interest in or no time for when displayed.
It would be interesting to be able to define if an advertisement is still an advertisement in the sense the OP was referring if it is something sought out.
I myself usually choose to watch trailers for movies, look at job ads and housing ads when I actually want to watch a movie, change job or move house. What pisses me off is the 99% of ads in my life that are just blasted in front of me online and in public.
It's probably silly and the answer is just that they are, but they at least meet two different types of advert to me, personally.
I would partially agree with OP in that I can't believe any adverts I've ever seen have influence a purchase from me. I actually quite often blacklist brands and products for aggressively marketing to me.
I remember having that experience as a kid - seeing an ad for Action Man™ during my Saturday morning cartoon block, and feeling that I need that toy right now. My dad then explained to me that these advertisements are carefully crafted to elicit this response from kids, and that I should always think critically about the messaging in ads.
Part of the issue may also be that to many companies rely on selling ads as their main source of revenue and there simply isn't enough money in "good ads" to fund all the services we've come to expect to be free.
There simply isn't enough ads for soft drinks, supermarkets or cars to reasonably fund the tech industry as it currently exists. Ad funded Facebook, perfectly fine, but that's not a $200B company, not without questionable ads for gambling, scams and shitty China plastic products.
Platforms should have higher standards, accept lower profit margins and charge users if needed, rather than resort to running ads for stuff we all now is garbage.
Can you remember the last 3 times when ads showed you products that solved your problem? I cannot.
The closest experience I have had was with ads for new restaurants, of which two turned out good and one - not good. Also, twice last year, I saw trailers of new movies I wasn't aware of at the moment. However, I am sure I would later discover it via reviews or word of mouth.
And mind that it was not problem solving, just an entertainment suggestion. I can live comfortably without new restaurants, or I will eventually discover them via other channels.
Historically, yes. People in their 70s might remember that time. But language has moved on. Advertising now means manipulation. The ad market is priced for that. The rare cases of someone wanting to use advertising channels to put out actual information now have to pay a premium.
I wonder if there's a middle ground, where you only have statement based, textual ads. Amusing ourselves to Death (great book btw), discusses how until the 19th century, ads were basically just information dense textual statements. The invention of slogans and jingles was the start of the slow downfall in ads.
I interned at an ad agency once, and I really enjoy creative advertising, but frankly there's just way too much advertising in this world.
> until the 19th century, ads were basically just information dense textual statements.
I'm curious how does this account for "town criers" and the like? And there seems to be quite a few examples of less "information dense textual statement" in some of the articles on Wikipedia about advertising [1] [2].
I'm not an expert, but looking at those articles, most of the illustrated and colour designs seem to have become popular in the 19th century, though I do see a few illstrated examples from the 18th century as well.
Damn! I have been reading about Amusing Ourselves to Death on here since weeks and I assumed it was a new book from a contemporary author! I'll get it now, thanks for being the one who finally got me to :)
I just wanted to second recommend Amusing Ourselves to Death. A very good and short read that I find continually relevant applying the same ideas to social media.
Adverts I specifically request are fine. Trailers for example -- I specifically go to youtube to find trailers.
Or I'll go to rightmove if I want to look at adverts for houses. I'm happy to spend both time and even money on seeking out new products.
But it seems that people have a parasitical relationship with adverts, they can't imagine a world where there aren't wall to wall adverts on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and written in the sky.
Adverts should be for my benefit, i.e. I can turn them on or off.
And the worst part is, from a societal point of view - it doesnt matter if $companyA wins over $companyB, if the reason they won is that there was more Geico ads than Liberty ads etc.
We allow every space to be overrun with these things, wasting our time and infecting our brains and in the end its zero-sum for the companies and negative-sum for us. No value anywhere is created.
They get paid per ad. Whether the product actually works is not their problem, unless they get a lawsuit. IIRC Facebook did lose a lawsuit over scam ads, but continued doing the process it was sued for, because it's so profitable, and just added a check so those ads don't get shown to regulators.
Even as a consumer I am legitimately happy that I’ve seen ads for some products.
Now sure, it probably happens about once a quarter, and for that I watched probably hundreds if not thousands of ads, so was it worth it, I don’t know, probably not.
Furiously seconded. Ads are just a tax that we pay both with our attention and then with our wallets. Every dollar that a company forks over to Google is a dollar they recoup by passing the costs on to you, for absolutely no benefit whatsoever to the product you're paying for. Destroy this heinous rent-seeking industry.
You are ignoring the value of discovering a good or service. Increasing the customer acquisition cost for a company to infinity doesn't make them lower their prices. It makes them go out of business because they have no customers.
People are really out here acting like we didn't have a functioning economy before we invited ad companies in to parasitize global commerce. I don't give a fuck if it means "less discoverability", if I could snap my fingers and make every ad company disappear tomorrow, the world would be a better place.
When did we have a functioning economy without ads? Was it the 1980's when some of the most classic children's shows were 30 minute commercials for toys? Was it the 1960s when Charles Schultz was lamenting the commercialization of Christmas in the Charlier Brown special? Maybe the 1910's when Uncle Sam famously wanted you to join the army? Was it the 1890's when Montgomery Ward and Sears were sending out mail order catalogs? Was it the 1860's when you could learn that "The Best Glass of Ale In the Globe" was available at Isabella Nesbitt's Inn[1]? Town criers and traveling medicine shows date back to at least the 1700's.
Less intrusive ads? Less frequent ads? Sure I can get behind that (though, I can turn off a TV, can't turn off the town crier). But ads have been a part of us since the first person with something to sell wanted to sell it.
What is an "ad company" though? If it's someone you pay to advertise your product for you, well that's something town criers often did for merchants so "ad companies" are at least that old.
I will note we effectively have that law already for political text spam. No robo-texting it has to come from a “real” person. Doesn’t seem to have changed the amount of text spam I get, they just all start with “This is Bob from People Against Things …”
You could probably hire a lot of “town criers” on fiver for the cost of a 30 second TV spot.
When I say I would accept town criers to get rid of those ads I mean literal town criers. Not people sending me mail, email, texts, or calls. People being kinda loud and/or holding up big signs in public places. They can offer me a flyer when I walk by, I suppose.
Sure I get it. I just don't think your annoyance level is going to go down that much. It wont take many sign twirlers on every corner, or people driving up and down your neighborhood at all hours of the day with a "ad truck" to be more annoying than the worst of youtube's advertising. Imagine if every fedex or ups truck and amazon van you see was also blaring a loud speaker advertising businesses. Door to door salesmen are less prevalent because other forms of advertising are cheaper, but if you can't do those other forms of advertising, door to door becomes economically competitive again. I'm pretty sure a "town criers only" world would be significantly more grating and annoying than you think. Imagine "liberty tax" sign holders during tax season, but all the businesses and all the time.
It works for ice cream trucks, and when you ban all other forms of advertising, it's not like there's any more efficient places to spend that ad money.
> Blocking that double use is part of why I tossed "independent" into my earlier post.
So we'd just wind up with fleets of "independent contractors" doing deliveries for part of their income and advertising for the other part. It's not like a bunch of those vans and trucks aren't already contractors in the first place.
>You are ignoring the value of discovering a good or service.
This has very little value to me. I'm buying my wife a new car next year and I won't be perusing adverts to find what to buy. If I did I would be thoroughly mislead as the adverts are full of aspirational bullshit.
Adverts encourage people to eat unhealthy food, take unneeded drugs, drink, smoke, buy more house than they need and replace perfectly functional consumer goods. They make everybody's life worse (apart from the advertisers).
Commerce won't stop without them. I've mostly eliminated them from my life but that hasn't stopped me from spending my money.
Advertisement also more or less puts a wrench in the theory of capitalistic competition in that companies would be incentivized to create the best product for the lowest price supposedly. They're now just incentivized to create the best ad campaign which costs money and does not improve the product in any way.
Also, the existence of crippleware, where companies actually invest resources into removing features from a product is interesting. It would be interesting if we were to live in a world were both advertisement and crippleware are forbidden. It's already forbidden in many jurisdictions for various public function professions such as medical services or legal services so it's not as though it couldn't be implemented.
Catalogs - offline and on-line, commercial and government. Deprived of constant noise and overstimulation of advertising, people will actively seek such information out, whether because they have a problem to solve, or just out of curiosity. All we're talking about here is switching from current "push" model of advertising back to "pull" model.
Who here never browsed a product or company catalog they found, just because they were curious?
How did people that had something to sell do it before advertising?
The problem again is greed. The organic way is too inefficient so advertising needs to come in and make people rich instead of letting the product do the convincing naturally, word of mouth and so on.
Most of the YT ads are AI rubbish. I can't imagine those fake "realistic puppy" ads generate any sales whatsoever. Same for the monocular that can zoom into a book title from a mountain range away. And nearly all the other YT and news feed ads one typically sees.
Frankly, they should be illegal. If a physical store did that in Canada, it certainly would be. I'm surprised Canada hasn't reacted to these overabundant fake-product ads.
That’s not a problem for the customers though. Capitalism twists our incentives toward prioritizing return on investment over quality of life. Especially now with the internet, I literally never need ads. I just search for the solution to the problem I’m having. No push needed (or wanted).
> I literally never need ads. I just search for the solution to the problem I’m having. No push needed (or wanted).
I want to agree with you, but you only think you're not seeing ads. Obviously, the SEO corruption has made everything you search for distorted by irresistible economic incentives of tilting the search results and search engine in favor of promoters.
Yes, and if you ban ads then you can expect a lot more underhand marketing as the companies peddling their goods will try and find another way to reach you.
How do you search? Google? That's typically part of marketing spend. It may not be pure ads as in I pay google, they display my ad. But it's still a company spending money to get their result to the top so you are more likely to see it.
Ads solve the discovery problem. Without ads, people still try to solve the discovery problem and try to get your attention. Are those methods still ads?
This is a silly and short-sighted blanket statement. People used to love getting catalogs, which are just big books full of ads. In the right context, people appreciate being informed of products that can help improve their lives.
There are plenty of legitimately well-intentioned ads that can connect someone who needs a good/service with someone that supplies it and everyone wins.
The problem is that we use a nearly totally free unregulated market where anyone can advertise anything anywhere.
edit: I'm not saying we should necessarily try to optimize for good ads over bad ads or even assuming that is possible. I would settle for just somehow reducing the total volume of ads to help make email, snail main, voice mail, and other methods of communication more usable.
Hard disagree, without any ads the only way to find out about new things is via word of mouth, which would make many valuable products never get off the ground. Ads done badly are poison but ads done well educate people about new things they can benefit from and drive the entire economy. I have had many experiences where I’ve seen an ad that I genuinely think is interesting and was enlightening to find.
>The world would definitely be better without ads.
I don't have the proof but I'm guessing that this is provably wrong. Without advertising in some existance it would be nearly impossible to start a business which means everyone would be peasants farming for subsistence living. I think the problem is that the propose of ads has become divorced from product. The issue is poor regulation not the existence of ads.
Think about it, how as a small or competitive business owner would you get people to buy your soda vs coke/pepsi without advertising in some way? The issue is that coke/pepsi know they have a simple product so they blast ads not to sell their product but to adversarially drown out competitors before they can exist. Tons of advertising has counter agenda purposes like this rather than selling a product, its propaganda not advertisement. There are probably tons of unenforced laws already about this but IANAL.
Why would it be impossible to start a business? You would still be able to list your business in mediums where potential buyers willingly go and search for products and services. If anything, it would level the playing field, paying more for ads would not mean you getting your poorer services more visible buy paying more for ads.
The very concept of fair pricing is an advertisement. In nearly all of history the merchant would charge what they judged you could pay. but keep those noses up HN.....
How are the ads that local grocers and restaurants mail to me telling me of sales or giving me coupons which let me get things I'd be buying anyway for less money poisonous?
Let me clarify. When I said I'm going to buy it anyway I didn't necessarily mean at that time. There are many things that are in the "do not need to go out and buy it now but I do need to buy it in the near future" category.
I would normally get those at the store I normally buy that kind of thing when I'm there to get other things. E.g., most groceries come from the big Walmart Supercenter near my house. If I get a flyer in the mail from the Safeway that is on the other side of town, and see they have a good sale price on one of those things, I might stop by that Safeway when I'm in that part of town on other business and get it.
just get a list of shops and compare their prices instead of waiting for an ad popping up in front of you for each product you buy when you actually would prefer to watch something else?
I actually think so, yes, the world would be better off with everything you listed happening.
When we used to pay for newspapers, the informational value of the news was a lot higher, news and news-like social media posts were not the primary tool to spread stupidity.
Yes. I'm not even sure it's a question anymore. Yes it would be a better world.
Not even because of the first order consequences of the ads, but because since there are ads, we have an entire media ecosystem based on grabbing your attention.
So that TV displays series and movies meant for people with the attention span of a goldfish. This applies to Netflix and Hollywood by the way. All of it. Even music changes for radio, meaning more ads.
Google, Youtube, etc, along with news, along with social networks, depend on ragebait, being the first to spout whatever factoid, true or false, polarization of thought and basically a good chunk of what is very evidently wrong in today's society.
I trust we could support a weather app with donations. For the rest? If I could remove either ads or cancer from this world I would sit a long time thinking about the decision, but gut feeling? Ads. The actual cost of the ad industry is enormous and incalculable, not even mentioning the actual purposes ads serve.
As for the rest, I'm very much a fan of the Bill Hicks standup bit regarding the subject.
Given that companies often spend a significant fraction of their budgets on advertising, I wonder if some products would be cheaper if advertising was banned. Sure, maybe some ad-supported services would be paywalled, but it might end up being a wash in the end.
At the very very very least, every ad-supported service should be required to offer an option to pay and see no ads. I do pay for services I use regularly when they offer it as an option to avoid ads.
Companies spending money on advertising is just another way of acquiring customers. If they were unable to do that, they would need to resort to other, more costly ways of acquiring customers. I doubt that higher costs would result in lower prices for customers.
Definitely the world wouldn’t be better without all ads, because that would be a clear violation of free speech.
However ads should be limited only to communication channels that are optional to engage in. As for example, an ad on YouTube, a private video platform, should be perfectly fine. That’s part of the product. On the other hand, ads on a highway, on the street, should not be allowed. I have not given permission for them to enter my personal mental space. I’m fine with shops advertising their presence, but not full fledged advertising on roads, streets, etc.
Free speech does not mean you get to yell at me. In the same way, banning ads where they are shown to users without their consent would not mean violation of free speech.
I think it would have been a better world without ads. There would be more competition which would improve products and thus outcome for customers.
Also most of the demand of goods is artificially created by ads, so there would be less production of crap and thus less resources wasted.
It would also mean a whole industry of people would do something else that is potentially not as detrimental to society.
The money spend on the digital marketing industry was estimated at 650 billion USD 2025. For comparison that is equivalent to the whole GDP of countries like Sweden or Israel.
While I agree that the world would be better without ads in their current form, we should think why are ads required and what are the benefits.
The main issue is how you discover a new product. The main benefit to society is/could be faster progress. The main downside to society could be unhappy people that consume crap.
I think smart people should think about alternative solutions, not just think "ads are the problem".
I personally have the exactly same issues as above when I look for example for open source libraries/programs for a task. There are popular ones, there are obscure ones, they are stable ones, etc. The search space is so big and complex that it is never easy.
My personal preference would be a network recommendation system. I would like to know what people I know (and in my extended network) are using and like - being it restaurants, clothes or open source software. I have 90% of friends (or friends of friends) satisfied with something - maybe I should try. Of course it is not a perfect system, but seems much better than what we currently have...
> I personally have the exactly same issues as above when I look for example for open source libraries/programs for a task. There are popular ones, there are obscure ones, they are stable ones, etc. The search space is so big and complex that it is never easy.
And adverts don't help determine what the best tool for your problem is. They determine which product spent the most on adverts.
So yes, adverts do not help you with decision making at all.
Open source software (mostly) don’t have ads, and that doesn’t seem to be a problem in practice. Good projects become known by word of mouth, people blogging about it, etc. If anything, it exemplifies that ads aren’t required.
> My personal preference would be a network recommendation system. I would like to know what people I know (and in my extended network) are using and like - being it restaurants, clothes or open source software. I have 90% of friends (or friends of friends) satisfied with something - maybe I should try. Of course it is not a perfect system, but seems much better than what we currently have...
I can think of a hacky solution where your friends can share their (trustpilot?) or alternative accounts username and then you can review what they are reviewing/what they are using etc.
The problem to me feels like nobody I know writes a trustpilot review unless its really bad or really good (I dont know too much about reviewing business)
I feel like someone must have built this though
Another part is how would you get your friends list? If its an open protocol like fediverse, this might have genuine value but you would still need to bootstrap your friends connecting you in fediverse and the whole process.
And oh, insta and other large big tech where your friends already are wont do this because they precisely make money from selling you to ads. It would be harmful to their literal core.
> My personal preference would be a network recommendation system.
Random question: do you have a personal site where you write about things you recommend? Because that's the solution IMO. And that's the network you're talking about: it's the web. You find enough people you trust and you see what they recommend. The issue is that in modern society 99% of the people consume and 1% are fucking influencers getting paid to promote crap.
I was thinking (theoretically) we should strive for a more efficient system that could include more people. There are plenty of simpler and less efficient to achieve the same goal.
For example I have for example a list of restaurants that I share with people that visit my city (plenty of tourist traps around), but it is cumbersome to manage/share. Does not feel like a solution.
I learnt Basic, C++ in that order because at the time there were the only options (Basic because of a computer like Sinclair that only had basic, C++ because there was the only thing offered as a course at a computer club around).
Programming languages are easier to discover because they are a reasonable number (tens) you can asses, they are very important (if you are in the field), so you can invest a lot of time in choosing and following the trends.
I will not spend the same amount of time deciding about everything...
One thing that I prefer something like ads/reviews (and in fact works well enough in my case): cultural events in the city I live.
Ok, but do you agree that we should put ads in designated places (and out of sight, generally) where people can look them up whenever they find it convenient rather than the other way around where companies just shove them in your face at random times?
I think it is largely a Marketer's fantasy that people get up in the morning with a goal of "discovering new products." I don't want to discover new products. I especially don't want to while I'm trying to do something else that I actually WANT to do. If I need a new product, I will deliberately go out and look for it. I don't need marketers doing drive-by product announcements while I'm just trying to live my life.
The question of "how do people spontaneously discover products" is invalid. It's just not something people want in their lives.
Oh man this is a nice idea, I will try to add on somethings which I can think about from the top of my mind
To be really honest, even if things were publicly broadcasted, The amount of choices of products we make in each day would be huge.
So no random stranger would go and look for your product choices. What would matter are the close friends and family or perhaps when one becomes really famous?
Would the fundamental idea of anonymity go away from all internet? Like if someone posts a youtube video or even a yt comment, would I get to know what they ate for dinner?
Can ads still be blocked? If my product choice is an LLM lets say, would my prompts be choices as well that will get leaked with the conversation to everyone?
To be really honest, Govt.'s (snowden showed us) already can know about your product choices pretty good enough and the internet/infrastructure behind it is pretty centralized nowadays as well
Sure there are alternatives but how many people do you see using beyond the tri-fecta of cloud and how those choices come downstream to us consumers if services run there
I feel like this is gonna be a classic example of Hawthorne effect (Had to look the term for that) meaning that people will behave differently now that they are being observed.
Also do you know that its not any technical limitation which limits it but financial incentives.
There is no incentive to having your product choices be publicly broadcasted but for the services, there is an incentive of money if they show you ads and which they end up showing to ya.
If there was an financial incentive for the servers to create this choice itself of opting out / public broadcasts option, they probably would be reality.
By going to a website where they can learn about various choices.
It could be similar to ads, but with higher truth value to it.
AND most importantly, the user would view the information when THEY want to see the information, not when the marketeer wants to shove it in their face.
People don't care. Youtube has an option to watch it without ads, most people don't. I refuse to watch ads and pay for the ad-free versions of the streamers. Lots people won't pay. Would the average person pay $10/m for ad free social media? Or pay for add free search? Pretty sure there are search engines that you can pay that are ad free.
What needs to be regulated is ads that you can't avoid. You can avoid online ads by paying ad free versions or not browsing certain sites(eg: instagram, FB). Billboards need to go away, and some cities have outlawed them.
I am often frustrated by ads/sponsored content on YouTube that I cannot buy. Youtuber present me nice product targeted for US audience. I am in Europe. No way I can use it or buy it. I would do it sometimes, but I cannot.
Still I have to watch such ads.
I dont think there is a practical way to prevent this case.
That's the funny part, ads would be less annoying if they were hyper-targeted, which means there was more supply of ads and worse privacy. There's been a number of times I've found useful stuff from ads, but it's rare and almost never on Youtube.
Youtube is the one site worth paying for not to see ads and sponsorblock extension skips the live reads.
>Would the average person pay $10/m for ad free social media? Or pay for add free search?
At some point, yes. But by that point they switch to the next service with ads and the cycle repeats.
Its also important to note that many can't pay for such services. I.e. minors. So they don't get a choice unless their parents sympathize. That helps indoctrinate the next gen into accepting ads. I think that late Millenial/early Gen Z was a unique group that grew up with minimal ads (or easy ways to block ads) before smartphone hoisted most control from them.
When crypto was genuinely new, and I was young, I had hope that one day we might actually embrace micropayments. Turns out I was not only young, but stupid.
All transactions include several kinds of costs. Reducing the monetary costs to zero does nothing for the other costs.
Enthusiasm for micropayments is very similar to enthusiasm for cutting the price of something from $5.001 to $5.00000001. It's a 0.02% decrease in the price! They make about as much sense as saying "hey, if I can buy 80,000 plastic ninjas for $500, I should also be able to buy one ninja for $0.007".
> often wondered whether the world would be better without ads
You’d probably have to compromise on free speech, since the line between ads and public persuasion is ambiguous to the point of non-existence.
Better middle steps: ban on public advertising (e.g. no billboards, first-party-only signage). Ban on targeted digital advertising. Ban on bulk unsolicited mail or e-mail.
> You can self promote, but you can’t pay third parties to do it for you and you can’t sell it as a service
An acid test I've found surprisingly powerful is that of the founders promoting the Constitution through pamphleteering. They wrote the pamphlets themselves. The historical record is silent on whether they paid for their printing or distribution. (The papers could publish due to subscribers and paid advertising.)
If your rule would let them pamphleteer, it should be fine. If it would not, it probably needs work. I have not yet seen a definition of advertising that satisfactorily isolates this.
Someone who prints something for a third party isn’t selling ad space.
Everyone could self promote, they just couldn’t contract someone to do it for them. Employees could promote for their employer, but it couldn’t be subcontracted out. And you can’t pay a company to put up your ad on their billboard or their website, etc.
Ignoring how this might be enforced, would it be enough to let people express themselves while cutting out the impact of negative externalities of advertising?
> would it be enough to let people express themselves while cutting out the impact of negative externalities of advertising?
I think it's doable. But I haven't seen the scalpel yet.
In the meantime, we have clean lines we can run up towards. Banning ads (basically, commercial speech) in public space. Banning commercial bulk mail. And banning targeted commercial advertising (beyond the content it sits).
I pay for YouTube Premium, which would in theory pull me out of the perverse incentive structure around an ad-based model. Yet I feel like I still get pushed toward all the same “features” of ad-funded accounts. I find it incredibly frustrating and keep sending feature requests and reporting site issues as a result.
Autoplay keeps turning itself back on. I’ve probably turned it off a dozen times now.
The other autoplay, where it starts playing stuff while browsing. I’ve tuned this off many times too.
The massive thumbnails so I can only see 2 thumbnails on the screen, I’m not sure what the advantage is here other than better tracking what you linger on. They also get bigger on the active row, so if I see a video I might want on the 2nd cut off row, then make it my active row, the thumbnails get bigger and I can’t see it anymore. I lose context due to this all the time and it drives me nuts.
Shorts, yes, but not just Shorts in the Recommendations, but Shorts dominating search results, where it almost doesn’t show traditional videos anymore. In the browser you can filter search results for videos vs shorts, but not on the AppleTV.
It keeps showing big banners with a demo video next to it for features Premium users can get… it’s an ad for something I’ve already signed up for. I report these as spam.
The games. I’ve never once played one, yet they are prominently displayed in my recommendations.
I think as a Premium user I should be able to choose what screen the app opens into, or what is on my home page. I’d like my watch later list, for example. Instead, it just randomly mixes some of those into the recommendations and it may or may not make it clear which ones those are.
I know there is more, and some big ones I’m missing, but those are some of the things they come to mind.
Maybe, but on the otherside, ads make available a huge amount of media and services to people who would otherwise be unable to afford it. Like, I suspect a non-trivial percentage of people wouldn't have email if it weren't for gmail and other free w/ads services.
> ads make available a huge amount of media and services to people who would otherwise be unable to afford it.
They don't. Follow the money: why do ads power free services? The advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the scenario where they run the ad as compared to where they don't. The viewer must be spending more money in response to having seen it
If the viewer doesn't have the money to pay the first party fair and straight (say, a video website), they also don't have money to splurge on that fancy vacuum cleaner in addition to the website and advertisement broker getting paid, no matter how many ads you throw at them
Ads are useful for honest products, like if I were to start a company and believe that I've made a vacuum cleaner that's genuinely better (more or better cleaning at a lower or equal cost) but nobody knows about it yet. However, I don't see the point in money redirection schemes where affluent people inefficiently pay for public services (if they're indistinguishable and the company shows ads to both, thereby funding the poor people's usage). Let's do that through taxes please
"They don't. Follow the money: why do ads power free services? The advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the scenario where they run the ad as compared to where they don't. The viewer must be spending more money in response to having seen it"
The first part is true, the second part pretty obviously isn't. Advertizers expect to net $ from ad buys, but most advertising isn't trying to increase a consumers total spending, its trying to drive that spending towards the companies products.
To give the most obvious example, the largest category of advertising is for food and beverage products. But no one thinks that if those ads all suddenly disappeared, people would stop buying food.
That makes sense, though you're still paying for the service or product that includes advertising as part of buying the third party product such as a beverage. If you can't afford the service or product then you're down to off-brand products that don't run ads
I addressed that above. If that's the point, the people with disposable income who view the ad subsidise the ad broker and the website as a hidden charge on a product which they probably didn't need. It doesn't get less efficient than that. I'd rather that people living under the poverty threshold get subsidised directly
Advertisers/brokers will also do everything to optimise to whom the ad is being shown to not waste they money. Poor people can't turn it into arbitrary cash, they can just waste time on video sites and freemium games while they barely (or don't) have enough money to make ends meet
I guess I am very much in the "let's pay fair and square" corner, both for websites/services and for taxes/subsidies where needed. I don't see it working reliably or efficiently any other way in the long run
Sure, but a lot of that is 1) just influencing what type or brand you get of products your going to buy anyways, and 2) only an average, presumably wealthier consumers are "subsidizing" poorer ones, since they have more spending to be influenced.
Probably not too popular of an opinion on HN but email in my opinion would be a great example of a service that could be run by the government. Just like postal service (at least in some parts of the world)
There was something like that in Germany called de-mail. It was official and receiving and reading a mail was considered legally binding (invoices, etc.)
It could have been great but the implementation lacked encryption and had wild security issues. So nobody used it and it was shut down
Then we'd be living in a world that didn't require you to have an email in order to do anything like have a job or a social life, which is probably a good thing
We aren’t even mining asteroids near Earth’s orbit. Space colonization is a ketamine dream. There’s no extraterrestrial economy. Earth is all we have. One pie.
A pie that includes sand which is now turned into GPUs that can solve complex problems described in English. Value that was unlocked fairly recently from “one pie”.
Of course: Everything is resource-constrained. That’s why it’s called economics.
The question was whether the “pie”—total economic output—has a meaningful upper bound on growth because we only have a whole planet full of resources to exploit as our minds and capabilities allow.
Most internet services are very low cost to offer for any company that has some infrastructure setup already. So for instance 'back in the day', before Google hoovered up everybody's email, what would typically happen is you would get an email address with your ISP.
> So for instance 'back in the day', before Google hoovered up everybody's email, what would typically happen is you would get an email address with your ISP.
Well, no, not even close. You'd get an email address from your ISP. You still do; nothing about that has changed.
Among the things that haven't changed is that you were more likely to use a free online email service, most notably Hotmail or Yahoo.
Similar as it happens for phone numbers, where there is internal routing of phone calls between providers. A customer can be at a different provider with their phone number than the provider who “owns” the containing block of numbers.
You're dead right, it would be the one killer move to remove a lot of perverse incentives, fix the internet, possibly even social media, and all live in a happier world. The whole economy would stop paying the ad tax to Google and Meta.
And it's not that impractical : just make a consumer-run search engine for products and services.
People already complain about having 10 differently monthly subscriptions for internet stuff. If you remove ads people will need 30 to do the same stuff they do now.
People won't pay a few bucks a month for YouTube. They won't pay to keep their favorite sites online. They won't pay for their news. Without ads, a lot of things wouldn't exist.
They will actually. Youtube premium has had explosive growth after YT started pushing more ads and blocking ad blockers. People pay for streaming services quite regularly. And youtube has one of the strongest platforms/content bases to sell a subscription.
Youtube is more like modern Cable TV though, there's huge value there for the price. I like visiting Twitter and Reddit occasionally for news, I've been using both since they launched, but I wouldn't pay for either of those. I could easily make the choice to cut that out of my life.
I don't like ads either. Who does? I really don't mind unless they are hard-cut and aren't made by the creator themselves. What's your solution here? A new policy that prevents creators from doing sponsor spots? We all know what the result of that would be.
> A new policy that prevents creators from doing sponsor spots? We all know what the result of that would be.
Well or not show the sponsors to premium users. They could simply upload a separate premium version. Don't forget, these content creators are already getting a lot more money from YT when a premium user views their vids. So they're not entitled.
They can walk away but where would they go?? Besides, more and more people are using sponsorblock since it's become totally insane with these.
so you just dont think people making video content should make money in any way? if you hate ads that much dont watch any creators that have sponsored content. oh wait, the only way they can make videos that good is because they make money and are professionals. doh!
No, I think they shouldn't be double dipping. If I pay for premium I want no ads whatsoever. Not for the content creators to sneak some in anyway.
And no I don't tend to watch many with sponsor crap in them because they aren't actually very good (think the low-quality crap from LTT etc). The best channels (EEVBlog is one notable one) don't have sponsors at all because they're made for love.
What I am not doing is watching the sponsorship segments anyway. So yeah I use sponsorblock. And I use Ublock origin or revanced to remove the ads too because there's way too many now.
No but if they weren't double dipping with the sponsors I'd pay for premium.
It's just that as it stands it makes no sense to do so. I still get ads so there's nothing in it for me. And if I use sponsorblock I might as well go the full way.
It's really on YouTube that they have let this situation be created. They should have stopped sponsor segments the moment they arrived.
There are already numerous competitors to YouTube. Of course they have collectively like 1% marketshare, but that's because it's basically impossible to compete against YouTube right now. But if YouTube died, these sites would rapidly become fully competent replacements - all they're missing is the users.
>these sites would rapidly become fully competent replacements
they wouldn't. For two reasons. Without the capital (that to a large extent comes from ads) nobody could run the herculean infrastructure and software behemoth that is Youtube. Maintaining that infrastructure costs money, a lot. Youtube is responsible for 15% of global internet traffic, it's hard to overstate how much capital and human expertise is required to run that operation. It's like saying we'll replace Walmart with my mom&pop shop, we'll figure the supply chain details out later
Secondly content creation has two sides, there aren't just users but also producers and it's the latter who comes first. Youtube is successful because it actually pays its creators, again in large part through ads.
Any potential competitor would have to charge significantly higher fees than most users are willing to pay to run both the business and fund content creators. No Youtube competitor has any economic model at all on how to fund the people who are supposed to entertain the audience.
However, you brought up the distinction between consumers and producers, but I'd argue that such a thing doesn't inherently exist. YouTube was thriving before Google when it mostly just a site for people to share videos on. Here [1] is one of e.g. Veritasium's oldest videos. What it lacks in flare and production quality, it makes up for in content and authenticity.
You don't need 'creators', you simply need people. And I think a general theme among many of the most successful 'creators', is that they weren't really in it for the money. They simply enjoyed sharing videos with people. Like do you think Veritasium in that video could even begin to imagine what his 'channel' would become?
And that's extremely harmful. In theory we have democracies. In practice, if you have the capital, you get to decide for what products and services the world's resources are used for.
How would they pay for the infrastructure required to support all those users? I can't stand ads, but when I was younger, no way would I have paid for YT Premium (though to be fair, ads are much, much worse now).
Let me pay usage based, with full transparency in hosting, infra, and energy costs. Like a utility.
Subscription services are like hungry hungry hippos, you give them $10 a month and next year they want $100.
I honestly think if everyone starts paying, it will only make them remove the free tier quicker. I think society is better with youtube free, even if ads are annoying.
Bandwidth transit prices, peering, and other data for for ISPs and the like tend to be highly classified (lol), but it's very close to $0. Take Steam for instance. They are responsible for a significant chunk of all internet traffic and transfer data in the exabytes. Recently their revenue/profit data was leaked from a court filing and their total annual costs, including labor/infrastructure/assets/etc, was something like $800 million. [1]
Enabling on site money transfers (as YouTube does) and taking a small cut from each transfer (far less than YouTube's lol level 30% cut) would probably be getting close to enough to cover your costs, especially if you made it a more ingrained/gamey aspect of the system - e.g. give big tippers some sort of swag in comments or whatever, stuff like that. It's not going to be enough to buy too many [more] islands for Sergey and Larry, but such is the price we must all pay.
This makes me wonder how the system makes any money. Presumably the same people that won't pay a few bucks a month for YouTube won't buy things from ads either. So how do the ad companies make any money on them?
There is a huge chunk of companies who do not pay to advertise their products or services, because their value offering is good enough to not need to. And a huge chunk who does very little advertisement for the very same reason.
For example, when was the last time you saw a TV or YouTube ad for a motorcycle from any of the big Japanese brands? The products are so mature and the value proposition is so good that they don't need to. And that's a 70 billion dollar annual market.
I was just in the Philippines, tons of ads for Japanese motorcycle brands. In places where competition and usage for the product or service is high, there will be ads, and lots of it. You use motorcycles as an example, but it probably isn't a very good example.
I don't think that's impractical - isn't it exactly what YouTube Premium offers, ad free viewing for £12.99 a month.
I watch quite a lot of content on YouTube and really should sign up for Premium but I feel that the shockingly irrelevant ads I get presented with on YouTube are trying to drive me to sign for it - they're certainly not going to get me to buy anything!
YouTube has been increasing both the amount, frequency and length of ads in their video's for a long time now. They know people will keep using them anyway because of the network effect, and people who are really fed up with these ads will buy premium anyway. For them it's a win/win.
I probably use YouTube more than any other website, for about 10 minutes my premium subscription had expired and u rushed to throw money at Google to turn it back on.
Musicians complain about low streaming payouts, but 30 years ago I'd pay $40 ( inflation adjusted) for 15 songs and only like 3 of them.
Now I can listen to 500 or 600 unique songs a month + music that would of had to be imported for that 15$.
If I actually like an artist I'll buy an album as a keepsake.
The "creators" are complicit, and are in fact directly responsible for the worst aspects of the platform. Especially with most popular and well-known ones, the content itself is typically a very long, insidious ad, which makes the platform-supplied ad breaks a breath of fresh air in comparison.
> Lei Cidade Limpa (Portuguese for clean city law) is a law of the city of São Paulo, Brazil, put into law by proclamation in 2006 that prohibits advertising such as outdoor posters.
It'd be great if all public ads were banned and digital ads were the only form. That way those who are savvy enough can also block the digital ones and live a completely ad-free life.
My annoyance is that regardless of how I lock ads out of my own home and devices, I will still always see ads for McSlop and Coca Cola everywhere I walk in my city.
Better from whom? As a user, maybe. But if you're trying to compete, it's incredibly useful to get exposure. For instance, suppose you run a competitor to Salesforce and you want to buy the Salesforce keyword because you provide a better product. I don't know how you would bootstrap that otherwise.
If anything the big businesses use advertising as a protection moat. As a small business, I would def prefer to be in a world that allows me to advertise, even if I have to compete for things like my own name
If I search for "Salesforce alternative" and something that isn't Salesforce shows up, great! That's what I want!
If I search for Salesforce and something that isn't Salesforce shows up above Salesforce, the tool I'm using is wrong and I will assume that the promoted product is a scam.
This happened to me yesterday when installing the mobile version of Brotato. Some other game appeared above Brotato in the Google Play store. I already hate Android but this only makes me hate it more. Google already gets an unjustified cut of the money I'm paying for the game, yet on top of that they serve me the wrong result at the top.
>Google already gets an unjustified cut of the money I'm paying for the game
Brotato is free to distribute their game outside the Play Store as well, Android isn't locked down. If the cut was unjustified why would they give money away to Google for free? The reasons are actually extremely similar to the reasons ads benefit society.
They kinda created this fake locked down market that people expect to be able to be used, same as Apple, compared to say, just downloading apps normally like on a computer.
Also "sideloaded" apps cannot be automatically updated, although personally I think it would be better if nothing could automatically update lol
I'm also not the biggest fan of Steam. But at least on Steam if I search for Brotato it's the top result, Steam is not tied to the OS so if gamers and game makers decided they hate Steam they could jump to some other market (as opposed to, say, the built-in Microsoft store in Windows that thankfully seems to be failing), and Steam has helped drag Linux into the 21st century in a good way.
And if I am not searching for Salesforce or alternatives, and an ad for Salesforce or an alternative gets pushed into my face, the ad is wrong and the advertiser is wrong.
It's infuriating, the other day I had to download an app to pay for parking. What the fuck do I need the top choice to be a competing parking app? That won't do me any good when the place I'm parking need the one I searched for and who the hell goes "oh, an exciting new parking app? I'm gonna drive around until I can find a place that uses it so I can park there!"
> If anything the big businesses use advertising as a protection moat. As a small business, I would def prefer to be in a world that allows me to advertise, even if I have to compete for things like my own name
These two sentences are contradictory. Big business uses it as a defensive measure, yet you think a small business can use it as an offensive measure. It's an absurd outcome of the SEO of the last two decades that people think it's fine to pay for get traffic using your own keywords. Stockholm syndrome.
I can see how it's contradictory on its face, but the reality is pretty nuanced.
Large brands continue to run ads to enforce brand loyalty and keep their image fresh. For a lot of companies, dropping advertising will lead to reduced sales.
However, as a new entrant to a consumer facing market, how is one supposed to drive new customers to try their product? Just being a bit better or a little cheaper isn't necessarily going to win over a lot of people if they never bother trying it due to existing brand loyalties. So you've got to do some amount of advertising to build some kind of awareness to the product and get people to try it.
That doesn't necessarily mean unskippable video advertisements or whatever, but one should try and do some kind of marketing push to get awareness of your product up other than hoping presence on some store shelves will result in enough sales fast enough to keep your company alive.
If you have to advertise - shove your product in people's faces - to keep sales, your product is not supplying enough real value, does not have staying power, and you should lose.
"Just being a bit better or a little cheaper isn't necessarily going to win over a lot of people if they never bother trying it due to existing brand loyalties"
This is a feature, not a bug. Brand loyalties are built when products are reliable and good. Your product should be enough of an improvement to make people move of their own accord.
If your new product solves frustrations present in an incumbent, on a long enough timescale, your product will come out on top.
If both products are presented equally in a marketplace, the better one will win. If your company does not survive because you can't shove it in people's faces, this is a good thing.
> If your new product solves frustrations present in an incumbent, on a long enough timescale, your product will come out on top.
I've got numerous examples where this didn't happen because of other brand awareness. Neato had a very competitive and better bot vacuum to iRobot for years and yet they failed to gain traction. A large part of that would be because everyone knew about iRobot's offerings and yet ask any random person if they've ever heard of Neato Botvac and you'll get crickets. You're imagining an ideal world where clear better performers always win. This doesn't often happen in practice.
First mover advantage, brand awareness, word of mouth, early reviewers, etc. People then build a brand connection of "robot vacuum" == "roomba", everything else is just a fake imitation.
Imagine you're a normal random consumer and not an electronics nerd. You've heard people on the morning TV news show talk about these robot vacuums and showed a Roomba. You have a friend that got one last Christmas and said their Roomba was pretty cool. You go to the store, and you see a few Roombas and some other brands you've never heard of. You're probably only going to spend a few minutes looking at the shelf. Which one are you likely to get?
And in the end iRobot managed to coast on that brand connection of "robot vacuum" == "roomba" for a lot of people for nearly 20 years. It really only took until competitors were way cheaper and way better that got people to really start to switch. Their products have not been competitive for over a decade and yet they've only finally died. That power of linking a brand to a specific item or service is powerful, and its not purely push advertising and forced video ads that build it.
Its somewhat the same thing for Google. Sure, they do some amount of advertising especially at top of line events, but overall it seems their direct outbound marketing is kind of low overall. They spend a bunch of defaults and continue to build the connection that to search the internet is to Google, even as they continue to inject more paid results and the quality declines. Other competitors are out there which are comparable or better, but even with them heavily advertising they fail to unseat that brand connection.
> For instance, suppose you run a competitor to Salesforce and you want to buy the Salesforce keyword because you provide a better product. I don't know how you would bootstrap that otherwise.
Why would you assume I'm providing a better product? Ads are predominantly needed by those providing worse products, because spending money on marketing has much better ROI than actually creating a good product.
A big part of advertising on Google is making sure your own brand is the top result. This is essentially extortion from Google. Companies are burning money on something that should be the default result in Google.
The problem isn't fundamentally advertising - it's stuff like toxic and anti-user advertisements, and the ad industry not knowing what the word "privacy" means.
I think there is a fundamental problem with an ad-subsidized service. Even ignoring the privacy issues inherent to the way modern advertising works in practice (which you probably shouldn’t ignore), the mere presence of an advertiser as a third party whose interests the service provider must consider creates malign incentives.
I also think providing a service for free is fundamentally anti-competitive. It’s like the ultimate form of dumping. And there are many studies showing that people are irrational about zero-cost goods, so it’s even harder to compete against than might be expected.
Arguably, the advertiser is not merely a third party whose interests the service provider must consider, but rather the actual paying customer (and much more of the second party) whose interests the service provider must satisfy to make revenue. That to me puts into perspective the absurdity of this business model: the user is not the customer, the product or service itself is not the product but only a means to keep offering the actual product to the paying customer.
Yes, I mean from the consumer perspective. You're right that the user of an entirely ad-funded service isn't the real customer. They're still at least somewhat the customer when they're still providing some of the revenue though.
I would disagree on this. The reason is that the main point of most ads is to induce artificial demand. When successful this is essentially making people think their lives are missing something, repeatedly. I think it is fairly self evident that at scale this simply leads to social discontent, materialism, and the overall degradation of a society.
There are endless studies, such as this [1] demonstrating a significant inverse relationship between ads and happiness. The more ads, the less happy people are. And I think it's very easy to see the causal relationship there. And this would apply even if the ad industry wasn't so scummy.
When I first visited Latvia, I thought it was a charming side effect of communism that store names were quite small on the façades. Was there an ethic of abjuring crass commercialism? Then I noticed the shadows left by larger store names above the small Latvian store names. It wasn't that Marxism Leninism called for demure commercial logos. The Latvians had just taken down the Russian signs. Commercial promotion is, I suppose, a condition of life,
I've often wondered what would happen if we _taxed_ advertising [0]. The same rationale applies: it'll never work, and it'll never even be tested, but I agree, it was fun to think about.
In Thailand signs are taxed based on its size, text language (Thai only, No text or multilingual text and Thai text are placed lower than other languages, Multilingual text), and static/dynamic (I assume this applies to both digital and trivision).
This also not only for advertising but also normal signs like the logo of the business on buildings. You'll see most people circumvent the more expensive multilingual rate by adding small Thai text at the top of the sign.
Unrelated, but another interesting fact is that some bus stops in Bangkok are completely funded by an advertising company. Of course, they'll get the ads space for free as a result, and they only offer it in viable locations. The current governor doesn't like this idea and settle for a less fancy bus stop paid by public money.
He talks about a Pigovian tax for ads, which is interesting. I don’t have any thoughts other than “yeah good idea.”
But, something I haven’t fully worked out but have vague suspicions about: are ads actually a tax-favorable business model under the current system? We watch ads in exchange for some service, if it wasn’t an ad-supported service we’d have to pay money for it, and that transaction would be taxed.
Of course, the transaction between the ad network and the company placing the ad is taxed. But it seems like they could have a lot of play, as far as picking where that transaction takes place…
Ads should at least be taxed as heavily as if we had paid for the thing with money, IMO.
You're forgetting a very important problem: hard to implement. Sugar in drinks and CO2 emissions are easily measured. The definition of what's an ad is much harder.
No need to wonder: the world would certainly be better without ads. Advertising is psychological manipulation. They should be illegal.
And don't whine about "how will new companies find customers?" They'll figure it out. Capitalism always finds a way. Business interests should always be secondary to the needs and safety of real people.
My experience is that people who make sweeping claims like "all advertising should be banned" have never run or managed a small business. There is simply no way to survive as one of the little guys without some kind of marketing.
Without adverts, the platform has less incentive to maximise engagement. They won't send you push notifications, they won't implement short form video, etc. My gym/ISP/email provider don't design their services on making me spend the whole day using them. If anything they don't want me using the service at all but I myself want to.
I'm imagining a world where ads on screens generate enough revenue to mean that rail and bus services are free. It would be annoying, but free public transport would also reduce car volumes improving transport for all.
It's unlikely ads would ever actually fund any meaningful real world product or service like public transport. The most they can fund is some crappy apps, websites and digital platforms, and most of the time they can barely do that.
It's only a matter of time before our ad-driven tech economy pops when they realise how much fraud is committed by the adtech companies, how little return these ads really give, and peoples susceptibility to ads further declines, causing them to exhaust even the most invasive and penetrative advertising techniques.
A nice idea I saw was a service where you can get a free/discounted public transport ticket for doing some squats or other exercise in front of a machine. Something like that would shift a lot of money from handling healthcare for the inactive over to providing free public transport.
I mean, infinitely so. I don't give a shit that you (the royal you, not literally you :p) and your business can't find their target demographic without ads, they are psychological manipulation of the worst kind and they should be eradicated from existence with prejudice. There is NO type of advertisement that is okay in my mind, whether it be a 5x5cm image in a black and white newspaper or the ubiquitous cancer that we're inundated with daily on the internet, none of it should exist. Moreover, if your business isn't possible without ads, then good riddance. Maybe at some point in the past I would've been okay with the "innocuous" ones like the newspaper ones, but the advertising industry and the psychotic, soulless ghouls that inhabit it have changed my opinion forever on it.
For every "innocent" and well intentioned ad out there, there are quite literally a billion cancerous ones that rely on pure deception to make the biggest buck out of you. Ads are the driving force behind the cancerous entity that is Meta and all the ills that they've brought upon the world such as actual fucking genocides. The "people" I've had the displeasure of meeting that come from advertising backgrounds have all been soulless psychopaths who would sell their own family for a bit of cash.
I mean just look at the type of shit they come up with in this very thread. It's all just games on how they can circumvent these kinda rules. "Oh you'll force me to let people skip my brainwashing? I'll just put up 20x more ads to make up for it!" Who even talks and thinks like this other than ghouls?
Why not. Just run with it sometimes. Get people to argue for ads.
> Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's fun to think about sometimes.
Yeah, sure. Get them to convince you how impractical it is. How the economy relies on it. How things “wouldn’t work” without it. Then you/they have just argued themselves into the position that society relies on this shitty practice to sustain itself. Then in turn: why ought we live like this?
- Improved incentive for the IT and medias industry. Users and viewers are the customers again.
- Removal of the culture of normalized lying that infects everyone to the point people don't see it anymore.
- Natural selection of product by actually asking people for money. Can't pay 2 euros / month for facebook? It deserves to die.
- Redirection of resources from marketing to useful things. Billions going back to R&D, quality control, etc.
- Brand forced to rely on quality and word of mouth again. No more temporary product trick. No more "one month brand lifetime" hack. No more "PR will save this disaster".
- Improved skin in the game. And you will see less reputation-damaging behavior because of this. Think twice about doing A/B testing, fake sales, use too many notifications. You need those saavy power users to spread the word now.
- Disappearance of old and new artificial social norms solely created by marketing firms to sell stuff that parasites our reality. No need for everybody to look the same, no need for diamonds for engagement rings, no "whole white family having breakfirst in a big house and everything is clean and they are all happy and hot" to sell coffee, no "big red guy with a beard" created by coca cola.
- Getting back on specs. You can't sell perfume and cars on an vague idea anymore.
- Children won't get conditioned from a young age to want stuff they don't need, think ideas they don't really have, and adopt behaviors that are harmful for them just so that a marketer can get 3% more engagement.
- Creating massive volume of bad content will not be a successful strategies anymore, since it's not about displaying ads. So content quality go up.
- Streets get nicer, with no more ads display. Clothes as well, with no more big logo making you look like a billboard.
- No more ads in your mail box! And you can redirect the money from the gov marketing budget to actually find email spammers as well.
- Removal of a huge means of accumulation and centralization of power. Right now, it's pay to win, and the more money you have, the more you can run ads, the more you can sell. Which means a small local shop cannot easily compete with a big one. But without ads, it's actually close to its own clients, and has an advantage to get their attention organically.
- People get back some part of their attention span.
The benefits are not superficial; they are immense!
Ads are a plague on our societies.
Evolving as humans requires us to find a way to ban them.
I doubt I will see it in my lifestyle, but we need to get rid of this parasite if we want to go to the next level.
This argument doesn’t make much sense to me. Claude Code, like any product, presumably has dozens of external dependencies. What’s so special about Bun specifically that motivated an acquisition?
A dependency that forms the foundation of your build process, distribution mechanisms, and management of other dependencies is a materially different risk than a dependency that, say, colorizes terminal output.
I’m doubtful that alone motivated an acquisition, it was surely a confluence of factors, but Bun is definitely a significant dependency for Claude Code.
> MIT code, let Bun continue develop it, once project is abandoned hire the developers.
Why go through the pain of letting it be abandoned and then hiring the developers anyway, when instead you can hire the developers now and prevent it from being abandoned in the first place (and get some influence in project priorities as well)?
If they found themselves pushing PRs to bun that got ignored and they wanted to speed up priority on things they needed, if the acq was cheap enough, this is the way to do it.
The logical conclusion here would be to have no door for the bathroom, but to have specifically the toilet in a separate subroom.
But I don’t think this makes much sense anyways. The hotel industry is not one that thrives from repeat patronage, and “the bathroom has no doors” features rarely in marketing.
Not sure how uncommon that is. Certainly a sink is often in an open alcove. The toilet and probably often the shower is in a subroom with a door.
Not sure how common sharing a room with a work colleague--especially of the opposite sex--or a family member who is a teen is. But traveling with friends, activity partners (hiking, etc.), so much of what's being discussed on this thread just isn't a real issue in my experience at least in most Western culture.
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