On the other hand, other humans may have intrinsic interests outside of your control that may lead them to harm you despite the mechanisms you mentioned, whereas bots by default don't have such motives.
In order to sell anything, people need to know about it. Google and Meta provide a way to make this possible. If they didn't exist, you wouldn't somehow have a more affordable way to get people to know about your product. However frustrating the current situation is, it is still more accessible than needing access to the airwaves or print media to try to sell anything new.
> In order to sell anything, people need to know about it. Google and Meta provide a way to make this possible. If they didn't exist, you wouldn't somehow have a more affordable way to get people to know about your product. However frustrating the current situation is, it is still more accessible than needing access to the airwaves or print media to try to sell anything new.
The places people can find out about your product are controlled by a very small number of companies. And those companies not only own those spaces, they also own the means of advertising on those spaces. So if you have a product you want to advertise, you're not paying to distribute your message broadly to consumers, you're paying a toll to a gatekeeper that stands between you and your potential customers.
but that’s not really true. You’re not paying, you’re bidding. You are competing against thousands of other advertisers for eyeballs. If you are the only advertiser targeting a group of people, you will spend almost nothing to advertise. If you are targeting a group of people that everyone targets (e.g: rich people in their 30s) you will pay through the nose.
Facebook, Google etc. are the most “fair” forms of advertising. We can dislike advertising, their influence, product etc. but when you compare them to almost every other type of advertising, they’re the best for advertisers.
The reason they generate so much revenue is because they are so accessible and because they are so easy to account for. The reason LTV and CAC are so widely understood by businesses today is because of what Google, Facebook etc. offer.
No financial market would be able to run the way Google and Facebook run their ad markets. They are the supplier, the exchange, and the broker all at the same time. This is not a competitive market. It's a captured one where the supplier effectively gets to set their price, and the exchange and the broker incentivize and advise you to trade at that price.
Google has famously and repeatedly rigged this bidding system in anti-competitive ways and has had to pay billions in fines because of it (which I am sure were less than the amount they profited from)
That's generally my thought as well, I am not implying you don't need to advertise. I just believe the industry has more or less reverted to an even worse version of what we had before (TV & Radio ads). At least before, there was ~100 networks you could sell to, now there's basically 10 if you include major networks. Of course you don't actually launch new products with TV ads, so it is more or less 2 platforms.
The problem is that most businesses used to be local. This naturally limited competition and gave your business a chance, even if it sucked. Nowadays the competition is global.
People don't really care to address that most of the mom and pop businesses that went out of business because Walmart/Amazon weren't offering better products or services. They got their products through the same retail suppliers, just at higher costs and the variety of choices was much lower. They also had much less generous return policies.
There's a personal touch that people opine for but I think that's rose colored glasses. I remember some local retailers where I liked the owners but more often they weren't anything special and sometimes they were downright unpleasant.
The thing I like about Amazon is that I can get my shopping done quickly at home then I can go socialize with people I choose to.
This is just an example if retail but I think it applies to most industries that people think have been decimated by big companies displacing local companies. The whole attitude reminds me a lot of the whole "Make America Great Again" idea. Opininig for a past that never really existed.
> People don't really care to address that most of the mom and pop businesses that went out of business because Walmart/Amazon weren't offering better products or services.
In a local mom and pop store, the mom and pop owned the store and were invested in the community, Their money was spent back in the same place it came from. They had a personal stake in their reputation and knew the customers, and the customers knew them. This is how a community operates. You are thinking about it as a dry 'products and services' offering, when it is much more than that. You don't live to buy products and services, you live to do other things, and a community fosters that part of your life. The 'spending money to get things you need or want' part is to facilitate the rest of your life, not the other way around.
> They also had much less generous return policies.
Why is this an issue? People who consistently rely on generous return policies are either buying shoddy goods or abusing it at the cost of everyone else. Figure out what you want before you buy it and then it won't be a problem.
Walmart employs a bunch of people in their stores and their profit margins (the money that leaves the community) are slim. That money is more than likely offset by their ability to offer lower prices than mom and pop places. Mom and pop places go out of business because they can't compete with economies of scale.
If Walmart was really extracting so much money from the communities they operate in, those communities would wither and the Walmart would eventually collapse as well. Walmarts rarely close.
> Why is this an issue?
Because customers prefer better service over worse service.
You're flipping the script on this criticism. Walmart offers better service (returns) and your saying it doesn't matter. Usually people argue that The mom and pop places offer better service but can't compete on price.
In the previous comment I was about to say it but then stopped myself: the same thing happened to human relations. Competition isn't local, it's global. In dating you aren't competing against the rest of your village, you're literally competing against the whole planet, because the cute girl you see at the office can get a Tinder match from a guy in Australia and there's nothing you can do about it. Similar thing happened to friends - why would you be friends with your neighbor if instead you can be friends with a guy who lives one hour away one way but he's more fun.
Obviously, it's great to be on the winning side and bad on the losing side. If you're rich and charming then globalization has zero downsides for you. If you're not, well, welcome to capitalism.
There are lots of ways to find out about products. We don't need Google or Meta to do look at a review site or ask a friend or search a directory or to solicit offers.
Adverising isn't there to push ideas into people who didn't need to know about it. Many industries would be better off without advertising (see e.g. cigarettes) because it ends up in an arms race.
If google and meta didn't exist, it is possible that the advertising market could be more competitive, so the amount companies would need to spend would be lower.
There is no competition in the ad space, so those companies can continue to just parasite their way to record earnings by stealing every other businesses profits. They create almost nothing of actual value, they are just heads of an ecosystem they totally control. Parasitism as a business model.
I am surprised that these sort of declarative specs are so popular in certain domains. Essentially you always seem to be putting settings into the ether and hoping they interact with each other in the way you expect.
I prefer an api with documented contracts between its abstractions
Latest reasoning models don't claim 2 + 2 = 55, and it's hard to find them making an sort of obviously false claims, or not admitting to being mistaken if you point out that they are
I can’t go a full a full conversation without obviously false claims. They will insist you are correct and that your correction is completely correct despite that also being wrong.
Also that I specifically mentioned bikeshedding yet the reply bikesheds my simple example. While ignoring the big picture that LLM's still regularly generate blatantly and easily noticed false information as answers.
It was clearly a simplified example, like I said endless bikeshed.
Here is a real one. I was using the much lauded new Gemini 3? last week and wanted it to do something a slightly specific way for reasons. I told it specifically and added it to the instructions. DO NOT USE FUNCTION ABC.
It immediately used FUNCTION ABC. I asked it to read back its instructions to me. It confirmed what I put there. So I asked it again to change it to another function. It told me that FUNCTION ABC was not in the code, even though it was clearly right there in the code.
I did a bit more prodding and it adamantly insisted that the code it generated did not exist, again and again and again. Yes I tried reversing to USE FUNCTION XYZ. Still wanted to use ABC
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