[niftich]

Machine learning on your images and videos to "enhance our strength in live and video and opens up a whole lot of exciting creative possibilities for Twitter"!

As ironically stated here [1], "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."

Though Twitter has a good record of open-sourcing internal infrastructure projects, I think it's it's safe not to expect any substantive amount of this work to see the light of day.

On the other hand, the quality of their search and recommendations when it comes to non-text content will significantly improve. They're really doubling down on Twitter being the "best place to see what's happening and why it matters, first", which is a welcome change from the confusing signalling in months prior.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11930354

[fizx]

> "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."

The best minds of the previous generation were thinking about how to kill Russians. I'd say it's an upgrade.

[GrumpyYoungMan]

>The best minds of the previous generation were thinking about how to kill Russians. I'd say it's an upgrade.

At least the results of the previous generations research went (largely) unused, whereas the results of ad clicking research is targeted against and used on people on a daily basis, to their considerable detriment. An upgrade? If so, it seems kind of dubious at best.

[debaserab2]

Only on HN would someone compare starting a nuclear war to click advertising.

[ben_jones]

Well only one of those two things actually happened (thankfully).

[J_Darnley]

Global nuclear war sounds immensely more fun than the present.

[rwallace]

To quote Douglas Adams: "No, not really."

[placeybordeaux]

Surely you're joking.

[J_Darnley]

No. I only hope I live long enough to see the apocalypse.

[wpietri]

As somebody who lives a mostly ad-free life, I totally agree. I think it's somewhat hard for people used to ads to appreciate how pervasive and manipulative they are. And it seems impossible to get people in the industry to see that maybe, just maybe manipulating people for a living is kinda sinister.

Even if it weren't, it's certainly wasteful. Advertising is mostly an arms race. Pepsi spends to challenge Coke. Coke spends even more to maintain hegemony. Neither is informing consumers, the perennial econ-theory justification for advertising. We all know those products exist. If we banned advertising tomorrow, consumers would be no worse off, and all those people could be doing something actually useful.

[PhasmaFelis]

A shit sandwich is better than a catered shit buffet, but that doesn't make it good in the slightest.

[Zephyr314]

> "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."

There is a strong argument that as long as they continue to publish and produce open source (which they have been doing) then you could think of ads as just a source of funding and tons of data to continue to push the state of the art. It can also be a stepping stone to other ventures [1].

[1]: http://www.wsj.com/articles/where-would-we-be-without-intern...

[rqebmm]

Since the last few generations used weapons research to fund scientific advancements, I guess this is progress after all!

[ben_jones]

Don't mind the huge military-industrial complex that has helped derail education, health care, retirement-funding, ...

[abakker]

Remember that the US military Active Duty + civilian jobs makes it probably the largest employer in the US. Not everything they do is great, but they pay salaries and benefits.

[drewstiff]

A government employer for the sake of employment... Marx would be high-fiving himself in his grave.

[cpeterso]

Side benefits from the advertising-industrial complex?

[danmaz74]

> "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."

That's just half the truth. The other half of the best are thinking how to skim money off financial transactions.

[heroprotagonist]

> They're really doubling down on Twitter being the "best place to see what's happening and why it matters, first"

It's a little ironic that they announce this in a blog post.

[talmand]

Wouldn't the Twitter equivalent be a tweet that points to the blog post?

[theseatoms]

Not really. This isn't the sort of news that most people need to know "first", or alternatively "live."

[jsprogrammer]

Or "ever".

[robbiemitchell]

This is the actual source of the quote: www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b4225060960537.htm

[sdegutis]

> As ironically stated here, "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."

Thanks. Perfectly succinct summary of what I hate so much about today's business world.

Dear all advertisers: how about you stop trying to figure out how to make people want your product/service more, and focus on making it discoverable and clearly understood when the time comes where they finally realize they do want such a product/service and go seeking it out from someone? And if they never do end up wanting it, MAYBE THAT'S FINE and maybe it's time you stop selling it?

[grok2]

As I was reading your comment, I was thinking - "Why not? Why shouldn't advertisers figure out how to advertise in ways that comes somewhat close to what you are suggesting, but make you want to buy before you know you want something?" ;-)...

Sometimes I think we are in a difficult dichotomy -- we like Twitter and we consume it voraciously and love that it is free, but we don't want them to use advertising as a source of revenue even though that might be the source that keeps it alive for us to consume. And, for free!

[sdegutis]

For sure, we're a greedy, selfish, and short-sighted species. But that doesn't make the advertisers right for doing what people are implicitly asking them to.

[true_religion]

People say 'the advertisers', but don't most people in the world work for a company that uses ads?

It seems that there's a mentality of compartmentalization, where people believe there to be 'evil ad companies' that somehow do nothing but make ads and don't actually sell products, nor employ people in the creative industry.

[lmm]

> People say 'the advertisers', but don't most people in the world work for a company that uses ads?

I don't think so? 90% of businesses sell to businesses, not to consumers, and in that world it's more about networking than advertising. (You could argue that that's just another form of advertising, but at the very least it's easier to avoid).

[sdegutis]

Just a crazy idea, but what if instead of TV/radio commercials and billboards and internet popup ads, products advertised themselves in the places they are sold (e.g. the sign next to a restaurant, or the side of a shampoo bottle on a shelf in the store), to explain very briefly why they're better than the competition? Most of the time, people will come across it organically, and that's healthy and good. But if discoverability is needed too, they can advertise in appropriate places, like restaurant listings, etc.

[icebraining]

One of the buzzwords a few years back was the "intention economy"; the idea is that you wouldn't have ads, instead you'd have a kind of automated RFP process in which consumers would say what they want and sellers would reply with offers that matched the request.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention_economy

[niftich]

There's a difference between advertising and branding, although sometimes they blur together.

In brief, advertising is trying to get you to buy a specific product, whereas branding is about mindshare. When Coca-Cola runs TV commercials, you're seeing branding, and you're associating Coca-Cola with energetic, smiling people living life to the fullest and all that good stuff.

Advertising, however, has a clearer call-to-action. In the US, car commercials seamlessly combine the two where they show people like actor Matthew McConaughey driving a Lincoln, and you think 'wow, successful people drive Lincolns' -- branding -- and at the end, they show current offers for leasing the car for 36 months -- advertising. What you propose actually happens in grocery stores today: sales. The rotating sales are a way to gauge market loyalty to a particular brand not currently on sale, vs. the other brand currently on sale.

[blahi]

People like to feel righteous and superior. Whether they deserve to feel this way is an entirely different story.

[Analemma_]

I don't know if advertisers are the villains here, or at least they're not the only ones. People want things that are expensive to run and maintain (journalism, social networking services, accurate internet search), but don't want to pay for them. AFAIK, advertising is the only way to square that circle.

[ams6110]

Because when they do want it, there will be several competitors offering it and from experience I know they will most likely choose the name they recognize from my prior brand awareness campaigns, and do little other research.

[niftich]

In even further irony, in this particular case, they're one and the same.

[joshdotsmith]

> "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."

What are people doing to change this? What do you think needs done?

Asking seriously because I'm actively trying to figure out the answers to these questions.

[niftich]

Make an 'ask HN' to keep this thread closer to its original topic. I'm sure many of us would like to share our perspectives on the matter.

[hkmurakami]

Frankly, the majority of the absolute very best minds of my generation are now tenure track associate professors. They received offers from substantially all of the best research institutions in the country.

Much of the very very good minds are thinking of ways to make us click more on ads.