this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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Privacy
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This whole fuckin video is bonkers.
He picked out the one instance where high-powered advertising produces a positive result, while ignoring the 90% of it that is sinister in some way. Big categories of that:
You can join me or not in my tinfoil-fit view, but I would say that 90+% of the impact of advertising is one of those things, and a very very small percentage of it is what he's talking about, good honest people who make good honest products and just want to laser-focus on customers who happen to want those products and make it easy for them to find out about them. Personally I'm pretty skeptical that these things with seeing ads for camera stands or his Singapore trip actually happened that way, but even if they had, it formed a very small percent of the ways that advertising impacted his world that day.
5 or 10 per cent, yeah? You must be fascinated by ads for things. Personally they form an offensive tide of bullshit against my own mental landscape, 95% or so of which I'm not interested in.
What in the ever lasting fuck are you talking about
Pretty much every single time that ad-supported-ness comes into the equation, the service gets worse then it was without it. BBC is better than Fox News. Mastodon is better than Facebook. Craigslist is better than everything. When the service is designed to be good, it's good, and when it's designed to draw ad revenue, the "being good" part of the goal becomes, by definition, secondary. I won't say the two are always incompatible, but specifically with the examples he lists, they're largely incompatible, and being good has become secondary.
I can kind of be charitable about what he's saying, and agree that Chrome's UI is superior to some purely-open-source browser that doesn't have the same level of funding, or that Youtube is more reliable and performs better than some bodged-together video service. But I cannot possibly fathom the kind of brain that would look at the modern world and use TikTok or YouTube as examples of things that are "so good" and lead to "better everything."
Among other things, the designed-to-be-addictive-to-drive-advertising-revenue nature of how they're designed creates real harm in the real world. Youtube dopamine loops trap young kids whose brains aren't developed, and playing with tablets all the time fucks up their brains. If you've been around kids in the modern world you've seen this. Political advertising and shill-friendliness on social media produces bad political outcomes that cause genuine tragedies in the real world. Few people involved in creating those products seem to give a shit about any of that, because they're so focused on maximizing ad spend. I would not describe that as "better everything."
To me this is the real harm in the system he's defending. It's not that tracking a person for advertising to them, in itself, creates that much harm in every case. It does sometimes, but his short-sighted view of the problem that it's often fine, is actually valid. But the wider scope of letting advertising rule our modern world even though it's objectively making everything shittier for no benefit to everyone (except making money for a handful of people who don't need any more), is a very big problem, and defending that system because one particular aspect of it isn't the part that's really hurting people seems obviously wrong.
Yeah people like him are the reason we are where we are with this dystopian internet.
Even the positive result in your first point I am skeptical of. Advertisements have a huge selection bias on what they show you. Even if it's the topic you want, I'd be concerned about correctness, reasonability, viability. The highest bidder shows me ads, does that mean it's the most expensive option? Most wasteful? Most manipulative into other spending or into vendor or thinking lock-in?
Thanks for putting it so well. I'd give you reddit gold but I only have this rock: 🪨 Maybe it'll comes in handy one day!
PS: Consumerism also drives climate change and the potential genocide of many or even all people of earth.
Me personally seeing or not seeing ads doesn't change the fact that good online news outlets are going out of business because the wholly-internet-ad-supported business model doesn't support honest journalism, kids spend their time watching devices designed to get them addicted to the flashing colors instead of something designed to help them, etc etc and so on. Did you read my message?
I see a pretty small number of ads also, but if you took away from that that my main complaint is that I personally see a lot of ads, I think you should read it again.
I think there's been a misunderstanding. I read the OP, it seemed to me like he asked a relevant question about the linked video, I did my best to answer his question from my POV because I like talking about this stuff and I'm self-centered enough to think that my POV on it might be something other people might like to read.
To me, there are more valuable things in the world than tons of good videos. The systems that you "do not care" about, help to maintain the nice world that you live in, and whether you're aware of it or not, failing to take good care of them will eventually impact your cushy existence. But, you're free to believe me or not about that, and to value whatever you choose.
You don't need to tell me any more about your value decisions, though, because I don't share them and I don't plan to start. Good luck.