I don't get it, why can't ad be run on the SAFEnetwork? It can be like Brave!

Lol really? I’ve never seen an ad that has added value to my life. They just show me stuff I have already purchased and stuff I would prefer to not see in the first place. The only other person I’ve heard argue for ads besides you is a guy I know that is the spitting image of American consumerism.

1 Like

I just saw this today which i would totally not mind seeing more ads promoting this. Not enough people know about this. So maybe realise that everyone’s different, and ads aren’t exactly evil. It’s like, sure, harm can be done with it, but harm can be done with hands, and we don’t just cut peoples hands off… it’s bit of an exaggerated example but I hope you get the idea. Ad/tracking can do people good, ESPECIALLY true for depression, sometimes people don’t like talking to others, but they’re comfortable searching on Google, and who knows an ad at the right place for the right person might just prevent a suicide, for example. And THIS CAN ONLY BE ACHIEVED WITH AD AND TRACKING!

Again, just another example, either way though, I don’t see an internet without ads as a good thing long term. It is made so we can share information after all. And yeah sure, information can be shared by friends you meet in real life to you, but that’s very limiting, the internet was created so people far apart could communicate, and ads facilitate this, added to the fact some people don’t know exactly what they’d like until they see it, and certain non-intrusive ads isn’t exactly a bad idea. Especially if the surfer also gets paid a bit to just surf the net(like Brave)

Agree, Orwells 1984 surely was the ultimate in advertising danger, doublethink etc. People persuaded that the enemy yesterday is today’s friend and vice versa. A lot of that is a bit to close to today’s reality of government control of people and their minds (Lybia, Iran, Iraq, Rwanda and many many more). Unfortunately, where companies are profit first (ie.e all public listed companies with shareholders and many now cryptocurrency projects) they will advertise doublethink, see examples like “low fat”, which really means “extra chemicals and high unnatural sugars”, so essentially it should read “will make you fat”.

Then there is advertising to make us all believe something, like a political party or politician is actually doing what we think they should or satisfying our desires, in steps Cambridge analytica, google and facebook, to find what we want, alter it at will and have us believe we vote for a truthful set politicans. Only then to think what the …

All this from small businesses putting signs up setting out their wares in days gone by. All of which were much more honest and not meant to alter peoples minds, but just to advertise their product for those who wish to buy their product. Then mars, cadburies and supermarkets got into “product placement” and confusing shoppers, forcing them to take longer to find stuff and in frustration choose a particular brand/product they do not really need.

However people do say, advertising is only to let you find good stuff, well, in my opinion, those days are gone. The honest products will be lost in noise or their message copied by fakes and counterfeits.

IF there are good things out there then we have to find better ways to find out about them and a great way is word of mouth, personal (unpaid) recommendation and the likes. That can happen when we remove at least some (hopefully all) ability to manipulate the populous. I hope SAFE allows this free speech, honest collaboration and more, but at the same time removes many pathways for mind-altering promotion that is played off as harmful advertising. Tracking, alterning and manipulating humans is likely to have devastating effects on our ability to move forward and certainly to care for others, as personal greed and ignore thy neighbor proliferates, spurred by manipulating our vision of the world.

Sorry for the sermon like language, these are my thoughts and hopefully unbiased, but who knows :wink:

18 Likes

Hmm, reminds me of something…

2 Likes

Advertising itself was never an enemy.

Again, to do with the people using ads, not ad itself, if you encourage freedom of expression, allowing anyone to put up ads so they can reach more people with their ideas is part of it.

This is so ironic, I don’t think you understand the idea of free speech… what you describe as mind-altering promotion is basically the same with any political speech, as most political speeches are designed to change people’s views(which I assume what you mean when you say mind-altering). So you might as well ban all political posts from the SAFEnetwork too! It’s like: “lets allow freedom of speech, but at the same time remove some speech.”

I thought the point of the network was to GIVE PEOPLE THE POWER to decide for such things. As people can also organise terrorism and do human trafficking MUCH more easier with the SAFENetwork. So what you’re describing doesn’t even make logical sense. By removing ads, you’re not even giving the power to the people who don’t mind to see ads, keep in mind, the rights of the people who do NOT want to see ads is totally respected here as they can have the option to turn all ads off, now leave the other half of the population alone and actually allow some ACTUAL freedom of expression.

It’s quite biased, unfortunately… you’re cherry picking companies and events that have harmed/could harm people through advertising, completely ignoring the other side of the story and also your bias for no ads has messed with your understanding of true freedom of expression and sharing of ideas/information.

1 Like

I think there are some really interesting aspects coming up in this discussion, but they are a bit shadowed.

For example, making it into a discussion about ads are good or ads are bad, is shadowing some more profound implications of various ways to think about it.

There are also some related things being mentioned, that can spawn entirely new conversations. (I’ll get back to that).

Now, I am among those who don’t care the least for ads. Just as you write @dirvine if not outright lying, they are so very often misleading people just as good as if they had been. And it’s a real problem to have that proliferate at a global scale, it just leads the humanity on a wrong path in so many ways (economic, environment, psychological, cultural, spirtual, many many ways…).

But there’s something about the discussion that I’m not entirely comfortable about.

To me, ads is just a subset of communication, and when we start talking about blocking communication, and not using the powerful tools of internet, and wishing that things were done like before these powerful tools, then we are heading for a slippery path IMO.

I’m not so sure that we can put such a clean block without starting to limiting freedom on the network in a way that the network should not be doing.
Like for example legislating about hateful speech. That truly is very very perilous, (because who will be defining hate?). OK, so it’s an analogy, we’re not talking about legislation, but the point is to discuss how much the network will be an ideological tool vs a technical tool, and what real prices we pay if we start to go ideological.
It’s easy to say “We don’t want bad things, so let’s remove them from the network”. But hey, wait a minute. What does it mean, what does it implicate ?

I’d like to see that deeper discussion before just cheerishing the obvious “no kittens shall be killed!” to the hurraays of the masses.

One other problem I see is to attribute all ability to effectively reach many, to mere power.
I think we are limiting and narrowing down a phenomenon and use case for human enterprises, down to a very one dimensional thing (“ads”) and just assuming that it is all about power. I would say it is not all about power.
I would say that there is an element of competence also in it. And that it is a rightful and necessary thing. Competent actors need a way to communicate with the rest.

Yet another problem is to bring up money and wanting to limit big money to be powerful. What it means in essence is that money should not bring power. This is a VERY large topic, and a bit different than this one. But in essence, if money has no power, then money is useless. It is a tool.

6 Likes

THIS! x1000000000000

1 Like

Advertising has changed. I recommend Doc Searls, who used to work in advertising (old style, non tracking) and who is not anti advertising as such but is vehemently against the new style of advertising - adtech or surveillance capitalism because it takes the possibility for manipulation to a whole new level.

1 Like

I agree with much of what you say here, the slight difference is this part. I think we should use and allow the full power of the Internet in selling wares etc. Right now though that power is concentrated and enough cash allows the controllers (like Google, facebook etc.) to set the stage and message to the many. I hope we alter that to allow the many to “advertise” (for want of a better word) to the many. i.e. true freedom of thought and decision making as opposed to controlled by the few at the behest of the wealthiest.

An example, drugs, the huge manufacturers will not wish non patentable medicines to become mainstream as it affects their bottom line. This practice is easy if they have enough cash for advertising (mind control) and lobbying. It’s not though in the interests of us all. Same with more efficient engines, inventions etc. Look at the both Tesla’s for examples of that as well :wink:

Agree it’s a huge area, but if we can make it all play out on an even playing field then I feel we will have made a huge difference and improve humanities ability to reason.

Oh I think you could be very wrong there :wink:

11 Likes

And @dirvine you can make a network wide advertising portal, much like Google Adwords, and since you can’t allow tracking on the network, it can just be site specific ads, meaning advertisers can simply decide which specific site they’d like to put their ads on. And website owners get to choose whether they would like to have space on their website set to put “SAFE-ad-network”'s banners and get to approve specific ads too. If they do choose put the banner/ad, they’ll get paid for it.

Website surfers can choose to disable/enable seeing ads either completely or site specifically, and they’ll also get paid a portion of the money the advertisers pay for the ads they are seeing. It’s a perfectly all consensual situation where everyone can get what they desire! Don’t ruin it, it can potentially generate millions of revenues per day of which it won’t otherwise, at least not from ads

Anyone could and that is perfectly OK, whether it’s used or not is another thing though. The deeper consideration is the conglomeration or control of those things which in today’s Internet has obviously been the lazy simple and illogical manner we have done it. This is due to no real ability to connect 1 to 1 without intermediaries.

Websites need money to run in today’s web, this will not be so much the case in SAFE there will be a small cost up front and PtP/D etc. would allow income. Then it allows a much more real freedom. So disambiguate the advertising as

  • control of people and facts (today)
  • dissemination of information (SAFE)
    and it becomes more clear. It is rooted in control and that control is the price we paid when we allowed centralised services to proliferate because we did not know a better way. We do now :wink:

In SAFE when large orgs control or are seen as evil, the ability to switch will be very much simpler. That balance is missing today.

8 Likes

I’m no fan of Google or Facebook, don’t get me wrong, however I think this is misguided. The Internet almost requires an intermediary in the regard of advertising. There are millions of sites out there that get significant enough traffic to warrant ads being worth placing on the site. Doing 1 to 1 comparisons to find an advertising partner is simply not feasible. Thus you get the intermediaries that gather site metadata across millions of sites to determine which ads would best fit with which site. You can cut out the tracking part of it, and still have an effective advertising campaign by targeting it to websites that let you crawl metadata. It’s still targeted advertising if you are placing video game ads on a video game review site, even if you aren’t tracking the customer to know exactly what genre of video game they like.

A one to one advertising search places too much burden on the company wanting to advertise their wares. It also places way too much power and money into the well known sites, ignoring the smaller guys, thus, just changing the power dynamic from the intermediaries to the sites being advertised on. You just increase the “power” of the high traffic sites and smaller sites get ignored, even if they could be an effective target for marketing a product.

As I said, and you essentially agreed, people with money will always win the advertising game. Product placement is not something that can be stopped with any amount of network control, unless they network goes full authoritarian. That’s not what anyone wants. So, eliminating advertising just gives the big boys even more chance to suck in consumers with no alternative ways to get your product in front of the eyes of the people.

Plus, free speech and all that. Eliminating choice is never the right answer.

1 Like

Drugs are regulated because they can harm people. The selection process may favor wealthy companies but it still has benefits. For example, regulations for “almost medicine” are stricter in Europe than in the USA and, as a result, there is a much smaller market for snake oil there.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the rest customize the content to my taste. This often creates an echo chamber, but let’s not forget the benefits either. If I’m searching for “safe” on Google, it knows I mean the Safe Network and I get the desired results quicker. Similarly, if I search for the elections, I won’t have to skip a list of crap from Fox and Breitbart because they won’t even show up on my results.

What will substitute for the lack of regulation and custom targeting on Safe?

How can I, a user, silence the noise so I can hear the signal?

1 Like

Through social apps where you control what you see, rather than a mega corporation or those who pay it money to push messages at you.

You can include advertising services if you wish, but at least you will know what they are and can choose not to consume paid messages. Opt-in rather than opt-out, or rather little alternative with current services.

3 Likes

How would this work? Curated lists? Subreddits? MyWOT? Scraping my friends’ likes? Scraping my friends’ friends’ likes?

Why not employ a communist approach to advertising where no advertiser can pay more than another to command more ad space. Fixed volume from each advertiser. Yes, employ cookies to attract the punters. Adds could be bordered in a traffic light colour frame based on sale conversions from adds. add cookie tokens used as a sales conversion marker at purchase. This will entice the advertiser to be more honest and a better supplier. Allow browsers to filter colours out if the users want. So if you are not interested in seeing red bordered adds then so be it but make the filtering a feature that needs to be earned by a users value to the network.

This makes me think users of the safe network should be accredited with a “value to the net” accolade. Then, as an example, a forum troll can be reprimanded by other users, assuming their combined value surpasses that of the troll. Trust has to be earned. Its not just the advertisers ruining the www. It’s all the unkind, selfish lieing cheating people who are exploiting the nieve.

A web without advertising is more an encyclopedia. Which is good for information but not very interesting to surf. Like a calm sea to a surfer.

1 Like

Adverts are what makes the web exciting? BloodyhellitsworsethanIthought.

11 Likes

Not exciting pal. I didn’t say exciting. I’ll translate, One of the the nice things about the web is the surf. You can start looking at one thing and surf all the way to another totally different thing through links and adds etc. Inspiration can be had for free, at the look of a picture or reading of a word. Advertising is a big part of what makes the www spread virally. The problem with it (as I see it) is that its becoming harder to detect the true from the false. Take away your experience as a Web expert and imagine you’re elderly or 10 years old. This SAFE Web is for their benefit, more than that of a ardent Web user.

I block all ads. What am I missing?

3 Likes

You are correct, it will not prevent ads. It is a mechanism / network which will give users more choice than they have today. The freedom of choice to choose apps etc. The secure and private choice to directly speak/share with friends and with no intermediaries. This is the key and yes you are correct.

With that choice, I would hope if a facebook for instance appeared and people did use it with trackers etc. then something bad happened, that switching would be very simple. I would hope that apps though do not try and control folk, but are truely open source and openly developed and forked at an incredible rate as well. I believe massive forking will help apps deliver their vision and if it is a good value proposition for many then forking and many devs delivering the functionality will be great. Much like video players, email clients (of old) etc.

11 Likes