Comment by commodoreboxer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by commodoreboxer | Hacker News Reader

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Interesting. In my experience, advertisement and the incentives around it have led to the most devastatingly widespread removal of value in human culture and social connections that we've seen in this generation. Huge amounts of effort wasted on harvesting attention, manipulating money away from people, isolating and fostering extremism, building a massive political divide. And centralizing wealth more and more. The amount of human effort wasted on advertisement is staggering and shocking.

I don't think your average adult is inspired by the idea of AI generated advertisements. Probably a small bubble of people including timeshare salesmen. If advertisements were opt-in, I expect a single digit percentage of people would ever elect to see them. I don't understand how anybody can consider something like that a net good for the world.

How does non-consensually harassing people into spending money on things that don't need add value to all the world's citizens?

"Adding value" and "Generating wealth" are always the vague euphemisms that these guys fall back to when they try to justify much of today's economic activity. Adding value for who? Generating whose wealth? The answer is usually "people who are already wealthy." Of course, they'll downplay the massive funneling of wealth to these people, and instead point to the X number of people "lifted out of poverty in the 20th century" as if capitalism and commerce was the sole lifting force.

I wish some of these people would think about how they'd explain to their 5 year old in an inspiring way what they do for a living: And not just "I take JSON data from one layer in the API and convert it to protobufs in another layer of the API" but the economic output of their jobs: "Millions of wealthy companies give us money because we can divert 1 billion people's attention from their families and loved ones for about 500 milliseconds, 500 times a day. We take that money and give some of it to other wealthy companies and pocket the rest."

> If advertisements were opt-in, I expect a single digit percentage of people would ever elect to see them.

I mean, you'd see the same thing if paying for your groceries were opt-in. Is that also a net bad for the world? Ads do enable the costless (or cost-reduced) provision of services that people would otherwise have to pay for.

> I mean, you'd see the same thing if paying for your groceries were opt-in.

Is that seriously the comparison you want to make here? Most of us think the world would be better if you didn't have to pay for food, yes.

Ads are not charity. There is clearly a cost, otherwise they would lose money. They do not generate money out of thin air. "Generate" and "extract" aren't synonyms.

They do not enable any costless anything at all. They obfuscate extraction of money to make it look costless, but actually end up extracting significant amounts of money from people. Ad folks whitewash it to make it sound good, but extracting money in roundabout ways is not creating value.

> you'd see the same thing if paying for your groceries were opt-in.

Groceries are opt-in. Until you realize you don't want to hunt and cook your own food, then you opt back in for survival.

UBlock origin + some subscriptions show I'd definitely would love to opt out of IRL ads.

>Is that also a net bad for the world?

World, yes. We have to tech to end food scarcity, but poor countries struggle while rich countries throw out enough food each day to feed said poor countries.

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