Because they want to make you do stuff that is not in your best interest. They want to create a need that you don't actually have, and they do so by applying psychological pressure. They are a festival of fomo. They're pollution for your mind and distort your sense of reality.
In a knowledge economy your attention is your highest commodity, and ads want to take all of it.
One of the strongest rules I have for my household is that my children don't see any ads. I pay for Netflix, Youtube, and Spotify and use adblockers on all devices. And my tv is not connected to anything that can deliver flow tv - the biggest mindrot of all.
> How else do you find out about new stuff, or recommendations, or things you never considered before?
Personally, I chat with friends over a beer and talk about new things. More often than not, my friends have great recommendations on things to try — both old and new.
> How do you find out about new movies, concerts, etc.?
I go check the movie listings / concert venues’ schedules. Or look up the schedule for a band I like. I don’t constantly browse the lineup; only when I get the itch to go to a show.
Normally I’m the one engaging research into new experiences, and it seems to be going fine. The other month I was reading Troy by Stephen Fry. When I finished, I thought it would be nice if he covered the Odyssey, so I looked it up and saw he is releasing an ebook for it in the Spring. In the meantime, I decided to read the Iliad. I wasn’t sure which translation would be good, so I searched online and found that Emily Wilson has a great translation. And now hopefully a reader has benefited from m y suggestion here.
Most ads related to these fields seem to me that they are designed to sell me something I don’t necessarily want or need. I feel capable of taking action and looking up things that do interest me. It may be different for areas outside of entertainment, but I’d have to think on that more.
I wanted to know about headphones that have high sound quality yesterday and you know what I did to find out? I googled it.
I found out about ChatGPT and became a paying subscriber in january 2023, because it was all over hckrnews, youtube, twitter and tech media in general.
New stuff and recommendations are everywhere. They are even a form of entertainment themselves. I watch several tech channels on youtube just to see what cool new stuff there is. There are channels and websites for movies, books, home renovation, hobbies and anything really if you want to know more.
I think that's a good point, and it does make me doubt my initial comment.
One issue now, on a world without ads, is what incentive would also those actors have to provide you with that information? Search engine, review websites, YouTube channels, etc. Of course, we could pay them for this information. They could also have affiliate links, but doesn't then it become an ad?
I think we hate ads now simply because they are implemented poorly and there's a lot of low quality, deceiving ads for useless products.
I play table-tennis a lot, and my shoes are always wet after a session, I usually left them outside to dry, but it doesn't work in bad weather (which is common here). I then saw an ad for shoe-fresh (a dry rack/sanitizer for your shoes), I got one, and it has completely solved this problem. Maybe I could have found about it in a different way, but this is how I found it.
Another example is computer games. I got No Man's Sky recently because it was discounted on Steam, and I always wanted to try it. I would consider the pop-up you get when you launch steam, and the discounts showed in the store to also be "ads". I am enjoying the (still buggy) game so far.
If you want to buy a specific Steam game on discount, you can just add it to watchlist and get a notification when it has one.
If you want to buy some random games because they are discounted, you can just go to the corresponding section in the Steam store.
The point of the popup is to distract you from whatever you're doing right now to get you to make an impulse purchase, as opposed to a well-researched one. That's exactly how people end up with Steam accounts that have literally hundreds of never-played games in them.
Just like you can visit hacker news and see all the stories right there, do they just manifest through out the day? Or is there a group of people trudging through the new stories to pick which ones to elevate?
Having worked on the product side, I can tell you that when you google a product looking for organic reviews, what you are seeing is the sprouts of seeds planted by advertising.
Trust me, try and launch an amazing product with no advertising.
Then do it with a standard set of web ads, wait a few months, and go see the people on reddit talking about your product despite you never doing more than buying standard website/social media ads (not sponsored posts, just regular ads)
I am right now launching a sass product that I develop using advertisement. I have launched many products in the past. I used to be a concert organizer and band manager in my youth. All the times I have driven around town to hang up posters... I went to business school. I know advertisement.
Advertisement is 99.999% bad people doing bad things to you.
In a knowledge economy your attention is your highest commodity, and ads want to take all of it.
One of the strongest rules I have for my household is that my children don't see any ads. I pay for Netflix, Youtube, and Spotify and use adblockers on all devices. And my tv is not connected to anything that can deliver flow tv - the biggest mindrot of all.