[TeMPOraL]

Advertising is a cancer on modern society. It will metastasize to any new communications medium, public or private, and destroy it from within. People will switch to new medium that offer less spam, but advertisers quickly follow to strip-mine the new channel. A cycle of life, so to speak.

[lovethevoid]

It’s also so annoying circular. We spend money to get more clients but this stops being effective at a certain point so now you’re just spending money to advertise for the sake of it or the status, and could even be losing money by doing so.

[_heimdall]

In my experience, the fear of missing out is a big driver for companies to continue to throw good money after bad in marketing. Maybe Facebook ads aren't driving as much traffic to your company as it used to, but if you give it up and all your competitors still use it it's pretty understandable to worry about falling behind the market.

[pembrook]

I don’t have a problem with advertising generally, as long as I know upfront that’s what funds a tool I’m using, and isn’t disguised like a non-ad (eg. Unlike what Google does, which is outright deception). Advertising and spam are two separate things in my book.

However, my real problem is with what I call “The Google Strategy.” Basically, they take publicly funded infrastructure like HTTP and SMTP, capture the network by dumping “free” products on the market (with basically no advertising), kill off competitors, then monetize their market capture by removing the "free" part, packing these products with ads, making them worse and worse over time in the process. And everyone is trapped, since they captured the network of this public infrastructure. This is the story of Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.

It’s anti-competitive, anti-markets, and quite frankly should have been regulated away as a strategy a long time ago.

Google basically ran Microsoft's classic anti-competitive B2B strategy to capture the consumer internet, and got away with it!

[jhonkola]

This process has a descriptive name, enshittification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification), and it seems to apply to most internet services.

[pembrook]

That might be the trendy term for it now, but the strategy is as old as time.

In old school economic terms its called "dumping." When international trade started becoming a major thing, aspiring monopolists would flood foreign markets with goods sold below-cost to push out local competitors, then ratchet up prices and reduce quality once they'd captured the market (basically the Google strategy).

Just like crypto people had to learn that financial regulation was in place for a reason, internet people have had to learn that industrial age anti-trust rules were also put in place for a reason. Now we just need to enforce them.

[mort96]

> I don’t have a problem with advertising generally

You should, honestly.

[kelnos]

Agreed. Advertising is psychological manipulation. I would be happy if all forms of it were just outlawed.