I've now seen Netflix's Fyre Festival doc

[olivermoss]

It was pretty good. I think Hulu did a better job overall, but the Netflix one was not bad. People who said things like 'every festival feels like it could be a disaster and you are always dealing with emergencies' to try to dodge blame drove me a bit nuts. That statement is true, but it doesn't apply here. Their overall attitude towards the attendees are upsetting.

I've seen reactions online from people who got the impression that the festival was 'so close' to coming together. It disturbs me a bit because it's people still buying the hype of a serial fraudster. I don't understand people sometimes.

Now I've cancelled Hulu. I watched the Fyre doc, Runaways, Castle Rock and got out. It was weird how the longer I used Hulu the more adblock would stop working on other websites and twitter ads went from general to targeted. I mean, assume the two things are related. I hadn't seen ads on Reddit for so long I forgot that site even has ads. I think of anything else I did that might've effected my blocker. Also Hulu ads had dialogue that changed as they mined more data from me. Creepy.

Comments

[rosefox]

(here via network; we seem to be linked by alexseanchai)

Also Hulu ads had dialogue that changed as they mined more data from me.

Like... live-action ads? Or text ads? That is deeply disturbing.

[olivermoss]

The narration of live action ads. A car ad went from 'For Americans' to 'For that Pacific Northwest Lifestyle' to 'Portlanders and their love of handcrafted things'. I mean, Hulu had my billing address so my location wasn't that big of a deal, but it was still weird.

I don't see a lot of advertising, so my brief time having Hulu again was super weird to me.

[rosefox]

Wow. That's... wow. I wonder whether that's even a live voice. Digitally generated voices have gotten very good in the last couple of years.

My mom just got a smart TV and I warned her that it was going to listen to her and she'd start getting ads for things she talked about in front of it. She laughed it off. A week later she emailed me, "Amazon keeps advertising that thing I told you about on the phone the other day, how does it know?!"

I run both UBlock and Privacy Badger in Chrome, and I don't watch network TV, so I hardly ever see ads and am really profoundly weirded out when I encounter them on bar TVs or whatever. They're so psychologically aggressive.

[olivermoss]

I run Ublock and Facebook Container, even though I don't even use FB in this browser. I use it in a separate one. I also don't allow scripts, flash and I mute tabs by default.

I do not want Smart devices or The Internet of Things. Privacy aside, it creates dumb points of failure and obsolescence. I'm not a luddite, I used to query google via SMS before smartphones existed. The problem is that the majority of people have acclimated to dealing with flickering, strobing images and a massive lack of privacy. I've had ads on imgur based on the internet activities of my roommates. How does anyone keep a secret anymore?