Their whole point was "drop in node replacement" - instead of hitting that target they built an entire framework of tools, seemingly changing focus every month or two, and are now rewriting all that to a new language.

Some municipalities even make it opt-in so you'd need YES/YES to get mail without a name and address on it. (ie. not direct mail)

There are also laws to enable opting out of direct mail (with name and address).

In effect, junk mail is just gone once you slap a sticker on your mailbox. This is not an unsolvable problem if you just regulate things.

Exactly. From my experience: the times I've found an ad relevant and worth clicking is about one-to-a-gazillion. Maybe relevance is higher for others but that still doesn't necessarily translate to real value. (ie. your life was improved in any way)

Also, this all presumes the targeting actually works and the current sea ads for shoes I just bought disagree with that. It's all just spam.

Arguable, on the other hand it did kill the internet. (or, almost so far, we'll see whether we rebound after decades of enshittification)

AI is all about losing every possible bit of friction, severely underestimating the value that friction brings.

Look up in an old city, look at the facades of the buildings. They have quirks, uniqueness, it makes the city almost a living thing. Every time we shave off another edge we lose that. Nevermind the fact that shoehorning everything into the same patterns is actually an antipattern and very good paradigms have been invented after the 90s.

It's not perfect, but I'd rather have a bit of a mess than boring emptiness.