Well there’s one obvious answer to all these - the dead awoke and left the graveyard en-masse. I’ve seen that happen in films.

Sweet Emotion - Aerosmith. Get some of those Dazed & Confused vibes.

I guess that advertising has been around for 100s of years. For the vast majority of history it’s been something people accept - nobody could avoid posters on the street, adverts in store windows and later it was adverts on the radio, in the cinema, then ads on TV… It’s only incredibly recently that people have had even the possibility of blocking ads, and even then it’s only a small subset of online adverts that can be blocked. Most ads (TV, radio, billboards, print…) are just as unavoidable and unblockqble as before.

Which basically means advertising has been part of people’s lives since the day all of us were born. Mostly folks just accept it, like we accept we have to spent 2 minutes every single morning brushing our teeth even though we wish there was a better way.

It’s just one of those tradeoffs. You can avoid that 2min every day but your life would be massively inconvenienced as a result (people would avoid you and you’d be in pain every day), and you can avoid ads by not using the internet, but life is inconvenienced as a result.

Facebook are an advertising platform. They only offer a paid tier because they now legally have to. They don’t really want you to take the paid tier, they want you to explicitly opt in to the ad-supported ‘free’ one. - because by specifically agreeing to "I want the free Facebook with ads’ option it means you’re actively choosing to be served ads, which is what all the recent lawsuits have been about - users giving explicit consent to be targeted for advertising.

No, you get automatically issues them. About 1 invite every 2 weeks once you’ve been on there for a few weeks.

Interesting. I might give it a go, thanks.

Yeah I know, but it’s such an ‘all or nothing’ approach. I don’t dislike the idea of boosting. I like to be exposed to other people’s content. I just wish it wasn’t so constant. Kind of feels like people do 1 post of their own and then 10 boosts.

I have both but drifted away from Mastodon. It seems to lack the anarchic wild humour I want. Plus the culture of excessive boosting was too much and just meant my timeline was full of posts from people I don’t follow because they’d been boosted by the people I do follow. I follow folks because I want to hear what they have to say, not what the people they follow have to say.

Also all the servers had too strict rules. Having to post content-warnings if you mention food or other innocuous stuff.

I far prefer Bluesky. It’s a lot more liberal and far more more chill. Plus there’s lots of nonsense that keeps things fun. The feeds are a great way to find new people (you don’t need to beg for followers, just find people you dig and things will grow organically anyway). It takes the good things about Mastodon (decentralisation and open) and the parts of Twitter that were fun (people over brands, weird humour). I hope it keeps growing and opens up to more people, but I don’t mind it taking its time while it stabilises and adds features.

Or alternatively not taking the mobile operators side - being able to charge £10000 data costs to stream a couple of football matches worth of data shouldn’t be allowed.

In what possible way does that price come anywhere close to the costs of the providers in servicing that data?

Everything should be pirated, never use any Google or Microsoft service, use an email server you’ve built yourself, only get your social media access through obscure Mastodon servers, write your code in assembly language, only eat food you’ve caught or grown yourself, avoid the rental market by just building a hut in the woods.

After reading the Jon Ronson book “So you’ve been publicly shamed” where he interviewed a load of people that were outed for both bigger and smaller ‘crimes’, no, I don’t agree with it. Doxxing and other public shaming can have consequences you could not expect.

Plus, what if you get the ID wrong and dox someone innocent? That happens all the time too.

The last election was in 2006. 17 years ago. The median age of people there is only 20. Most of those people didn’t vote for anyone, let alone Hamas. And even those that did vote, Hamas got less than 50% of the vote.

Also, nice use of ableist slurs there. Is that really appropriate?

But that’s the wrong way around. They don’t want you to pay, they make their money through advertising. They make far more money from advertiser’s paying to put up ads than they ever make from people paying for premium.

Same as with Facebook now bringing in an ad-free version (in the EU anyway) - they charge higher than is reasonable so that people will opt for the ad-supported free version instead.

It’s not that you are blackmailed into paying premium, it’s that you’re encouraged not to as a way of explicitly consenting to ads.

Basically, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

But people advertise with Google precisely because they know the ads will be targeted at relevent people. If Google just sell loads of ad slots that just show to random users then that’s just a waste of money. If I’m selling motorbike helmets I don’t want to waste my money having Google show those ads to 60 year old men who only travel by bus or golfers or people who use wheelchairs.

Google won’t just sell loads of ads here, they’ll totally change their business model to something closer to the targetting approach.

Lens has been one of the most impressive bits of Google tech for years, but it still flies under the radar. I guess they’re just going to label it ‘AI’ now to get people to pay attention to it.

Rocky. Because it’s a Roborock and we’re unimaginative.

Thanks, but I can’t install into a Roku, which is the main TV I’d be using.

Weirdly, and annoyingly, I get this same thing when watching YouTube on my TV (the quantity thing, not the war propaganda stuff. Just regular ads). Whether via Roku stick, Chromecast or anything. It’s sometimes an ad every 2 minutes. However watching the same thing on a laptop or my phone even without any adblock and the video will play far better. Maybe 1 ad at the halfway point and nothing else.

I don’t know why the TV version of YouTube is such an arse for ads. They’re not even in clean places - I get an ad mid-sentence.

Honestly, for a 20 minute video I’d be perfectly ok with a 30 second ad or so. It helps the creators and isn’t that much of a pain for me. But getting adverts every 2 minutes, even if they’re skippable is just a horrific experience.

Love the nominative determinism at play here for Mr Bankman-Fried.

Sadly these still a lot of folks on there that haven’t moved elsewhere. If you curate your follower lists and don’t venture into the replies of big/ trending accounts then it’s still manageable. Mostly I just use to to read people I follow rather than post anything new myself these days.

Also, I’ve feeds of decent journalists that I’ve built up over many years that don’t post elsewhere. There’s still that immediacy that you just don’t get elsewhere.