• 8 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • How can they benefit from innovation that has been stifled?

    a) how are you measuring “innovation”?

    b) how are you measuring the “benefit”, and for who?

    Regulations and standardization can hold back an existing company from trying a new idea, however, they are also the only thing that creates true, lasting, interoperability, and interoperability is what let’s new companies enter markets.

    i.e. Theoretically, Apple may be held back if they want to innovate their charging port because they have to make it compatible with USB-C.

    However, now new companies that aren’t apple that want to innovate on cables and chargers can enter the market, and they’ll benefit from a consistent specified interface and not having to design a million proprietary variants, and they’ll be able to plan their products in a stabler, longer term environment, that will make it easier to attract investment.

    Standards are effectively a government created platform / framework for building and designing new ideas. True innovation often strives when you have some thoughtful constraints that lets everything work together predictably.





  • However, most of that is still part of advertising; producers proactively strive to get reviewed.

    Reaching out to reviewers is still technically advertising in the broadest definition of the word, but it is distinct from commercial advertising where companies pay to broadcast their specific messages to users.

    This distinction is also reflected in the way that most companies are operated these days: reaching out to reviewers with information and offering them review units would fall under the marketing / communications / strategy department, but wouldn’t be referred to as advertising unless they were paying the reviewer for a positive review, which isn’t even legal in some places.





  • OpenAI said the threshold for referring a user to law enforcement was whether the case involved an imminent and credible risk of serious physical harm to others. The company said it did not identify credible or imminent planning. The Wall Street Journal first reported OpenAI’s revelation.

    OpenAI said that, after learning of the school shooting, employees reached out to the RCMP with information on the individual and their use of ChatGPT.

    Not defending them, but OP’s selections seemed intentionally rage baiting.


  • TBF, the original meaning of advertising was just that: spread the word about your product. Sure, praise it, add nice pictures, but that’s about it. People need to know that your product is out there, and what it’s like.

    I get that, if you’re arguing from an economic efficiency standpoint, there was an argument to be made that the spreading of new information through advertising helps to spread new innovative ideas and thus increases overall societal efficiency.

    It’s just that a) in the Internet age, we have other, non-advertising ways to spread information (i.e. specs and reviews), and b) if advertising was actually still about genuine education, then it would not scale in effectiveness the way it does with volume and repetition.


  • You’re right overall, but the mechanism you listed about advertising only appearing near safe content is not that big of a deal compared to other mechanisms at play:

    1. psychological manipulation vs competition - the way that a capitalist economy is supposed to work is that a bunch of firms compete to sell you a good or service, you pick the best one for your situation and buy it, then the firm that produces the best good or service gets more resources (money) to grow, rewarding the best product maker.

    Advertising breaks this. It lets you spend money on psychological manipulation to get people to buy your product, instead of just trying to produce a better product. True conservative capitalists should fucking hate advertising for distorting the economy, and letting big companies pay advertising money to drown innovative competition, but there are very few of those left these days.

    1. engagement driven algorithms - because advertising operates on the basis of psychological manipulation rather than actually informing you, it means that its effectiveness always scales with volume.

    i.e. I can read everything there is to learn about two different laptops, watch YouTube videos, read all the specs and reviews, and after about two hours of research I’ll know everything there is to know. A company can try and provide me with more information about their product to sway me, but at that point it’s probably ineffective because I know everything about them already. However if they bombard me with slick fun ads that evoke certain emotions in me over and over and over and over and over again, it will create an emotional bias towards one over the other.

    This distinction is super important because it is what leads to most of advertising’s ills: most specifically engagement driven algorithms, which social media uses to keep you scrolling and are what are truly destroying society. The amount of human time and effort wasted to them is incalculable, the amount of languished relationships, neglected kids, over tired and angry people etc. is truly jaw droppingly damaging, and it is fundamentally because advertising is a cheap way to manipulate you into buying something, and unlike true education, it’s effectiveness keeps scaling with volume.