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Advertising Is a Cancer on Society
401–410 of 657 posts
Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, sales might go down a little. So GM doesn't advertise their latest model and it doesn't sell as much. No worries. It's not like the livelihood of thousands of people is at stake. They'll just find other jobs. Who cares about them?
Replace GM with a factory, and advertising with dumping toxic waste into the local river. Would you still cry about the lost jobs if someone proposed banning dumping toxic waste into rivers?
Strawman argument. When advertising works it has some upside for everyone (customers, platforms and advertisers), dumping toxic waste only benefits the dumper.
Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society
#403He doesn't quite say it by name, but most advertising is a classic arms race. Especially given how the internet now makes information easily available, a great deal of advertising is about manipulating consumers to pick company A's products over those from competitors B, C, and D. This forces those other companies to spend to get and keep customers. It's pure waste. For example, everybody on the planet is now familia…
I would argue that society would be worse off. There are a lot of things we enjoy, for free or cheap, because of advertising.
Tv, radio, street fair, among other things
And no, we wouldn't have billions of dollars to spend on other things. The soft drink companies would have billions of dollars more profit. And fewer people would have jobs
The cost of drinks wouldn't go down. Basically the only thing that would change is we would lose a lot of free things, and fewer people would have money.
Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society
#404This is a dogmatic viewpoint I think often seen in very technical people who are unwilling to see the interconnectedness of how our society works. I bet there's any number of things this person values that simply wouldn't exist without advertising. It's a childish and immature opinion really. Anyone who hates advertising this much should show their commitment by working at an organization that does not advertise. Loa…
Found the ad tech guy. We do not have to accept the current state of advertising because it may or may not have had good effects in the past (practically by accident). Wanting things to change for the better is the opposite of dogma, and I daresay most advertising is much more childish and immature than this blog post. It is not hypocritical to hate ads and be subjected to them/benefit from them as they are so pervas…
The problem is nobody is having a proper discourse on how to make ads better. There is a real problem here that we can fix and need to fix if we want to keep the internet economy from eventually collapsing when everyone gets too sick of ads to avoid adblockers.
Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society
#405Thoughts on NYC Subway ads? They are sort of entertaining sometimes, when there isn’t cell signal underground.
Strong dislike. I'm already paying $2.75 per ride - how much are the ads subsidizing my ride by? I couldn't find anything on it with a cursory search but my guess is not much - far less than the psychological cost of getting toothbrushes, mattresses, food delivery services, and who knows what other ads shoved into my face any direction I look. I think the worst ones are the TV show/movie ones lining the subway walkways where I feel like I'm walking through some sort of physical channel directory.
I do think the space should be reserved and used for advertising city services such as 311 information, elderly housing services, housing rights etc. It's a great way of educating the city residents about benefits and rights they might not otherwise be aware of.
Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society
#406He doesn't quite say it by name, but most advertising is a classic arms race. Especially given how the internet now makes information easily available, a great deal of advertising is about manipulating consumers to pick company A's products over those from competitors B, C, and D. This forces those other companies to spend to get and keep customers. It's pure waste. For example, everybody on the planet is now familia…
Thank you for your service.
Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia almost goes under every year if their banners are to be believed. They have to beg for money to stay open. That's not a ringing endorsement of an "ad-less" model.
Wikipedia is lying through their teeth and has tons of expenses well beyond keeping the servers running.
They're going to shoot themselves in the foot doing that. Eventually people are going to stop donating as people become more blind to the donation drives.
Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Maybe some products inherently can't be sustained by word of mouth, and in a world without widespread commercial advertising they wouldn't exist at all. Maybe those products shouldn't exist, then. Just because someone has an idea or wants to sell yet another iteration on an existing product or service, doesn't mean they deserve to. Maybe advertising allows markets to be far more diverse and saturated than they shoul…
Don't be so reductionist. Someone could find this escape room via a search ad, have a blast and tell all of her friends and none of them may never choose to do the same. And an escape room experience isn't something you can easily bring people back for - you need to find new customers every single time. I suppose a good way that could make word of mouth work is to create two experiences and recommend the other in an…
Maybe there could be a middle ground: keep most of the internet ad-free, but allow users to do explicit "commercial searches" for e.g. vacuum cleaners, or hotels, or fun things to do in their area. Then the escape room would show up there.
Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a product can't be sustained by word of mouth, it's because it doesn't fill a need that wasn't artificially created by advertising. These products shouldn't exist.
Certain medical products, various hygiene supplies, or other things that cannot be talked about in 'polite society' would fall into the realm of things that are very hard to spread by word of mouth. Additionally, things that are rarely used by a person but are widely used by society, like stump removal services, plumbers, etc.
All of those can do just fine with a general search engine.
You just need to know that removing a stump is generally possible. That fact itself can be advertised by a the guild of stump removers if it is obscure enough. "Tired of hitting your toe on the stump in your backyard? Ask you doctor for an eye check!"
Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
If projects as large as Linux or Wikipedia can thrive without ads, I'm sure a Google-quality search engine can do the same. So far it hasn't been done because the ad-supported model is promising more money to anyone who tries; but if the ad-supported model goes away, you'll see a good non-ad-supported search engine soon enough. It could be P2P and free (like Mastodon, which proved that social networks don't have to r…
How many Linux contributors are paid by companies who make money by advertising?
Seems most of the contributions are from hardware/distro developers. Recent contributions pin Google at making up about 2% and Facebook at 0.8%. I can imagine they're contributing far more value with their Linux Foundation memberships though.
[0]https://regmedia.co.uk/2016/08/26/top_30_linux_contributions...
