cm2012 3 hours ago

"The average person in the USA has about $1200/year spent on advertising intended to reach them. Where do you want “your” $1200 spent?"

Interestingly $1,200 is roughly 3.5% of what the average American spends per year (roughly $78k), and $1200 is roughly 15% of the average American's discretionary spending. That doesn't seem too crazy to me as a cost for the main driver of the matching and branding system of the capitalist economy of the United States.

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rpastuszak 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The cost is your attention, your mental health, as well as buying things you didn’t know you needed or didn’t know you didn’t need. It’s not a level playing field.

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aleqs 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Except it isn't a level/merit-based 'matching and branding system', it's exactly the opposite - people see what others pay for them to see (and what's most likely to influence the viewer in a generally detrimental way), not what's actually beneficial/useful to them.

Imagine if all google results were ranked purely based on advertising potential... this is already starting to happen and it clearly makes google noticeably worse.

Not only is it bad for people and society, but it also undermines the whole idea of open and fair competition in a capitalist system - why do I need to make my product better if I can just spam advertising and dishonest marketing instead?

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cm2012 43 minutes ago | parent [-]

Both ads and capitalism are messy and have some externalized harms, but are better than the alternatives.

In the "advertising led" model of customer discovery, businesses advertise to essentially tell the market that they exist and provide a service. They do so by paying for advertising space across various mediums. This includes everything from their store signage to Craigslist ads, to TV and sophisticated digital advertising.

Most modern advertising is an auction where businesses compete to serve their message to customers the algorithms think are most likely to be interested.

This function - of matching users that might be interested in products to businesses providing products - is at this point hugely scaled.

People who want to ban ads will usually give the alternative of a reviewed directory of products and services for each category. That, they say, would be the ideal method of product discovery, along with word of mouth.

However, that runs immediately into the same problem that communism has historically. Who actually controls these directories, which would be a huge source of power for society? I posit that that it is impossible to centralize this effectively, and that the most likely most effective method for idea and product dispersal is something close to modern marketing and advertising.

	▲	aleqs 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Why do you assume that any alternative to ads has to be centralized? You also seem to assume the advertising space is not centralized (lol). If we can build a (centralized or decentralized) system capable of querying/serving content based on price and ad revenue projections, we can also build system capable of querying/serving content based on relevance, ratings, reviews and any number of parameters. You seem to imply that advertising and marketing give us some kind of advantage in terms of (de) centralization, but that's really not true. The whole purpose of advertising is MAKE people look at ads despite the fact that almost nobody actually enjoys or values looking at ads, whether it's run as a centralized or decentralized model is an implementation detail.