731–740 of 882 posts
The author seems to have fallen into the classic trap of conflating media/medium and content. Content can be free (or not) but getting it to eyeballs requires additional effort that is rarely free/gratis (your ISP charges you).
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I used to think like you, but now I think it's 5D chess. Marketing is like air, so ever present you can't even see it. If you don't buy anything and live off your homesteading, then marketing probably doesn't have any effect on you. If you live a life anything like the average westerner, you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on things you had to be taught to desire. It's in your TV shows, your news articles, you…
It's certainly quite possible. However >It's in your TV shows, your news articles, your Instagram feed, your word of mouth, your everything unless you are in the forest I think I, and some decent percentage of HN readers, may kind of be "in the forest". I don't watch TV, I don't read news articles, I've never had an Instagram account or any kind of social media account (besides more "pseudonymous" social media like H…
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It's certainly quite possible. However >It's in your TV shows, your news articles, your Instagram feed, your word of mouth, your everything unless you are in the forest I think I, and some decent percentage of HN readers, may kind of be "in the forest". I don't watch TV, I don't read news articles, I've never had an Instagram account or any kind of social media account (besides more "pseudonymous" social media like H…
Do you buy your clothes at the thrift store or at the mall? If you buy them at the mall, how did you choose those stores? Did you buy those clothes to make sure you were meeting other people's expectations? Were those people's expectations shaped by advertising, marketing and branding? If you wear flour sacks, then my humble apologies and sincere congratulations.
This is good skills: https://www.jefftk.com/donations The author seems to have fallen into the classic trap of conflating media/medium and content. Content can be free (or not) but getting it to eyeballs requires additional effort that is rarely free/gratis (your ISP charges you).
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I see advertising as intrinsically immoral. So it's not only the privacy abuses (which are the most serious part) but advertising in general.
So its immoral for a math tutor to post a flyer about his services in a local coffee shop? Advertising is a very wide spectrum and I think its way too heavy handed to say it is all intrinsically immoral. Some is, maybe even most of it, but surely not all is immoral. I'd argue that advertising in general is a good thing, but that there are a few parts that are bad. One bad part is the vast surveillance and privacy int…
The coffee shop with far too many flyers or 7 by the same local tutor becomes very hard to handle. With experience you fight through the flyers to read the menu and get to the counter to order that coffee.
There is so much 'opportunity' in the world at any moment for which the provider of the opportunity's ad thinks that it could be relevant to me. I can accept a little of that every day without it being bad, but patience wears very fast.
However, I have a problem with Google adverts specifically and that is that they’re absolute hot garbage. Google has advertised to me: outright scams, malware, gambling, mobile games with extremely exploitative monetisation.
And they are working to take away any privacy I might have to keep showing me this shit. In my opinion, Google is basically evil these days.
I personally have a very low opinion of anyone who works for a company that does that and even lower of anyone who actually works on serving those adverts.
The online ad business generally mystifies me. While an awful lot of the internet, especially the surveillance advertising part, looks to be the greatest misallocation of engineering (and other) talent in the history of the world, ya gotta ask about the efficacy. The only reasonably accurate targeting I've ever run into is the occasional ad for something I just browsed on Amazon. I've never clicked on an internet ad.…
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I still don’t believe audio surveillance exists at this scale, and I still haven’t seen any evidence that these events are anything but coincidence. It seems to me that Facebook is extremely good at targeting me with ads (via Instagram) for products I might be interested in. I’m also much more likely to talk about products I’m interested in. I’m also much more likely to notice the spooky scenarios where the ads match…
I had a hard time believing it myself and came to terms with it after reproducing it consistently over many months, despite using everything from pihole to on-device firewalls running as root. Unfortunately, this topic tends to be routinely brushed off as coincidence and I believe it's partially because the level of surveillance underway would cause panic and outrage, if it becomes widely known. Although I have have…
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Which do you think is more likely? a. A $300 billion dollar industry is based entirely on a delusion. b. You are an outlier.
c. a portion of the industry is based on a delusion Given that some industries (or movements, ideologies, etc.) could credibly be based on delusions, what do you think is the upper limit for how big such an industry could get?