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.
As i just responded to a sibling commenter: the way weaccess information is now more pull-based (serving requested media) than push-based (broadcast). Advertising should change to fit this paradigm.
Let consumers who are searching for product information be given advertising. Contain the virus to ecosystems that want it.
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.
> 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.
yes, take driving for instance. Some people drive responsibly, watch for bicycle and walkers, others drive like maniacs yet it's the same thing, driving a car.
It's not so much what you do with advertisement than how you do it, but advertisement in itself isn't bad.
Now if you take the worst example possible, Facebook, Google, Microsoft etc. all these companies behaving like rats trying to extract as much data as possible from you, it's going to look bad. But for instance, when we still had phonebook you would look for a plumber and some plumber who paid for advertisement would get a bigger space, in exchange the phonebook company would make money and everyone would receive phonebook for free.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
As i just responded to a sibling commenter: the way weaccess information is now more pull-based (serving requested media) than push-based (broadcast). Advertising should change to fit this paradigm.
Let consumers who are searching for product information be given advertising. Contain the virus to ecosystems that want it.
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.
> 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.
yes, take driving for instance. Some people drive responsibly, watch for bicycle and walkers, others drive like maniacs yet it's the same thing, driving a car.
It's not so much what you do with advertisement than how you do it, but advertisement in itself isn't bad.
Now if you take the worst example possible, Facebook, Google, Microsoft etc. all these companies behaving like rats trying to extract as much data as possible from you, it's going to look bad. But for instance, when we still had phonebook you would look for a plumber and some plumber who paid for advertisement would get a bigger space, in exchange the phonebook company would make money and everyone would receive phonebook for free.
That is an exemple of usefull advertisement.
And that is why I use exclusively open source software that respects the user.
> 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.
The city of Sao Paolo would like a word: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/travel/destinations/sao-...
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.
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.
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.
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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...
Those are getting compromised too—not a complete solution.
that sounds suspiciously like an ad. :)
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.
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.
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.)
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