Comment by 👻 darkghost
Re: "Is hating online advertising weird? I asked my son (25)…"
I guess my perspective re ad subsidizing things: in the early days of cable there were no ads. Then you still had to pay for cable and watch ads. This was a violation of the social contract. One tolerated ads over broadcast TV/radio because it was free. In the early days of streaming there were no ads. Hulu had a free tier with ads. This is long gone. Now you are again paying for ads.
YouTube monetizes my watch habits. That should be the end of the deal but instead it is yet more ads, now targeted.
An audio streaming service has a holiday play list. I heard one song and after 10 minutes of ads I switched it off for good.
It's gone over into flagrant cash grab.
Company founders with no ideas on how to create a sustainable business from their web product enshittify their user experience, cram ads and tracking everywhere, lock previously free features behind paywalls, or sell useless digital merchandise. (give your avatar a neat hat!)
The whole business is scummy because fundamentally it is convincing you to spend money on things you don't need. Couple that with the modern web's hands off anything goes even if it's outright malware ads and there really is no lower form of life. Your bank account was drained because your computer got hacked because a mandatory ad played? Sounds like a you problem. The utterly stupid wellness craze we are in is a product of this.
Folks are trying these worthless supplements for things like treating cancer. Still other supplements contain outright illegal ingredients because they come from dodgy suppliers who do not GAF. An unregulated ad environment is pushing online casinos as the solution to all your money woes in a never lose kind of campaign.
No, advertising is what gave us the T zone promoting cigarette use, the patent medicines that killed people and contained illegal drugs, and the current crop of garbage like supplements and cannabis oils containing straight up THC in them where it's illegal, all the crap we hate on the web, and worst of all, we still get the privilege of paying for it. Screw. That.
Sorry, I hate ads.
Mar 02 · 2 months ago
12 Later Comments ↓
🚀 lars_the_bear [OP] · Mar 02 at 17:21:
@darkghost : Wow! Just... wow. In the UK at least, traditional advertising in newspapers and on billboards is subject to at least some level of regulation. You can't advertise cures for cancer, unless you can back up your claims. On the web -- who knows? I presume that UK advertisers still have to submit to regulation but, to be honest, I'm not sure.
We should be teaching our kids not to trust advertising. We probably are, but the advertisers are better funded than we are.
It's actually worse than just saying "Don't trust advertising", or even believing that you don't trust advertising. Because your meatbrain is highly suggestible, and those jingles get stuck in there and with spaced repetition form solid connections. Then, when shopping, you will say to yourself: I have this great idea to try Tide, or buy a Ford truck...
Advertising is a prime example of market failure. It's the only industry that aims to maximise waste. They create artificial needs instead of meeting exitsting needs. Why waste money making a better product when you can spend half as much on a huge psyop campaign to gaslight people into thinking your product makes them healthier, sexier, more socialy connected, respectable, etc. Supply and demand fail when demand can be purchased as a product. This is why society has become so consumerist and why the 100x productivity increases of the last 50 years of technollogy has not led to us working any less.
What's even more profitable is bribing some politicians with a few million to get billion dollar contracts and not have to peddle crap to individuals at all
@lars_the_bear in the US - supplements are basically unregulated. There's a few small exceptions (like prenatal vitamins) but yeah, you could go into a drugstore and buy some supplement. and there's no oversight into safety, how effective it is at actually doing anything, etc like we have for medications.
This results in lots of scams involving supplements. You'll see ads that use non-specific language like "helps with" and other weasel words to imply a supplement is a treatment for something without outright claiming it is. You're basically just buying snake oil.
If government oversight were helpful, the US population would not be predominantly obese, diabetic, and taking Ozempic or whatever the new miracle drug is being advertised non-stop today.
🚀 lars_the_bear [OP] · Mar 03 at 15:54:
@jprjr : supplements are basically unregulatd in the UK, too. But advertising -- at least in its traditional form -- is regulated. So I guess unproven medical treatments are more advertised in unregulated places.
👻 darkghost · Mar 03 at 17:58:
Try feces for all that ails you! Cheap and readily available! Now my lawyers tell me I must utter the magic make this legal phrase. "These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA and are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease."
🚀 thoughtterminatingcliche · Mar 03 at 18:02:
I am like this. The only weird one annoyed by any ad in my surroundings. I also demand people mute commercial breaks, LOL. It is the compressor my friend. Some evil wizard pays up those guys to dial the fucking compressor all the way up. When the commercial break kicks in all hell breaks loose...
Fecal transplants are not entirely without merit, given what we are learning about gut-to-everything connection.
In amateur setting, a messy disaster.
And yes. The wall of noise.
👻 darkghost · Mar 03 at 19:45:
@stack This is something I worked on in the past. A facial cream made of the stuff will not, however, make you younger and sexier. For the latter it is most surely the opposite.
@darkghost, no way! A shit face cream?
Original Post
Is hating online advertising weird? I asked my son (25) how he can bear to watch videos on YouTube, when they're interrupted by advertising every few minutes. He looked at me is if I'd just laid on egg. That, apparently, is just how things are -- he didn't find it odd at all. He found _me_ odd for objecting to it. Do you have to be old, like me, to find online advertising objectionable? The popularity of ad-blockers suggests not, but perhaps only the old folks use them? Is viewing the world...