💾 Archived View for tilde.town › ~hush › gemlog › 2024-06-14.gmi captured on 2024-08-24 at 23:47:48. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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thoughts on Ads vs. Content

Computex was last week. For those unaware, its this big tech expo where many companies have new product demonstrations - new pc cases, new cpu coolers, keynotes by Intel, AMD, and Nvidia, oh my! It's also a content feast for tech youtubers who make the trip.

I run firefox with ublock, so youtube is pretty much ad-free for me. I watched a ton of videos from computex, though, and the effect on me was pretty much the same as if I'd been advertised to. I don't currently have a desktop - I sold my custom build a couple years ago - but after watching these videos, I'd spend time on pcpartpicker speccing out a system to build. There's some kind of thing about window shopping that makes it easy to hyperfocus on. Thing is, I don't want to *do* anything that I need this hypothetical computer for. My focus on it is almost entirely a consumerism urge. I have this urge because of the videos. They're content, but they're also ads, which is why companies pay for these youtubers to make the trip to Taiwan for the event.

So, if I want to truly block ads, I need to just block youtube, probably.

My desires are so easily shaped by the media I consume. I watched a couple of youtube videos about programming, and suddenly I want to be a good programmer again. If I watch a couple videos of drummers, I want to be amazing at drums again. The likes of youtube and reddit are great because there are so many people making neat content about their interests - but they also flip over into a kind of advertising so easily. Sure, it's not (always) the kind of ads created by some marketing department, but reddit posts and youtube videos are really excellent at fostering wants in me. In a way, their content can simply be ads, and no adherence to ublock or pihole or other adblocking techniques can block that.

part of what this post really boils down to is questioning what I actually want. As yet another example, I used to be active on /r/guitarpedals and /r/letstradepedals, subreddits for guitar effects (and trading them amongst ourselves). I tried a lot of cool pedals through it, which is great! But, since I deleted my reddit account, I only rarely even think about pedals. While they were fun little gadgets, they aren't something I really care about unless I have a feed of images and videos about them available easily. So, how much of my current desires are influenced by the videos and content I consume? I want to program, but I'm reading Gemini and lobste.rs a ton, where programming talk is common. Is that just like how I wanted to build a computer after watching a bunch of videos from computex?