This analogy seems weak. In general, this post argues one way while ignoring all the good advertising does. Do cancers typically do good things at their baseline?
I put on plays. Some people would enjoy seeing them. I can only do four or five performances so I can't wait for people to rave to their friends about it.
I put up polite, attractive, informative ads in forums that I think will have people who might come to my shows. Not everyone will; the large majority won't. But some of these are web sites that talk about theater, where my ad spend pays for the site itself to exist.
I recognize that the ads we most notice are nothing like that. But the idea that all ads are automatically a bad thing misses out on the fact that the original purpose of ads, as cited in the article, does still exist. If you waved a magic wand and got rid of ads my theater probably wouldn't exist. No big loss, I suppose, but the world is very slightly poorer for it.
> Do cancers typically do good things at their baseline?
Cancers are tissues gone rogue. The original tissue does in fact tend to do “good things”.
There are a few transmissible cancers, but the vast majority of them are your own tissues twisted to only consider their own personal survival and short-term gains at the expense of the rest of the organism.
Informing potential customers of products that might be useful to them.
Let's say you are the inventor of the chainsaw, you need to tell lumberjacks that chainsaws exist, that's advertising. Otherwise you won't sell any and your invention will be lost, while lumberjacks will continue struggling with inefficient tools.
> Informing potential customers of products that might be useful to them.
Isn't there an insurmountable conflict of interest when the person doing the informing is also the person who directly benefits from the product being 'useful' to as many people as possible?
Yes there is, but you have to tell someone you have something to sell at some point. Even if it goes through independent reviewers, the reviewer has to be reached somehow, that's still advertising.
You are probably not going to find a job if you don't tell anyone you need a job, job hunting is also advertising.
>Yes there is, but you have to tell someone you have something to sell at some point
It's 2025. You could list it on your website, have it searchable in search engines, and aggregators for your product category, have independent and user review sites, and lots of other solutions that don't involve advertising.
I don't want anyone telling me they have something to sell I didn't ask them to tell me, and when I wasn't looking for such products actively (i.e. not because I searched somewhere else for a similar product).
>Even if it goes through independent reviewers, the reviewer has to be reached somehow, that's still advertising
No, it's not, unless the reviewer is paid or gets benefits for making your product look good.
And a great difference with "independent reviewers" is I can go to them (watch their videos, read their blog, go to their website, or whatever).
Advertising, on the other hand, cames to me. And increasingly I can't even skip it or get rid of it.
They also take the form of a review. Not a praise, or a video/image unrelated to the product, trying to sell it to me via sex, cool imagery, etc.
I knew it was war when i noticed how they force the advertising as ANNOYING as possible: many podcasters have tried to make it reasonable by frontloading at the start or making visual queues you can easily fast-forward. But then you can tell they have specifically FORCED the creators to make them interstitial.
The problem is this whole thing could have been gamified into something people want to participate in: I am looking for baby stuff, so its time to launch up The Buy Game. Only inside this game do I see ads for things I am very specifically signalling I am looking for, limiting what I see to what I want, and mayyybbeee I can click on "i feel lucky" to see something new. SOME kind of participatory signal or a negotiation, not shoved down my throat forcefully
Instead it has to be this fucking war, where I know full well I am not going to buy anything i see an ad for, in fact I now keep lists of the most annoying companies to make sure I never ever buy from them. I am considering spending the remaining years of my life making tools to help people get away from this shit
> Do cancers typically do good things at their baseline?
I mean, true, a cancer will probably destroy its host organism. But what about the cells whose mutations allow them to think outside the box, and replicate and expand beyond their wildest dreams by throwing away the limits imposed by overbearing genetic regulations and expectations of the organism? Isn't that a good thing?
(I agree with you, based on the point being made here, but I'm actually here to say I stumbled across your earlier comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828485 and wanted to say "holy crap". I apologize for interrupting your current thread, it was just too astonishing a medical recovery story for me not to say something.)
Somehow i feel like we can get this with employment that produces value. It'd be more productive to get people to dig ditches—ditches don't destroy our cities, roads, and services, so they produce even more value than ads do.
Anyway, the last thing this society needs is encouragement to buy even more crap they never asked for. We can be something better than "that shithole strip-mall where everyone is an ignorant consumer who worships ronald reagan". As much as the evidence points to the contrary, I do believe we are capable of more.
