Asklemmy

Basically what happened to the Internet as a whole.

You're insane but I respect it

Since I don't know how well their manipulation works

I do. It works really fucking well. $900 billion per year well.

Unfortunately there's a lot of products that most people don't even know exist. Hell I keep finding new tools and wondering why I've been doing things the hard way for so long.

For sure. I'm not against promotion in the large, but the constant and intrusive advertisements within other tasks, such as web ads that take up valuable screen real estate, or TV/YouTube commercials that keep me from the programs I want to watch.

Like my username is literally PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S. I have no problem getting PM'ed or emailed stuff. For example, I'm subscribed to a number of mailing lists from sites I ordered from. Guitar Center can send me all the emails they want [1], sell me all the crap they want, because I can opt out at any time, and I have a work email so I can put them aside for later.

[1] To the specific email I gave them, which I do check.

I would argue that if there's a product that nobody knows exist that's not necessarily because we need to allow constant intrusive ads, and more indicative that people don't actually need the product.

I want to say that in any given day, 60% of the ads I see are from big, well known companies who don't need me to see them to know they exist. Shit like Liberty Mutual (I swear I see more of their ads than anyone else and THEY ARE ALREADY MY INSURANCE PROVIDER), Coke, Pepsi, etc. 39.9% of the remaining 40% are advertisements for shit that I just don't care about. I don't care about the newest tech toys. I don't care about the newest car mods, or random shit I can put on my desk, or stupid extra kitchen gadgets. Fully 40% of the ads I see are trying to convince me that I should buy a product that I straight up don't need because the ad looked cool. Why should those ads be allowed to exist? Why should I be constantly bombarded with ads for services that I either already know plenty about or for things that are trying to manufacture a reason for their existence?

Only about 0.5% of the ads I see are actually for things I did know know about and that seem useful to me, or like something I would like. Probably even less than that, I'm drunk rn and estimating.

And who is to be blamed for setting up this system ?

I brought this up the last time I talked about this, but to be clear, if we must choose between advertisements and paywall, then we should choose advertisements as the lesser evil. However, we must never accept the fallacy that advertising or paywalls are the only possible choices! More generally, we must never accept the fallacy that a market is the only acceptable way to distribute goods, a corollary of which is the idea that any acceptable solution needs to compete on equal terms with existing products in a market.

Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing but it will fundamentally change how the internet works and it potentially could limit informational access to poor people.

Well the first part at least would be a welcome change. The issue in my view is the very fact that poor people are treated as second-class citizens in information access or any other field of endeavor.

Youtube? Sorry you need to login and pay up to watch anything. You want to Google,Bing, Duckduckgo something sorry you better pay up can't sell you data to advertisers anymore.

I very genuinely want those sites to fucking die so I don't have to coexist in a world where they dominate the internet. I would be literally thrilled to join a group of like-minded people who have to reimplement the conveniences of the modern web from scratch for free.