I've sold a product that were only possible to sell because of targeted advertising.
The customers were happy and I made a profit.
Hard to see advertising as outright bad even though it should probably be more regulated than it is.
What if we made advertising illegal?
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Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#622What if we built a strong culture around actively avoiding advertising? What if we educated the general public about adverse effects of time after time giving up your attention, without getting anything in return besides a short lived dophamine kick? What if we showed how it's only in those moments of paying attention a person has a chance to exercise agency over their own life, and spending that scarce resource on doomscrolling is a catastrophic-group-mind-suicide, sadistically prolonged over the lifetime of an entire generation? That the illusion of community in the comments is just that, an illusion that dispels the moment the user clicks the dreaded "logout" button spitting them back into a gray heroine-withdrawal-like reality, isolated from their peers, all means of human connection monopolized by the attention sharecropping farms? That every moment a jingle on the radio captures your mind it's distracting you from something necessarily more important? That we are all in effect trapped in that externally-perpetuated procrastination loop, with all the neon-lit arrows pointing us further and further away from what truly matters -- our very lives?
Stay away from the algorithmic feeds, instead get to know your authors and choose them explicitly. Stay away from the personalized ads, pay for content you care about, block what can be blocked, avoid the rest. Learn active banner blindness: catch your attention drifting and look away. Uninstall reels, tiktok, youtube, sanitize your life from short term attention grabbers. Turn off that TV. Mute your car radio. Practice focus: take a book and set a timer. Lock yourself up in a room with a hobby project. Meditate. Set up a ritual with a friend or family, as long as you still got any. Make smalltalk to strangers. Get to know your neighbors. Plan that getaway. Choose your life!
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#623I can’t stop thinking about this article. I spent a long time in ad tech before switching to broader systems engineering. The author captures something I've struggled to articulate to friends and family about why I left the industry. The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings p…
>We've built something that converts human attention into money with increasingly terrifying efficiency, but we're all trapped in a prisoner's dilemma where nobody can unilaterally disarm.
We still get a choice about where we work, and we could choose not to put glorified ad companies on a pedestal.
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#624I have seen it suggested before, but not for a long time. Things have become even worse since then. What I saw suggested was to ban all forms of marketing, not just advertising. The argument was that it exists purely to mislead consumers rather than inform consumers which is vitally important for a free market to function. So that means standardised plain box packaging, for example. Companies like Apple would have to display the features that matter, like battery life, rather than hide behind clever marketing.
I really like the idea. Fuck advertising.
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#625Some years ago, at the height of the Augmented Reality bubble, I had a hackathon idea about smart sunglasses that would replace any detected poster and billboard with information of your choosing - your favorite art, personal photos, notifications about upcoming alarms. I am no longer into hackathons, but I would pay good money for such a product. Bonus points if it is styled like Nada's glasses from They Live.
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Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#626Just from the headline alone: oh please dear god yes . The internet became usable after implementing the Pi-Hole. So much noise, so much wasted bandwidth, so many unnecessary lookups, gone with a Raspberry Pi and a few packages. While other commenters are getting into the technical weeds of things, the reality is that the OP is right. Ads don’t inform, they manipulate. They’re an abusive forced-marriage that we canno…
I've been using browser ad block for more than twenty years now. Back then it was to block flashing banners etc. I use Firefox everywhere so have it on my phone too. Due to this I haven't realised how bad it's become. I didn't even realise YouTube had ads until recently and how ridiculous they are.
I run DNS blocking at home which helps somewhat with shitty devices like Apple that don't give users any control. But my partner was looking at a local news site on her phone on the train the other day and I couldn't believe it. Literally an ad between every single paragraph plus one sticky ad at the bottom. It was like twice as much ad as content. Sickening.
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#627I can’t stop thinking about this article. I spent a long time in ad tech before switching to broader systems engineering. The author captures something I've struggled to articulate to friends and family about why I left the industry. The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings p…
That parallel between propaganda and advertising is why I have a pathological hatred of advertising, I block it in all forms possible, to the extent that if I can’t block it I won’t use the product. I simply hate been manipulated. So much so that I forget what the modern tech landscape is like for the average user til I use one of their devices. We’ve (collectively we for techies) helped create a dystopia.
I am the same exact way.
When I visit my parents it's eye opening how much advertising they're bombarded with daily.
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#628[dead]
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#629Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you can do relatively easily is to control the physical format of advertising. For example, consider how rare "billboards" are outside of the USA. Or towns in various places that prohibit signage that is not in the same plane as the edge of the building (i.e. no sticky-outy signs). Or for that matter, consider Berlin, which has banned all non-cultural advertising on public transportation. Yes, there's some edge…
That is requiring advertisers to set the HTTP evil bit. If advertising is fine, they're happy to make it obvious that something is an ad. If you ban that, suddenly it'll all be astroturf campaigns and product placement. I'd be surprised if banning billboards caused advertising budgets to drop.
> If you ban that, suddenly it'll all be astroturf campaigns and product placement.
Advertising already makes extensive use of astroturf campaigns and product placement.
Cable TV started out with no ads, as a major selling point over broadcast TV. Then they started advertising because they figured they could make more money that way. There's no reason to believe that advertisers will ever refrain from introducing ads when there's money to be made by doing so.
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#630On the South Bank in London, physical advertising (posters/billboards etc) is banned and it makes it a much nicer place to hang out