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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 27th, 2023

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  • Thanks for writing an essay so I no longer feel the need to lol. I hope your post gets more visibility.

    I fucking hate advertising. I want it banned to the greatest extent that we can do so. But if we want actual change, it needs to be a lawfully applicable strategy. We don’t need to make the perfect the enemy of the good. Banning ads for medication is a great start that everyone can agree on for instance. We should work up from there.

    The most insidious stuff is the content you don’t even realize is an ad, like comments and methods of boosting/lowering visibility on social media. That is a thorny issue.


  • This is a new phenomenon here in my experience, the cynic in me says this is ad companies trying to control and shut down the conversation as Lemmy grows. Better to have your opposition not have a realistic and feasible route to their goals.

    It reminds me of how close the US was to actual police reform before all the discussion became “defund the police entirely” like that was going to just suddenly fix everything and cause no other problems. Then the whole movement just basically evaporated.




  • I don’t think social media is inherently evil, but profit motive creeps into people’s private lives and fundamentally corrupts the natural premise of social connection.

    Social media is huge money, all through advertising. Advertising will use anything it can to manipulate an audience’s behavior, that’s what it exists for in terms of research and how organizations decide what ads to run and where: net engagement and sales figures. Whether to sell you a product or a political idea, it is most effective when you don’t realize you’re being advertised to. This encourages ad firms and political campaigns to manipulate user psychology to get the most meaningful results they can. I think the depth of insight all the data collection tech companies do opens a window to manipulate people in ways we haven’t really come to terms with as a society.

    And while the fediverse is probably more resistant to advertising than a centrally controlled system, there is nothing stopping well crafted astroturfing in this space. Political astroturfing in particular doesn’t generally look like what someone expects an ad to look like because of its ubiquitous nature and its natural network effects.









  • Well sure it is. I mean nonpaid advertising is the best kind for everyone since it’s likely to actually be honest and actually listened to but it’s not always easy to tell from some comments what their true motivations are. Thus the existence of astroturfing.

    Kagi probably has a social media manager or hires a marketing agency (as most companies do) and their time would be well spent posting on Lemmy (and other sites) about Kagi but in as organically of a way as possible since we’re all pretty ad averse here. I mean, it’s possible Kagi specifically isn’t doing it, but it is a matter of when, not if, companies start doing that here.