141–150 of 286 posts
The below section resonates: lately YouTube has figured out I am in my mid-twenties and considering for the first time how best to save money for a secure/stable future. The number of ADs I see now not so subtly implying that I can expect to “lose big” or “rent forever” if I don’t subscribe to QuestTrade/WealthSimple/… It’s just frustrating to know that someone put time and thought into making me and a million other…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would rather live with ads than with literal bread lines my family stood in decades ago, in a socialist state (that funnily had more govt propaganda than ads).
How about none of these? Why do I always need to choose the lesser evil and never good?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's a good that advertising does: letting people know how your product or services address some pressing need.
explain what pressing needs this BMW adv addresses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8UPg6hyDBg
It doesn't mean there are no problems with ads today.
The below section resonates: lately YouTube has figured out I am in my mid-twenties and considering for the first time how best to save money for a secure/stable future. The number of ADs I see now not so subtly implying that I can expect to “lose big” or “rent forever” if I don’t subscribe to QuestTrade/WealthSimple/… It’s just frustrating to know that someone put time and thought into making me and a million other…
I use two browser addons, uBlock origin and SponsorBlock.
If there were no ads, how would people know that products existed? Would they just see the products on store shelves? What about services? Would labels be ads? Would how stores merchandise things be advertisements? Could businesses negotiate for specific product placement? How would you find out about stores? Would store signs be ads? How about really big ones? How about at the edge of their property along a road highway? Could the sign say what the store sold? If you were to start a product guide to help people find what they need, how could you possibly afford to buy enough products to be useful and up-to-date enough while slow crawl word of mouth got the business off the ground? Would asking people to tell their friends be an ad? If not, could you pay someone to spread the word about your product? Would traveling sales reps be ads? What if they wore head to toe logo gear? Could you just pay people to do that without selling things?
Manipulative advertising practices suck. Privacy destroying data-driven marketing sucks.
Ads themselves often suck but I don’t see how a capitalist society could survive without them.
Most of the arguments made are not about "advertising" per se, but the methods that SOME forms of advertising take and other methods (data mining, phishing, scams) that are either not advertising or are things that are already regulated/illegal but which enforcement actions against are low/non-existent. In the book "Fire in the Valley" about the development and early days of the internet there is a great deal of disc…
How do we know if "this level of speed and content online" is net good?
If all you are consuming is FB, IG, X, and Reddit - I mean that's like going to a candy store and complaining there is no broccoli.
> ...so we end up with a zero-sum game instead (or really negative-sum, if you count the externalities). If you have competitors, you can't not participate.
Advertising is basically a moloch trap, so it probably has to be solved by regulation to fix the incentives. Solving these kinds of problems well is pretty hard, so I think it shouldn't be surprising that they are not solved yet.
> GDPR is doing an excellent job destroying some of the most privacy-invasive practices of the adtech industry
I disagree pretty strongly. I plan to write a bit more detail about this at some point but shortly I think GDPR is a net negative. It places too much burden on the user, while the burden should be on the adtech companies. I also don't like how it bundles all the surveilance stuff under a single consent (per company). This is giving the user a choice to accept what they hardly know the real consequences of and also giving the companies a strong incentive to manipulate the user to get that consent. In terms of fixing incentives, GDPR did pretty much the opposite.
It's also incredibly vague, so it's a nightmare to develop around, and limits legitimate use cases. The end result is that we still get surveilled, but we now also have to click through cookie banners and consent forms and small businesses have to spend enormous resources to deal with it even though it was supposed to be a measure to tackle big tech companies. Worse than that, walled gardens like Facebook and Google have advantage over normal websites, because they have to ask for consent only once during registration.
The second comment (now) quibbles about the use of the word cancer. (there is benign cancer).
Advertising (whether it uses tracking or not) can be defined as the intention of convincing someone rather than providing information. Intent is to convince. PROPOGANDA.
The intent is for the target/prey/victim to be unable to distinguish the truth value.
So here we have a first problem. Is the intent of the first comment on HN
"Most of the arguments .. are not about 'advertising' ..."
made to help me understand the article better? Or are they made with the intent of causing to me doubt the article (or even not to read it).
The same question can be asked about the second question. Ad infinitum and nauseaum.
THAT is STAGE 1 social cancer. I can no longer trust the intention of posts on HN.
STAGE 2 is that I can no longer trust the INTENTION of any media.
Do I want a recipe for cookies? Use the "garrble" to search. Can I really believe that this recipe has ever been made by the person/bot/AI that created it?
STAGE 3. Human societies and Communities are founded on trust. The ability to come to a common understanding of a situation and act collectively. STAGE 3 is when communities and societies no longer function.
The internet has STAGE 2 cancer and some STAGE 3. Since our society in the US depends on the internet ....
Well you cannot trust anything I say, I could be an AI for all you know. And probably my definitions are wrong, my understanding of stages of cancer is faulty, etc.
Here is my 2cents. The article vastly underestimates the damage and dangers, but is definitely worth a read.
Like cancer, I think it's possible to split ads into two categories: Benign and malignant. Benign ads are like ads for toothpaste, Febreeze, or airlines. Malignant ads are, to give but two examples, for things like gambling and pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceutical business, in particular, was much more widely trusted and had far higher public favorability ratings in the old days when their advertising to the public wa…
Example with airlines: airlines stealing each other's customers just raises the price for the tickets (by the amount paid for advertisement) without net benefit for the consumer.
The only advertisement I can consider a good one is a shop sign on the shop/restaurant and perhaps a sign on a nearby crossing to direct me there.
Logically, a 'really good deal just became available' should be a useful one (information - wise), but that has been gamed to such an extent...