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We need legal controls on web advertising

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Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#161

Post by m463 »

lordnacho wrote: post #33

If we know that humans have all sorts of cognitive biases, how come it's ok to use that fact while at the same time we insist there's some kind of free market? Say you discover that putting good-looking women next to cars causes the sale of cars to increase. Why does nobody question whether it is legitimate to do so? It's as if there's a line between actively lying ("Studies show that men who buy this car will find m…

I (sincerely) don't understand responses like yours.

You are arguing against a red herring.

To be clear the definition is: "A red herring is something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important question.

People have accepted the term "web advertising" as "showing product images" or something similar.

"web advertising" is actually identification of the individual viewing a web page, matching it to an online database of other information about that person, tracking and recording that person's behavior, and the sale of information about that person to others.

Putting an attractive woman next to a car is small potatoes next to the darkness of identification and surveillance.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#162

Post by edmundsauto »

oblio wrote: post #99
xkde wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dumping chemicals in shared rivers/air vs placing ads in a privately owned space that users have the option of visiting. Not comparable. The fact that more people use Gmail than Protonmail / others is a testament to their willingness to trade their eyeballs on ads for a service they don't have to spend their monetary resources on. It's also worth asking - what makes you so confident about an absence of malfeasance fr…

> It's also worth asking - what makes you so confident about an absence of malfeasance from the largest, unbreakable corporate entity (ie. the government)? I'm not confident in that either. But in a democracy, the government is the people. It's voted by the people, replaced by the people. The government may be corrupted but at least its stated goal and the way it works is to serve the people. Corporation don't even h…

Given the American federal response to Covid-19, compared to the efforts of corporate America... it's not so clear to me that being chosen by the people is the better option.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#163

Post by fendrak »

krapp wrote: post #159
DamnInteresting wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the wo…

Don't get me wrong, I think advertising is responsible for a lot of evil in the world, and SEO in particular is a cancer. But if anyone reacts to an ad with this degree of paranoia and self-loathing, it speaks more to their own fragility than it does than the nature of advertising.

I don't think it requires any particular paranoia or self-loathing, just the day-in, day-out grind against the receiver's psyche.

We take it for granted that living with an emotionally-abusive person deeply affects someone's sense of self-perception, but for some reason when advertisers use the same sort of tactics, but at a slightly lower level spread across a greater amount of time, we're supposed to accept it as appropriate?

We all have a finite store of, let's call it "self confidence"; why should we accept as status quo that all comers have a right to drain some of it every day in order to line their own pocketbooks?

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#164

Post by krapp »

fendrak wrote: post #163
krapp wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get me wrong, I think advertising is responsible for a lot of evil in the world, and SEO in particular is a cancer. But if anyone reacts to an ad with this degree of paranoia and self-loathing, it speaks more to their own fragility than it does than the nature of advertising.

I don't think it requires any particular paranoia or self-loathing, just the day-in, day-out grind against the receiver's psyche. We take it for granted that living with an emotionally-abusive person deeply affects someone's sense of self-perception, but for some reason when advertisers use the same sort of tactics, but at a slightly lower level spread across a greater amount of time, we're supposed to accept it as a…

Does it drain you that much?

It doesn't drain me. It's anecdotal but no one I know seems to be suffering from some psychological equivalent of battered-spouse syndrome due to the effects of advertising.

I don't even really see a lot of advertising that uses psychologically demeaning tactics, sneering and flippant insults and shaming and the like. Maybe I just don't notice them. But to me, demeaning your customers isn't likely to result in them being more likely to buy your product.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#165

Post by fendrak »

krapp wrote: post #164
fendrak wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it requires any particular paranoia or self-loathing, just the day-in, day-out grind against the receiver's psyche. We take it for granted that living with an emotionally-abusive person deeply affects someone's sense of self-perception, but for some reason when advertisers use the same sort of tactics, but at a slightly lower level spread across a greater amount of time, we're supposed to accept it as a…

Does it drain you that much? It doesn't drain me. It's anecdotal but no one I know seems to be suffering from some psychological equivalent of battered-spouse syndrome due to the effects of advertising. I don't even really see a lot of advertising that uses psychologically demeaning tactics, sneering and flippant insults and shaming and the like. Maybe I just don't notice them. But to me, demeaning your customers isn…

Does it drain me entirely every day? No. Does it drain me some days or in particular instances? Certainly! Are some people far less resilient than I, and are perhaps drained to a larger degree? It stands to reason so.

To be clear I'm not saying any one advertiser is directly attempting to demean any particular person into buying their particular product, because clearly this isn't a winning strategy. It's the dose that makes the poison, however.

If one person walks up to me on the street and says "I've got some shirts that would make you look really slim" I would shrug it off as a weird happening. When the second person say "I used to look large, but this brand really made the pounds seem less obvious", I think it's been an odd day. When this continues to happen over the course of the month, perhaps I begin to think I'm looking a bit large around the middle.

Taken in isolation, no one instance is going to break me. Taken together, over a lifetime? That could change my own perception of myself in ways I can't even begin to estimate.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#166

Post by krapp »

fendrak wrote: post #165
krapp wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it drain you that much? It doesn't drain me. It's anecdotal but no one I know seems to be suffering from some psychological equivalent of battered-spouse syndrome due to the effects of advertising. I don't even really see a lot of advertising that uses psychologically demeaning tactics, sneering and flippant insults and shaming and the like. Maybe I just don't notice them. But to me, demeaning your customers isn…

Does it drain me entirely every day? No. Does it drain me some days or in particular instances? Certainly! Are some people far less resilient than I, and are perhaps drained to a larger degree? It stands to reason so. To be clear I'm not saying any one advertiser is directly attempting to demean any particular person into buying their particular product, because clearly this isn't a winning strategy. It's the dose th…

>When this continues to happen over the course of the month, perhaps I begin to think I'm looking a bit large around the middle.

Maybe you are. I certainly am. Are these theoretical shirt-sellers trying to convince you you're getting overweight to get you to buy a shirt for overweight people, or have they noticed you're overweight and have a shirt you might want to buy? One is clearly abusive but the other isn't.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#167

Post by fendrak »

krapp wrote: post #166
fendrak wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it drain me entirely every day? No. Does it drain me some days or in particular instances? Certainly! Are some people far less resilient than I, and are perhaps drained to a larger degree? It stands to reason so. To be clear I'm not saying any one advertiser is directly attempting to demean any particular person into buying their particular product, because clearly this isn't a winning strategy. It's the dose th…

>When this continues to happen over the course of the month, perhaps I begin to think I'm looking a bit large around the middle. Maybe you are. I certainly am. Are these theoretical shirt-sellers trying to convince you you're getting overweight to get you to buy a shirt for overweight people, or have they noticed you're overweight and have a shirt you might want to buy? One is clearly abusive but the other isn't.

Indeed. I wonder though whether they could possibly know the answer to that question to a degree of confidence that would make them comfortable to pursue me endlessly to make their sale, and sell and trade my information and their inferences about me with their advertising partners in order for them to do the same, just with 1000 different variants of the above example.

And I wonder whether they're incentivized to care. In either cases above, my money is still green and smells like money, and makes the same number go up in their quarterly sales goal dashboard.

My point, and I gather the point of the Banksy quote, is that any one instance has a negligible effect on me, but that in aggregate I'm stuck staring down the barrel of a machine that has infinite stamina and resources that's attempting to wear me down, and is likely succeeding in ways I can't detect, nor have the power to detect if I wanted to.

If being exposed to this aggregate process all day makes me less patient with my family at night, to what degree is it worth it? If it makes me less willing to treat someone else with kindness, is it still justified if it's only a _little_ less willing?

No single advertiser is literally laughing at me while doing the backstroke across their vault full of money, but none of them needs to have such overtly malicious intent for the aggregate effect of the entire system on me to be just as corrosive.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#168

Post by samoa42 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #133
samoa42 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not popular relatively speaking, no >irrelevant and annoying in the internet age disagree strongly

I meant the business model, not the content. German collection of the tax is incredibly unpopular, especially for those of us who don't even have a television.

true, would be more sensible to make it a "real" federal tax instead of collection via a obnoxious semi-private entity.

while i have not owned a tv for the last two decades i still sometimes consume their content via internet or car-radio and would probably miss it if it wasnt available.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#169

Post by BlueTemplar »

mguerville wrote: post #43
SCNP wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it would be awesome to have hardware that did the heavy lifting, I don't like the incentives for commercial products anywhere near the ad-space. It would only be a matter of time before a firmware update allows "permitted" ads through because the advertiser paid the proper sum. It may be time to finally set up my pi-hole.

I set up NextDNS instead of a pi-hole, because frankly pi-hole seemed a bit daunting as a non technical user (if not setup, proper maintenance) and it's been great, between that and uBlock Origin I feel well shielded, and when I use my wife's iPad with neither of these I'm appalled at what the internet has become ad-wise

I wanted to set up a Pi-hole and even bought a Raspberry Pi, but then I realized that : - It didn't really support IPv6. - Neither did my ISP. - It was hosted on Github. So I gave up on the idea...

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#170

Post by marcus_holmes »

samoa42 wrote: post #168
marcus_holmes wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant the business model, not the content. German collection of the tax is incredibly unpopular, especially for those of us who don't even have a television.

true, would be more sensible to make it a "real" federal tax instead of collection via a obnoxious semi-private entity. while i have not owned a tv for the last two decades i still sometimes consume their content via internet or car-radio and would probably miss it if it wasnt available.

In Australia, the ABC is just funded out of general taxation, with no specific tax for it. That works a lot better.

Triple-J (their "youth" music radio station) is an Australian cultural mainstay (or was; its relevance is fading), and I don't think anyone actually minds that some of their tax goes to support it. Except the usual right-wing conspiracy dicks who are mad that the ABC doesn't publish their shite.

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