I started a small business selling candles during the pandemic. It's crazy how quickly you change your opinion about advertisements once you start needing to advertise your own business. All of the sudden, they're this amazing benefit for society.
Advertisements can be good (when the business is good and genuinely wants you to know about good new product), and they can be bad (when the business if bad / misleading / scammy). An optimist would say there are more good than bad. I suppose you wouldn't consider yourself an optimist.
> All of the sudden, they're this amazing benefit for society.
No, they're an amazing benefit to your business. I'm sure your candles are great, but society doesn't need them (your candles, specifically) to survive. People would continue to find candles without your advertisements. Maybe candles that aren't as nice as yours, but people will get by just fine, and wouldn't know (or care) what they were missing.
> Advertisements can be good (when the business is good and genuinely wants you to know about good new product)
Advertising is emotional manipulation. Why do I need to know about good products, even genuinely good ones? If I have an actual, articulated need for something, I can go out and look for it. But if I'm not actually looking for something, but someone advertises to me and convinces me to buy their thing, likely I would have gotten along just fine without it.
> An optimist would say there are more good than bad. I suppose you wouldn't consider yourself an optimist.
False dichotomy. Whether there are more good companies that honestly try to hawk their wares, or more bad companies that try to trick people into buying their garbage, is irrelevant. Advertising is a blight on society.
The thing that really makes my stomach churn, though, is that if I ran a company, I'd absolutely advertise. It's the prisoner's dilemma. Because advertising exists and others will use it, I can't opt out of using it myself. I feel super gross about this fact.
If you know you need something, great! You don't need advertisements. But there are a lot of things that you never would have thought of if they hadn't been advertised to you. Things that you would now consider necessities. Like toilets. You better believe it took a ton of advertising to get everybody to stop crapping in holes or buckets. I'm sure those people were annoyed by those advertisements too.
> I suppose you wouldn't consider yourself an optimist.
With regard to modern advertising, you are absolutely correct!
That said, I fully understand and agree with the usefulness of advertising. What I'm against is the modern state of advertising. If all ads were simply contextual based on the content being shown and not the user, I don't think many of us would have problems with the ads industry.
How are ads for less relevant products better? If the user tracking data is used only for showing ads and doesn't leak I would guess 99% of people would care about getting tracked.
If I were browsing a mountain biking forum, I'd see ads for mountain bikes and other related services. They would be MORE relevant, rather than the current ads I get for the product I bought 2 months ago.
And how is that going to work for all the non-English speaking countries? If that were the case then I could see more stringent regulations on which languages you can use for media creation depending on where the company is from.
It'll work same way browsers know what language to present their main content in: either via the Accept-Language HTTP header, or through a UI element on the website that lets the visitor choose the language.
But then they are not based on the context of the website. This is just the same tracking with another name.
>or through a UI element on the website that lets the visitor choose the language.
This is nonsensical too. People don't just speak only one language. If I'm going into an English website and you're giving me a language pop up I'm going to pick English. But ads that are in English are not relevant to me whatsoever.
Also, I would like to note that language redirects are, in my experience, absolute trash. It makes using sites like Adobe awful.
Even the language settings in windows lead to a bad user experience. I have to keep English as my first keyboard language and locale to make sure that websites don't default to other languages for me.
People rarely have issues with advertising in general. They want to know about the special edition Coke, new bikes/guitars/phones/etc, local small businesses, whatever.
What people don't like is the current advertising business, which is intrusive, a blackhole of privacy concerns, rarely useful, and full of abusive companies (clickbait sites, for instance) that exist on the back of scummy behavior that hurts the advertiser (costing them money) and annoys/infuriates the consumer.
They don't like having an ad-free 7usd Netflix/Amazon/etc account that is now 12usd with ads, or 22usd without ads and the same privileges.
Advertisements can be good (when the business is good and genuinely wants you to know about good new product), and they can be bad (when the business if bad / misleading / scammy). An optimist would say there are more good than bad. I suppose you wouldn't consider yourself an optimist.