As some others have said, a well-thought-out article on the larger scale impacts of the Internet as a new medium of communication - just get past the intro. In the end, it's interesting because it puts together a number of intuitions you may already have about the upcoming western social-democratic crisis stemming from the loss of authoritative sources of information. What is missing is actually ideas about what syst…
I think the core issue here is the elephant in the room in tech that noone wants to talk about. The tech industry has put most of it's money making eggs in the ads basket. This means companies selling ads are promoting the kind of mass information spread that is sensationalist because it gets their ads the most views, and the tech community makes money off of this. How well do ads actually work? I really don't know.…
Pretty much every digital marketer's job description consists of measuring and optimizing this. All the major digital ad platforms let you put tracking beacons throughout your page's sales flow so you can measure conversion rates directly and know exactly which ad campaign led to a sale; that's one of the major advantages of digital over print or TV.
You can certainly debate the ethics of advertising in general, and whether it's ethical to psychologically manipulate people into buying products they don't need and wouldn't have bought otherwise. I personally don't really want to first because I hold opinions on both sides and second because nothing's going to get resolved by such a debate on HN - it's a debate that's been going on for 120 years, though the media hegemony described in the article silenced it for many years. But as an objective fact, there's little room for debating the effectiveness of advertising. Ads work, even if they might be evil.