Comment by kibwen
4 days ago
Furiously seconded. Ads are just a tax that we pay both with our attention and then with our wallets. Every dollar that a company forks over to Google is a dollar they recoup by passing the costs on to you, for absolutely no benefit whatsoever to the product you're paying for. Destroy this heinous rent-seeking industry.
You are ignoring the value of discovering a good or service. Increasing the customer acquisition cost for a company to infinity doesn't make them lower their prices. It makes them go out of business because they have no customers.
People are really out here acting like we didn't have a functioning economy before we invited ad companies in to parasitize global commerce. I don't give a fuck if it means "less discoverability", if I could snap my fingers and make every ad company disappear tomorrow, the world would be a better place.
When did we have a functioning economy without ads? Was it the 1980's when some of the most classic children's shows were 30 minute commercials for toys? Was it the 1960s when Charles Schultz was lamenting the commercialization of Christmas in the Charlier Brown special? Maybe the 1910's when Uncle Sam famously wanted you to join the army? Was it the 1890's when Montgomery Ward and Sears were sending out mail order catalogs? Was it the 1860's when you could learn that "The Best Glass of Ale In the Globe" was available at Isabella Nesbitt's Inn[1]? Town criers and traveling medicine shows date back to at least the 1700's.
Less intrusive ads? Less frequent ads? Sure I can get behind that (though, I can turn off a TV, can't turn off the town crier). But ads have been a part of us since the first person with something to sell wanted to sell it.
[1]: https://bailiffgatecollections.co.uk/gallery-category/victor...
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It is what enables global commerce.
>You are ignoring the value of discovering a good or service.
This has very little value to me. I'm buying my wife a new car next year and I won't be perusing adverts to find what to buy. If I did I would be thoroughly mislead as the adverts are full of aspirational bullshit.
Adverts encourage people to eat unhealthy food, take unneeded drugs, drink, smoke, buy more house than they need and replace perfectly functional consumer goods. They make everybody's life worse (apart from the advertisers).
Commerce won't stop without them. I've mostly eliminated them from my life but that hasn't stopped me from spending my money.