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Comment by pyinstallwoes | Hacker News Reader

SEO / billboards / paid-for advertising is basically legal propaganda (arguably a form of mind control or more neutral we can say reality shaping through narrative structuring).

I think the only place advertising should be allowed is in a marketplace setting, anywhere else is "public domain" and shouldn't be allowed in my opinion. It is the root to many evils, it is the mechanism that trends towards hacking the user in the loop in a positive feedback system, which also optimizes at the users expense yet depends on the user. Quite parastic.

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> I think the only place advertising should be allowed is in a marketplace setting

That's the horrifying beauty of it. Everything has been turned into a marketplace.

Everything is a marketplace. In all situations, the human being follows incentices.

The first does not follow from the second. Historically, incentives on human behavior have tended much more towards collaboration than competition. If all human behavior was framed as a competition, we would not have been able to construct communities.

>Historically, incentives on human behavior have tended much more towards collaboration than competition

Humans spent far longer in kill others mode than in don't kill others mode. Incentives to not kill others is fairly new in history.

Can you cite the pop-sci TV show you got that from? You've got it exactly the wrong way around.

Evidence of deadly human-on-human violence mostly starts showing up with the Neolithic period, before that humans didn't go out of their way to kill each other as much. It looks a lot like you need to be settled and amass possessions to give people a good enough reason to kill each other. That's recent behavior as far as our species is concerned.

https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-e...

Death by homicide seems much worse the further back you go, on balance.

When you say “fairly new” what timeframe are you thinking about?

Just because we have a ton of evidence of humans collaborating as far as historical artifacts go back. But then of course with the appropriate perspective almost everything is fairly new. Would you call Göbekli Tepe fairly new for example?

After all 9000 BCE was just yesterday compared to the invention of multicellular life for example. Which is also massively about cooperation.

That's just the ultra-capitalist creed.

And that's just name calling.

Can you name a modern monetary theory that does not model supply and demand (production and consumption , if you prefer) and does not devolve quickly into black markets in practice?

Following incentives is not the same as a marketplace. Marketplaces have a number of additional assumptions.

* Items are capable of being traded.

* The items being traded are unchanged by the process of assigning a numeric value.

* Abstract concepts such as “risk” and “investment” are best measured in the same numeric values as are used for concrete items.

Adding to that, even if I were to accept the reasoning that following incentives is equivalent to being in a marketplace, your statement that “In all situations, the human being follows incentives .” is simply untrue. It ignores the existence of self-sacrifice (e.g. a soldier sacrificing themself to save comrades), the existence of self-harm (e.g. Jonestown), and the distinction between incentives and perceived incentives (e.g. also Jonestown).

Ew, yuck

I hate ads as much as everyone else (and actively block the hell out of it)

At the same time, ads made a lot of the free web possible.

I run services making money with ads: I would not be able to work on them without.

Or maybe the revenue I would make is too little to bother with all the stupid EU regulations around VAT - ads offer a simple solution and you get a single B2B transaction, while providing values to Customers.

If we had easy to use cheap (or free? I'm sure we can work out a model based on profiting off the analytics alone if we streamline the service and don't become as bloated as VISA / Mastercard) microtransactions with low fees and no ***ing bureaucrauts, maybe ads would not be needed as much.

But we don't. And a big chunk of the last 20 years of internet innovations was sponsored with ads money.

> At the same time, ads made a lot of the free web possible.

What made all the free web possible was free software, not ads. Google and the likes created empires through ads and breaking laws, we owe nothing to them. The sooner they go, the better. Also, they don't own the ads business model, there are healthier ways to sell, buy and deliver ads and that's not what Google and Meta are doing. They need to go.

> And a big chunk of the last 20 years of internet innovations was sponsored with ads money.

and a much bigger chunk was killed with it.

>and a much bigger chunk was killed with it.

To say nothing of the opportunity costs. They killed a lot of what was, but they’ve also prevented so much of the promise of the internet from coming to fruition. Lost time, lost talent and lives, and a gaping hole in society where a more productive internet might have been. Somehow we let them.

You are right. But the pendulum swings back.

It’s hard to swing back over walled gardens, they employ behavioral tactics to hook people into certain behaviors. When internet was new it grew organically, these tactics weren’t needed. Now all large platforms do it. Imagine how much effort it would take to unhook people off doomscrolling for example.

Yeah but at the same time, 1% of the internet today is bigger than what I thought it was a huge market 20 years ago, when I started. And now with the new tech available I can reach even a bigger global audience.

Big tech became too big even for themselves. Infinite growth is impossible and the capital market will punish them heavily when they stop growing. And they will. This big tech recess might never end. The likes of Google and Meta will go into maintenance mode and operate with much smaller engineering teams. I'm betting on the end of an era.

It is possible it’s the end of an era and when an era ends another one begins. Maybe something good will come out of the ashes but it will take a while…

It was all considered risky and niche (anything on the internet).

What made the free web possible was first and foremost, access to it.

Then, probably a combination of technological, cultural, and economic factors and the human beings behind the scenes who worked to either create software to give it away or to make money with ads by creating foobar service.

Yes, free software, and yes, because of advertising.

It’s both.

It is not both. The free web would never exist without free software. But would have thrived even more without those parasites.

It doesn't sound like you hate ads as much as I do. :)

What I do: work a day job to make money and then give my content away for free, or charge what the market will bear. No ads, no SEO. Classic, old-school Internet.

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