By chance, maybe, but I specifically don’t click on “Advertised” links in search results. Even if do, does it matter if I’d chose service anyway? Coz all it changes is money moved from one rich ass to another. It doesn’t make me buy what I didn’t plan to buy. Contrary, I might avoid products which are too pushy with ads. In place where I come from people used to say that good things don’t need advertisement. So to me this ad changes nothing. If tomorrow world stop making ads nothing changes to me - I do search, it gives me options, I do research and make a decision

Is phone book an ad? The fact I bought something does not mean I did it because ad convinced me. When one buys a car presume they check what is available on the market and select option based on comparison. Same with travel, you don’t visit place because you saw poster somewhere, you have limit time so you find a list of popular options and pick what to visit. It’s exactly what you called it - research and review. It’s people rating things helping you make your choices, not companies convincing this is what you want to buy by showing you 10 seconds stupid ass video. Or at least I hope. I never understood the concept of ads beyond informing that this business exists. From my perspective could be just brand name and what it sells. No difference to me. I always thought it would be much better to just have site list of businesses with description and reviews

I typically find those things on the map. Or in specialized apps. Don’t see how it’s ad driven revenue.

Also who is changing barbers every time or moving between cities every few weeks? It’s like once a year thing for most people, isn’t it?

TF is this formatting

I think those are symptoms of more general trend - IT is not a tool to make people’s lives easier or fun anymore. Until last 5 years all my projects were about making things possible or automating tedious manual tasks. Now, for almost all use cases there is some solution or components you (or AI) can slap together to build a solution. Today it’s all about cutting costs and increasing margins. There is nothing fun or creative in this job, all feedback you get is lower numbers on dashboard. Budgets are squeezed to make more profit, so there is no time to get bored and improve things around you.

Look, in my IT company, I have to track my time in 3 different system and no-one cares because there is no ROI in automating it. That should tell you in which state IT is