Re:Elementary OS is imploding
by civilized on Wednesday March 09, 2022 @12:43PM
(#30617620)
Those are all good points. You certainly seem more informed about it than me.
Some of these points seem to apply to traditional advertising as well, although arguably traditional advertising isn't great either. Attribution is an eternal ad industry problem. Principal-agent issues exist too, but might be worse now, with the layers of tech abstraction that only the "agents" understand and manipulate. OTOH attribution is easy for agents to manipulate even in low-tech contexts.
The relentless digital surveillance is new, and yeah, pretty awful, and hopefully we see it getting shut down by moves in consumer tech, e.g. that privacy thing Apple did that pissed FB off (I don't recall exactly what it was).
I think the basic idea behind Google AdWords is pretty neat, although now they're trying to extract maximum value by clogging pages with ads and reducing the distinction between ads and organic search results.
Some of these points seem to apply to traditional advertising as well, although arguably traditional advertising isn't great either. Attribution is an eternal ad industry problem. Principal-agent issues exist too, but might be worse now, with the layers of tech abstraction that only the "agents" understand and manipulate. OTOH attribution is easy for agents to manipulate even in low-tech contexts.
The relentless digital surveillance is new, and yeah, pretty awful, and hopefully we see it getting shut down by moves in consumer tech, e.g. that privacy thing Apple did that pissed FB off (I don't recall exactly what it was).
I think the basic idea behind Google AdWords is pretty neat, although now they're trying to extract maximum value by clogging pages with ads and reducing the distinction between ads and organic search results.