> Without advertising, you wouldn't even know that many products and services exist.
This is a vastly positive tradeoff. The number of products which would improve my life, versus the number of products I am inundated with daily, is a negligible ratio.
> You can't rely on word-of-mouth for everything.
That's true. However, I can rely on independent review sites, and I could probably rely on search engines to find me products that solve problems when I search for them, if they weren't controlled by advertisers.
Nobody is saying rely on word-of-mouth. That's a straw man.
> Of course, so many advertisers have abused their power that blocking ads is a good choice for many reasons, but don't make the mistake of calling all advertising "evil". Without it, how do you know a new movie is coming soon, or that someone's invented and is selling a new computer peripheral, for instance?
There are a number of movie reviewers I follow, and a few friends who have similar taste in movies as me. I'm not interested in computer peripherals, but if I were, I imagine Wirecutter contains information, and there are probably other similar sites.
Advertisers are not helping me find movies to watch or computer peripherals I need. They're helping themselves, and in a way that's aligned with harming me. I never saw an ad for Everything Everywhere All At Once, which was my favorite movie last year--my friend Adam invited me to see it. I did see a ton of astroturfing for White Lotus, which was a complete waste of my time to watch two episodes of. Why would I want ads?
Stop this nonsense about how we need ads. We don't.
> The old-style small, highly-targeted, text-only ads that Google used to show alongside search results really were the pinnacle of advertising I think. They were great for learning about something that would fix whatever problem you were googling about.
God forbid Google return the solution to your problem as a search result, you know, like a functioning search engine.
This really is the most absurdly missing-the-point example you could have chosen.
This is a vastly positive tradeoff. The number of products which would improve my life, versus the number of products I am inundated with daily, is a negligible ratio.
> You can't rely on word-of-mouth for everything.
That's true. However, I can rely on independent review sites, and I could probably rely on search engines to find me products that solve problems when I search for them, if they weren't controlled by advertisers.
Nobody is saying rely on word-of-mouth. That's a straw man.
> Of course, so many advertisers have abused their power that blocking ads is a good choice for many reasons, but don't make the mistake of calling all advertising "evil". Without it, how do you know a new movie is coming soon, or that someone's invented and is selling a new computer peripheral, for instance?
There are a number of movie reviewers I follow, and a few friends who have similar taste in movies as me. I'm not interested in computer peripherals, but if I were, I imagine Wirecutter contains information, and there are probably other similar sites.
Advertisers are not helping me find movies to watch or computer peripherals I need. They're helping themselves, and in a way that's aligned with harming me. I never saw an ad for Everything Everywhere All At Once, which was my favorite movie last year--my friend Adam invited me to see it. I did see a ton of astroturfing for White Lotus, which was a complete waste of my time to watch two episodes of. Why would I want ads?
Stop this nonsense about how we need ads. We don't.
> The old-style small, highly-targeted, text-only ads that Google used to show alongside search results really were the pinnacle of advertising I think. They were great for learning about something that would fix whatever problem you were googling about.
God forbid Google return the solution to your problem as a search result, you know, like a functioning search engine.
This really is the most absurdly missing-the-point example you could have chosen.