As a previous self employed man, advertising is good. It helps small companies compete against the big ones that are well known.
However no one need this amount of data, all advertiser need is : you search for a pair of shoes on Google, show you ads for shoes. That's good advertising and sometimes it can be useful for the user.
As i just responded to a sibling commenter: the way weaccess information is now more pull-based (serving requested media) than push-based (broadcast). Advertising should change to fit this paradigm.
Let consumers who are searching for product information be given advertising. Contain the virus to ecosystems that want it.
If you look at old ads for random products from e.g. the turn of the (last) century, they seem to often give this slight "wall of text" impression. Image of the product, surrounded by prices and descriptions of what it was and what it (purportedly) did. The motivating belief seemed to be that if a company communicated the benefits of buying from them, they would attract customers.
It seems like at some point the focus shifted away from expressing factual information, and to creating vague associations and implications. I think that's still fine on its own, and in fact quite fun and the source of a lot of creativity, but it also created the opportunity to mislead in new ways. E.G. most famously harmfully maybe, the very mid-20th century idea that cigarettes are "cool". In modern times this seems to have gone even further towards exploiting basic quirks in human psychology— A dancing bear, chocolate man, or screaming celebrity has nothing to do with selling a product, but it's bizarre and surprising and therefore memorable, so by making an ad around it you're cluttering the viewer's brain with useless information designed to redirect mindshare to your capital-B "Brand".
So at that point it becomes dishonest and manipulative. But at least it's still broadcasted, e.g. on radio, TV, in newspapers and magazines. It's predatory, but everyone gets the same thing. You can still sorta avoid or ignore it. It doesn't single anyone out.
That's changed now with the Internet. The mass collection of location and personality data, identifiable to individual profiles and paired with tools allowing those individuals to be targetted with a combination of terrifying granularity and omnipresent scale— That adds an entire new dimension to "advertising", and it would still be wrong, because it would still comprise many violations of privacy and basic decency, even if it weren't being actively exploited for commercial gain. If any one individual knew as much about you and had as many tools for trying to influence you as Facebook and Google have built on an industrial scale, they would be either a stalker deserving of a restraining order, or some kind of a (probably malevolent TBH) supernatural spirit.
So "advertising", in terms of "informing the market of a product" and "connecting customers to businesses in mutually beneficial transactions", is fine I guess. Good, even. Stalking, lying, manipulating, and rent-seeking through dominance are wrong.
And with technology centralizing power in the hands of a few organizations, the modern practice of "advertising" seems to be less about "informing people" these days and more about dominating the information space in order to manipulate human behaviour with neither the consent nor the knowledge of your targets. No wonder it's apparently being abused by law enforcement.
...To be clear, I use the word "you" only as an indefinite pronoun here. Small businesses that use ad networks aren't the ones to blame for a large system having messy incentives and malicious central actors.
> So "advertising", in terms of "informing the market of a product" and "connecting customers to businesses in mutually beneficial transactions", is fine I guess. Good, even. Stalking, lying, manipulating, and rent-seeking through dominance are wrong.
yes, take driving for instance. Some people drive responsibly, watch for bicycle and walkers, others drive like maniacs yet it's the same thing, driving a car.
It's not so much what you do with advertisement than how you do it, but advertisement in itself isn't bad.
Now if you take the worst example possible, Facebook, Google, Microsoft etc. all these companies behaving like rats trying to extract as much data as possible from you, it's going to look bad. But for instance, when we still had phonebook you would look for a plumber and some plumber who paid for advertisement would get a bigger space, in exchange the phonebook company would make money and everyone would receive phonebook for free.
> And that is why I use exclusively open source software that respects the user.
We're all proud of you but this is barely related to avoiding ads. You can build your own car too, and you'd still have to look at the billboards on the highway. Or you could build your own phone and never giving anyone the number, then you'll still get to enjoy 5 spams/day during election season when someone decides to simply call every phone number in the region.
Ads are the new certainty besides death and taxes. If they aren't in your face yet, be assured that whole legions of shitheads are very busy trying to make it happen.
Governments and big tech/media try to brand anyone knowledgeable about privacy measures as pedophiles, and it's incredibly effective because they control the laws and narrative. Doesn't help that a huge fraction of people conflate having something to hide with not wanting everything be public, and in the vast majority of cases are blissfully and willfully ignorant so long as they get their Instagram or TikTok.
At a societal level we fully deserve all this because apparently we can't be fucked to care about basic rights anymore (cf. "everyone gets the government they deserve"), too lost in Huxley's dystopian future of infinite dopamine distractions.
The best concert I ever saw was one I only knew was in town because of an ad.
My interests align with advertisers to an extent. I do want to know what products are out there. I'm an adult, I won't forget that their descriptions of their products are biased.
Surveillance advertising is a bad thing, but it doesn't help to take the most extremist position possible. Advertising is information, and it's not difficult to use that information to your benefit.
That kind of old-school vision of advertising is a vision from the 80s, it's been a long time that advertising isn't about information anymore.
The big spenders are in the game for brand awareness (there's not even a product being shown sometimes) and then there's a parallel world of which I would call scams which went on top of it (less than half of the Youtube ads I see look legal)
If you remove those two, I'm not sure how long the advertising industry would survive.
I use open-source software too, but it (by itself) doesn't stop me from seeing annoying and intrusive ads on internet websites. An ad-blocker like uBO does, mostly (but not completely), though it's much less effective with paywalled sites.
The problem with online ads is mostly orthogonal to FOSS. Of course, it does help to not use an OS with ads baked into the Start menu...
Advertising is the engine of free market. Advertising in Web and apps is used for evil purposes, just like cash (or almost anything else) is also used for evil purposes. Regulation exists to try to minimize those, but it’s always a workaround for human malice.
Advertisement is the engine of free market. The technological progress made possible with free market and advertisement as its integral part is evidence supporting my argument—yes, the very device you are reading this on is the evidence.
You have not provided a viable argument so far. I can’t say you failed to provide supporting evidence, because you have not even made a claim. Inventing a meaningless term like “information paradigm” and implying it has somehow changed is not one.
You either lack a point to make, or are struggling to express one.
Repeating something ad nauseam does not make it true.
Advertising is just attempted demand generation for otherwise weak product offerings, a ploy to exploit human psychology by appealing to needs to be part of an in group, desire for sexual appeal. It is exploitative and harmful to its viewers.
> Advertising is just attempted demand generation for otherwise weak product offerings
Just like money is just a vehicle for abuse and fraud.
Advertising is disseminating information about a product. The rest is you describing how advertising is abused, which I already addressed in my first comment. Yes, it is also used for malicious and abusive purposes, just like everything else is also used for malicious and abusive purposes.
If we talk about things that can be used for bad stuff, how about we start with E2EE comms and cash. The amount of evil, abuse, violence that they directly enable simply drowns out any potential downside of ads.
I guess either you want to ban it all, in which case there is no more argument to be had, or you can acknowledge that the world is not black and white and something that can be used for evil can also be a crucial part of an ecosystem.
