Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do not read news sites and I do not consider myself as uninformed.
where are you getting informed about the news?
Mostly family or friends.
What if we made advertising illegal?
61–70 of 90 posts
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. But the sites I read and others like news site definitely have ads. Imagine news all being a subscription, fewer people would actually be informed, the opposite of what should be the case. NYTimes can do it because they're big enough but most news sites especially smaller or local ones cannot.
I do not read news sites and I do not consider myself as uninformed.
Your story is therefore irrelevant to this conversation about advertising versus micropayments. Like, good for you that you don't read news but many people do.
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#63Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#64I despise advertising, but anecdotally, I can think of three ads in the past week that informed me about products I didn’t know existed but would enjoy. I also learned about multiple new games releasing, sporting events that were happening, etc. The claim that ads are not at all informative is incorrect. That being said, I also block as many ads as possible from my life, so the few I actively notice tend to be more n…
You could have a service that lets you look for promotional information, only when you want. And lets you configure it from a completely random choice of ad, to something tailored for what you're really looking for at the moment (as opposed to the surveillance industry trying to read your mind). If you steal the idea please give me a slice of the revenue xD (although it would be best if it were not for profit, so tha…
The catch there is I don’t look for this stuff, as it isn’t a priority. I am happier not pursuing what advertisers want to sell me, as my time is limited. I imagine many folks are the same, based on it being a core problem advertising tries to solve for businesses.
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#65We could just start making it illegal to advertise to children. Without age verification, it's just a burden of proof with the advertiser that their ad isn't targeting children and a ban on age specific target groups for ad platforms.
Do you really want to give platforms more incentives to push for age verification?
That's a valid point. Maybe better to have no ads at all
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#66We could just start making it illegal to advertise to children. Without age verification, it's just a burden of proof with the advertiser that their ad isn't targeting children and a ban on age specific target groups for ad platforms.
Do you really want to give platforms more incentives to push for age verification?
That's a valid point. Maybe better to have no ads at all.
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) Not every single site is displaying ads, e.g. Codeberg.org 2) aren't you paying indirectly anyways? (With only a part of the revenue actually landing in the bags of the operator of the site - another part is used to fund Google Chrome and people who design ads)
Sure. But the sites I read and others like news site definitely have ads. Imagine news all being a subscription, fewer people would actually be informed, the opposite of what should be the case. NYTimes can do it because they're big enough but most news sites especially smaller or local ones cannot.
For me the majority of private news sites are already subscriptions with a part of it being available without subscriptions.
Then there is publicly accessible news forcibly paid by everyone.
I guess even without ads content without subscriptions would still exist to attract people, however the reality might shift completely if micro payments became a thing (i.e. paying a few cents for every news you view - could be enabled by something like a digital currency like digital euro).
Currently manu are informed by news which attracts many clicks (incentives through ads), which might be considered more disinformation than news.
People might have more money in the bags, because they'd pay less to marketing departments designing and paying for ads.
Lots of things to consider
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. But the sites I read and others like news site definitely have ads. Imagine news all being a subscription, fewer people would actually be informed, the opposite of what should be the case. NYTimes can do it because they're big enough but most news sites especially smaller or local ones cannot.
I do not read news sites and I do not consider myself as uninformed.
What's hacker news?
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't rigorous of course, but "free speech" has come to mean oligarchs and corporations more-or-less outright buying politicians and supreme court judges, and media that's limited to touting some oligarch's best interests, and carrying very invasive, targeted advertising. When ordinary people do manage to offer up an opinion on a larger scale, they're cancelled or worse, doxxed and targeted by something like Ale…
So you think free speech only benefits Trump and his friends? Have you stopped for a split second and thought about what can happen to YOU, you know, someone who seem to have issues with the current president, if there is no free speech?
Free speech is not a binary effect (have/dont have). You can have free speech, but the parties you communicate to are only listening to others with more compelling voices. (politicians and funding sources or news outlets and mango temper tantrums)
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could have a service that lets you look for promotional information, only when you want. And lets you configure it from a completely random choice of ad, to something tailored for what you're really looking for at the moment (as opposed to the surveillance industry trying to read your mind). If you steal the idea please give me a slice of the revenue xD (although it would be best if it were not for profit, so tha…
The catch there is I don’t look for this stuff, as it isn’t a priority. I am happier not pursuing what advertisers want to sell me, as my time is limited. I imagine many folks are the same, based on it being a core problem advertising tries to solve for businesses.
That's kind of interesting. I was thinking independent reviews would become important. But you're saying that you wouldn't want to spend any time at all reading or watching or listening to the output of an entertainment reviewer.
Instead you want exactly what adverts do: to be tracked in an effort to read your mind, and then to mendaciously shove news about events and movies and games in your path, while you're doing other things. Interleaved between songs you were listening to, in a sidebar when you use software, as a two-second video before the video you were going to watch deliberately. You will have to be extra skeptical about the things you hear this way. The whole industry, including the free ad-supported services, is a bucket of the sleaziest crabs, clambering over one another in a competition to win your money's attention by any means, not necessarily by giving you honest information. But that's the way you like it.
Yet you said at the start you despise ads and block them. Huh.