To the extent that ads cause you to make purchases that you're retrospectively happy about, I agree. The limit case of a really good advertising system is a recommendation engine for arbitrary products, which is super useful. There are a few reasons why I think they don't converge to that though.
Different products have different margins that are uncorrelated with how useful they are to use, and this distorts the recommendations.
Advertising systems are competing to cause you to buy via them, and that causes them to expose you to more ads than your desire to purchase things would warrant.
Designing ads that do not disrupt UI or UX, but instead align with the default context within which they exist. Cc: Reddit and Quora's native ads.
Better data collection to improve relevance.
This is about as useful as saying "the solution for crime is not telling the criminals theft and murder is bad, and putting them in jail. The solution is to make people just realize they shouldn't steal and murder". Good luck with that, please tell me when you find out how to do that. So far all the ad industry is running - no, flying on super-sonic jets - in the opposite direction. I am lazy, so I tried to get by without installing ad blockers a couple of times when getting new phones/tablets. Nope. It's not possible. Ads eat so much CPU/memory/bandwidth that it is just intolerable to me. I'd rather stop using the device altogether then use it with ads. And the targeting of the most ads remains to be horrific. I'm pretty sure by now ad networks know about me more than I bother to remember about myself. But they still show me crap that is so dull, repetitive and annoying that it threatens my mental health if left unblocked. I get the role that the ad industry played in the spread of the free services on the internet and supporting independent creators. But this once useful function turned malignant, and now it grew entirely out of proportion and became evil. And I see no way to make it go back to benign forms.
Informing you of changes in value or quality that may be desirable.
Reminding you that a product exists.
Making you view a product more favorably.
Encouraging you to make impulse buys.
Putting a tracker in the ads for data collection.
Deceiving you (for example those ads on software download sites that look like download buttons).
As a vector for malware.
1-3 can be considered benevolent. 7-8 are always malevolent, and 6 is arguably malevolent because it's one thing collecting data for a site/product people are using, but the person collecting data may well be a company you want nothing to do with. 4 depends on if the company is trying to make their reputation better than it should be, or if the ad viewer has an unreasonably low opinion of the company. 5 might increase short term happiness but is probably unwise in the long term.
I block ads because the negatives outweigh the positives. I don't care if I am not aware of a product that could benefit me. If I wasn't motivated enough to look for it it probably wasn't important. By blocking ads I protect myself from 7-8. I hate data collection because companies are always dodgy about what exact data they collect, they rarely let you curate it, and you have no control over what they do with it or who they sell it to. The more data a company collects, the more effective it can potentially be at encouraging me to make poor purchasing decisions. Also ads are more effective when they are distracting.
So no, I do not want ads. If I must have ads, I want them to know as little about me as possible because I see ads on the whole as oppositional to my interests (exercising good financial judgment) rather than aligned.
PoiThePoi often makes the steelman version of this argument (though given where some of his paychecks have come from, he would), but I'll also point to LycheeSlicer.
For those unfamiliar with resin 3D printers, like conventional hot plastic (aka fused deposition modeling, or FDM), they require an intermediate program to convert 3d models (usually but not always STLs) into instructions specific to your printer and environment. Unlike FDM, resin printers have a few very popular specific use cases, the majority of which are around small plastic figurines. It's not everybody using the things, but if you made me guess I'd probably estimate 95%+.
I expect this is eventually the open-source-like thing that eats Games Workshop alive, though resin printer firmware and software is a lot more closed-source than the FDM Marlin-variant world, excluding PrussaSlicer. And since most thing are closed source, they're paying people. Some vendors make this work through premium capabilities, other through weird partnerships with resin and printer part suppliers, and others with advertising. (most with a mix.)
For LycheeSlicer, the ad support comes in as thirty seconds of advertising before you can save the file for a (often hour-long) print, many of which are things you're also going to want to print. Which is a hilarious feedback loop, but it's also in theory a good solution to the discoverability problem.
There are a lot of sites with input STLs and tools for creating those STLs out there, and there's also really hard to find what you're looking for. Patio11 points to myminifactory, but there's a few dozen different sites focused on this sphere, as well as generalist sites that also have 3d models for sale to some degree. And search is hard: even if you know what you're looking for, text-based search is a mess when the best project might not even be in your language, there's a ton of overloaded language, and you also care about issues like dimensioning and complexity that not all search engines even support. A lot of times if you're just looking for inspiration, gfl.
But emphasis on the "in theory". I'm not much into the minifig world -- another use case for resin printers is producing fiddly gearing and other small parts FDM printers don't really do well -- but I just started a slice operation and the entire 30-second block was set for an advertisement for this group (not endorsed). There's probably someone who cares about these guys. But they're very much the most generic common denominator, and most importantly they're subscription model so you're paying for nearly-random material. So I'd expect that they're optimized more for ability to pay for advertising, rather than ability to get new purchases. To be fair, this isn't constant: the next try gave these folks, which seem a little pricey for their skill level but at least could plausibly be good arguments for someone who played with (or was curious about) whatever that system is.
Part of this is because a lot of decent advertising in the resin printing world has moved to other formats: patio11 points to kickstarter and youtube, but word of mouth and other approaches still apply. But a lot of it's just that advertising well is hard, and advertising poorly is economically viable for an obnoxious amount of content. It doesn't take that many people signing up for a patreon-like to pay for a small ad buy, even if they literally never use your product.
And in the resin printing world, the buyers at least get something that they paid for out of it, even if it's not necessary the deal they expected (uh, modulo kickstarters). That isn't the case for everyone. The various furry fandom ad systems tend to be a scattering of actual promotion mixed with grifts or scams and a delivery system that tries to make the ads block as much of your display as possible; Amazon will try to advertise repeat purchases of things you'd almost never buy twice in a lifetime and its 'promotions' system is a mess at best; Google's search ads are increasingly toeing the line into extortion schemes for big-name competitors.
Which leaves the question of, if advertisements could be good, why they degrade this way so readily.
I wish the rise of 'targeted ads' lived more up to the stated potential.
As others have noted ads are a tolerable intrusion to the extent they make you aware of a product you hadn't previously heard of but might in fact purchase, or about deals on stuff you would normally purchase, or possibly provide some pure entertainment value.
Under ideal circumstances, you would ONLY be exposed to those sorts of ads and this would be a net benefit for both sides since you now have some additional useful information AND this ad is more likely to convert into an actual sale for the advertiser.
I've talked about my confusion as to why well-established brands feel they need to maintain a strong advertising presence. But almost universally such brands avoid being obnoxious with their ads.
So really, advertising is a problem because it intrudes into spaces where they are unwelcome, provide no useful information to the vast majority of viewers, and are often obnoxious in nature. And advertising/marketing as an industry seems to be trying endlessly to find ways to intrude into more spaces, and become more obnoxious (so as to grab your attention), and don't really care if their information is useful to the viewers so long as they can snag a few more sales out of it.
Arguably worst of all is when you get 'fooled' into interacting with an ad on the assumption that you're getting a 'genuine' interaction out of it and only after you've already committed some time and effort to the interaction does it reveal that in fact they just want to extract money from you. I fear with LLMs this will become more universal.
I think the problem as it exists is that Advertisers are aggressively optimizing for grabbing attention. There is some subset of the population who are very negatively impacted by ads and aren't likely to actually convert into sales. But some large majority of the population accept advertising and actually make purchasing decisions based on what ads grab their attention. So in their zeal to get access to the latter group, there is a large deadweight loss borne by the former group.
So basically, advertisers are acting in ways that don't really consider the total impact of their actions, and arguably they produce many externalities, and their behavior might be changed if they were forced to internalize those costs, but the incentives don't quite align for this to happen.
Ads were okay when they might be relevant to what I wanted. But they got too damn greedy. I avoided using adblockers for years, until websites finally became literally unusable unless I blocked ads, because between popups, autoplay, banner ads, side bar ads, and ads/links in between paragraphs, the content I wanted to see was invisible.
I highly value my time and attention. And ads are theft of both.
Every once in a while, I'm exposed to the internet without an ad blocker, and I scream in existential terror at how bad things have gotten.
As far as I'm concerned, if a product is worth it, I'll come to organically hear about it from happy customers, and that's the extent of advertising I can take.
Fuck, once Neuralink comes out, I hope it has an IRL ad block feature that just hides advertisements from my perception, the cursed things.
ThisIsSin
The boob tube emits harmful XXX-rays
1yr ago
Most of the products I want to buy are not the kinds of products that $major_platform is willing to sell ads for (to the degree that I have to intentionally seek their ads out), and of the ones that are, I... generally already shop there.
So the only ads I really see when I'm not looking at something under uBlock... are ads for cars and food products, and the odd government office trying to justify its budget again. I'm not in the market for cars at the moment since they're all >15,000 dollars for anything that would be a worthwhile upgrade, I already have enough Coke in the fridge, and I've seen enough "our Branch Covidian stance was justified" over the last 2 weeks that those ads are just a net negative to my mental well-being.
Thus I just block everything, and don't feel guilty about doing so.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1yr ago
There are two purposes of ads:
Create common knowledge that deals are available
Hoodwink gullible people into taking bad deals.
#1 is strongly positive-sum because it reduces deadweight loss. #2 is strongly negative-sum; the equilibrium is that everyone gets taught about how not to fall for ads, and also that businesses spend large resources on marketing, both of which are losses to society. Back in the 1930s when marketing psychology and communications technology were far less advanced, #1 was the bigger effect. Nowadays it is fairly obvious that #2 is the bigger effect.
You can't uninvent modern marketing techniques, and you can't ban ads without extreme collateral damage, but reducing their effectiveness is almost certainly a net win. Ads masquerading as non-ads are more effective and therefore bad. Ads that are better targetted to people's psychological weaknesses are more effective and therefore bad.
There's also the third one - capture the territory for the brand in the cultural space. In fact, most of major brand's ads are like that. Coca-Cola ads don't advertise where you can get your sugar hit $0.02/bottle cheaper than usual. They advertise that drinking Coca-Cola is part of the American culture and by drinking it, you're being a good member of society, and all that. When I was in market for a car, I read a ton of articles, discussed on forums, read manufacturer sites, signed up for various deal groups, etc. One thing that was absolutely, 100% useless for me was any brand's ad campaigns. Local dealers, which do run campaigns sometimes, and those could be either 1 or 2 - sometimes gave useful information about actual deals. Brand's ads are almost always "Driving is cool, do it!". Sadly, though completely useless for me, ads of this type seem to be pretty effective overall.
"In your interest" is very vaguely defined. Is being perceived as a cool dude in your interest? For myself, I don't really care for it, but many other people behave, like they do. Can I deny them their agency and claim that their true interests lie elsewhere? I think it's be presumptuous. If they say they want to be cool, then they want to be cool. And then consuming brands that are perceived as "cool" would be in their interests.
There's also the factor that ads could be trying to do 1, but failing. If the audience is wrong, either due to the individual not caring about the thing in question, or due to the individual already knowing that the deal is available, the ad is not helpful to either party, and is an obstruction to whatever the audience actually wanted to do.
Except in a few cases which nobody objects to (like classified ads in newspapers) even as a "cached thought", ads are pretty much always created under circumstances where the advertiser has bad incentives . You are basically saying "just because ads incentivize bad behavior doesn't mean there's anything wrong with ads. Instead, blame the advertisers who behave badly". That ignores how incentives work.
If we had a law which lets the police shoot anyone they want, and they shot up a mall to catch one shoplifter, it's wrong to say "there's nothing inherently bad about the law, it's just bad police".
I'm not sure why you think it makes sense to blame the groundwork instead if the bad actor.
Please speak plainly. "I'm not sure why X" is a passive aggressive trick used to blur the distinction between "I don't believe X is ever possible", "I don't believe X in this particular case", and "I do actually believe X but I'm going to filibuster the argument by forcing you to argue for it anyway". Which is it?
Do you really think that even a law which says the police can shoot anyone they want, isn't a bad law because it's only creates problems when abused?
Plausibly, it depends on how they're used. I would especially draw a distinction between ads as part of the platform's core business model, and ads used partly to annoy people until they buy a paid, "premium" version.
For all Meta's flaws, their ads are actually pretty good. Both Facebook and Instagram regularly show me stuff I actually want to see, and advertise products I would either consider buying, or at least like looking at.
Youtube, on the other hand, seems to be pursuing a strategy of not so much advertising things people might want to buy, as annoying them until they finally give in and buy Youtube Premium. As far as I can tell, Grammerly doesn't care about targeted advertising at all, and is secretly a company developed by Youtube specifically to annoy people with plausible deniability. Despite having a lot of data on me -- I watch reviews on Youtube to see if I want to buy certain products -- they ignore this, and have played the exact same Verbo ad at least 30 times. I'll click on a link to a review of an art product, and instead of the clear and obvious move of advertising an art product, which I am currently interested in buying (clearly!), or even something like Sketchbox, for people who aren't committed to any particular art supply and just want to try them out -- instead of that, they load a Grammerly ad for the 50th time. Video companies seem the most susceptible to this model, and it is pretty antagonistic.
Ads are tools that aid problem-solving by matching people to tools that solve their problems.
The purpose of ads, the reason for their existence, is definitely not to help me get what I want, nor are they tools that primarily serve my interests. If they were, then an advertising agency would be something that I sought out and paid for to help me solve a problem or find a solution. Instead, they're the other thing.
I'm not fundamentally against advertising in some form. What I'm against is the form it naturally takes where rather than informing me their purpose is transparently to try and use every trick in the book to subvert my interest to push the maximum number of units at the highest price for the lowest cost. Advertising I'd actually like needs an adversarial component where some agent on my side aggressively curates the recommendations that I receive in a way that I can trust their objectivity. There are certain product reviewers in spaces like board and video games that I think achieve this but it's vitally important to their credibility, and they know this, that their revenue stream is never even suspected of crossing paths with the marketing departments of the products. What ads reddit pushes to me has nothing to do with whether purchasing the product advertised is a good idea for me and everything to do with how much the ad company paid to have the product pushed and thus it has no useful signal to me.
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Notes -
To the extent that ads cause you to make purchases that you're retrospectively happy about, I agree. The limit case of a really good advertising system is a recommendation engine for arbitrary products, which is super useful. There are a few reasons why I think they don't converge to that though.
Different products have different margins that are uncorrelated with how useful they are to use, and this distorts the recommendations.
Advertising systems are competing to cause you to buy via them, and that causes them to expose you to more ads than your desire to purchase things would warrant.
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This is about as useful as saying "the solution for crime is not telling the criminals theft and murder is bad, and putting them in jail. The solution is to make people just realize they shouldn't steal and murder". Good luck with that, please tell me when you find out how to do that. So far all the ad industry is running - no, flying on super-sonic jets - in the opposite direction. I am lazy, so I tried to get by without installing ad blockers a couple of times when getting new phones/tablets. Nope. It's not possible. Ads eat so much CPU/memory/bandwidth that it is just intolerable to me. I'd rather stop using the device altogether then use it with ads. And the targeting of the most ads remains to be horrific. I'm pretty sure by now ad networks know about me more than I bother to remember about myself. But they still show me crap that is so dull, repetitive and annoying that it threatens my mental health if left unblocked. I get the role that the ad industry played in the spread of the free services on the internet and supporting independent creators. But this once useful function turned malignant, and now it grew entirely out of proportion and became evil. And I see no way to make it go back to benign forms.
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What ads are:
-Ads are a tool to increase revenue by a company.
Ads can serve one or more purposes:
Informing you that a product exists.
Informing you of changes in value or quality that may be desirable.
Reminding you that a product exists.
Making you view a product more favorably.
Encouraging you to make impulse buys.
Putting a tracker in the ads for data collection.
Deceiving you (for example those ads on software download sites that look like download buttons).
As a vector for malware.
1-3 can be considered benevolent. 7-8 are always malevolent, and 6 is arguably malevolent because it's one thing collecting data for a site/product people are using, but the person collecting data may well be a company you want nothing to do with. 4 depends on if the company is trying to make their reputation better than it should be, or if the ad viewer has an unreasonably low opinion of the company. 5 might increase short term happiness but is probably unwise in the long term.
I block ads because the negatives outweigh the positives. I don't care if I am not aware of a product that could benefit me. If I wasn't motivated enough to look for it it probably wasn't important. By blocking ads I protect myself from 7-8. I hate data collection because companies are always dodgy about what exact data they collect, they rarely let you curate it, and you have no control over what they do with it or who they sell it to. The more data a company collects, the more effective it can potentially be at encouraging me to make poor purchasing decisions. Also ads are more effective when they are distracting.
So no, I do not want ads. If I must have ads, I want them to know as little about me as possible because I see ads on the whole as oppositional to my interests (exercising good financial judgment) rather than aligned.
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PoiThePoi often makes the steelman version of this argument (though given where some of his paychecks have come from, he would), but I'll also point to LycheeSlicer.
For those unfamiliar with resin 3D printers, like conventional hot plastic (aka fused deposition modeling, or FDM), they require an intermediate program to convert 3d models (usually but not always STLs) into instructions specific to your printer and environment. Unlike FDM, resin printers have a few very popular specific use cases, the majority of which are around small plastic figurines. It's not everybody using the things, but if you made me guess I'd probably estimate 95%+.
I expect this is eventually the open-source-like thing that eats Games Workshop alive, though resin printer firmware and software is a lot more closed-source than the FDM Marlin-variant world, excluding PrussaSlicer. And since most thing are closed source, they're paying people. Some vendors make this work through premium capabilities, other through weird partnerships with resin and printer part suppliers, and others with advertising. (most with a mix.)
For LycheeSlicer, the ad support comes in as thirty seconds of advertising before you can save the file for a (often hour-long) print, many of which are things you're also going to want to print. Which is a hilarious feedback loop, but it's also in theory a good solution to the discoverability problem.
There are a lot of sites with input STLs and tools for creating those STLs out there, and there's also really hard to find what you're looking for. Patio11 points to myminifactory, but there's a few dozen different sites focused on this sphere, as well as generalist sites that also have 3d models for sale to some degree. And search is hard: even if you know what you're looking for, text-based search is a mess when the best project might not even be in your language, there's a ton of overloaded language, and you also care about issues like dimensioning and complexity that not all search engines even support. A lot of times if you're just looking for
inspiration, gfl.But emphasis on the "in theory". I'm not much into the minifig world -- another use case for resin printers is producing fiddly gearing and other small parts FDM printers don't really do well -- but I just started a slice operation and the entire 30-second block was set for an advertisement for this group (not endorsed). There's probably someone who cares about these guys. But they're very much the most generic common denominator, and most importantly they're subscription model so you're paying for nearly-random material. So I'd expect that they're optimized more for ability to pay for advertising, rather than ability to get new purchases. To be fair, this isn't constant: the next try gave these folks, which seem a little pricey for their skill level but at least could plausibly be good arguments for someone who played with (or was curious about) whatever that system is.
Part of this is because a lot of decent advertising in the resin printing world has moved to other formats: patio11 points to kickstarter and youtube, but word of mouth and other approaches still apply. But a lot of it's just that advertising well is hard, and advertising poorly is economically viable for an obnoxious amount of content. It doesn't take that many people signing up for a patreon-like to pay for a small ad buy, even if they literally never use your product.
And in the resin printing world, the buyers at least get something that they paid for out of it, even if it's not necessary the deal they expected (uh, modulo kickstarters). That isn't the case for everyone. The various furry fandom ad systems tend to be a scattering of actual promotion mixed with grifts or scams and a delivery system that tries to make the ads block as much of your display as possible; Amazon will try to advertise repeat purchases of things you'd almost never buy twice in a lifetime and its 'promotions' system is a mess at best; Google's search ads are increasingly toeing the line into extortion schemes for big-name competitors.
Which leaves the question of, if advertisements could be good, why they degrade this way so readily.
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I wish the rise of 'targeted ads' lived more up to the stated potential.
As others have noted ads are a tolerable intrusion to the extent they make you aware of a product you hadn't previously heard of but might in fact purchase, or about deals on stuff you would normally purchase, or possibly provide some pure entertainment value.
Under ideal circumstances, you would ONLY be exposed to those sorts of ads and this would be a net benefit for both sides since you now have some additional useful information AND this ad is more likely to convert into an actual sale for the advertiser.
I've talked about my confusion as to why well-established brands feel they need to maintain a strong advertising presence. But almost universally such brands avoid being obnoxious with their ads.
So really, advertising is a problem because it intrudes into spaces where they are unwelcome, provide no useful information to the vast majority of viewers, and are often obnoxious in nature. And advertising/marketing as an industry seems to be trying endlessly to find ways to intrude into more spaces, and become more obnoxious (so as to grab your attention), and don't really care if their information is useful to the viewers so long as they can snag a few more sales out of it.
Arguably worst of all is when you get 'fooled' into interacting with an ad on the assumption that you're getting a 'genuine' interaction out of it and only after you've already committed some time and effort to the interaction does it reveal that in fact they just want to extract money from you. I fear with LLMs this will become more universal.
I think the problem as it exists is that Advertisers are aggressively optimizing for grabbing attention. There is some subset of the population who are very negatively impacted by ads and aren't likely to actually convert into sales. But some large majority of the population accept advertising and actually make purchasing decisions based on what ads grab their attention. So in their zeal to get access to the latter group, there is a large deadweight loss borne by the former group.
So basically, advertisers are acting in ways that don't really consider the total impact of their actions, and arguably they produce many externalities, and their behavior might be changed if they were forced to internalize those costs, but the incentives don't quite align for this to happen.
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Ads were okay when they might be relevant to what I wanted. But they got too damn greedy. I avoided using adblockers for years, until websites finally became literally unusable unless I blocked ads, because between popups, autoplay, banner ads, side bar ads, and ads/links in between paragraphs, the content I wanted to see was invisible.
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I highly value my time and attention. And ads are theft of both.
Every once in a while, I'm exposed to the internet without an ad blocker, and I scream in existential terror at how bad things have gotten.
As far as I'm concerned, if a product is worth it, I'll come to organically hear about it from happy customers, and that's the extent of advertising I can take.
Fuck, once Neuralink comes out, I hope it has an IRL ad block feature that just hides advertisements from my perception, the cursed things.
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Most of the products I want to buy are not the kinds of products that $major_platform is willing to sell ads for (to the degree that I have to intentionally seek their ads out), and of the ones that are, I... generally already shop there.
So the only ads I really see when I'm not looking at something under uBlock... are ads for cars and food products, and the odd government office trying to justify its budget again. I'm not in the market for cars at the moment since they're all >15,000 dollars for anything that would be a worthwhile upgrade, I already have enough Coke in the fridge, and I've seen enough "our Branch Covidian stance was justified" over the last 2 weeks that those ads are just a net negative to my mental well-being.
Thus I just block everything, and don't feel guilty about doing so.
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There are two purposes of ads:
Create common knowledge that deals are available
Hoodwink gullible people into taking bad deals.
#1 is strongly positive-sum because it reduces deadweight loss. #2 is strongly negative-sum; the equilibrium is that everyone gets taught about how not to fall for ads, and also that businesses spend large resources on marketing, both of which are losses to society. Back in the 1930s when marketing psychology and communications technology were far less advanced, #1 was the bigger effect. Nowadays it is fairly obvious that #2 is the bigger effect.
You can't uninvent modern marketing techniques, and you can't ban ads without extreme collateral damage, but reducing their effectiveness is almost certainly a net win. Ads masquerading as non-ads are more effective and therefore bad. Ads that are better targetted to people's psychological weaknesses are more effective and therefore bad.
There's also the third one - capture the territory for the brand in the cultural space. In fact, most of major brand's ads are like that. Coca-Cola ads don't advertise where you can get your sugar hit $0.02/bottle cheaper than usual. They advertise that drinking Coca-Cola is part of the American culture and by drinking it, you're being a good member of society, and all that. When I was in market for a car, I read a ton of articles, discussed on forums, read manufacturer sites, signed up for various deal groups, etc. One thing that was absolutely, 100% useless for me was any brand's ad campaigns. Local dealers, which do run campaigns sometimes, and those could be either 1 or 2 - sometimes gave useful information about actual deals. Brand's ads are almost always "Driving is cool, do it!". Sadly, though completely useless for me, ads of this type seem to be pretty effective overall.
That is within the scope of my #2, AFAIK. They are trying to get you to buy their brand when this is not actually in your interest.
"In your interest" is very vaguely defined. Is being perceived as a cool dude in your interest? For myself, I don't really care for it, but many other people behave, like they do. Can I deny them their agency and claim that their true interests lie elsewhere? I think it's be presumptuous. If they say they want to be cool, then they want to be cool. And then consuming brands that are perceived as "cool" would be in their interests.
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There's also the factor that ads could be trying to do 1, but failing. If the audience is wrong, either due to the individual not caring about the thing in question, or due to the individual already knowing that the deal is available, the ad is not helpful to either party, and is an obstruction to whatever the audience actually wanted to do.
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Except in a few cases which nobody objects to (like classified ads in newspapers) even as a "cached thought", ads are pretty much always created under circumstances where the advertiser has bad incentives . You are basically saying "just because ads incentivize bad behavior doesn't mean there's anything wrong with ads. Instead, blame the advertisers who behave badly". That ignores how incentives work.
If we had a law which lets the police shoot anyone they want, and they shot up a mall to catch one shoplifter, it's wrong to say "there's nothing inherently bad about the law, it's just bad police".
Please speak plainly. "I'm not sure why X" is a passive aggressive trick used to blur the distinction between "I don't believe X is ever possible", "I don't believe X in this particular case", and "I do actually believe X but I'm going to filibuster the argument by forcing you to argue for it anyway". Which is it?
Do you really think that even a law which says the police can shoot anyone they want, isn't a bad law because it's only creates problems when abused?
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Plausibly, it depends on how they're used. I would especially draw a distinction between ads as part of the platform's core business model, and ads used partly to annoy people until they buy a paid, "premium" version.
For all Meta's flaws, their ads are actually pretty good. Both Facebook and Instagram regularly show me stuff I actually want to see, and advertise products I would either consider buying, or at least like looking at.
Youtube, on the other hand, seems to be pursuing a strategy of not so much advertising things people might want to buy, as annoying them until they finally give in and buy Youtube Premium. As far as I can tell, Grammerly doesn't care about targeted advertising at all, and is secretly a company developed by Youtube specifically to annoy people with plausible deniability. Despite having a lot of data on me -- I watch reviews on Youtube to see if I want to buy certain products -- they ignore this, and have played the exact same Verbo ad at least 30 times. I'll click on a link to a review of an art product, and instead of the clear and obvious move of advertising an art product, which I am currently interested in buying (clearly!), or even something like Sketchbox, for people who aren't committed to any particular art supply and just want to try them out -- instead of that, they load a Grammerly ad for the 50th time. Video companies seem the most susceptible to this model, and it is pretty antagonistic.
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ads are a distraction that break the flow. that is why people hate them. it has nothing to do with solving problems.
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Nah, fuck ads.
The purpose of ads, the reason for their existence, is definitely not to help me get what I want, nor are they tools that primarily serve my interests. If they were, then an advertising agency would be something that I sought out and paid for to help me solve a problem or find a solution. Instead, they're the other thing.
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Ads can be great when their creators put effort into them.
The death of print and TV was disastrous for artisanal advertising.
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I'm not fundamentally against advertising in some form. What I'm against is the form it naturally takes where rather than informing me their purpose is transparently to try and use every trick in the book to subvert my interest to push the maximum number of units at the highest price for the lowest cost. Advertising I'd actually like needs an adversarial component where some agent on my side aggressively curates the recommendations that I receive in a way that I can trust their objectivity. There are certain product reviewers in spaces like board and video games that I think achieve this but it's vitally important to their credibility, and they know this, that their revenue stream is never even suspected of crossing paths with the marketing departments of the products. What ads reddit pushes to me has nothing to do with whether purchasing the product advertised is a good idea for me and everything to do with how much the ad company paid to have the product pushed and thus it has no useful signal to me.
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