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>Advertising has approximately the same "context switch" problem[1] that programmers often complain about. By definition, an advertisement is not the thing I'm

>Advertising has approximately the same "context switch" problem[1] that programmers often complain about. By definition, an advertisement is not the thing I'm currently involved with. No, it doesn't. A good Google ad will be about the exact thing you're searching for. And yet ad blockers will aggressively attempt to block every such ad. >Ad blockers (and this discussion in general) are talking about ads that are not the content the user requested; otherwise ad blockers would ban the entire page. They block Google ads, and so are blocking content that can be useful to the user.

throwaway2048 11y ago
If its exactly what I want, why is it an ad, and not the first result.
- SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
  How exactly do you bootstrap popularity? The first result has high PageRank. If no one has heard of a new product, how can it get high PageRank without some kind of promotion?
  - copsarebastards 11y ago
    > How exactly do you bootstrap popularity? Who cares? I don't want sites that "bootstrap popularity", I want sites with quality content. To quote XKCD[1]: "I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at." If you're more worried about getting your content onto the front page of Google than about having content that's good enough to end up on the front page of Google, you're never going to produce anything I care about. [1] http://xkcd.com/874/ http://xkcd.com/874/ EDIT: The question "How exactly do you bootstrap popularity?" is the most repugnant, repulsive thing on this thread. I can at least empathize with people who are trying to create content and now have to find a different way to fund it. But you're literally just trying to achieve popularity without doing anything that deserves to be popular. It's people like you that I'm trying to avoid when I use an ad blocker. Your goals are diametrically opposed to mine. I don't want anything to do with whatever crap you want to shove in my face. I want the internet to be a place for people to share art and information that helps push humanity forward, and you want to add noise to the signal. Your small-minded profiteering is literally holding humanity back, and I can't wait for you to go out of business.
    - prawn 11y ago
      I think you've ascribed more malicious intent to the person above you than is fair. Repugnant and repulsive are huge stretches for many genuine businesses starting out. Let's say you're a plumber in a city. You have a family at home you need to support. You'd like to rank top ten for "plumber in cityx" but you're competing with hundreds of alternatives, including directories and so on. How do you demonstrate your ability for a decent chance at ranking well? Door knock to get early customers and then rely on word of mouth or reviews? That's advertising with a shotgun approach and could intrude on people when they're at home with their family. Letter box drop? Advertising. AdWords and decent contextual advertising not an unreasonable option at getting in front of people already interested in your service.
      - copsarebastards 11y ago
        > I think you've ascribed more malicious intent to the person above you than is fair. Repugnant and repulsive are huge stretches for many genuine businesses starting out. The person wants to bypass actual quality and compete by advertising instead of on merits. They're changing the rules in a bad way, and I don't much care about their intent: they're screwing up the internet and it's repugnant even if they don't intend it to be. > Let's say you're a plumber in a city. You have a family at home you need to support. You'd like to rank top ten for "plumber in cityx" but you're competing with hundreds of alternatives, including directories and so on. So either you're not a good enough plumber to be working on your own, or you've worked with an experienced plumber and have built up your reputation that way. You're talking about this in the context where people need to manipulate their rankings to compete, but the only reason they need to manipulate their rankings is because their competition is manipulating their rankings. I'm saying I would rather remove manipulation from the system and let people compete on their actual merits. Ads are the problem, not the solution.
        SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
        >The person wants to bypass actual quality and compete by advertising instead of on merits. The person was me, and you're completely mistaken about what I said, much less the intent. "Actual quality" is not an objective metric, and many ads are promoting new products that are high quality. >So either you're not a good enough plumber to be working on your own, or you've worked with an experienced plumber and have built up your reputation that way. I call BS. You've obviously no real experience promoting a product or service from scratch. You could have 30 years of experience as a plumber and go out on your own as an independent contractor and you'd be starting from ZERO. Not from experience. You can't just take your former employer's customers; that's unethical and typically against your employment contract. So you have to find new customers under a new brand. And it's arguably worse for promoting other products or services today. I had 20 years of experience when I struck out and started my own company again; that experience opened doors when I made personal connections to work with people, but it meant crap for my indie game release. Most popular games would fail without being propped up by advertising (and some would be less valuable to their players if they weren't as popular -- I'm thinking of games where you play against others, and so the more people who play, the more valuable the game is to everyone. Standard network effect). >You're talking about this in the context where people need to manipulate their rankings to compete Ranking in Google isn't magic. It's an algorithm based (in large part) on popularity. You're basically saying no new business or product ever has the right to exist, because anything that isn't popular now has no right to become popular. How exactly do you expect something to become popular quickly enough for a company not to go out of business without getting the product in front of enough consumers?
anon1385 11y ago
Google ads are often actively malicious to the user. For example it was the case for a very long time that if you searched for 'firefox' on Google the ad at the top of the results would take you to a site offering downloads of firefox that came bundled with malware[1]. So it's quite possible for Google ads to claim to be "the exact thing you're searching for", but to actually be tricking you. Thus the user needs to think carefully before clicking any Google ad. This is true of search results too of course, but it's vastly harder to game the search results to get your malware into the top spot for a term like firefox, compared to just buying up the adwords inventory, so the chance of getting scammed is much lower. Google ads are not just text ads of course. Their display ads include many of those big fake download buttons that you find on any software download site. Yet another minefield for users that makes a simple task into a battle of wits and requires constant vigilance. The biggest illustration I had of that was using a fresh Windows VM last year to download some Windows software, and falling for one of those fake download button adsense ads. The reason being that I normally use an ad blocker and I wasn't mentally prepared for the challenge of finding the download link on the page that wasn't a landmine. Given that Google were happy to serve up ads for malware for years, despite being told about it frequently, I have absolutely no sympathy for them, and I would recommend that everybody I know uses an ad blocker to block ads on Google search results pages. [1] http://i.imgur.com/Ote9c2k.png http://i.imgur.com/Ote9c2k.png an example from the start of the year, taken when I wrote this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8879229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8879229

throwaway2048 11y ago

If its exactly what I want, why is it an ad, and not the first result.

SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
How exactly do you bootstrap popularity? The first result has high PageRank. If no one has heard of a new product, how can it get high PageRank without some kind of promotion?
- copsarebastards 11y ago
  > How exactly do you bootstrap popularity? Who cares? I don't want sites that "bootstrap popularity", I want sites with quality content. To quote XKCD[1]: "I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at." If you're more worried about getting your content onto the front page of Google than about having content that's good enough to end up on the front page of Google, you're never going to produce anything I care about. [1] http://xkcd.com/874/ http://xkcd.com/874/ EDIT: The question "How exactly do you bootstrap popularity?" is the most repugnant, repulsive thing on this thread. I can at least empathize with people who are trying to create content and now have to find a different way to fund it. But you're literally just trying to achieve popularity without doing anything that deserves to be popular. It's people like you that I'm trying to avoid when I use an ad blocker. Your goals are diametrically opposed to mine. I don't want anything to do with whatever crap you want to shove in my face. I want the internet to be a place for people to share art and information that helps push humanity forward, and you want to add noise to the signal. Your small-minded profiteering is literally holding humanity back, and I can't wait for you to go out of business.
  - prawn 11y ago
    I think you've ascribed more malicious intent to the person above you than is fair. Repugnant and repulsive are huge stretches for many genuine businesses starting out. Let's say you're a plumber in a city. You have a family at home you need to support. You'd like to rank top ten for "plumber in cityx" but you're competing with hundreds of alternatives, including directories and so on. How do you demonstrate your ability for a decent chance at ranking well? Door knock to get early customers and then rely on word of mouth or reviews? That's advertising with a shotgun approach and could intrude on people when they're at home with their family. Letter box drop? Advertising. AdWords and decent contextual advertising not an unreasonable option at getting in front of people already interested in your service.
    - copsarebastards 11y ago
      > I think you've ascribed more malicious intent to the person above you than is fair. Repugnant and repulsive are huge stretches for many genuine businesses starting out. The person wants to bypass actual quality and compete by advertising instead of on merits. They're changing the rules in a bad way, and I don't much care about their intent: they're screwing up the internet and it's repugnant even if they don't intend it to be. > Let's say you're a plumber in a city. You have a family at home you need to support. You'd like to rank top ten for "plumber in cityx" but you're competing with hundreds of alternatives, including directories and so on. So either you're not a good enough plumber to be working on your own, or you've worked with an experienced plumber and have built up your reputation that way. You're talking about this in the context where people need to manipulate their rankings to compete, but the only reason they need to manipulate their rankings is because their competition is manipulating their rankings. I'm saying I would rather remove manipulation from the system and let people compete on their actual merits. Ads are the problem, not the solution.
      - SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
        >The person wants to bypass actual quality and compete by advertising instead of on merits. The person was me, and you're completely mistaken about what I said, much less the intent. "Actual quality" is not an objective metric, and many ads are promoting new products that are high quality. >So either you're not a good enough plumber to be working on your own, or you've worked with an experienced plumber and have built up your reputation that way. I call BS. You've obviously no real experience promoting a product or service from scratch. You could have 30 years of experience as a plumber and go out on your own as an independent contractor and you'd be starting from ZERO. Not from experience. You can't just take your former employer's customers; that's unethical and typically against your employment contract. So you have to find new customers under a new brand. And it's arguably worse for promoting other products or services today. I had 20 years of experience when I struck out and started my own company again; that experience opened doors when I made personal connections to work with people, but it meant crap for my indie game release. Most popular games would fail without being propped up by advertising (and some would be less valuable to their players if they weren't as popular -- I'm thinking of games where you play against others, and so the more people who play, the more valuable the game is to everyone. Standard network effect). >You're talking about this in the context where people need to manipulate their rankings to compete Ranking in Google isn't magic. It's an algorithm based (in large part) on popularity. You're basically saying no new business or product ever has the right to exist, because anything that isn't popular now has no right to become popular. How exactly do you expect something to become popular quickly enough for a company not to go out of business without getting the product in front of enough consumers?

anon1385 11y ago

Google ads are often actively malicious to the user. For example it was the case for a very long time that if you searched for 'firefox' on Google the ad at the top of the results would take you to a site offering downloads of firefox that came bundled with malware[1]. So it's quite possible for Google ads to claim to be "the exact thing you're searching for", but to actually be tricking you. Thus the user needs to think carefully before clicking any Google ad. This is true of search results too of course, but it's vastly harder to game the search results to get your malware into the top spot for a term like firefox, compared to just buying up the adwords inventory, so the chance of getting scammed is much lower. Google ads are not just text ads of course. Their display ads include many of those big fake download buttons that you find on any software download site. Yet another minefield for users that makes a simple task into a battle of wits and requires constant vigilance. The biggest illustration I had of that was using a fresh Windows VM last year to download some Windows software, and falling for one of those fake download button adsense ads. The reason being that I normally use an ad blocker and I wasn't mentally prepared for the challenge of finding the download link on the page that wasn't a landmine. Given that Google were happy to serve up ads for malware for years, despite being told about it frequently, I have absolutely no sympathy for them, and I would recommend that everybody I know uses an ad blocker to block ads on Google search results pages. [1] http://i.imgur.com/Ote9c2k.png http://i.imgur.com/Ote9c2k.png an example from the start of the year, taken when I wrote this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8879229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8879229