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The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

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Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#181

Post by jxdjsks »

nickff wrote: post #80
chc wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to sell a bad product? It's done all the time. Heck, a tube of wax called "HeadOn" managed to sell pretty well with an ad campaign that stopped just short of claiming it helped headaches.

The fact that one product which seems to be a placebo may have made some money does not disprove my point; I never said it was completely impossible to make money by selling a bad product, just that it is vanishingly unlikely. If you think that selling diluted ingredients in wax is an easy way to make money, please go ahead and try your hand at it. My position is that advertising a bad product is a very bad bet; the…

You don't get how brains work. Advertising is wildly effective because underneath the human is a monkey. If the monkey sees bananas always paired with ipods, the monkey will want an ipod. It might not fit neatly into your everyone is responsible for themselves world view, but thems the apples. Deal.

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#182

Post by jxdjsks »

alanwatts wrote: post #162
nickff wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money always buys speech; whether it is by allowing a columnist to write full time, affording the puchase of a computer to post on the internet, or giving someone the ability to travel to a public square. Using money to purchase a magazine, newspaper, television, radio, or online advertisement is just another way that money helps people express their views. In any case, I wouldn't be too worried about money changing…

"We just had a misunderstanding, I thought I lived in the U.S.A, the United States of America, and actually we live in the U.S.A, The United States of Advertising -- freedom of speech is guaranteed, if you've got the money!" -Bill Hicks on being censored by CBS

Lovely. This should be top comment, fools, fools as far as the eye can see.

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#183

Post by tunap »

diskcat wrote: post #117
devishard wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you kidding me? Of the major companies out there, almost all of them made money from bad products. McDonald's food is so unhealthy it makes you ill almost immediately when it's even edible. Comcast is hated almost universally for their crap internet and crapper customer service. Fox News makes money by actively deceiving their customers. These aren't exceptions to the rule: these are the rule . They're leaders in…

If these things are so bad, why do people consume them? Is everybody else but you so stupid as to be consuming these obviously 'bad' products? Just because you think something is bad, doesn't mean it is bad. I would have no trouble selling something you think is the 'worst shit in the known universe' as long as everybody else thinks it's pretty good.

Because they are laced with a highly addictive substance? Why else would HFCS be added to fries or a burger, to make them sweet?

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#184

Post by tunap »

Karunamon wrote: post #115
md224 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just saying I wish we could have only organic results. Why should people with more money have more of a presence online? Money shouldn't be able to buy speech. The Internet should not be a place where those with more money get to cut the line in front of those with less. Let PageRank sort it out. Also, what's this about my example not holding weight because "information purity" doesn't exist? It's not about the i…

At the risk of sounding flip: Install adblock. If this "purity" is really that important to you, you're about 3 clicks away from banishing the paid advertising and only having organic results show.

I use AB+ AND NoScript(Google-free whitelist) and my results aren't even organic-ish. I searched for cabling a few weeks back & monoprice.com's first result was on page 12. First 3 or 4 pages were almost exclusively amazon & ebay. That's google's algo, sans adsense.

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#185

Post by md224 »

pcmaffey wrote: post #180
coldtea wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The library is a catalog of books produced by publishers for the sake of making money. That's not what he asked though. Generally libraries don't have special "sponsored" books, and don't control and push certain books to people more than others. Those libraries that do, fall into 2 categories: 1) Promoting widely recognized cultural works (e.g. with events like "Mark Twain Year", etc). 2) Promoting some ideologica…

You're missing the point that organic results are also hugely influenced by financial motive. The underlying concept is that all information is biased. A system that incorporates bias is vastly more useful than one that ignores it.

> The underlying concept is that all information is biased.

Right, but why add more bias if we don't have to?

Organic results are influenced by the content of the pages as well as their relationship to other pages. Sure, people spend thousands of dollars on SEO to make their page more attractive to Google, but at least they're trying to fit Google's idea of what makes a useful web page. With AdWords, money is directly influencing rank. Why is it good for Google to incorporate more financial bias than it has to?

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#186

Post by tunap »

andrepd wrote: post #150
puranjay wrote: post #144

Most people find this a joke, but I don't kid when I say that 4Chan might be the single most influential political force today. 4Chan's 'meme makers' have an uncanny ability to distill an idea to its simplest form. Ideas that emerge on 4Chan end up on Reddit, from where they are picked up by Buzzfeed and HuffPo. Before you know it, what was a dumb little idea spawned by some anon on /b has become a part of 'internet…

>Most people find this a joke, but I don't kid when I say that 4Chan might be the single most influential political force today. I do hope you are kidding, because to say that a fringe Internet forum holds more sway on the masses than TV, newspapers, Super PACs, corporate lobbies, etc, then I think you are seeing things very very wrong. >I've seen firsthand how 4Chan has been able to influence Trump's presidential ru…

Digg it!

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#187

Post by task_queue »

guelo wrote: post #18

This is a really interesting study but it's hard for me to believe in the conspiracy theory that the hundreds of engineers that work on Google Search would be OK implementing a complicated vote manipulation algorithm and keeping it secret. But it's possible, criminal conspiracies involving many people seem to happen regularly in the financial industry.

I find it hard to believe that thousands of engineers work in secret to build weapons that can maim and kill hundreds/thousands/millions of people at the flip of switch.

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#188

Post by task_queue »

whatTheFuckEvr wrote: post #97

Oh god. This article is so fucking disappointing. What a quaint boogey man this "Search Engine Manipulation Effect" is. It even has it's own obscure little acronym, SEME, to appear more relevant. I learned about the subtle effects of advertising by the time I was in fourth grade, and certainly understood how to ignore them by middle school. Back when special holographic foil comic book covers and trading cards were n…

Besides being incredibly masturbatory, this post misses the point. You _are_ susceptible to these manipulations, and if you're barraged with them at every turn, it will be difficult to see each one for what they are.

You are susceptible to advertising and other types of influence as well, you just seem to think you aren't.

Even if there was a class of ubermensch that can sidestep human psychology, the majority is still heavily influenced by such manipulations and that is a problem for everyone.

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#189

Post by ArkyBeagle »

diskcat wrote: post #117
devishard wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you kidding me? Of the major companies out there, almost all of them made money from bad products. McDonald's food is so unhealthy it makes you ill almost immediately when it's even edible. Comcast is hated almost universally for their crap internet and crapper customer service. Fox News makes money by actively deceiving their customers. These aren't exceptions to the rule: these are the rule . They're leaders in…

If these things are so bad, why do people consume them? Is everybody else but you so stupid as to be consuming these obviously 'bad' products? Just because you think something is bad, doesn't mean it is bad. I would have no trouble selling something you think is the 'worst shit in the known universe' as long as everybody else thinks it's pretty good.

Because "bad" outside of context is utterly meaningless.

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#190

Post by ArkyBeagle »

treebeard901 wrote: post #123
diskcat wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If these things are so bad, why do people consume them? Is everybody else but you so stupid as to be consuming these obviously 'bad' products? Just because you think something is bad, doesn't mean it is bad. I would have no trouble selling something you think is the 'worst shit in the known universe' as long as everybody else thinks it's pretty good.

You raise an interesting point. Do people consume things they know are bad because they want to or because they are manipulated to?

And here's Stimpy with the red shiny history eraser button...
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