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Yes, it is accepted. What is so wrong about advertising? Why is it bad that someone making a product wants to market it? There is absolutely nothing wrong with

Yes, it is accepted. What is so wrong about advertising? Why is it bad that someone making a product wants to market it? There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. The problem is how the ad-tech industry deals with advertising. There is no regard for privacy and no control for the consumers. It's become a shady practice because of lack of privacy, transparency and lack of regard for the end user. Mozilla is clearly saying these things are important to them and will be central to their mission so what's the problem here? It's not like they'll inject ads from Google or Facebook. Instead of dissing at their attempts to make themselves self-sustainable, we should be supporting them by giving them a chance. May be they'll do ads right, may be they'll fail but one thing I'm sure of is that if they fail to make it work without compromising the user, they'll just give it up. Mozilla is our biggest if not the only hope of an open and healthy web. I don't mind supporting them by seeing a couple of ads every now and then as long as I'm in control and they respect my privacy.

msla 9y ago
> What is so wrong about advertising? It inherently shades into malware. First, all advertising platforms are malware distribution platforms, because the people who run ad platforms have every incentive to push through all the ads submitted to them and negative incentive to stop the ones which are malware. Nobody in the ad industry wants people to talk about this, but as long as the malware authors are using them to distribute malware, they can't pretend it never happens and they shouldn't be allowed to ignore people who say it does. Second, advertising requires data to be effective, which leads to tracking, which is, itself, a form of malware.
dingaling 9y ago
Advertising is psychological warfare. It aims to change and shape the future behaviour of its targets by feeding them specifically-designed messages.
Spivak 9y ago
I have no idea what sources you consider trustworthy so I won't blindly link them, but search "your brain on ads" and you'll get lots of results talking about how ad exposure affects people. But you don't necessarily need the brain scans to see that advertising preys on human psychology and emotional weakness, because of how effective those kinds of ads are. If advertising was just "Here's my product. Here's what it can do. Here's why you might want it." I don't think we would have gotten to where we are now -- where advertising is basically just a mix of exposure therapy and negging.

msla 9y ago

> What is so wrong about advertising? It inherently shades into malware. First, all advertising platforms are malware distribution platforms, because the people who run ad platforms have every incentive to push through all the ads submitted to them and negative incentive to stop the ones which are malware. Nobody in the ad industry wants people to talk about this, but as long as the malware authors are using them to distribute malware, they can't pretend it never happens and they shouldn't be allowed to ignore people who say it does. Second, advertising requires data to be effective, which leads to tracking, which is, itself, a form of malware.

dingaling 9y ago

Advertising is psychological warfare. It aims to change and shape the future behaviour of its targets by feeding them specifically-designed messages.

Spivak 9y ago

I have no idea what sources you consider trustworthy so I won't blindly link them, but search "your brain on ads" and you'll get lots of results talking about how ad exposure affects people. But you don't necessarily need the brain scans to see that advertising preys on human psychology and emotional weakness, because of how effective those kinds of ads are. If advertising was just "Here's my product. Here's what it can do. Here's why you might want it." I don't think we would have gotten to where we are now -- where advertising is basically just a mix of exposure therapy and negging.