Time to ban all adverts everywhere. I'm not the only one who is fed up with ads.
I don't see ads, thanks to ad blocking tech in browsers and smartphones. Any time that happens to fail and I get to endure an ad, I am amazed that regular people without ad blocking tech can endure this onslaught.
The time to negotiate a "middle ground" is long past. Let's not even entertain that idea.
An acceptable middle ground could have been designated areas for ads, which you have to seek out to see them. Think of the Yellow Pages.
Ad companies need to be reined in. They cannot control themselves. They are lobbying against all limits and controls. The only solution is to eradicate ads entirely and to make sure that anyone who gets that idea will never get it again.
There needs to be serious reform or just abolition altogether of advertising on things like Smart TVs
We bought a TV for my grandfather in his nursing home as he was dying from Alzheimers. All TVs available now are Smart TVs, which are already difficult to work for the elderly.
I'm visiting my grandmother now and watching the TV we had provided him, and it inserts ads into everything available to watch from the most accessible menu. The last ad block was 8 ads long, during which one of those was repeated twice, and had all the subtlety of a row of slot machines at a casino (I think it was for some silly tablet game which I assume has in-app purchases)
Straight up cruelty that should result in some serious fines or even arrests.
I bought a Sony OLED a couple years ago. I was able to set it up in “dumb” mode and all the default apps could be manually removed. It acts like a monitor and shows nothing but our Apple TV at powerup.
The home screen’s just a nice static background with a settings app and nothing else. I never see it unless I press the appropriate button, but it’s nice to know there isn’t an onslaught of junk waiting for me if I do.
YMMV but other brands with Google TV may have similar “dumb” capabilities.
I think in cases of people with Alzheimer’s or other elderly people who can’t really operate things besides play/stop/next dumb screen isn’t going to work. Mostly because you have to hook up something else that will require additional steps to operate.
My father doesn’t have any serious dementia or signs of Alzheimer’s - he is 65 but typing in anything on keyboard is still a major hassle for him. If he could have play/stop/next button it would work for him.
This is irrelevant to what OP said which is that it this should be the default. One anecdote of "with effort and technical expertise I returned the appliance to a workable state" doesn't mean things are ok.
edit: Im not trying to be snarky, I think your reply was genuinely trying to be helpful, but its not ok that we're being sold this crap
I agree it should be the default, but this TV was readily placed into dumb mode at first powerup. Set your country & language, select dumb mode ("Basic TV"), skip WiFi and most would be satisfied with the result.
Some effort's needed to clean up the homescreen, but you never need to see it. Hand your grandparents a basic programmable remote without extras like the home button. They should be good to go.
I pretty much make it standard practice to get an apple tv or whatever streaming device for all tvs and not allow internet access to the tvs. You have zero control over the tv, so why subject yourself or others to it instead of getting a $50 to $150 device.
This. This is the problem. TVs with user-hostile firmware are the only options available. Imagine if the only beds available were smart beds that wake you up with advertisements and project ads onto your ceiling while you try to sleep. Honestly it seems like we're almost there
The splash page on that website seems to be primarily AI-generated images. It looks cheap to say the least - such an obvious corner cut it's hard to have confidence in the product.
If we had an effective government, this would have already been solved by a FTC issue of fraudulent sale.
If I sell a widget, but do not transfer full control to the buyer, that should be considered a fraudulent sale that was misclassified from a rental.
Same for a computer. Same for a phone. Or a refrigerator. Or a car.
(Old person comment incoming) I remember when working on hardware from the 70's and earlier, the manufacturers would glue in a full schematic on the back plate. Reparability was absolute. Now, its "how can we screw you over with cryptographic signing of individual hardware"
Reparability and ownership go hand in hand. And it also strongly goes towards sustainability and ecology, with not needing as much resources.
But the "Smart TV" in your comment, pcthrowaway, is that in 5 years, the 'Smart' OS will be either so slow to be unusable, die cause a $.10 part failed, or other really dumb ewaste reason.
The fundamental problem here is a little broader than ads, but "ads" mostly cover it. The problem is the commoditization of human attention. The incentive to catch and sell attention is poisonous to all human endeavors. Some things need to grab your attention to fulfill their purpose, I'm not against the idea of something directing a person's attention. Where it becomes a problem is the murky line of that direction of attention being something that is bottled and sold, or otherwise used in the interest of the distracter rather than the distracted.
So ads that someone seeks out of their own volition? Fine. That's just marketing material, and falls in the same category as every product announcement, press release, etc. What if a product catalog is mixed in with coupons or other rewards? Not fine anymore, you've mixed up reward-seeking and information-seeking.
If someone means to direct their attention and gets distracted by an important notice, like "I mean to drive down this road, and the stop sign grabbed my attention," that's also fine. The information is relevant to the human and important for augmenting their intention. But if you download an app and try to do something, only to be met with a banner/popup/whatever informing you of other products on offer by the company? Well, they're not selling your attention to third parties, but they are monetizing it by taking your intention to use one product and attempting to redirect it into a potential purchase of another, so that's out. If you want, you can include a clearly-labelled "our other offerings" section in the app, out of the way, somewhere it would only be encountered by someone seeking it out.
Distracting people cannot be allowed to be one of the main drivers of our economy.
It isn’t commoditised. It’s priced to a tee. If you can afford to keep your attention, you do.
The problem is we’ve let sociopaths like Zuckerberg and Mosseri convince us that we’re born into their servitude. That the natural order for our kids is for their attention to be stolen. That their parents have to then pay and work to buy it back.
> Distracting people cannot be allowed to be one of the main drivers of our economy.
Sure it can. Apple, Google and Microsoft get millions of impressions every day and everyone accepts it. Just because it's uncomfortable for you to think about doesn't mean that it's not happening, at-scale, this very minute.
Well, they cannot stop it. We're already in a post-advertising world and the US has no consumer protection laws to protect your attention.
If your OEM decides to serve you ads, you don't get to complain. The alternative is to buy a device with adblock or Airplane Mode and supposedly this represents a healthy, competitive economy.
Okay, go strike. Stop buying iPhones and smart-devices and let me know how many people follow your righteous warpath.
I don't disagree with your thesis. But the time for revolution has long since passed, this admin won't do anything about the ads. Nor will it's constituents.
One that is really insane to me is Ads when driving on the highway. I can’t recall seeing that in Europe, but now in Canada when I take the highway there’s Ads everywhere. Some of them rotate.
Ironically they also have a sign that changes, one of the updates is “don’t drive distracted”… and like, I wasn’t distracted until the sign flashed at me lol.
What you are observing is the trick the industry used to get approval for changing LED billboards— they “donate” say fifteen hours per month to public service announcements. This kind of concession is gold to an ambitious public servant, the old prohibitions never stood a chance. The PSA could be “stop electronic billboards” but that was the way they got through high-friction public processes.
My state has a neat legal trick that applies to most major highways: You can set up a big tall sign to advertise but it has to be for a product or service drivers can stop and buy on the premises.
This removes much of the incentive for spamming enormous signs and renting them out to the highest bidder. That may change if it becomes really cheap to put a functional vending machine below.
Europe has billboards too. Perhaps not everywhere, and not as bad as some other places, but it does exist, and it is infuriating. I don't think I've seen them flash intentionally, but nobody seems to be too interested in fixing broken LED bulbs.
I even saw a "you should be looking at the road" ad on one of those billboards.
Legal ads in product catalogues only. Product catalogues are actually useful and nobody is subjected to them unless they chose to seek one out and pick it up willingly.
Wait, what? I'm confused. Is the entire product catalogue considered an ad? Or do you mean parts of a product catalogue can contain adverts? I'd argue a product catalogue is not advertising at all.
Anderton's (a music retailer in the UK) has an enormously popular YouTube channel (1M subs) which is basically just them demoing their stock while shooting the breeze. It's 100% an advertisement, but it's the sort that most people (including myself, who otherwise hates ads) is fine with because you have to seek it out.
I'm a huge buff for music gear/tech. I love seeing the newest plugins, pedals, software. I actively seek it out. I know demos of products are effectively advertisements, but they are the right type of ads and aimed at a crowd that seeks info the right way and likely is a higher probability of making a purchase.
I consider each product listing in a catalogues to be ads, or perhaps the whole catalogues is one big aggregate ad. Either way, I'm fine with them. Product catalogues are mostly innocuous and usually provide more empirical product information than other forms of advertisement.
Of course it's advertising. It's telling you about products you can buy, pushed by people who want you to buy those products, and they can pay money to be on an earlier page (we should probably ban that). But the general idea of a product catalogue shouldn't be illegal even if ads are illegal, because it's actually useful and non-invasive.
I think a decent middle ground would be to allow contextual advertising and ban personalized advertising. That is, it would be fine to show you ads based on where you are, what you are doing or what you are searching on the internet, but not based on what you did on another website or where you had lunch yesterday.
Of course this would add friction for finding the appropriate targets but it would still allow pretty decent business for adtech. it just would be a bit different.
(I'm pretty sure that the line between contextual and personalized ads is blurry, but I leave that to be solved by lawmakers and judges. Its kind of their core competence. And to be clear, what I personally think should be done would be much, much stricter ban, but this is a compromise proposal I think should be agreeable by all parties who are the slightest interested in the harm current adtech is doing)
The main arguments I hear against banning all ads is that it will hurt small businesses, a better solution might be to ban all adds for companies making above X amount per year, or even better: create systems where users pay for ads themselves, then the incentives would switch to be in favor of consumers.
In any case, totally agree, ad companies are out of control, I'm hoping more Kagi like services start appearing soon.
Banning companies above a size still allows a unhappy medium where only "small businesses" BUY the same horrible ads and we drop one or two Army or IBM ads from the lineup.
No because small businesses arent hiring ad agencies who spent years studying psychology in order to manipulate people into doing what the company wants, not what the person wants. This is very much an issue of scale
I tend to think that banning things is almost never the right answer. Who gets to decide what counts as an ad? What's stopping governments from designating speech they don't like as an ad?
Taxing them is an option. Disallow advertising and marketing as a deductible business expense. You can still advertise, but it comes out of the bottom line. This encourages putting more money into product value and less into promotion.
The harm they cause is so massive compared to the small amount of benefit. Everyone got along just fine when they had to go look for the things they wanted (like with a search engine!), or they did without.
> Time to ban all adverts everywhere. I'm not the only one who is fed up with ads.
This is a terrible idea. Users should have choice & control.
I'll say something that on the surface level seems controversial, at least to HN: Some users prefer ads. And those users should be allowed that choice.
Ads are part of a value exchange. It's disingenuous, imho, to frame the question as "Do you want 'X' with or without ads?" Absent any other criteria most people would naturally say without ads. But I feel it's disingenuous because it overlooks the value exchange.
A better example: Would you prefer Netflix with ads for $7.99/month with ads, or $17.99/month without ads?
A lot of people are choosing the ads tiers. It's the fastest growing tier. Personally, I have the ads-free tier, but I can make that choice for myself. The people wanting the ads tier should be able to make that choice too. I don't see the value in taking it away from them.
I don't deny there are bad experiences. I do think Samsung is making a mistake & damaging customer trust with the refrigerator thing. I likely won't be buying one in the future.
Like anything, advertising can be done well or it can be done badly. I don't use Instagram myself, but I have a lot of friends who love fashion who do & say they're on their to follow brands & find deals. They find the ads a good way to discover some new fashion product & snag a good discount.
Likewise Amazon sent a catalog to my house. My kids are using it to think of what they want to ask Santa. A catalog is basically a book of ads.
This is one of the major political problems of the 21st century, convincing people that many of the problems they see in society are in fact free choices made by individuals, and not necessarily something that needs to be fixed from the top down. The human tendency to impose one's own preferences on others is strong, and it seems every generation needs to learn the lesson anew.
Unfortunately, the whole point is that along with the fridge/whatever tech you purchase a billboard and willingly bring ads into your home. Of course ads on purchased devices should be mandatory AND we customers will soon be expected to pay a "subscription fee" to temporarily unsubscribe from the ads. What kind of company would possibly make ads opt-in? IMO allowing the owner to turn off ads is a problem (for the company), not a solution
That's fine. They can simply charge for the product what it costs to make, like they always did before, and if they find that nobody uses the "enable ads" button (because why would they?) they can save some maintenance effort by removing that button. They might even find the fridge doesn't need a wifi chip and can be cheaper.
It's not as easy with some digital devices (even TVs these days), but fridges are a category where I can decisively say people who don't want ads can just buy a version without ads.
If a fridge maker wants to sell you a cheaper fridge subsidized by ads, I don't think that's a problem as long as tracking is optional.
That’s true as long as there are options that don’t have ads.
There used to be TVs that don’t have ads or tracking, but that’s not the case anymore (or so I’ve heard; haven’t bought a TV personally yet). I don’t see why fridges would be immune to that.
Smart TVs became the norm when they reached the same price point as normal TVs. That's when the ad bullshit came up. You can still buy smart TVs without ads though, going for Android TV and put it in "basic TV mode" will disable pretty much all the crapware. You won't be able to use the TV to watch Netflix or HBO without a third party streaming dongle, though, which is probably why nobody does it.
The smart part of a fridge isn't inherent to the technology necessary (unlike DRM'ed TV streams and apps). In fact, bolting the display (or ice maker for that matter) into the door makes it conduct more heat and therefore perform worse. I don't know about other economic regions, but here the energy label is quite clearly visible on the front of every fridge, so they can't hide the power waste either.
I have yet to see a smart fridge cheaper than a similar normal fridge. Partially because manufacturers seem to market this crap like a luxury feature.
The cheapest smart fridge I can find on a reliable web store, at least here, is three times the price of a normal fridge (€1500 vs €500). Even in the huge "American style" fridges, there's a sizable price difference (€1500 vs €1000) before you get to the first smart fridge.
At least with fridges a screen is extra cost to be built in.
On other hand with TVs unless you are doing just a monitor, you need something to control it. And I mean like digital TV, selecting input, possibly show some overlay or controls. And at that point just slapping a computer in it is lot faster development cycle. And then you might as well support streaming services as general population seem to want those.
I think that is too much, but it should be almost entirely banned, with only very limited exceptions. Advertisements which you are specificailly looking for, such as catalogs for those specific things, could be one of those exceptions.
However, even regardless of these exceptions, there will need to be limits, such as: do not be dishonest, do not emit light, do not waste power, do not spy on you, do not block the view of other things, do not try to prevent you from seeing them, they cannot pay you or give you discounts for seeing the ads, etc.
> The time to negotiate a "middle ground" is long past.
I think it will need to be a "nearly banned" ground rather than the "middle" ground, though.
> Ad companies need to be reined in. They cannot control themselves.
This part I agree with.
> The only solution is [...] to make sure that anyone who gets that idea will never get it again.
But, this part, I think that won't work. Even if it does work (which it won't), it is bad for freedom of speech and freedom of opinion.
No there aren't. There are not billions of people motivated for the total elimination of all advertisements everywhere. The vast majority of humans do not care one way or another, and most of those who dislike advertising probably wouldn't support banning them entirely.
My wife also likes ads. It drives me crazy. Half of the time she’s on instagram, she’s paging through ads. At least we have agreed to minimize our children’s exposure to ads. For example if there’s an educational show only on YouTube I will download it and they watch it offline. We will never buy a kitchen appliance with ads on it.
I think, if given the conscious choice, people would choose to not have ads as they are now. The point is, that choice is not given, and most people don't know how to eliminate them from their lives, or that they even have a choice
A lot happens in the world because people are passive, or prioritize their attention on other things, not that they are "okay" with it. If it was made easy for them, they'd choose it.
Lobbying ensures such choices are taken away from people, outside of the envelop of actionability by most people.
> The vast majority of humans are not benefiting from it and are therefore motivated against it.
The vast majority of humans do not benefit from you, personally, owning a car, but that doesn't mean we're all motivated to call a towing company to your house.
You must own shares in Google. The vast majority of humans are motivated against inequality. Advertising creates a larger wealth gap. The fact that you're annoyed by me says a lot more about the type of person you are than anything else. And no I'm not "trolling". Grow up and reconsider your insane position.
The vast majority of humans don't consider advertisement to be as fundamental a form of inequality as you seem to.
The fact that you can't comprehend my disagreement in good faith demonstrates that there's no point in continuing this conversation. No, I don't own shares in Google, nor am I insane. I think you're the one who needs to broaden their horizons a bit. Good day.
Back in the day, I chose to buy the Kindle with ads to save a few dollars. (I think it was $10 cheaper; looks like it's $20 now[0].) I 100% found this a worthwhile trade-off, and so did thousands of other consumers.
My own hypothesis is that our lives will become so saturated with ads that they will completely lose their effectiveness, advertisers and platforms will finally be forced to acknowledge that they aren't effective, and a monetization crisis will follow. Subscriptions everywhere.
It’s more like drugs in that they will be less effective , but not completely, so we will continue to get more exposures as advertisers compete for attention
They won't lose effectiveness because once in a while you will actually find something you want, click on the ad, and buy it. The reason there's ads everywhere is because they actually do work. It's not a hypothesis.
I didn't claim what you think I did. I said that I hypothesize that they will become increasingly ineffective with time. Data already shows it's trending in that direction.
Then there needs to be stronger campaigns against addictive advertising (ironic) but we also need to enforce education about malicious advertising and marketing. People need the knowledge of how to defend themselves against advertising weapons. The current status quo is everyone for themselves. Even the too few volunteer shepherds (you) have no pull against giant money machines.
My parents were architects and my sister and I lived our first few years in Honolulu before moving to the SF Bay Area. There were no billboards in Hawaii, and I recall distinctly the first drive from SFO the the East Bay. I was unable to avoid reading and staring at every billboard next to the freeway and it literally made me throw up. I didn't understand what was happening.
Of course, I was quickly conditioned off of that response to billboards, which I consider natural.
Ads exist because options are available. There exists the need to stand out and differentiate the moment there are more than one choice for the consumers. Commercial ads didn't exist under communism for a reason.
Your resume is ad. Cover letter is ad. Think about different word choices you made when creating your resume?
If explicit advertising doesn't exist then implicit one will. Which one is worse? I'm sure you've seen all of the product placements on movies and shows.
Product placement is already illegal unless explicitly signposted (a specific state mark being shown on the screen while it is happening) in certain types of shows, in the EU at least.
No, ads are not the same thing as free speech at all. "Free speech" is the right to say anything to anyone *who is willing to listen*. You don't have a right to come into my home and tell me your ideas about immigration policy - though you do have a right to talk about immigration policy in other places!
The government has to guarantee that there are places for people to say things. But the government does not have to guarantee that there are places for people to say things *in my own home*. And similarly, I think most public spaces should be free from ads and other 'attention pollution'. If a company wants to write about their own product, that's fine, but they must do so in a place where other people are free to seek them out, as opposed to doing so in a way that forces the writing upon others without consent.
There is no need to be a puritan against any form of pornography to expect consensus against having most addictive/eye-catching porn ostensibly displayed everywhere in the public sphere. And it’s perfectly clear that it’s actually possible to be simultaneously fine with people watching all the porn they want in their private sphere if they are warned willing adults.
If you change words in a text then the meaning changes. Even if all ads are speech (I don't think they are, but I don't need to argue that), not all speech is advertisement. You can say your piece in one of many other forms that doesn't hijack my attention.
Time, place, and manner restrictions already exist on speech. I'm not an anti-ad absolutist, but it would be perfectly fine by me, and most people not financially incentivized otherwise, to place time, place, and manner restrictions on ads. I'd love a blanket ban on billboards, for example.
The term free speech is misleading. It is really freedom of speech. I.e. someone who says something doesn't have to be afraid of prosecution because of what they said.
It isn't the speech that is being protected it is the person who says it.
Using the term "free speech" creates those weird scenarios where now we have someone argue that the US Constitution mandates ads to be everywhere.
You might be safe as long as the ad is on a website but stupid laws that shouldn't exist like the DMCA can make it illegal to block ads when you have to circumvent a technological measure in order to block those ads. Blocking ads and the steps needed to block them might also violate some product's EULA which could result in civil judgements against you.
> DMCA can make it illegal to block ads when you have to circumvent a technological measure in order to block those ads. Blocking ads and the steps needed to block them might also violate some product's EULA which could result in civil judgements against you.
Your issue there is with the government. No disagreement from me in this regard :)
The problem of course isn't the fact that government and laws exist. Most of us are happy that we have government and laws. The alternative is very ugly and doesn't lend itself to progress or prosperity.
The problem is that our government was allowed to be bribed/corrupted by corporate interests to pass bad laws designed to protect their profits and enforce control by taking freedom from consumers. The true villain here isn't government, government was just the tool they leveraged against us.
It's supposed to be our job to insist that our government work for the interests of "we the people" and we failed. The solution now is to get rid of corrupt politicians and the bad laws they passed and replace them with good ones that preserve our freedoms and don't put corporate interest ahead of the people's.
Sadly, our entire political system has been carefully refined over centuries to make it harder and harder to keep our government accountable to the people but hopefully it's not too late to change that situation within the democratic framework we've created.
The founding fathers knew that the system wasn't perfect and would need to be modified as things changed and flaws were discovered. Making it work by "doing it right this time" was the point. That's not a sign of a bad system, it's a good thing!
Of course, nothing about government itself prevents adults from engaging in consensual transactions, and only a tiny percentage of laws do. Sometimes those laws are stupid and sometimes they are good to have. The original plan (and I still think it was a good one) was that we would have the ability to remove the bad laws and add good ones as needed. That process mostly even works, but with corruption and bribery in our government going unchecked it usually just works for a small few and the rest of us get shafted as a result.
That is a very weak argument. I don't have any way to decline seeing the ads before I do. I can't disable tracking by disabling js because, like a parasite, tracking software has uses what is necessary technology for websites to function.
Otherwise this is a very weak argument. Using the Internet is approximately mandatory in our current society. "Don't use the Internet" is not useful advice.
Nope. Something only a person benefiting from such cancer that ad business is would say that (and there are tons of those here on HN lets be honest, better half of faangs has ad-paid ultra high salaries and bonuses).
Ultimately its just another manipulation to part you with your money in other ways than you intended, nothing more and nothing less.
I love the idea, but our whole world is built on advertising. A world without ads does not seem possible. The internet mostly works only because of advertisements.
I would not go back. YouTube is a wonderful thing that I can't afford to pay for, and I don't want to live without. There are so many creators I love that would not be able to create and share beautiful things if they didn't get ad money. It's not all bad.
But if I had to choose one or the other, I'd choose no ads.
And that's only comparing "then" to "now". I'm confident that "now" will get worse in the future, making "then" all the more appealing!
I'm all for the idea of small content creators being able to afford to create their work. I wish content creation did not attract so many people who only do it for money, though. Maybe this would be achievable if the rewards were lower. Advertising sucks all the air out of the room for alternative funding mechanisms. If ads were eliminated, there would be other mechanisms.
However, back in reality, I'll concede that (e.g.) Google's massive ad revenue has given them the ability to try a thousand other things, a handful of which will be long-term valuable to the world. But the cost is immense.
That's what YouTube premium is. The fact that someone with no money gets access to all of YouTube seems like a win to me. If the only way to access was premium the world would be a worse place wouldn't it?
The web precedes commercialization, but many tons of money were pumped into the web post-commercialization, so a lot changed quickly after that.
There were free ways to get on the net, and to host web pages, before 1995. And for many years after that, you could pay for ISP access, which would come with the ability to host pages.
We're still paying for ISP access, we just get fewer services with it. That could change.
> A world without ads does not seem possible. The internet mostly works only because of advertisements.
Wow you were fed that lie and you swallowed it right up. It's actually scary that you've been so thoroughly convinced that you've fallen into learned helplessness as a result. Of course it isn't impossible to have a world without ads (at least not intrusive/unwanted ones). The internet didn't have ads when it started and doesn't need them now. No, we don't have to surrender ourselves to constant abuse by adverting, or abandon entire mediums of communication just to rid ourselves of them.
I agree with you on the total ad ban, but this has more about schizophrenia than ads. I've had to care for someone with schizoaffective disorder and she would tell me the smoke detectors were spying on us because of the red light in it, so we had to cover it with electrical tape or she would become too distressed. She told me the cats were spies with CIA microchips in them. The fridge ad is incidental -- if weren't the fridge it would have been something else.
I agree, ads are inserted everywhere, also hidden, and has surpassed the physiological threshold and brain barriers for a more healthy life (e.g. attention and feelings).
I think Advertising is the issue where I have the most radical views. I don't think it is a terribly controversial view anymore.
In the past when taking to people about this I have asked them to come up with an example of something funded by advertising that has not been corrupted by it. In recent years nobody even wants to take up that challenge, it is far more common for them to concede I'm right on that point.
It's a definite shift 8n public opinion but I'm still a bit wary when people change their views to agree with me when much of their world view seems unfounded. I don't really accept the us vs them narrative. I don't think billionaires are necessarily evil, I certainly don't think the solution to hyper-capitalism is to abandon all elements of society (which seems to be a growing belief), or that socialism an capitalism are fundamentally incompatible. I'd like people to agree with me about the properties of a thing rather than by whether proponents of it are on you tr8be or an opposing tribe.
I'd like a free society where that freedom is limited only by the harm you can do to others. Prevention of harm should be through robust and evidence based regulation.
I think there is a good case to be made that all advertising is harmful to some extent. There are certainly examples that are clearly harmful evading any form of regulation. When people break the rules that currently exist, what motivation do the6 hav3 to mitigate their behaviour? This is a failure of government. I'm not sure if adding more rules that can be broken with impunity would help.
Regulators need the power to inflict punishment that rule breakers actually feel. Enough that it is logical for even an amoral entity to obey the rules. That doesn't seem like a complicated thing, but I feel like it would go a long way healing society.
To be clear, Dems are about as unlikely to do this as the Trump administration is. This is the sort of generational reform that requires a redefining of a political party.
Ads really aren't that bad. Targeted ads may even help you discover products you'll enjoy.
The ad in the article is pretty obviously an ad to anyone that can read the words, "New Series. Start Watching".
Ads like these that randomly display during idle is hardly what I consider invasive.
Hopefully OP's sister gets her mental health under control, but I wouldn't immediately raise pitch forks to ban an entire industry vital to the economy and business-consumer communication.
Why should one have to endure the intrusion? Why does every product need adverts as it seems to be the place society is going? They are that bad and their place is only potentially in the places that people are looking for said products.
When every product has adverts, is it a choice any longer? Even finding devices, like TV's without ads is more difficult( no on is advertising them :) ) and paying more is often not an option.
And a banner ad may display on a laptop in your home, what's your point? Location or device type matters not. This ad doesn't interrupt the user or demand any attention.
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It's a bit trite, but also true -- a significant portion of reddit is totally made up. It's worse than it was a few years ago, but I have no way whatsoever to measure it. Occasionally I bump into youtube videos which are just narrations of reddit posts which tell some interesting or controversial story. They all really sound fabricated. There's no way for me to know with certainty, but I think extreme skepticism is the safer assumption for any large reddit.
Everything on the internet is fake. That is as true now as it always was.
For every real post, I can make up a fake one that's more agreeable to the hivemind and therefore will be more upvoted. Since you see a limited amount of posts in a session, you will only see fake posts and the real ones will be hidden forever.
On Reddit? It should...
These were historically almost always made up after people looked into it.
To be clear, the picture is likely real. The backstory to it probably not.
The people that actually feel like they've had the episode would almost certainly not go on social media with it.
The venn diagram of people sharing such content, having the money to buy such a gigantic smart fridge and suffering from schizophrenia is miniscule
Its not minuscule at all. Some studies have employment rates for schizophrenics approaching 50%. In any case the rate is not 0%. Apparently when you look at the literature you find conclusions such as:
Very low employment rates are not intrinsic to schizophrenia, but appear to reflect an interplay between the social and economic pressures that patients face, the labour market and psychological and social barriers to working.[0]
Barriers like you believing you can generalize all schizophrenics to be poor/unemployed and unable to earn.
I did now and am even more certain it's made up now.
I'm not sure how anyone can honestly think this is a person talking about their family. This is like a textbook made believe story people have been doing since Reddit got popular in early 2010s.
For this story to be real, you'll have to add a fourth and fifth circle to the diagram with a family member being close enough to the person suffering from the illness to be confided in and being so karma hungry to utilize their personal story which is likely shameful to them for going viral on Reddit.
> the schizophrenic sister's name happens to be Carol ...
Obviously made up.
Why? because no-ones' sister is ever called "Carol" ? Or because people of that name don't get schizophrenia?
I consider myself sane, but if I saw a billboard addressing me by name, I would do a double-take at least. I can easily understand how it would have an impact and look like a schizophrenic symptom.
The TV show advert with that text actually does exist, I've seen it.
Given that, what are the odds that some day a) it is seen, b) by someone called Carol, c) who is susceptible to being affected by it. I would say substantial.
Assuming that it's "so unlikely because Carol" seems to be the mistake.
No matter what name is picked for a fictional protagonist, some people will match it. If it's a real name, then people have it, pretty much by definition.
But, this doesn't really reflect one way or the other on this story being true or not. The mistake is in thinking that it does.
Somehow it all happened just in time to coincide with the release of this big show: Samsung rolling out ads(a big story in its own), Pluberis (or whatever the name of the show) from the creator of the Breaking Bad on Apple TV, schizophrenic sister that is named Carol.
Totally NOT made up.
Not related at all, but I have this very exciting business idea – you can make billions, can you contact me via email in my bio? Not a scam, 100%.
Name matches will happen regardless of the name chosen for a fictional person. "named Carol" specifically vs other names is an irrelevance. You put too much on it.
> Totally NOT made up.
Once more for the hard of reading, I refer you to what I said earlier, "We don't know the truth of this at all."
> but I have this very exciting business idea – you can make billions,
It looks to me like you want to rant people you have invented, who hold positions that I do not. I'm sorry that you can't parse nuance, but I think I'll keep the sceptical lack of faith in your position that I used earlier.
Carol is a very uncommon name, it was last popular in the 40s and 50s so almost every Carol you find today will be in an old folk's home. The odds of two truly independent instances of somebody named Carol appearing in this manner of circumstance is extremely small.
Also, it came from reddit therefore it is fake. Reddit is a dumpster fire, if we're being generous it's a website for playing around with creative writing exercises. The not so generous interpretation is that reddit users are deranged internet point addicts who habitually lie to get their fix.
There is a pattern of Asian immigrants to the US adopting such "old-fashioned" names for themselves or their kids.
I'm Gen-X, born and raised in California. I have a coworker whose Taiwanese American wife is Carol. And I've seen my fair share of people in my age cohort or their offspring with names like Ann, Karen, Katherine/Catherin, Susan, Mary, Lillian, etc.
Yes, these were the names of my grandparents' generation, but they didn't go away in my experience. They just branched out from their original userbase.
This level of simple assurance is for simpletons. You and I don't know the truth of it and can't be sure based on "it's from reddit". I'm sorry that not being sure is hard for you.
> The odds of two truly independent instances of somebody named Carol appearing in this manner of circumstance
What on earth are you talking about? There there are not "two people named Carol appearing in this manner." The first is the protagonist of a sci-fi show. You know, a fictional person. There is 1 - count them, one, supposed victim appearing in this manner. Which is possible regardless of the name chosen for the show and ad.
> "This level of simple assurance is for simpletons. You and I don't know the truth of it and can't be sure based on "it's from reddit". I'm sorry that not being sure is hard for you."
I respectfully disagree with your dismissal. Reasonable heuristics are necessary to get through life without getting lost in hours of deep dives into any random shit you hear. Anyway, the mere fact that the fridges have ads of any sort at all is reason enough to never buy one, I don't need to also believe some redditor's karma seeking tall tale.
> Reasonable heuristics are necessary to get through life without getting lost in hours of deep dives into any random shit you hear.
And I respectfully disagree with that.
Firstly, I have my own opinions on reddit and I don't find your simplistic ones persuasive. It's not monolithic.
But more importantly, you make a leap from "We don't know the truth of it and can't be sure" to "getting lost in hours of deep dives" (to establish certainty) which IMHO just does not follow.
You can decide that you don't know, that you do not need to have an authoritative opinion on the topic, and leave it at that. There are a lots of things that you and I don't have certainty on, and never will. Most of them are not important to us.
Deep dives might or might not be worth it, but you present choosing a side as the only alternative and it is not.
Again, I'm sorry that not being sure is hard for you. But it's a useful thing to do. It's a useful heuristic to me, better than false certainty.
> I don't need to also believe some redditor's karma seeking tall tale.
I don't think I ever said that I believe it as certainty. But if the only options that you understand are binary, then not picking one as a certainty seems to be misread as picking the other one. Which it is not.
The amount of "black or white", all or nothing, no-nuance, no doubt, no open mind, "if you say you're not convinced of x, then you must be trying to convince everyone of not-x" thinking here is frankly pathological.
FYI, I find the arguments that have come up that "Ads on Samsung fridges don't look like that" more substantive than "no one has that name" or "reddit always lies". Those last are opinions masquerading as information.
To go full schizo conspiracy theory: It may also not be a coincidence. There may be someone that dislikes that one Carol, knows she has schizophrenia and a smart fridge. They design this ad, or perhaps just plant the idea of it at the company they are working for with the intention of harming her.
If there really was a Carol I think police should look into this theory just to rule it out.
Nope, for the simple and trivial to check reason that it's not just an ad, or even just a whole ad campaign. It's the name of a protagonist of a drama, that the ad promotes, using a phrase that is said to that fictional character.
Honestly some of the posts defending "it could be true!!" when nearly any rational reading of it would deem it "fake beyond a reasonable doubt" are just tiresome at this point.
Like you say, it's easy to have a rational discussion that these adverts are dumb and annoying, and purporting this fan fiction as truth just weakens the case.
Yeah so this hypothetical sister doesn’t work, lives by themself, is severely disabled by schizophrenia but at the same time can afford a £2000 fridge. That’s a crazy amount of money to splash for someone who doesn’t work. Especially as amazing fridges are sold for £600-800. Oh, on top of all that, the persons name is Carol. It wouldn’t have worked with any other name.
I don’t think the story is real. But people who want it to be true are easily convinced.
It's also true that illness and disability can come to any of us. Carol could have been a software developer who made a good bit of money before being unable to work anymore.
> is severely disabled by schizophrenia but at the same time can afford a £2000 fridge.
The fridge has been on sale for a few years and schizophrenia can come on very suddenly. People's lives can change in a day because of it. You and I don't know the truth of it and can't reasonably jump to conclusions like that.
I recently had an obviously disturbed man come to the window of my Tesla asking for help. He did not specifically say money, but that's what he wanted. Long story short, he sees that the Tesla has identified a human standing next to the car, but the Tesla showed four people. The man asked how does the vehicle know there are people there, I told him that the Tesla has eight cameras around it. He then asked how does it know there were four people, I explained that the Tesla does not know there were four people, rather the Tesla has a hard time figuring out where something as small as a human is - it is designed to detect larger things like other vehicles. The man was obviously extremely affected, and walked away without another word.
Only later did I understand that the Tesla may have just confirmed what he had suspected all along - that there are in fact four people in the place where he is standing.
The ads for this TV show are real and do look like that.
Honestly, a trigger for paranoia in someone of the same name as the show's protagonist, or stealth marketing, are equally likely scenarios to me. We don't know.
I used to follow a few personal finance and FIRE subs. Pretty much all of them had surprising number of creative writing exercises too:
"I just inherited $10 million from a dead relative I never knew, what should I do?"
Or:
"I sold my online business for $37 million, is this enough to retire on?"
These daydreamers always create fresh throwaway accounts and usually never come back to answer clarifying questions. If they do, their answers are vague and unhelpful.
Because it's internet + social media. You should assume 60% of it is made up, every time. People are either saying things they know to be untrue, or things they think are true but or not.
When a million doomers post their predictions in response to something, a few are bound to be correct. Doesn't mean it's real, fake, or manifested by the hivemind. Just monkeys with typewriters.
It’s not genuine. The fridge doesn’t show full-screen ads, the original Reddit post and image of the ‘Carol’ ad is staged. At best, this is a parable about the slippery slope our ad-ridden society is sliding down.
Update 11/14: Samsung has commented on the image posted to Reddit, noting that the ad format shown on the smart fridge display is not one that would appear over the cover screen. Any ad shown would be limited to the cover screen widget, which displays news, weather, and calendar events. Those slides rotate every 10 seconds or so, and an ad is looped in around every 40 seconds.
It appears that the ad shown in the Reddit photo is of the fridge’s Samsung Internet app. Through that, an ad seems to have shown up organically through a third-party website.
Samsung notes that full-screen ads do not appear as part of these recent software updates, and users shouldn’t expect to see ads that take up the entire display.
‘Shown up organically’ seems like a very generous interpretation to me - it seems far more likely that someone viewed it deliberately for the purposes of staging the photo.
If Samsung cared about their reputation they would have stopped releasing garbage electronics a decade ago and anyone suggesting putting ads on a fridge (and a high end one at that) would have been fired the same day they suggested it.
On one hand I wouldn't cheer for spreading lies, but if this specific post got Samsung to lay down where the ads appear and at which frequency, I'd see the positive side of it. In particular they're that less likely to actually silently move to full ads in the near future even if they planned to, now that they officially commented on it.
On the other hand, this was traditionally the role of art and fiction. Black Mirror was based on the premise of getting people to react to this kind of future, and it looks like it's either not working (anymore?) or we're past the point where hypothetical situations would grab our attention and we can do something about it.
On the third hand, I have no intention to buy a fridge with a screen on it, but if it becomes the mainstream offering will I be forking 10% or 20% to not have th screen, or if those will have significantly better features (better temperature management etc.). I also wished I wasn't looking at ads, but in practice the best educational content right now is sponsored by S**space.
the technology to directly transmit audio without the need for headphones has been around for a while , for a recent implementation one could search up soundlazer
it is interesting to consider that at any point the thoughts in one's skull are not necessarily their own
That might sound strange at first, but we've seen enough now to know that this will inevitably mean that a lot of manufacturers will follow this model.
I can imagine deals where you get a huge 'rebate' if you permanently enable the ad-feature (the on-screen wizard will blow one of those tiny fuses as its final step, locking the device to that setting). That effectively mandates that the price for the device is its selling price minus the huge rebate, and the whole market will adjust to that.
"Telly" [1] is a real 55" TV that is available for free. It is designed to always, constantly be running advertisements.
> To reserve a Telly, you must agree to use the device as the main TV in your home, constantly keep it connected to the internet, and regularly watch it. If the company finds that you violate these rules, Telly will ask you to return the TV (and charge a $1,000 fee if you don’t send it back).
Also because just because something is done "willingly" doesn't mean they fully understand that it may not be in their best interest, long-term. This is why drugs are illegal.
From another posts recently, just the fact some of the greatest minds in our planet are mostly working in advertising and trying to squeeze the most out of consumers just tell us everything. Our society is so rotten. This time of the year it gets even worst.
Already done! You agreed to it in the Terms and Conditions - you did read them, right?
But yeah I agree with you, there needs to be a way for people to get away from ads without relying on the existence of some benevolent alternate company
Terms and conditions can't just force anything on the buyer. like, you can't enslave people and point at the terms and conditions. It should also be outlawed to enshittify products with terms and conditions.
Despite what the average multinational will have you believe, terms and conditions usually don't hold up in court. If they write some illegal bullshit into it, it's just that, bullshit.
That may be true but doesn't help if not accepting the terms prevents you from using the device.
On a practical level you then at best have a battle to get a third party (the retailer) to give you a refund and most people faced with the option of removing and returning a huge expensive device like a fridge with no guarantee of a refund are going to just leave it.
It does need some stubborn and tenacious people to make a stand and set a president - perhaps backed by a consumer rights group but it's an uphill battle.
Sure, but that depends on the thing actually being illegal first. Genuine question - how often in practice are terms and conditions successfully challenged? My thought is that companies like that would be able to drain plaintiffs out before it getting that far very often
If ignoring them is your only option, and challenging them would fail, we would expect to see a lack of challenging them. Which we do.
Unless there's a solid track record of people consistently challenging them and winning, we can assume, based on bayesian priors, that most people cannot.
Hmm, maybe there's a simple legislative fix for this problem. Basically vendors that want to make you "rent" devices would have to allow termination for convenience at any time by customer including repayment of any fees paid by the customer for the device.
Termination for convenience is a standard term in contracts, hence well-understood by corporate lawyers. The repayment could be reduced using a depreciation schedule so the longer the device is in your hands the less that's returned.
I think this would work. The legal machinery is already there. The market would work out the details.
Outlawing this specific scenario sounds pretty hard. I can see only two reasonable options:
* Ban all advertisements. (I'm all for it, at this point.)
* Make sure smart-devices make extremely clear that they can be used to show ads, and include trivial instructions to disable ads
Forcing ads onto stuff we pay money for is not okay. Ads to fund free content is probably unavoidable, but even then, it needs to be clear up front what you're subjecting yourself to. Unexpected ads on devices you don't expect them from, can be confusing and disorienting for many people. For people with schizophrenia, it can clearly be dangerous.
And I think this is not just true for smart fridges, but also for those billboards at bus stops that seem stationary at first until they suddenly start to move or talk to you. Ban those please. Or make it clear upfront that they're video. Don't spring this on unsuspecting people.
> Make sure smart-devices make extremely clear that they can be used to show ads, and include trivial instructions to disable ads
The other way around — make it clear that the devices are capable of showing ads, and provide instructions on how to opt-in to them (and no cookie-like prompts either)
> Ban all advertisements. (I'm all for it, at this point.)
What would that actually look like though?
Take something that could be considered an ad, but probably most people agree is a good thing. Say you post on here that task X is such a pain in the butt to do all the time as a general gripe, then I say hey, I built a cheap subscription webapp to solve task X easily that you might want to check out. You sign up for it and use it and like it. Seems like everybody wins - you get a problem solved for a small amount of money, I make a little money and get my project used and my work validated etc. But it's still technically an ad.
Lots of stuff like that could be considered an ad. Every "Show HN" could be considered an ad. Suggesting people vote for candidate X or party Y could be considered an ad too - plenty of organizations do pay for actual ads just like that already. Product placements is a type of ad, but it's pretty hard to not do. I don't know how you even make a movie or TV show with people driving cars without showing a particular model of car.
I don't expect that's the kind of ad that everybody is complaining about. Okay, but then how do you legislate the difference? Can you, or anyone, actually write down a definition of the ads you want to ban and the ads you don't? And how will people distort or abuse those definitions? There's billions of dollars in advertising (maybe trillions?), it's not going to all just go away because somebody passed a law. What happens when all of that money gets poured into attempting to abuse such individual personal recommendations? That's already happening on Reddit now, though at small scales for now.
Can we talk about billboards too? As in, giant, increasingly bright ads intended to catch our attention while we're supposed to be carefully operating giant speeding hunks of metal?
And are only the visible part of the iceberg. The part you don't see is the collection of personal data. That is linked to habits - and to deviations from habits - and that is shared with third parties.
I'm going to keep this sort of on topic and this will not be a popular opinion.
No, this does not need legislation. If you don't wants ads on your refrigerator, how about not buying a refrigerator with a screen built in, it's not necessary.
People said the same thing about cars. People said the same thing about smart TVs. Do you know any cars currently being manufactured that respect your privacy?
They have had to walk that back, because it cost them dearly in market share. Turns out most of their customers don't agree that touchscreens are unwanted.
There's also the fact that the problem was never about touchscreens per se, but inappropriate/incompetent UI design that happened to use touchscreens.
Try to buy a new TV without « smart » features. It’s nearly impossible and all of them will come with some kind of ads on it.
I fear it will become impossible to buy a fridge without screen and ad if we don’t find a way to stop this. It’s pure profit for manufacturers and the consumers are fucked since fridge are basic necessities.
No one can force you to watch ads, they're your eyeballs. There will always be a solution to this problem; if it's in your domicile then no one can stop you from spending time coming up with solutions
And what if the manufacturers decide to sue you for disabling the screen? Or decide to simply disable your fridge? This isn't a far out scenario either, the whole right-to-repair movement was based on a company not allowing you to do things with the tractor you bought.
I've long wondered what would happen if, say, NYT sued me for blocking their many ads (despite being a paying subscriber). My argument would be that I'd never click on the ads anyway out of principle, so the ad blocker is just me delegating the ignoring of ads that I would've done myself regardless. Also that if I couldn't turn off ads, I wouldn't have subscribed and they'd make even less revenue.
That said, I doubt these companies would sue because of the risk of setting a precedent in favor of the consumer. Scary legal letters (e.g. cease & desist letters) perhaps. But given enough customers, at least one will have the resources to hire a good lawyer and fight it all the way to court.
If a company intentionally spoiled my food out of spite I would sue them. If they did it to all of their customers that becomes class action. They cannot force their customers into a contract which would include allowing them to spoil your food out of spite, that contract would not be legally binding.
It would be with merit, because it would be part of the contract you signed when you bought the damn thing. We already live in a world where any attempt to bypass DRM on things you've bought is tantamount to a potential legal battle if they really wanted to be assholes about it. Where you don't really own the things you buy.
Drm is one thing, taping construction paper over a screen is another. That contract would be unenforceable. Shit is dystopian lately, but you're being hyperbolic.
My last two televisions both came from the "Sceptre" line at Walmart which seemed to be the last holdout of non-smart TVs. I don't know if they're still holding the line; the model I checked just now says it has "V-chip" but doesn't say anything about a "smart TV" operating system or any of that nonsense. It's not very well-advertised but it's still around. I don't know of any way to find a normal TV that isn't from Walmart or a thrift store, though.
I'm no prude, but I'm finding horror, pharma & sex ads to be incredibly disturbing in how they are presented. Google TV takes over my wall with moderately graphic horror movie ads. My family members aren't comfortable with horror and they have no way to use the TV otherwise. It's unsetting in the middle of the night. And graphic pharma ads for stomach turning skin disorders and other inappropriate disorders play even during casual, family content. And most of the sexual content is not family friendly -- even I find it awkward to have on the wall, especially when my parents visit.
These devices used to be ours with some level of control, and now they are all remotely managed to present awful content at all hours
At least with the pharma commercials they don't get "real" about living with a given disease. It's like stock footage of old people canoeing in slow motion and stuff.
You're right that most pharma are generic korean karaoke parlor videos, but a few of them show really gross sores, rashes that I don't want burned into my brain by an 85'' screen
The timing is just unsettling like i'm having a laugh and then subliminally the next frame is a raw skin lesion
Google TV showing ads on the home screen convinced me to buy an Apple TV. Had to go back to a set-top box - to use the same apps I have built into the TV - just because Apple won't spam me with this shit.
It's a good tip, I may end up doing that. I'm hoping that Apple has better standards for third party streaming apps (just yesterday I made a Ask HN post about how terrible they are)
Been there and absolutely can see this happening, it is sometimes a prodromal symptom called a 'sign of reference' [1].
I recall during my first psychosis episode thinking a TNT logistics van contained a bomb and was being used as a terrorist vehicle to blow up a building (or maybe at the time I think it could have been targeting myself directly).
Also, in that same episode, the train stations in Sydney were being plastered on every possible space and surface with high contrast white on blue posters that said "HEY TOSSER!" [2]; it was an anti littering ad campaign bringing some levity to the situation. My mind was overwhelmed by both its alerting nature and the fact that everywhere I would turn I'd see a poster, and in my infirmity it felt like someone was pointing a finger an inch from my forehead arresting me to say I should stop being a tosser in the derogatory (Australian slang) sense (though my mind was contending with the many multiple meanings).
On one hand you're correct, but on the other hand Carol is a very common name and this is a very reasonable reaction. I'm split, and I think this is plausible enough to take seriously.
I inherited a Samsung fridge when I moved to a new place, it was a terrible fridge with serious mechanical flaws. The deicer broke, causing a constant stream of leaking water in the fridge. The French door middle component hinge was cheap plastic that broke and I had to replace it, then it broke again and I had to replace it again, then it broke again. I finally gave up and replaced the fridge.
Recommendation threads on Reddit usually begin with "anything but Samsung". They seem designed to be made cheap and hit the lowest price point with consumers that don't want to spend a lot more on something they don't really care about, so I'm not surprised to learn that ads are a part of their strategy.
But also, why do fridges need to connect to the internet?
Manufacturers for 100 years didn’t try to wrap their fridges in ads, or tune the compressor sound to a commercial jingle. They sold mostly honest products to cool your food efficiently.
But when they add an LED display and Internet connection, suddenly they forget about cooling your food and impulsively add a bunch of adversarial functionality, meaning functions that monetize the consumer rather than keeping the food cool.
It’s like the Internet advertising ecosystem is a virus intent on infecting anything and anyone with an Internet connection, making them do bizarre customer-hostile things they never would have done otherwise.
You are way off: it's just about money. For a long time, making appliances was an ok business, making good stuff, selling them, factories running, employment, margins ok, ... and there was progress/innovation to do.
Now that there is not much to update or innovate with, and companies have already squeezed workers in Bengladesh to the max, the only current innovation and additional money source are "connected" and "ads".
I don't see any contradiction between the two takes; I suspect capital pressure will force us into an inhumane dystopia where baseline existence is miserable, and quiet rational thought is a luxury.
I was in a car accident a few years ago that triggered my pre-existing PTSD, so it was a very rough experience. This experience was made worse by the fact that my insurer apparently sold the fact I had been in a crash to third-parties. I could not go anywhere on the internet without seeing personal injury ads, which often featured gratuitous pictures of crashes. This felt incredibly creepy and made a bad experience much worse.
On the day Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed, I started getting Youtube ads for silencers and tactical gear. I guess it follows that people were searching for those sort topics then and I fit some cohort (probably "angry young male"), but it was very unnerving.
Now Youtube mostly shows me ads for fake AI generated products and other scams.
I read [Unauthorized Bread (exerpt) by Doctoro](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-...) this year which was pretty approachable read on the topic. Not severely interesting or mind blowing if you're already here hopefully but did make me wonder how I could sneak it into my mums reading list.
If you have a router you control, many routers allow you to take away internet access from a device while keeping it on your local network. Some (all?) Asus routers can do this from their UI.
This won’t help with devices that require 24x7 internet access, but it’s great for things you want to access the local network but don’t trust not to send info to a third party. (TVs, music amps with built in streaming, home surveillance systems [1], etc.)
Also handy for briefly turning on Internet access for software updates or one time activation.
[1] while making a surveillance system available online safely and with software you control isn’t hard, it’s not trivial. Turning Internet access off for your cameras without a plan will mean you can’t monitor your home or get alerts when away from your local network.
"I just saw something incredibly cool! A big floating ball that lit up with every color in the rainbow, plus some new ones that were so beautiful I fell to my knees and cried."
"Was it out in front of Discount Shoe Outlet?"
"Yeah..."
"They have a college kid wear that to attract customers."
"Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball games, on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams. No, sir-ee!"
I know this is the sort of story HN would love to be true (and to be clear, I think ads on appliances are Black Mirror level stuff), but this — like most things on Reddit — is made up. [1]
This story, while fun to discuss, should be flagged, and not on the FP of HN.
That thread goes into how Samsung has confirmed that this ad can’t show up like it did [1]. There are many comments in that thread debunking this. Which is why I linked the whole thread, not a single comment.
When something posts something on Reddit that sounds far fetched (fun to believe, but unlikely), we (the HN community) should default to skepticism/critical thinking, rather than assuming it’s true without evidence that it is.
>has confirmed that this ad can’t show up like it did
While this certainly may be true, I trust companies to tell the actual truth about this when it's been verified by an independent 3rd party.
So much of the "This can't happen", "We didn't scan and save all your wireless network names", "We didn't copy all the contacts in your address book" quite commonly break down later when it is realized that some sub-group doing an A/B test or keeping their work somewhat hidden actually did the thing in question.
> When something posted on Reddit that sounds far fetched (fun to believe, but unlikely), we should default to skepticism/critical thinking, rather than assuming it’s true without evidence that it is.
That's my point. This doesn't sound at all far fetched if you've spent time with people recovering from psychosis with visual hallucinations.
I'm normally a very skeptical person, and while I both agree claims require evidence. I don't find the comment thread from before very compelling evidence.
Fake or not, I do believe that an ad with the text from the troll image would show up on a smart fridge, I don't trust Samsung to tell the truth^1, and importantly the minimal description from the linked post describes an experience similar to one I've seen before working with a patient. (But from a print ad.)
Even if this exac is fiction, this kinda stuff actually happens. Perhaps I'm wrong, to believe it's plausible, but dismissing it outright is a mistake. You don't want to acknowledge hallucinations are real, but more important than that, you don't want to tell someone that they're lying without positive proof.
edit ^1: I read that exactly prior to reading your reply, and yes I do agree that explanation seems to be correct; that wasn't what I was basing my take on. i.e. true or not it's less important to my original objection. Or I find it plausible than even a small advert would result in the same event.
> Fake or not, I do believe that an ad with the text from the troll image would show up on a smart fridge, I don't trust Samsung to tell the truth^1
I trust them more than some reddit post. Samsung has at least some incentive to tell the truth (they don't want to piss off consumers). What's the penalty for lying on Reddit?
I’m saying this particular story was fabricated. There is evidence in the comments below my linked thread, specifically the one to MacRumors from Samsung, that prove why this was fabricated.
As a schizotypal person, I'm unsure how more people aren't exhibiting paranoid schizophrenic symptoms in this wildly untrustworthy digital age.
Yesterday a good friend reached out to me on a new phone number to wish me happy holidays, she shortly afterwards asked me to donate to a fund to help her sick cat.
Even though this person had a similar typing style, the unrecognized phone number made me feel paranoid that it may be an LLM attempting to get money from me in an automated scam, so I made the choice to call my friend to get more evidence via voice.
It turned out to be my friend(or an even more elaborate ruse using voice capture and mass data-mining tech, but that seemed extremely unlikely, at least for another couple years).
My brother had full on shizpphrenia, and would often call family members asking them to provide evidence that they are who they say they are and not government robots. It was an obvious delusion when he was alive, but now that we're in a world where that sort of evidence-gathering is no longer extreme, paranoia is the new normal.
Our usual safeguards of identity are breaking down, and you can bet that large corporations with an eye on the coin are going to swoop in to establish new, more secure methods of identification.
Society, in a sense, is highly dependent on trustworthy interactions. Credit, ownership transfers, banking, etc. all depend on trust. If we go back to only being able to trust in-person interactions, we'll be stepping back to a financial system from over 100 years ago.
Because of this, I believe that solutions will be developed. Nothing is 100% fool-proof, but the government depends on a solution being found.
>swoop in to establish new, more secure methods of identification.
This is already being done. However it is being done in backroom deals to make sure that the individual has no control over their identity only the corporations. You are not who you say you are, you are what a corporation decides you are.
As an aside, having scroll that thread, Reddit is a shambles. There's more deleted comments and related justification comment than actual comments. Make for a jarring experience.
It's a legal advice subreddit; they tend to have stricter moderation because their primary goal is to get the OP an answer to their question or advice on how to consult a legal professional about their issue. Posts like the one linked here tend to be a magnet for people more interested in the drama than the actual legal principles, so they end up being a wasteland of removed comments.
Exactly. There are reasons for those many deleted comments. It's specific to this subreddit for very good reasons and not something you can use to disparage all of reddit. Many subreddits have their own rules and culture.
It's not disparaging to point out a fact. The whole delete comment content but keep the comment and then add a reply comment with wordy reason for deletion of comment content is a shambles. And irrespective of whether it's on every subreddit or not, doesn't make it less so. It's basically just spam at this point.
My solution would be to simply delete the comment and PM the OP. If another user had already replied, replace the original content with a *short* reason for deletion, and PM the OP, leaving the replies in place unless they needed deleting.
It's a recursive issue, and this is something that Reddit could potentially improve. Reddit preserves a deleted comment's space in the comments section as [deleted]. Users who see a graveyard of deleted comments will comment to wonder why, especially if they are unfamiliar with the subreddit rules. This may require the mods to delete more off-topic comments, which worsens the issue, etc. So the established "best practice" is to delete but leave a moderator comment with an explanation so there's a paper trail.
Another example: r/AskHistorians is so heavily moderated almost every comment gets deleted.
Their standards of quality are very high. It's not a sub to push your views or argue, it's a sub for historians or people who can back an answer with academic references. So most comments and answers will get modded.
It's oddly refreshing. No flamewars, no junk comments, no "everybody knows the reason X did Y is Z" because that won't be accepted by the mods.
AskHistorians is far and away the best moderated sub on the site, but it relies entirely on guidelines that you can understand and agree with. Moderation on other subs (no clue about this one) is so heinously biased it makes them unusable. Very common on political and news oriented subs....
Absolutely- I can't understand why it still has such a loyal base considering how low the quality is- I see more insightful discussion on facebook half the time
Because Reddit != Reddit and each subreddit has their own audience and moderation style. Most of Reddit might be a cesspit, but that doesn't mean all of it is.
I can't understand why cigarettes have such a loyal fanbase. They're smelly and expensive. Costing roughly 4k a year, I can't understand why someone wouldn't buy a nicer car or massive TV or something.
Whenever a platform is popular these days I just assume it is more addictive.
Because their old fridge died and they need a new one now, and this is all that's in stock.
Because they didn't buy the fridge, their landlord did.
Because the fridge is installed at a workplace, or community centre, or other location at which the individual has no effective choice.
Because there are no new fridges with other desired features which don't have screens.
Because, at some future date, absent legislation or crushing litigation, no non-screen, ad-free fridges exist.
Substitute for "fridge" and "ads" any of number of other consumer / general appliances: stoves, washing machines, dishwashers, phones, televisions, thermostats, doorbells, petrol pumps, etc., or features: cameras, microphones, speakers, iris scanners, thumbprint readers, facial recognition, etc., etc.
I recently tried this for a new TV - buying a regular “non-smart” TV without the internet features without being “AI-enabled” (whatever the fuck that means).
It wasn’t possible - there was literally no TV available that didn’t have a small computer built in to connect to the internet and send all my usage data somewhere.
I probably have to find a second hand one somewhere or just continue to live without one.
Not saying that it’s the same with fridges - but who knows a few years down the line it might be…
These companies have no decency. Putting ads on a fridge! They’ve already invaded our phones and computers, and almost everywhere else. This needs to stop
If there is one appliance in my house that does not need a LCD screen and «smart» features, it’s my fridge. It was installed maybe 6 years ago, I adjusted some temperature settings and I’ve never touched the dials again.
Open source, as in corporate outsourcing software maintenance to free labour? No. Free software, as in four freedoms? Yes, because you could install your own firmware that doesn't show advertisements.
That's what the whole GPLv3 debacle was about after all.
Stallman may have not imagined this specific scenario, but he absolutely did conceive of owner-hostile software that could not be replaced.
You could, but would most people? Most people voluntarily subject themselves to garbage adware-ridden SmartTVs even though this is a problem you can solve with a £12 dongle and no software installation at all. If the humble HDMI cable defeats the average person’s technical ability, what difference would it make if they could technically install their own firmware?
Fine, but I don't care about the average person. _I_ do not want this junk in my life. I don't deserve to be treated this way. If everyone else want to be manipulated by their fridge, thats one's on them, but count me out. It doesn't matter _if_ you install your own firmware, but _if you have the right to do so_. I don't own a gun, but I still believe that owning a firearm is a human right.
I knew using ad blockers is good for your mental health but this is plain creepy and unfair. Especially when advertisers know more and more about you as more and more everyday items are spying on you and serve you ads without any additional core functionality. Appliances don't get better, they are getting creepier to increase the return of investment for the manufacturers. The schizophrenics are just more sensitive to this enshittification of everyday items because they are quick to assume deliberate agency in chaotic events where there is none. But this is changing, for everybody.
The problem is today you can't really tell anymore whether this "Carol" the ad was addressing is the advertiser knowing that it's your name or just a random "clever" reference to a character in the TV show, I mean even after getting the resolution that it's the latter, nobody can be sure if this excludes the former, like the algorithm decided to send Carol an ad about a show with a Carol in it. It's not good to have to make up your mind about it even when you are not suffering from schizophrenia.
It's annoying, it's intrusive, it wastes your time and ruins your day. And it makes you hate your new tech, makes you hate tech in general, because it's a big "fuck you we can do what we want with you now" towards the customers. No wonder Luddites are making a come back, that's just self-defense.
Reddit used to be free for anyone to view without logging in, but now I get "Your request has been blocked due to a network policy." Sorry, but I'm not turning my ad blocker off.
I know this isn’t Just a Samsung problem, but it’s sure not Not a Samsung problem either. Samsung’s taken the early-00’s Sony crown of most anti-consumer company out there - don’t buy Samsung.
If modern ad tech and future holographic display technology makes schizophrenic symptoms indistinguishable from regular waking consciousness in our Bitchun society...does that make us all crazy? or all sane?
I love technology but avoid all the smart stuff because it's all shit, all spyware, all will eventually show ads. Its a perversion of something that could have been so nice.
I have Philips Hue lights, it started out great, now every time I open that app it slaps an ad in my face. I paid hundreds of euros for that system. Never again.
When I first saw somebody complain about the Pluribus smart fridge ad I immediately knew something like this was going to happen. How did Apple/Samsung not think this through?
if you read the entire reddit thread, OPs sisters name actually was Carol. That's why it wigged her out so much and triggered her schizophrenia to kick in I suppose.
It’s totally understandable for the brother to feel frustrated and shaken by what happened, anyone would be. But playing devil’s advocate for a moment, it’s also worth recognising that the sister ultimately made a very sensible and protective decision for herself, even if the trigger turned out to be an advert rather than a delusional message.
For someone with a history of psychosis, misinterpreting an ambiguous or out-of-place stimulus, especially one that feels personal and unexpected, can be an early warning sign that their symptoms are shifting. The distinction between advertisement and communication may seem obvious to someone who is currently well, but for her, that specific moment must have felt real enough to question her own stability. Instead of ignoring it, hiding it, or hoping it would pass, all things that can lead to deterioration, she sought help immediately. That takes insight. In a lot of cases, people only end up in hospital after things have escalated far further.
Two days of monitoring and a medication review may feel excessive in hindsight, but it also means clinicians were given the chance to catch something early rather than during a crisis. If anything, her awareness that “something was wrong” and her ability to mobilise herself to A&E suggests she still has some protective judgement intact.
Regarding the advert, yes, it was an unfortunate coincidence and the tone clearly could be upsetting to many people even without a mental health condition. But unpredictable stimuli are a part of the world, and the goal in recovery is often less about eliminating triggers and more about learning to manage responses when they occur. What happened here may actually give her care team useful information about how she’s processing her environment and whether her medication is adequately supporting her perception and reasoning under stress.
In short, while the situation is distressing, she may have handled it in the safest way possible. She saw something alarming, she recognised she might not be thinking clearly, and she took action rather than letting it spiral. That’s not nothing.
What may matter more now is how they both plan for situations like this in the future, who she contacts, what early signs she notices, how to reality-check things before they escalate, and how her care team can support her if these misinterpretations become more frequent.
The brother handled a stressful situation, the sister acted to keep herself safe, and they both have more information to work with going forward.
In the golden era of advertising (don’t really know but say before the iPhone)
there was no “opt-out”. If you wanted to watch Lucille Ball, rich or poor you had to sit through the ads. If you wanted to read the New York Times article, rich or poor, you had to turn the full page ad over.
Today that’s gone - you can for a fee never see an advert again. And that fee is easier to pay if you are rich, and harder if poor. And so more and more “traditional” advertising will become aggressive and aimed at both lower income audience and more scammy products (because you are selling to the poorest you cannot beat costs eventually). And advertising will stop being about “brand” (which are naturally less aggressive and focused on closing) and more about the last click to sale.
We are already seeing this world take shape, as “influencers” become the way to reach those who have paid to stop all other advertising, and why travel influencers are head of that pack.
Ultimately this is about design of our public spaces. We rightly celebrate architects, civil engineers and their sponsors who create enjoyable and beneficial built areas - we have still to get a hold of the digital public spaces. While Times Square has a quality of its own, living there permanently would have mental health issues for most of us.
And in the end, positive public spaces are associated with the words paternalism, socialism, public good and none with Toll, extraction, rentierism.
The arguments against ads are arguments for paternalism of government control for a better life for us all.
Every time I see an article on HN about a "smart" device doing shitty things, my first thought is why would someone (especially from this crowd, who's supposed to be enlightened about the state of enshittification of tech) buy any IoS device in the first place ?
What good could you expect from an appliance that's permanently communicating with its non-giving a f*ck about users, profit driven, immoral and unethical mothership ? Would you really expect your life to be better after buying such a product ?
There's an old joke that a tech enthusiast will have "smart" everything in their house, while someone who works in tech keeps a shotgun in case their 10 year old laser printer makes a funny noise...
I work in the IoT industry and delight in making things work automatically.
I live in a log cabin in the back woods with minimal technology and drive an older car with actual knobs and physical switches for controls because I've seen how the sausage is made.
If you want to put an end to this you’ll either need to boycott products, make your own, or get something serious passed to abolish a good chunk of ads. This industry is loaded with money and they reinforce their own (see: ads on fridges) so good luck. It’s a tough battle.
FYI, the slogan ""WE'RE SORRY WE UPSET YOU, CAROL" on a yellow background is from the Apple TV Show "Pluribus" (Or "PLUR1BUS"). It would be an ad for that show. It is indeed creepy at times.
The main character is called "Carol". As also, it seems is the person who saw it here.
Back in the day we asked webmasters to run their web sites through Bobby for accessibility checks.
I am curious if any LLM work like this is being done. If it were really a smart fridge, it would moderate its users content appropriately. Eg I don’t want haram ads, don’t freak me out, I’m color blind.
this post is a meme (or an attempt to shed light at the problem) referencing a video by louis rossmann who foreshadows that something like this could hypothetically happen
1/2500 .. What is the probability of being born blind?
1/100 .. What is the probability of having schizophrenia?
1/250000* .. What is the probability of both?
1/250000* .. What is the probability of both + having resources to have it diagnosed?
[*] Assuming genetic blindness (born this way) and schizophrenia (elevated genetic risk) are not somehow inversely linked.
So, in the US:
340MM people -> 1360 born-blind people who would develop schizophrenia
Reduce that by half or so, since schizophrenia tends to emerge in or after adolescence. And since it may be confusable at older ages with other brain health issues (is this true?).
So call it 700 people in the US alone. If it is in fact zero, that is significant!
I chose the US because 100% people will have adequate access to this level of medical care. A formal diagnosis is not the same thing as access, but a born-blind person either has parents/family, or has a state warden with access to care. This is also true in many many other countries, but certainly not all.
The US has 4.1% of the world population. Figure 50% of the world does not have this level of medical access. It's probably less than that, but maybe not.
This suggests about 10,000 people worldwide, living today, who would be affected, and in an environment where they would be diagnosed.
Don’t buy appliances with anything but a small screen. Any large screen on any appliance will be used to show ads. If not now then eventually.
It’s also a gimmick, and gimmicks on things like appliances and cars are red flags for poor quality. Appliances in particular are best when simple and designed for their function. “Feature” means “thing that will break.”
These targeted ads are incredibly harmful when you have to take care of someone with psychosis. They think that someone who is listening to them is sending them "messages" through ads and that feeds into paranoia. Unfortunately it is not possible to reason in such situations with the person and any attempt to explain tracking is met with hostility.
I really wish regulators stopped being corrupt, naive or both and outright made it illegal.
There is no upside for tracking of any kind for consumers.
The gut reaction of too many geeks is "I can't believe you'd install a smart fridge in your home". But we need to think about this differently. Imagine if vehicles had no mandatory safety checks. How many people know anything about car safety? You'd get people barrelling down the highway with broken suspension, bald tyres or worse. We are the professionals. It's our responsibility to keep the public safe and stop shit like this happening. The software engineers who implemented this at Samsung should be struck off. Well, we could start by having something to be struck off from. I'm done with assuming individual developers will be scrupulous. We need real consequences to come from higher up. It's way past the point that this is fucking with people's lives.
It also falls apart over when more and more products become "smart" to the point where you can't really even buy one without things like this, like TVs now or cars for that matter. I'm dreading the day where I end up forced to watch an ad before starting my car.
I do think some kind of ethics training/education/licensing/organization is long overdue for software devs.
It's the smug superiority too many "tech smart" people have.
"Why would you buy HP? Everyone knows that it stands for Horrible Product."
"Serves you right for getting a TV with built in Netflix, everyone knows that it's a backdoor to botnet!"
I don't think it's apologetics for dogpoop corporate behavior, directly. But it has that effect because those of us with knowledge enjoy being smart asses or belittling those whose ignorance rewards trends we disagree with.
People should be able to go into a store and buy a thing without researching how evil it has become in the decade or two since the last time they did. Or move into a house pre-furnished. That is a failure of legislatures, not of average Joe.
Real consequences from higher up... for ads on a fridge? Corporate execs only care about money. Engineers aren't going to get themselves fired every time someone asks for a feature they don't agree with. Government? We don't need more nanny laws.
What we need is for people to think for themselves. The powers that be aren't going to save you from all the bad things. Call out the bad things to educate people, and vote with your wallet.
There's a whole growing class of people that do not have the ability to vote with their wallet. Fridges, TVs etc will all be at their cheapest because they're subsidized by ads. Or worse, if you're a renter then there's a big incentive for apartments to put up smart fridges in every room both as a selling point and for ad revenue.
How would you propose to deal with apartments having every fridge be a smart one?
I'll admit, I hadn't thought of subsidized fridges. What a bleak and depressing idea! I suppose I'd just tape over the screen or "accidentally" break it and complain to my landlord.
> You'd get people barrelling down the highway with broken suspension, bald tyres or worse.
You have this in most of the US, and people rail against any attempt to bring it in because they're frightened that garages will not give them their cars back if they think it's got something wrong with it.
I've seen people driving cars in the US that you wouldn't even be able to get a scrapyard to take in the UK, they'd tell you to just sweep it into a bag and put it in the recycling.
>Any ad shown would be limited to the cover screen widget, which displays news, weather, and calendar events.
>The ad shown in the Reddit photo is of the fridge’s Samsung Internet app. Through that, an ad seems to have shown up organically through a third-party website.
Here's the docs that talk about ads on the cover screen:
Well they might want to produce some photos or screenshots of what it actually looks like when it displays ads. So far, they are only telling us what it doesn't look like, which doesn't instill much confidence. It should have been pretty easy for them to say "and here's what it actually looks like btw: [photo.jpg] [screenshot.png]". They didn't do that though. Why might that be?
Unless this is satire, one of the most frightening comments I have read here in a while. Not because of any intended malice, but precisely because of its very absence in advocating something that is the psychological version of eugenics. Much like the Formics in Ender's Game (or the protomolecule in the Expanse), the scariest type of monster is the one that genuinely has no malicious intent, but simply cannot comprehend our individuality, our desire to live and be free, and our fear of pain.
If it is satire, it's very good. They pointed out exactly how their proposed dystopia is consistent with policies that already exist.
Withholding autonomy from anyone with a diagnosed mental/neurodevelopmental disorder or an IQ below 100 is the logical conclusion of banning drugs, alcohol, or prostitution. It's all the product of a mindset which presumes that adults aren't sufficiently competent to make their own personal life decisions, and need to be forced into the correct decisions through threats of violence.
I know that sounds like a horrible violation of individual freedom, but we already treat children and cognitively impaired elderly people that way. Maybe to graduate from childhood to adult-who-can-sign-contracts, have sexual relationships, vote, etc. everyone has to pass a test, and it's retested periodically in case you regress.
if its harmful in some way to some person the “obvious” solution is to means test the entire population for their competency to vote or have sex? i dont own a samsung fridge, but okay sure. sign me up for some weird battery of invasive tests and write me out of life so Samsung can sell hardware and ads.
maybe samsung can even serve me some personalized ads based on my test results.
everyone in big tech is guided by “CAN we do this?” and never “SHOULD we do this?” and theyre totally unaccountable for all of it.
it doesnt matter who it hurts or how it hurts them. thats why they they do whatever they want.
and if something goes wrong, hey i know! lets just turn the screws even tighter on every man woman and child so Samsung can do whatever it wants.
Id tell you to go hell but it sounds like we’re already all in it.
im sorry if thats rude but it actually was the most polite thing i could come up with.
Sounds reasonable to test them as well. You shouldn’t be allowed to build home appliances if you’re disabled to the degree you fail this test. Executives, other employees, etc.
Children and the elderly are often not treated as human, and it's not a good thing. We should be looking at restricting corporate freedom a little bit before jumping to creating another explicit legal underclass of people.
Most people are thinking of restricting free human beings from buying fridges with ads. I’m saying that should only happen to the disabled who would be exploited. Rather than turn everyone into a underclass, I propose we explicitly do that only to those who are unable to live without our overwatch.
The net freedom should be higher in this scenario.
Why can't I read it too? Replies act like it was something over-the-top great, yet HN isn't showing it to me?
Which brings us back to the topic: why would anyone use HN when it is not good for its single purpose: sharing text between users? It's not even like a fridge with ads, where an ad is an additional annoyance, but fridge functions still work. HN sucks at its very purpose.
I don't see ads, thanks to ad blocking tech in browsers and smartphones. Any time that happens to fail and I get to endure an ad, I am amazed that regular people without ad blocking tech can endure this onslaught.
The time to negotiate a "middle ground" is long past. Let's not even entertain that idea.
An acceptable middle ground could have been designated areas for ads, which you have to seek out to see them. Think of the Yellow Pages.
Ad companies need to be reined in. They cannot control themselves. They are lobbying against all limits and controls. The only solution is to eradicate ads entirely and to make sure that anyone who gets that idea will never get it again.
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