The internet runs on ads.
Ad companies pay for all the “free” popular social media we use. Ad companies dictate to social media what their clients want their ads to be associated with, not associated with, and drive media of all kinds to push inflammatory and click-bait content that drives engagement and views. It’s why you indirectly can’t swear, talk about suicide, drugs, death, or violence. Sure, you technically can unless ToS prohibits it, but if companies tell their ad hosts they don’t want to be associated with someone talking about guns, the content discussing guns gets fewer ads, fewer ads = less revenue, low-revenue gets pushed to the bottom.
So lowbrow political rage bait, science denialism, and fake conspiracies drives people to interact and then gets pushed to the top because it gets ad revenue. Content that delves into critical thought and requires introspection or contemplation languishes.
Ads are destroying society because stupid and rage sells views.
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.
emulation’s another thing. i was glad to toss the duckstation devs five bucks so’s i could keep it easily updated on my phone (i like the psx generation, it’s great for that screen size) and so they could hopefully afford to keep working on it. it’s been so long i can’t remember if they charged or if it was a patreon thing, but five bucks is five bucks.
There’s no such thing as “competitive enough.” Corporate greed is literally insatiable, inherently and by design. There’s an entire series of Supreme Court decisions – not just Citizens United – that would need to be overturned to fix that.
I think ad funded stuff is the only way to get things done in a capitalist economy. There may be other types of economies that could get by without ads, but we’ll never know because this is the world we’ve created.
Do you remember those free “newspapers” that used to choke your mailbox once a week, or your favorite club? With like 75% ad content and a few poorly written articles? That’s how I learned about the power of advertisment. The internet just put that in hyperdrive. How much of it is driven by ads these days?