Yeah, that was what I was getting at. I believe it in theory, but in practice I find all advertising to be the sort of implicit-mugging the grandparent is describing.
> but I learn about new FOSS projects on here every day because the maintainers and developers are willing to 'advertise' them to me.
That’s an excellent counter-point. I’ve had the same experience.
Unfortunately, it's a useful thing that people have used to prey on our inquisitive simian brains.
Personally, I'm in favor of doing things like banning billboards &c, but it's hard to draw a line on banning advertising in general.
Others are there to promote lock in to some cloud service, or increase the authors rep as a 10x hacker and those are skeevy because the author is skeevy and did not have joy in their hearts.
All corporate ads ate the second kind.
Its also so very rarely factual - the idea is more for you to believe that 'Disney Land is an important milestone for all happy families'. Or 'Stella Artois is the type of beer a sexy intellectual orders - that's you right?'
I completely believe that ads are a huge part of our culture.
Volume of ads I see is proportional to dollar amount imo. Outside of movie trailers I don't think I've ever seen an ad and been happy to know about whatever it was.