Sounds like message-based advertisement is essentially crowd-sourcing a gigantic Turing test. Looking forward to trying to figure out if my chat partner who casually mentions another product or service is a sales person or a ML model.
Why not just ban all commercial advertising in public spaces and online? I don't think anyone thinks advertising is a public good, why do we tolerate it?
I'd very like that, but then again, how much of "public space" is actually public? Most meatspace ads tend to hang off someone's private property. And on-line world is really closer to private than public, as most content is served from privately owned machines.
>I'd very like that, but then again, how much of "public space" is actually public?
It's not simply a matter of raw percentage, it's also a matter of advertising value (eyeballs) which is a different question. A significant amount of the most valuable space is publicly regulated, such as along highways. So for example in the US four states ban billboards entirely (Alaska, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont), and it's really nice even just driving through them. For Maine and Vermont (since they share land borders with the rest of the contiguous 48) it actually makes for quite the state border transition in some cases, where leaving you suddenly cross and instantly face a pile of advertising. It doesn't have to be that way though, and as a quality of life goal it wouldn't be wrong for people in other states to give it some thought. Constant ads IRL may somewhat fade into the background just as in other contexts, but that doesn't mean it has no impact.
There was a move in the 1960s led by the wife of President Johnson to get rid of them. One success was, I believe, a freeze on erecting new ones on interstate highways. I don't know how well that worked, but they don't seem to be the worst offenders.
Outdoor advertising is obnoxious and not very affective compared to targeted advertising. I wish cities that are advertising hubs would ban them, to further their lead in developing a newer more effective, less obnoxious ad industry.
You are assuming that we will be able to install an adblocker to it. I would bet that it would be more common to have AR devices inserting ads instead.
While I agree that marketing and advertising is bad for the world, suicide is no joke. Words can have big consequences, especially online when they can reach so many and you can't see who reads them.
> Canning said he expected Facebook to continue leading the way with chatbots and ads in Messenger, along with WhatsApp
I think Facebook has truly pioneered the worst form of advertising. Compare it to YouTube. YT puts ads at the beginning of videos, and tries to make the ad as relevant to the video's audience as possible. They're still ads, they're still annoying, but at least they are clearly and obviously ads. It also incentivizes good content. Both the audience, the content creator, YT, and the advertiser benefit from the videos being as high quality and engaging as possible.
Facebook does the opposite. The vast majority of the advertising spend on Facebook is to "boost" a post, which just means that Facebook biases the algorithm to cause the post to be more visible to more people than it otherwise would be. This means that 1) that post pays money to displace other content. Content that the viewer would have enjoyed more. Generally it's organic content from actual friends. 2) that post is in no way marked as an advertisement. The viewer does not know that someone is paying money to influence them. Something as simple as "<friend> likes <company>" can be shown in your news feed just because that company is paying money to show you that.
It's as if someone paid your friends to say things like "wow, I love McDonalds" when they're around you. Except that both you and your friend don't know they only said that because McDonalds paid for it. It's deeply manipulative. And there's really no line between advertising for some company selling a product and advertising for a political candidate or platform. The fact that they want to expand into private conversations is genuinely scary.
They often are. But it's not something that's fundamentally built into the platform like it is on Facebook. YouTube receives no benefit from it so they certainly don't promote it, and the audience discourages it too because they feel like they're watching dishonest content. So yes, it happens, but it's outside the control of YouTube. Facebook fully embraces it. They've built their entire platform around it.
I find Youtube advertising to be way worse, primarily because I can’t skip the ad, I have to sit their for some minimum number of seconds, and the ads never seem relevant.
Compare that to Facebook, where I can just keep scrolling. I’ve also found a few hobbies through Facebook ads, I think their targeting is pretty good.
No advertising company wants you to see ads you don’t care about. It just wastes the advertisers money. Ads that are boosted are still trying to target audiences that will actually click on the ad.
You don't need to skip the ad. Just install uBlock Origin and optionally uMatrix and there will be no ads anymore, either on YT or any other site for that matter.
I'll chime in to recommend youtube-dl[0], which in addition to fixing ads, also means you have a local copy that can't be stolen by copyright trolls or otherwise bitrotted.
...I pay for keeping ads off and generally have one of the 4k relaxation/outdoors or old Warren Miller videos playing. I really enjoy that specific interaction. As for Facebook, I am off, except for occassionally logging in to retrieve messages. I can't find a way to interact with it personally. I just don't enjoy it anymore.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 66.2 ms ] threadCan't wait for good ambient AR so we can wear IRL ad blockers.
It's not simply a matter of raw percentage, it's also a matter of advertising value (eyeballs) which is a different question. A significant amount of the most valuable space is publicly regulated, such as along highways. So for example in the US four states ban billboards entirely (Alaska, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont), and it's really nice even just driving through them. For Maine and Vermont (since they share land borders with the rest of the contiguous 48) it actually makes for quite the state border transition in some cases, where leaving you suddenly cross and instantly face a pile of advertising. It doesn't have to be that way though, and as a quality of life goal it wouldn't be wrong for people in other states to give it some thought. Constant ads IRL may somewhat fade into the background just as in other contexts, but that doesn't mean it has no impact.
There was a move in the 1960s led by the wife of President Johnson to get rid of them. One success was, I believe, a freeze on erecting new ones on interstate highways. I don't know how well that worked, but they don't seem to be the worst offenders.
Still it's a good cause.
I think Facebook has truly pioneered the worst form of advertising. Compare it to YouTube. YT puts ads at the beginning of videos, and tries to make the ad as relevant to the video's audience as possible. They're still ads, they're still annoying, but at least they are clearly and obviously ads. It also incentivizes good content. Both the audience, the content creator, YT, and the advertiser benefit from the videos being as high quality and engaging as possible.
Facebook does the opposite. The vast majority of the advertising spend on Facebook is to "boost" a post, which just means that Facebook biases the algorithm to cause the post to be more visible to more people than it otherwise would be. This means that 1) that post pays money to displace other content. Content that the viewer would have enjoyed more. Generally it's organic content from actual friends. 2) that post is in no way marked as an advertisement. The viewer does not know that someone is paying money to influence them. Something as simple as "<friend> likes <company>" can be shown in your news feed just because that company is paying money to show you that.
It's as if someone paid your friends to say things like "wow, I love McDonalds" when they're around you. Except that both you and your friend don't know they only said that because McDonalds paid for it. It's deeply manipulative. And there's really no line between advertising for some company selling a product and advertising for a political candidate or platform. The fact that they want to expand into private conversations is genuinely scary.
Compare that to Facebook, where I can just keep scrolling. I’ve also found a few hobbies through Facebook ads, I think their targeting is pretty good.
No advertising company wants you to see ads you don’t care about. It just wastes the advertisers money. Ads that are boosted are still trying to target audiences that will actually click on the ad.
0: http://youtube-dl.org/