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When will we realize that adwords and everything it inspired was a wrong turn for the internet? I’d much rather pay a monthly fee to get the services I want.

When will we realize that adwords and everything it inspired was a wrong turn for the internet? I’d much rather pay a monthly fee to get the services I want. I understand that Google and Facebook have gone too far down this path, and they will say such a service is not as profitable, but ultimately their business model seems unsustainable. People search for the truth, and while you can sell anybody anything, the truth will prevail.

t223 7y ago
I’m not willing to pay anything. The internet was built on good will, fun, and generally good intent. Now that it’s a mechanism of commerce it’s attracted the worst of the worst who have no ethics. Ethics courses will be taught in response to bad actors, not in anticipation of. I’m aware the cats out of the bag and all of the high paid engineers need to make a living somehow. I just don’t think it’s about the consumer anymore, if it ever was. It will get worse before it gets better and I’m checking out. I’m an older engineer and going to school for HVAC/R. I plan to do it on the side and eventually start a business. I’m pulling the rip cord. One thing I will say about the blue collar world: they’re better about ego management. Many young engineers I meet are highly paid and treated well, sometimes rarely disagreed with. I can’t help but think that fosters some bad habits.
- pieterk 7y ago
  I’m so sorry to hear you have such a dark outlook. I totally agree, those companies are not about the consumer anymore, but that’s fine. That’s their problem. I see computers and the internet as an extension of ourselves, and so they still allow us to communicate with whoever and whatever we want. I’m so glad this community exists and we can express that. The worst part should already be over, you just joined hn. I’m also all about good will, fun, and generally good intent. And if you do something cool but it’s costing you something, let me know how I can chip in.
  - Invictus0 7y ago
    This brand of techno-optimism is so tired. Who today still believes the old facebook line about connecting more people? It didn't work and it enabled automated surveillance on unprecedented scale.
    - rapnie 7y ago
      There are still many wonderful niches on the web, and by going there - while avoiding the bad stuff - we strengthen them so they don't disappear as well. As techies we have an opportunity here to bring them more to the front, by the technology choices we make and the projects we contribute to, the awareness we raise.
      - Invictus0 7y ago
        You're missing the factory for the dandelions growing in the parking lot. Weird niche personal pages and projects are just distractions from the massive power struggle that is being fought by corporations and governments for the minds and personal data of every human on earth.
        pieterk 7y ago
        There’s a massive power struggle indeed, but if you look who’s really behind those organizations, you’ll see people just like you and me, imperfect minds in funky bodies that came from the same place we all once did. World leaders and CEOs go to bed every night just like us, they speak, poop, and reproduce at the same rate as everyone else. Corporations and governments are nothing more than contracts to benefit those very same people, us. Even though there’s not an equal benefit to everyone involved. If those contracts fail, and our freedom and liberty is at risk like you say, we ought to renegotiate. It seems, if you listen carefully, that’s what the world is currently choosing to do.
    - randomsearch 7y ago
      I agree, but a reminder to not allow evil companies like Facebook to take away our optimism. Just because they didn’t make the world a better place does not mean a better world cannot be made. What it does mean is their funding and business model probably isn’t the right way to go if you’re still an optimist.
- monadic2 7y ago
  I would definitely pay, but not through a middleman like google. We need to return to a decentralized, peer to peer internet where media companies are not beholden to advertisers (a very old problem). Technology presents the first real chance to implement this. A non-trivial part of the media’s (eg newspapers, news sites, cable news) is due to advertising, including “cancel culture” itself (the name dates back to pressuring advertisers to pressure media to cancel tv production, although the word has gained life of its own).
  - jophde 7y ago
    I listen to a podcast called the No Agenda Show that has sustained itself for about 10 years on a value for value model. Listeners donate what they want and there are never any ads. I think the model is applicable elsewhere. Granted it won’t make someone rich but someone can make a living.
    - monadic2 7y ago
      I am not sure that a pay what you want model would work, but I want options dammit, and I would hazard a guess that content creators do too—just look at the wonderful, nearly complete lack of ads on patreon content.
- falcor84 7y ago
  >The internet was built on good will, fun, and generally good intent. The main catalyst for the internet was the fear of nuclear war, as exemplified in this influential RAND paper from 1960 [0], which led to the investment in ARPANET. I'm not disputing good will and good intent, but I don't think fun had much to do with it. [0] http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2008/P1995.pdf http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2008/P1995....
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    By the time you get to the opening up of the internet to mere non-defence mortals, there was plenty of fun. There was a beautiful sweet spot between the earliest ISPs around 1990, and the end of fun once the effects of the mid 90s ending of NSF's ban on commercial activity fully kicked in. Probably late 90s/millennium as the first dot com boom turned into full on idiotic bubble.
- tunap 7y ago
  I didn't go to HVAC school, but I have been moonlighting w/ a friend's HVAC business since 2002 for the exercise & appreciation of hard labor. That was well & good, and in time I was making decent, seasonal money working for someone else when not servicing IT needs of SB clients. Around 2008, as many of my clients were closing shop, I crossed paths with a "controls" guy and he showed me how to meld the technical & the labor to make as good money, if not better, as sitting behind a keyboard and playing whack-a-mole security full-time. Between pulling runs, provisioning controllers, solving failures and putting it all into comms I get all my mental, physical & financial needs met. I couldn't recommend it enough for anyone tired of the sedentary life at the keyboard. The only downside is I am still reliant on corporate managers & NOC engineers who have no clue how their products work in the field. YMMV. TLDR: Get the HVAC skills, then go into PLC work. Edited: 3rd sentence for context.
  - t223 7y ago
    Awesome advice, thanks. I’m happy to buy some stuff on eBay and play around. Any suggestions? How about programming software? Readily available? I recently picked up a Asco 300 w/comms module for my standby gen, DSE800 to control the engine, and a Siemens 9610 for consumption analysis. I’m working on controls for load shedding now. I put shunt trip breakers on my water heater and it’ll kick off when on standby since I don’t have enough power, as per NEC. I’m also working on a modulating valve controlled by the temp delta of my tankless water heater. Sometimes it can’t keep up and I’d rather slow down flow for a shower instead of letting it throw an error, resetting, and annoying people in the shower.
    - tunap 7y ago
      Most of the equipment & software I work with is owned/licensed by Honeywell and is proprietary, aka pricey. Older equipment can be found on reseller sites, but the developer software is expensive to license & hard to come by outside of the HON ecosystem. If you go down the rabbit hole, check out Tridium, aka Niagara AX. Most(all?) of the big controls platforms are built on the Niagara framework. Also, maybe contact contractors of Johnson Controls, Carrier Controls, Novar Controls, etc for more pertinent info.
dangrossman 7y ago
As long as you realize the web without ads is a much smaller and less commercial one. That may be fine with you. But a lot of things hundreds of millions of people use every day would have to go away. Subscriptions can't replace ads, as individuals don't have nearly as much discretionary money to spend as companies have in their advertising budgets. We've already given them that money when we bought our groceries, and gas, and paid our bills for rent, internet, TV, phones, insurance, etc. It's not our bank accounts any more to reallocate to Google Maps or our favorite websites instead.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  The web is far too large, and far too commercial -- adtech have forced commerce into fucking everything, and fucking ruined it. Without ads, a lot of things hundreds of millions of people use wouldn't go away, they'd reduce to a more sustainable number of companies and products. The remaining products and services would have to work harder to be better to compete and attract custom. Your new startup might have to offer a genuine improvement or innovation to get traction... As an example every single Amazon or web product or service search results in dozens to thousands of irrelevant, shoddy and worthless products and services that are far closer to an outright scam than something to use. That's without considering the vast array of true scams and fakes. A web without ads would have a chance of being useful once again, rather than every single click being an opportunity to part me from more money. Perhaps with suitable heavy regulation we could have the best of both worlds, more like newspaper advertising of old. Just "enough" non-invasive, non-tracking, non-JS ads to provide information on new services and products, but with enough demands of honesty, escrow good behaviour deposits, or whatever constraints you can conceive to keep all advertisers well behaved.
- matheusmoreira 7y ago
  > As long as you realize the web without ads is a much smaller and less commercial one. This is fine. People should make web pages because they have something to say, not because they want to make money. Since the advertisers can stop supporting a site, they effectively become the arbiters of right and wrong on the internet. Anything paid for by ads is inherently worse and less trustworthy than independent creations and platforms because they must necessarily be advertiser-friendly.
tempodox 7y ago
> their business model seems unsustainable I do agree, but if you're unscrupulous enough you can still get rich before such a business model eventually folds.
- catalogia 7y ago
  Unsustainable businesses can be profitable for generations. Particularly if the law doesn't force them to deal with the externalities. Coal mining seems like an appropriate example. It's doubly unsustainable; coal is finite and burning fossil fuels is fucking up the climate, but coal mining remains profitable.
bostik 7y ago
I believe you are conflating two things. AdWords and keyword-based contextual advertising was not problematic by itself. (And I say this as a person who absolutely hates ads.) The problem is all the associated crapware, bloat, intrusion, bandwidth hogging, end-user hostility to point of abuse, dark patterns, intentional misdirection, A/B-test-optimised serendipitous confusion, SEO game-theory shenanigans, and ABOVE ALL the industrial scale stalking. I've linked this piece a couple of times in the past three months: https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html Hell, I remember back in 2005 when I held a university course on basics of information security. The class laughed when I noted that observing everything a person does is called stalking when done by an individual, but as soon as its done by a large corporation indiscriminately and at scale, it's data-mining. In the eyes of the law, only one of them is criminal.
- zepto 7y ago
  I don’t think there is any conflation. AdWords is the incentive structure that creates all of the hazards you listed - it is the cause. In the same way we could say the cholera virus is not by itself a problem - it is the associated symptoms that are the problem.
  - bostik 7y ago
    Well, I don't think AdWords - in their original form - were a problem. But I definitely agree with you that it and its ilk are powering the perverse incentives, and what has resulted of them: the entire adtech ecosystem.[ß] I can still recall the bad vibes when Google announced their acquisition of DoubleClick. In the early days their search advertising had been non-intrusive, text-only, rendered server side, and visually out of the way. Banner ads were introduced only some time later. (That was already a step in the wrong direction, IMO.) DC, on the other hand, was known as an invasive bad actor who shoveled unwanted crapware to browsers and had already earned the reputation of an online stalker. In fact, ad blockers had existed long before Google got into serving them. Privoxy, anyone? All the hazards I listed are direct causes of adtech's surveillance business model, and the neverending quest to remember every possible piece of information available on the end-users. I'm not sure comparison with cholera is the most accurate one. (It's a bacteria, after all.) Malaria, a parasite, might be a better fit for this purpose. The symptoms are what makes either one dangerous, but instead of trying to eradicate just one type of a problem, we would do better to purge the environment from what makes the organisms' existence and breeding possible in the first place. ß: Honest question. What do you call an ecosystem comprised entirely of parasites?
nottorp 7y ago
I'd very much like that mythical universal micropayment platform to show up. Probably won't happen, or it will be too expensive because every site will think "We're only charging as much as a Starbucks coffee!" [Note: I don't drink Starbucks coffee, just have a faint idea that it's overpriced.] Although, shockingly enough, one of the sites I regularly visit (ars technica) saw the light and greatly reduced their subscription price like 2 years ago. And earned my subscription as a result. I'd pay for a couple more sites if they dropped the coffee fallacy.
OrgNet 7y ago
> I’d much rather pay a monthly fee to get the services I want. How is that possible if you never visit the same sites? That idea appears to favor the big players.
- pieterk 7y ago
  Great point! I think ISPs are fine services, they can host and serve websites like they’ve always done. I pay for my service, you pay for yours, we can connect, it balances out. If you decide to do something that adds value for the both of us, I can chip in to help you cover your costs. One thing very valuable to me is a search engine. You promise to index all sites you can find on the internet, but you need funds to buy disks and servers. I think you’d do a great job, and I’ll pay you a monthly fee to keep giving me access to your wealth of information. It so works out that the more people you can serve, the more income you’ll have to become a bigger player. Nothing wrong with that, just as there used to be nothing wrong with Google’s search. It’s when they asked not the searchers but the advertisers to pay them that things went awry.
  - pieterk 7y ago
    Another great service would be one to advertise my products on or disseminate ideas with. To like minded, or just interested people. I’d pay you a monthly service and will keep up my inventory. Customers would build up a profile of things they are interested in being subjected to. You could help them get to know themselves better, or find what they like by asking for information that they’re comfortable divulging. Just please don’t combine those two products in one, for the love of god!
latexr 7y ago
> People search for the truth People search for whatever confirms their worldview.[1] > while you can sell anybody anything, the truth will prevail. Those ideas are at odds. If you “can sell anybody anything”, you can also sell them a lie. That keeps happening, so I see no basis for the argument that “the truth will prevail”. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

t223 7y ago

I’m not willing to pay anything. The internet was built on good will, fun, and generally good intent. Now that it’s a mechanism of commerce it’s attracted the worst of the worst who have no ethics. Ethics courses will be taught in response to bad actors, not in anticipation of. I’m aware the cats out of the bag and all of the high paid engineers need to make a living somehow. I just don’t think it’s about the consumer anymore, if it ever was. It will get worse before it gets better and I’m checking out. I’m an older engineer and going to school for HVAC/R. I plan to do it on the side and eventually start a business. I’m pulling the rip cord. One thing I will say about the blue collar world: they’re better about ego management. Many young engineers I meet are highly paid and treated well, sometimes rarely disagreed with. I can’t help but think that fosters some bad habits.

pieterk 7y ago
I’m so sorry to hear you have such a dark outlook. I totally agree, those companies are not about the consumer anymore, but that’s fine. That’s their problem. I see computers and the internet as an extension of ourselves, and so they still allow us to communicate with whoever and whatever we want. I’m so glad this community exists and we can express that. The worst part should already be over, you just joined hn. I’m also all about good will, fun, and generally good intent. And if you do something cool but it’s costing you something, let me know how I can chip in.
- Invictus0 7y ago
  This brand of techno-optimism is so tired. Who today still believes the old facebook line about connecting more people? It didn't work and it enabled automated surveillance on unprecedented scale.
  - rapnie 7y ago
    There are still many wonderful niches on the web, and by going there - while avoiding the bad stuff - we strengthen them so they don't disappear as well. As techies we have an opportunity here to bring them more to the front, by the technology choices we make and the projects we contribute to, the awareness we raise.
    - Invictus0 7y ago
      You're missing the factory for the dandelions growing in the parking lot. Weird niche personal pages and projects are just distractions from the massive power struggle that is being fought by corporations and governments for the minds and personal data of every human on earth.
      - pieterk 7y ago
        There’s a massive power struggle indeed, but if you look who’s really behind those organizations, you’ll see people just like you and me, imperfect minds in funky bodies that came from the same place we all once did. World leaders and CEOs go to bed every night just like us, they speak, poop, and reproduce at the same rate as everyone else. Corporations and governments are nothing more than contracts to benefit those very same people, us. Even though there’s not an equal benefit to everyone involved. If those contracts fail, and our freedom and liberty is at risk like you say, we ought to renegotiate. It seems, if you listen carefully, that’s what the world is currently choosing to do.
  - randomsearch 7y ago
    I agree, but a reminder to not allow evil companies like Facebook to take away our optimism. Just because they didn’t make the world a better place does not mean a better world cannot be made. What it does mean is their funding and business model probably isn’t the right way to go if you’re still an optimist.
monadic2 7y ago
I would definitely pay, but not through a middleman like google. We need to return to a decentralized, peer to peer internet where media companies are not beholden to advertisers (a very old problem). Technology presents the first real chance to implement this. A non-trivial part of the media’s (eg newspapers, news sites, cable news) is due to advertising, including “cancel culture” itself (the name dates back to pressuring advertisers to pressure media to cancel tv production, although the word has gained life of its own).
- jophde 7y ago
  I listen to a podcast called the No Agenda Show that has sustained itself for about 10 years on a value for value model. Listeners donate what they want and there are never any ads. I think the model is applicable elsewhere. Granted it won’t make someone rich but someone can make a living.
  - monadic2 7y ago
    I am not sure that a pay what you want model would work, but I want options dammit, and I would hazard a guess that content creators do too—just look at the wonderful, nearly complete lack of ads on patreon content.
falcor84 7y ago
>The internet was built on good will, fun, and generally good intent. The main catalyst for the internet was the fear of nuclear war, as exemplified in this influential RAND paper from 1960 [0], which led to the investment in ARPANET. I'm not disputing good will and good intent, but I don't think fun had much to do with it. [0] http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2008/P1995.pdf http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2008/P1995....
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  By the time you get to the opening up of the internet to mere non-defence mortals, there was plenty of fun. There was a beautiful sweet spot between the earliest ISPs around 1990, and the end of fun once the effects of the mid 90s ending of NSF's ban on commercial activity fully kicked in. Probably late 90s/millennium as the first dot com boom turned into full on idiotic bubble.
tunap 7y ago
I didn't go to HVAC school, but I have been moonlighting w/ a friend's HVAC business since 2002 for the exercise & appreciation of hard labor. That was well & good, and in time I was making decent, seasonal money working for someone else when not servicing IT needs of SB clients. Around 2008, as many of my clients were closing shop, I crossed paths with a "controls" guy and he showed me how to meld the technical & the labor to make as good money, if not better, as sitting behind a keyboard and playing whack-a-mole security full-time. Between pulling runs, provisioning controllers, solving failures and putting it all into comms I get all my mental, physical & financial needs met. I couldn't recommend it enough for anyone tired of the sedentary life at the keyboard. The only downside is I am still reliant on corporate managers & NOC engineers who have no clue how their products work in the field. YMMV. TLDR: Get the HVAC skills, then go into PLC work. Edited: 3rd sentence for context.
- t223 7y ago
  Awesome advice, thanks. I’m happy to buy some stuff on eBay and play around. Any suggestions? How about programming software? Readily available? I recently picked up a Asco 300 w/comms module for my standby gen, DSE800 to control the engine, and a Siemens 9610 for consumption analysis. I’m working on controls for load shedding now. I put shunt trip breakers on my water heater and it’ll kick off when on standby since I don’t have enough power, as per NEC. I’m also working on a modulating valve controlled by the temp delta of my tankless water heater. Sometimes it can’t keep up and I’d rather slow down flow for a shower instead of letting it throw an error, resetting, and annoying people in the shower.
  - tunap 7y ago
    Most of the equipment & software I work with is owned/licensed by Honeywell and is proprietary, aka pricey. Older equipment can be found on reseller sites, but the developer software is expensive to license & hard to come by outside of the HON ecosystem. If you go down the rabbit hole, check out Tridium, aka Niagara AX. Most(all?) of the big controls platforms are built on the Niagara framework. Also, maybe contact contractors of Johnson Controls, Carrier Controls, Novar Controls, etc for more pertinent info.

dangrossman 7y ago

As long as you realize the web without ads is a much smaller and less commercial one. That may be fine with you. But a lot of things hundreds of millions of people use every day would have to go away. Subscriptions can't replace ads, as individuals don't have nearly as much discretionary money to spend as companies have in their advertising budgets. We've already given them that money when we bought our groceries, and gas, and paid our bills for rent, internet, TV, phones, insurance, etc. It's not our bank accounts any more to reallocate to Google Maps or our favorite websites instead.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
The web is far too large, and far too commercial -- adtech have forced commerce into fucking everything, and fucking ruined it. Without ads, a lot of things hundreds of millions of people use wouldn't go away, they'd reduce to a more sustainable number of companies and products. The remaining products and services would have to work harder to be better to compete and attract custom. Your new startup might have to offer a genuine improvement or innovation to get traction... As an example every single Amazon or web product or service search results in dozens to thousands of irrelevant, shoddy and worthless products and services that are far closer to an outright scam than something to use. That's without considering the vast array of true scams and fakes. A web without ads would have a chance of being useful once again, rather than every single click being an opportunity to part me from more money. Perhaps with suitable heavy regulation we could have the best of both worlds, more like newspaper advertising of old. Just "enough" non-invasive, non-tracking, non-JS ads to provide information on new services and products, but with enough demands of honesty, escrow good behaviour deposits, or whatever constraints you can conceive to keep all advertisers well behaved.
matheusmoreira 7y ago
> As long as you realize the web without ads is a much smaller and less commercial one. This is fine. People should make web pages because they have something to say, not because they want to make money. Since the advertisers can stop supporting a site, they effectively become the arbiters of right and wrong on the internet. Anything paid for by ads is inherently worse and less trustworthy than independent creations and platforms because they must necessarily be advertiser-friendly.

tempodox 7y ago

> their business model seems unsustainable I do agree, but if you're unscrupulous enough you can still get rich before such a business model eventually folds.

catalogia 7y ago
Unsustainable businesses can be profitable for generations. Particularly if the law doesn't force them to deal with the externalities. Coal mining seems like an appropriate example. It's doubly unsustainable; coal is finite and burning fossil fuels is fucking up the climate, but coal mining remains profitable.

bostik 7y ago

I believe you are conflating two things. AdWords and keyword-based contextual advertising was not problematic by itself. (And I say this as a person who absolutely hates ads.) The problem is all the associated crapware, bloat, intrusion, bandwidth hogging, end-user hostility to point of abuse, dark patterns, intentional misdirection, A/B-test-optimised serendipitous confusion, SEO game-theory shenanigans, and ABOVE ALL the industrial scale stalking. I've linked this piece a couple of times in the past three months: https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html Hell, I remember back in 2005 when I held a university course on basics of information security. The class laughed when I noted that observing everything a person does is called stalking when done by an individual, but as soon as its done by a large corporation indiscriminately and at scale, it's data-mining. In the eyes of the law, only one of them is criminal.

zepto 7y ago
I don’t think there is any conflation. AdWords is the incentive structure that creates all of the hazards you listed - it is the cause. In the same way we could say the cholera virus is not by itself a problem - it is the associated symptoms that are the problem.
- bostik 7y ago
  Well, I don't think AdWords - in their original form - were a problem. But I definitely agree with you that it and its ilk are powering the perverse incentives, and what has resulted of them: the entire adtech ecosystem.[ß] I can still recall the bad vibes when Google announced their acquisition of DoubleClick. In the early days their search advertising had been non-intrusive, text-only, rendered server side, and visually out of the way. Banner ads were introduced only some time later. (That was already a step in the wrong direction, IMO.) DC, on the other hand, was known as an invasive bad actor who shoveled unwanted crapware to browsers and had already earned the reputation of an online stalker. In fact, ad blockers had existed long before Google got into serving them. Privoxy, anyone? All the hazards I listed are direct causes of adtech's surveillance business model, and the neverending quest to remember every possible piece of information available on the end-users. I'm not sure comparison with cholera is the most accurate one. (It's a bacteria, after all.) Malaria, a parasite, might be a better fit for this purpose. The symptoms are what makes either one dangerous, but instead of trying to eradicate just one type of a problem, we would do better to purge the environment from what makes the organisms' existence and breeding possible in the first place. ß: Honest question. What do you call an ecosystem comprised entirely of parasites?

nottorp 7y ago

I'd very much like that mythical universal micropayment platform to show up. Probably won't happen, or it will be too expensive because every site will think "We're only charging as much as a Starbucks coffee!" [Note: I don't drink Starbucks coffee, just have a faint idea that it's overpriced.] Although, shockingly enough, one of the sites I regularly visit (ars technica) saw the light and greatly reduced their subscription price like 2 years ago. And earned my subscription as a result. I'd pay for a couple more sites if they dropped the coffee fallacy.

OrgNet 7y ago

> I’d much rather pay a monthly fee to get the services I want. How is that possible if you never visit the same sites? That idea appears to favor the big players.

pieterk 7y ago
Great point! I think ISPs are fine services, they can host and serve websites like they’ve always done. I pay for my service, you pay for yours, we can connect, it balances out. If you decide to do something that adds value for the both of us, I can chip in to help you cover your costs. One thing very valuable to me is a search engine. You promise to index all sites you can find on the internet, but you need funds to buy disks and servers. I think you’d do a great job, and I’ll pay you a monthly fee to keep giving me access to your wealth of information. It so works out that the more people you can serve, the more income you’ll have to become a bigger player. Nothing wrong with that, just as there used to be nothing wrong with Google’s search. It’s when they asked not the searchers but the advertisers to pay them that things went awry.
- pieterk 7y ago
  Another great service would be one to advertise my products on or disseminate ideas with. To like minded, or just interested people. I’d pay you a monthly service and will keep up my inventory. Customers would build up a profile of things they are interested in being subjected to. You could help them get to know themselves better, or find what they like by asking for information that they’re comfortable divulging. Just please don’t combine those two products in one, for the love of god!

latexr 7y ago

> People search for the truth People search for whatever confirms their worldview.[1] > while you can sell anybody anything, the truth will prevail. Those ideas are at odds. If you “can sell anybody anything”, you can also sell them a lie. That keeps happening, so I see no basis for the argument that “the truth will prevail”. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias