> there's a zero percent chance any social media platform such as Facebook would ever ban ads.
Yes, this is what the article says. This means we must force them to.
Yes, this is what the article says. This means we must force them to.
Advertising represents 98.5% of Facebook's revenue and you're proposing that we (btw, who is "we"? They are a global company) tell them they can't run ads? What exactly remains for the 43,000 employees and the 5% of the S&P500 market cap that you just decided to eliminate?
It's not impossible to imagine that, say, Microsoft and Apple, in competition for users, could start filtering advertisements in the browsers. That this pulls users from Chrome. And changes the landscape yet another time.
In the absence of abusive advertising people would not suddenly stop spending money. They might even be more inclined to seek out new experiences without a constant mental assault by the largest corporations with the deepest coffers to bury them in their ads. Regardless of the way it goes, advertising is absolutely a net deficit to a small business - they don't have the capital resources or scale to permeate culture the way large corporations can. And if they are expending their limited resources trying to participate in the rat race they are sacrificing value to their existing customers and shortchanging their own growth for what is effectively an extortion of participation - if everyone else is deluged in manipulation to rob them and you don't participate there will be no money left over once the wallet has been rung dry by as many emotional vectors as possible for them to find you.
And with ads the mechanism is really obvious—-it helps people identify products that solve their problems.
The economy growing is not necessarily a good thing. For instance, the economy would get bigger if the government passed a law requiring everyone to buy mud pies — a mud pie industry would spring up, employ lots of people, and add to the country's GDP. But society wouldn't be better to live in for it, because mud pies are useless. Likewise, the economy would be smaller if people didn't constantly replace their clothes to keep up with the latest corporate-engineered fashion, or if they stopped buying books like Rich Guy's System for Making Guaranteed Free Money in Real Estate, but people would still be better off if they did.
But I don't really think that adverse economic impact is one of them.
The shortsightedness of such thinking amazes me.
If people couldn't easily monetize the platform the way Facebook does it opens up the market for diverse platforms. Monetizing email service is notoriously difficult and Gmails lack of in-app advertising sets a playing field nobody else can exploit for massive growth. That has probably in large part been what has kept IMAP alive while XMPP and other open communication protocols died - the ubiquity and lack of ability to dilute the user experience with ads for profit keeps predatory competition out. That hasn't stopped Google from doing some seedy shit in recent years with their position but even they have to be conservative on radical anti-user behavior that would drive their base off Gmail - because their userbase can leave. Its the beauty of decentralization.
It seems more delusional to predict the future (nobody would use it) with confidence.
I know framing such things as false dichotomies is kinda what educated Western intellectuals do, but God or nature impose no such limitations on us. We are free to think, negotiate, create hybrid solutions and adjust as necessary, and so forth and so on. We have the ability to largely be the masters of our own destiny, but waking up and making that choice is our responsibility, not God's.
Ok then, can you restate your prediction of the future without the use of figures of speech? Calling people delusional who disagree with an utterly vague warning seems a bit inappropriate.
> It's easy to settle the question with a poll: ask people worldwide if you 'd pay $40/year for FB. My bet would be it's < 5%
I like this much better, as it is no longer suggestive that certain approaches cannot be done for certain reasons, and instead only poses a perfectly valid question with an explicitly speculative bet about what the answer would be. Fantastic.