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kleinbl00  ·  1668 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Google: Building a more private web

Your thought experiment is a wish to pay more for better ads. Here's a better thought experiment:

Person A has a need for a specialty product. Person B makes a perfect version of that specialty product. Who is going to be better at connecting Person A to Person B: Person A looking for what the fuck he wants or a faceless, shapeless, gerrymandered algorithm operating on imperfect information over an opaque network designed to abstract and obstruct the steady flow of information from Person A to Person B?

By blocking ads, I keep the price of ads low. Things that do not work are not valuable. If the goal is to get an ad in front of me, and I make it so that ads don't get in front of me, I've taken the value of ads to ZERO.

Advertising MUST suck by definition. You can solve that one by inspection. It is content that I did not ask for that interferes with the content that I did ask for and it does so through imperfect statistics. The approach taken by the Internet has been to get excruciatingly invasive in its statistics rather than recognize that as the system improves the advertising gets increasingly invasive.

Even you, arguing that advertising could theoretically be useful, refer to it as "potential landmines." there is no part of my shopping experience that EVER needs "potential landmines." None of it. Zero. Zilch. This is why the casinos in Vegas chase the pornslappers away from the entrances: they're fucking bad for business.