Let’s be real here though, has anyone clicked on a digital news site in the last few years and been happy with the result? Half of them are paywalled and the ones that aren’t are absolutely filled to the brim with obnoxious auto play ads, it’s no wonder people don’t click news site links anymore. I’ve got no sympathy for them.
It’s almost as if giving a giant corporation unilateral control over what news our society consumes was a bad idea?
One quote that jumps out: “It’s difficult to say with certainty what the causes are, but Facebook has made no secret about its intention to deprioritize news on its platform and give greater precedence to video content, which by nature results in less clickthrough traffic."
It does feel like my Facebook “algorithm” is constantly trying to push “shorts” on me…annoying little videos clearly meant to imitate, I assume, Youtube Shorts, Tiktok, Instagram short videos, etc…
Broadly speaking, with all that’s happening in the social media world, it feels like some sort of reckoning or change is coming, but where exactly things are heading is hard to say…
I honestly am not sure why we had become so tolerant of advertisements in our face.
Perhaps we had reasoned it was just the way these companies make money, a necessary evil.
Its getting to the point though, where the more I see a company advertise and put out meaningless and ambiguous statements the less I trust that company.
Isn’t there some old adage about don’t trust what someone tells you about themselves, rather than the way they act?
Aggressive advertising isn’t anything new, remember when a 30 minute TV slot was 8 minutes of advertising? Or when every site in the 00s had at least 3 banners of malware ads with sound that played obnoxiously loud on load?
I wouldn’t mind as much if half the websites out there didn’t have the trashiest ads I’ve ever seen in my life. I’ve got an ad blocker on my desktop but not on my phone. Amazing that supposedly “professional” businesses are filling their sites with sleazy ads that look like they’ll lead you directly to installing a bunch of viruses.
Pi-hole and a vpn on my phone keeps me ad free everywhere, and with extensions on firefox on pc and andriod it keeps other annoyances that aren’t ads away
AdAway says it’s blocked 200K advertisers since I got my new phone less than a month ago.
I don’t love the Pixel 7a’s size or battery life, but I can’t go to a phone I can’t root. Call recording and AdAway are non-negotiable.
I also needed root to get LineageOS-style “hold hardware button to activate flashlight” to work. I could live without that, but it would be very annoying not to have a flashlight instantly when I need it. I activate that all the time.
The version I’ve always heard is “when somebody tells you who they are, believe 'em”.
