[saidajigumi]

I think you have a vast disconnect between the reality of advertising today vs. the quaint mid-20th century mental model that you seem to hold. Or you're being entirely disingenuous about what people complaining about "advertising" mean.

If modern advertising 1) did not vacuum up personal data in extremely invasive ways, 2) didn't distort the entire business models of the largest tech companies against the interests of the overwhelming majority of their users, and 3) wasn't a broad attack vector on that same user population (dark patterns, outright malware delivery, just plain terrible UX everywhere, etc.)... then there'd probably be very little complaint about advertising, relatively speaking.

Put another way: no one gripes about the existence of Craigslist. Thought experiment: what if the targeted advertising model was illegal, both enforceable and enforced with teeth. How much of what's detrimental about modern advertising would simply vanish, like a bad memory?

[coredog64]

Nitpick: Plenty of people gripe about CL. By giving away classified ads, CL killed a huge cash cow for many newspapers.

[saidajigumi]

This is a direct corollary of the existence of the internet and the effect that had on the scarcity of information that supported the local newspaper model. Ben Thompson has written a number of great articles diving into this topic at Stratechery[1]. I understand why blaming CL seems like it should be a thing, but it's absolutely the wrong target: the very existence of the internet made newspapers utterly unsustainable because the scarcity they depended on vanished.

[1] https://stratechery.com/

[vasco]

Not taking sides but what you described were the natural developments of "making advertisement more efficient", people found that by showing targeted ads they'd have to show less of them to get the same amount of new customers, therefore making advertisement cheaper and more efficient. If this is a net positive or negative for society is something I'll stay out of.

[rhizome]

Efficiency is overrated. It's an acceptable rationale for destruction and exploitation (the process demands it), but that acceptance doesn't make it a good thing overall.

>people found that by showing targeted ads they'd have to show less of them to get the same amount of new customers

I mean, did they really? Where can I read about these successes?