Why all of a sudden tech companies are not being favorable to their users?

lionkoy5555@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 1572 points –

YouTube disallowing adblockers, Reddit charging for API usage, Twitter blocking non-registered users. These events happen almost at the same time. Is this one of the effects of the tech bubble burst?

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Algo ads could be good, if they weren't primarily advertising stuff to me after I already bought it.

I look up a specific type of product that isn't consumable, buy it, then get ads for it for weeks.

How many mattresses or tires can one person need?

That's the problem with personalized algorithms, because they don't understand what people actually needs.

(What people actually need is tickets to "Barbie")

The advertising companies, Google & Facebook, absolutely do understand this and are happy to mistreat small companies.

The worst part of using Google Search without uBlock is that if I'm just trying to get to a specific website without typing out the full html address, I have to scroll passed the top result which is an advert for the website I already typed.

Google charges companies for customers they already had.

It's even worse than that. The ad is often a fake version of the website you are looking for. Ublock protects you from phishing and malware.

Very often do I have to bypass the wrong links as well for competitor services I wasn't looking for, because I explicitly wrote the service I had chosen.

It's even worse than that, Facebook and Google have been selling "impressions" that are actually bots for decades at this point.

Long ago I was searching for a new printer then the printer ads started following me to different places on the Internet. Places that should not have known I was searching for a printer. I decided I wasn't going to have any of that and installed an ad blocker.

Not sure how effective that will be in future. Pretty sure ads as content written by AI is going to be the hot new thing. And by hot new thing I mean thing that can die in a fire.

Surely the fact that you bought a toilet recently means that you're now a toilet enthusiast and will happily click on ads to add to your toilet collection!