If you're asking whether advertising works, there is plenty of science making clear that it does, without fishing for anecdata.
As to whether every company buying ads is making a good investment, mileage may vary - but the blunt answer to your question is that yes, people do purchase things because they saw ads for it, the advertising economy is well understood. Companies like Google whose fortunes rest almost entirely on the known efficacy of advertising are not full of idiots who have never thought about whether or not ads actually work.
"Is an economy based on selling attention ultimately the most beneficial and productive one for all participants" is a separate question, but it's not the question you're asking.
> there is plenty of science making clear that it does
Funded, ran, and interpreted by whom?
I can't remember the last time I bought anything just because of its ad, that I already did not know about or was going to buy anyway, nor I know anyone who did.
In fact, if I see an ad TOO often, it permanently turns me off the product or service.
The whole ads racket seems like a case of an emperor with no clothes at best, and a thin veil for mass surveillance at worst.
Say what you will about Zuck, he's made investors a trillion dollars. If they cared about his occasionally being wrong and losing a few billion here or there, it's not showing up in the stock price.
You mean cars being allowed to endanger human lives? Enshrined by law, urban infrastructure and cultural notions of independence for over a century? Why is it just now seen as a problem because robots are driving, instead of the stupid, reckless, poorly trained, often intoxicated humans who have been driving up until now?
Lol no, way to discuss something not mentioned - do you work at one of these reckless companies? I'm talking about self-driving legislation, written by those wanting to test on an unsuspecting public.
Lists like this, or “tech trees” as you might find in Civilization-type games, are hard in part because language is insufficient to map technological progress. There’s also no version of modernity that could exist without some form of philosophy, pedagogy, and cultural development, but naming “most significant” ones in a modern context involves going back to very ancient and deeply opinionated texts that include the Bible, Koran, Torah and so on.
I like this. Although - can we stop naming every project with a single short, common, vaguely related English word? Does anyone name software after what it actually does anymore?
It’s almost as if software authors are afraid that if their project names are too descriptive, they won’t be able to pivot to some other purpose, which ends up making every project name sound at once banal and vague.
Isn’t “paying for what you use” the ultimate expression of personal responsibility, though? Is unlimited high-speed internet a basic human right? (I’d argue _access_ is, given its necessity in participation in modern society, but not unlimited data).
The point may end up being moot, however, since the dark patterns feeding the social media-data harvesting pipeline are driven by keeping most people hooked on algorithmic infinitely scrolling feeds, and that attention-selling system will fight any attempt to rein it in, whether cultural or governmental.
> Isn’t “paying for what you use” the ultimate expression of personal responsibility, though?
The value of bandwidth is negligible until you start to work with 100s of TBs. Bandwidth is basically free on a consumer scale. It's the infrastructure you're paying for, but once purchased, it has minimal upkeep compared to how much use you get out of it. It'd be one thing if bandwidth were subsidised; then we could raise pricing up to where you're actually paying for what you use. We're already at that point though. Raising pricing further, either directly or through rationing, is just rent-seeking.
Responsibility is not inherently good. Imposed responsibility for no good reason is in fact bad.
If a computing device can’t actually do more useful things tha another computing device, then saying it has more “computing power” is a bit silly.
It’s like measuring national power by population, or saying that ants have “more power” than humans because ants are more numerous, have more legs and can lift more per unit of size. It’s fun to think about for about five seconds before recognizing that “power” is about capability, not abstract numbers.
tl;dr Engineer discovers that sales & marketing are real jobs. Calling it “content creation” or “influencers” are just another way of minimizing a side of business development that scares you. Thanks for the story, it was an enjoyable read!
Marketing is a real job in the same way both pharmacists and drug dealers are both real jobs. Its really easy for marketing to go from providing a useful product to using dark patterns like rage bait to peddle the equivalent of drugs to the masses. Marketing gets a bad name for a reason.
I share your aversion to modern marketing tactics, but by your logic, programmers that develop the addictive social media algorithms are the meth cooks. Everyone is complicit. Modern day "tech bros" get a significantly worse rep than marketing folks these days. No use in participating in this blame game.
I agree that software engineering isn't exempt from warranting serious introspection as to the world that a given project is enabling. I do not agree that we should simply throw up our collective hands and say "Oh well, everyone is complicit." Professional endeavours causing interpersonal harm and enabling exploitative behaviour should be called out and forced to bare the reputational cost wherever and whenever they occur.
I mean that kind of tracks? I had to take a computer science ethics course in college. It mainly focused on stuff like the Therac-25 case study, but I could easily see a more modern version of the course covering social media algorithms.
I wonder if marketing courses also have an ethics component taught in them?
For someone just learning about the Therac-25 incident, what more recent cases would've worked better to foster discussion that can also be read about?
Mass surveillance and face identification by private companies for law enforcement eg https://www.auror.co/role/loss-prevention
You can't appeal it and they don't respond to requests for your records (like a government department would).
Social media and addiction to it. How this should be managed with vulnerable groups, eg children?
I'm sure there are numerous better examples out there.
If you sell access to the data then buy it back, that basically lets you get it organized, formatted, and searchable for a fraction of the cost of developing and maintaining your own internal API’s, no?
All it costs is your citizens’ privacy, which if we’re being honest was never a priority in the first place.
As to whether every company buying ads is making a good investment, mileage may vary - but the blunt answer to your question is that yes, people do purchase things because they saw ads for it, the advertising economy is well understood. Companies like Google whose fortunes rest almost entirely on the known efficacy of advertising are not full of idiots who have never thought about whether or not ads actually work.
"Is an economy based on selling attention ultimately the most beneficial and productive one for all participants" is a separate question, but it's not the question you're asking.
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