Nonsense.
See, there are (were?) lots of niche specific publications and communities. They'd actually know about a subject, and provide informed and largely unbiased advice, and carry advertisement, of course. Similarly, there were regional newspapers, carrying information and advertisement of regional interest.
TV and other broad media could not steal their advertisement dollars, because that was the only way to reach the niche or region.
What Facebook is doing is to usurp all of that and monopolise advertisement, driving smaller niche and regional publishers out of business. Their hypocrisy is astounding.
> there's a good chance no one who's recommendations you trust would be interested in the same type of service/product
I think the trust problem has gotten much worse. As I said, there used to be niche publishers supporting communities (by interest or region) that were interested in keeping these sustainable long term, and therefore would not be interested in scamming their audience. Now, these publishers have been bled dry, and you have to find your information on the world wild web, where any scammer and fly-by-night producer can target you and link farm and buy fake reviews etc.
Perhaps I should have said "in the modern world, word of mouth doesn't work..."
Today, chances are those niche publications & communities are going to be online. And how do we determine the trustworthy ones from the ones that are just trying to exploit us? I guess we need to rely on word of mouth to determine which mouths we should listen to words from...
My point was if these communities are hard to find, targeted ads from small businesses in that niche might inform you of relevant products or services, not relevant communities.
Definitely not saying it's a perfect solution, or one that I like, just trying to point out it's not as black & white as people like to make out (especially on sites like HN)
At least with ads (on a platform like Facebook), it's obvious they're ads and what their incentive is. With a random community, it may be unclear if people within it/the community itself is being paid by some company etc. Or if they have some other incentive to misrepresent the quality of certain products/services (e.g. recommending only what they can get affiliate links for).
Ads on the other hand you can trust to lie to you 100% of the time. Ads are never honest, their only intention is to fool you to buy something you don't need.
I legitimately don't understand how _anyone_ would think he gains any value from reading dishonest corporate propaganda, less how he would think "hey, thats nice! I'll buy that!"
Your example of rockbox forum seems disingenuous because I assume they're not recommending you buy particular products (maybe recommending some particular mp3 players that the cfw works well on, but I think they try to target a wide range of players).
> Ads on the other hand you can trust to lie to you 100% of the time.
Exactly my point. You know exactly what you're getting and what their incentive is.
Well actually, maybe not exactly my point - it's pretty clear to me that ads do not "lie to you 100% of the time". Some ads are going to exaggerate the quality of their products etc., but some ads literally just inform you "this is a thing that is available", which is typically an easily provable claim.
But the point is that yes, with ads you know that it's being paid for by the people who have a direct financial interest in you buying the thing. You can make an informed decision.
Also, we can discuss the quality of Internet communities, but I would tend to trust one of these quite a bit more than an advert, even targeted, which was where we were coming from.
As real life examples, I have got advice on stuff to buy from photography websites, modelling (railway and wargames) Facebook groups and blogs without any trouble, and I know where to find it when I need it. I know when to take a photography buff raving about a camera with a grain of salt ("but it has a better score with DXOMARK"), I have about zero confidence in adverts on the web.
It also favours more established businesses that are more known, making it harder for new businesses to gain any traction.
I'm not keen on advertising (I use adblockers on all my devices etc.), but there are definitely some (in my opinion) some compelling arguments on both sides.