Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

> Maybe its just a function of growing up during the transition of physical software to advert/subscription software, but I love the advertising model.

I also have been around a while, but I am the opposite opinion as yourself, mainly because I really appreciate actually owning something that I don't need to pay to continue to consume like Media which is a good example.

> I have a lot more of a problem with infinite scroll & algorithmic content delivery than advertising

This is basically the same thing as the advertising models that are being used except the advertising is a bit more nefarious (IMO) into manipulating you into feeling like you have to buy something, gamble a little bit or whatever it is just to remove money from your wallet to them.

The products you mention are obviously great for society, this isn't for debate I think, but it's how these services are monetized, which they should be 100% but there is a disgusting extreme in play these days to my eyes.

In the same service based ecconomy, I am okay with paying for Kagi for example, pay as you use without (hopefully) my data being sold to the highest bidder.

There are better models possible then the one we have, I think that's somethign that should be explored.

These are good. But I think there is a tipping point where the asymmetry of power (millions invested in databases, information gathering, algorithm development, etc.) pushes against the tiny power an individual has. There is no agent on the individual's side that has power (time, money, smarts) enough to counter the onslaught. It's a problem of degrees.

I watched a bit of "the Superbowl" once and it made me feel the same way about using the unfiltered web: I can't believe anyone watches this without adblock. Then I slowly started to realise the NPCs in Idiocracy/Wall-E aren't actually fictional...

From a personal perspective, my view on ads has done a complete 180 over the past decade. 10 years ago, I was massively in favor of ads: they were a nice way to indirectly show support to those who produced high quality content. And while I acknowledge that cloud providers have astronomical costs associated with the ability to provide so much data on request instantly, at this point the internet is borderline unusable without a hyper aggressive ad blockers - both on browser level and DNS level. Everything in the article is completely true. Especially the common characteristics: take any video for instance. I'm perfectly fine with watching a 5 second ad or endure a few banners. But much like untreated cancer, those minutes spread to the point where the vital functions get cluttered with crap. Even with the browser based ad blockers, pihole blocks almost 10% of requests. Sure, some of them are trackers, some of them are services owned by comrade elon musk which I've blacklisted but a large chunk are still ads.

> and you don’t fully know what your customer wants.

This is very true.

However, as Facebook ads are showing me both dick pills and boob surgery offers, and legal advice for giving up a citizenship I don't have (and even then only available in a country I don't live in), and foreign government announcements that a breed of dog I've never heard of is now banned in that country…

I'm not convinced that this is in any sense "solved" by the huge quantity of surveillance that even Facebook has.

I mean, these advertising profiling errors are what I'd expect in a university student project introducing AI as a concept, not a megacorp whose main monetisation strategy is selling attention to advertisers. Even a classifier itself built by an LLM ought to do better than this when using only my name and GeoIP data.