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Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

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Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#231

Post by chefandy »

vdnkh wrote: post #190
acc_297 wrote: post #67

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…

This is incredibly petty of me but why do people keep spelling "ads" as "ADs" lately? It's an abbreviation not an initialism

Phone autocorrect usually is the culprit for those types of typos for me. I imagine this crowd would be more likely than many to have that common abbreviation for Active Domains trained into their input methods.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#232

Post by somenameforme »

someothherguyy wrote: post #223
somenameforme wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the entire point of our dialogue. You claimed my statement that most people [ who don't have children ] claim they aren't having children because of economic reasons was false. Your evidence was a study that showed a negligible majority of people [ who actively don't plan to ever have kids, age 18-49 ] are simply doings so out of personal choice, and then seemed confused about why this was an inappropriate sa…

I didn't claim anything. I was just asking where you heard what you heard. I provided a survey that showed a different response. You weren't happy with the population it sampled from. You thought the buckets should be sized differently. You called this p-hacking. I provided another survey from a larger population with a similar response to the first one I shared. You didn't acknowledge it. You still haven't provided…

Their sample was fine, but them subsampling it to present clickbait misinformation is not. Here [1] for instance are some interesting broad picture datums. General planned fertility hasn't changed much at all over the years, but rather people are simply failing to achieve their goals. The percent of people with the intent to remain childless (100% of the sample in the studies you linked to) remains relatively negligible, rarely more than ~15% per age bucket, and generally much lower. So those views are quite unrepresentative and fringe.

The relationship between economics and fertility is widely accepted, but surveys have been hijacked by clickbait. Going the other direction with studies is also difficult because it's well established and taken as a given, rather than studied. But this [2] seems to be some older foundational study on the topic. ctrl+f for "opportunity cost." Essentially the more people earn, the more they lose out by having children, which is seen as a major deterrent to having children. In other words, they don't see themselves as having enough money to afford what they would lose by having children, so prioritize earning more, to buy more things, over having children.

[1] - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/padr.12535

[2] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3576563/

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#233

Post by taurknaut »

someothherguyy wrote: post #81
taurknaut wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the good advertising does? What are you referring to?

Oh you know, economic growth, jobs, efficiencies in matching producers and consumers, etc.

Somehow i feel like we can get this with employment that produces value. It'd be more productive to get people to dig ditches—ditches don't destroy our cities, roads, and services, so they produce even more value than ads do.

Anyway, the last thing this society needs is encouragement to buy even more crap they never asked for. We can be something better than "that shithole strip-mall where everyone is an ignorant consumer who worships ronald reagan". As much as the evidence points to the contrary, I do believe we are capable of more.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#234

Post by taurknaut »

quectophoton wrote: post #73
taurknaut wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only way to stop this would probably be to "close your eyes?" or perhaps this isn't really a big enough problem in the first place. The idea of banning advertisements never struck you? That seems like the obvious way forward.

88x31 banners (ads) on Neocities, or artists I follow mentioning they have new merch (ads), or HN (website whose sole purpose is to let people advertise), don't bother me enough to ban them.

All we have left is a dumpster fire supported by ads.

> HN (website whose sole purpose is to let people advertise)

I don't think anyone comes here to read the advertisements (which is what paid job postings with no comments? I'll pass.). The closest you get are the "who's hiring" threads. Calling that an advertisement when both parties clearly want to engage seems wildly disingenuous. Advertisements are necessarily forced on people. There isn't a single person in human history whose life was improved by an advertisement (except the people hosting the ads, of course).

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#235

Post by p3rls »

Eh, I run an ad-supported website that employs and has had to fire people because of adblocker fluctuations before.

I would kill to get a few regular sponsors and not need an ad platform but I've been literally able to only find one sponsor after almost a decade. No one wants to pay without tracking, especially in emerging markets/niches.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#236

Post by reginald78 »

Jenk wrote: post #26
someothherguyy wrote: post #21

This analogy seems weak. In general, this post argues one way while ignoring all the good advertising does. Do cancers typically do good things at their baseline?

"all the good things advertising does" is doing a lot of the leg work without much being specified.

Things are so far gone at this point I'm perfectly willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater on this one.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#237

Post by [deleted] »

neom wrote: post #92

I teach people how to advertise for a living. This is how I teach it: an advert is simply the ability to buy a knock on someones front door. That is literally all you are doing when you buy an advert. All business activity you experience today is an abstraction of business we have already done, I'm sure back in the day people thought door to door sales people were annoying, and I'm sure sometimes they were not. From…

[deleted]

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#238

Post by Levitz »

hermannj314 wrote: post #45

What about advertising for cancer screening? That type of advertising is shown to be cost effective and saves lives [1]. So advertising can be a good thing and a literal cancer-preventer to society. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4018507/

Well yeah, and cutting someone open can save his life in the context of a surgery.

The vast, vast majority of the time and the vast, vast majority of money spent on ads is nothing like this.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#239

Post by ngriffiths »

danaris wrote: post #222
ngriffiths wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see it as subscribing to free-market ideology - more like "every bad thing has a certain prevalence, and that prevalence is a policy choice." The flu exists because we don't aggressively isolate/contact trace people who get the flu, but it isn't that prevalent and results in few deaths because of how much we invest in vaccination, hygiene, and medical care. The muggings continue because we don't spend the ins…

In addition to what pavel_lishin says... > people seem happy to complain but pretty hesitant to pay actual money to reduce them. First, you have to look at this in the context of the actual economic situation of the average American, which has been, more or less, getting steadily worse in a relative sense for roughly 40-50 years. Second, you can't actually say this with any degree of rigor because in the vast majorit…

> First, you have to look at this in the context of the actual economic situation of the average American, which has been, more or less, getting steadily worse in a relative sense for roughly 40-50 years.

I don't have a good grasp of the broad economic trends, but the accessibility of ~free, high quality, valuable knowledge (as well as entertaining content) online has exploded in this time frame. That may be unrelated to wages but it certainly has to do with demand.

> Second, you can't actually say this with any degree of rigor because in the vast majority of cases, there isn't an option to pay money to reduce the ads.

Maybe, but this seems like a problem that could have been solved if it were actually profitable to do so, no? I mean, I guess it's possible that we're in some local minimum where it's really hard to set up a less terrible system. But the simpler explanation is people would rather "pay" with attention than money. I'm honestly not sure though.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#240

Post by chefandy »

talkingtab wrote: post #149

The first comment (now) quibbles about the definition of advertising. 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.…

One of my least favorite tendencies of software developers is assuming they can pull apart non-technical/mathematic problems involving human complexity, even at a societal scale, with a series of logical thought experiments like they’re debugging software, and that their “bug fixes” and doc updates would tidy everything up with people as effectively as it does with processes. As complex as software can be, it hasn’t a sliver the complexity of human interaction on a small scale, let alone societally. The developer mindset often isn’t effective enough in reasoning about human behavior to make effective user interfaces for software they created.

When you start classifying entire categories of human interaction and societal structures in concrete stages based on a combination of a priori reasoning, gut instinct, anecdotes, and ‘common knowledge,’ there’s a good chance your words are portraying the boogie men in your head rather than any of the very significant and consequential problems in our society. There are entire fields that study complex topics you casually wield in your assessment— they’re probably a good place to start if you honestly think your gut instinct about forum posts on advertising can be meaningfully generalized to societal structures on a whole.

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