Comment by blub - Hacker Neue

blub Mar 31, 2021 parent

Anything which provides more signal to advertisers is a bad thing.

alwaysdoit Mar 31, 2021

Disagree. The abandonment of advertising in favor of paywalls in media is directly contributing to the increase in polarization and consumption of disinformation. Quality journalism is getting harder and harder to access. People might subscribe to one or two, but they are unlikely to shell out for a publication that does not align with their preexisting views. Meanwhile the propaganda and fake news remains free to read.

realusername Mar 31, 2021

Advertising is directly contributing to the increase in polarization. If you want to get ad revenue, you have to produce in increasing quantities every year (by directly reducing the quality of the content) and use shady tactics like clickbait and polarizing topics to increase page views.

None of those issues apply to paid journalism.

dialtone Mar 31, 2021

Are you perhaps misunderstanding how the newsfeed works? People can write all clickbait they want, always have, but it wasn't until that content was forced in your face by Facebook's newsfeed algorithm, or youtube recommendation algorithm or twitters feed algorithm that you are really exposed to that stuff.

And even without clickbait stuff people search for the news that satisfies them and their value system.

All of this happens on data voluntarily shared with the platforms people complain about like Facebook, and there's no end to this in sight.

Advertising in this forum is at the same time useless and barely works (cue the 50% advertising is wasted, don't know which one, and other similar sentences) and the most powerful tool for mind control ever existed.

realusername Mar 31, 2021

Facebook and Youtube are also powered by advertising and suffer from the exact same issue. Content producers using these platforms have an incentive to create the maximum amount of content they can and use polarizing topics to get more views.

Any revenue model based on the number of views (like advertising) is fundamentally flawed and will suffer from the exact same problem.

HWR_14 Mar 31, 2021

Advertising and targeted advertising are not the same. Youtube creators bake in ads relative to the videos (or not) via sponsors and they make more money off that than the ads Google puts in front of the videos.

kenny11 Mar 31, 2021

It seems that the same argument could be made about hyper-targeted advertising. In the days where everyone was watching the same network newscasts or reading the same newspapers, they were also all seeing the same advertisements.

The trend towards segmenting people into ever-smaller classes to serve them more targeted ads is another cause of, not a solution to polarization.

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