[salawat]

Advertising in the sense of making an entry in a service registry like the Yellow Pages used to be where the customer can look you up and find you, yes.

Forcing news of your existence on people who didn't ask though? Nah. That's just parasitism.

[jfengel]

That works if you're advertising something people knew they wanted beforehand. It doesn't work if you're offering something novel.

If they're looking up plumbers in the yellow pages, you won't encounter the existence of Drano.

[salawat]

We have a solution for things like that. It's called search engines and indexes if you don't poison the fuck out of it for economic and political gain. Outlaw or regulare SEO and we can go back to a marvelous time when everyone could actually find things without having shit shoved into their face every second of every day.

Optimize pulls. Not pushes. Pushes are acts of force. Pulls are acts of grace. If you can't understand this, I'd say you're stuck in the Sinclairism of being impossible to get to understand due to your life or ambitions in some way being dependent on not understanding.

Research works. Has worked. Will continue to work. If we can put a check on rampant greed and coamp down on the tragedy of the commons that is the pollution of the modern web.

[more_corn]

So convincing someone to buy something they don’t want or need. Perhaps you’ve stumbled upon the root problem of our overconsumption.