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Ads are evil. They represent the efforts of a multi billion dollar industry using the output of millions of dollars of psychological research to manipulate you
by falcolas 3y ago
Ads are evil. They represent the efforts of a multi billion dollar industry using the output of millions of dollars of psychological research to manipulate you into buying things you don’t need. The average person has no chance against this psychological manipulation.
Burn it to the ground, and let something sane take its place. Micro payments and its kin don’t work today because ads are easier. Create a space and a need for them, and watch them flourish.
- insanitybit 3y agoI'm fine with looking for alternatives to advertising, but so far nothing has been successful. People are choosing ads.
- 93po 3y agoIt’s almost like there’s hundreds of billions of dollars at play to make people incentivized to push ad ecosystems as much as possible
- insanitybit 3y agoI think mobile ads are an obvious example of users choosing ads. Mobile apps can almost never actually charge money - people will not pay a dollar to download an app. But they'll happily accept advertisements in their app.
- 93po 3y agoi avoid the app store like the plague because it's awful, but it's basically impossible to find options that aren't ad supported. and the lack of purchasing incentive has a lot of other factors into it as well aside from "i want ads". there's also massive user distrust in paying for apps because they're so often garbage in general i search for apps these days by googling for FOSS and filtering results to reddit.
- bad_user 3y agoAds are communication. Are you saying that communication is evil? I regularly see young and naive folks online saying things like "supporting your favorite creators by buying their product isn't capitalism", or "self-promotion isn't advertising". All that cognitive dissonance must really hurt.
- falcolas 3y agoAds are a subset of all communication. So no, communication as a whole isn’t evil, ads are. No cognitive dissonance required. Nice fallacy though.
- bad_user 3y agoOK, advertising is communication "promoting a person, product, service, event or a job opening". Is that kind of communication evil?
- r00fus 3y agoThis isn't about ads which I doubt we'll ever get rid of. This is about privacy invading targeted ads (which Google enables as the 800lb gorilla ad network). Those are evil and unnecessary (and honestly unclear in terms of efficacy these days). The promise is that Google is some "unimpeachable authority" that preserves your privacy instead of selling you out, when in fact, they are not and they do just that. That the modern web economy is based on this unethical behavior doesn't make it just or even an ideal economy.