meta
brainlessly following/adapting mob mentality sucks
fedi has a stance against ads, yes. But that's fedi disliking big corporate stuff on the network.
having to read that some people have internalized the "hating ads" part so bad that they think it's necessary to tell small artists that they should stop advertising their commissions or merch stuff on here? please.
this is the same as back on Twitter, where someone validly says "x is bad" and others take everything close to x as bad too.
@pixel@desu.social That mentality indeed makes no sense.
Advertising is not a bad thing. There needs to be a way to inform the public about the existence of a certain product or service (commercial or otherwise), this is true in even the most anti-capitalist types of societies.
If there is no way to make people aware that a thing exists, how will people ever know that a thing exists?
Think about why you should hate ads on centralized social media in the first place, it's probably because of unethical practices like:
* Ads get placed into your timeline without your consent.
* The website collects your private data for targeted advertising.
* Unfairness, advertisers pay money to have their posts show up on top, making other people's posts less visible as a result.
None of these practises are true on the fediverse. We are all equal here. No private data that you didn't gave away with consent gets collected here. There no algorithm modifies your timeline to better suit advertisers. And you definitely can not pay someone here to guarantee that your advertising post will come out on top.
So by design advertising on the fediverse is already ethical. The system is not rigged. You can only successfully advertise on the fediverse if you actually offer a good product that people like and are interested in. You can not simply buy your way into creating artificial interest for your product here.
There's corporate accounts that I follow on the fediverse. I read their advertisements with consent, because I am interested in their products.
Like for me the definition of ads is paying to force your way into people's feed/vision (and of course manipulation to make that money worth it).
For example an artist talking about their own merch at end of a concert isn't an ad, people are there for it.
@lanodan @pixel @SuperDicq Does promoting someone else's product/service because you actually like it count as an ad, by your definition?
@xianc78@gameliberty.club @lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me @pixel@desu.social That would be word of mouth I think.
@SuperDicq @pixel @lanodan Some people can't tell the difference between word-of-mouth and shilling.
And it's a job/market, not something that happens accidentally.