Advertising is fundamentally corrosive to society and should be outlawed with few and carefully tailored exceptions. Any business models that consequently fail, fail because their externalities to collective society are now priced in.
Weird that This is not the case in the US?
This doesn't mean the movie article (or indeed the hardware comparison) can't be sponsored. It just means the ad shouldn't be able to be shoved in your face unsolicited.
So, is another page, that links to that page also an ad? Because maybe the homepage that runs Cisco-sponsored reviews might also have a cisco-sponsored banner. And even if not, maybe over time they become associated as "the thing that reviews things were cisco always wins"...
Oh, and what if it wasn't a sponsorship. What if instead Cisco just gave them the hardware to test at a discount? Or for free? Would you not write a slightly more favourable review for nvidia if they gifted you their top-tier GPU? What if instead of gifting you the GPU, they just give it to you at a discount? Or earlier than normal customers? Or they just have nvidia-stickers for your kids in the box?
Ads are an extremly slipperly slope, they're part of human nature; everyone I ever met is trying to tell me about (=market) themselves, their beliefs, their current hobbies, that new burger place down the road, ....
It's an issue but I'd be happy with a 90% solution over a 0% solution.
In the end, on paper, the studio has no editorial oversight, but in practice you need to give them good reviews (essentially, adverts) if your business is to survive.
This is exactly how it works, by the way.
Advertising is everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, to an extent far beyond what you're used to from home. Posters, billboards, fliers, TV commercials, product placement, celebrity endorsements - you can barely step outside without being bombarded by yet another obnoxious advertisement. And "obnoxious" is an understatement: American adverts are noticeably more loud, garish, cheesy, repetitive and attention-grabbing.
It's really quite something. And it's exhausting.
The idea that prescription medication is marketed to the general public on TV is entirely foreign to me, the descriptions of conditions that 99% of people wouldn't have heard of make me wonder just who they are connecting with.
Then you get to the "side affects may include headaches, vomiting, diarrhoea, haemorrhaging, spontaneous combustion, exploding eyeballs, bubonic plague and instant death - do not take this drug if you are a living breathing human being" bit and you can't help but laugh. Who goes to their doctor after watching one of these?
And "Dude Wipes" - I mean is that a spoof?
For example I buy SaaS, and the way I hear about most tools are ads. I choose what to buy via references and evaluation, but ads are often how to get things on my radar. Without Ads, I would have bought worse software in the past
I don't even know how to reply to that, but I feel the need to call it out as, potentially, the most creepy-as-fuck quote-unquote justification of literally anything.
You remarked to a coworker that it would be a great justice if a Porta Potty truck overturned onto a spammer, and you respond to your coworker —good, hit them with another. Alas that karma does not work that way.
You forgot when the modern web got so bad—indeed, has only continued to, well, you have a term for it now, "enshittification"—as you do not recall the moment of souring. Was it a decade ago, or more like two?
You is here used in the Hindu sense of you being divided from you, as that is a good way to explain you being both a great fan of ads and you holding them in extremely low regard. You may also recall that you sometimes make "you're either with us, or against us" pronouncements.
If you have a specific problem you're trying to solve, then you will find out about the relevant categories.
That CNN clip is basically South Park in real life.
I take it that you have not been to Tokyo or Seoul, then?
Most foreign people would just gloss over them but even most temples (say in Kyoto) have the names of companies which donated money plastered all over the place.
Even the famous tori gates at inari have cool looking Japanese text which basically says "Applebees", "Yamato Metal Industries", and so on.
Some of my faves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRLe826lyao
My main curiosity was about the legal classification of product placement etc.
Interesting, why?
They incentivize businesses to maximize for engagement which generally promotes harmful content over informational content. Empty informational calories.
Unsolicited advertisement tries to induce a sense of demand in consumers which they didn't have to begin with. This is done using many different tactics, e.g. by disguising the true cost, exaggerating the benefits or simply misinforming. This tips the utility in favor of the supplier while making it harder for the consumer to navigate the market.
However, I agree with the position that all ads with some small exceptions are a negative thing. I think the incentives behind advertising are inherently perverse because of what they are at their core, an attempt to manipulate (if they work then a successful attempt!). They are dishonest and inauthentic by design. It’s possible to create an ad that is like “hey this thing exists and this is strictly what it does without any exaggeration” but that basically never happens because the people who make ads have no external incentive to do that.
I think a much more ideal situation is where a user searches for something on a search engine, or an LLM or whatever, and they are shown as unbiased as possible results. This way the people making good products get their exposure and the people looking stuff get the stuff they want. Of course there’s a lot of problems in practice with that as well.
I don’t claim to have a solution, and I don’t think making an add is like super immoral, but I think ads are a scourge on our society and culture.
If I were to propose a general law to regulate advertisements, then it would be that if you serve content that qualifies as being an advertisement to a user, then the choice of advertisement must be independent of any data about that user. This includes the username and any details the user has entered or which has been collected as the user has been using the service, and also any ephemeral data associated with the session such as IP address. That is, the choice of ad is completely parametric in the user; if two users request the content from different locations, then they should in principle be served the same ad (ignoring other state such as ad impression counters which would still be allowed).
This would probably not be good for the ad-tech industry but I think it could remove many of the perverse incentives leading to excessive data collection.
In a knowledge economy your attention is your highest commodity, and ads want to take all of it.
One of the strongest rules I have for my household is that my children don't see any ads. I pay for Netflix, Youtube, and Spotify and use adblockers on all devices. And my tv is not connected to anything that can deliver flow tv - the biggest mindrot of all.
How do you find out about new movies, concerts, etc.?
Most customers don't know themselves that a solution to their problem (which they might not even notice) exists.
Manipulative ads are bad, yes. But ads that expand your knowledge of what's available in the world are good in my opinion.
I found out about ChatGPT and became a paying subscriber in january 2023, because it was all over hckrnews, youtube, twitter and tech media in general.
New stuff and recommendations are everywhere. They are even a form of entertainment themselves. I watch several tech channels on youtube just to see what cool new stuff there is. There are channels and websites for movies, books, home renovation, hobbies and anything really if you want to know more.
No ads needed.
One issue now, on a world without ads, is what incentive would also those actors have to provide you with that information? Search engine, review websites, YouTube channels, etc. Of course, we could pay them for this information. They could also have affiliate links, but doesn't then it become an ad?
I think we hate ads now simply because they are implemented poorly and there's a lot of low quality, deceiving ads for useless products.
I play table-tennis a lot, and my shoes are always wet after a session, I usually left them outside to dry, but it doesn't work in bad weather (which is common here). I then saw an ad for shoe-fresh (a dry rack/sanitizer for your shoes), I got one, and it has completely solved this problem. Maybe I could have found about it in a different way, but this is how I found it.
If you want to buy some random games because they are discounted, you can just go to the corresponding section in the Steam store.
The point of the popup is to distract you from whatever you're doing right now to get you to make an impulse purchase, as opposed to a well-researched one. That's exactly how people end up with Steam accounts that have literally hundreds of never-played games in them.
Viewing a review on a site where the reviewer got sent a set of headphones to review is also advertisement. It's just not a placed ad.
Just like you can visit hacker news and see all the stories right there, do they just manifest through out the day? Or is there a group of people trudging through the new stories to pick which ones to elevate?
Having worked on the product side, I can tell you that when you google a product looking for organic reviews, what you are seeing is the sprouts of seeds planted by advertising.
Trust me, try and launch an amazing product with no advertising.
Then do it with a standard set of web ads, wait a few months, and go see the people on reddit talking about your product despite you never doing more than buying standard website/social media ads (not sponsored posts, just regular ads)
Advertisement is 99.999% bad people doing bad things to you.
Personally, I chat with friends over a beer and talk about new things. More often than not, my friends have great recommendations on things to try — both old and new.
> How do you find out about new movies, concerts, etc.?
I go check the movie listings / concert venues’ schedules. Or look up the schedule for a band I like. I don’t constantly browse the lineup; only when I get the itch to go to a show.
Normally I’m the one engaging research into new experiences, and it seems to be going fine. The other month I was reading Troy by Stephen Fry. When I finished, I thought it would be nice if he covered the Odyssey, so I looked it up and saw he is releasing an ebook for it in the Spring. In the meantime, I decided to read the Iliad. I wasn’t sure which translation would be good, so I searched online and found that Emily Wilson has a great translation. And now hopefully a reader has benefited from m y suggestion here.
Most ads related to these fields seem to me that they are designed to sell me something I don’t necessarily want or need. I feel capable of taking action and looking up things that do interest me. It may be different for areas outside of entertainment, but I’d have to think on that more.
Back when Google was great, they kind of acted as an advertising police on the entire internet, keeping ads unobtrusive and negatively ranking sites with bad user experiences. That system worked pretty well back in the day (although definitely not perfect), and I think it gives a good model to start from if we as a society ever decide to try and fix this hellscape we're living in.
I never hated ads when we had full-page ads in magazines and you had to skip multiple pages of ads to get to the actual articles. But selling my data makes them too much money, so I do my best to never have them load on the internet.
It's difficult to run a business without advertising in a world full of advertising. If others can get to your customers before they find you then yes that's a problem. But all you get from paying to advertise is to get back to where you would have been without ads (assuming your competitors spend a similar amount).
Ads should show if and only if the user asked for them. There are plenty of people who intentionally opt out of ad blockers to support their favorite websites, or who enjoy browsing ads and shopping. There's a reason ad-only TV channels (24-hour infomercial stuff) are viable despite being able to be turned off at will, and plenty of people subscribe to product-promotion magazines (catalogues). I'm sure there are websites for those interests, too.
What should be outlawed is mixing unsolicited content into solicited. If I solicit a video on black holes, or a blog article on Python, it should not be allowed to interrupt it with a dishonest, manipulative appraisal of some VPN service. That's immoral and disgusting.