alt Hacker NewsThe advertising industry is run by people trained for centuries to do one thing well - find ways to mine your finite Attention. This is what they spend their mind on 24x7. They have discovered thousands of ways to do it. So blocking one or two paths at a time doesnt do anything useful.
Human Attention so far is not treated as a scare natural resource. So there is a free for all overfishing of the finite pool going on.
Since politicians/lawmakers also use the same mechanisms to harvest attention the Ad/Ad tech industry has regulatory capture. It will never collapse just like Big Tobacco is happily chugging along baring some major public catastrophe.
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customary reminder that things can be better…
“things are bad” is a good reason to align your work towards things that make life better
As hard as that may be, it’s where progress rather than backsliding comes from
We should champion every effort for improving the conditions rather than restate things are bad
Blocking a few of the biggest paths absolutely can work, look at 20th century TV with a few big networks. You couldn't easily get wide distribution of anything too bonkers.
We already have a form of this for the internet that you can see if you visit sketchy pirate websites, you don't see those ads for porn games on facebook or any reputable website. They get flagged by adsafe and/or the ~15 or so big exchanges. So it's possible, it's just a question of will.