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Australian Broadcasting Corporation carries a piece of analysis/commentary on the societal ethics of advertising. I found it fascinating by the depth of arguments (true, there is a bias, but it's likely that most of us soylents share it); do take your time to read it in full, my attempts to summarize it below is bound to fail:
Advertising is a natural resource extraction industry, like a fishery. Its business is the harvest and sale of human attention. We are the fish and we are not consulted.
Two problems result from this. The solution to both requires legal recognition of the property rights of human beings over our attention.
First, advertising imposes costs on individuals without permission or compensation. It extracts our precious attention and emits toxic by-products, such as the sale of our personal information to dodgy third parties.
Second, you may have noticed that the world's fisheries are not in great shape. They are a standard example for explaining the theoretical concept of a tragedy of the commons, where rational maximising behaviour by individual harvesters leads to the unsustainable overexploitation of a resource.
A classic market failure
The advertising industry consists of the buying and selling of your attention between third parties without your consent. That means that the cost of producing the good — access to your attention — doesn't reflect its full social cost.
...Since advertisers pay less to access your attention than your attention is worth to you, an excessive (inefficient) amount of advertising is produced.
...It's a classic case of market failure. The problem has the same basic structure as the overfishing of the seas or global warming. In economics language, people's attention is a common good.
Why now?
First, as we have become more wealthy our consumption decisions have become more valuable...
Second, a shift in social norms has made it more acceptable to sell other people's attention.... Anyone in a position to access our attention, like the managers of pubs or hockey arenas, will be approached by multiple companies offering to pay a fee to install their advertising screens, banners, or cookies...
Thirdly, technology has made advertising even more intrusive. Not only is it now possible to print advertisements on grocery store eggs and to put digital displays above pub urinals.... Every moment we spend on the internet or with our smart phones is being captured, repackaged and sold to advertisers multiple times...
Counter-counter arguments: How economists defend advertising and why it isn't enough
- The direct value of advertising First is that advertising gives consumers valuable information about the sellers and prices of products they want to buy. The favoured example here is the classified ads section in newspapers.... Perhaps it was the case in 1961 that consumers struggled to find such information for themselves. But it is hard to see how this can still be the case in the internet age...
Advertising can be used to reduce competition: high spending by rich established players drowns out information from smaller newer competitors and thus creates an entry barrier, converting markets to oligopolies...
Second is the counter-intuitive claim that brands communicate their trustworthiness by their conspicuous expenditure on advertising not by what it actually says....[but]Companies wanting to demonstrate their confidence in their products don't have to waste so much of our time to do so. There are all sorts of more constructive ways of spending money conspicuously.
Third, is the social status that advertising can confer on a product and its consumption. What's the point of buying a Rolex or Mercedes unless the people around you know that it is expensive and are able to appreciate how rich and successful you must be? The business logic here is sound, but not the moral logic.
- Financing public goodsAdvertising is the financial model for many pure public goods like terrestrial television and radio, as well as club goods like newspapers, Google's search/email and Facebook... Advertising provides an alternative revenue source that makes it possible to profitably provide such services universally at the marginal cost of production — that is, zero.
There are alternatives. If these things are so valuable to society there is a case for supporting them from with taxes — grants, license fees (many national broadcasters) or payments for ratings. This is a well-established system for funding public and club goods...
Alternative models, like that of Wikipedia, are sometimes possible and are more socially — that is, economically — efficient. Wikipedia's value to consumers is in the hundreds of billions of dollars while its annual operating costs are only $25 million...
Obviously Wikipedia's operating costs are so low, like Mozilla's, because of its volunteer labour force. But that fact just makes one wonder why we couldn't have a "democratic" Facebook too, and whether that would not be superior from a social welfare perspective to the current "farming model" of extracting maximum value from its members-cum-livestock.
The right to preserve our attention
Advertising is a valuable commercial opportunity for businesses with access to consumers' attention, or their personal information. For the companies that buy and sell our attention it is — as all voluntary transactions must be — a win-win. But advertising lacks the free market efficiency that is claimed for it. Advertising is made artificially cheap, like the output of a coal burning power station, because the price at which it is sold doesn't reflect its negative effects on third parties — us.
Original Submission
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Marand on Sunday July 19 2015, @11:57PM
I honestly won't be surprised if a lot of thought that went into both Slashdot Beta, and its current "enhancements" is a ploy to try and increase the amount of ad revenue they can get
If you've seen the mobile version of the site lately, you wouldn't have any doubt at all about their intent. At some point after the "beta" fiasco and their "we listened to our users and rolled it back! we promise" bullshit, they started putting giant fucking advertisements at the end of the main page and in between the summary and comments on individual summaries. By "giant" I mean that the 2x2 ad square (four ads total) takes up probably 80% of the screen and has to be scrolled past to get from summary to comments. On the main page it's at the end, but is followed by even more ads, taking up about 95% of the screen space. Easier to avoid there, but they make up for this by inserting smaller adverts into the list of summaries.
I made the mistake of visiting one day when I was out and not much was going on. Figured I'd see how much cross-posting there was between here and there and see if SN had posted anything they hadn't yet. I immediately regretted the decision; it's so bad I thought I accidentally loaded a Sourceforge download page instead.
The problem is, it's easy to miss this sort of downhill slide on a site because of things like adblockers and NoScript. The admins start abusing the readership, but the people that provide the good comments are also likely to be blocking the shit that would scare them away, so they continue to give the site free content in the form of insightful or funny remarks without realising just how sleazy the site they're helping has become.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by NCommander on Monday July 20 2015, @12:40AM
I still occasionally check Slashdot, and I've found the most recent changes are actually worse than beta; honestly, what pissed me off was their response to the "audience", combined with a completely dysfunctional commenting system. For those reading this comment and weren't there for beta, the new discussion system was the unholy lovechild between D2 and discus. What really got me seething was their response to the "audience" that got me to the point of wanting to take action, which lead me to the altslashdot movement. I haven't been to their mobile site in quite awhile, the old one used to regularly lock up my Nexus 5 though due to the sheer amount of javascript that abomination uses. While I'd like SN to grow a mobile site, we'll do it with modified CSS + HTML via the theming system.
Watching them dick around with the site, it's pretty clear that they don't really have much understanding on how to run or manage slashcode; the site looks flat out broken when you use the old D1 system, user preferences are completely hidden (I'm not sure I can find a link to the homepage preferences anymore), and there are weird visage bits all over the place. I get the distinct impression they're tacking on bits via the plugin system, and have no idea how the core goes together.
Still always moving
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Monday July 20 2015, @02:16AM
Why have a mobile site? Any device worth it's batteries can load standard web pages, and they will get better with time. I do about half my browsing on my phone, and the standard pages are always preferable to the mobile versions. I think mobile versions are a short lived concept.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Insightful) by captain normal on Monday July 20 2015, @03:33AM
Bingo!! And just what the hell are "Aps"? Why does every website need a client on your device, be it mobile phone or computer?
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 3, Touché) by penguinoid on Monday July 20 2015, @05:20AM
And just what the hell are "Aps"?
I think they're a type of data-mining tool.
RIP Slashdot. Killed by greedy bastards.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MrNemesis on Monday July 20 2015, @05:28AM
Makes it considerably easier to get access to your contact list and GPS location.
"To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @06:55AM
Another way of saying Ads.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday July 20 2015, @08:17AM
Why have a mobile site?
Two reasons. One (which is increasingly becoming less important) is that mobile devices often mean 'paying for bandwidth', so having a low bandwidth version can be useful. Slashdot actually had a low-bandwidth version for a while back when a lot of the users were on modems, with fewer images and a reduced set of comments. The second is the screen size. It is possible, with style sheets, to have conditional rendering, but it's often better to avoid downloading and processing all of the big site to get at the functionality. For this done well, take a look at the FlightAware mobile site: it doesn't do everything that the main one does, but it presents the core functionality in a way that's a lot easier to use on a small-screen browser.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday July 20 2015, @03:17PM
Many companies design their sites for a specific width and ignore what resolution the browser is actually at. Any smaller than their designed resolution and you get scroll bars and any higher leaves blank spaces on the sides. SN goes down to 700px before scrolling but expands to any width. So it would work pretty well with any high-res device. Reading the front-page could suck on a low res device because after scrolling down some you'll have 50% gray background with a column of content in the middle. A good mobile site is identical to the real site and just uses some CSS (and maybe JS) to improve visible content. The front-page would have to vertically stack the navigation on top of the content or something if the resolution was low. Otherwise it sort of looks like slashdot beta, a thin column of content.
I totally agree though that normal sites are better than mobile. For some reason companies make super shitty mobile sites that can't do half of what the regular one can.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by hankwang on Monday July 20 2015, @04:57PM
"If you've seen the mobile version of the site lately,"
[Plug] That's why I browse that (green) site mostly using avantslash - http://avantslash.org/ [avantslash.org] . There's also a version for Soylentnews at http://soylitenews.org/ [soylitenews.org] (not operated by me).
Avantslash: SoylentNews for mobile [avantslash.org]