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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 absolut

by 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?

by bostik 7y ago

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?