Friends, ignore this thread. Move on. Don't engage.
I mean, that’s pretty rich coming from the folks willfully engaging in human rights violating surveillance to overwhelm you with obscure useless nonsense that is literally an assault on your time, attention and mental health all for the 0.00001% chance of a vague hope you’ll click or tap their lie of an ad for snake oil that doesn’t work and is designed to steal your credit card number anyway, all just to make them rich so they won’t have to get a real job in the first place.
Moral argument. Right.
It still doesn't quite hold, and the fact that it's being handed to them by the companies who get most of the profit is a big red flag.
But it's at least understandable why the site owners don't see themselves nearly as badly as we see the ad companies.
And even if ads are respectful of user experience, there is a cognitive load to having the content you want to consume bombarded with unrelated content, especially when it’s trying to manipulate your emotions in some way.
Site owners don’t have a right to complain about people using ad blockers because their insistence on money over user experience is the reason everyone is installing them.
A lot of the time I just read sites in Reader Mode. There are no ads or distractions and it seems that site owners haven’t figured out how to block or detect it yet.
and I realized its like a video game. we've actually been trained to try to keep your eyes on the actual content and go through a series of skilled motions just to be able to read it.
If it's from DuckDuckGo, like its search results, it's based on either crude geolocation or recent movies of similar names, bizarrely, when I search for specific technical terms. I have to qualify searches with multiple negations to get anything of interest to someone with more than high school education and interests.
A lose-lose proposition.
I block all ads with extreme prejudice and disable javascript very often to get rid of nag screens. I turn off javascript very often. A word to web devs. I hate your crap.
(Repost)
Since the rise of "social media" driven by clicks on ads, quality has almost entirely been replaced by quantity. And now, creativity has been farmed out as well. I still believe in quality. George Monbiot said it years ago.
Advertising is a poison that demeans even love – and we're hooked on it.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/24/advert...
Definitely not safe for work!
Know Your Meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/big-bill-hells
> This highly over the top commercial was originally produced as a joke in 1990 for a faux award show put on be the Advertising Association of Baltimore called The Ad Follies. The AAB searched for agencies willing to produce ad spoofs mocking the top agencies in the city despite the impending threat that people working on these spoofs may place their jobs in jeopardy for doing so. The production was conducted at television studio WBFF and all of the footage originates from car manufacturer promotional videos and generic stock footage. The writer and narrator of the copy are still both unknown.
> The video was never intended to be shown outside of The Ad Follies show because of the vulgarity and the possibilities of being viewed by the mocked. Copies were only distributed to people who worked on production and to WBFF employees following the screening.On top of all that, I avoid the iOS app store as much as possible because it's an advertising-infested mess. I'm sure I'd have more apps on the phone if I trusted the app store more.
I totally understand what the article is about though... I went on to my wife's instagram and her ad load is unbelievable. She probably has to look at 1 ad for ever 3 reels or images or whatever the hell they call them. I couldn't imagine having to see that many ads.
Last quick note - part of the reason why I avoid that kind of media, and use the tech to block it. I had a professor in college who pointed out that the purpose of ads is not to sell something, its actually to make you unhappy.
Though I did notice last week lots of unique ads for a while. They were wildly inappropriate to me. It was actually funny to get ads for wheat seed by the ton (I don't live in a wheat compatible location), followed by private plane time-share(don't travel that much). How those are supposed to go together stump me.
Block and cover [2], block and cover. For the rest, live on.
[1] https://anathem.fandom.com/wiki/Bulshytt
[2] Yes, I sometimes just cover them with my hand if I happen to use a device without functional content blocking.
Luckily there's few exemptions services which im happily paying since its proven they dont collect your data so advertisers can't prey on you when you're at lowest.
Like did you know, just by obtaining credit card, your shopping history is sold? And you can't reject this, at least i haven't managed to do so. Yet in EU we're banning cash, where's option so i can buy my grocies without insurances knowing i bought candies for weekends so they'll hike insurance up.
as soon as people realize the diminishing value of buying ads on random internet platforms... what next? ads have subsidized almost everything online. will we start paying for basic services, or will there be some other new mechanism for us to sell our attention in exchange for somebody else's web hosting?
Of all the advertisements in the world only a few could be replaced if ubiquitous micropayments were a thing. Sometimes I never wanted to be subjected to the medium carrying the ad (e.g. billboard). Many paid services will see slow growth and switch to mixing in ads (or things they cheekily don't call ads but are still meant to redirect users' attention for profit).
The problem for content providers, is that their total market for a paid product is lower than running advertisements. Most people would just skip by things they don't need if they know it's slowly racking up tiny costs. That's why microtransactions target kids, Robux, vbucks. Adults will have a grocery store mentality: skipping non-necessities, choosing mid products over expensive ones, and only buying premium for a handful of things they care about.
I’ll pay whatever the ad revenue is. It’s not $0.10 - it’s not even $0.01
IMO, the real problems with ads are
1) They just aren't relevant to you. No I'm not going to start drinking AG1 ...
2) There's no information about the product. How do I even know if AG1 is a good idea?
(Consider the typical "you just bought a new fridge, so let's show you ads of fridges".)
I think the golf magazine example is the way ads should be. Eliminate all data collection and advertise based on context. It doesn’t make any sense that a YouTuber making construction videos is advertising for AG1 and VPNs, but it would make sense to advertise for Home Depot. This is more in line with how advertisements work on traditional broadcast TV.
I know a guy who used to run a forum for the saltwater fish tank hobby. He was mostly regional people. His site had ads from local businesses that these people actually used. Each year he’d host various events and these same companies would show up to sell coral and whatever else. It was a 2 way relationship, connecting willing buyers with local businesses. Exactly what marketing and advertisement should be.
I don’t see a lot of ads thanks to using Kagi, YouTube Premium, and some other paid services. I won’t subscribe to a streaming service that will also show me ads, I draw a hard line on this. I think I’d be slightly less opposed to ads if the business of data collection behind them wasn’t so creepy and off-putting. The ad-to-content ratio also has to be reasonable. I think everyone of a certain age has had the experience of flipping through a magazine and finding out it’s 80% ads. That’s not pleasant.
As a random example of the latter, it doesn't bother me too much when electronics youtubers are sponsored by PCB manufacturing companies.
When the advertiser saw the cathedral spires over the downs in the distance, he looked at them and wept.
"If only," he said, "this were an advertisement of Beefo, so nice, so nutritious, try it in your soup, ladies like it."
One: Human psychology tends to ascribe more weight to negative things than positive things in the short term. In the long term this generally balances out, but in the short term it's more prudent in a biological sense to pay attention to the rustling in the bushes than the berries you might pick from them. This is known as the [negativity bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias).
Two: The modern gatekeepers of social interaction, Big Tech, employ blind algorithms that attempt to steer your attention towards spending more time on their platforms. These companies are the arbiters of the content we experience daily and what you do and don't see is mostly at their discretion. The techniques they employ, in simple terms, are designed to provoke what they call 'engagement'. They do this because at the end of the day FAANG have not only a financial interest, but a fiduciary duty to sell advertisements at the behest of their shareholders. The more they can engage you, the more ads they can sell. They employ live A-B testing, divide people into cohorts and poke and prod them with psychological techniques to try and glue your eyeballs to their ads.
Extrapolated conclusion: These companies have a financial and legally binding interest to divide the population against itself, obstructing politics and social interaction to the point where we might not be able to achieve any of the goals that we need to reach to prevent oblivion.
I only watch TV where I can pay the service for an ad-free tier. Every podcast I can I subscribe to to get rid of ads if I listen to it regularly. I had an ad blocker, of course. No ads in my music streaming. YouTube Premium, and I skip embedded ads.
Any ads I see are infuriating. I’m pissed at Apple starting to shove them in my face more and more. App Store is whatever. But MAPS??? I chose Apple because they DIDN’T do stuff like that.
But gotta grub that money to make the stock keep going up for no sane reason.
I’m all for regulating the advertising industry more somehow. I realize there is value to advertising at times, but they have managed to piss me off far enough I don’t care.
I essentially don’t see or hear ads in my life.
As much as I do to avoid ads (using adblocker, priorizing gemtext caches of news sites, avoiding FM radio and buying my own music) I can't say I avoid it completely.
- NPR (I pay, happy to support)
- Podcasts (I skip ads, using a client that supports that)
- Movies/TV/Music (I self-host, thank you open source community!)
- Twitch (I pay 1 creator 6$/mo and must watch 40+ hours per month)
I don’t have mainline social media downloaded on my phone, I sometimes visit reddit.com and see the ads that aren’t blocked by ad block but I find myself visiting less often recently anyway.
All of this to say, pay a bit and put in some work and you can avoid 95% of ads
How about proposing a better model? I don’t have the answer, but I have a feeling we gravitated to the ad-supported freeware model because it’s actually the best and most efficient middle ground. It allows us to exchange our time for creators’ time without the inconvenience of turning it into money first. It removes a step.
It looks like ads will corrupt our only hope, AI.