461–470 of 657 posts
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I used to just ignore them. Now I click the shit out of the ones with pretty women modelling skimpy clothing. More and more, those types of ads dominate my targeted ad stream and it's beautiful.
Did you drop the "/s"?
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How on Earth did you come to the conclusion that computers wouldn't exist without advertising?
Home computers were initially a novelty item, sold mainly through direct-response advertisements in magazines like Popular Electronics. This early hobbyist market created the economies of scale that made a mass market home computer a possibility. In the late 70s and early 80s, most people simply had no idea why they would want a computer; The first home computer adverts in the mainstream media didn't really sell the…
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If they merely existed but didn’t engage in advertising, you could advertise and, consequently, outperform them. But they all know this too. This is the game theory I’m alluding to. It’s a Prisoners Dilemma except with added externalities in the cases where anyone advertises at all. Now, how does the prisoners dilemma get solved? External enforcement. In advertising that might entail laws and regulations to curtail a…
You could never remove advertising without silencing companies. Let that sink in. As long as companies exist and have tools to reach out, even if it was a free Facebook post, they're always going to do that.
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So in your world where advertising went away and Facebook/Google/YouTube/etc are gone (don't pretend they'd survive without ads), where exactly do you do the screaming? In real world public spaces? That's an even more toxic form of advertising and far more wasteful.
You don't scream. You talk to people. They talk to other people. If your message is worth it, it'll organically reach those who'd benefit from it. Also, you could post your message in places where people interested in the kind of problems you're solving come to look for solutions. Trade shows, product catalogs, storefronts, and their on-line equivalents. > don't pretend they'd survive without ads I don't see why Face…
> Trade shows, product catalogs, storefronts, and their on-line equivalents.
These are all advertisements, just a different type.
He 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…
Ah only a strong central government could redirect resources and restrict freedom of speech in such a manner. In theory this works, in practice it doesn't. Nobody is quite sure about what the dichotomy is between the theory and actual results. Basically by allowing commercial interests to control the direction of capital you get useless areas of inn-efficiency like advertising. The weird thing is, these types of econ…
So lots of uneven distributions (anybody growing up in USSR will know what I mean), and lots of overhead.
A modern networked infrastructure could mitigate that. A general AI could solve it (but that has its own drawbacks, great if you like your paper clips though).
Markets in a sense create that distribution system organically, but they pay efficiency costs (comparing to a strictly optimal solution). One of those operational costs is advertising.
Market has its own deficiency/glut profile too -- instead of whole city lacking butter and drowning in socks, we have individual people lacking everything evenly and others having abundance.
However some advertising is very good. I go to work to make money and I want to spend it ... how do I know what to buy? I like video games, an ad that tells me there's a new game coming out for a console I own is really useful to me! I'm not embarrassed to be a consumer and to be open to influence.
If you stop watching ads for awhile and go back to it you’ll see how mind numbing it all really is. I aggressively block ads - no exceptions.
Then of course less than 10 minutes later (or 4 when I'm in America and that's just horrendous) the same ad gets shown again. That's the bit that is truly mind numbing and turns me off ads, the share the copious repetition of low information drivel.