We lost communication to advertising.

PaulHoule 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's kinda weird.

Facebook started as a way to connect with family and friends and it is still really good at that. When I got back into Facebook to post my photos (e.g. in a "publish everywhere" strategy) I reconnected with distant family I hadn't been in contact with for a long time and I'm thankful for that.

On the other hand that's not enough for a business so Facebook mashes that up with brands/businesses and community groups and "creators" and cleverly took the free publicity away from brands and started selling it back.

I think the thing is friends and family don't generate enough content to be cover traffic for the ads and my feelings are kinda ambivalent for those people because there are people I care for who post vast amounts of content that I see as "cringe" (e.g. COVID-19 hyperchondria while I am seeing Gen X get their education and future friends, family and socialization stolen by school lockdowns) and thank God Facebook knows I don't click on that shit and shows me ads and stuff from "creators" instead!

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basisword 15 hours ago | parent [-]

>> On the other hand that's not enough for a business

It could be. Once Facebook had everyone on board they could have pivoted to a model where people pay directly. It's easy to forget how incredibly useful it was in the early years. It's not enough for a business that needs to endlessly grow but businesses don't NEED to do that - especially tech companies where costs can be incredibly low once the initial website is built.

	▲	PaulHoule 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		20 years ago I'd say that "free-to-play" would have been necessary because of the N² value that social sites create, just getting the idea mainstream was difficult enough and you can very much see the phases we went through, how Facebook inspired Twitter and back, etc. Like, of my family and friends who are on Facebook I think very few of them would become subscribers. Today people believe in the value of social media and selling a subscription would be easier but the barriers I see are - from the viewpoint of incumbents, the people who would pay to have an ad-free experience are the people you most want to show ads to! Or to the converse, the person who won't spend $10 to block ads is cheap and won't spend money on anything else - incumbents will get in the way of any kind of "aggregator" service which adds value In a Fediversal system there would be a possible markets for a product that helps a consumer have a better consuming experience or a publisher have a better publishing experience (e.g. I post links and photos to 9 services) and would some pay, yes. But incumbents are threatened by openness and price API access at punitive, not profit-maximizing levels. Even in a more open world I'd have a lot of fear that the revenue and the costs won't line up and the profits in some part of the systems will be at the expense of unsustainable losses elsewhere and the mechanism design to make that work is tough. (e.g. I did some biz dev with a guy who had a track record in influencing freakin' telecoms to do better with mechanism design who thought "freedom isn't free" is the problem with the internet who struggled to get calls with anyone)

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plagiarist 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We lost civilization to advertising IMO. It feels like the majority of all technology is built around monetizing clicks. Astrophysicists are working at Stitch Fix.

	▲	cons0le an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Hear hear. Ban all advertising. We could do it slow. Start by banning all gambling and drug commercials. That's like 20% of all commercials right there. This is already normal in other countries. Then ban all billboards. People hate them already. Then the big one, ban targeted advertising. With personalized ads gone, all of the incentives that make data collection profitable are gone. Of course there will still be bad actors that want data mining to continue. But right now you can't even read 95% of websites because they have popups that make you agree to data mining just to get in. I'll be searching for like, a recipe and they want my name, device IP, browser fingerprint, and anything else they can pinch. I'm searching for a nice spinach salad recipe. I go to google First it fires up an LLM, which will run a GPU in an AI data center that they probably cleared a forest to build. I just made nvdia stronger. I just helped pump their AI "adoption" numbers. And I helped train an AI that will help layoff me and my friends. As always I run the search again with "-noai" at the end. Now I'm searching twice for no reason. The results were better, and faster 10 years ago. It gives me results and I click the first link. A video that I can't pause starts auto playing. This recipe isn't that good so I go back and find another. I need to click the back button 4 times. I try another link. And get another pop up. I opt into data mining this time because uBo is having trouble with the full page transparent overlays. Now they have my data to sell to 3rd party intermediaries that will sell them to companies like palantir and cambridge analytica. Every search builds a little more of my "shadow profile". Maybe I should have just gone to the library and taken a picture. All I wanted was a salad recipe and I've now helped train the system that made brexit possible. I've helped nvdia. I've helped the very AI datacenters that I hate. I've helped the data miners. The experience of using a computer in 2025 is exhausting. Particularly search engines. They used to work so good. They used to be so fast.
	▲	towledev 16 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		We need a Caesar who will ban all advertising. Lacking a Caesar, we could start with publicly funded NFL stadiums e.g. MetLife to get a foot in the door and go from there. Something must be done.