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Comment by apacheCamel | Hacker News Reader

I hope there is a light at the end of the tunnel for all of this. It seems like there will always be a cat and mouse effort to be just one step ahead of the other. Like how many websites have those popups now where they ask you to turn off ad-blocking. Intrusive ads and website tracking should both be a problem by default. I guess not all ads can be a problem, but I am unsure if the same could be said about tracking...

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We're willing to play the cat and mouse game indefinitely, if that's what it takes. Widely deployed trackers are limited in how fast they can try new tricks. And in practice, we know that ITP is working pretty well to block cross-site tracking: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/12/09/the-information...

> Widely deployed trackers are limited in how fast they can try new tricks.

How so? Tracking scripts are often included by a script tag that points at a website. Can’t the code be updated, “deployed” to websites immediately, and take advantage of the relatively slower release cycle of Safari?

Maybe I should have said that some tricks are slow to deploy.

Sometimes the publisher only embeds an image form the tracker (the famed "tracking pixel"). Getting lots of sites to change that to script is a pain. Sometimes they need to deploy new server-side tech for a workaround. For the recent CNAME cloaking trick, they have to get sites to modify their DNS and change what URL they embed script from.

You're doing good work, thank you.

2021: "Preventing Tracking Prevention Tracking Prevention Tracking"

[2019/12/12] [Hotfix] Pre-Emptive Tracking of Track-Preventative Tracking Users by Home Address

Whether it’s a light or not, the end of the tunnel is in sight, it’s the ads becoming the content.

This is so prevalent already. Brands disguised as users posting "content" that is mostly just an advert for their brand.

It has got to the point where any time someone posts something that seems to too clearly show a brand name or speaks too highly of a product I suspect its the PR people at work and I downvote it.

There’s a marketing term for it, too. It’s called “native advertising.”

"Native advertising" was originally ads that were served by the site itself, first-party. It's advertisers who have co-opted it (yet again), but that doesn't mean you have to go along with their preferences. Typing isn't hard and "sponcon" (sponsored content) is already perfectly cromulent jargon, as well as being shorter.

The old way: tracking you as you look for snowboarding videos on the Web and advertising you a snowmobile wherever you go.

The new way: making sure that 95% of the snowboarding videos you see are subliminally designed to sell you a snowboard (the guy riding the competitors snowboard goes slower and crashes... the guy riding your company’s snowboard wins the race and his girlfriend looks like a supermodel)

I think eventually we will pine for the old way. Already you can’t get useful reviews anymore because all of the “comparison” searches are run by manufacturer mouthpieces.

>I think eventually we will pine for the old way. Already you can’t get useful reviews anymore because all of the “comparison” searches are run by manufacturer mouthpieces.

Absolutely. A lot of reviews these days from google results read like someone who has only ever read the feature list from the marketing page. There is a bit of a search engine hack where you just put "reddit" after any search and it brings up fairly real results for now.

If people are doing that, it’s fairly certain that there are marketers maintaining “humanoid” Reddit accounts which then chime in with opinions on Bluetooth headphones.

No doubt. So far the only defense against crap products is buying them from a physical store so you can test and easily return them and having a good warranty.

I find reviews useful anyway. I simply ignore the "good" reviews and always look at the worst ones. There are three kinds of bad reviews - people who had random bad stuff happen (postal service broke it) that is irrelevant and think everyone should know - people with some sort of vendetta (possibly disgruntled employees, or competitors, or crazy customers) - and finally, people who actually had a bad experience that might be characteristic of the product's quality or design.

If the third category can be used to construct a narrative about something that is a deal-breaker, then that's the information I'm looking for. Of course, it has to be taken in context of the competitors.

My expectation is that the best products have some type (I) and type (II) bad reviews, but no type (III). Almost as good is something with type (III) that are about something that either doesn't matter to me or is actually a positive from my perspective.

I'm pretty good at finding decent reviews. I'd never post my process on a public forum, but I apparently don't have as much trouble avoiding sponcon as a lot of others.

I've said before, and I'll say it again, much of the content I want to consume is basically advertising, but the way today's internet works, is that I have to view ads for stuff I don't want in order to see the ads I want to see. And for some reason, people call avoiding this "stealing".

And how much real functionality will be sacrificed to this war?

>> Like how many websites have those popups now where they ask you to turn off ad-blocking

Handle them the same way as websites with a cookie or gdpr warning that blocks everything else, vote with your valet by leaving the site and find another site instead

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