Comment by musicale
1 day ago
> we fought so hard against pop-ups throughout the 90's and 2000's only to re-implement pop-ups in javascript as soon as we could
A group of people who thought that web users should not be abused may have won the first pop-up battle, but the businesses that made money from intrusive advertisements clearly won the war.
In hindsight maybe it wasn't a such a great idea for web users to switch en masse to a browser made by an advertising company.
The endgame is a probably a war between web sites that are endless mazes of advertising and user agents that try to navigate the maze and extract the non-advertising content.
I don’t know if hindsight is quite right. There were people raising alarms about this when Chrome initially came out and repeatedly as it grew in popularity. Especially when sites started requiring Chrome. It’s just they were dismissed as conspiracy theorists or brushed aside because right now Chrome is faster and the present is all that matters. This was 100% pushed by tech enthusiasts and web developers… the average person would’ve otherwise stuck with their OS default browser.
I’m not trying to correct you. It’s just a sequence of events I’ve seen play out repeatedly and I’m not sure if there’s a solution. Most recently I’ve seen it with Bambu Lab locking down their 3D printers. Prior to that Autodesk yanking the Fusion 360 enthusiast licenses.
Maybe there isn’t a solution. There’s a lot of UX work that isn’t fun to do and so it’s hard to get volunteers to do it. It’s hard to do product management in a distributed group of volunteers in general. So, companies that can afford to bankroll projects often gain traction with performance or usability gains and suck away attention and funding from open source options. Then when they amass enough of the user base they flip the switch and now folks are stuck. The cost of changing is often prohibitively high and the OSS option is generally far behind at that point.
I think people are bad at thinking longer term. Or maybe they just prefer immediate gratification. In any event, absent a shift in human behavior I expect we’ll see this sort of situation to continue to play out. It’d just be nice if folks were less antagonistic about it when those concerned raise that alarm.
"OK Gemini, please take this 10-minute video on youtube and give me a version without any advertising or promotional content."
"I'm sorry Dave, but I am unable to accept requests that oppose Google's business interests."
"Well, send it to ChatGPT then!"
"Sure thing. Here is your... 5 second video:"
(Video) "Hey what's up? Be sure to like and subscribe." (end of video)