this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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I find it disturbing that there are people out there who spend much of their time thinking about new ways to get people to see adverts. Surely it falls under the "bullshit jobs" category that David Graeber once wrote about.
It's not just that there are people thinking about it, it's that this is what our brightest minds in our society are incentivized to think about.
There is a joke in tech circles - if you are smart enough you eventually end up in ad tech. It's really unhealthy for our society.
A lot of ads should be banned for environmental reasons alone. From junk mail, lit up signs, eyesore billboards, and all the power wasted in digital ads.
The big reasons I'm against this is all the side effects. Yes, there will be more ads, but there will also be:
I hate shitty ads as much as the next person, but you're ignoring how much of the internet runs on advertising money. Think of all the websites, services, apps, etc that you use that are "free" (read: ad-supported) — without ad revenue, a large percentage of them would be too expensive to run.
I'm not saying ad-tech companies/people are always good, many of them clearly do unethical shit, but the idea that you're being forced to see ads is kind of crazy. You always have the option to not use ad-supported stuff, it's just a lot more limiting and expensive.
The double post to demonstrate the weirdness of Lemmy is a nice touch.
Whoops. Fixed, hahaha
Your point doesn’t make sense. Even back when people where creating their own services and sites (which they still are, it’s not like that has ever stopped) there was still often ad-funding when those things grew to a scale where donations alone couldn’t support them.
And yes, lemmy is ad-free. That’s doesn’t mean the model will work for everything else. Ad-support can be a great way of keeping something accessible and free for people who can’t or won’t pay for it. It’s not always a bad thing.
The heart of your stance is apparently that pernicious socially harmful mechanisms are okay as long as they finance something useful. Correct?
Or is it that you don’t see the harms of advertising?
Advertising is a wasteful arms race. Bob may not want to spend money advertising his business, but if Mallory (his competitor) spends money on ads, then Bob is forced to spend money on ads to recover marketshare loss due to Mallory’s ads.
That’s a pretty disingenuous interpretation of what I said. But I get it, you don’t like advertising so it has to be completely evil with no redeeming qualities or nuance.
Oh you talked about the good ads!
Really, I have yet to see an ad that is not just trying to enter your brain with force and malice.
It's just getting worse too, the "Buy Acme product!" image is now a +100% loudness jump-scare video on auto-pay.
I don't know that your counterpoint makes much sense either. Just because the web has devolved into a centralized ad-powered mess doesn't mean that's how things should operate. And I do mean mess, consider the many overlapping, sometimes competing rules each advertiser has the right to impose on the location their ads may appear.
I personally consider advertisements to be psychological warfare, an unfortunate requirement for business today. If we allow the "local maximum" that advertising is to fester, the number of spaces and the amount of time occupied by ads pretty much is required to steadily increase.
Let's just... Not do it. AdBlock, open-source browsers and services to promote privacy, while making it clear that the money to run the servers has to come from somewhere.
I donate to Wikipedia every year. Signal, proton, several git projects... If you can help, please do. If you can't/won't, we'll try to keep the ship moving along anyway.
I donate to a bunch of projects and pay for ad-free services too, but that doesn’t mean that all ad-funded things are bad or that all advertising is evil.
Monetisation in general has ruined the internet in many ways, but that extends beyond just ad-based monetisation. Subscriptions, excessive upgrade pricing, in app purchases and dlcs, etc. it all plays a part in the problem, but people like to blame it all on advertising for some because (at least from what I’ve seen) they largely don’t really understand the thing they’re talking about.
Erm.. I didn't see where anyone blamed it all on ads alone. Haven't seen anyone else proselytizing their usage either.
But that'd almost seem like a mischaracterization eh? We're on the same page, trying to 'win' an argument nobody's having makes one of us look a bit goofy.