zlacker

This is the largest damage in my opinion. How many thousands, millions of hours of some of the most brilliant minds of our generations have we dedicated to making the experience of lived daily life worse? Ads are a scourge upon the actual usability and safety of the internet. I understand the current necessity of the economics, it doesn't change the fact that the web without ads is an infinitely more pleasant and self-paced place without all the flashing imagery and psychological subterfuge surrounding every single piece of useful information you could ever find.

This massive wealth of intelligence, drive, ambition, all spent on something as useless as banner ads everyone explicitly tries to ignore or block anyway. It's insane. But money is the primordial force that allows the planet to keep rotating so inevitably someone will dedicate their intelligence to whatever cheap money they come up with. That's fine, that's good. I just imagine all that money could've cured some diseases, built better telescopes, put more powerful technology in the hands of the disadvantaged, maybe even, i dunno, fed some hungry people or something. What the fuck is the metaverse gonna do for anyone besides exploit them for maximum profit driven by distraction

>>wholin+(OP)
I mean the banner ads are the tip of the iceberg in terms of what millions of hours of all those brilliant minds are up to. In my mind at least, that goes out to much worse things than banner ads: incitement of all kinds of engagement, the most effective being rage; the infinite scroll that traps people in apps not unlike a slot-machine; the curation algorithms that promote the most insane, bugfuck and completely-detached-from-reality topics, individuals and trends; the normalization of documenting one's life in excruciating detail for no audience, only to find yourself flung into the life of a celebrity at a moments notice without the resources of one to handle it; the weaponization/creation of culture wars and all the monetizable attention that follows them...

It really is no wonder all of this shit has so badly corroded our social structures, given the sheer weight of the resources we've piled into it. If only we could get this kind of effort out for problems that actually need solving, instead of just endlessly punching dopamine out of unsuspecting consumer's brains.