31–40 of 88 posts
It's also key in making us get into debt which then enslaves us.
Throw your TV out the window. Put adblock on.
I never help these people. Even on a site where I go via google and get their advert questions I do not read the question, I just look at the answers, try to find "I don't know" and click it.
This is a really interesting challenge, both as a person being bombarded by this, but also as someone trying to sell something. We had a choice at FastMail a few years ago now, when we were still providing free accounts and trying to use advertising - both to the user of the account and in the signature of outgoing email - to cover the operational costs. In the end we decided to ditch the free accounts entirely, remo…
Now I know that FastMail is:
1. A paid service
2. A service that cares about their customers
3. A service that doesn't use advertisements to subsidize free accounts
There are two types of advertising, those that make you aware of a brand you were previously aware of, and those that try to burn one into your head. The first is ok, the more aware of competition we are the better the market is. It is the second one, the one that big brands participate in, that drives me crazy. I want my mind to be clear, not to have a jingle playing in it. I don't want a brand to pop into my head because I see it on a bottle in my peripheral vision.
This absolutely influences my choices too. No cable subscription. Adblock. I try to avoid services that are ad supported. Paying to remove ads in apps (I do not want to be served a brand when my alarm goes off).
As well, my decisions in building applications. I'm making a paid application with no ads hoping that users will be willing to pay a small price to protect their data from that system.
Thanks for writing about this. I feel it's a very important issue and that not having this bombardment should be a human right.
I've come to the conclusion that advertising and the general thrust of mass communication with commercial interests is a powerful force. As such, I would rather it's power lie in the hands of everyone, not just the state or a religion or strong man. Advertising in the hands of a small family business gives that family the ability to have economic autonomy, and ensures that both purchasing power and political voice is distributed across wide, diverse populations rather than a few powerful elite that control the voice of everything.
Advertising, in the hands of the many, breeds democracy. Think of the world-bending power of the printing press. It effectively created the middle class in Europe. It's not just the economic activity it generated. It is the voice it gave to everyone who reached for it.
We can't put the genie back in the bottle. I think the way forward is to actually get better at connecting with each other in a decentralized mesh network of demand and desire. If enough people can share what they want in a trusted manner, we can live without ads and live into becoming a real global community.
It's not a war. It's evolution. Nature, red in tooth and claw . Ideas live in you, and they die in you, and they evolve. Reproduction: ideas spread, through words, deeds, and creations. Variation: communication inherently introduces errors, and thoughts change over time. Selection: ideas that are forgotten die without spreading. With reproduction, variation, and selection, you have evolution. Religion is a coherent,…
Unfortunately for my budget, in all but the rarest circumstances advertising is quite a weak vector, seldom infectious, and requires constant reinforcement to have even a small effect.
Good luck with that, but advertising knows you better than you know yourself.
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>For quite some time I've felt that advertising/marketing, at least the sort we've had for the past century or so, is inherently immoral. The fact that it's a necessary evil in our economic system doesn't stop it from being an evil.
>Modern advertising is not merely informing people about products and what they do. It's brain-hacking, where advertisers have figured out over decades of experience, and research into human cognitive biases and failure modes, ways of presenting the same product, the same information, but getting a desired response out of the target.
>We accept this as a society because we tell ourselves that, as rational human beings, we have the choice to listen to or reject these messages. But modern understandings of cognitive biases show how advertising works on deeper levels, and even works despite us knowing about the tricks that are being used on us.
>The problem is that there's a severe imbalance. Advertisers are getting better and better at attacking -- at figuring out precisely what makes us tick, down to the level of pixels on an A/B-tested website. Are people getting any better at defending themselves? Are people being trained in dealing with their cognitive biases to make themselves resistant? Overall, I don't think so.
Shamelessly reposting an earlier comment of mine ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9909259 ) because I feel it's relevant here: --- >For quite some time I've felt that advertising/marketing, at least the sort we've had for the past century or so, is inherently immoral. The fact that it's a necessary evil in our economic system doesn't stop it from being an evil. >Modern advertising is not merely informing people…
> I've decided to "opt-out" of this war entirely. Good luck with that, but advertising knows you better than you know yourself.