Cigarette advertising was banned in the US. It famously increased profit because they didn’t have to burn it all on advertising.
Advertising is like nuclear weapons. It’s bad that it exists, harms people around it, and is only needed because the opposition has it. If it disappeared, everyone would benefit, but no one wants to be the first.
This is absolutely the answer. If it isn’t funneling money away from actual value creation and into their pockets, it’s evil in the mind of the investors.
Honestly, I’m slightly surprised ‘tattoo printers’ haven’t become a thing for those little ‘formulaic’ tattoos. (Stars, hearts, bird silhouettes, etc.) People love getting inked up and I could see it making those sorts of tattoos absurdly fast, albeit probably much more intensely painful due to the speed.
Don’t forget the vocal minority problem. The subset of people who comment on things is much smaller than the set of people who consume them. And while the threshold of effort for making comment is low, it isn’t zero, so people who hold more extreme views are going to be more prevalent in the selection because the people with moderate views aren’t going to have the motivation to spend 20 minutes explaining the nuanced position they have, while the ‘love’ and ‘hate’ camps will gladly spend 10 seconds on posting their simplistic view.
Add on the way modern systems work, focusing on likes, upvotes, etc. and you get short form responses getting greater engagement purely because they don’t take as long to read. It’s always easier to get traction with a short, maybe amusing, rehash of a common opinion than with a long dissertation on niche, complex views.
That cycles back in at the top to create a visibility bias so the people making the next round of commentary/content see the wave of love/hate and try to ride it. The result is a feedback loop with a terrible signal to noise ratio.