This kind of thing is why the kids can create a band called "The Anxiety" and no one says "what anxiety?"
At least the business model makes more sense than before.
Ah, so my stupid comment in the American Oxygen thread was actually smart.
11: It seems like the sort of thing that would be playing on a video screen when you go out to pick up NERPs*
Also when you are in a head restraint with your eyelids forced to be open.
Are they going to have to licence Patent US8246454B2 from Sony, though?
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8246454B2/en
(Direct link to the meme: https://content.fortune.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/sony-patent-8246454-01.png?w=868)
This really doesn't make a lot of financial sense. Moviepass charged from $15 to $40 a month. (And couldn't make a success of it, but never mind that.) How many ads would I need to watch per month to represent $40 of revenue for the company? YouTube ads are charged at an average of 10 cents per view, so... four hundred?
And the sort of person who will watch hundreds of ads in order to see a couple of films for free is almost by definition time-rich and cash-poor. Who would want to advertise a product to that particular demographic?
This really doesn't make a lot of financial sense. Moviepass charged from $15 to $40 a month. (And couldn't make a success of it, but never mind that.) How many ads would I need to watch per month to represent $40 of revenue for the company? YouTube ads are charged at an average of 10 cents per view, so... four hundred?
And the sort of person who will watch hundreds of ads in order to see a couple of films for free is almost by definition time-rich and cash-poor. Who would want to advertise a product to that particular demographic?
The real treasure is the panopticon-related technology we develop along the way.
Plus, science will finally learn just how much the nipple should stick out through the t-shirt before "I'm watching this ad closely so I can see her chest" becomes just "titties, hooray" with no gain in product awareness.
It's just wild how much the ability to gather better consumer data is destroying the world. It used to be that most people spent most of their time at their job trying to make their products good, and a smaller fraction of people were working on directly making money. Now everything is financialized and it just gets worse and worse.
Speaking of advertising and titties hooray, I have taught facebook during the pandemic to stop feeding me stupid ads that are for things I either don't want or have already bought, and instead it gives me ads for cute dresses which I also don't buy but which cheer me up.
I took Facebook off my phone because I was getting fucking alarmingly on target ads.
5/6: Presumably they aren't offering people unlimited new movie tickets or whatever absurd benefit it was before, so they don't need to target replacing the revenue (which was itself never sufficient either).
The penis enhancer people are good at targeting. So I've heard.
But how could they know the enhancement I wanted was adding a jingle sound?
Facebook seems to give me lots of ads for women's clothes and lingerie. At best it's a hint that I should buy presents for Cassandane more often. More likely it has got our purchases confused at some point.
Scrolling through it right now I see a cologne ad. Fair enough, I'm a cishet man, so it's well-targeted in that sense. But I work from home and am happily married. Fashion for me starts and stops at being presentable enough to drive the kid to school.
There's also a whiskey ad that seemed well-targeted until I noticed it was alcohol-free. What the actual fuck?
In our crazy dystopia, that brief window where venture capitalists would just buy me tickets for any movie for no good reason was truly a delight. I would never have watched Mama Mia: Here We Go Again under any other circumstances, and what a joy that film's brought to my life.
"Mom, how many guys did you have unprotected sex with in the same month?"
Facebook won't allow ads for alcohol. If whisky ads were an option I would definitely consider training it to that instead.
I took Facebook off my phone because I was getting fucking alarmingly on target ads.
I took Facebook off my phone because I found the birthday onslaught of messages so awful. Then I just never put it back on.
Also something about the algorithm had been showing me a seriously boring selection of posts, and I'd only see interesting ones when they had 80 comments on them, which is not as fun.
Then, after not saying "happy birthday!" to anyone for a year, my friends' learning algorithm successfully made them not wish me a happy birthday, and I only got maybe 2 wishes this year, and it felt like a pleasure.
The problem is always that there's various things that I don't actually want, but still click on occasionally (and then regret clicking on because then I get way too much stuff for that). Mostly news, political fundraising, and thepointsguy blog posts. It's frustrating to have think before clicking on a link not whether I want to follow the link but instead about how it will effect the algorithms. It's one thing for websites to have to do SEO, it's a very different thing to have to live your life that way. So instead, pick something that cheers you up, and make sure to click the links regularly, then you have more freedom to occasionally click on other things without the algorithms going nuts.
But yeah somehow you have to actually "engage" in some way with the posts that you like if you want facebook to show you more. I don't think just "liking" is enough engagement, I think they want you to click through or comment.
There was literally a Black Mirror episode about OP, no? 15 Million Merits. Starring Oscar winner Posh Kenneth and the weird cult leader from the finale of the first season of Misfits.
It's just wild how much the ability to gather better consumer data is destroying the world.
My brilliant and original response to this statement is probably wasted on you lot, but I think I can make a Slate article out of this: In a world of diminishing democracy, our only hope is that the capitalists will find that, say, antiracism is a popular view and will thus choose to promote it more than our politicians are willing to.
But they already do that, and it just makes the olds madder. The fundamental dynamic where culture only cares about young people but politics only cares about old people is a disaster. What old people actually want is to change what's on TV, but all they can actually do is win elections.
What old people actually want is to change what's on TV, but all they can actually do is win elections.
I have been out-Slatepitched.
Also given the tendency of people to become conservative and assholish as they age means that demographic bubbles are bad. (In addition to other ways they can be bad.)
If you'd like to outsource the writing part of your already successful newsletter, I know a writer looking for work.
You Maniacs! Your nostalgia blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
5 really does respond to the article, but I'm responding to the "dystopia" thing instead.
@4
No. They won't have to license that patent. The claims recite an abstract idea without additional elements that amount to significantly more than the additional idea. The claims are therefore invalid.
See Ultramercial
Compare claim 22 of Thales, which doesn't even recite an abstract idea.
26 is great, but I have a solution. Cable for old people that only has channels that plays repeats of shows from the 1950s to the 1980s. No news channels, of course.
37: Only for seniors, only $10 a month, and no pesky internet connection!
tendency of people to become conservative and assholish as they age
I confounded the template by starting out an asshole and sticking to my commie guns in support of that personality.
26 is amazingly pithy and also frighteningly correct.
I won Facebook for a while by hiding ads from every single advertiser in the as preferences, to the point that they had none to show me and I got no ads. For a while this broke the feed algorithm and I wouldn't see more than about five posts before it said there's nothing else to see. Now feed works and I get ad free for a few days until a new batch of ten or so shows up and I hide those. I think I've blocked on the order of five or six thousand advertisers at this point.
There was some tv exec- maybe in the 80s?- who said that going to the bathroom and not watching the commercials was theft and people doing so should be fined. There are similar arguments about ad blockers. But I finally installed ad blockers when the multiple pop ups and auto plays were so bad they crashed my browser, and I'm sure they'd laugh at the idea I should be able to fine them for breaking my computer.
Going to the bathroom meant that your brother would take the good chair and mom said that was fair but I called it theft.
I don't recall any of the TV people going into rage mode until the VCR-enabled commercial skipping was common.
Actually it was 2002 and was in the context of DVRs. Turner CEO said using them to skip commercials is stealing, and interviewer said well what about going to the bathroom, and he said maybe that's an excuse but unless you're going to the bathroom in 30 second increments you're probably using a DVR to steal TV without watching the ads (because DVRs could skip specific increments that are the common lengths of an ad.)
I've never even seen a Tivo hooked to a TV except at a store or something. I just missed that and went straight from cable/VCR to streaming.
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