> It is just crazy how easy it is to set this stuff up nowadays. I run both Navidrome and Jellyfin in docker containers….
Wow, I’ll get grandma to do it! Ha ha, just kidding, but I’ll try it myself. Ha ha, just kidding.
Honestly, I just want to scream “self-hosting isn’t going to happen, stop trying to make it happen.” I absolutely welcome the hobbyists doing this fun stuff in their free time, but the idea that they will ever win over ordinary users is total fantasy. And it’s accompanied by reality-denying stuff like how “you don’t need” feature X or Y. Sure, I long to go back to organising my own mp3 files like it’s 2002. And because you’re angry about corporate power, Spotify or whoever definitely provide no features of value to anyone! This is all pure mood affiliation.
Sorry. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad your setup works for you. But I think you are not using the word “easy” in the same way as most people.
Those aren't competitors of Spotify/Netflix; they're alternatives for people who are willing to tolerate small inconveniences to have full control over their library.
Of course it's not as easy as signing up for Spotify/Netflix, but setting them up is easier than ever (even easier for tech people).
Yup, the key word for me is control. And over time, considering the continual loss of control, more people will adopt self hosting, and things will get better and easier. For now, i only recommend it to hobbyists or people with free time and money. It does take quite a while to get it all running smoothly.
Disagree. With a little bit of technical knowledge which I’m assuming most people browsing hacker news have, these services are easy to spin up and use.
If you can read a README you can set up Navidrome and point it to your local library in 5 minutes.
Locally. It's a bit harder if you want remote access... I ended up using a reverse proxy and let's encrypt certs... It wasn't to bad but it wasn't easy. I have never looked into Tailscale or similar solutions though, maybe those are just click and go.
Tailscale, ZeroTier, Tinc, Hamachi, and the like are all very, stupidly easy mesh VPN solutions that anyone can use. If you feel like owning a domain, Cloudflare Tunnel makes it similarly easy to expose your service to the wider Internet on a home connection and not have to worry about proxies and certs. The barrier to self hosting has never been lower, and it keeps falling. Heck, Cockpit's Podman management means you almost never need to look at a terminal, and aren't locked in to a bespoke platform that's rainbows and glitter until it stops getting maintained or gets enshittified. Get a little SBC with as much RAM as you can find and you'll be amazed at the capability:effort ratio.
but because users are used to doing that for free, they can't charge money for that, but if they don't charge money for that, and no one's seeing ads, then where does they money come from?
There are probably more ad-supported or ad-enhanced properties, but what's been shifting over the past few years is the focus on subscription-supported products:
1. YouTube TV
2. YouTube Premium
3. GoogleOne (initially for storage, but now also for advanced AI access)
4. Nest Aware
5. Android Play Store
6. Google Fi
7. Workspace (and affiliated products)
In terms of search, we're already seeing a renaissance of new options, most of which are AI-powered or enhanced, like basic LLM interfaces (ChatGPT, Gemini, etc), or fundamentally improved products like Perplexity & Kagi. But Google has a broad and deep moat relative to any direct competitors. Its existential risk factors are mostly regulation/legal challenge and specific product competition, but not everything on all fronts all at once.
I think Wall Street would love to know the secret formula that can detect fraud and insider trading by analyzing trade volume in real-time that apparently hundreds of people in this very forum all seem to be aware of.
I'm surprised if they would let the trades go through at all once they know the secret.
This idea isn't uncommon because it's beyond the Overton window, it's uncommon because it is silly and unworkable.
* Total fantasy to think you wouldn't fall afoul of free speech, both legally (in the US) and morally.
In fact, the author touts as a benefit that you'd stop populists being able to talk to their audience. This is destroying the village of liberal democracy in order to save it!
* Absolutely zero thought has been given to how to police the boundaries. Giving a paid speech? Free gifts for influencers? Rewards for signing up a friend?
* Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy. Advertising fulfils an important social role. Yes, I know it can be annoying/intrusive/creepy. "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.
* Banning billboards or other public advertising? Fine. Not new. Done all over the place for commonsensical reasons.
* Any article that talks about "blurry, “out-of-focus fascism”—that sense of discomfort that you feel but can't quite point out" is itself blurry and out-of focus, not to say absurd and hyperbolic. Calling a mild sense of psychological discomfort "fascism" is just embarrassing.
> * Total fantasy to think you wouldn't fall afoul of free speech, both legally (in the US) and morally.
Some limits exist on advertising exist in most countries. Do they respect free speech?
> * Absolutely zero thought has been given to how to police the boundaries. Giving a paid speech? Free gifts for influencers? Rewards for signing up a friend?
Absolutely zero thought is never given on policing boundaries on anything. That's not how the legal system operates. All laws are approximations at best and grey areas get decided by courts on a case-by-case basis.
> * Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy. Advertising fulfils an important social role. Yes, I know it can be annoying/intrusive/creepy. "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.
In my country, advertising alcohol is forbidden. Somehow I still manage to find interesting new beers to try year after year
> In my country, advertising alcohol is forbidden. Somehow I still manage to find interesting new beers to try year after year
This is interesting. Alcohol companies a well known to bypass this prohibition by all possible means (product placement, influencers,...) and yet I find real benefits in it. It would possibly be similar if advertising was forbidden for everything
They probably do some sort of promotion targeted to the retailers. I don't know and don't really even care. All I know is that I don't see any beer ads on TV, outside, or anywhere else really, and I wouldn't mind if the same was true for everything.
Any existing policy inevitably has a gray area, no matter how elaborate it is. That's okay if the author didn't cover corner cases in a short essay.
> You don't just magically know what to buy.
Knowing what you need is not magic. I don't remember much advertising lately that would tell me how a good can satisfy my existing needs. Mostly, they are trying to make me feel I need something I didn't need before
Hardly a corner case. It's such an obvious question that the failure to cover it means the author isn't serious.
Knowing what you need is not magic, but knowing which products might satisfy it is not automatic. Advertising targeting, which people quite reasonably find intrusive, exists because advertisers desperately want to find people who may potentially want to buy their product.
Of course it does, but this proposal entails banning search engines, right? I can imagine definitions of "advertising" that don't encompass search, but this author doesn't intend them; he explicitly states that he is not just classifying "paid" advertising of products as advertising but all "third-party" advertising, "full stop", and acknowledges this would make Google "cease to exist" in its "current form". He clearly intends his proposal to include banning search engines, entirely.
It really isn’t. The comment argues that the proposed solution is unworkable and would have adverse consequences, not that it would only partially work.
> Total fantasy to think you wouldn't fall afoul of free speech, both legally (in the US) and morally.
Corporations don't have rights. Corporations don't have the right to free speech.
Yes, I'm aware of the SCOTUS opinion on this issue--I'm saying SCOTUS is wrong on this.
And no, granting corporations personhood isn't a viable approximation. We're discussing a case in this thread where granting corporations a right is drastically different from granting individuals rights.
> Absolutely zero thought has been given to how to police the boundaries. Giving a paid speech? Free gifts for influencers? Rewards for signing up a friend?
Your criticism is basically that OP didn't draft a full detailed legislation in a blog post. That's not how ideas get proposed on the internet and you know that.
> Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy. Advertising fulfils an important social role. Yes, I know it can be annoying/intrusive/creepy. "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.
I agree that people don't magically know what to buy, but ads make that problem worse, not better. Ads cannot inform, because they don't come from an unbiased source and even in the rare cases where they tell the truth, they're leaving out important facts intentionally. You're basically saying, "People don't know what the truth is, so we need to let liars lie to them." The solution to lack of knowledge is truth, not lies.
In the absence of advertising, independent third party reviews such as those provided by Consumer Reports would actually fill the need for consumer information.
We don’t have to do it all at once. Focus on what ad platforms like Google’s offers. Ad banners, ads on videos, etc.
Start by banning target advertisements - now ad platforms can’t use information about the user to decide which ad to show.
Next, ban forced advertisement - people cannot be forced to watch 10 seconds of an ad, or to have the ad be persistent on a page. All ads can be easily dismissed.
Then, force ad platforms to respect a user setting that says they don’t want to see ads. Just a new browser standard that communicates the user preference, or a toggle that can be changed in apps.
That alone should get rid of most problematic ads, but we’d still have sponsors and affiliate links. For those, we can start by increasing the requirements for disclaimers or identification. e.g. sponsored content has to be strictly separated from non-sponsored content. Get rid of “segways” and affiliate links close to the actual content.
If advertisers find loopholes or ways around these measures, we just close the holes with new regulation.
> Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy.
A-Are you Don Draper by any chance?
Seriously, though: you don't need marketing. What you need while searching for what product to buy is a technical specification of the product by which you can determine if the product suits your needs.
I keep thinking about this, and the only conclusion I can come to is that businesses would still need to be able to advertise their own products in places that they own.
For example, what if I want to buy a guitar?
I'm shopping online. First, I need to pick a company to purchase my guitar from. How do I choose? Any sort of aggregated comparison of places to purchase from can be considered advertising, so they are all banned (otherwise, astroturfing would be only form of advertising). Do search engines also count as advertising? Okay, so I've found a site. How do I know I'm getting a good deal? (although this is a whole different argument about us worried about getting a good deal because maybe we over-consume, it's still a consideration).
Now, on that site, is this company allowed to advertise different brands that they carry to me? By definition of advertising, no - the whole purpose of showing me products is to make me purchase, which is the definition. So then do we reach a true communist state where there is only one option to purchase? If so, can I still not see it because it's considered advertising? Okay, fine, I need to be able to see at least one guitar, we can concede that point.
Or maybe instead I go to the store to purchase a guitar. Firstly, how do I find the store? If they are not allowed to advertise, must I organically drive past their store? Are there rules on business signs that disallow specifying the type of store, because that could be construed as advertising products? Or is that limited to a certain brand - the goal is to allow all competition equally, so it just says "guitar store"? We've already agreed (probably) that this store can't 'advertise' itself elsewhere, so the only way I will know about it is through (illegal) word-of-mouth, which is still technically advertising. Or maybe it's only illegal for businesses to advertise? Or for people who are earning money from the act? How is that defined?
Okay, anyway, I've made it to the store. When I walk in, I'm met with the same dilemma in example one - the store isn't allowed to hang up products, because that incentivizes me to purchase. Maybe I need to just say "hey, show me a guitar so I can try it" and they must present me with a randomly selected guitar to avoid bias. We continue this until I find one that resonates with me. They can tell me the price of each, but not a sale price, as that falls under unfair advertising law to incentivize me to purchase a specific brand, so brands aren't allowed to run sales anymore. I have no idea if I'm getting what I want - sure, it sounds great and feels great and I enjoy it, but maybe I could have gotten that from a less expensive guitar, or maybe I didn't realize that I wanted a different size guitar.
By this point, economies of scale have collapsed because every purchase must be organic and therefore every national retailer has been dissolved - and most likely the largest manufacturers have discovered the best way to exploit this situation, so the largest now have natural monopolies and the rest have died off because they couldn't compete and were selling direct to consumer, not stocked in stores. Speaking of which, how do stores even work? How do grocery stores work? Every grocery store is built from the ground up on advertising. The same logic applies here. Two choices on a shelf must be in identical nondescript boxes with absolutely no calls to action or differentiators listed. Therefore, the smaller companies go out of business, or maybe the companies with the largest or smallest packages. In fact, just the size of an item can be used to intuit value, so now prices must be fixed to size, and sales & coupons are outlawed.
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All this to say, marketing in some form has existed since time immemorial. Finding value in choices is human nature.
The only way something like this could happen ("Advertising is illegal") would be a monumental wide-scale, best-effort, not-perfect set of judgement calls, which would require drastic overreach by a governing body - which would be exploited by finding weak links in the system and exchanging something they value to look the other way for a certain seller - which is exactly what got us to where we are.
One of the main reasons that we always arrive right back where we started is because the people with (less empathy, win-at-all-costs, better-than-thou, etc.) mentalities are willing and able to exploit the other group, the group that wants (peace, fairness, equity, teamwork), because the second set of values means enabling those around you, and the first set of values means taking advantage of that.
The only way I ever see healthy systems working is in relatively small groups of people where there can be shared accountability and swift action taken towards selfish behaviors, as defined as a community. Unless there is near-total buy-in, a system cannot thrive with the assurance of fairness, teamwork, equity.
A list of stores by closeness is not advertising, a site dedicated to impartially reviewing guitars is not advertising, telling your friends about a guitar you like is not advertising.
I hate all the comments being so coy about definitions. Ublock seems to block ads pretty well. Maybe start there and not these crazy hypotheticals where anyone saying anything about a product is banned
the difference here is if you search or seek something, i.e. explicitly consent to viewing advertisements for guitar in your active browsing session vs them being pushed to you without your consent the next day on your phone.
I'm not against monetizing advertisement for the 1st use case either.
> Any sort of aggregated comparison of places to purchase from can be considered advertising
This is where your confusion stems from, I think. Any sort of independent third-party review site is totally not advertising as far as I'm concerned. The problem with sites like Yelp is that they accept money from companies and are susceptible to astroturfing. But truly independent reviewers like Consumer Reports, are pretty clear not advertising.
> Now, on that site, is this company allowed to advertise different brands that they carry to me? By definition of advertising, no - the whole purpose of showing me products is to make me purchase, which is the definition. So then do we reach a true communist state where there is only one option to purchase? If so, can I still not see it because it's considered advertising? Okay, fine, I need to be able to see at least one guitar, we can concede that point.
This seems like handwringing about the most extreme possible form of legislation possible which nobody is proposing. I am not sure what definition of "advertising" you're thinking of, but having a list of what products your store sells isn't advertising by any reasonable definition.
Is the right to pay others for speech necessary for free speech to exist? If so it is already non-existent. No functioning democracy allows judges or politicians to sell their speech to the highest bidder for example.
The difference is that advertising is extremely broad while bribing a judge or politician is extremely narrow (not to speak of conflicting with their professional remit)
It's relatively easy and sensible to ban very specific forms of paying for influence. But a ban on publishing your opinion in someone else's publication is extremely broad and obviously in violation of free speech. Free speech isn't defined as standing on a corner yelling at people.
I also think it's counterproductive. All influence seeking (both commercial and political) would be forced to move from overt advertising to covert infiltration of our communication.
> "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.
It's worse than that in that it's just plainly wrong. I learn about useful products via advertising all the time -- so often, in fact, that I'm sort of bewildered that anybody could claim otherwise. We must be experiencing the world quite differently.
> In fact, the author touts as a benefit that you'd stop populists being able to talk to their audience. This is destroying the village of liberal democracy in order to save it!
the irony is the author is using propaganda to spread populist ideas
You are defining marketing as manipulative. In fact, marketing is just "bringing a product to market". For example, it includes having booths at a trade show. The line between objective information and "puff" is impossible to draw. I googled "strollers" and got:
Joolz strollers with ergonomic design, manoeuvrability, compactness, and storage space. compare and choose your favourite Joolz pushchair model.
We can see historically that advertising evolved from the charmingly blunt "Foo Bros. makers of hats" to "makers of the FINEST hats" (untrue, but at least we still know what business they're in...) to "wear Foo or no one will talk to you again". Along the way, regulations had to be enacted here and there, snake oil didn't actually raise the dead, so lying about that was banned, but letting us feel that we're inadequate because we can see how happy and cool the people wearing Foo are on TV (or TT) is just their free speech. And of course there are the side effects TFA touches on like building trillion dollar empires for Goog and Meta, and using the same levers to manipulate voting and buying.
Personally, I can imagine a world without ads because I block them everywhere I can, and somehow I still manage to buy things, even if they might not be making me feel as cool as I should if I'd only play along.
Looks like manipulation. Information would be a sheet of parameters relevant to the product. The cheapest and most expensive strollers can be claimed to be "Compact" and "Ergonomic".
Who would maintain such information repositories and what would the incentive be to take that on? (As they no longer could be supported by ad revenue.)
Resellers maintain such information. There are many websites where you can specify the weight, height and hundreds of other parameters for your product search.
Ad revenue is not the only kind of revenue. Traditionally, people would pay purveyors for goods or services they deemed valuable enough to acquire/use.
I didn't think it. I imagined a cartoonish chubby character in typical tan safari gear with a like-colored round explorer hat and swinging a whip like a lion tamer. He is mustachioed, light skin, and bespectacled. And I am well familiar with Dr. Jones.
Is HN the whole world? Isn't an AI model supposed to be global, since it has ingested the whole Internet?
How can you express, in term of AI training, ignoring the existence of something that's widely present in your training data set? if you ask the same question to a 18yo girl in rural Thailand, would she draw Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones? Maybe not. Or maybe she would.
But IMO an AI model must be able to provide a more generic (unbiased?) answer when the prompt wasn't specific enough.
Why should the AI be made to emulate a person naive to extant human society, tropes and customs? That would only make it harder for most people to use.
Maybe it would have some point if you are targetting users in a substantially different social context. In the case, you would design the model to be familiar with their tropes instead. So when they describe a character iconic in their culture, by a few distinguishing characteristics, it would produce that character for them. That's no different at all.
EU has signed up to lucrative trade deals with Canada and Mexico since Brexit and has many more similar ones with other Asian countries. International trade is complicated and it is very much something the EU specialises in.
Not really, if the whole world sinks into an economic depression then the percentages won’t matter much. What will matter is the starting position and whether the country’s economy has enough headroom to ride it out.
Wow, I’ll get grandma to do it! Ha ha, just kidding, but I’ll try it myself. Ha ha, just kidding.
Honestly, I just want to scream “self-hosting isn’t going to happen, stop trying to make it happen.” I absolutely welcome the hobbyists doing this fun stuff in their free time, but the idea that they will ever win over ordinary users is total fantasy. And it’s accompanied by reality-denying stuff like how “you don’t need” feature X or Y. Sure, I long to go back to organising my own mp3 files like it’s 2002. And because you’re angry about corporate power, Spotify or whoever definitely provide no features of value to anyone! This is all pure mood affiliation.
Sorry. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad your setup works for you. But I think you are not using the word “easy” in the same way as most people.
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