>>"The only way to solve this problem is for the product/service provider to know about you and the fact that you have a problem."
Only way?? No.
No no absolutely not.
If/Since we are talking ideas and hypothetical, the preferred way would be for me to search for a product / indicate my need, and then marketplace to provide / compete for it.
The whole notion that advertiser must understand what I need, all the time, without my involvement knowledge or permission, then shove what it thinks I need up my throat constantly, is dystopian.
Basically, I think we are mixing up a pull paradigm to satisfy the consumer, with a push paradigm to satisfy the business. This is not to be naive about realities of world, business, saturated market, crappy products and differentiation, etc. But it peeves me when companies lack self awareness to be honest with themselves about which model is beneficial to which party.
Edit (and if we are going to talk about consumers being ignorant of the realities, let us not please pretend that the ultimate purpose of advertising is to perfectly satisfy a need with optimal product. Ultimate purpose of advertising is to make a sale. Sometimes, that sale is in fact optimal for the consumer. We can disagree how often that occurs as a percentage.)
Edit edit : the more I think the more I disagree. It's the word "optimal" that really bugs me - there's nothing optimal about modern online advertising. Clever, persistent, pervasive, desperate, obnoxious, hard work, devious, are some attributes that come to my mind. But it feels far from optimal - there's so much money and effort in this arms race which is increasingly hostile between an advertiser and consumer, and knowingly so; google and meta are 300 billion worth of not optimal :->
There was a recent Ask HN from someone who was concerned that maybe greed was the only reason people would work for places like Facebook or Google any more.
That thread was quickly killed before it could grow any legs, but I did have a knee-jerk response anyway:
I'm sure there are some other reasons for those employees having potential to do more noble work, but aspiring to become an "ad man" on an aggressive media platform has always had an appeal to a certain amount of selfishness at the expense of others.
Now when the entire process is geared to appeal more strongly to even more greedy individuals, that's what you're going to end up with more so than anyone else.
I'm certainly not the innocuous one, with the toxic petrochemicals and all, where the oil business has always appealed more strongly to the greedy get-rich-quick types in its own way.
Rather than add to the size of a growing behemoth, I chose to do my survival activities more as a parasite instead.
There's definitely less money for the taking when you have to earn every dollar by adding value to resources, as opposed to collecting pay from accounts where funds were accumulated wildly before you showed up.
But that's the kind of decision you've got to make.
Organizations that are trying to do something disreputable or shameful (or just something that could be construed that way by a nontrivial portion of the population) often come up with sweet little lies about their motives that help their employees sleep better at night.
It's not about making money by serving ads, it's about "organizing the world's data". It's not about winning defense contracts to put military hardware into space, it's about "colonizing mars to save humanity". It's not about printing money by getting poor people to sign up for 50,000% APR payday loans, it's about "providing liquidity to undeserved communities". Etc.
Hypothetically working on the security aspect doesn't seem so unethical. I mean, it is helping the evil empires in a sort of abstract way, but realistically people are going to use the services because they are ad-funded (and so, appear free). The direct harm to people who have their communications which they believe to be basically private (in the sense that they are only spied on by the service provider) broken into seems to be more significant.
Agree with you wholeheartedly, just look at the advances in AI defined graphics, why can't the search engine be the same, we give the search engine a query and click on whether we want paid product ads to be included in the search. The web is getting so convoluted, that we(the consumer) will have to install pihole into our own version of "assistant software" in possibly our own design of an android and funnel every web interaction thru that android/assistant. They are making it to the point that we will not trust their "asistant software", nor their ad platform, and anything else they build. Essentially we will filter and curate all web interaction that is not text. And even text may need to be curated to avoid echo-chamber.
I sometimes browse random awesome-[thing] lists just to see what they have in store and if anything in there gives me any new idea or seems to scratch some itch I didn't even know I had.
No need for any invasive tracking or obnoxious pop-ups.
> But there are also things that would benefit me that I don't even know exist, so I can not ask for them.
True, but those are categories of products, not products. That's not something companies are interested in advertising to you, so you can't rely on advertising to learn about them.
Only way?? No.
No no absolutely not.
If/Since we are talking ideas and hypothetical, the preferred way would be for me to search for a product / indicate my need, and then marketplace to provide / compete for it.
The whole notion that advertiser must understand what I need, all the time, without my involvement knowledge or permission, then shove what it thinks I need up my throat constantly, is dystopian.
Basically, I think we are mixing up a pull paradigm to satisfy the consumer, with a push paradigm to satisfy the business. This is not to be naive about realities of world, business, saturated market, crappy products and differentiation, etc. But it peeves me when companies lack self awareness to be honest with themselves about which model is beneficial to which party.
Edit (and if we are going to talk about consumers being ignorant of the realities, let us not please pretend that the ultimate purpose of advertising is to perfectly satisfy a need with optimal product. Ultimate purpose of advertising is to make a sale. Sometimes, that sale is in fact optimal for the consumer. We can disagree how often that occurs as a percentage.)
Edit edit : the more I think the more I disagree. It's the word "optimal" that really bugs me - there's nothing optimal about modern online advertising. Clever, persistent, pervasive, desperate, obnoxious, hard work, devious, are some attributes that come to my mind. But it feels far from optimal - there's so much money and effort in this arms race which is increasingly hostile between an advertiser and consumer, and knowingly so; google and meta are 300 billion worth of not optimal :->