One common case I notice this is with FFMPEG. Everything that saves a video needs its own dialog with different settings. It would make a lot more sense if you had 1 single polished FFMPEG frontend that everyone just streamed data to.
On the other hand, I'm afraid that if this did happen that FFMPEG frontend would look like a GNOME app and I would hate using it.
Me, on the other hand, love ffmpeg, because I notice my ytdlp using it and my vlc player sometimes using it and I have two homemade powrshell scripts using it to convert flac to mp3 and whatever. I don't want to open a program and figure out it's UI for those things. It has a job, it does it well, you can sort of pipe things to it and I'm very happy.
I'm not sure you understood what I mean. I'm talking about applications like Krita using FFMPEG to export their data as video. Sometimes they include their own FFMPEG instead of using FFMPEG installed in the system. Each of them has its own dialog. The only way to input custom settings for FFMPEG would be to export in a lossless video format and then reencode using FFMPEG, when you should be able to just "connect" a data stream to an FFMPEG frontend as the input and the frontend has all the options you might want to customize how that data is turned into a .mp4 file or .mov file.
Want to generate a video, it's just a few lines of code. Want to connect the user's camera (with permission), it's just a few lines of code. Websockets? About 4 lines of code.
There could be 1000s of options for each of those but they mostly distilled it down to what most people need, and they're cross platform.
I'm pretty sure the only ad that would work on me would be an ad for an indie game, but indie game developers don't buy ads, they buy blue checkmarks on twitter then they try to game the algorithm. Even if I did see an ad for an indie game, I would probably not click on it, but just google its name instead.
What I mean to say is that there is a type of person that will never click on an ad, even if they want to buy the product. Worse yet, most of the time I do click on an ad, it's a misclick.
But I don't see this as a failure of the ad industry. I just think I'm the edge case.
Last time I asked someone that (over a decade ago), the answer I got was that ad companies wouldn't spend millions of dollars on their ad campaigns if they didn't have proof of effectiveness. Sure, okay, that's good evidence that the ad campaigns are effective at getting some people to buy the product. But what's the evidence that I, personally, am influenced by ads? Rather than "many people are influenced by ads, don't think you're immune"?
Especially because I, personally, actively avoid advertising. I block it on the Internet, I avoid watching live TV and instead buy (or check out from the library) DVDs of shows I'm interested in... And the billboards on the highway are mostly for services I don't need (like injury lawyers) so I have almost never bought something because I saw it advertised on a billboard. The only exceptions are the ones where the billboard said "(name of restaurant) 10 miles ahead" and I thought "Oh good, I had been hoping to find exactly that restaurant, I'll pull over in 10 miles". But I was already looking for that product, the billboard ad just helped me find it.
Not to mention that if all ads were like that — "Hey, our restaurant is at exit 183, we do really good fajitas" — I would be far, FAR less annoyed by advertising. If that was the only kind of ads you saw on the Internet, I might not have sought out adblockers in the first place.
> I was already looking for that product, the billboard ad just helped me find it.
that is what ad-infested society does to everyone… everything you end up spending money on you sure think you were going to already :) you sound here exactly like my wife does when she gets pulled in bu an ad - “oh we really needed new curtains and these just came across the billboard, the ones we have are like 7 weeks old…”
> that is what ad-infested society does to everyone… you end up spending money on you sure think you were going to already
Your followup example of this is an impulse buy that happened adjacent to ad exposure. For that particular confluence, your theory could bear out.
But I'm not sure folks do that with any regularity. And for folks who rarely impulse buy or don't see/hear ads in spaces they control - I don't think they run into it.
Give me a little credit for knowing my own mind, please. I meant exactly what I wrote.
Edit: I mean, yes, some people do think they came up with the idea that was just suggested to them. Stage magicians have used suggestion tricks for years. But part of my point is that billboards that simply remind you that a product exist, and your own preexisting desires then make you want to buy it, are the form of advertising I am least annoyed by. Even people susceptible to ads had some kind of preexisting desire for the product (I really don't like those curtains, I know we only bought them two months ago but I'm having buyer's remorse, I want something else, oh look, curtains on sale!) or else the ad wouldn't work. I mean, if I know I don't have psoriasis then I won't care about psoriasis medication ads in the slightest. But if I suspect I have psoriasis (maybe I do have it, or maybe I'm a hypochondriac) then the ads will actually have a chance of influencing me.
Thing is, as far as I myself am concerned, I'm a pretty content guy. What I want is more good books to read, more good open-source software to be created, and to be able to enjoy time with my wife and kids. Almost none of which are desires that will make me susceptible to most ads. (Though if the ad was "Hey, Lois Bujold has a new book series out!" then yes, I'd be susceptible to that ad. But again, pre-existing desire: Bujold has only written two books out of her entire oeuvre that I've disliked. A much higher like-to-dislike ratio than most authors).
Metric implies there is some way to objectively measure it. I'm not sure if that's true.
But almost everyone thinks the same as you do, and yet ads are huge business. How are you affected? I don't know, but my first guess is brand perception, regardless of your self-diagnosis. If a company is advertising a certain time-limited sale, some of their value will come from conversions taking that offer. But some, maybe most, is the brand impression that people get over time. Think "I never heard of that" vs "Oh yeah, I've seen that somewhere".
Does the average person really think the same way I do? I'd assume the average person does click on an ad for something they want sometimes, and they do convert. They do things that are measurable, so they have ad profiles that show the sort of ads that are effective on them.
I'm not saying that I'm immune to ads. What I'm saying is that my "ad profile" probably only says what sort of content I consume, if anything at all. Ironically, since I barely consume gaming-related content these days, I assume there is no way for ad companies to figure out that's the one thing I would actually buy from an ad.
Instead they show me ads for things I would never spend a cent on, like Decentraland, just because I've watched some tech videos.
Is that quote really true? I've always understood "bottleneck" as the slowest part of a system, so a system without a bottleneck simply has all parts being equally fast, it isn't necessarily infinitely fast.
The funny thing is how these pizzas were going to 5 full-stack engineers. You would think with this many people there would be a specialist for each layer of the stack, but it's just 5 people who have to be able to do everything.
It also provides different opportunities for growth compared to other social media. A video that gets over half a million views on TikTok may not get 5 thousand on Youtube, or even 10 views on Instagram or Facebook.
It's not just different videos, Tiktok is much better at recommending videos by very small creators and people with no followers. On Instagram or Facebook if you don't already have a large following you most likely wont get any views at all no matter how well your video matches the platform. YouTube often pushes big creators that already made it big while Tiktok allows me to discover new and niche ones.
You build a Twitter. Profiles have posts, posts can have images, etc. It's very easy to model the database.
But then how do you make money with it? Now you need to build a separate system for advertising? Or do you want to sell subscriptions? Which means you need to build a separate system to handle payments. This is usually the big one, because when you handle money, what happens if there is a bug and you charge someone without delivering anything? How do you prevent fraud? How do you handle disputes?
Someone posted something illegal. What do you do in this situation? Do you call the police? The FBI? What kind of data do you give the authorities? How much data SHOULD you have been logging in the first place in case something like this happens?
One user doesn't like you so he bought a botnet to DDoS your website. How do you handle this? Are they mass posting? Mass creating accounts? Is it possible for them to exhaust all the usernames possible and then nobody can create an account anymore?
Your website is online but if the server blows up you'll lose all the data in the database. You need backups. You need a system to ensure the backups are actually working. But then some guy from the UK said he wants his posts all deleted. What are you going to do now, because his posts are also in the backups, and you don't want to touch those.
Trolls are posting things against the ToS. Who handles these things? Shadowban? So there needs to be a shadowban system? Moderators? So there needs to be a moderator-only section of the website? Should this be integrated with the main website or not?
Then you look at this horrendous mess of 6 paragraphs and you think back about the first paragraph that already did everything you wanted from Twitter. All these other systems, most of the work, and all you actually wanted was the first paragraph.
Startups have no users and no data to start with, and if they fuck up security, well, they just fail sooner than expected.
Once you get past a certain size, you have very different sorts of problems. Any idiot can vibe code a facebook lookalike, but the real one has to handle hundreds of millions of users and posts while being a target for state actors.
This week Adobe decided, out of nowhere, to kill their 2D animation product (Animate, which is based on Flash) to focus on AI. I'm already seeing animators post that Adobe killed their entire career.
Although that feels a bit exaggerated, I feel it's not far from the truth. If there were, say, 3 closed source animation software that could do professional animation in total, and they just all decided to just kill the product one day, it would actually kill the entire industry. Animators would have no software to actually create animation with. They would have to wait until someone makes one, which would take years for feature parity, and why would anyone make one when the existing software thought such product wasn't a good idea to begin with?
I feel this isn't much different with AI. It's a rush to make people depend on a software that literally can't run on a personal computer. Adobe probably loves it because the user can't pirate the AI. If people forget how to use image editing software and start depending entirely on AI to do the job, that means they will forever be slaves to developers who can host and setup the AI on the cloud.
Imagine if people forgot how to format a document in Word and they depended on Copilot to do this.
Now I think you touched the perfect point on why this is being shoved through our throats, and why I'm very reticent in using it.
This is not about big increases of productivity, this is whole thing about selling dependence on privately controlled, closed source tools. To concentrate even more power in the hands of a very few, morally questionable people.
On the other hand, I'm afraid that if this did happen that FFMPEG frontend would look like a GNOME app and I would hate using it.