AlteredEgo

On the one hand I hate Elon Musk. On the other hand I also hate advertisement.

So.... win / win?

Hmm well arguably I ought to rethink my opinion now that lemmy is working well enough.

Look at how many niche communities tried to move from reddit to lemmy and failed. Basically all of them. Even just a little pushback of reddit did a lot (not letting communities be abandoned or closed). Then lemmy is becoming increasingly fragmented (e.g. US imperialists and socialist instances). Then you have people deleting years worth of contribution and valuable content on reddit, answers to questions etc. Or what happens when ~20% of the current lemmy instances fold because of server cost or lost interest? And ultimately how much of a dent on a civilization level is the fediverse going to make?

All that are example of how network effects create a "toll" if you try to leave them.

The EU recently mandated that messenger apps need to create a compatibility layer and afaik even that looks like it's going to fail to work as thought.

Because of network effects the understanding of a monopoly has to grow with changing technology.

The fundamental problem is that it wouldn't even be desireable to split up many of the new social media and internet technologies because that would reduce the quality for everyone, increase costs to support as a business and increase environmental damage from duplicating server storage and power consumption.

What we need is to turn them into public utilities that have significant democratic input by their own workforce (the experts and enthusiasts) and the users (the billions of people who actually create the value for the thing).

The emperor has new body paint

Personally I preferred punk in the "deliberately ugly" way

No the other way around. Smoking hits you very fast, almost instantly because it's very fine particles that pass into the bloodstream. Vaping is much slower because it's vaporized droplets that get absorbed slowly through mucus membrane, and it's less effective (like 50% effective after 30 min vs. 100% after 5 min). Nicotine salt e-liquid "improves" that a bit to hit faster, to help people stop smoking. You can find articles and papers on this.

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I really prefer the Israeli and the USA disinformation campaigns /s

Fucking neoliberals... decades of neoliberal economic policy, imperialism and media conglomeration allowed this fertile ground in the first place.

You're right, if it was an intelligence service they'd want the service to continue while they have a backdoor.

Yeah basically the problem is the apps because mobile browser / mobile websites are less usable than desktop browser. I use NewPipe / PipePipe for youtube on android, hopefully it'll keep working. Right now I don't have any ads on android. But I'm only using very few apps. Thankfully the android ecosystem seems to be improving.

Is it? Maybe. I managed to install the apps I need from f-droid and use firefox but it felt more difficult than on PC - where you just need to install an adblocker in your browser.

I'm living mostly ad-free due to adblockers everywhere (except android) but most people don't know, can't do it or are brainwashed to think it's amoral to block ads. If more people would catch on adblocking would be made illegal. And either way my personal choice doesn't change what content is produced and how society is influenced. Personal responsibility doesn't solve this just as it doesn't climate change. Because advertising clearly does work.

Sorry I don't have any great sources on this. It's rather speculation because how could you research this scientifically? Even if you could, an experiment like that would actually be unethical! And who would fund this, there is no way to talk in mainstream about advertising without running against massive financial interests. There are some search results but most of those articles look like mental garbage.

My guess is that because we're constantly being told what to consume our minds work quite differently from what they would without advertising.

Our minds constantly have to resist intrusive advertising and psychological manipulation which means we constantly have to switch between and adversarial mindset and whatever content we were watching / reading. Or we become obedient and just "let the advertising wash through us". And advertising constantly has to find new ways to activate our emotions.

Just as massive is the effect on content produced, there is a "natural selection" that any content that helps sell advertisement is more successful on the market. It's not just that you can't piss off your advertiser but that generally you want the consumer to be in a certain mood - or that content producers who do this naturally are more successful and grow.

Then there are privacy concerns which reduce humans to machines and creates a powerful system that can and is abused for political control (public relations).

How can any of that not have massive societal impacts, since it's being done on a massive scale and is near ubiquitous? How can anyone assume these effects are not incredibly bad?

You could have a country banning advertising that has a kind of "content tax" that is funded publicly and administered independent from the government through separate elections. And that has strict mandates and distributes the money to news papers, websites, movies and video creators dependent on views - similar to music rights agencies. But none of this is even talked about. We've completely lost the ability to even think seriously about how to improve our society. I believe in large part this is due to advertising.

PS: There is a film called "Branded (2012)" about the "horrors of advertising".