• quixotic120@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Advertising is cancer and the reason to believe the slippery slope fallacy.

    Every single time advertising enters a space it claws its way in with a wonderful pitch: allow us to have some small space to promote our products and in exchange we will give you some money to do whatever it is you’re doing here.

    If the medium is in any way popular enough to justify the investment advertisers will continue to do so. However, they will always get greedier. They will demand more time, more space at first. They will then run statistical analyses and demand sensitive data on your customers to help them maximize their investment by targeting their advertisements. They will demand you make changes to your platform if possible to accommodate more granular data collection and more ways to serve targeted ads. They will demand the changes to your platform to the nature of serving ads to make them more obtrusive and harder to ignore, again to make their investment “more worthwhile”. They will influence and infiltrate businesses/conglomerates to help spread their cause

    Look at literally any evolution of ad space. Look at newspapers, radio, television, webpages, youtube, paid streaming networks.

    A web page in 1994-6 rarely had ads at all, in 1998-2000 you started to see them infect the space. Banner ads were there. Tolerable. But very quickly the ad men realized how useless this was. They were simply ignored by most people and even back then there were already early modifications to block them.

    Then it became out of control, fast. Interstitial ads, affiliate marketing, sponsored posts, reskinning entire websites (oldheads might remember when IGN became McDonald’s themed for a few days and caused an uproar), sponsored links in search engines, SEO, etc. all creating the hellscape of an internet we have now; where 5 websites control like 85% of the traffic, searching for things is impossible, there are no more real communities because everyone’s too busy watching 30 seconds videos served by algorithms to keep them angry and engaged with the platform (but also lets complain about how kids can’t get off their phones while literally allowing these scumbags to design media to entice them into staying on forever)

    If you allow ads onto your service you allow your service to be destroyed. The only exception to this is if your service never becomes popular in any way. and even then they’ll probably still do it because they’ve got most of this down to a science at this point. There are vb forums with 3k members that have insanely intrusive ads and sell member data

    advertisers steal from you every day and want more despite this. they drive consumerism, debt, avarice, political divides, etc. destroy the advertising industry to heal the world. if your child decides to go into advertising you’ve failed as a parent.