Here on "hacker news" we get articles like this, meanwhile my brother is having a blast vibe-coding all sorts of stuff. He's building stuff faster than I ever dreamed of when I was a professional developer, and he barely knows Python.
In 2017 I was having great fun building smart contracts, constantly amazed that I was deploying working code to a peer-to-peer network, and I got nothing but vitriol here if I mentioned it.
I expect this to keep happening with any new tech that has the misfortune to get significant hype.
But it's fundamentally a correlation, and this observation is important because something can be completely ad-free and yet disempowering and hence unpleasant to use; it's just that vice-versa is rare.
Yes, a number of ad-supported sites are designed to empower the user. Video streaming platforms, for example, give me nearly unlimited freedom to watch what I want when I want. When I was growing up, TV executives picked a small set of videos to make available at 10 am, and if I didn’t want to watch one of those videos I didn’t get to watch anything. It’s not even a tradeoff, TV shows had more frequent and more annoying ads.
But note that I, as the user, want to block the ads. If I can easily do so (and I usually can) it’s fine. But the moment I can’t, in that very small way, I am disempowered.
And that’s usually where the junk shows up: in what way is the software not as good as it could be both because it needs to show ads and because it wants it to be hard to disable them (the second is worse).
The thesis is that jank is not quite imperfect software (it will never be perfect!) but rather something which is clearly not at a local minimum, and it’s pretty hard to have a local minimum with ads (even if the global ecosystem requires them for sustainability; something something evolutionarily stable something something always defect).
On a secondary point, when ads are locally optimal, we call it an effective sponsorship. Especially interesting when you don’t know that it’s an ad. How many times have you paid to see something with an agenda? Note that’s not a bad thing; I’d say every decent work of art needs at least some agenda. But it’s interesting because ads generally are not, in this sense, art; though on the flip side I’ve seen sponsorships on YouTube which are genuinely as if not more entertaining than the video itself and are still clearly sponsored and hence not deceptive.
But they'd prefer if it was shorts.
Exactly and I'm sure it was our naivete to think otherwise. As software became more common, it grew, regulations came in, corporate greed took over and "normies" started to use.
As a result, now everything is filled in subscriptions, ads, cookie banners and junk.
Let's also not kid ourselves but an entire generation of "bootcamp" devs joined the industry in the quest of making money. This group never shared any particular interest in technology, software or hardware.
Disagree. Ads hurt, but not as much as technology being invaded by the regular masses who have no inherit interest in tech for the sake of tech. Ads came after this since they needed an audience first.
Once that line was crossed, it all became far less fun for those who were in it for the sheer joy, exploration, and escape from the mundane social expectations wider society has.
It may encompass both "hot takes" to simply say money ruined tech. Once future finance bros realized tech was easier than being an investment banker for the easy life - all hope was lost.
To use the two examples I gave in this thread. Digital music is more accessible than ever before and it's going from strength to strength. While at-home subtractive CNC is still in the realm of deep hobbyists, 3d printing* and CNC cutting/plotting* (Cricut, others) have been accessible and interested by the masses for a decade now and those spaces are thriving!
* Despite the best efforts of some of the sellers of these to lock down and enshittify the platforms. If this continues, this might change and fall into the general tech malaise, and it will be a great loss if that happens.
That happened because technology stopped being fun. When we were kids, seeing Penny communicating with Brain through her watch was neat and cool! Then when it happened in real life, it turned out that it was just a platform to inject you with more advertisements.
The "something" that happened was ads. They poisoned all the fun and interest out of technology.
Where is technology still fun? The places that don't have ads being vomited at you 24/7. At-home CNC (including 3d printing, to some extent) is still fun. Digital music is still fun.