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points by sjdh76 2 days ago | 0 comments

The advertising industry is run by people trained for centuries to do one thing well - find ways to mine your finite Attention. This is what they spend their mind on 24x7. They have discovered thousands of ways to do it. So blocking one or two paths at a time doesnt do anything useful.

Human Attention so far is not treated as a scare natural resource. So there is a free for all overfishing of the finite pool going on.

Since politicians/lawmakers also use the same mechanisms to harvest attention the Ad/Ad tech industry has regulatory capture. It will never collapse just like Big Tobacco is happily chugging along baring some major public catastrophe.

[–] nixon_why69 2 days ago

Blocking a few of the biggest paths absolutely can work, look at 20th century TV with a few big networks. You couldn't easily get wide distribution of anything too bonkers.

We already have a form of this for the internet that you can see if you visit sketchy pirate websites, you don't see those ads for porn games on facebook or any reputable website. They get flagged by adsafe and/or the ~15 or so big exchanges. So it's possible, it's just a question of will.

[–] monster_truck 2 days ago

Actually, you do see ads for those things there, and on instagram, and on threads, and many much stranger and more fucked up things. That's part of the entire problem.

These kinds of ads aside, I've also seen offers of free shit from amazon sellers in exchange for positive reviews, "legal"/unscheduled drug analogues, flavored nitrous (free shipping!), unrestricted gambling/prediction markets, and oddly enough cellular/wifi jammers where the ad was specifically targeting semi truck drivers (I do not drive a semi truck, gamble, or search for unscheduled drug analogues, nor do I have an active amazon account)

[–] mschuster91 2 days ago

> and oddly enough cellular/wifi jammers where the ad was specifically targeting semi truck drivers

That one is about fighting back against employer surveillance, and it's not just limited to semi truck drivers any more, people are also really interested in fighting back against their car snitching on them to their insurance.

[–] Melatonic 1 day ago

I don't use Instagram anymore but I remembering being able to go into the settings and turn off ads for alcohol and other categories. Once I did that I only got ads for honestly fairly relevant stuff (like hiking and running gear).

So obviously they have the power to filter and recognise this stuff properly

[–] coldtea 2 days ago

>Actually, you do see ads for those things there

At a very smaller rate.

[–] monster_truck 18 hours ago

Wrong, I see them as much or more than I see completely insane, unrelated ads for things like "managing my herd of cows". I do not live on or anywhere near cow farms, or know anyone who has cows, or lives near cow farms.

[–] pixl97 1 day ago

The rate should be zero, or very very close to it.

[–] monster_truck 18 hours ago

With the amount of money they've spent minimizing liability and covering up what a dogshit job they do, they probably could have hired enough humans to handle manually combing through each submission, and an engineering team to train a classifer. It's disgusting imho

[–] kakacik 1 day ago

> I do not drive a semi truck, gamble, or search for unscheduled drug analogues, nor do I have an active amazon account

Yeah yeah yeah but what about those stranger and more fucked up things? They come from someplace like fingerprinting your browser, no? A genuine question, as a user of firefox + ublock I simply don't see them, not on desktop not on phone. The only ads I rarely see are some given server decides to host themselves.

[–] whiplash451 2 days ago

20th century TV created a bottleneck via a hard-limited set of channels. We seem to be going the opposite direction now, which each platform spawning an unlimited number of "channels".

[–] ruidnd37434 2 days ago

customary reminder that things can be better…

“things are bad” is a good reason to align your work towards things that make life better

As hard as that may be, it’s where progress rather than backsliding comes from

We should champion every effort for improving the conditions rather than restate things are bad

[–] zbentley 2 days ago

Case in point: we used to say all the same things GP said about advertising about businesses that used child labor. Now there are far, far fewer of them.

[–] Melatonic 1 day ago

Exactly. Just saying "we're gonna always have 7 day work weeks with children dieing in factories and unsafe conditions!!" Is exactly the kind of catastrophising and attitude that gives those in power continued power.

Fight back. Organise. Get shit done in real life

[–] pixl97 1 day ago

Moloch problems are rarely solved by individual actions against the issue. That is, because they are legal and profitable, it's going to be very difficult to make a living in the radius of an industry that does ads that does not use these tactics. At the end of the day we need to eat. Corporations that use these crappy methods are apt to grow larger and richer than moral ones, making it doubly difficult to make that living.

Hence the best call of action is to push for industry regulation forcing a level market.

[–] sjdh76 2 days ago

You are right. I'll reframe it to - Human Attentiom needs to be treated as a scarce finite resource. Otherwise they have many different ways to overfish.

How to make that happen is the trillion $$$ question.

[–] libertine 1 day ago

This isn't about advertising tactics, it's about lack of regulation.