Good morning to the 1/16 of the internet that’s still functioning mostly as intended.

@hacks4pancakes It's been really productive today!

@hacks4pancakes Good afternoon from the distributed internetwork!

We have tea and hot chocolate.

@hacks4pancakes
I've been involved in IP network protocol implementation since 1991, and I no longer believe I know what the intent is.

@brouhaha @hacks4pancakes

The House of Cards is falling down
falling down
falling down

The House of Cards is falling down
(insert some witty Interweb reference here)

@brouhaha @hacks4pancakes

I believe the intent is now "serving ads."

Sigh. Been working in network-wrangling since 1994, been on the internet longer than that. Speaking of intent, this is definitely not what I intended to help build.

@rmd1023 @brouhaha @hacks4pancakes turning the entire internet into an ad-based business model is genuinely one of the most baffling things in life for me.

I say that as a marketer who oversees ad campaigns from the backend on a weekly basis. Digital ads just don’t work well.

I recall seeing a statistic a few months ago that ~30% of global marketing budgets just get lost to ad waste. (Fraud alone is >10%)

It’s insane. Businesses don’t see returns from ads, so they spend more and push even more ads. Consumers see too many ads so they install ad blockers and tune out and get rightfully annoyed. That means the ads work even less well. And get pushed even more heavily.

And all the while the 2-3 companies running most digital advertising are raking in billions and billions for making the internet worse for everyone.

@brouhaha @hacks4pancakes I blame IPv4 address camping for profit that dis-incentivized IPv6, IPv6 for being IPv6, DNS giving us a built-in global race condition and defeating layer 3 filtering, and IPv4+NAT, nudging every connection away from peer-to-peer.

... and humans, in general... 🤦

@brouhaha @hacks4pancakes

"hold my beer and watch while i write this RFC"? :)

@rmd1023 @brouhaha @hacks4pancakes Amen to that. None of this is what I intended to help build. I hate it all. I wish I'd gone into a different field but I'm too much of a coward to start over this late in life.

@causticmsngo @rmd1023 @brouhaha @hacks4pancakes

indeed.

my career goal used to be hoping that the internet just stayed glued together for a few more years so that i could retire, saying "i never had a real job in my life. i just worked on the internet.".

now i'm not so sure i want it to hold together...

@mariyadelano @rmd1023 @brouhaha @hacks4pancakes At my previous employer, we spent millions and millions on advertising. I think that money was wasted. Shoving ads in people's faces isn't effective, like you said. The things that work are deeply unsexy, from a marketing perspective, but they are cost-effective and dependable. Email newsletters work, but they need to be written well and at the very least be entertaining. Well made product websites work. Well written blogs work.

@mariyadelano @rmd1023 @brouhaha @hacks4pancakes Like, I fucking LOVED working on the Blizzard Insider newsletter, because it was so much fun to package "read it here first," genuine insider content that players loved with marketing beats that were actually relevant to their interests.

We always had great clickthrough rates on that newsletter, and it even won some kind of games marketing award. I wish I could have kept the Insider alive, but that was always an uphill battle, for many reasons.

@mariyadelano @rmd1023 @brouhaha @hacks4pancakes this is a great article, pointing out that if someone charges you by their performance while they are also responsible for measuring their own performance, there is a slight chance of fraud
https://thecorrespondent.com/125/the-non-sense-of-online-advertising-when-the-numbers-dont-add-up