My favorite most annoying ad tactic is the trick slowing down progress bar. It starts off fast making it seem like it’s going to be, say, a ten-second ad so you decide to suffer through it… but progressively slows so you notice at like the 20 second mark you’re only 2/3 of the way through the progress bar, so probably less than halfway done. Murderous rage.
Mr. Beast on youtube is guilty of that. Matt Parker of Standup Maths fame did an in-depth look at how that works. Whoever came up with that type of progress bar must hate people in general.
If you watch him on Joe Rogan’s podcast he gives a full overview of how every single tiny detail down to colors, length of scene cuts, facial expressions, language, total length of videos, time of day for release, thumbnails, sound effects, music is extensively A/B tested to not only optimize for the algorithm but for hijacking people’s attention as well. That weird creepy face with the outline and uncanny smoothing aren’t by accident. Everything is intentional because he obsessively tests anything that might give him even the slightest edge in a sea of videos. The content itself barely matters.
This seems like innately hostile behaviour. Not to other video creators, but to his audience. Stripping as much as he can using data and mathematics is the kind of thing engineers do to pull more out of a machine, not something you do when you're creating informal communications to other humans.
Attention engineering is how the charts are topped. Media producers knew this decades before the social media, and perfected it by the late 90's. Avoiding extremely popular stuff is just common sense if you want any real authenticity.
> when you're creating informal communications to other humans.
What he’s creating is fame and money for himself, the fact that it’s by doing videos is incidental. That’s why he also got into ghost kitchens, a game show full of corner cutting, and a theme park in Saudi Arabia open for under two months.
Appealing isn’t the goal. Catching someone’s attention is the goal. (Nobody thinks the balloons on the cars at the car dealership look good but statistics prove that balloons sell cars.) Then, triggering someone’s curiosity, which is more where the copy comes in. (You can increase your click count with this one weird trick!)
You’re subject to it every bit as much as me or anybody else, but for whatever reason, we have different triggers than the Mr. Beast crowd. People that think they’re immune to it after having it pointed out to them are likely just less aware than most how their emotions are being manipulated by things they don’t even consciously perceive. Sales guys love people like that.
If you're aware of it and think you're susceptible then you can make it impossible to be influenced by it. Ie, You can disable all 'related videos'/feeds/home page on Youtube with Unhook, and sponsored segments with SponsorBlock. I'll probably never see a Youtube thumbnail for the rest of my life, throw in Adblock and your exposure is extremely limited.
> Sales guys love people like that.
You can also easily never speak to them. I know they exist, but as a consumer I can't think of anytime I've had a sales interaction with a salesperson. I understand that some people do, and might even actively seek a salesperson - but if I go to a physical store I already know what I want to buy before I get there and the only interaction I might have is to ask how to find the thing I want.
I know it's a common argument/appeal to authority that advertising must work, because companies are still doing it - but there are economists who think that it might not[0].
> Ie, You can disable all 'related videos'/feeds/home page on Youtube with Unhook
This is not specific to YouTube. It’s billboards, product placement, etc etc etc.
> You can also easily never speak to them. I know they exist, but as a consumer I can't think of anytime I've had a sales interaction with a salesperson
Ok, so you make every major purchase online, probably don’t own a car, never purchased a home or lived in a city where its extremely difficult to rent without a realtor, never go out to restaurants or bars in the US where the service staff essentially works on commission in the form of gratuity… sure thing.
Thinking Sony would sell just as many products entirely based on word of mouth is absolutely absurd.
And as an aside, conversion measurement is der rigueur in digital advertising— for obvious reasons, companies don’t publish it. It is the basis for A/B testing which uses large sample sizes to see which presentation is more likely to make people do or not do something. It’s easier than ever to tell where someone was exposed to something and the click trail they took to end up on a purchase screen. I don’t, nor have I ever worked in digital marketing, but this information is extremely easy to find. Additionally, the Freakonomics guys are no strangers to vibing their way through topics they know nothing about and mistakenly assuming their brief thought experiments and unchallenged researchers have uncovered something useful. It’s not like they’re never right, but they’re no stranger to unforced errors in their analysis and you’d be wise to not rely on them as a source.
I somewhat suspect our difference here is cultural divide - I've never been to the US, but none of the things you mentioned have involved salespeople in my experience in Europe.
I live in a city, have a car (bought second hand), buy things in person, go to restaurants. We have no tipping or gratuity, apartments have a fairly standard application process and often it's a previous tenant showing you around because they want you to take over their lease, unless the apartment is empty.
It doesn't have to be appealing, it has to make you click.
Car crashes are not appealing, and yet it is something most people are tempted to look at. Many people think of dopamine as the pleasure hormone, not really, it is the motivation hormone, pleasure is one way to achieve that, but so is horror.
It makes evolutionary sense, if something horrible happens, you better pay attention, to get prepared so that it doesn't happen to you.
I don't know the details of the psychological response to Mr Beast thumbnails, and I think neither does My Beast himself, the analytics say it works and that the only thing that matters to him.
They give access to these features to their partners before general release, but this A/B feature has existed for quite some time now. I’ve seen various Patreon tech creators run those A/B tests and see them discuss them in their creator Discords.
> Whoever came up with that type of progress bar must hate people in general.
My first thought is that the person has a strong grasp of their profession and they love money. A hack like that has to have a really high value/effort ratio.
Yet another data point on why nobody should be wasting a second watching Mr Beast content. Complete algorithmically optimized garbage.
I recall Mr Beast showing up in a Colin Furze video for a few minutes and Mr Beast was very clearly incapable of being a normal person. He was obviously out of place, being in full makeup and styled, and couldn't seem to be bothered to actually engage or express real interest in the subject. I think the guy has replaced his real persona with some manifestation of the YouTube algorithm. If he's not actively making money, he's just a shell.
Luckily the recommendation system does work to some extent. I'm glad I don't get to see any of that stuff on my youtube. Opening the front page in a private view is a scary place of hyper-optimised drama and attention seeking.
It's scary imagining people getting sucked into that :/
It used to be very good, but now the personalized recommendations kind of suck. Seems like they enormously regressed, and basically do the 2009 move of just shoving the last type of video you watched in your face 37 times.
If you turn off you watch history in account settings, then youtube.com is just a passive-aggressive black screen telling you to turn it back on. It’s beautiful.
When you click over to subscriptions, you see only the stuff that you subscribed to, and nothing else.
Recommendations on a video are based on you subscriptions and the current video, and nothing else.
This is basically what I do in NewPipe! Just a good ol' chronological list of my subscriptions, nothing else. Ahh if only everything could be this 2006...
Mr Beast not looking like a normal person next to Colin Furze is impressive.
That guy is so over the top that I cannot bear watching his videos, despite them theoretically being exactly up my alley. I like tinkering videos, I like his ideas, and the high-quality results, but I hate his mannerisms.
Every time see Mr Beast (I don't watch any of his stuff, just accidentally see promos on Prime sometimes), he reminds me of Homer Simpson's forced smile in the Simpsons' espiode "Re-Nedufication" [0].
From what I can tell, based on an excerpt of an interview with Colin, Mr Beast had a bunker-related video and visited Colin's bunker. As a viewer of Colin's channel and not Mr Beast, it seemed very strange, but makes more sense if there was a more substantial collaboration taking place in a different video stream.
MrBeast is a hack, but its worth pointing out that all "progress bars" are bad design. You could make the same complaint against most of the progress bars in MsDOS. There was never a consistency in timing so you can never really use them to gauge how much time is left.
We’re not talking about a measure of computational progress here. We’re talking about visually representing how much time has elapsed out of a fixed duration. This is exactly where progress indicators shine, the total time for the thing to happen is perfectly specified in advance.
The difference between a lot of OS/app progress bars for IO (and sometimes CPU) operations and these timers, is that the total length of time for a lot of IO operations is often unknown with any accuracy so you have to use a heuristic to guess the current % done.
For instance: when reading/writing/both many files of differing sizes on traditional drives there is an amount of latency per file which is significant and not always predictable. Whether you base progress on total size or number of files or some more complicated calc based on both, it will be inaccurate in most cases, sometimes badly so. Even when copying a single large file on a shared drive, or just on a dedicated system with multiple tasks running, the progress is inherently a bit random, the same for any network transfer. Worse are many database requests: you don't get any progress often because there is no progress output until the query processing is complete, and the last byte of the result might arrive in the same fraction of a second the first does¹. The same for network requests, though IE (at least as early as v3) and early versions of Edge did outright lie² there to try make themselves look faster than the competition.
The progress bars in videos are a different beast (ahem): the total time is absolutely known, any inaccuracy is either a deliberate lie or gross incompetence.
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[1] I once worked on a system that kept logs of certain types of query so it could display a guess of how long things were going to take and a progress bar to go with it, but this was actually more irritating to the users than no progress display as it would sometime jump from a few % directly to done or sit at 99% for ages (in the end the overly complicated guessing method was replaced by a simple spinner).
[2] It would creep up, getting as far as 80%, before the first byte of response is received. This also confused users who thought that something was actually happening when the action was in fact stalled and just going to time-out.
> [1] I once worked on a system that kept logs of certain types of query so it could display a guess of how long things were going to take and a progress bar to go with it, but this was actually more irritating to the users than no progress display as it would sometime jump from a few % directly to done or sit at 99% for ages (in the end the overly complicated guessing method was replaced by a simple spinner).
In the Tiger era, the OS X start-up progress bar worked this way—it kept track of how long boot-ups would take, and then displayed its best guess based on that.
Many progress bars or other indicators lie, and the incentive is always to make it look good at the beginning, so that’s what we end up seeing most, whether it’s these ad ones (which thankfully I’ve never seen) or installers or especially something like Uber that always lies about how quickly someone is coming to make it appealing and then stretches it out. Even the thing in your car that tells you how much range you have left before refuelling (except it starts showing more than you actually have). I think in all cases it’s probably possible to give a more realistic estimate but it’s counter to the goals of whoever designed it.
As a full mea culpa, I once implemented this years ago for an open-source project (non-ad-related) that could have an unpredictable number of steps with unpredictable timing. We went with an algorithm that would add a % of the remaining progress on each status tick, so, while it would inevitably decelerate, at least users would know that the processing wasn't just frozen.
It was a compromise that let us focus our limited attention on the things our project could uniquely do, without needing to refactor or do fast-and-slow-passes to provide subtask-count estimates to the UI. I'd make those same choices again, in that context. But in an ad context, it's inexcusable.
If the only purpose is to show progress and you don’t known the total number of steps in advance, it’s better to show information about the current step and/or substep. Otherwise when your processing actually freezes, the UI would still happily show an advancing progress bar. That’s worse than even just showing a spinner animation or similar.
I've done something similar with a progress bar back in the early days. The task needed to do 10 things, so when each one completed the bar would move 10%. So the bar indicated completion in terms of things that needed to be done but not really in terms of time. It was quick and dirty and we had higher priorities but someone insisted on a "progress bar" so that was the easiest thing.
As a sometimes designer, i don’t think there’s any distinction between punishing the ad and the company. The company bought the ad, probably directed its creation, and decided what its criteria was for success. 1-star away as far as I’m concerned.
“Hey you bought socks that one time! Want more socks??” -> Unsubscribe.
“Hey it’s your weekly sock news! What’s new in socks!” -> But I unsubscribed! Haha no, you only unsubscribed from the “product releases” list. Not the “weekly news” list or our 10 other fabulous mailing lists!
-> Report all emails from this domain as spam. May god have mercy on your soul, cute socks.
This is exactly something I hate about the current state of things.
Interacting with a company/organization immediately turns into a lifelong "legitimate relationship" that supposedly entitles them to contact you forever and ever.
I "love" the ones that randomly decide to reactivate literally years after unsubscribing and never interacting with the business again. The other day I randomly got an email from a yoga studio I once bought my wife a gift card from. We moved and neither of us has been there since 2021. Why on earth am I suddenly getting spam 5 years later. I get similar messages from hotels many years later too. Sometimes ones I didn't even end up staying at, just browsed. You can sense the desperation through the monitor.
I now militantly use apple’s “hide my email” function for this reason, though it doesn’t really work when you “need” to give your email address in person (I have a “junk” email address that’s normally turned off on my devices for those people)
Yeah, good call, but I honestly have no problem with that 1-star either. They can’t say “well we just opened the garbage conduit and pointed it at your face… we didn’t actually MAKE the garbage.” Those ads are part of their app experience, now. They published it, so they’re ’re responsible for it. If it sucks I give it a sucky rating.
Yep. There's no other way to maybe-convince them to get a different ad provider, because they're the ones that chose it (probably because it paid the most).
This is usually against ad network rules, so if you're willing to go out of your way a bit, you can screenshot those ads and report directly to the ad network
Which is often not possible because clicking an ad generally closes the ad. And there's no incentive for users to report, by design IMO.
They could have a separate ad-reporting UI in every ad-running app (so you can report stuff later), and they could reward valid reports by skipping all ads on their network for a month or something, but doing that would reduce fraud, and that means reducing their profit. So none of them do it.
I'd say they probably need an oversight committee with teeth, to strongly punish every single violation (so the networks develop functional defenses), but they'll probably just VW-emissions-fraud their way around it.
Difficulty is when you don't know what ad network it is, the app hides the ad network they use, and refuse to disclose who it is.
You got served an ad from "one of our partners". That's all you'll get to know, and there's no mechanism to even report the app's shitty behavior to Google or Apple (and they don't care when the app becomes too large, either).
I'm not sure that is mostly the ad's fault. Hitting a target on a touchscreen is hard to do. This seems like it's the phone's fault first to me.
(If you're using a mouse, forget what I said. But I haven't run into an ad where the close button didn't close it... if you were able to click the close button.)
On iOS I have seen ads with very small close buttons, so clearly intended to cause people to miss-click. Buttons should be 44x44 pixels, it’s recommended in the human interface guidelines [0].
No, I mean there are ads with a "close button" in the corner, and then a few seconds later the real close button will appear and it'll weirdly overlap it. Because the first one was fake, just part of the image asset of the ad.
They're very very clearly click-fraud tricks, and most platforms will ban them if they're caught. But by clicking on the ad, it closes the ad, and there's no way to go back and report them, nor incentive for ad-viewers to do so. By design, IMO.
The whole industry runs on scams like this, there's no incentive for large platforms to proactively block any of them because they lead to money moving through them, where they can extract their rent. They only move against the most egregious, to keep fraud at the same barely-acceptable level as all the others.
Wasn’t there an article here a few days ago about Facebook specialising in hiding such malicious ads from testers and law enforcement to maximise gains?
A common trick is that the first click on the X will go to the ad, but if you return and click the X again it will close, gaslighting you into thinking you just misclicked the first time.
Another trick that I’ve noticed on the Reddit app is that the tappable area is much larger for ads than normal posts. If you tap even near the ad it will visit the ad
There's also the tactic of having different ad behaviours during the same video. The first will be a 30s unskippable ad, the second will be a single skippable one, the third will be 3 ads, one of which you can skip, etc. It's ok on a mobile or if you're at your desk, but if you're watching from a distance it gets really annoying...
The positive version of this is clocks in escape rooms. You set the countdown timer to be slightly faster for the first 45 minutes and slightly slower for the last 10, so that people get more of a taste of time pressure towards the end and a higher chance of a "photo finish" which makes for a great fun story.
Uber (and many other apps probably) do a similar thing. A completely deceptive progress bar that's basically an animation that's AB tested for lowest perceived wait, rather than being an actual progress bar in any sense of the word!
Looking at a bunch of developers assume expertise in interface design while shitting all over design as a field used to be a rage bait situation for me, but it’s fruitless. I’ve been both, and I was a developer long before I was a designer. I don’t think you have to be an expert to criticize an interface, and you definitely don’t have to like it, and some number of designers undoubtedly agree. But I encourage you to consider that the osmosis-learned nibbles about design and that Edward Tufte book you enjoyed might not qualify you to judge the competence of the better part of an entire set of professions. Most developers don’t even know what actual problems designers are tasked to solve, let alone evaluate their efficacy. Developers are a lot better at knowing when they know something than realizing when they don’t. NOBODY is good at discussing what they’re used to with what’s objectively good or bad. The “I don’t care what anybody says — this is just objectively bad” attitude is something that arises with literally any interface change in any major product. Developers have a very different usage style than most people and when you get a bunch of people in one place agreeing with each other without any outside voices, that’s an echo chamber at best and a circle jerk at worst. To be clear, I’m not even discussing, let alone defending the design: I’m countering the cocky obnoxious designer hate that pops up in these threads.
PS— Edward Tufte has some interesting perspectives on data visualization but the reason he’s so popular with the engineering crowd is because he was an engineer and he makes cut-and-dried rules about things that are easy to understand without any design education, and explains them in a way that appeals to engineers. Reading that book is better than nothing, but it’s gives laypeople about as much understanding of design as a “[language] cookbook” gives laypeople an understanding of programming.
Considering the economics of scale, your local cobbler advertising on Facebook and Google might be pretty close.
If you’re selling sports equipment — a very image-driven market — you’d have to be literally insane to not actively make interested buyers aware of your product’s existence. It’s an extremely specialized, research-heavy product that’s expensive to develop… it’s not like you’re hawking homemade cookies and can just wait until word-of-mouth gets around.
The marketing is not just for Nike, the marketing is also for people wearing Nike, to show their purchasing power.
There are other brands with sufficient scale and quality that don’t hinge their product sales on paying celebrities a ton of money. Obviously, brands have to to do some marketing, but it’s my impression that Nike is more about the image than the quality.
The marketing is not just for Nike, the marketing is also for people wearing Nike, to show their purchasing power.
Where I live, Nike have mid-range prices at most and are known for not-so-great quality. They were primarily popular among teenagers due to marketing through athletes (so I agree about the more about image than the quality), though they wear them as everyday shoes.
I do not know about the US market, but here most adults will either not care and are not brand sensitive (and will buy Nike, Puma, Adidas, NB, or any other low to mid-price/quality brands) or buy European brands that are generally 2x or 3x the price of Nike but last for years (e.g. I have some pairs of Ecco that still look like new three years later).
I’d rather go barefoot than count on Ecco. They feel so comfortable up until the sole spontaneously falls apart some random Thursday. I posted pictures of my crummy Eccos online after they refused to fix them under warranty. People started finding the pictures after googling “Ecco shoes suck” and “Ecco shoes fall apart”, and some started sending me their own pictures. It turned into a whole thing. During the 2010s, I was getting about 250,000 hits a year on my gallery of their crummy shoes.
There are better quality brands than Nike. Ecco isn’t one of them, and unless things have radically improved there, their customer service is horrid.
Weird, I have had them for years now without any issues. I contacted customer support once because some laces were unraveling faster than I expected for a premium brand. They sent me some packs for free.
I just looked on Amazon and the prices for Nike are comparable to all other major American sports sneaker brands. Give me an example of an athletic shoe company with lower prices than Nike with noticeably better quality that doesn’t market their products heavily.
Consider the percentage of sales those endorsements take up. Advertising is expensive for everyone. Doing a version of it that’s 60% less effective to save 20% of the cost is penny wise and pound foolish.
A pretty light-grey comment as I came across it. Maybe I’m missing something odious about it? People downvote this, but as a VERY skeptical AI skeptic, it’s exactly the sort of use case that makes sense to me:
A) Low-stakes application with
B) nearly no attack surface that
C) you don’t use consistently enough to keep in your head, but
D) is simple enough for an experienced software developer to do a quick sanity check on and run it to see if it works.
Hell, do it in a sandbox if you feel better about it.
If it was a Django/Node/rails/Laravel/…Phoenix… (sorry, I’ve been out of my 12+ years web dev career a short 4 years and suddenly realized I can only remember like 4 server-side frameworks/environments now) application, something that would run on other people’s devices, or really anything else that produces an executable output, then yeah fuck that vibe coding bullshit. But unless you’ve got that thing spitting out an SPA for you, then I say go for it.
If only those who voted to close would bother to check whether the dup/close issue was ACTUALLY a duplicate. If only there were (substantial) penalties for incorrectly dup/closing. The vast majority of dup/closes seem to not actually be dup/closes. I really wish they would get rid of that feature. Would also prevent code rot (references to ancient versions of the software or compiler you're interested in that are no longer relevant, or solutions that have much easier fixes in modern versions of the software). Not missing StackOverflow in the least. It did not age well. (And the whole copyright thing was just toxically stupid).
I think they should have had some mechanism that encouraged people to help everybody, including POSITIVELY posting links to previously answered questions, and then only making meaningfully unique ones publicly discoverable (even in the site search by default), afterwards. Instead, they provided an incentive structure and collection of rationales that cultivated a culture of hall monitors with martyr complexes far more interested in punitively enforcing the rules than being a positive educational resource.
You’re either arguing about semantics or missed the point they were trying to make. If it doesn’t have to be publicly reachable, why should it be publicly addressable in the first place? I can’t think of any common requirement that will be afforded to users having devices that will never need to be publicly reachable be publicly addressable. Considering most peoples use cases solely involve home networks of devices that they definitely do not want to be publicly reachable, why is needing to explicitly disallow that better for them?
In non-abstract terms, I just don’t see how that works better.
> I can’t think of any common requirement that will be afforded to users having devices that will never need to be publicly reachable be publicly addressable.
Because you do not know ahead of time which devices may have such a need, and by allowing for the possibility you open up more flexibility.
> [Residential customers] don't care about engineering, but they sure do create support tickets about broken P2P applications, such as Xbox/PS gaming applications, broken VoIP in gaming lobbies, failure of SIP client to punch through etc. All these problems don't exist on native routed (and static) IPv6.
> In order for P2P to work as close as possible to routed IPv6 in NATted IPv4, we had to deploy a bunch of workarounds such as EIM-NAT to allow TCP/UDP P2P punching to work both ways, we had to allow hairpinning on the CGNAT device to allow intra-CGNAT traffic to work between to CGNAT clients, as TURN can only detect the public-facing IP:Port, hairpinning allow 100.64.0.0/10 clients to talk to each other over the CGNATted public IP:Port.
By having (a) a public address, and (b) a CPE that supports PCP/IGD hole punching, you eliminate a whole swath of infrastructure (ICE/TURN/etc) and kludges.
When it was first released, Skype was peer-to-peer, but because of NAT "super nodes" had to be invented in their architecture so that the clients/peers could have someone to 'bounce' off of to connect. But because of the prevalence of NAT, central servers are now the norm.
A lot of folks on HN complain about centralization and concentration on the Internet, but how can it be otherwise when folks push back against technologies that would allow more peer-to-peer architectures?
> by allowing for the possibility you open up more flexibility.
The problem is that flexibility is often the enemy of security, and that’s certainly true here. Corporate networks don’t want to allow even the possibility of devices that are supposed to be private being publicly addressable. Arguing that it’s “simpler” or “more flexible” is like arguing that we don’t need firewalls, for the same reasons. And in fact, that argument used to be made quite regularly. It’s just that no-one who deals with security has ever taken it seriously.
What do you mean by popular? I hosted a site on a home machine in the early teens. If you don't know how to do that with NAT, you should not have a web server under your control exposed to the internet.
The early teens didn’t have huge proliferation of ISPs using CGNATs.
These days ISP can’t get hold of new IPv4 blocks, and increasingly don’t provide public IP addresses to residential routers, not without having to pay extra for that lowly single IPv4 address.
Hosting a website behind a NAT isn’t as trivial as it used to be, and for many it’s now impossible without IPv6.
> Hosting a website behind a NAT isn’t as trivial as it used to be, and for many it’s now impossible without IPv6.
The example I keep coming back to is multiplayer games like Mario Kart, where Nintendo tell you to put the Switch in the DMZ or forward a huge range of ports (1024-65535!) to it [1].
If you’ve got more than one Switch in the household, though, then I guess it sucks to be you.
To require that, the person would have needed to disable upnp on their router. I’ve played tons of multiplayer games on the switch and upnp handled it seamlessly on the 7 or 8 home networks I connected it to over its life. Never once even had to think about it.
So yes, if you disable the requisite, standard, built-in feature on your router, you may need a pretty annoying workaround. Weird!
What percentage of users do you imagine disable upnp? Let’s be real. This is a problem that your average user will never, ever experience a problem with.
No they wouldn't. UPnP is not requisite, certainly not standard, or necessarily built-in. For example, the router I've got doesn't implement UPnP.
It's not unusual for it to be disabled, because it's a security issue that something with no authentication can punch enduring holes out through NAT.
It's also irrelevant in a scenario where the ISP's using CGNAT.
I'm sure the Switch deals with conflict resolution with multiple consoles on the same network too but shrug it's another example of how NAT is a pain and also contradicts your assertion that incoming connections would be a breach of ISP ToS [1].
Edit: A quick Google suggests the Switch originally didn't support UPnP, and the Switch 2 now supports IPv6.
Ok, so it didn’t even need upnp then. Are you talking about using their LAN head-to-head feature across the internet? Or perhaps all the times I used my switch on various networks to play head-to-head games it was… my imagination? Sure. If people had to consistently forward every port on their home router to play Fortnite, smash, etc. with a portable console you’d never hear the end of it. This is literally the first time I encountered someone saying this was a problem. Regardless, most people don’t buy routers— they use the ones their ISPs gave them, and I haven’t seen one of those come without upnp in at least a decade. You’re seeking out reasons to dislike NAT.
Capitalism, essentially. Companies can make more money from centralized control over systems than from truly distributed systems, and customers are suckers for the simplicity of delegating their needs to single providers.
The reason Google bought and destroyed dejanews.com, for example (try visiting that site) was to weaken one of the distributed sources of competition. Similar for RSS.
I'd like to know the average number of broadband customers that make support tickets because of NAT. I'll bet it's far less than 1%. And you really think NAT, rather than SV betting huge on cloud services and surveillance capitalism, was the reason that everything is centralized? Come on...
To be fair, your old feature phones don’t do the same thing as a modern smart phone— you just aren’t interested in doing things they aren’t capable of. I have very different use cases.
Digital Ocean didn’t even have an ipv6 address on by default in the droplet I created last week. It’s just a switch to flip, but I’ll bet the support costs of hobbyists/enthusiasts not realizing they needed to also write firewall rules, make sure ports weren’t open for databases and things like that for ipv6.
My memory of IPv6 is getting waves of support tickets from people who took their (already questionable) practice of blocking ICMP on IPv4, blocked ICMPv6, and then got confused when IPv6 stopped working.
It's a "just doesn't work" experience every time that I try it and I don't experience any value from it, it's not like there isn't anything I can connect to on IPv6 that I can't connect to on IPv4.
My ISP has finally mastered providing me with reliable albeit slow DSL. Fiber would change my life, there just isn't any point in asking for IPv6.
Also note those bloated packets are death for many modern applications like VoIP.
Exactly. Spectrum delivers good IPv6 service in my area. I tried it when I upgraded my gateway. All of my devices are assigned 4 IPv6 IPs, hostnames are replaced by auto assigned stuff from the ISP, and lots of random things don’t work.
I went from being pumped to learn more to realizing I’m going to invest a lot of time and I could not identify and tangible benefit.
The biggest tangible benefit is you don't need to worry about NAT port mapping any more. Every device can have a public address, and you can have multiple servers exposing services on the same port without a conflict.
(The flip side is having a network-level firewall is more important than ever.)
You also don't have to worry about running a DHCP server anymore, at least on small networks. The simplicity of SLAAC is a breath of fresh air, and removes DHCP as a single point of failure for a network.
So the benefit is that you dont need to worry about NAT for a couple of port forwarded services you may use (which might well even use UPnP for auto setup), but the tradeoff is you now need to think about full individual firewall protection for every device on your network?
I'll take full security by default and forward a couple of ports thankyou!
You can maybe connect to everyone over IPv4, but chances are that that path is strictly worse (in terms of latency, P2P reachability, congestion et.c) than a v6 one would be.
For example, two IPv6 peers can often trivially reach each other even behind firewalls (using UDP hole punching). For NAT, having too restrictive a NAT gateway on either side can easily prevent reachability.
I have tailscale on all my mobile/portable devices I use away from home. It punches holes so I don't have to, even makes DNS work for my tailnet in a way I've never been able to get to work the way I want the normal way.
Yes, Tailscale is great, and it does manage to traverse pretty much every firewall or NAT in my experience as well. Quite often, it even does so using IPv6 :)
> those bloated packets are death for many modern applications like VoIP.
Huh? The packet sizes aren’t that much different and VOIP is hardly a taxing application at this point anyway. VOIP needs barely over dial-up level bandwidth.
It's not the bandwidth it's the latency. Because of the latency you need to pack a small amount of data in VoIP packets so the extra header size of IPv6 stings more than it would for ordinary http traffic
Last time I looked at Digital Ocean they had completely missed the purpose of IPv6 and would only assign a droplet a /124 and even then only as a fixed address like they were worried we are going to run out of addresses.
Because 2^128 is too big to be reasonably filled even if you give a ip address to every grain of sand. 64 bits is good enough for network routing and 64 bits for the host to auto configure an ip address is a bonus feature. The reason why 64 bits is because it large enough for no collisions with picking a ephemeral random number or and it can fit your 48 bit mac address if you want a consistent number.
With a fixed size host identifier compared to a variable size ipv4 host identifier network renumbering becomes easier. If you separate out the host part of the ip address a network operator can change ip ranges by simply replacing the top 64 bits with prefix translation and other computers can still be routed to with the unique bottom 64 bits in the new ip network.
This is what you do if you start with a clean sheet and design a protocol where you don't need to put address scarcity as the first priority.
Yeah, the current system is really weird, with many address assigning services refusing to create smaller pools. I really hope that's fixed one day. We already got an RFC saying effectively "going back to classful ranges was stupid" https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6177 (for over a decade...)
Point of fact it's giving 4 billion Internets worth of addresses to every local subnet.
You will sometimes see admins complain that IPv6 demands that you allow ICMP (at least the TOOBIG messages) through the firewall because they're worried that people on the internet will start doing pingscans of their network. This is because they do not understand what 2^64 is.
Do the math on 2^64 possible host addresses, multiply by the length of an IPv6 ICMP ECHOREQUEST, and then divide by available bandwidth to determine how long it might take you to scan a single subnet.
Hint: the ICMPv6 packet is no shorter than 48 bytes and there are 1.8446744e+19 addresses to scan.
"Simple" VPS providers like DigitalOcean, etc. really need to get the hell onboard with network virtualization. It's 2026, I don't want to be dealing with individual hosts just being allocated a damned /64 either. Give me a /48, attach it to a virtual network, let me split it into /64's and attach VM's to it - if I want something other than SLACC addresses (or multiple per VM) then I can deal with manually assigning them.
To be fair, the "big" cloud providers can't seem to figure this shit out, either. It's mind boggling, I'm not saying I've gone through the headache of banging out all the configuration to get FRRouting and my RouterOS gear happily doing the EVPN-VXLAN dance; but I'm also not Amazon, Google, or Microsoft...
Do you think anything other than trivial internal networking is a common requirement on DO? I’m not saying it’s not, I really don’t know— I haven’t been in the production end of things for a while and when I was, everyone was basically using AWS et. al. for non-trivial applications. They make it easy enough to set up a private ipv4 subnet to connect your internal services. Does that not satisfy you use case or are you just avoiding tooling that might be obsolete sooner than ipv6?
I use IPv6 on my authoritative DNS servers and that's basically it. To your point keeping it disabled on all my hobby crap keeps everything simple for me. If someone can not reach IPv4 then something is broken on their end.
IMO ipv6 is a perfect example of why interface designers can be valuable on technical projects. One of the genius things about ipv4 is it’s a pre-chunked number you can shout across the room or keep in your head as you run down the hall to your keyboard. IPv6 addresses simply don’t have that feature. If they had kept the 4-chunk format and made it alphanumeric, or added a chunk and made it hexadecimal, or something along those lines, I think they could have reasonably alleviated the problem of running out of addresses while not making the addresses SO unfriendly to remember.
But when designers bring things like that up, you get “it’s really not that complicated,” or “I explained this to my 200 year old grandmother over tea/my 16 month old child over the course of a diaper change/my non-technical wife that I intellectually respect less than I should/etc. and they wrote a book on it the next day,” kind of crap. Human factors engineering. Ergonomics matter in technical products.
You’re absolutely right! You astutely observed that 2025 was a year with many LLMs and this was a selection of waypoints, summarized in a helpful timeline.
That’s what most non-tech-person’s year in LLMs looked like.
Hopefully 2026 will be the year where companies realize that implementing intrusive chatbots can’t make better ::waving hands:: ya know… UX or whatever.
For some reason, they think its helpful to distractingly pop up chat windows on their site because their customers need textual kindergarten handholding to … I don’t know… find the ideal pocket comb for their unique pocket/hair situation, or had an unlikely question about that aerosol pan release spray that a chatbot could actually answer. Well, my dog also thinks she’s helping me by attacking the vacuum when I’m trying to clean. Both ideas are equally valid.
And spending a bazillion dollars implementing it doesn’t mean your customers won’t hate it. And forcing your customers into pathways they hate because of your sunk costs mindset means it will never stop costing you more money than it makes.
I just hope companies start being honest with themselves about whether or not these things are good, bad, or absolutely abysmal for the customer experience and cut their losses when it makes sense.
I took the good with the bad: the ai assisted coding tools are a multiplier, google ai overviews in search results are half baked (at best) and often just factually wrong. AI was put in the instagram search bar for no practical purpose etc.
Yeah totally. The point I’m trying to make, however, is that most people don’t code, so they didn’t get the multiplier, and only got the mediocre-to-bad, with a handful of them doing things like generating dumb images for a boost. I think that’s why a lot of people in the software business are utterly bewildered when customers aren’t jumping for joy when they release a new AI “feature.” I think a lot of what gets classified as cynical ceo enshittification is really people ignoring basic good design practices, like making sure you’re effectively helping customers solve an actual problem in a context and with methods they, at least, don’t hate. Especially on the smaller scale, like indie app developers who probably get more out of AI than most, they really think people are going to like new AI features simply because they’re new AI features. They’re very wrong.
There was also source point pollution before the Industrial Revolution. Useless, forced, irritating chat was ‘nowhere close’ to as aggressive or pervasive as it is now. It used to be a niche feature of some CRMs and now it’s everywhere.
I’m on LinkedIn Learning digging into something really technical and practical and it’s constantly pushing the chat fly out with useless pre-populated prompts like “what are the main takeaways from this video.” And they moved their main page search to a little icon on the title bar and sneakily now what used to be the obvious, primary central search field for years sends a prompt to their fucking chatbot.
Maybe there should be some kind of annual ISO privacy certification for companies that resell any customer data in any form. Then make data customers (e.g. marketing agencies, major retailers) and data collectors (e.g. those that collect telemetry data from libraries included in their app, auto manufacturers, wireless providers) civilly liable for any privacy violations dealing with uncertified brokers, making sure there’s an uncapped modifier based on the company’s annual revenue. That seems like it puts the bulk of the compliance responsibility on the parties that can do the most wide-scale damage with unethical and dodgy practices, while leaving some out there for others that need incentive to not ignore the rules.
Haven’t really thought this through and I’m not a policy wonk… just spitballin’.
I would hope for something stronger. Put a currency value on some kinds of info. To store my SSN and full name and military ID totals 20 units. Maybe a full name and home address is 15 units. If I agree to give you my info, you agree that I can keep the CEOs home address, stored as safely and hygienically as I can. Part of our contract mandates when we mutually delete. Because of course we trust each other.
For starters, it provides protection and accountability for those who don't have the prior presence of mind to demand deletion.
An act which mandated deletion in all cases for data once business needs are addressed (often 30--90 days for much data), might address your question. But the Delete Act isn't that.
I work in a specialty in an industry that requires a fairly stringent annual ISO certification. Even preparing for the audit it is a completely worthwhile exercise in seeing things that maybe got swept under the rug or left by the wayside. Customers having clearly defined criteria to prove in court or even business negotiations, that our lapse was negligent or in bad faith keeps us from straying too far to begin with. Our having clear criteria to show that we followed industry guidelines shuts down customers trying to accuse us of something in bad faith, or even trying to make a mountain out of a molehill to get leverage in a contract negotiation or something.
I’ll bet most of it depends on how good the certification is. My bosses think it’s annoying, and sure not 100% of the requirements make a difference for us, but most do, and from my vantage point, I can see how much of a difference it makes.
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