> They faked the ratings away from stupid trash TV towards some higher quality stuff, documentaries, culture, ... Obviously in the movie then the country saw a renaissance, everyone got smarter, yadda yadda, you get it.
> I feel like this is similar. All tech savvy people block ads and analytics and at least the known tricks they use against us. So the internet only tracks the defenseless people and is then built to serve them (and or exploit them).
I think this is right - ad-traffic is manipulative and actually I don't think it is a societal 'good' at all.
A few personal examples:
* On Youtube almost all my adverts are encouraging me to start Forex / Stock / Property investment and trading, and sign up for courses on these. These courses are scams (or at best, 'half-scams' and poor/generic advice repackaged and sold for thousands), and in general provide poor financial advice (either through extortionate courses, recommending you become too heavily leveraged or advising you to day-trade high-volatility stocks by just looking at charts). Presumably it does this because I am 32 and male, so I am considered 'prime' for this marketing.
* One of the friends I know is a girl, and she has never seen the above adverts. We were talking and she says every single advert is just about pregnancy and fertility. I wonder how many of these adverts are just reinforcing gender-stereotypes in a wider sense, i.e. while google claims to be progressive and care about 'equality' really is their business model at it's core really just targeting women and telling them that they should be getting pregnant, while telling guys that they should be the bread-winners and earn money via stocks/shares?
* While my adverts are for forex, and my apparently fertile friend is getting adverts for pregnancy tests, my older parents just get targeted adverts for pre-paid funerals. One or two are probably be fine, but they are just on constant repeat - and I can't help but think that I wouldn't the constant reminder of death before every youtube video.
* My laptop is convinced that I want to go camping. It's only my laptop, every advert is camping related. Sleeping bags, tents... and the strange thing is that when it started I didn't want to go camping, but it's been so consistent across the last few months now that I kinda wanna go camping. Like it's sold me this romantic vision which I know wasn't there before, so even though I would usually like to say I can't be manipulated through marketing, it's really made me realise I can be.
Is the above really making society better? And if it's not, why should we put up with it? IMO the biggest lie we have been told by Google is that 'personalised ads' are a good thing.
> The advertiser has a tracker that it places on multiple sites and tracks me around. So it doesn't know what I bought, but it does know what I looked at, probably over a long period of time, across many sites. Using this information, its painstakingly trained AI makes conclusions about which other things I might want to look at, based on...
> ...well, based on what? …Probably what it does is infer my gender, age, income level, and marital status. After that, it sells me cars and gadgets if I'm a guy, and fashion if I'm a woman. Not because all guys like cars and gadgets, but because some very uncreative human got into the loop and said "please sell my car mostly to men" and "please sell my fashion items mostly to women."… You know this is how it works, right? It has to be. You can infer it from how bad the ads are. Anyone can, in a few seconds, think of some stuff they really want to buy which The Algorithm has failed to offer them, all while Outbrain makes zillions of dollars sending links about car insurance to non-car-owning Manhattanites. It might as well be a 1990s late-night TV infomercial, where all they knew for sure about my demographic profile is that I was still awake.
> You tracked me everywhere I go, logging it forever, begging for someone to steal your database, desperately fearing that some new EU privacy regulation might destroy your business... for this? [1]
I agree on a personal level, although at a societal level I believe regulation is required.
As per the parent comment to my original one, I just fundamentally do not believe that most advertising contributes anything positive to society and mostly generates negative externalities.
Intuitively, I'd say it doesn't hold water: Entrenched incumbents would generally tend to have more money than new competitors, so the incumbent can afford more advertising to drown out that of the challenger.
The only net gain I can see is for the advertising industry, which extracts money from both challenger and incumbent.
> I feel like this is similar. All tech savvy people block ads and analytics and at least the known tricks they use against us. So the internet only tracks the defenseless people and is then built to serve them (and or exploit them).
I think this is right - ad-traffic is manipulative and actually I don't think it is a societal 'good' at all.
A few personal examples:
* On Youtube almost all my adverts are encouraging me to start Forex / Stock / Property investment and trading, and sign up for courses on these. These courses are scams (or at best, 'half-scams' and poor/generic advice repackaged and sold for thousands), and in general provide poor financial advice (either through extortionate courses, recommending you become too heavily leveraged or advising you to day-trade high-volatility stocks by just looking at charts). Presumably it does this because I am 32 and male, so I am considered 'prime' for this marketing.
* One of the friends I know is a girl, and she has never seen the above adverts. We were talking and she says every single advert is just about pregnancy and fertility. I wonder how many of these adverts are just reinforcing gender-stereotypes in a wider sense, i.e. while google claims to be progressive and care about 'equality' really is their business model at it's core really just targeting women and telling them that they should be getting pregnant, while telling guys that they should be the bread-winners and earn money via stocks/shares?
* While my adverts are for forex, and my apparently fertile friend is getting adverts for pregnancy tests, my older parents just get targeted adverts for pre-paid funerals. One or two are probably be fine, but they are just on constant repeat - and I can't help but think that I wouldn't the constant reminder of death before every youtube video.
* My laptop is convinced that I want to go camping. It's only my laptop, every advert is camping related. Sleeping bags, tents... and the strange thing is that when it started I didn't want to go camping, but it's been so consistent across the last few months now that I kinda wanna go camping. Like it's sold me this romantic vision which I know wasn't there before, so even though I would usually like to say I can't be manipulated through marketing, it's really made me realise I can be.
Is the above really making society better? And if it's not, why should we put up with it? IMO the biggest lie we have been told by Google is that 'personalised ads' are a good thing.