I'm going to be blunt: advertising will not exist on the new internet.
It will be reduced to its original organic form of referrals from your web of trust.
Incentive structures exist that make advertising as we know it obsolete.
Today is a good day to relaunch what #Ross posted on Medium almost 4 years ago: a proposal for a new decentralized architecture for social media, a proposal that will appear quite familiar to all Nostr users. A truly remarkable document that could potentially serve as a roadmap for Nostr development.
Some of Ross's design goals have already been achieved by Nostr. Others still require further work. Some may not be well-received by the community or may be technically challenging to implement within the protocol.
I am skeptical about the role of advertisers being as central as Ross envisions. In his vision, advertisers are considered an essential pillar, alongside users, content servers, and interface providers.
Nonetheless, it’s something I recommend reading to everyone.
And the handmade diagrams are just so cute! <3
https://rossulbricht.medium.com/decentralize-social-media-cc47dcfd4f99
#freeross #socialmedia
Discussion
Make word of mouth great again.
In principle, a meer post on nostr about cyberspace is "advertising something" to the people on nostr and those it reaches.
Yes. This is more of a referral than full on surveillance capitalism. The digital advertising apparatus will be rendered useless
Digital advertising doesn't work. That's why places like FB etc started paying users to become influencers to sell their products etc.
Old school methods work best:
Word of mouth
Door to door
Billboards
Flyers under windshield wipers
Etc
This is how you reach people in today's world without getting skipped over and people can't pay to remove either.
As someone who worked at an ad agency for 16 years, I would disagree with your assertion that digital advertising doesn't work. I've seen it work. But I understand what you are saying about the value of IRL ads and I agree that they are powerful and will always be around.
I like the idea of this but your web of trust won’t be enough for even a fraction of things you’d want referrals for. You’ll always need to rely on some other referral source much larger than your web of trust. And I don’t think this is necessarily bad. For example, when I want to buy a video card or a processor that is not THE top of the line - I’ll go to places like Tom’s Hardware Guide and check their benchmark charts. If I had to rely on my web of trust alone, I would never get the answers I’m after. This requires a dedicated team to test tens or hundreds of CPUs and GPUs. And that’s just one example.
BUT, if nostr became the place of conversations of a huge scale, it could be used as such a referral place - maybe not in my example, but in many other every day items. Reddit more or less currently fills the gap - despite being heavily manipulated by companies.