241–250 of 282 posts
I am amused that the article detailing a very good reason to use an adblocker asked me to disable mine.
Hey, there are no ad blockers for apps, right? Messing with other apps is a ToS violation for both Google and Apple, as I recall. Edit: OK, you can. But not with other apps from the official stores.
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> The point I'm trying to get across is that something can be critical to a functioning system even if on its own it doesn't look very impressive. Voters are the scourge of every democracy, they push for all sorts of stupid policies and usually get them. I'd love if you could expand how this applies to advertising. Voters are critical to democracy. Advertising isn't critical to society, it's mostly a way for a lot of…
Imagine if literally the only way to get a phone, or even find out what phones there are, was through a carrier store. Take away advertising and the only way someone could find out about a product is word of mouth, or walking into a shop. Functionally everything would originate in shops. That means looking at the available options would be very time consuming, involve a lot of travel and be dominated by very powerful…
Your thought experiment isn't very useful for picturing a world that only lacks advertising.
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There are ways to optimize access to this information. Trade shows that display new products. Mail-order catalogs for companies or industry groups. Companies would find a way to make information - not ads - available for interested people to peruse. The core difference would be "pull not push", i.e. people with a problem would go looking for solutions, and very little space to compete on product information - prevent…
Trade shows and catalogs are forms of advertising. Also, regarding "pull not push", people sometimes don't know there is a solution to their "problem" (where "problem" might not be a real problem, per se, but maybe simply not even knowing that a given option exists).
Of the ads I see, if we exclude the drug ads that really should not be allowed, I'd say that an extremely small fraction are telling me about solutions I didn't already know existed. The "useful" case should not be so rare.
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There are ways of becoming aware of what's available other than watching trailers. For instance, reviewing lists of recent releases then reading the wikipedia pages for them. The A/V format of trailers is fundamentally more coercive than text.
Television commercials are fundamentally more coercive than radio commercials, so should we all transition back to radio just to avoid those small additional coercive factors? No, of course not, there are benefits to television that are more important than those factors.
You should not begin listening to more radio to compensate. Reading more newspapers and books would be more appropriate. Something movie trailers, television, and radio all have in common is the coercive use of music to manipulate how you feel, particularly when trying to persuade you to buy something or vote for somebody.
Try this simple exercise: instead of watching CNN on television, go to CNN.com and read the stories they have there in text. I assure you, anything important they have to say on television will be written down. And in text form, it will have less flashy graphics to daze you, the emotion in the television personality's voice will be neutralized, there will be far less repetition and typically more details organized in a more coherent manner. And perhaps best of all, the advertisements will be much easier to filter out.
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> Advertising is a scourge upon society. I understand where you're coming from, but that's painting with a pretty broad brush. Advertising covers everything from the signage stating the name of the mom-and-pop shop on the corner (which is why cities often limit the size of logos/names on building) to billboards on the side of the freeway. It covers movie trailers I seek out ant watch to see what's coming soon to comm…
I'm not against advertising, but I am against branding. The term was borrowed from the cattle industry, where a hot piece of metal scars the cattle with a logo of the owner. Branding in advertising is meant to scar your brain. I consider it a form of assault.
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Television commercials are fundamentally more coercive than radio commercials, so should we all transition back to radio just to avoid those small additional coercive factors? No, of course not, there are benefits to television that are more important than those factors.
This isn't true in my experience, radio ads are much more intrusive as they hinge on one sensory experience only.
Either way, avoiding television only to listen to the radio more is absurd. Like an alcoholic who's trying to quite booze so he starts chain smoking to cope.
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> historically there have been and are plenty of other businesses at their scale that did/do not need this at all. Have we ever had an internet company with over 1 billion active users not using advertising as its main source of income?
Microsoft? Major ISPs and wireless carriers? Basically any company that has a real product that people need can succeed without advertising. Maybe the real answer is that Shitbook is just not worth paying for?
Advertising as a business model is perfectly valid and has allowed billions of people to access things they otherwise wouldn't get.
Advertising is a scourge upon society.
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There's a difference between consuming products that are funded by ads, where you can just it out of the product, and add that pollute public space.
Is a shop an advert ?
Shops are similar to this, I don't enter a shop unless I've decided to purchase something I believe they might have. One difference is the amount of signage outside the shop, which assaults me whether or not I've decided to enter the shop. (The cover of a catalogue arguably does the same, but is much smaller and that's an important difference.) Thankfully many municipalities have taken a stand against this and have begun regulating commercial signage, if only to preserve the local aesthetic / property values.
Consider the difference between Victoria and Vegas. Both have no shortage of commercial zoning. One is delightful, the other is an blight. A monument to just how bad things can be when we allow commercial interests to run rampant. Cynical, exploitative, and ugly.
It is interesting how this article starts. A guy has an app which drains users batteries. But it's not his fault of course, because it's the ad company. Except the ad company says it's not their fault, because the ad came from some other company. This fingerpointing points to one of the core problems of the ad industry: They created a system where nobody knows who's responsible for anything, so malware and fraud has…
Adtech companies know exactly who is responsible. Every ad on any serious network is approved before going live. Every single auction is logged, that's just basic tracking and necessary for billing anyway. The problem is that there are no serious consequences in this industry. Ad fraud isn't a technical problem, it's a business problem, one that most companies are not incentivized to solve or prevent.
So you're saying the standard practice is to let the malicious ad buyers from your network run arbitrary javascript on our sites...
"Yes that's what our publishers do..."