There are lots of cultural opposition movements online, like against work exploitation, consumerism, car culture, surveillance, intellectual property, etc. I can find communities on lemmy for all those topics. But regarding a more general opposition to advertisements and marketing, other than the occasional person telling others to use adblockers online (what about ads in every day life?), I fail to see organized attempts to challenge advertisements. There is a lot that can be scrutinized. Ethical concerns such as manipulation, lack of consent and just the simple fact your attention is for sale. The effects range from damage to environment, to our mental health, to harming industries themselves, lowering product quality and maintaining monopolies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outdoor_advertising#Regulations billboards are banned in several cities and, surprisingly, in four entire states of the US.
I’ve been pushing it for a while now.
But, we need to start harassing marketers.
We need to tell them “No, I won’t and haven’t ever subscribed to your shit. I’ve never bought your shit. You spend millions to shove your shitty product and service in my face, everywhere I go and everything I use. I will continue to use adblockers to spite you. I will shit all over your product and service in anyway I can. I will send back the shit you’ve sent me. And if anything, I will get personal with you because you’ve been harassing me and getting away with it for however long, just because you’ve spent millions to do so. I am making it even.”
The marketers don’t make the decision. They’re underpaid wage slaves just reading script.
It depends what you mean by movement, and where you mean.
There are already some direct action movements on the ground, like Subvertisers International, Adbusters and historically B.U.G.A.U.P to name some famous Western ones.
Depends. Fediverse challenges advertisement. Adblockers challenge advertisement. People switching to piracy after amazon and netflix pushing for more adds challenges advertisements.
Is there a united movement? No. But that’s partly because those that do care have an adblocker and rarely see ads.
I remember a time when webpages had banner ads that didn’t flicker and make it impossible to read the page, and that also weren’t based on corporations spying on you. If it had stopped there, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. Even a few second pre-roll ad before a video starts based on the video content and not the user’s history would be annoying, but something a lot of people would tolerate. But no, number must go up!
No it will not. In order for an anti-advertising movement to grow it will need to advertise…
I dont think the main stream will ever meaningfully turn against advertising. We’ve collectively demonstrated that we’re willing to accept advertising and trade our privacy in exchange for free content and services.
That said, the worse the main stream web gets the better the “side web” gets. The good parts of the web will always exist, even if they’re not as popular as they once were.
Do you have any recommendations of cool ‘side web’ sites that are worth visiting?
Not really, although you might try the 512kb club.
Im talking more about technologies and platforms. IRC, XMPP, RSS…
I think the abundance of tools available to block ads online hints at a movement in itself. We don’t need a leader or a central committee.
The wrinkle I see here is that a generalized ‘everybody’ hates ads but ‘everybody’ is also aware of the fact that they finance a large swath of stuff that we would have to pay for otherwise.
I think “most people” would tolerate advertising if it wasn’t so predatory and invasive (especially for apps/sites that a person values). So the solution to the “wrinkle” has been hiding in plain sight for years.
Honestly, advertising is very dystopian. Online tracking being the obvious first example.
But that’s not all. How should I block physical ads in the city? Not only does it ruin the view, but roadside billboards surely caused at least one death by distracting a driver, and ads can get quite distasteful.
Also, it’s not just roadside - they’re plastered everywhere! Buildings, bus stops, right in the middle of the sidewalk. Some are classic paper, some are of the TV screen type. Some are quite small and inconspicuous, but a lot are huge enough to be seen from at least half a mile away.
Physical ads don’t finance anything. They’re just obnoxious. I don’t know how succeptible to ads other people are, but for me it takes an actually good offer to entice me - and usually that’s heard on radio or seen on TV (as far as ads go).
Chose your own dystopia. Where no ads exist and everything is pay per view/read/report/etc. Or the one we’re in.
The bigger problem with traffic deaths is that we developed a system of transportation that relies heavily on cars that are mostly driven by humans. Removing billboards is not going to improve on that that much. But underwear model billboard pileups are a thing. But so are those caused by drivers on their phones and my guess there are way more of those.
Tracking and selling of information has gotten out of hand, no doubt. It is political decisions or a lack thereof that got us here.
Btw everybody thinks they’re immune to advertising. And we’re not.
The unofficial wisdom of marketing is that half of any advertising budget is wasted. They just don’t know which half. So they continue. This whole thing boils down to the fiduciary responsibilities to provide as much value to shareholders again, the bane of capitalism. They cannot afford to check which half is wasted.
And just for some context here: personally I don’t mind billboard ads to be honest.
Chose your own dystopia. Where no ads exist and everything is pay per view/read/report/etc. Or the one we’re in.
Ads being a replacement for paying applies to internet services (social media, news sites, etc. that you can use for free). When you have billboards on the side of the road, you still have to pay the road toll. When you see ads in public transport, you still have to pay the ticket. When ads are shown on a TV channel, you still have to pay the subscription.
Online ads, as insufferable as they are, are still more clearly justifiable from the end user’s point of view than traditional ones.
You could argue my take is too accepting of the current situation and I would agree with that. At the same time, I would argue yours is simplifying things quite a bit. Subscription TV channels came after free-to-air channels with commercials. This may depend on where you live in the world but most places have at least one local station or a selection of them broadcast through the air, not cable or satellite, and not subscription based. Financed through commercials or in some countries also through a license model (like in the UK). Cable/satellite/subscription channels are iterations on the model brought to you by capitalism. Ads in public transport can lower ticket prices. Billboards can help lower rental rates in buildings and their revenue adds to the tax intake of the community they’re in. If you think it already takes too long to get potholes fixed, it would take even longer without them. Not all roads are toll roads. I get it: you don’t like billboards. You’re going to get all these unintended side effects if they were banned tomorrow.
Online ads are insufferable. I’m running 3-4 plugins to avoid them. I’m also normally watching broadcast TV on DVR so I can skip through the commercial breaks. I bail on any subscription service that adds ads.
The problem online is the cause of the problem. It’s the simplicity with which data can be collected and the lack of regulation. It’s also generally still paying off a debt incurred when in the early days of www users got accustomed to getting everything ‘for free.’ Traditional media has lowered the price dramatically of its own offerings to get new eyeballs online while older streams of income still paid for most expenses, like the income from TV commercial revenue or sales of printed paper. And as these traditional sources of great rivers of money decreased over decades, the ones that replaced it were digital trickles in danger of drying out. That brought about a “militarization” of online ads, ever more targeted and annoying. This problem needs a multi-pronged approach including regulation of data collection and new financing models for media in general.
I’d join. Ads do nothing but damage to society. How much? Well they manipulate people to make suboptimal choices and waste at least as much as the advertisers budget (on average), or they would stop doing it. So it’s at least 775 billion dollars per year. Rising annually. Enough to end world hunger and homelessness.
My eyes opened when a videogame in a company I worked for (I worked on another title) was made under hard conditions, polished, pushed under almost burnout conditions to be finished “in time”, and the budget for commercials was 4x the dev budget…
Im here to remind you that someone is wasting untold millions marketing GTA6.
Rockstar could literally say nothing, preview nothing, zero demos, zero screenshots and drop GTA6 randomly one weekend and make a billion dollars.
Yet the money is wasted.
not until poverty ends
Unfortunately people are too addicted to stuff and tolerant of the rich and greedy to push back. Ads are accepted, along with the many other ills of consumerism and overreach.
There is relatively big ones including political organization who cover ads, or sue all ads not matching environmental laws, and a whole ad-free social media trend like for example Lemmy
I have met several people who told me they don’t mind advertising. Unfortunately, I don’t think you’re gonna convince enough of the normies to get rid of advertising wholesale
On the other hand, I think pretty much everyone can agree that the current amount of advertising is excessive, especially when consuming media. A movement against excessive advertising would be a lot more successful imo
I did bump into this page, but it seems what they do is they buy air time intended for ads and place a kind of subverted piece in what is apparently called “culture jamming”. I was hoping more for an organic kind of movement on social media that gets people to talk about the issues more clearly and rethink what is acceptable.
I fail to see organized attempts to challenge advertisements.
I think lot of that is embedded in the privacy communities/movement, so it gets easily overlooked as a separate part, even though most of the time it actually is the cause of the disease. Many times it’s just easier to treat the symptoms (“just install adblocker, bro”) because the real cure is to topple the entire system and challenge our late stage capitalism. That tends to be a bit too much for a “normie” who doesn’t necessarily even see the constant flow of ads as a problem and even if they do, installing a browser plugin tends to be “lol, too much work”
