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Re:Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work by davidw on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @06:15PM (#21276567)
The problem is also that they are advertisers, and I'll be damned if I want ads for my company appearing next to "Illinois Nazis" or ISIS or whatever other garbage.

There's another problem: it becomes a race to the bottom if it's nothing but trolls and garbage content.

Re:Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work by flukus on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @08:35PM (#21277766)
And the problem this creates for society is that we censor content that isn't advertiser friendly. We've already seen where this leads with broadcast television, lowest common denominator trash that is safe for advertisers, escaping that advertiser optimum made youtube good in the first place.

I subscribe to a lot of history channels so I've seen the effects of this filtering directly, history contains a lot of talk about nazis and hitler and you can't even mention the big H without being demonetized.

But this is just another example of how advertising is a cancer on society.

Re:Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work by mcny on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @08:06PM (#21277573)
> The problem is also that they are advertisers, and I'll be damned if I want ads for my company appearing next to "Illinois Nazis" or ISIS or whatever other garbage.

I don't understand the problem. Why can't Toyota or Proctor and Gamble say it only wants to bid on a certain white list of channels or videos? The only downside is a smaller reach for the advertiser and a smaller "pie" for the "content" company (be it Instagram or YouTube).

I think the main problem is the "content providers" be it Instagram or YouTube want to maximize the ad revenue and any suggestion I have such as strictly reverse chronological timeline by default goes against the idea of "growth hacking".

I would personally love to be a fly in the wall in Netflix or Spotify headquarters. Because in my naive mind, Netflix makes MORE money when people subscribe to Netflix but never watch anything. But then if people watch Netflix a lot, they are more likely to talk about what they watch to others and encourage others to subscribe to Netflix?

Any company probably wants to make sure they make more money the more customers they have? Kind of sounds obvious but I don't think it is the case with every company. I'd imagine there are some businesses where there is an ideal size and if you are bigger, the additional customers kind of follow a law of diminishing returns? I can't think of any examples but would love to hear if anyone reading this can...