Agree. Which is why I get so irrationally annoyed when sharing a good piece of journalism that's not catering to ad-clicks and the peanut gallery here grabs their torches and pitchforks while shouting "PaYwALL!" despite me posting the gist of the article in the post body (enough to get the gist but not the full article for copyright reasons). It's one of several reasons why I don't even bother anymore.

Like, good journalism costs money. That money's gotta come from somewhere if you want good journalists to be able to eat and keep doing what they do.

I think the answer always comes down to capitalism

That’s an interesting thought, and I would like to add a few things to it.

The whole idea of having ad funded things is fundamentally flawed. It has also become too dominant, and difficult to compete with. Ads are the tool used in this business model, but are they really the root cause of the problems you mentioned? I would say no.

Theoretically, you could still have ads without ruining everything. When other business models aren’t competitive enough, the whole system naturally gravitates to the mess we’re currently in.

I think cheap mobile games have showed that you can charge a small amount of money, and people will be willing to pay up. That way, everything doesn’t have to be ad funded. It’s just that this business model doesn’t appear to be appealing enough in other arenas, and that’s a real problem.

Advertising is one of the most prolific environmental pollutants of economic activity, and needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.

Bill Watterson tried to warn us

You're right overall, but the mechanism you listed about advertising only appearing near safe content is not that big of a deal compared to other mechanisms at play:

1. psychological manipulation vs competition - the way that a capitalist economy is supposed to work is that a bunch of firms compete to sell you a good or service, you pick the best one for your situation and buy it, then the firm that produces the best good or service gets more resources (money) to grow, rewarding the best product maker.

Advertising breaks this. It lets you spend money on psychological manipulation to get people to buy your product, instead of just trying to produce a better product. True conservative capitalists should fucking hate advertising for distorting the economy, and letting big companies pay advertising money to drown innovative competition, but there are very few of those left these days.

2. engagement driven algorithms - because advertising operates on the basis of psychological manipulation rather than actually informing you, it means that its effectiveness always scales with volume.

i.e. I can read everything there is to learn about two different laptops, watch YouTube videos, read all the specs and reviews, and after about two hours of research I'll know everything there is to know. A company can try and provide me with more information about their product to sway me, but at that point it's probably ineffective because I know everything about them already. However if they bombard me with slick fun ads that evoke certain emotions in me over and over and over and over and over again, it will create an emotional bias towards one over the other.

This distinction is super important because it is what leads to most of advertising's ills: most specifically engagement driven algorithms, which social media uses to keep you scrolling and are what are truly destroying society. The amount of human time and effort wasted to them is incalculable, the amount of languished relationships, neglected kids, over tired and angry people etc. is truly jaw droppingly damaging, and it is fundamentally because advertising is a cheap way to manipulate you into buying something, and unlike true education, it's effectiveness keeps scaling with volume.

I was thinking about this earlier today.

It’s amazing to me that in my lifetime, ads went from a thing that companies got to do as an extra once they had succes all the way to a thing that runs everything everywhere.

Nowadays if you don’t have ads in some form abusing the algorithm (which is in itself designed to be abused) then you get nowhere.

(Also holy shit this has a lot of comments, seems like people have this on their liver somewhat)

Follow the money. Advertisement exists because businesses demand it.

Your post is literally shooting the messenger.

Yeah, I agree. People were doing an en masse boycott, using tiktok as a way to gather, and who to hit, then, bam suddenly the elites have to buy tiktok. I know they did that for other reasons too, controlling the narrative and what people see and know has been the M.O. of the evil elite, since days of old, but it just seemed like interesting timing. If we all just gather and boycott, together, as a movement, do targeted hits, I wonder if we could break their choke hold on us. I know there's a lot of movements for boycotting, people are moving away from the more evil things. I just feel like it doesn't get as widely spread as it should? Maybe? And I really appreciated the approach behind the other movement, they targeted one brand for one quarter, in a very calculated and planned strategy, so as not to affect anyone's jobs.

They definitely try, but why do we let them?