This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
People hate ads full stop and tech has amplified them to be there, all the time, following you. Start buying only what you need from small businesses if possible.
Stop fawning over brands and marketing. They don't like you, they don't want a conversation, the don't care if you are a better person. They want your money. Capitalistic is a cancer...don't feed it.
I dont know. I watch less ads now woth the aid of tech. Lemmy, jellyfin etc
Yeah, even my wife who uses standard streaming services with ads, youtube with ads, etc reminded me recently that we used to have 3 5-minute commercial breaks every half hour on broadcast tv growing up. I'm all for getting rid of ads, but it was interesting to realize that even before the internet you only got about a 50% ad-to-content ratio.
What's crazy is if you watch shows from the 60s and 70s they can have an extra 3-5 minutes of content in a 30 minute time slot.
This is fantastic if it means companies can switch to inexpensive ads that can be cobbled together by somebody's kids, and ditch their multi-million dollar ad budgets that just make everything cost more.
i mean sure, but it’s corporate greed that actually makes things cost more.
That is definitely a major factor, it's just not the only one. People seem to believe the world operates like a comic book with designated villains do all the bad things and everybody else is just a victim. Individual behavior is also a factor. I mean what's the dominant gospel on Boomers - that they irresponsibly polluted the Earth and wasted all the resources, or that they were innocent victims of a few evil billionaires?
The former.
Evil billionaires are more of a 2020's thing.
Interesting - the idea that rich people weren't taking advantage of everybody else all through history until they just started uniquely victimizing the current generation seems mind-bogglingly unaware tbh.
The difference is that it used to be harder to concentrate massive wealth in the hands on one individual. It used to require very large companies, which were controlled by multiple people through shares and board positions. Companies themselves weren't allowed to grow too massive or achieve monopolies.
Lately all checks have gone out the window which has resulted in single individuals having control over mind-boggling amounts of resources. This changes the dynamics a lot because an individual will act very differently from a large board or shareholders.
Depends on what you mean by "recently". Think Rockefeller, Getty, Rothschild, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Morgan... all the classic mega-wealthy families were built around companies with one man at the top, who made or approved all major decisions and either owned the company outright or had a dominant majority share. That didn't really change until around the 1930s. Modern corporate structure with distributed participation made it possible to get extremely wealthy without starting or inheriting your own company.
