I still don't understand the point of ads past getting their name out there, although I have never really been a impulse buyer or one to trust a company of any size or type without doing atleast a google search on them. So, I agree ads should go away, however I do not think it will happen until groups using the ads for profit (most online things like youtube, hulu, web stuff in general, tv, etc.) find a better method of generating revenue without adding direct cost to the consumer (because if youtube suddenly became netflix style revenue I think everyone would be too pissed to let it happen), or the companies go "Oh, maybe the 20,000 ads didn't help sales much because people aren't as dumb as we thought."
That is literally the point of advertisement. It's also rather the definition "a notice or announcement in a public medium promoting a product, service, or event."
The whole reason it exists as a concept is to let people know your whatever-it-is is a thing, and it's a thing that whomever is being advertised to can obtain.
Word-of-mouth advertising is a force of good. People tell other people about things they enjoyed and suggest that maybe those other people might like whatever-it-was too. That's good.
The problem from an advertiser (and even producer) perspective is that it's inefficient and slow... and you actually have to have a practically divinely good product. So people start putting out notices themselves. Instead of waiting for customers to tell other people or for people to walk by the sign out front your store? You go pay some people to tell their friends, or you slip the town crier a few extra rupees (mmm Zelda...) to mention your newfangled whirlygig. That's better... but still too slow. With the advent of newspapers? Stick it in there! But that's easy to ignore and miss. Radio/TV? Now those are methods for spreading ads! If a person wants the content you're producing they're going to have to either sit there and listen to "These messages from our sponsors" or expend a lot of effort trying (and likely failing quite often) to avoid them.
Then came the internet, and advertising had become a soft-science artform, and BIG business. And we get all the junk that I have like 5 layers of blocking for. I have a redirecting proxy at my router, my hosts file, adblock edge, and noscript. I turn these things down for sites I explicitly want to support, but I've been burned too many times by promises that "we're different" and "we're safe". I do not condone the flashing adverts, the background music, the wasting of my bandwidth and the increasing of my load time, the horrible volume level matching (Hulu!), or 99% of the tactics used by advertisers nowadays.
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Also wtf is with the botania subreddit? I swear like half the posts I'm reading have that "controversial"
dagger-thingy that signifies something close to a balance of total up/down votes
Is it just growing pains? I don't know if I've ever actually been privy to the start of a new subreddit before, is that normal?
Edit: Apparently there was a downvote spree... no idea why. *sigh* reddit.