this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
509 points (97.2% liked)

Showerthoughts

34121 readers
1034 users here now

A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. No politics
    • If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
    • A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS

If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Everything that makes advertisers happy is to the detriment of humanity as a whole. Everything that makes advertisers' jobs easier also makes it easier for authoritarian governments. "Innovation" is no longer about creating new things, it's about taking what already works, breaking it, shoving ads on it and charging a ransom in the form of a premium subscription.

On the other hand, there are endless ad-skipping tools, pages and sites where the main attraction is the lack of ads without a subscription. More and more people are talking about how intrusive and annoying ads are, even those who make their living from them. As the efforts of big tech to please advertisers grow, so do the efforts of ordinary people to screw them.

Very Cyberpunk.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (2 children)

we have ads because services paid for with attention are more accessible and get more traffic than services paid for with a monthly subscription ... we could probably subsidize a lot of websites or make them community efforts (like Wikipedia), but because there is a desire to profit from websites, we have this aggressive push for ads and monetization in every corner of the web.

Commercialization, though, is the problem more than advertising itself is. Monetization through "native ads" or affiliate link marketing is just as insidious and toxic, and pervasive. Just like people hate loot boxes and games that have mechanics where skill is less important than paying cash for in-game content to gain an advantage, the root problem is commercialization.

This is just capitalism, and cyberpunk as a genre is meant to be critical of capitalism and its rotten fruits.

I think it misses the mark to interpret the war as a war between humanity and advertisers when it's a war between the powerful and wealthy and the 99%.

[–] NONE_dc@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

I know that the advertising problem is just the tip of the iceberg. My observation is in how it seems to me that this antagonism between the Human experience vs. advertisers seems to be the first active front in a more generalized class war.

[–] crozilla@lemmy.world 3 points 8 hours ago

Exactly, also stop vilifying “advertising” when the cause of advertising is corporations. There would be no advertising without corporations paying for it. It’s like complaining about ashes instead of the fire.