[JumpCrisscross]

> Can the search result quality be quantified somehow?

Encourage you to try it. I've repeated Scott Galloway's mantra that advertisement is a tax on America's poor and stupid. But I never quite clocked the cost of search ads. It might be solely due to that lack of scrolling through crud that makes Kagi seem much, much faster than Google or DuckDuckGo.

[MatthiasPortzel]

You can turn off ads in DuckDuckGo. Settings > General > Advertisements = Off.

Obviously you can also use an ad blocker, but I think DuckDuckGo deserves more credit for making it a first-party option.

[bee_rider]

Advertising has always felt zero-sum to me. Like, I already want shoes, the ad isn’t going to wear holes in the soles of my old ones, the holes are there already, so the ad will just push me one way or another.

So, I guess it is not just a tax on the poor and stupid. Everyone has to pay, company A buys ads, company B burns an equally large pile of money to cancel it out, and we’re just back where we started.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Advertising has always felt zero-sum to me

Your attention is valuable. Your data, your preferences, your identity--these are valuable. (They may be the only thing about humans that, economically, is.)

When you see an ad, your brain deploys coping mechanisms [1]. The tax isn't paid with money, but with time and neurology.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363287602_Coping_wi...

[5e92cb50239222b]

I have personally seen people pushed into buying crap they don't need (and didn't even think about a few minutes before) by ads they saw on the internet. I don't like playing tech support for others, but installing ad blockers for technically illiterate friends and acquaintances now feels like a socially responsible thing to do.

[Thorrez]

If you're a new company, buying ads can help you get customers who would otherwise have bought something from your older, more well-known competitor.

Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on ads.

[vxNsr]

Hmmm… my impression was that Google is an ad company, wasn’t aware they did anything but collect data for ads and deliver ads, I’m curious to hear what you work on that isn’t “ads”

[Thorrez]

Currently I work on internal security. Preventing hackers from stealing data, like[1]. I worked on GCP for a while.

My point isn't that my paycheck doesn't come from ads or that I've washed my hands from that dirty ad business. What I meant was that I don't really have internal knowledge about ads, I'm not an authority, and also I don't speak for Google's ad business.

However, after I posted my comment I realized my statement, while true literally, was misleading, because I did intern in ads in 2015, which I had forgotten about when I posted my previous comment. So I'm sorry for that mistake.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora

[abind]

Ever heard of google cloud?

[vxNsr]

Didn’t think it was a real business. But regardless isn’t that also just the services they use internally just externalized for general consumption. So still in many ways supporting the ad business.

[kridsdale3]

It may not be market leader (IIRC it's a distant 3rd) but it is a profitable self-sustaining business unit that employed tens of thousands of engineers.

[bee_rider]

Unless the older, more well-known company has a larger ad budget, which seems… very likely.

[Thorrez]

Without ads the big company gets 100% of the mindshare and the small one gets 0%.

With ads the big company gets 99% of the mindshare and the small one gets 1%.

[Thorrez]

I just came across this example of how ads help (or at least helped) small and medium businesses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37662179

[dylan604]

Isn't that the same thing said about Lotto/scratch-offs/etc?

[kelnos]

It's complicated.

I go to Vegas and gamble sometimes, which is not all that different. I don't gamble because I expect to win money; I gamble because the experience (especially with more social games like craps) is fun to me, even when I lose. Certainly it's not fun to everyone, but roller coasters aren't fun to everyone either, and that's fine.

If you only gamble or play the lottery because you genuinely think you have a reasonable shot of coming out ahead (vs. other uses for that money), then you may have a problem. Or if you have an addiction to gambling and it's actually hurting your finances.

The other bit is that if you're poor, and playing the lottery is a way for you to build a little hope into your life (even if, deep down, you know you're unlikely to win), that's... questionable, maybe? Not an indictment of yourself, but it calls into question societal structures that essentially profit off your low-level financial despair, in return for lessening that despair a little, but only with a placebo. When instead society should instead be helping you, to, y'know, not be poor.

But hey, if someone allocates $5 in their budget to buy scratch-offs every day, I'd say that's probably better for their health than eating a $5 ice cream sundae every day.

[dylan604]

Look at the numbers of the people playing lotto/scratch-offs. Look at where they are being sold. These are targeted at a specific group of people. You can try to whitewash it all you want, but it only makes you look naive. Especially that last sentence of yours. I'm really struggling to not get banned for commenting to this, but I'd suggest taking some rose tinted glasses off and taking a real look at this issue.

[flagrant_taco]

Can you help me understand how this is whitewashing exactly? I guess you could invent a term like poor-washing, but where did race come into this?

[shkkmo]

The term "whitewashing", like many uses of the color "white" has nothing to do with race. Rather, it is a metaphor referencing a type of paint.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitewashing_(censorship)

[flagrant_taco]

There are many meanings to the term whitewashing, including applying a semitransparent white finish to wood.

I may have simply misread the GP and picked the wrong meaning, but I was going with this definition https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/whitewashing-words-...

[d-z-m]

Recently, it has also become a term of art in Hollywood to refer to what are deemed racially inaccurate castings.

[pbhjpbhj]

The poor people who buy a $5 ice-cream sundae every day are the ones addicted to food ... people are not making a freely reasoned choice to spend money gambling, poor people are in a vulnerable position and lottery runners exploit that with heavy advertising to ensure people are hooked on the idea they can improve things by spending money on what seems like hope.

[rchaud]

> But hey, if someone allocates $5 in their budget to buy scratch-offs every day, I'd say that's probably better for their health than eating a $5 ice cream sundae every day.

What happens when you have $5, but you win the scratchcard, and now you have $10?

A person buying ice cream every day, probably isn't going to want to be buy 2 on the same day. Can the same be said for lotto patrons?

[InitialLastName]

If they spend the $10 on scratch-offs that didn't pay, are they any worse off than they would be if the first hadn't paid?

Arguably, they'd be better off having had 3X the entertainment for their dollar.

[oaktowner]

A good friend once described the lottery as "a tax on people with bad math skills" and I don't think I've played since.

[bee_rider]

I don’t play the lottery, but I think this is not really correct.

Playing the lottery must be an action that has a negative expected value (otherwise they’d go out of business). But if, rather than expected value, you are optimizing for “probability of having a hundred million dollars” or whatever, your options are: keep the money you would have spent on the ticket (0% chance of success) or buy the ticket (very small chance of success).

So, I can see why people go for it. Especially if the ticket cost won’t make an actual difference to their life circumstances, and the winning money would.

[yunwal]

I think it's still probably better to throw all the money down on an unlikely sports bet or some crazy options trade. The lottery is particularly skewed to the house.

[NotSuspicious]

You can buy a lottery ticket for every single big jackpot for a year and lose less than your average options trader. The value is the feeling you get that you and your family might not have to work for the rest of your lives. That feeling is clearly and obviously worth a dollar a day.

[bluGill]

At least with sports betting skill can make money. Just betting on the first place team to win over the last place team for example, it won't always win, but typically will. Of course bookies know this and so the payoff isn't enough to make a living on (if you can figure out the exception and bet only on the last place teams that win you can live well). Statistics are generally well studied in sports, but if you study how a team is coached you can find cases where they have a better than statistical chance to win a game they are expected to lose. Most people betting sports either always bet for their team, or bet on statistics, so if you can exploit something else.

[Falkon1313]

$2 isn't going to get much from an options trade, or a sports bet either.

[dazc]

I can see a potential problem here in that a sizeable win from a random bet is likely to encourage some people to keep making these bets in future, with inevitable consequences.

[audiodude]

I don't love the lottery or scratch offs, though I don't mind playing occasionally.

But what I can't stand is the self perceived moral superiority of people who are like "haha, lottery is for idiots!"

[dazc]

People still win the lottery though, bad math skills or not.

[meroes]

Even those who don’t think ads affect them are mistaken. And if you extirpate ads completely from your life the tax is your time and effort to do so. That’s one of the most toxic mantras, it even seems purposefully misguiding.

[gaudystead]

I mostly agree, but I've been blocking ads however ways I can for years now, and I'd say a few minutes of setup has saved me HOURS of dealing with ads at this point.

Plus... Building a PiHole was downright fun and easy.

[meroes]

I know this is late but I did a PiHole for years as well. But then I needed another solution for being out of the house, and my housemate later complained they wanted to see Facebook ads…

And like the other poster my gateway didn’t work with a a pihole so I had to change each clients’ DNS (which reverting for the housemate was a solution).

It was worth it but ultimately I needed more than just a pihole, sideloading my iPhone every week with custom YouTube apps, trying to find a custom twitch app to sideload, having to use Yewtu.be on mobile, etc. None of the apps like Adguard blocked ads in other apps well enough from what I experienced.

[Falkon1313]

I wish I'd been able to get the pihole to work as easily as it sounded. It looked cool. But it was incompatible with the router from the ISP I had at the time, and rather than also buy and setup a new router, I just packed it away. Now I have a new ISP with a different router, and I'm sure it's incompatible too.

But at least it only takes 30 seconds to install ublock origin, and no extra hardware.

[Silasdev]

You should really consider getting a proper router like Unifi or the like. It's a one time cost and it will save you from these issues no matter what ISP supplied crap you end up getting.

Just plug whatever ISP router directly into your own, more capable, router and your home network will look identical, no matter where you move to or how many times you change ISP.

That said, running Pi-hole on a Raspberry pi is a treat!

[lostlogin]

I used a EdgeRouter and it was amazing, though a little-hair raising as a complete rookie.

The Unifi line solves this, and while it has some rough edges, it is so great. 9/10.

[comprev]

Consider using NextDNS to help block ads on both individual devices and network-wide too.

[manishsharan]

I don't have PiHole but this instead https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ on all laptops.