I don't want ads to show up everywhere, and I don't want them to tell me that they have a solution to my problem _without knowing what my problem is_. I have complained about it before (partly in the wain hope the some facebook engineers will see it), that Facebook does not use the data I freely give it to base its ads on[0], but only what its AI can match me with.
In short, I think there is a time and place for me to enter transaction mode - but not with ads that assume their are smarter or know me better than I do, and not when I get interrupted.
[0]: I am pretty good at blocking third party tracking, but I did tell them what school I went to, that I studied computer science, and when I did. Any basic human would be able to infer that I might like nerdy things and that I have a relatively high income. FB continually feed me slop ads.
A search engine does not only search for products.
Why does it have to be an alternate universe? I have been thinking the same and there it would not be easy, but it could be done, and even if we had people finding lots of loopholes it would greatly restrict advertising.
Besides, even in the extreme where no new media is ever created, would that be so bad? Anna's archive has 38 million books. You would be challenged to even read the index in a lifetime.
Stop buying things from advertisers and it will die on its own.
I hate commercials, they're annoying, I mute/skip them all but that one got through and it's made me consider that you can be too extremist about this like anything else. To an extent, our interests are aligned with advertisers. Of course their information is biased, but an intelligent person can cut through that and take just the raw information, which has value. If there's a new pizza place open on a street I don't drive down, I'd like to know.
Another example. I realized I haven't seen anything but already-familiar movies in recent years because I've closed off all avenues to seeing trailers for movies I'm not already sold on.
You may be intelligent as an individual but your adversary has teams of PhDs, decades of psychological research and tons of personal information on you, now parsed and analysed by AI to target you. Thinking you can see "raw information" is very naive.
Even if you don't believe the claim that X is the best product, it's good to know it exists as a starting point for if/when you ever start research on the options.
We get a little buzz dragging the super value pack off a top shelf or knowing that the bottom shelf economy product is actually made in the same factory as the high priced brand. We are the ones standing in the aisle eyes glazed computing the 1g/£ value of a "get one free offer" vs. the family pack no matter how hard supermarkets obfuscate it with different units on each label. It's a contrarian world-view that assumes by default, that eye-level products have the lowest value.
I used to humbly assume I must be vulnerable to advertising but I later realised I actually have years of expenses that show otherwise. They show I am a cheap bastard. I don't make impulse purchases, mostly buy fruit and veg, don't buy branded products if it can be avoided and major purchases will be drawn out optimisation processes with spreadsheets and using return processes to compare alternatives if necessary.
What I can humbly reveal is that this is no brag, this is no moral virtue, just a personality trait that is not always rational and comes with swings and roundabouts e.g. good opportunities are rejected with suspicion, important purchases are procrastinated and we can make poor use of our time to indulge our psychology e.g. walk 10 minutes to the next store to buy something for 50p cheaper just because being gouged 50p physically hurts!
To be fair, I've gotten some great ads for things I never would have found myself, on places like Instagram. And yet I didn't get to choose when or how the ads were delivered.
(Cable) TV ads are not more consensual just because you were using the ad blocker of the time: DVR
That said, instagram still has a bunch of obnoxious ads I don't want. It's really not as user tunable as the "opt-in bazar" model should be. But that is the solution, ads should be 100% opt-in. You should be in control of when you want to go browsing vendor wares, and when you do that then sure they can hawk their stuff to you, but otherwise not.
Given media is advertising funded, they need it to be necessary. It means they cannot run cultural content that informs you of things of a commercial nature. It would be to give away their revenue generating product for free.
Rather than your example showing the advertising-economy is successfully informing you of things, it may show that it has extinguished an entire category of cultural programming that could have kept you entertained and informed without being a pay-to-win manipulation game.
Meanwhile, at the top of this thread, we have someone advocating seizing control of all public speech and media to forcibly eliminate any perceived advertising messaging. With very little thought in the replies paid toward the potential unintended consequences.
What could possibly go wrong creating a centralized body to police all speech for perceived commercial intent. I’m sure it would be all roses and sunshine!
I thought the internet was funded by internet subscriber fees.
What are we paying ISPs for.
Advertisers do not pay our internet access fees.
Any internet subscriber can publish on the internet. No advertisers needed.
Owning a radio station or TV channel is expensive and may require funding from advertisers.
But an internet subscription is affordable in the same way as a TV set or a radio receiver. If an internet subscriber has a reachable IP address then she can publish.
For example, HN readers are known to enjoy the comments section, perhaps more than the submitted news items themselves. But HN commenters do not get paid for their "content". Many years prior to the existence of so-called "tech" companies, this phenomenon was observable on Usenet. Without advertisers and without payment.
Internet users are perhaps unwilling to pay for content published to the internet; they are however willing to publish internet content without payment.
Don't just imagine. Think. There must be some argument that advertisement isn't the same thing as the "speech" in free speech. I haven't figured it out, but I keep hoping someone else will.