4 ms·

Advertising is a virus that eventually infects all ecosystems.

by drawkward 2y ago

antiframe 2y ago
And that is why I use exclusively open source software that respects the user.
- m463 2y ago
  that sounds suspiciously like an ad. :)
- pixelpoet 2y ago
  Governments and big tech/media try to brand anyone knowledgeable about privacy measures as pedophiles, and it's incredibly effective because they control the laws and narrative. Doesn't help that a huge fraction of people conflate having something to hide with not wanting everything be public, and in the vast majority of cases are blissfully and willfully ignorant so long as they get their Instagram or TikTok. At a societal level we fully deserve all this because apparently we can't be fucked to care about basic rights anymore (cf. "everyone gets the government they deserve"), too lost in Huxley's dystopian future of infinite dopamine distractions.
- photonthug 2y ago
  > And that is why I use exclusively open source software that respects the user. We're all proud of you but this is barely related to avoiding ads. You can build your own car too, and you'd still have to look at the billboards on the highway. Or you could build your own phone and never giving anyone the number, then you'll still get to enjoy 5 spams/day during election season when someone decides to simply call every phone number in the region. Ads are the new certainty besides death and taxes. If they aren't in your face yet, be assured that whole legions of shitheads are very busy trying to make it happen.
  - EGreg 2y ago
    The city of Sao Paolo would like a word: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/travel/destinations/sao-paulo-the-city-with-no-outdoor-advertisements/amp_articleshow/36441208.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/travel/destinations/sao-...
- realusername 2y ago
  Even if you would never see an ad in your life somehow, you would still have to pay for it on the products you buy. The advertising industry is so large that it's basically private taxation, except that you get nothing in return from it.
  - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
    The best concert I ever saw was one I only knew was in town because of an ad. My interests align with advertisers to an extent. I do want to know what products are out there. I'm an adult, I won't forget that their descriptions of their products are biased. Surveillance advertising is a bad thing, but it doesn't help to take the most extremist position possible. Advertising is information, and it's not difficult to use that information to your benefit.
    - n_plus_1_acc 2y ago
      Billboard ads don't yell as you at least. They are like two orders of magnitute less annoying than video ads
    - drawkward 2y ago
      I follow the bands I care about seeing. There are other, less intrusive modalities for communication than advertising.
    - realusername 2y ago
      That kind of old-school vision of advertising is a vision from the 80s, it's been a long time that advertising isn't about information anymore. The big spenders are in the game for brand awareness (there's not even a product being shown sometimes) and then there's a parallel world of which I would call scams which went on top of it (less than half of the Youtube ads I see look legal) If you remove those two, I'm not sure how long the advertising industry would survive.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  I use open-source software too, but it (by itself) doesn't stop me from seeing annoying and intrusive ads on internet websites. An ad-blocker like uBO does, mostly (but not completely), though it's much less effective with paywalled sites. The problem with online ads is mostly orthogonal to FOSS. Of course, it does help to not use an OS with ads baked into the Start menu...
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  Those are getting compromised too—not a complete solution.
strogonoff 2y ago
Advertising is the engine of free market. Advertising in Web and apps is used for evil purposes, just like cash (or almost anything else) is also used for evil purposes. Regulation exists to try to minimize those, but it’s always a workaround for human malice.
- drawkward 2y ago
  Maybe it was in days when only broadcast media existed. Now, we have the ability to search for answers to our needs. Our information paradigm has changed; so should advertising. Let consumers seek out new products, if they wish to.
  - strogonoff 2y ago
    It hasn’t changed. To know to search for X you must first know X exists. (If you search for “the best ways to Y” and find an article that tells you about X, congratulations—chances are, you are reading an advertisement.)
    - drawkward 2y ago
      That's a weak argument. Stores are not advertisements.
      - strogonoff 2y ago
        Advertisement is the engine of free market. The technological progress made possible with free market and advertisement as its integral part is evidence supporting my argument—yes, the very device you are reading this on is the evidence. You have not provided a viable argument so far. I can’t say you failed to provide supporting evidence, because you have not even made a claim. Inventing a meaningless term like “information paradigm” and implying it has somehow changed is not one. You either lack a point to make, or are struggling to express one.
        drawkward 2y ago
aucisson_masque 2y ago
As a previous self employed man, advertising is good. It helps small companies compete against the big ones that are well known. However no one need this amount of data, all advertiser need is : you search for a pair of shoes on Google, show you ads for shoes. That's good advertising and sometimes it can be useful for the user.
- Intralexical 2y ago
  Stalking is bad. Lying and manipulating is bad. If you look at old ads for random products from e.g. the turn of the (last) century, they seem to often give this slight "wall of text" impression. Image of the product, surrounded by prices and descriptions of what it was and what it (purportedly) did. The motivating belief seemed to be that if a company communicated the benefits of buying from them, they would attract customers. It seems like at some point the focus shifted away from expressing factual information, and to creating vague associations and implications. I think that's still fine on its own, and in fact quite fun and the source of a lot of creativity, but it also created the opportunity to mislead in new ways. E.G. most famously harmfully maybe, the very mid-20th century idea that cigarettes are "cool". In modern times this seems to have gone even further towards exploiting basic quirks in human psychology— A dancing bear, chocolate man, or screaming celebrity has nothing to do with selling a product, but it's bizarre and surprising and therefore memorable, so by making an ad around it you're cluttering the viewer's brain with useless information designed to redirect mindshare to your capital-B "Brand". So at that point it becomes dishonest and manipulative. But at least it's still broadcasted, e.g. on radio, TV, in newspapers and magazines. It's predatory, but everyone gets the same thing. You can still sorta avoid or ignore it. It doesn't single anyone out. That's changed now with the Internet. The mass collection of location and personality data, identifiable to individual profiles and paired with tools allowing those individuals to be targetted with a combination of terrifying granularity and omnipresent scale— That adds an entire new dimension to "advertising", and it would still be wrong, because it would still comprise many violations of privacy and basic decency, even if it weren't being actively exploited for commercial gain. If any one individual knew as much about you and had as many tools for trying to influence you as Facebook and Google have built on an industrial scale, they would be either a stalker deserving of a restraining order, or some kind of a (probably malevolent TBH) supernatural spirit. So "advertising", in terms of "informing the market of a product" and "connecting customers to businesses in mutually beneficial transactions", is fine I guess. Good, even. Stalking, lying, manipulating, and rent-seeking through dominance are wrong. And with technology centralizing power in the hands of a few organizations, the modern practice of "advertising" seems to be less about "informing people" these days and more about dominating the information space in order to manipulate human behaviour with neither the consent nor the knowledge of your targets. No wonder it's apparently being abused by law enforcement. ...To be clear, I use the word "you" only as an indefinite pronoun here. Small businesses that use ad networks aren't the ones to blame for a large system having messy incentives and malicious central actors.

Advertising is a virus that eventually infects all ecosystems.

antiframe 2y ago

And that is why I use exclusively open source software that respects the user.

m463 2y ago
that sounds suspiciously like an ad. :)
pixelpoet 2y ago
Governments and big tech/media try to brand anyone knowledgeable about privacy measures as pedophiles, and it's incredibly effective because they control the laws and narrative. Doesn't help that a huge fraction of people conflate having something to hide with not wanting everything be public, and in the vast majority of cases are blissfully and willfully ignorant so long as they get their Instagram or TikTok. At a societal level we fully deserve all this because apparently we can't be fucked to care about basic rights anymore (cf. "everyone gets the government they deserve"), too lost in Huxley's dystopian future of infinite dopamine distractions.
photonthug 2y ago
> And that is why I use exclusively open source software that respects the user. We're all proud of you but this is barely related to avoiding ads. You can build your own car too, and you'd still have to look at the billboards on the highway. Or you could build your own phone and never giving anyone the number, then you'll still get to enjoy 5 spams/day during election season when someone decides to simply call every phone number in the region. Ads are the new certainty besides death and taxes. If they aren't in your face yet, be assured that whole legions of shitheads are very busy trying to make it happen.
- EGreg 2y ago
  The city of Sao Paolo would like a word: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/travel/destinations/sao-paulo-the-city-with-no-outdoor-advertisements/amp_articleshow/36441208.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/travel/destinations/sao-...
realusername 2y ago
Even if you would never see an ad in your life somehow, you would still have to pay for it on the products you buy. The advertising industry is so large that it's basically private taxation, except that you get nothing in return from it.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  The best concert I ever saw was one I only knew was in town because of an ad. My interests align with advertisers to an extent. I do want to know what products are out there. I'm an adult, I won't forget that their descriptions of their products are biased. Surveillance advertising is a bad thing, but it doesn't help to take the most extremist position possible. Advertising is information, and it's not difficult to use that information to your benefit.
  - n_plus_1_acc 2y ago
    Billboard ads don't yell as you at least. They are like two orders of magnitute less annoying than video ads
  - drawkward 2y ago
    I follow the bands I care about seeing. There are other, less intrusive modalities for communication than advertising.
  - realusername 2y ago
    That kind of old-school vision of advertising is a vision from the 80s, it's been a long time that advertising isn't about information anymore. The big spenders are in the game for brand awareness (there's not even a product being shown sometimes) and then there's a parallel world of which I would call scams which went on top of it (less than half of the Youtube ads I see look legal) If you remove those two, I'm not sure how long the advertising industry would survive.
shiroiushi 2y ago
I use open-source software too, but it (by itself) doesn't stop me from seeing annoying and intrusive ads on internet websites. An ad-blocker like uBO does, mostly (but not completely), though it's much less effective with paywalled sites. The problem with online ads is mostly orthogonal to FOSS. Of course, it does help to not use an OS with ads baked into the Start menu...
mixmastamyk 2y ago
Those are getting compromised too—not a complete solution.

strogonoff 2y ago

Advertising is the engine of free market. Advertising in Web and apps is used for evil purposes, just like cash (or almost anything else) is also used for evil purposes. Regulation exists to try to minimize those, but it’s always a workaround for human malice.

drawkward 2y ago
Maybe it was in days when only broadcast media existed. Now, we have the ability to search for answers to our needs. Our information paradigm has changed; so should advertising. Let consumers seek out new products, if they wish to.
- strogonoff 2y ago
  It hasn’t changed. To know to search for X you must first know X exists. (If you search for “the best ways to Y” and find an article that tells you about X, congratulations—chances are, you are reading an advertisement.)
  - drawkward 2y ago
    That's a weak argument. Stores are not advertisements.
    - strogonoff 2y ago
      Advertisement is the engine of free market. The technological progress made possible with free market and advertisement as its integral part is evidence supporting my argument—yes, the very device you are reading this on is the evidence. You have not provided a viable argument so far. I can’t say you failed to provide supporting evidence, because you have not even made a claim. Inventing a meaningless term like “information paradigm” and implying it has somehow changed is not one. You either lack a point to make, or are struggling to express one.
      - drawkward 2y ago

aucisson_masque 2y ago

As a previous self employed man, advertising is good. It helps small companies compete against the big ones that are well known. However no one need this amount of data, all advertiser need is : you search for a pair of shoes on Google, show you ads for shoes. That's good advertising and sometimes it can be useful for the user.

Intralexical 2y ago
Stalking is bad. Lying and manipulating is bad. If you look at old ads for random products from e.g. the turn of the (last) century, they seem to often give this slight "wall of text" impression. Image of the product, surrounded by prices and descriptions of what it was and what it (purportedly) did. The motivating belief seemed to be that if a company communicated the benefits of buying from them, they would attract customers. It seems like at some point the focus shifted away from expressing factual information, and to creating vague associations and implications. I think that's still fine on its own, and in fact quite fun and the source of a lot of creativity, but it also created the opportunity to mislead in new ways. E.G. most famously harmfully maybe, the very mid-20th century idea that cigarettes are "cool". In modern times this seems to have gone even further towards exploiting basic quirks in human psychology— A dancing bear, chocolate man, or screaming celebrity has nothing to do with selling a product, but it's bizarre and surprising and therefore memorable, so by making an ad around it you're cluttering the viewer's brain with useless information designed to redirect mindshare to your capital-B "Brand". So at that point it becomes dishonest and manipulative. But at least it's still broadcasted, e.g. on radio, TV, in newspapers and magazines. It's predatory, but everyone gets the same thing. You can still sorta avoid or ignore it. It doesn't single anyone out. That's changed now with the Internet. The mass collection of location and personality data, identifiable to individual profiles and paired with tools allowing those individuals to be targetted with a combination of terrifying granularity and omnipresent scale— That adds an entire new dimension to "advertising", and it would still be wrong, because it would still comprise many violations of privacy and basic decency, even if it weren't being actively exploited for commercial gain. If any one individual knew as much about you and had as many tools for trying to influence you as Facebook and Google have built on an industrial scale, they would be either a stalker deserving of a restraining order, or some kind of a (probably malevolent TBH) supernatural spirit. So "advertising", in terms of "informing the market of a product" and "connecting customers to businesses in mutually beneficial transactions", is fine I guess. Good, even. Stalking, lying, manipulating, and rent-seeking through dominance are wrong. And with technology centralizing power in the hands of a few organizations, the modern practice of "advertising" seems to be less about "informing people" these days and more about dominating the information space in order to manipulate human behaviour with neither the consent nor the knowledge of your targets. No wonder it's apparently being abused by law enforcement. ...To be clear, I use the word "you" only as an indefinite pronoun here. Small businesses that use ad networks aren't the ones to blame for a large system having messy incentives and malicious central actors.