[VikingCoder]

You want to have that conversation with them? Because some of them are right here. In fact some of them just got shot at yesterday.

Is it hyperbole, or do you honestly feel that trying to connect users with products they might like is inherently unconscionable?

[AndrewUnmuted]

> trying to connect users with products they might like

It is delusional to suggest that this is the goal of ad-tech. The only people thinking about the users and the products are the creative teams that make the ads themselves.

Ad-tech, on the other hand, engages in dragnet data mining operations that serve the creative/design teams at ad agencies. The way the ad-tech industry has decided to go about things absolutely is inherently unconscionable. The unrestrained nonsense they've unleashed on the web over the past two decades have resulted in leaving nearly all internet users vulnerable to malicious code, privacy loss, and other horrible things.

> some of them just got shot at yesterday

Nice appeal to emotion there. But how do you know what the people at YouTube HQ did for a living? Do you have insider information? By all means, don't hold back.

[VikingCoder]

Do you know anyone who works on ad-tech?

Or are you making uninformed hyperbolic statements?

> The unrestrained nonsense they've unleashed on the web over the past two decades

I feel sometimes like I'm the only one who remembers how awful, insulting, and dangerous ads were before.

> But how do you know what the people at YouTube HQ did for a living? Do you have insider information? By all means, don't hold back.

I asked, "You want to have that conversation with them?"

I'll ask you the same thing.

You know some of them are here.

They're your peers.

But feel free to demonize them without talking to them.

[AndrewUnmuted]

I do know people who work in ad-tech. However, I don't see why that should matter in the least. Who I know in the ad-tech industry is not pertinent to my argument.

> how awful, insulting, and dangerous ads were before

You seem to be missing the point. Yes, advertisements are awful, insulting to our intelligence, and dangerous psychologically. But that has nothing to do with ad-tech. Your conflation of advertisement production with ad-tech is especially curious, considering your strangely dogmatic defense of this reprehensible industry.

It's even more curious that you didn't reference any of the things I actually brought up in my post about the ad-tech industry. The content of an advertisement is not nearly as important as the means by which people are consuming the content. This is a fundamental premise of Marshall McLuhan, on whose ideas much of the advertising industry has operated for decades now. ("The medium is the message.") The real problem with ad-tech is not the advertising content that it helps propagate, but rather the techniques employed by ad-tech to achieve its goals. Why don't you respond to those problems I raised, rather than ones that are both wholly irrelevant to the discussion and entirely absent from my comment? Ad-tech is what introduced malicious code, unethical privacy breaches, and absurdly non-scientific measurement practices to the advertisement industry as a whole. The ads distributed on yesterday's television and radio broadcasts, and on yesteryear's magazines and newspapers, could never have come close to the destruction today's internet ads achieve - because those older media were not capable of being leveraged as irresponsibly as ad-tech leverages the world wide web.

[VikingCoder]

> However, I don't see why that should matter in the least. Who I know in the ad-tech industry is not pertinent to my argument.

Of course it should. You denied any users X exist, (Ad-Tech who think about the users.) I was hoping to demonstrate that your sample size of X that you know well enough to judge them so, is too small to be meaningful. I say that because I know many people in Ad-Tech, and almost all of them care very much about users. Since our conclusions are different, I can conclude our samples are different populations, or you're speaking in hyperbole.

You said:

> The only people thinking about the users and the products are the creative teams that make the ads themselves. ... is inherently unconscionable.

If you know people in Ad-Tech, and you tell them, "You don't care about users, and your business is inherently unconscionable" I'd like to hear what responses you get. Genuinely. Would they agree with you? Or, more likely would they say something like, "At my place, even when I think about the user, it doesn't matter much," which seems much more likely the kind of human response you'd get.

> It's even more curious

You opened with bald-faced hyperbole. I'm trying to get you to admit that your most outrageous claims are based on nothing but lies. Once I do that, maybe I'll dive into the rest of what you said.

My concession to you is that there are awful ways to do ads - exploitative, manipulative, bad for the user. And there are ways to do ads that are not those things. You claim there's no difference - it's all homogeneously bad. That's hyperbole or delusion.

Moreover, none of it is particularly helpful. It's just spite. You don't have any actionable proposals for making the world a better place. You're just making "dead lawyer" jokes.

And I did respond directly, reminding you that ads used to be far worse. You haven't responded to that at all.

[gaius]

As I said yesterday, if someone needs something, they’ll just go out and buy it. Ads are fundamentally about using psychological tricks to make people buy things they don’t need, or even want once the manipulation has worn off

[pteredactyl]

Yea, but sometimes I don't know about a product.

For example, I tried to find a pair of quality underwear that did not have some guys name above the crotch for years. I heard mention of me undies on a podcast, checked it out, and am now a happy customer. ( this is not a paid post )

[Myrmornis]

Yes, it's inherently tasteless and makes the world a worse place. No-one needs or wants the "help" of advertisers providing suggestions about what products they might want to buy.

[VikingCoder]

Even when you're searching for that product?

Out of morbid curiosity, do you get that ads fund most of the internet?

[Myrmornis]

Yes, even when searching. Of course, impartial help with the search could be beneficial (by definition of "help"). But advertising is by definition not impartial. I do not want my search results to be influenced by those who have a financial incentive to bias my search outcome. That's obvious -- surely you don't either?

> Out of morbid curiosity, do you get that ads fund most of the internet?

Yes. But that does not mean that we want or need advertising, or that it is not tasteless. It might mean that we cannot conceive of or achieve an alternative version of the world without advertising and with the internet.

More generally, I'd say it's important to make a clear distinction between statements of principle, and statements of pragmatic policy.

[VikingCoder]

Capitalism is tasteless, then, right?

As a matter of principle, if you have something and don't need it, and someone else needs it, you should give it to them, right?

I'm just trying to understand your principle and where the boundaries of it are.

[Myrmornis]

> Capitalism is tasteless, then, right?

Oh, I don't think I'm well-informed enough to answer that question properly. Let's suppose by "capitalism" you meant allowing market forces to operate freely. No, I wouldn't say that's entirely tasteless, but yes it has tasteless aspects.

And a principle one is advertising, i.e. standing up and saying "Hey, I suggest you buy this, and here's why" when

(a) you have a financial motivation to encourage the sale

(b) quite obviously, that motivation corrupts your role as the recommender

(c) despite being educated people you make no acknowledgement of that corruption.

Ideally, the best way for consumers to choose between competing products would be for them to read peer-reviewed scientific literature comparing the merits of the products and their suitability for the intended use. That again is basically definitional -- that's what science means.

Now, do you think science should be conducted by people with a financial interest in the conclusions of each paper? No, you don't. And that's why you shouldn't have a hard time accepting that advertising is inherently undesirable.

> As a matter of principle, if you have something and don't need it, and someone else needs it, you should give it to them, right?

Yes.

> I'm just trying to understand your principle and where the boundaries of it are

Sure, happy to continue the discussion.

[VikingCoder]

>> As a matter of principle, if you have something and don't need it, and someone else needs it, you should give it to them, right?

> Yes.

So, is property tasteless?

Why are people trying to sell something? Shouldn't they just give it to me?

And then scientists should determine which products should be made.

And scientists should determine who is the best at making those goods and services.

And scientists should decide who doesn't deserve to live or reproduce.

... So... I purposely tried to go too far. At which point do you think I went too far?