• GetOffMyLan@programming.dev
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    1 month ago

    And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet, and the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.

    I’m afraid they aren’t wrong. The majority of people aren’t going to pay for access to random blogs etc. So we’d end up with only the big players having usable sites.

    People kick off about ads but rarely suggest an alternative to funding the internet.

    Back in the day ads were targeted based on the website’s target audience not the user’s personal data. It works fine but is less effective. Don’t see why they couldn’t go that way.

    • Pulptastic@midwest.social
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      1 month ago

      More effective is a massive understatement. Now they can precisely measure effectiveness and adjust their strategy in real time to maximize output. They have increased effective effectiveness several fold. The cat is out of the bag, even if we try to roll this back the googles of the world know the data is there and can’t not harvest it. Our best strategy has to combine regulation and monopoly busting, break these companies into smaller ones that have less power to comb through big data.

      For a good read on this, check out The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuniga.

    • erenkoylu@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      Internet was fine in the early 2000s before the rise of social media platforms resulted in surveillance advertisement complex.

      It was a different place, but worked ok.