Discoverability is a very difficult challenge, especially for small niches. Many customers contact my employer, saying that they didn't know our products existed (and many products have existed in some form for >10 years). If you can find a way to improve discoverability, you would be a hero to many niche businesses.
I truly don't care. I would much rather miss out on hearing about a few genuinely-desirable products due to poor discoverability, if the payoff is that I don't have to suffer the deluge of imposed advertizing I never asked for.
Do you have any non-feeling based thoughts to contribute? I see your comment as being non-constructive, as you have not presented any new information or thinking.
On the contrary, you haven't explained why discoverability matters, or why any of us should care. You just take it as a given that it justifies the means. I believe that is what the poster above is pointing out.
I would agree, that I would rather not suffer imposed advertising I did not ask for even if missing out some products.
However, you can have e.g. a magazine that lists computer parts if you want to buy that (as mentioned by another comment), or in a restaurant that has a sign on the wall (or a printed menu) indicating new items, or a news paper might have a section relating to restaurants or movies or whatever else you might want to buy, or there might be publications that specialize in these things if you are deliberately trying to look for them. They should not need to put advertising anywhere, and they should not need to make it excessive or abusive or dishonest like they do, etc.
(Products that they advertise way too much often have some problems other than just the advertising, too.)
Exactly this. You can put information in a place that motivated consumers can find it. Heck, you could _even_ pay for it to be there, or to be prioritized there, if you want (I don't love that, but I don't have a coherent way to prevent it). But you should _not_ get to inject your information into my life.
There is absolutely no reason to think that advertising makes discoverability of desirable trades more likely, and every reason to think it makes it worse. The people best equipped to spend a lot on ads are those who are offering the worst deal (giving them the best margins). That's without even getting into ads that are used to manipulate people into wanting to make obviously bad choices, e.g. ads for soda, candy, fast food, alcohol, gambling, pointless plastic garbage, etc.
Obviously specifics make a huge difference here so it's hard to generalize, but generally, finding the market is not a new problem. In the current business environment, the entire ecosystem is rigged against you, forcing you to advertise. Consumers are so inundated with advertising that almost have no energy leftover, or any expectation that they need to go out and search. Worse, search is distorted in all the wrong ways because of the exact same incentives. Your competitors (or even poorly-fitting tangentially-related products) are stealing discovery from you by capturing searches through advertising. They can't even get to you because a wall of SEO stands between them and you.
I think I (mostly) agree with you, but it seems like SEO and search in general would be even more distorted if outright advertising were disallowed or penalized.
It's commercialization in general that distorts things, and you're probably right that SEO without advertising might actually have been worse? But then again, the online advertising market is a whole evolved thing that maybe...doesn't need to be...as big as it is? E.g. I don't see structurally how the economy requires spending hundreds of billions of dollars on advertising to function.
Yes, I agree that (on and off-line) advertising does seem to be unnecessarily expensive (across the economy), but valuable 'advertising placements' are scarce, and I'm not sure how else they could be allocated.
Catalogs, the kind used in the '80s for electronic components. Yellow pages.
Today it should be online, but then, imagine having to curate Amazon where hundreds of sellers appear and dissapear each month selling the exact same product.
I'm not sure about the metaphors. The "Axe of Satisfaction" suggests that some of the ills of late-stage capitalism can be overcome through individual grit alone. Maybe we need to band together and target the root system rather than hacking down individual trees?
Discussing this and its implications in a direct and serious manner is, regrettably, unpalatable in polite company. Few are willing to accept the risk of discussing it openly.
For me, Jellyfin makes my smart TV (running webOS) tolerable. It turns the TV into the appliance it should have been from the start, without ads, AI assistants, or silly apps.
Yes, it is becoming increasingly difficult to buy a non-smart TV. I don't like living in a world where my TV can crash or be down for a software update (which have both happened to me). They're also ticking time-bombs - who knows when support will be dropped and the apps will slowly break as they gradually fall out of compatibility with the external APIs they depend on. What horrors lurk in the depths of those lovelessly constructed TV OSs that call out to servers and will cause mayhem when those servers are decommissioned?
Why not just never connect it to the internet and never update the firmware?
I do wish I could just buy a dumb tv that just did TV things… but it’s simple to just use an Apple TV and never connect it. Or if I absolutely must to set it up or because there is a bug. Connect it via Ethernet briefly.
My dad had a Blu-ray player that had similar features to a smart TV (Netflix, etc). There was a licensing sever and the API was down, so everything stopped working. A single point of failure for the whole device.
Keep them airgapped or use a smart HDMI stick, their support typically outperform anything from the TV vendor and you can install apps (e.g. Jellyfin) on them. If you dislike Google or Amazon there are some Linux based options.
There is also HDMI over-radio but I don't know its limits (range, bandwidth, latency).
> What horrors lurk in the depths of those lovelessly constructed TV OSs that call out to servers and will cause mayhem when those servers are decommissioned?
My Sony TVs all work without an internet connection, so I'd guess nothing?
"We ask that the use and possession of Proof-Of-Work cryptocurrencies be banned, with a one year max wait period to let the various projects transition to other technologies, like Proof-Of-Stake (so that nobody loses money, and this is already happening in Ethereum)". Ugh, I think that says it all.
The article doesn't mention it but entries can include an "annotate" field. I use it to add short summaries and notes. It is not used by the standard bibliography styles, but it can be used to produce an annotated bibliography.
BBS: The Documentary Part 4 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cm6EFYktRQ) has some great interviews with Tom Jennings & co. on the beginnings, growth and decline of Fidonet.
"It just runs in spite of the idiots." (Tom Jennings)
Yes. A lot of pretty rare information. BBSing existed as a relatively niche mostly hobbyist community that was largely both decentralized and disjoint from the early, pre-mainstream Internet.
As a result, with a few exceptions like Jason Scott's textfiles, there was relatively little archived documentation/stories/archives about BBSs at the time and very little of that has survived. (BBSs pretty much all got shutdown at some point and there's very saved from discussions, especially outside of the relays.)
