Comment by shkkmo
10 days ago
> 3% decline in satisfaction was indeed a lot
That is 3% if you double ad spend. You've failed to demonstrate that the internet increased ad spend at all, let alone came anywhere near doubling it.
> Or now if you learn that economies, especially European, grow dramatically slower
I just was telling you what your own source claimed, not endorsing those claims...
> behaving like somebody on the defensive desperately trying to argue against something but having no foundation beyond the dislike of a seemingly inescapable conclusion.
Perhaps you should re-read the comment you just left...
So what is your argument supposed to be? That people don't see anymore ads than they used to, or that the internet is having no impact on the number of ads people are seeing? See the problem with how you're arguing? Obviously you don't believe these things, but it seems that's what you've apparently found yourself trying to argue.
Since you have forgotten what we are discussing, you made this claim:
> The internet can provide an immense amount of good for society, but if we net it on overall impact, I suspect that the internet has overall had a severely negative impact on society.
I am disputing the claim the net effect of the Internet on society has been severely negative.
> That people don't see anymore ads than they used to,
This seems hard to measure and the results would depend on how you define "seeing more ads". The result is irrelevant to your argument though because the one study you cited looks at ad spend, not "the number of ads people are seeing" so you can't generalize.
You've staked out a very strong claim here but have done a very poor job of backing it up.
It also just occurred to me in our discussion that you may have missed the fundamental point. The study used ad spend as a proxy for ads viewed. This is because measuring exactly how many ads people see, let alone over time, is impossible to measure, but it's undoubtedly increasing with a sharp exponential, largely thanks to the internet.
Ad spend works as a passable proxy for it, and is likely understating the impact in modern times since advertising has become cheaper than ever, again thanks to the internet. So ad spend is going up at the same time that the number of ads per spend is increasing, at a rate substantially faster than during their study period.
> The study used ad spend as a proxy for ads viewed
Yes, clearly that was the intent. That doesn't mean you can generalize from your proxy to the thing you have a hard time measuring.
> So ad spend is going up at the same time that the number of ads per spend is increasing, at a rate substantially faster than during their study period.
It seems like you are just making up facts.
The fact is that global spending on advertising is a fairly steady percentage of the GPD. It does occilate a little up and down, but the "exponential" growth you are talking about is merely the exponential growth of GDP.
Thus your argument that internet has increased ad spend and thus decreased happiness is false.
Addionaly, while this is also hard to quantify, the trends for cost per ad view does seem to be moving in the opposite direction. The cost of an impression seems to be moving upwards, not downwards.
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