Gentil

> You need a huge infrastructure for that. Only a Google or Facebook could possibly deliver such a competitive offering in that space. Sure, the ad ends up being the same a fair amount of the time, but dare you risk going with some Brand X ad network that can't do that?

I don't think you need that middleman. https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/ does this by selling ads directly. This also means relevant ads for users of your product and not pay cuts to middleman. But it does take more initial effort. Which you need to think about only if you make good enough user base anyways irrespective of Google ads or self managed ads.

Duckduckgo does this too. This is in the best interest of the creator and the user IMO. Don't you think?

> Well google don't sell behavioral ads to user, they sell to companies. Without extensive knowledge and experience, companies executives are more likely to lean for behavioral ads even it's more expensive or inefficient.

Yes. Third parties === companies if you have read my entire comment. Now that you mention this... if you are like me and read privacy policies, you know that there is nothing stopping a company/third party to sell those data that they got from Google to another third party. And in turn that third party to another third party in an endless chain. We have no idea. There are no laws and policies in places except the policies that are set out by companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon (Ironically these are policies set out in place IN RESPONSE TO THEIR THIRD PARTY GETTING HACKED OR MAYBE SUPPLY CHAIN ATTACKS).

This means your behavioural data is like covid. It can be spread to endless entities. Not the initial number of people Google sold the data to. This means... Google sells to 100 entities -> Those of the each hundred entities CAN share/sell this data to 100 entities each and on it goes. These are 100's and 100's of companies apart from their practices (shady or otherwise) which needs to protect your behavioural data from getting hacked and data breaches. And for what? Because I searched "What is NFT?" ? Ridiculous and wasteful.

> I don't particularly like the ads, but I understand they are needed to sustain many businesses (either online or elsewhere.) Would I prefer alternative payment methods? Maybe, depending on the publisher, and the price of the content.

The problem is not the ads but the way it is produced (Behavioral ads). The issue is always behavioural ads and not contextual ads. Duckduckgo has been profitable for so long with contextual ads. And not to mention, contextual ads which doesn't depend on lucrative data practices and privacy invasive tech has been proven to be much more effective than behavioural ads. Good read on it - [1][2].

Also, how is reactive ads (behavioural ads) useful to a user? Just think for a sec. Unless they are listening to everything you say which is ludicrous levels of privacy violation practice followed Google, FB and Amazon RIGHT NOW... behavioural ads are useless to many many topics and use cases. By the time you get a behaviour based ad, you would have stopped looking for it, found the item. And even when they are fast enough, after many hurdles of being reactionary, THE AD NEEDS TO APPEAL to the person. This again ignores the fact that users don't buy stuff based on behaviours but based on ratings and reviews from Yelp, Amazon, youtube reviewers and other influencing factors like ME! I am the tech nerd who helps my entire family and friends with purchases on electronic items like smartphones, computers and other items. And I know how to teach people to buy things by going through reviews and what not. Nothing I do is in favour of Behavioural ads. Meanwhile just by being proactive, contextual ads are more likely to be more appealing to user cos it depends on NOT YOUR BEHAVIOUR but behaviour of everyone who have searched the term/item. This means the ads are tested to work on more people IMO.

Also, behavioural ads miss the point that humans have strong opinions on things. But also that humans change their opinions from time to time. I might move from iOS to Android or vice versa. Behavioural ads also miss that a lot of the purchases are rare purchases and once in a life time purchases. So reactive ads based on my behaviour could be useless. Sure, you might be able to sell something based on this particular rare purchase. But why risk the resources wastage, data privacy and data breaches? This is not in favour of the user at all. Contextual ads are more effective in all the above scenarios than behavioural ads.

Behaviour data is not that effective to SELL ADS. But you can offset all these risks and ineffectiveness by selling your data to thousands of third parties or governments even. THE DATA ECONOMY MAKES BEHAVIOURAL ADS SUSTAINABLE. The data economy needs to stop. That is it. NOT ads. Ads have been present in media and everywhere else long before Google was there, nobody was up and arms about them, were they? They were annoying, yes. But not threatening like it is now.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/opinion/facebook-google-p...

[2] - https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-... (Thanks user iou)

PS: Writing this as a separate response (Instead of a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29357427) cos I don't want this to be tucked away from other users. There will be more people who sympathise with ads but miss the point of behavioural ads vs contextual ads.

I would have to respectfully disagree though. Cos like I said, the reason why free trial is there in the first place is to entice users. There are so many products without free trials.

Again, the burden should not be in the shoulders of the end user. There is no reason for the company to ask for credit card other than data sharing, other dark patterns and spam. Like many have mentioned, spam can be dealt with better by other means. These are companies who have tried it out. I don't know what else more to say. :)

Setting web development environments and mobile dev environments or anyway in which different languages are involved. NixOS have some documentation on it. Like I said, this wasn't because they (NixOS and Guix) implement it bad, but because of my time constraints as mentioned before.

But it also felt like, apart from learning the new way of using my system which NixOS/Guix works, now I have to work with how to deal with different languages. To me this felt like a big overhead. As a n00b of NixOS (not a n00b on Linux BTW), I have questions like doesn't this mean I will have lesser support on setting up something new development when something new comes along? This honestly have made me take my time on going back to NixOS. Cos I cannot just compile the packages directly like I could in normal Linux distros. Right? Or do correct me I am wrong. Like I said, the time constraints (+ pandemic) have made it hard for me to make time. Maybe you could correct me if I am wrong somewhere and make me understand it better. :)

Good points made by others. But another thing is you don't have to? Nix(OS)/Guix installs packages and dependencies separately instead of replacing packages like other OS/package managers do.

This means you have multiple versions of a package installed in your system and that you can use them simultaneously for different applications if I understand it right. You can move back and forth between versions if one breaks without effecting the rest of the system. Also if I remember, nixos-update rebuild switch (or something very similar to this command) which is usually fired after installing new packages or when a major change is made to the nix configuratino file creates a new boot entry and hence a snapshot for you to go back to if something in NixOS breaks. So there is no necessity for an LTS version to be present for stability's sake.

Garbage collection is also left to the end user to deal with. There is a garbage collector command in Nix package manager which will clean up when you push the command so that new packages are not flooding your storage space.

NixOS's stable channel can be very loosely compared to Manjaro in the sense that just like Manjaro, NixOS's Stable repo does opinionated changes/interferences/fixes. And NixOS Unstable is like Arch linux with latest and greatest upstream stable versions of the packages.

I moved to NixOS and came back to Arch because setting up development environments for general purpose computing felt tricky. I was on a schedule so had to drop it. Is it the same for Guix? I don't know why it should be any different. But still asking.

Also, am guessing people will likely have hardware compatibility issues for Guix which isn't a problem for NixOS since they bundle non-free drivers etc.

Interesting question. My question again would be why?. You just transferred the responsibility from you (the SaaS company) to a well known processor. This doesn't make a data breach or data sharing avoidable/impossible.

Also, anything related to finance is always hot. And this comes back to the same thing I made in the above comment, why should an end user who is just trying it out risk all of this? It's like telling a stranger a secret of yours. You wouldn't just share a secret with a stranger just because they say "trust me", would you?

It is the company who needs the users attention, not the other way around. The users shouldn't be punished for the same.

Credit card for trial is a dark pattern from the end user's perspective for sure.

Cos, that is one more place where the end user have to risk his/her/their PII. This is especially important considering the end user is trying the product out. The person has no idea whether they will invest in it or not. Yet, the person have to worry about their information leaked when he/she/they see this company on the news for a data breach.

Also, another problem is the overhead for the company on managing this data. The security, PR situation if this gets leaked. It's expensive and unnecessary. This is a risky business unless you are a data hoarder who sells them at which point that is again bad for the end user.

Interestingly enough, the pay for these individuals differ too. And this matters as well. We should be taught to negotiate. This is the most underrated thing our industry and seniors don't tell juniors of the field.

I learned this the hard way. After 5 years when the company was winding down, I learnt 5 colleagues of varied gender and race who were my colleagues were paid shit ton more than me. I know this is a sensitive topic. But if you ask, they will pay more or you will know how much you are worth. I thought the system will acknowledge and reward accordingly after I got a surprising bonus. IT DOES NOT. You have to fight for it. I felt really betrayed. And this is when everyone told me how and when to negotiate.

From the moment you are hired, you bargain for a better pay. That itself, from that starting period itself, your pay differs compared to the other person who may have been hired with you. Then not everyone takes the same effort (they can't or don't want to for varied reasons). But some people do a 9 to 5, the other people does late nights, some people are dettached from company and it's vision, some are are very loyal. It depends on individuals and their circumstances.

Handling everyone the same way doesn't work. This discourages people who want to put in more effort. So they jump ship and move to another company for a better pay. No person want the same amount of pay, they all want more. And the answer is negotiate. And ditch and make some noise on companies which have stereotype pay. Trust me. It is not the right place for you to work.

Imagine this, giving $1 million dollar to ten people and see how much money they all have after a year. It will all be very different for each of them. It will not be the same amount. That is the same for salaries, you salary at this point are based on how much you worked and how much you bargained. It won't be the same for another person with same experience and same background. It just won't be.

> This might be more indicative of your bubble than anything.

Sure. But this bubble that I was in since for a long time had been OK with JOB positions and talking about a career in FB before. So if there is anything else, that itself shows that "my bubble" stopped preferring FB. Shouldn't that itself mean there is a reduction in people choosing FB? :)

And I am coming across this online and elsewhere too. So my bubble is not the only one with this feelings for sure.

This is a huge possibility. They are already struggling. The reality is I don't see Zuck backtracking on anything. Meta and the new tech coming around it is a good example of it. They are actually looking into doubling down on surveillance and being invasive.So them struggling should be a good point. Or a good thinng IMHO.

They could use AI to tackle this in the future now that we have Copilot of the sorts. It would be interesting to see how the cope up with it.

I don't have much data points to share. But I've been seeing responses to people working FB have been horrible since for a while now.

It has been a common trend that when someone I know posts a job position in FB, nobody replies to it. At least not publicly (publicly means replying to tweet, replying to slack message in a well knit/known group of people). Even if they are replying personally and privately, that in itself shows a problem.

When I see someone working in FB, I can't deny that I am judging them. At this point, there is no reason to give a benefit of the doubt to how bad FB is to people, democracy and humanity in general. Sure, you can argue with technical meritocracy of some tech they produce. But how long can you sell yourself that excuse really when on the other side, adverse effects are mounting up?

As nerdy and smart as tech workers are, we are still in need of validation from others right? There definitely should be some effect on people being perceived as a bad person for working for a bad company even if it is paying a ton. FAANG engineers should be more than equipped to look elsewhere because of it.

As much as I would love to give the benefit of the doubt, this is purely about increasing engagement. Disliking something was a very easy way to say I don't like this.

When something controversial happens from now onwards, you will have engage in the comment section. Humans cannot just move on when they have strong feelings about something like Politics or Climate change for example. With the dislike button gone, most people will feel the need to say you don't like/agree with a video. How do you do that? Comments. The negative engagement makes Youtube/Google money. This has been a known fact for a long time. This way they can cash on it more with increased engagement.

Heavy blow to JAMF folks! It would be interesting to see how thing go from now onwards for them.

I hope they remove it. Anything and everything FB sends data. Their share button alone does it. Don't you think their auth does it too?

Forums are awesome for this context. It is most of the time better for privacy as well.

But is it just me or whenever I use Discourse forum, my FB container in Firefox shows it has blocked something which FB uses to track me! This is in multiple discourse forums self hosted and otherwise. So am assuming it is bundled with Discourse. This bugs me the hell out. And Discourse is everywhere too since it has an open source version.

I think Flarum is awesome and maturing! (https://flarum.org/)

Sir, I would ask your wife if it is OK to share all the usernames and passwords of all websites she has signed up to a stranger. And if she says NO, ask her if she wont share what she know are in her field of view, how can she be sure about the things/data she don't know about knowing big corps put money over your interest at first?

Also - https://www.privacytools.io/