[novariation]

Every consumer, and every human being in society faces the "exploration-exploitation" dilemma [0] weekly or daily. They've discovered a set of things they like and dislike, either through family, friends, circumstances, or marketing ploys in the past. Finding new things they like isn't easy. You need external influence. Without these you feel life is boring, repetitive, predictable, lacks texture or excitement.

As most honest people will tell (one recent example I've stumbled upon could be independent game developers) - you could have a great product, but sadly most people will not know about it or will be "too busy to try it", and will prefer sticking to their habits or past experiences.

How would you go about solving this issue in a reliable way, that's not prone to similar distortions and hijacking as advertising and public relations ?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration-exploitation_dilem...

[underlogic]

Here I was thinking marketers were in it for the money but now I see clearly. They're honest people just trying to help solve a problem we all have. Without advertising human beings would sit helpless, unable to discover the world around them.

[novariation]

The comment I'm replying to is very black-and-white: "X should not exist".

My answer is simple: there might be a reason that X exists, although it could take different forms and have different rules and methodology.

You reply with an equally black-and-white point : "so you're saying they're saints and no one would be able to do anything without their existence".

This is lazy and boring, do better.

[underlogic]

Look something has to be done about the constant interruptions these aggressive advertisements cause. They're breaking the internet experience and wasting an astonishing amount of valuable human life hours. They're really stealing that time. If advertising was an option, 99.9% of people would switch it off.

I think there was very little truth in your first reply it reads like an excuse for an exploitive business model. I'm assuming you're a marketer or just like playing devil's advocate.

In any case, time has come to find technical solutions to hit back at advertising to the degree the industry can never recover.

[novariation]

If I liked playing devil's advocate, I wouldn't be annoyed at your answers.

To be honest I started a few years ago interacting with comments I would otherwise ignore because I thought it was harmful to keep yourself in filter bubbles, but I think it's pointless and I'm mostly having negative experiences that I don't need in my life.

To address your points: I'm not a marketer, I've got a STEM masters degree and I work as a data analyst, never worked in any marketing related job so far, no interest to do so.

You bring a decent point that often advertising isn't something people want, it's rather something they have to accept because they're paying either zero or less than the producer wants/needs for the service they're using, which I think is a fine point. We could go back to a point in time where most things were not financed by ads: either they're financially viable or they don't exist. That's a tradeoff, and companies like Netflix tried to move away from this and found some success. But it seems to me in a lot of situations most people are fine with the old radio station model where you get a few ads every now and then but don't pay anything.

If we decide to go this way and make it impossible to fund most of your company or activity through ads, then we'll have a lot less ads, but still won't reach zero ads. Think of the very old ads in the newspaper kind of thing. People need to send information about things they're selling or jobs they need, or events that might interest people. You're bound to have some advertising, you probably just mean to say you would like to have much much less than the current level.