Might as well charge most of the AdTech/MarTech space for gross fraud over the past decade. ALL of these vendors were saying that they were using AI well before the general availability of such technologies. It simply wasn't possible without massive costs to access the compute required to deliver on their false promises.
These companies have a well well orchestrated PR effort though that attempts to flip the narrative towards all the good they are doing for these people.
In my mind, both are likely to be true.
Giving prisoners a purpose and minimum wage is far better than prison laundry rates ($0.50 per hour). That said, obfuscating the fact that your customer-facing pricing and incredible margins are based on what we'd all consider to be a form of slave labor is disingenuous a best. Transparency (think home page of their site) vs. back channel PR aimed at arming lobbyists would go a long way.
I dont know how i feel about this comment. It's almost as if there's the perception that the general public are a bunch of robots/sheep incapable of making their own decisions. I can sympathize with that perspective but need to draw the line and believe that people have a choice. Perhaps I'm being too naive.
If we look beyond Amazon, Apple has basically built their entire business model under the guise of "convenience." It's so convenient that you never will leave their ecosystem. If/when you attempt to leave, they'll make it so painful that you'll give up in frustration.
Think of your favorite site with the best experience possible. That is possible because people tested countless times what works, what didn't, what is the most efficient path to a rewarding UX, and so on.
Yes, there are a ton of garbage lazy marketers in the world. Saying that marketing shouldn't exist would immediately render every refined UX you have navigated, purchased from, and or loyally stream content from.
Throwing out the good because of the bad is too far of a reach IMO. Anywho, that's just little old me and my opinion doesn't mean much.
I disagree. You can improve your product without the extensive use of trackers, especially external ones. Hire UX and PM that know what they are doing, do UX research, talk to your customers, do competitive analysis.
Just accruing swaths of data doesn’t help, you need to interpret it correctly. I think qualitative data will bring you a long way. Once you need to do A/B testing, you can also do it privacy friendly.
If you market your product and run a campaign? Why not offer discount codes or something to figure out how you got them.
How do you think a UX person knows what works? It's not that they were born jedi's worthy of understanding good design and human intuition. They test, test, test, and you know what...they tested more.
Tracking what button or page layout works better from a conversion perspective is not a privacy issue. It's a user experience benefit.
Having a SaaS business and not understanding the exact user funnel, conversion, abandonment, etc. will directly translate into a loss of your job and/or the failure of your business.
This isn't about personal preference which you have every right to. This is about building a business, which is why we're all here, and understanding how to successfully delight our customers.
> Think of your favorite site with the best experience possible. That is possible because people tested countless times what works, what didn't, what is the most efficient path to a rewarding UX, and so on.
Funny; those kinds of sites are my least favorite. All those colors and buttons are an information overload, and the animations make my laptop fans spin like crazy. Not everyone bought their computer under a decade ago.
Please, blue links and black text aren't evil. We need to make interfaces functional and stop rather than continuously A/B test them to maximize addictiveness ("engagement").
You ignored my statement. I asked you to think of your favorite site...not mine. I'm in no way saying that what I prefer is somehow supposed to be preferred by you.
"Think of your favorite site with the best experience possible."
Regardless of the site experience that you prefer, I can assure you that thought, testing, and iterations have occurred to deliver the experience that you personally prefer.
One of my least favorite aspects of websites is change and redesigns when the original design worked perfectly well. Given that change is bad when a site has already hit the "meh, good enough" threshold, I doubt that testing and iterations would do anything positive for existing users' experience.
Furthermore, I don't want hyper-optimized experiences. These experienced tend to be addictive, whether intended or not. Using an interface shouldn't feel "magical", it should work. I know that you weren't implying addictiveness or engagement, yet these values are (consciously or unconsciously) prevalent enough in the field that they've lowered my level of trust in analytics-driven iteration. Other responses in this thread should also show that I'm far from the only one who feels this way. Earning back broken trust in these situations typically requires going above and beyond past expectations.
User research is research, and should require informed consent held to the same standards of consent as actual research. In any human research, participation should be opt-in. Participants should be given complete information about analytics and how they will be used (with the option to see source code), own their data, be able to revoke their data, and see conclusions of the studies in a format they can understand. Any questions they have should be responded to before and after they opt-in. This shouldn't be buried in a confusing privacy policy but provided upfront, in a language they can speak. People frequently learn interfaces in languages that are foreign to them, but reading details of user research is a different story: you might need a translator. Otherwise, your sample will be even more heavily biased.
This is a lot of work, and might make analytics more trouble than they're worth.
I'm not in the affiliate landscape but this kind of thing could have detrimental impact on publishers driving traffic to various commerce sites. If you're a person that makes an occasion purchase through publishers (small or larger)to support their content, this will immediately kill their earnings.
Publishers are desperate to monetize their audience anyway possible. Affiliate revenue always seemed to be lesser of evils, IMO, in comparison to programmatic/display. After all, the user intentionally is making a purchase vs. having their data sold out from under them with zero knowledge.
Here's to hoping that I'm misunderstanding how inclusive this will be to stripping parameters.
Check this out! I happened to see these folks just launched a business doing exactly what you described. I doubt they have any traction but there's hope:
That said, nothing about this is new. Whether Facebook, Google, or any of the other countless (yes, thousands) of players in the AdTech ecosystem, this kind of targeting can be done with ease and for pennies per user.
The deprecation of third-party data, cookies, and cross-domain tracking couldn't happen soon enough. It's not a perfect solution but it's certainly a step in the right direction.
I find it deeply disturbing that this was known by the US intelligence community the entire time yet they were suppressed from sharing publicly because of certain people being compromised. Ugh.
Remember the 9/11 redacted pages about the Saudis leaving? Oil and $$$.
The US and the world must decarbonize to remove the power from these feudal, vicious "drug dealers." The US wouldn't need to protect SA if most of NATO countries' energy could be had elsewhere. It would be essential to remove nukes and military arms from SA and Iran to ensure peace in the region.
The US is already a net oil exporter, and the EU mostly gets their fossil fuels from Russia. That's why anti-interventionist voices are so frustrated these days; it's increasingly rare to see any concrete justification for why regional conflicts in the Middle East are actually relevant to the US.
I think there are other interests beyond oil also:
- MIC: weapon sales and US military budget justification
- Focal-point for US proxy conflict with global adversaries
- Monetize Iran - Saudi Arabia tensions; simultaneously stoking it and tempering it
Getting away from oil, normalizing relations with Iran, and bringing SA and Iran closer together would work against the above interests but would deescalate tensions and obviate a major pretext for regional imperial occupation.
This makes sense to me. The idea that "the truth sets you free" is not just false, but in some cases even "privileged". If the political situation in the ME gets worse, it isn't necessarily Americans, or at least the current generation, who will be most harmed.
I'd argue it is up to US intelligence and the current Administration to make these decisions, or at least that's how the system is designed - and I would agree that any systems needs to be selective in what information is public - radical political honesty works about as well as radical social honesty, just with even more terrible consequences.
That's not to say 'there aren't problems with this, the most pressing being how to trust the authorities involved, especially when they are essentially given the means to bury their crimes, and control the very information by which their actions may be (democratically) measured - but I guess these are the paradox of the modern, democratic mega-nation.
This was known to the world. When a foreign critic is invited to an embassy, dismembered, and his body disposed of, you can be sure that all the key people in leadership knew about it, and those in a position to stop it must have approved it. The only possible reason why someone in the Saudi government would not know about it would be if they were an outsider that was generally excluded from the flow of sensitive information. Say the minister of agriculture or something.
Much of this story was published in Proof of Conspiracy in 2019, curated from major media reporting. The media just didn't cover the release at the time.
I don't know. It's not like the US government kept this as a closely-held secret or tried to convince anyone it wasn't true; they just didn't want to officially acknowledge it for diplomatic reasons. International politics works that way sometimes, and I'm not sure it's fair to characterize that as being "compromised".
Why is this in particular deeply disturbing? Your tax dollars are responsible for thousands of murders and hundreds of thousands of negligent homicides every year. Why is it that one guy getting killed for doing something that was illegal for him to do in his country is the thing that is getting to you?
Have the stupid wars we're fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Niger, Syria, Yemen, etc. somehow escaped your notice? How can a human with access to internet be so ill-informed?
Also, I read recently the CIA and other covert ops led to assassinations on members of the Black Panthers and even Malcom X and maybe Martin Luther King.
