Similar to endisneigh I take as many steps as I possibly can to avoid letting advertising influence me. I block ads wherever possible, and anything that slips through goes on a shit-list of companies that I will avoid buying from unless I have no other choice.

So if you see an ad about something, you never recommend it. Sounds like you let advertising influence you quite a bit.

Sure, if you're going to insist on an overly literal reading of my words.

Advertising is mental pollution. Reacting against it isn’t the same thing as being influenced to consume what they’re hocking.

Where can I buy some of your Bitcoins, please?

Maybe its reverse psychology by competitors

Not rewarding the awful ad-tech ecosystem is a good principle.

I don't think you can say this in general. I really, really dislike ads, but they _do_ sponsor a lot of content creators which could otherwise not focus on their content creation and they help companies to get their product known to you - which does not need to be a negative. If they sell you a product which genuinely improves your life, it's a win-win-win for you, the producer and the person advertising.

The current ecosystem is overly focused on manipulation and there are simply to many ads, yes, but I have found really good products via ads and I don't think companies should be generally demonized just for playing the game. It's not all bad.

The mafia was also famous for its community outreach and charity, that didn't make it a net positive.

Yes, but the key difference is that the mafia is, by definition, a criminal organization and the upside is not linked in any way with being a mafia. Ads, on the other hand, do inherently have the positive quality of showing you products and could exist without their current downsides.

Regardless of their current downsides (which are indeed considerable!), ads by definition are there to make me want to buy things I wouldn’t otherwise want to buy. That’s not exactly noble, even if we pretend that they’re just showing me stuff I wasn’t aware of.

> That’s not exactly noble

That's where we disagree. Imagine you always cooked your noodles in a pan. This is clearly a suboptimal situation. Then you see an ad for a pot, you go buy it and it turns out that making noodles (and other dishes) could be so much easier!

Sure, you would not have bought a pot otherwise, but this ad would have been a net positive for you and the ad company, no downsides.

Or maybe you see an ad for a Chinese restaurant, so you try it and it turns out you really like them. There's nothing inherently wrong with their food just because you got to know it via an ad.

As stated above, the current system is stupid. But it's not all bad.