This is interesting as a technical PoC but also feels a bit unethical.
The moral case for ad blocking on the web seems pretty clear: online advertising is built on massive exploitation of user privacy, has horrible UX, and is often implemented so poorly that it tanks pageload performance. In short, I understand why people use ad blockers on the web.
Podcasts though? In RSS-based podcasting, which is what this tool targets, you're typically getting a reasonable quality audio ad, with limited tracking, targeted broadly at the category of people who might listen to a particular podcast; it's about as unobtrusive as advertising gets. Widespread circumvention of those ads could really hurt the ecosystem, which would be particularity frustrating given that podcasting appears to still be a viable space for small scale creators to do great things (e.g. San Charrington and the TWIML AI podcast)
TLDR cool demo but everyone should please think carefully about if or when to use this tool.
> with limited tracking, targeted broadly at the category of people who might listen to a particular podcast
Not so fast. Many podcasts are served by intermediaries. The same intermediary can then observe and collect an individual's listener preferences and create a more targeted profile.
The iOS podcast app Overcast shows you all the intermediary platforms a podcast goes through.
E.g. 99pi goes through Chartable, with Overcast flagging that it "may follow individual-listener behaviour across multiple shows or the web, often to track responses to ads.'
How about if I turn the volume down during ads, is that morally wrong?
Maybe I play ads at regular speed and volume, but I think about something other than the ads while they play, is that wrong?
Perhaps a truly ethical consumer would listen intently to every ad, rewinding every time their mind wanders, pausing the audio every few seconds to take copious notes.
This sounds a bit like the fallacy of the beard; the existence of ambiguous behaviours that exist somewhere on the spectrum between "listening to an entire podcast with ads" and "automatically downloading the podcast, editing out the ads, and reuploading to a personal RSS feed so you can listen to it ad-free" shouldn't prevent us from contrasting the behaviours at the extreme ends of the spectrum.
That said, "unethical" was clearly a poor choice of words, as that's quite a loaded term. However, this technology is designed to systematically circumvent the mechanism by which many podcast creators earn money for their effort, and even if "unethical" is the wrong word, we should still discuss whether putting these technologies out, and using them, is a good move - particularly if we care about rewarding creators and supporting the podcasting industry. (And there's an argument that goes even further, around whether doing something like this is systematically violating an implicit contract with creators, even if it's more of a moral contract than a legal one).
> we should still discuss whether putting these technologies out, and using them, is a good move - particularly if we care about rewarding creators and supporting the podcasting industry
Note that a lot of people believe that it is not only a good move, but the actually ethical one. I fail to see how the ads would benefit the users directly, and I will go out of my way to not support advertising. So far I've installed tools like uBlock Origin and Sponsor Block for tens of friends/acquaintances now, and I firmly believe they are getting a better experience.
This is a space in which I still haven't fully formed an opinion (as I typed this response I realized I have an opinion, I'm just not totally sure what it is) so I welcome discussion. I hate advertising too, and use e.g. Sponsor Block, but I recognize that the majority of the modern internet would not exist without ads.
> if I turn the volume down during ads, is that morally wrong?
30 years ago, was it morally wrong to go to the bathroom during an ad break? (IMO: no)
> I think about something other than the ads while they play, is that wrong?
30 years ago, was it wrong to chat with friends during a commercial break? (IMO: no)
That being said, _skipping_ the ads entirely doesn't seem (to me) equivalent to these examples.
I cannot explain why I feel this way. I _think_ I still believe in _unobtrusive_ advertising - 5 to 15 seconds of ads before a 10 minute video.
If the author of our favorite podcast can't get any product placement in, why will they continue producing the podcast? (Maybe in a utopia they would create the podcast because that's what they love to do - but maybe in a utopia they would prefer not to cast, and instead listen to someone else?)
Idk. Some thought vomit here that maybe HN folks can help me work through.
You're not obligated to listen to an ad anymore than you are obligated to buy an advertised product.
Creators will still get paid per download with this tool. If everyone does something like this (unlikely), worst case is conversion rates might be lower, which could cause advertising to become less financially viable, so content creators may have to explore other monetization options or add more advertising.
Removing ads from a podcast that offers a paid ad-free alternative feels wrong, but aside from that I don't see anything wrong with this. I'll always choose a paid version over ads.
Video/audio ads (especially TV commercial breaks) seem inherently obtrusive to me. They're hard to skip, and rarely contextual. I personally think listening to ads is generally harmful, there are better sources of information to be influenced by to make a decision.
An unobtrusive ad would imo be more like putting a link in the description, or a privacy-respecting banner on the website. I'm sure that wouldn't pay as well, though.
I think there's a preponderance of scientific evidence to show that there's probably some kind of effect on you as a member of homo sapiens, even if it's not necessarily conscious or not exactly as strong as advertisers claim it is to their clients.
For example, would you say you are immune to the Mere-exposure Effect [0]? Absent some particular gripe, you'll unconsciously give an edge in preferences to a brand you've heard about versus one you haven't.
Do you have other feelings that you consider important enough that they should cause me to think carefully about something?
If your media contains parts that you needed to be convinced by money to insert I'll probably skip it entirely, for me it's a signal that the material is produced for other reasons than your interests and passion, and there are many other people that don't make such compromises. Some of them put a price on the material, some don't. I might be willing to make a deal with you, but I do not want to be pulled into your deals with third parties.
If the vast majority of folks started skipping ads, and ads thus no longer had reasonable conversion rates, companies would stop investing in podcast ads and many podcasts would stop being produced.
Probably, but subj has zero chance to ever serve vast majority. It’s a tool for people who’d never buy anything from ads either way and know what a local server is. No real ethics issues here.
I feel that the vast majority of folks would claim they'll 'never buy anything from ads'. Isn't one of the main benefits of advertising purely brand recognition?
I'm unsure how I feel about the 'zero chance to ever serve vast majority' argument. I use uBlock and Sponsor Block, but recognize that that has an impact at scale. I guess that argument kind of feels to me like "your single vote doesn't matter." For a few hundred or thousand folks, sure. But what if 500k people start using it?
I'd say the easiest comparison is that it'd be about as ethical as taking a VHS recording of a TV program and skipping through the old ad breaks.
Personally I don't see an issue with that; but even if you do, I'll also note that the overwhelming majority of companies that rely on Podcast/influencer ads in general have utter shite quality products. It's one thing to get a traditional radio ad break telling you about the current supermarket sales, it's another to hear the fiftieth VPN ad who is totally about convincing you that they're just for watching Netflix overseas, the twentieth food delivery company, bad earbuds manufacturers or shite like razor delivery companies and cast iron BBQ grills. To put it quite simply; there's a reason these companies aren't pursuing more traditional avenues and it's probably because they'd get undesired scrutiny if they did.
There are of course outliers, but the amount of false advertising for shoddy products compared to actually desirable shit is so low that the bar is below the floor.
Really miss Divvy (RIP). At the risk of causing a good thread on Apple's weird inability to lauch a really valuable OS feature devolve into a list of workarounds, Hammerspoon (a generic automation tool) plus this script (https://gist.github.com/artburkart/15b62f1a741eef0f74492860a...) offer a really good equivalent, with the added ability to change hotkeys, extend behaviour, modify behaviour, etc. since it's just a script. I was devastated for a brief while when Divvy (and then ShiftIt) stopped working, but haven't looked back for a while.
I think the main difference is that a 1 month sabbatical is typically over-and-above your normal holiday allocation. This can make a huge difference for some people, particularly people with families.
With a normal "x weeks" of holiday those weeks quickly get committed. Vacations with your partner, childcare during school holidays, etc. Having an extra month above that can free up time for learning, pursuing hobbies, travel, etc. that is much more selfishly focused on your own interests, which can be massively invigorating - essentially exactly what a sabbatical is supposed to do, even if I agree that it would be nice to be even longer.
According to these numbers the combined cost of replacing the battery and the screen is 22.99 + 44.99 == 67.98, which is less than half (~45.3%) of the cost of the original new phone. Comparing that to the market value of a used phone is a bit unfair, since screens and batteries drive the depreciation of used phones more than any other components (ignoring EoL timelines for OS security updates, etc), and in this example you're getting new ones. Plus not everyone needs a new screen and battery every year.
This definitely isn't going to be for everyone but, for what they're trying to do, IMO the numbers seem reasonable.
I think this assertion from them is misleading (in the same way that it is when Facebook et al make it). If Apple is allowing micro targeting then they are implicitly sharing data. E.g. let's say they let me buy targeted ads for "dog lovers aged 34-39", and then you show up on my website as a lead via that campaign, then Apple has just implicitly sold me demographic/interest information about you, even if it wasn't done as explicitly as if they sent it over in a spreadsheet. I fundamentally think that microtargeting and privacy are incompatible.
(I'm open to bring shown, however, that Apple's new ad marketplace explicitly eschews microtargeting, but I haven't seen that so far)
Unless I'm massively misunderstanding your setup, that Docker image contains an entire OS and runtime, not just your website. Reasonable people can disagree about whether that entire paradigm is sensible but, having chosen to use Docker, complaining about image size in this way seems an odd choice. More to this point, most of what is in the image will be little to do with Node or its build systems..
This kind of point comes up a lot in these discussions. I'd suggest a slight alternative:
"Death per million person kilometers, broken down by car age and road type."
The expectation of death in modern cars during highway driving should be very low. Given that tools like Autopilot are only installed on new cars and only enabled in highway driving risks spurious comparisons if all miles of driving are treated equally...
An article from 2018 [1] attempted an even stricter apples-to-apples comparison. The author’s estimates of fatality rates for Autopilot-driven Teslas vs. human-driven Teslas suggested that Autopilot was more deadly than human drivers but still the same order-of-magnitude.
The author also called Musk’s comparison of Autopilot’s fatality rate to NHTSA’s fatality rate an “apples-to-aardvarks” comparison because NHTSA’s statistic includes bicycles, pedestrians, motorcycles, and buses.
Bit late to the party but I just wanted to put one top level comment saying: this is awesome! I'd never have thought that putting a Fortran codebase like this into WASM was so possible. And doing so in this way surfaces great, battle-tested information, that would be herculean to reimplement and test in another language. Really awesome stuff!
I always find this to be a funny point in these conversations. The entire discipline of "agile development" exists because it's so hard to have foresight into the requirements of a software product up-front. By extension, I don't see how we think it's possible to define expectations for employees up-front and then pay them only based on results. If you look at agencies within our industry, for instance, about 0% of them will work on fixed-price contracts - it's always time-and-materials. Knowing what we know about software development, I don't see how individual employment can fundamentally be any different...
This is probably a cliched comment by now, but it never ceases to amaze me how quickly many crypto users appeal to centralized authorities as soon as they accidentally lose ownership of an asset. From one of Seth Green's linked tweets:
> Got phished and had 4NFT stolen. @BoredApeYC @opensea @doodles @yugalabs please don’t buy or trade these while I work to resolve
Just a continuous, incredible endorsement of the fact that in certain situations intermediaries, however imperfect, are actually very desirable...
Yeah, if these people had any integrity they wouldn't lean on the legal system to solve their problems. This case highlights the core problem with NFTs, that being you cannot have digital property without some kind of enforcement in the real world. Since there is currently no known mechanism for truly trustlessly connecting the blockchain to the real world (oracles don't count, they are trusted third parties) then the rights supposedly associated with these NFTs are effectively unenforceable. IMO Seth Green should just continue with his dumb show and if the owner of the NFTs wants to sue for copyright infringement they will be forced to reveal themselves to the legal system and open themselves up for all sorts of problems.
Strangely I think that might actually be less of a concern with BAYC? From the article:
> A growing number of NFT projects are granting owners the right to commercially adapt their works, which has been a useful strategy for increasing brand visibility but has consequently introduced a host of legal disputes. Bored Ape Yacht Club was among the first to adopt these terms, which led to an explosion of Bored Ape merchandise and derivative NFT collections but also set the stage for bitter copyright lawsuits.
IANAL though, and also "bitter copyright lawsuits" doesn't sound exactly like where you'd want something like this to end up :)
Unless the BAYC contract permits some party to deem a transfer of the NFT illegitimate and reassign the IP rights back up the chain, it's just as much of a concern. As illustrated by this very story.
The moral case for ad blocking on the web seems pretty clear: online advertising is built on massive exploitation of user privacy, has horrible UX, and is often implemented so poorly that it tanks pageload performance. In short, I understand why people use ad blockers on the web.
Podcasts though? In RSS-based podcasting, which is what this tool targets, you're typically getting a reasonable quality audio ad, with limited tracking, targeted broadly at the category of people who might listen to a particular podcast; it's about as unobtrusive as advertising gets. Widespread circumvention of those ads could really hurt the ecosystem, which would be particularity frustrating given that podcasting appears to still be a viable space for small scale creators to do great things (e.g. San Charrington and the TWIML AI podcast)
TLDR cool demo but everyone should please think carefully about if or when to use this tool.