You can just search for it, you don’t need ads for that. Ads is a really bad way to find out about options, because it’s never about quality, it’s all about appearance.
How would you know what to search for? Some advertising is fine - a sign for a restaurant or industry mailers or magazines, “related products”, etc etc are all very tame forms of advertising. The problem is hyperintrusive advertising which has now spiraled so far into hell that it drives a model of data harvesting and content slop that’s slowly tainting all access to information we have.
Because of the needs I have, when I am hungry ill search for recipes or restaurants. When my apartment needs cleaning ill search for cleaning supplies, when I am bored ill look up what movies are playing.
I actually can not come up with a single situation where advertisement would be needed or helpful in anyway. I also do not have a problem with smaller advertisement, but in my dreams they are all banned regardless. Won’t be missing those.
So how do people get on the internet or in the store? Heck, how do you know that the store exists in the first place (and if the store doesn’t have what you need, what do you do?)
I’m just after a middle ground - the current insanity of advertising is obviously too much, but the idea of doing away with it entirely isn’t feasible either. Burning all the advertising execs at the stake might be a good place to start in terms of reforming things…
Normally I look stores up using OSM and I believe I found my ISP through an comparison portal. Sure there could be advertisement involved and I definitely bought many things because of it. I just don’t think we would need that in any way and that the quality of life would even go up if we banned all advertisement.
Its definitely not feasible, at least not in our life times. In my city there was a citizen initiative to ban a lot of public advertisements which did not went through as there were not enough people signing up. So apparently we are not ready for that yet. Burning all the advertising execs does sound like a sensible thing to do though :) Lets settle on that.
I see what you’re saying, but the obvious distinction here is that if someone is actively searching e.g. Google for a product, they don’t mind being shown products (and by extension being advertised to) - they’re actively seeking it out. What everyone has a problem with is being shown advertisements for products when they aren’t seeking them out and in fact actively want to avoid them.
Thank you! The unending intrusiveness of modern advertising really has killed and buried the useful parts of advertising by becoming the norm, I wholeheartedly agree.
You can just search for it, you don’t need ads for that. Ads is a really bad way to find out about options, because it’s never about quality, it’s all about appearance.
How would you know what to search for? Some advertising is fine - a sign for a restaurant or industry mailers or magazines, “related products”, etc etc are all very tame forms of advertising. The problem is hyperintrusive advertising which has now spiraled so far into hell that it drives a model of data harvesting and content slop that’s slowly tainting all access to information we have.
Because of the needs I have, when I am hungry ill search for recipes or restaurants. When my apartment needs cleaning ill search for cleaning supplies, when I am bored ill look up what movies are playing.
I actually can not come up with a single situation where advertisement would be needed or helpful in anyway. I also do not have a problem with smaller advertisement, but in my dreams they are all banned regardless. Won’t be missing those.
Okay, to break down the point: search for them where?
I guess on the internet or in the store.
So how do people get on the internet or in the store? Heck, how do you know that the store exists in the first place (and if the store doesn’t have what you need, what do you do?)
I’m just after a middle ground - the current insanity of advertising is obviously too much, but the idea of doing away with it entirely isn’t feasible either. Burning all the advertising execs at the stake might be a good place to start in terms of reforming things…
Normally I look stores up using OSM and I believe I found my ISP through an comparison portal. Sure there could be advertisement involved and I definitely bought many things because of it. I just don’t think we would need that in any way and that the quality of life would even go up if we banned all advertisement.
Its definitely not feasible, at least not in our life times. In my city there was a citizen initiative to ban a lot of public advertisements which did not went through as there were not enough people signing up. So apparently we are not ready for that yet. Burning all the advertising execs does sound like a sensible thing to do though :) Lets settle on that.
Do you not have friends? Word of mouth recommendations exist.
Relevant XKCD:
The value of word of mouth advertising is the reason we have to deal with the hell that is astroturfing ad campaigns.
Not all word of mouth is advertising. While word mouth advertising is powerful, that argument is still just a straw man.
I see what you’re saying, but the obvious distinction here is that if someone is actively searching e.g. Google for a product, they don’t mind being shown products (and by extension being advertised to) - they’re actively seeking it out. What everyone has a problem with is being shown advertisements for products when they aren’t seeking them out and in fact actively want to avoid them.
Thank you! The unending intrusiveness of modern advertising really has killed and buried the useful parts of advertising by becoming the norm, I wholeheartedly agree.
In the ancient days we had a thing called the yellow pages.
Just FYI, any entry in the Yellow Pages other than the plain text, non-bold, name+phone number format entries were also paid for advertisements.
Yeah, exactly!
The search results are ads. If I’m looking to buy a table, those don’t inherently come with a webpage. The website in its entirety is an ad.