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Comment by TheChaplain | Hacker News Reader

Considering how technology develops, I could very well see a future where we are forced to watch/acknowledge ads before the actual content continues.

I think there was a movie with something like that, if the guy closed his eyes, the ad would pause and wait until he looked again.

I hope I am too cynical...

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There was a Black Mirror episode 15 Million Merits [1] where you either had to watch the ads (actually look at the screen) or pay to skip them!

1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

> I hope I am too cynical...

Nope, this will definitely come to pass. As long as there's munition left to be fired, or new one invented, the arms race will continue.

It was in Black Mirror. IIRC he was surrounded with screens in his room and was forced to watch ads

If that happens, I'll stop watching said content.

People seem to forget that if you make watching content too painful, opting out is always an option.

Good news, Sony already patented it. [0]

[0] https://fortune.com/2013/04/30/sony-patent-is-hilarious-terr...

Everyone always brings this patent up while forgetting that large companies will literally patent every single idea that comes up just in case. Doesn't mean it's ever going to actually happen. See also: Amazon's Wage Cage (though, looking at Amazon, they might actually do that one)

> I could very well see a future where we are forced to watch/acknowledge ads before the actual content continues.

I wonder if skipping YouTube ads is already used in a similar way?

Pressing that small "skip" button is a user interaction that acknowledges the users attention to the ad, and there is usually a minimum time the ad has to run before it can even be triggered.

So having an ad run for 5-10 seconds, with a manual skip, might possibly be a more impactful "impression" then the ads just running trough, without a skip, as most likely nobody is paying attention to them in the very first place.

I have suspected this for a while now. It's also a chance to advertise subliminally to sleeping people, sometimes if you don't skip the ad it will play what we used to call an infomercial. In practice it just punishes people that lost the remote, or are unable to easily move.

People will then find a way to hack it. You can't enforce this kind of thing on a general-purpose device like a computer or a phone.

Remember: on general-purpose devices, all code is mutable.

> general-purpose device like a computer or a phone.

Most smartphones sold today wouldn't qualify as a general purpose computer.

Android ones would. Even without root, you're able to use apps like Termux, AIDE, and various emulators.

Termux has whatever permissions Android gives it. No direct access to audio, video, etc.

What do you mean by direct access? You'll need to build a separate app to access these things because they are only accessible via APIs that are only exposed in the java land. But you can build an Android app right on your Android phone. AIDE allows you to do just that, and I believe you can install the raw SDK in Termux and use it as well.

In other words, you can use an Android phone on its own, unmodified, to program it to do arbitrary things. Yes it's awkward and yes you have to jump through some hoops to get it set up. Nevertheless, this fits my definition of a general-purpose computing device.

You could technically do the same on iOS. The only problem here is that Apple would never approve an app that gives a user this much control over their own device. It's not a technical issue, but rather an organizational one.

E.g. read this: https://github.com/OxygenCobalt/Auxio/issues/38

"Parsing music metadata is actually really fast, it's the process of getting a file handle from the android system thats the real bottleneck. MediaStore is a system-level daemon, so it doesn't have that restriction, but I do. This is why Vanilla and VLC take so long to load media, not because the metadata indexer is slow but because reading files is slow. Google prefers this as it furthers their quest to kill the filesystem, so there's nothing I can do about it."

> NOTICE: Termux is broken on Android 12. Android OS will kill any (phantom) processes greater than 32 (limit is for all apps combined) and also kill any processes using excessive CPU. You may get [Process completed (signal 9) - press Enter] message in the terminal without actually exiting the shell process yourself.

https://github.com/termux/termux-app

Say that to iPhone users who can't install anything that is not approved by Apple.

Android has around two thirds of market share worldwide iirc, and up to 90% in some countries. The Default HN Country (US) is pretty much an outlier with its 50/50 split.

Yeah and Android gets more and more locked down and user-hostile every year.

Once they deny root to the user it's all a matter of degree not principle.

I think we're reaching the end of that road. Look at Denuvo, sure it's still hackable but takes several magnitudes more time and effort than in the past. Eventually we'll reach a point where consumers have no choice but to comply

We've got anti-AdBlock tech, mandatory tracking consent for site usage, and even mobile games with mandatory ads that don't progress if the device volume is too low. Many people on HN would even support the first two. I think the lack of existence of this tech is not due to ethics concerns, but due to it being noticeable in the TV return window, rather than patched in years later like many smart TV's most obnoxious ad slots.

under-screen selfie cameras on phones will eventually take us there

put 4 or 6 cameras and analyze your gaze to figure out what part of screen you are paying attention to and if your pupils dilate when you see a product/model picture

I wonder if some UI and navigation can become interactive based on gaze too

obviously it will be ruined just like pop-ups and modals

I'd never watch digital content ever again. I would only ever read books from that point forward.

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