It’s pretty amazing that it’s as cohesive as it is.

That’s a very good point. I’ve often wondered that myself. We may have reached peak Linux already - it’s so hard to scale up massive FOSS projects without somehow sacrificing ideals on the way.

Because it exposes products to customers who were otherwise unaware of their existence or features, not because advertising has special brainwashing powers.

I think there is an implied argument you are making that unless people vote the “correct” way, they’re misinformed. I think some people just have different priorities. They care about different things and for this reason, consume different media. I was horrified to learn my wife clicks on ads when she’s shopping. Apparently that works for her. It doesn’t mean she’s wrong. Just that she’s not as rigorous about her selection process because she’s ultimately happy with the outcome.

I personally wouldn’t make much of a distinction between “I remotely made a group of people do something they otherwise wouldn’t have done” and “I have special brainwashing powers”, but that’s beside the point. You can look into ‘persuasive technology’ if you’re interested in the current SOTA.
The more pertinent things in this context are the, as you put it, product’s “existence or features” - because their existence, quality or veracity of claimed features has no bearing on whether the advertising works. It just does. Convince others that you have the solution to their problem and they will buy it - whether it solves the problem or not. Or go for the good old industry tradition of creating your own market niche by manufacturing demand that previously didn’t exist: 1. Convince others that they have a problem and then 2. convince them to buy your solution to it.
We could make a distinction between terminal goals and instrumental goals (if you’re interested) but it’s not that important, for simplicity’s sake I can just agree with “different people having different priorities”. And while there’s a spectrum, there absolutely are incorrect purchase decisions. Products that don’t work, products that don’t exist, products that solve problems that you don’t have. You can see how this applies to advertising, political will and democratic elections?

I deliberately used the word “tricked” earlier, because I think “misinformed” still carries some connotation that there’s some onus on the informee here - there isn’t. The victim of a con artist is always just that, a victim.

No. Advertising exists to inform people about products and services. I do not subscribe to the notion that advertising can convince an average voter to vote against their best interests or contra to facts.

Then I commend for your idealism and congratulate you further for never having had anything to do with the cancerous growth on humanity’s back that is the advertising industry. Keep it that way, you’re already making the world a slightly better place by staying away. But no, it unfortunately does not work as you describe it. Spending X on advertising will increase your product sales by Y. That’s the simple equation that justifies the industry’s existence - and it works. Helping consumers (or voters) to make informed decisions does not factor into it.

Not in a Western society in which one can easily obtain the facts on the internet. This might be true in a country like China where the internet is tightly controlled and facts aren’t easy to obtain.

You’d think that, yeah, it’s absolutely natural! But then you could also consider that even though a rural forest warden in the Harz mountains may hold and be entitled to opinions on, for example, both bark beetle control and foreign policy, he’ll only ever be able to make a truly informed decision on how one these issues should be handled in his best interest. For the other he’ll substitute a lifetime of proficiency with whatever is available. And that may or may not be in his best interest.

That’s how everybody does it. Spending your lifetime immersed in academic peace-and-conflict-studies for example might leave you to conclude that in a world of squabbling monkey tribes, transnational governing bodies with actual agency and legislative weight like the EU are, so far, humanity’s greatest and most unlikely achievement and that maintaining, growing and strengthening them while further eroding national borders is a reliable (and possibly the only) way to ensure sustainable peace and prosperity for everybody. And after reaching that conclusion you’d think “Why is this not obvious to everybody? The facts are freely available.” They are not. They are there, but in a complex world the cost to aquire them is high. Few will spend six months researching a tricky solution if they already got tricked by somebody else into believing that there’s an easy solution. That’s not on them though, that’s on the trickster.

And now I’ll probably dive into reading about bark beetles for a week because I’ve nerd-sniped myself. But that’s another thing: I can just do that. I have a well-paying job and plenty of spare time. In other words, I have a high budget to spend on informed decisions. That’s a bit of a tangent from the original topic but the gist is: If you wish to assume ideal voters then you quickly arrive at ultimate socio-economic and educational equality as a necessary prerequisite for a working democracy.

No, but I don’t believe voters are mindless drones which vote for whatever they are told to. Do you?

No, I wouldn’t agree with that statement.

This contempt for voter agency is a major reason the AfD is polling so well.

Voters will vote in favor of addressing whatever issue is important to them. And whatever issue happens to be important to them can be influenced by advertising, just like the purchase decision of a customer. That’s why that 4-trillion-dollar industry, on par with the petrochemical sector, exists. That’s neither a secret nor an insult to individualism, but an academic and economic reality. Do you… not agree with that?

“Hey boss I lost the election to right wing xenophobes.” “Why?” “I refused to give voters what they want in a democracy.”
Feel free to stay on your high horse. That doesn’t win election and I promise you, milquetoast immigration reform is better than what AfD is planning.

There are possibly a few things to unpack here, but I’m mostly concerned with the central implication I’m reading into this: Are you resigned to accepting that political power in modern democracies lies with those with the highest advertising budget and/or most ruthless advertising practices? That’s certainly an bleak and interesting thing to discuss, but I’m not entirely sure it’s what you meant. Is it, or am I reading this incorrectly?

This is an easy problem to solve. Denmark solved their right wing problem years ago. The centre left party adopted slightly tougher immigration policies and the right wing party last half their supporters almost overnight. Poll after poll across Europe finds the same: immigration is a major issue for voters. Get tougher on immigration and watch AfD disappear. It’s the easiest political win in history but so many parties refuse to do it. Bleating about social media influence is a losing battle. The internet is free and will remain free. It’s literally designed to work around censorship like it’s a damaged part of the network.

Hey boss, got rid of those nationalist xenophobes for you!
What did you do?
Oh, I just had to become a nationalist xenophobe! Now we cater to the widespread isolationist political demands manufactured by a few demagogues. But don’t worry, the demagogues didn’t get elected, so it’s alright!

Many things in a FOSS ecosystem will sooner or later confront you with one hard truth:

The program you’re using was not developed for you.

It was developed because the creator saw a problem and wanted to fix it. Then they made a program to fix it and stopped refining the program the moment they were content with it. Little to no consideration for other users or mass-adoption. Which is fine, they developed it, it’s their time.
But it also means that you will frequently be confronted with things that are objectively unintuitive and unreasonable from a new user’s perspective because they make sense from a developer’s perspective. The former will always be outranked by the latter, even though there will always be more users than developers. Unfortunately that’s just how it is. There are some few exceptions, but they are just that, exceptions.

That’s why Lemmy is such a GDPR nightmare :(

I know you’re trying to sound optimistic, but that particular example required significant (worldwide, in fact) external intervention…

3 billion humans in the world. About 300 million for Europe.

How do we calculate that?

Resources, living and recreational space, pollution

What’s the maximum capacity for resources, living and recreational space and pollution?

Too many for what? What’s the bottleneck?

Correct! Is that particularly important?

The Bay never went away. It’s always been there for you and it will always be there for you.