This whole fuckin video is bonkers.

I’m looking for, I get targeted Google ads about camera stands from Adorama and B&H Photo that do match my criteria. I like that when I get into a rabbit hole about traveling to Singapore or buying a new laptop, all of the content that I get fed is relevant to what I’m interested in.

He picked out the one instance where high-powered advertising produces a positive result, while ignoring the 90% of it that is sinister in some way. Big categories of that:

• Creating a need that didn’t exist before by manipulating people
• Bending the nature of the underlying content to its ends (producing news that communicates the message rich people want expressed to the masses, instead of informative journalism) (producing TV shows that lull people into a stupor so they’ll be susceptible to the ad breaks, instead of that which will wake them up and create genuine engagement and a vehicle for creative expression) (disrupting people’s use of social media to communicate so as to manipulate them into being better consumers) (etc).
• Providing a way for someone who makes a worse product but has more money to spend to promote their worse product over a better one that doesn’t focus as much on marketing

You can join me or not in my tinfoil-fit view, but I would say that 90% of the impact of advertising on the landscape is one of those things, and a very very small percentage of it is devoted to what he’s talking about, good honest people who make good honest products and just want to laser-focus on customers who happen to want those products and make it easy for them to find out about them. Personally I’m pretty skeptical that these things with seeing ads for camera stands or his Singapore trip actually happened that way, but even if they had, it formed a very small percent of the ways that advertising impacted his world that day.

5 or 10% of the time, Google and Facebook miss the mark and they show me ads that I’m not actually interested in or recommend videos that aren’t even relevant.

5 or 10 per cent, yeah? You must be fascinated by ads for things. Personally they form an offensive tide of bullshit against my own mental landscape, 95% or so of which I’m not interested in.

Something else that I wanted to note is that this effort has not only led to better advertising but better everything. This is the primary reason that the UI and experience on apps and services like Chrome, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok are so good

What in the ever lasting fuck are you talking about

Pretty much every single time that ad-supported-ness comes into the equation, the service gets worse then it was without it. BBC is better than Fox News. Mastodon is better than Facebook. Craigslist is better than everything. When the service is designed to be good, it’s good, and when it’s designed to draw ad revenue, the “being good” part of the goal becomes, by definition, secondary. I won’t say the two are always incompatible, but specifically with the examples he lists, they’re largely incompatible, and being good has become secondary.

I can kind of be charitable about what he’s saying, and agree that Chrome’s UI is superior to some purely-open-source browser that doesn’t have the same level of funding, or that Youtube is more reliable and performs better than some bodged-together video service. But I cannot possibly fathom the kind of brain that would look at the modern world and use TikTok or YouTube as examples of things that are “so good” and lead to “better everything.”

Among other things, the designed-to-be-addictive-to-drive-advertising-revenue nature of how they’re designed creates real harm in the real world. Youtube dopamine loops trap young kids whose brains aren’t developed, and playing with tablets all the time fucks up their brains. If you’ve been around kids in the modern world you’ve seen this. Political advertising and shill-friendliness on social media produces bad political outcomes that cause genuine tragedies in the real world. Few people involved in creating those products seem to give a shit about any of that, because they’re so focused on maximizing ad spend. I would not describe that as “better everything.”

To me this is the real harm in the system he’s defending. It’s not that tracking a person for advertising to them, in itself, creates that much harm in every case. It does sometimes, but his short-sighted view of the problem that most of the time that specific part of the behavior doesn’t cause too much harm, is actually valid. But the wider scope of letting advertising rule our modern world even though it’s objectively making everything progressively shittier for no benefit to everyone except a handful of already-rich people who don’t need any more money, is a very big problem, and defending that system because one particular aspect of it isn’t the part that’s really hurting people seems obviously wrong.