No Stupid Questions

2296 readers

26 users here now

There is no such thing as a Stupid Question!

Don't be embarrassed of your curiosity; everyone has questions that they may feel uncomfortable asking certain people, so this place gives you a nice area not to be judged about asking it. Everyone here is willing to help.

ex. How do I change oil
ex. How to tie shoes
ex. Can you cry underwater?

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca still apply!

Thanks for reading all of this, even if you didn't read all of this, and your eye started somewhere else, have a watermelon slice 🍉.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Do others feel somewhat conflicted talking positively about commercial goods/services? (lemm.ee)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

22 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Sometimes I feel like if I do so I'm basically serving as an ad, and I don't really care for that, especially if later I find that the business was scummy in some ways (which is often the case, especially later as it changes leadership/ownership).

If you do, how do you deal with it?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 months ago (2 children)

This is mostly a symptom of being online too much and seeing enough ads to think critically about them.

People have talked about the tools they use for about as long as we've had both tools and language. I think its fine to just talk about stuff and not need to worry about your impact on capitalist society while doing it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

This is mostly a symptom of being online too much and seeing enough ads to think critically about them.

Would this apply even in the case of an avid ad-blocking person? At least that's my situation, so what I'm seeing is less the ad-ridden web and more what remains, which is still a lot of discussion of commercial stuff.

I guess I'm thinking along the lines of the "What the hell is water?" story in a way.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

I get what you mean, but my statement wasn't really about how someone can escape the matrix by seeing enough advertising to realize that its poisioning society and wanting to escape that.

Its more that people would still talk about their commercial products even if there werent ads for it. Thats just a human experience thing.

Advertising muddies the water a whole bunch here because someone has taken that moment of human connection where you talk about a tool that fixed a problem you had, or some food you tried that was really good into something to make money.

Basically your choices are:

Talk about the things with people and ignore the commercial implications.
Be riddled with anxiety over a conversation accidentally making a few extra dollars for CocaCola or Amazon.
Somehow totally dismantle the capitalist system and remove the profit incentives from human conversations involving things you can purchase.

TLDR: you can't totally avoid capitalism so focus on your own happiness rather than worrying about who might be making money from the things youd be doing anyway.