Many, many software engineers have jobs and many startups exist because there is an advertising ecosystem.
The advertising ecosystem is an inherent part of the capitalist economy. In whose interest is it to kill that?
Apple should stop advertising if it hates advertising so much.
I doubt that; it distorts competition by making false / aggrandizing claims about products and their prices and capitalist markets would work much better with transparency instead of the smokescreens of advertising (i.e. more comparison shopping).
> In whose interest is it to kill that?
Consumers and small businesses would profit greatly if advertising played a smaller role (big businesses spend a lot of money in advertising to sell inferior products, small companies find it difficult to compete even with better or cheaper offers).
Also, page load times and traffic plans, obviously.
There is nothing particularly healthy about an advertising ecosystem. It skews the incentives of content creators towards dishonesty.
>The advertising ecosystem is an inherent part of the capitalist economy. In whose interest is it to kill that?
Anybody who believes that market power should be determined by the quality of your products rather than your advertising budget?
Sao Paolo banned advertising. As far as I'm aware they are still a capitalist economy.
Arguing that all advertising is misleading and evil is just as silly as saying that all advertising is truthful and trustworthy.
Honest salespeople know that selling a product to someone is a win-win situation. And honest ads can help people find things they are genuinely looking for, and solve a problem they are having.
Take Google for instance - it started out with good intentions and it has consistently blurred the distinction between its ads and content ever since. Why? Because that's how you get more ad dollars, of course. If being misleading didn't mean profits, Google wouldn't do it.
If you want to find the most egregious behavior in the advertising industry don't look at the small fry. Follow the trail of profit.
>And honest ads can help people find things they are genuinely looking for
They can, but that's a happy accident and a byproduct. The advertising industry is not geared to help connect people to things they want. It is geared towards invoking desires for things people didn't otherwise want and putting your name ahead of competitors in people's heads.
Why is it you don't believe THAT's the happy accident and byproduct, while diffusing information is the main mechanism?
If you'd ever tried to convince someone to buy something they don't want, you'd have a good idea about how likely that scenario is.
Have you ever bought something you didn't want?
What exactly did you think the purpose of high production values advertising that tries to convey a lifestyle or invoke feelings of inadequacy? You think they'd do all that to 'diffuse information'?
They're trying to hack your amygdala, not passing on a message.
And yea, I've bought a McDonalds hamburger while drunk before that I felt disgusted by after.
I don't think that's true. Advertising (or rather, marketing) is a way to circumvent word of mouth - instead of making something and telling the small number of people in your network, who tell other people and so on, an advert is essentially paying someone to go and tell lots of people all at once regardless of who they are and whether they're interested.
It feels necessary because it's how things are done at the moment. That's not the same as actually being necessary.
Mind you, I don't have an alternative. If I did I'd probably be writing an application to YC right now.