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Thank you. I feel like ads have such a bad rap because of the state of the internet. Yet, what does everyone expect? Is it shocking that content providers want

Thank you. I feel like ads have such a bad rap because of the state of the internet. Yet, what does everyone expect? Is it shocking that content providers want money for their product? And yes, I know, some sites and ads do terrible things. The actively hurt viewership. BUT, isn't that the same with everything? Even my groceries are getting worse as companies seek ways to increase profits without pissing me off; they swap out quality ingredients with cheaper ingredients. They change the shape of the bottle to reduce volume and hope I don't notice that the price effectively went up. Etc. My point is not in defense of these practices. Rather, I'm defending "no shit" in all of this; welcome to the real world. Everyone is going to try and take and make as much as they can before it starts to actively show a negative impact. So who is to really blame? Us, of course. Consumers of these practices are largely okay with it as is. So yea, I don't have a problem with ads. They sort themselves out because people will stop using the products. I do have a problem with selling out data though, as people are largely unaware of the consequences and severity of what is actually happening. Ads however though? Who cares. edit: Sidenote, I imagine an argument could be made that all and any ads are terrible. I definitely could agree with that, but getting rid of all advertisements across all mediums online or offline seems a tall order, and out of scope for this discussion heh.

Retra 8y ago
It's not shocking that content providers want money. It's shocking that pushing ads and selling data are the only ways they can conceive of doing it.
taurath 8y ago
I choose to believe we could have a better world, where loading a local news site doesn’t look like a virus-ridden Windows 95 desktop, where just trying to talk with friends isn’t interrupted by.. (checks twitter) payday loan lobbyists. Where the smartest people of my generation are using every dark pattern in the world to take my attention away from what matters to me.
- duxup 8y ago
  I think it is very possible, even with ads. So ads are often a place where dark patterns happen and such. But take Apple for instance. Apple seems to respect user privacy to a fairly far extent compared to say, Facebook, Google. If apple wasn't around ... we would probably say something about "you can't have these fancy smartphones without someone stealing all your data". But clearly Apple can do it (for a lot of reasons)... so we know it is possible. I feel the same way about ads, it might be different, but it can be done.
  - duderific 8y ago
    Apple makes massive profits on the hardware they sell you, that's how they can do it. The software companies that give it away "for free" (Facebook, Google) don't have any way other than advertising or selling/using data to make money.
    - llukas 8y ago
      Where do I sign up for a free android phone?
      - efreak 8y ago
        The _software_ companies give [their _software_] away for free. You can build a phone if you want, install Android on it, and sell it without paying Google anything. There's a ton of Chinese companies doing just that; Amazon does it too.
  - chillacy 8y ago
    Privacy is one of the features that helps the iPhone sell for over a thousand dollars. I remember one of the Amazon Kindles sold 2 versions: one with ads that was cheaper, and one without ads that was more expensive. So people do pay at least to get rid of ads (I'm sure both versions collect your data), it just costs more, and most end up not being able to afford it. For all the good in the iPhone, year after year android gains ground worldwide by virtue of being cheaper and more flexible.
hombre_fatal 8y ago
I run an old collaborative writing (roleplaying) forum populated mostly by teens that's paid for by a banner ad. When I read HN comments about ads, I see people who are forgetting what ads have actually gotten us: more people able to create more things that are available to everyone for free. HNers like to say "well, then adapt your business model," but look at the incredibly friction that exists for getting people to take their wallet out. On the frontpage of HN as we speak, there's an entire thread of people who justify why they won't even pay Spotify $10/mo. Where does that leave the rest of us who offer something much, much less than a ubiquitous, unlimited music-streaming platform? Let's be more concrete and look at the forum that I run. I grew up on roleplaying MUD servers and forums, and it helped me develop the passion and habit for writing early on in my life. I started a forum as a teen to continue the interest, and eventually it was popular enough for ads to pay my rent through uni while running a community for young writers. These days, my banner ad barely breaks even with server costs. It now makes less than 1/15th of what it did at the peak of its ad revenue with about the same traffic. I'm left with a decision: can I afford to run the site as a charity? How would the HN champion of "adapt or die" address my scenario? Ads are a middle ground between being a charity and paywalling your website, and the vast majority of websites don't fall at either extreme. Suggesting that this massive chunk on the internet doesn't deserve to exist, like my forum that gets teens into writing, seems incredibly extreme. The writing is on the wall, though. Just seems like a damn shame.
- throwawayjava 8y ago
  I've run a similar role playing style site since middle school. It introduced me to more than just a habit of writing. It also introduced me to programming at a young age and in a community and school system where that would not have happened otherwise. I run mine as a charity now. Its less than 200 dollars a year. The ads just aren't even worth keeping up. Before and during college, when I couldn't afford the 200, I solicited donations from former users who had used the site as a teen but since grew out of it. That worked really well. Good luck.
- bostik 8y ago
  The problem isn't ads per se, it's all the crap around them: * invasive, industrial grade stalking * wasted screen real estate * trackers * page load time * bloated third-party garbage * blinkenlights * dark patterns * bandwidth hogging * CPU hogging * drive-by-malware potential (compromised ad network is an incredibly powerful attack vector) And so on. Quite a long time ago I actually wrote down what I consider the minimum standard for acceptable ads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10521930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10521930 ; anything more intrusive is as good as toxic waste.
grawprog 8y ago
>They change the shape of the bottle to reduce volume and hope I don't notice that the price effectively went up. One of the memories that really sticks out for me from working in a grocery store was the time the Breyer's ice cream increased in price that way. They came in a 5 case of 500g containers. They sold regularly for around $5 or something like that. They went on sale for 2 for $5 for about 2 weeks. After the first week they started showing up in 4 packs of 430g containers. I remember having to rearrange the shelves to get them to fit properly, theit shape was slightly different. After the sale ended they went to $6 for a 430g container. It was the first time I noticed and really thought about price increases by lowering the volume of containers. That was also around the time they stopped putting handles on the big ice cream pails. A lot of people complained about it, they were no good for berry picking any more. One day I asked the dairy delivery guy about it. He said someone figured out that the handles added 2¢ to the cost of each bucked and some accountant figured out that by removing them they saved, I can't remember the exact number, but in the millions of dollars each year.
- oasisbob 8y ago
  And just imagine all the fun manufacturers can have when ice cream is sold by volume instead of weight...
Marsymars 8y ago
> Even my groceries are getting worse as companies seek ways to increase profits without pissing me off; they swap out quality ingredients with cheaper ingredients. They change the shape of the bottle to reduce volume and hope I don't notice that the price effectively went up. Etc. If you stick to fresh produce and bulk dry goods, you're pretty much immune to those problems. Incidentally, those happen to be products that never get advertised for.
- JacobJans 8y ago
  That is not necessarily true, as industrial food companies increasingly push for larger yield per acre, they do not account for the objective quality of the product. They're looking to maximize their profit; and quality is just one metric among many others that have an impact on this.
  - tofof 8y ago
    Exactly. I've taken to buying 'organic' carrots that are smaller and have had the leaves left on simply because they taste like.. well, carrots. The huge carrots in the 2 lb bag mass-market bag are tasteless in comparison. I'm otherwise as far away from the normal target audience of 'organic' foods as you can get; I'm decidedly pro-GMO, etc.
  - Marsymars 8y ago
    Yes, absolutely, but this typically feels like companies responding to market preferences of consumers for the cheapest/brightest fruits/vegetables, rather than the feeling I get from companies marketing typical packaged products, which is of malicious deception.
johnisgood 8y ago
As I see it, the issue is that ads are being sold to us as something that is for our own benefit, and then go on to collect data for personalized ads that we do not even want. It is not shocking that content providers want money, but perhaps it would be better if it would not be forced, and if developers would not actively try to make it more and more difficult for us to get rid of. You could just ask instead. Wikipedia seems to do fine.
andrepd 8y ago
To me ads are fundamentally about misleading you, manipulating you, or in short: making you do something that you wouldn't do otherwise. This to me is morally wrong on a base level. Advertisement is an attempt to attack/manipulate your vulnerable mammal brain to make you do something against your interest (be it buying a product, voting on someone, etc). In other words, to do something that you wouldn't do rationally, or wouldn't do without this prodding.
- pmontra 8y ago
  Exactly. I don't remember the words but my parents were like "it's an ad, don't believe it." It was the time of TV commercials and little else but I think it's still a good piece of advice now.
- JacobJans 8y ago
  This is a very immature view of advertising, that, unfortunately many advertisers share -- and it leads to scummy ads, with no eye on the long term relationship with the person viewing the ad. However, many ads are not deceptive in any way, and instead simply offer something of value to people who may be interested, without any deceit, psychological trick, or ulterior motive. Just because there are bad ads does not mean that all advertising is bad.
  - jackstraw14 8y ago
    I'd say the ads are still deceptive even if they weren't created with that intention. It doesn't need to be sneaky, but if it's unsolicited then the consumer didn't opt for their attention to be steered toward it. edit: removed example as it distracts from the point.
    - i_cant_speel 8y ago
      You are still using the reasoning of "Here is an example of a bad ad, therefore all ads are bad."
    - BenderBRod 8y ago
danaliv 8y ago
Thing is though, the state of the internet—all that shady stuff Facebook does—is because of ads. Ads aren’t something you can pluck out of a social/technical context and talk about as though they’re in a vacuum. When a site’s existence depends on ad revenue, every single product decision becomes tainted by “how can we hook people?” I can’t find the article now but there was a great one a while back about this very topic. The thesis was that the environment produced by advertising—not the ads themselves, but their effect on everything around them—is nothing short of psychological warfare. So it’s not just whether “ads” are good or bad. And it’s not enough just to block them. They are like a virulent symbiote. They seep into every aspect of the platform they live on, because the platform’s survival depends on them. And then the infected platforms poison their users, ad blockers or no.
foobiekr 8y ago
Ads in their current manifestation are inseparably connected to both the surveillance practices and the security-busting delivery of potential malware to user devices. Google and others could put a stop to both of these, but there is zero possibility they will do so. Ads themselves are .. not innocent, but not in-and-of-themselves evil. I rather like turn of the century advertising because it's mostly statements about products and their advantages. It wasn't until the Bernays/Freud era that ads switched from trying to persuade you as to the product's merits to trying to manipulate the consumer by essentially selling an identity. That practice is comparably dark.
tokyodude 8y ago
It is us that's the problem. We keep using these services. Your groceries getting worse remind me that I used to enjoy Blue Diamond almonds. I'd get them at the local Walgreens. Then Walgreens decided to replace them with their own "Nice" brand. They were crap. Not even remotely the same quality, first bag was barely cheweble, and of course not the same flavors. They did the same with Q-Tips, replacing them for "Nice" cotton swabs. Again, complete crap, cotton falls off, not as thick, sticks break easily. But even worse, almost no one except me cared. If people cared it wouldn't last because people would stop buying the crap brand and Walgreen would get the message but most people don't care This came up with my roommate who basically always bought the cheapest spaghetti sauce. When I asked her if why that one she said effectively "any spaghetti sauce is the same as another so I just always get the cheapest" to which I was shocked. They aren't remotely similar to my taste buds and also now understanding why everything gets worse, because most people apparently are fine with anything or can't tell the difference or don't find the differences important. It's the same for FB. Most of my friends are unlikely to ever leave. Whether it's because it doesn't bother them or because they don't think about it or because they just take it all for granted, it seems to be a combination of all of those which effectively means FB gets no signal to make things better. Heck, as another example the complaints are loud here about the MacbookPro's keyboard/touchbar/weight etc but sales are higher than ever which means the complainers are not remotely a signal to change things.
thaumaturgy 8y ago
> I imagine an argument could be made that all and any ads are terrible. And I'll be happy to make it. Advertising in its most optimized form is terrible, and it's terrible in ways that most people aren't even conscious of. Even in the relatively plodding print and television markets, modern advertising relies on numerous principles of human psychology to subtly alter the way you think about a product, a company, or yourself [1] [2]. Worse still, these tactics are being used on children, in a society which otherwise broadly accepts that mind-altering substances are especially harmful to youth [3]. Advertising is furthermore in a codependent relationship with the content it's injected into. For the advertising to be successful, it has to compete against the content for your attention. Likewise, the content needs to compete against its ads for your attention too. The natural result of this co-opetition between ads and content has been the clickbait headlines and junk content that are ubiquitous now, that everyone hates but can't seem to avoid [4], and this is having deep and powerful impacts on how we all view the world. Recently, other organizations -- like nation-states -- have realized that they can use all of the psychological effects understood by the advertising industry against a population which willingly accepts advertising while believing that it's immune to its effects. These organizations are weaponizing advertising, making us hate each other over our politics [5] and further dividing us ideologically [6]. And these are just advertising's intentional effects, the stuff that works the way that the advertising industry wants it to work, or as well as they can figure out right now anyway. Sometimes they get it wrong, especially when it comes to trying to market products to people using the vast wealth of personal information that we unknowingly provide with every page view. When this data model makes mistakes, it ends up marketing an endless stream of baby-related products and services to parents whose child didn't survive birth [7]. The future of the web is not dependent on advertising. Some are arguing that the future of the web, and maybe even the health of our society, depends on weaning ourselves off of the advertising tit [8]. Some of us grew up along with the web and remember what it was like before its unfortunate marriage to advertising, and we hope that it comes to its senses and gets a divorce while it still has a chance at a healthy relationship with society. Advertising is inherently unhealthy for our psychology. It can't help it. Like everything else, it wants to be as successful as it can, and its success depends on how effectively it can manipulate us while fooling us into believing we're not being manipulated at all. [1]: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ulterior-motives/201008/what-does-advertising-do https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ulterior-motives/201... [2]: https://prezi.com/2cekh73hothi/psychological-effects-of-advertising/ https://prezi.com/2cekh73hothi/psychological-effects-of-adve... [3]: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/140/Supplement_2/S152 http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/140/Supplement... [4]: https://medium.com/@tobiasrose/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511488de https://medium.com/@tobiasrose/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511... [5]: https://fathom.info/fakebook/ https://fathom.info/fakebook/ [6]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-ads/majority-of-divisive-facebook-ads-bought-by-suspicious-groups-study-idUSKBN1HN2KV https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-ads/majority-of-... [7]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18665048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18665048 [8]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-is-the-internets-original-sin/376041/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/adver...
acrispino 8y ago
If "no shit" is an appropriate response to advertiser behavior, I'd want "no shit" to also be an appropriate response to users installing ad blockers, instead of whining: https://www.adweek.com/digital/yahoo-exec-calls-out-mobile-ad-blocker-destroying-ecosystem-169820/ https://www.adweek.com/digital/yahoo-exec-calls-out-mobile-a...
- asdkhadsj 8y ago
  Agree 100%. Ad blockers are akin to piracy which has been a natural force on the consumer side. Legalities aside, if you make consumers UX miserable enough they often work through it - and I support that. My comment was mainly in the context of ads being discussed as some anti-consumer device. Where as I view them as a natural part of the payment ecosystem. Too many ads are akin to products being too expensive - and unsurprisingly shift consumers towards "piracy". It's a natural battle.
cortesoft 8y ago
I think advertising has value, but there is a really good article about why targeted advertising is bad: https://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/ https://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/ The tl;dr is basically that one of the key aspects of advertising is signaling (i.e. we stand behind our product so much that we can waste this much money advertising it to you)... with targeted advertising, it becomes so cheap display an ad to only a few people that you lose that signal, and you have no way of knowing if a product is total crap or not.
smsm42 8y ago
It's not shocking content providers want money. It is somewhat shocking that their way of making money is making user experience worse and essentially engaging in low-grade war with their users - not outright war, but sneaky cold war stuff, where you officially friends with them but unofficially spy on them, steal their secrets, subvert their actions to your benefit, make their life worse if it can make yours a bit better, and so on. It's not exactly how we commonly view customer-provider relationship.

Retra 8y ago

It's not shocking that content providers want money. It's shocking that pushing ads and selling data are the only ways they can conceive of doing it.

taurath 8y ago

I choose to believe we could have a better world, where loading a local news site doesn’t look like a virus-ridden Windows 95 desktop, where just trying to talk with friends isn’t interrupted by.. (checks twitter) payday loan lobbyists. Where the smartest people of my generation are using every dark pattern in the world to take my attention away from what matters to me.

duxup 8y ago
I think it is very possible, even with ads. So ads are often a place where dark patterns happen and such. But take Apple for instance. Apple seems to respect user privacy to a fairly far extent compared to say, Facebook, Google. If apple wasn't around ... we would probably say something about "you can't have these fancy smartphones without someone stealing all your data". But clearly Apple can do it (for a lot of reasons)... so we know it is possible. I feel the same way about ads, it might be different, but it can be done.
- duderific 8y ago
  Apple makes massive profits on the hardware they sell you, that's how they can do it. The software companies that give it away "for free" (Facebook, Google) don't have any way other than advertising or selling/using data to make money.
  - llukas 8y ago
    Where do I sign up for a free android phone?
    - efreak 8y ago
      The _software_ companies give [their _software_] away for free. You can build a phone if you want, install Android on it, and sell it without paying Google anything. There's a ton of Chinese companies doing just that; Amazon does it too.
- chillacy 8y ago
  Privacy is one of the features that helps the iPhone sell for over a thousand dollars. I remember one of the Amazon Kindles sold 2 versions: one with ads that was cheaper, and one without ads that was more expensive. So people do pay at least to get rid of ads (I'm sure both versions collect your data), it just costs more, and most end up not being able to afford it. For all the good in the iPhone, year after year android gains ground worldwide by virtue of being cheaper and more flexible.

hombre_fatal 8y ago

I run an old collaborative writing (roleplaying) forum populated mostly by teens that's paid for by a banner ad. When I read HN comments about ads, I see people who are forgetting what ads have actually gotten us: more people able to create more things that are available to everyone for free. HNers like to say "well, then adapt your business model," but look at the incredibly friction that exists for getting people to take their wallet out. On the frontpage of HN as we speak, there's an entire thread of people who justify why they won't even pay Spotify $10/mo. Where does that leave the rest of us who offer something much, much less than a ubiquitous, unlimited music-streaming platform? Let's be more concrete and look at the forum that I run. I grew up on roleplaying MUD servers and forums, and it helped me develop the passion and habit for writing early on in my life. I started a forum as a teen to continue the interest, and eventually it was popular enough for ads to pay my rent through uni while running a community for young writers. These days, my banner ad barely breaks even with server costs. It now makes less than 1/15th of what it did at the peak of its ad revenue with about the same traffic. I'm left with a decision: can I afford to run the site as a charity? How would the HN champion of "adapt or die" address my scenario? Ads are a middle ground between being a charity and paywalling your website, and the vast majority of websites don't fall at either extreme. Suggesting that this massive chunk on the internet doesn't deserve to exist, like my forum that gets teens into writing, seems incredibly extreme. The writing is on the wall, though. Just seems like a damn shame.

throwawayjava 8y ago
I've run a similar role playing style site since middle school. It introduced me to more than just a habit of writing. It also introduced me to programming at a young age and in a community and school system where that would not have happened otherwise. I run mine as a charity now. Its less than 200 dollars a year. The ads just aren't even worth keeping up. Before and during college, when I couldn't afford the 200, I solicited donations from former users who had used the site as a teen but since grew out of it. That worked really well. Good luck.
bostik 8y ago
The problem isn't ads per se, it's all the crap around them: * invasive, industrial grade stalking * wasted screen real estate * trackers * page load time * bloated third-party garbage * blinkenlights * dark patterns * bandwidth hogging * CPU hogging * drive-by-malware potential (compromised ad network is an incredibly powerful attack vector) And so on. Quite a long time ago I actually wrote down what I consider the minimum standard for acceptable ads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10521930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10521930 ; anything more intrusive is as good as toxic waste.

grawprog 8y ago

>They change the shape of the bottle to reduce volume and hope I don't notice that the price effectively went up. One of the memories that really sticks out for me from working in a grocery store was the time the Breyer's ice cream increased in price that way. They came in a 5 case of 500g containers. They sold regularly for around $5 or something like that. They went on sale for 2 for $5 for about 2 weeks. After the first week they started showing up in 4 packs of 430g containers. I remember having to rearrange the shelves to get them to fit properly, theit shape was slightly different. After the sale ended they went to $6 for a 430g container. It was the first time I noticed and really thought about price increases by lowering the volume of containers. That was also around the time they stopped putting handles on the big ice cream pails. A lot of people complained about it, they were no good for berry picking any more. One day I asked the dairy delivery guy about it. He said someone figured out that the handles added 2¢ to the cost of each bucked and some accountant figured out that by removing them they saved, I can't remember the exact number, but in the millions of dollars each year.

oasisbob 8y ago
And just imagine all the fun manufacturers can have when ice cream is sold by volume instead of weight...

Marsymars 8y ago

> Even my groceries are getting worse as companies seek ways to increase profits without pissing me off; they swap out quality ingredients with cheaper ingredients. They change the shape of the bottle to reduce volume and hope I don't notice that the price effectively went up. Etc. If you stick to fresh produce and bulk dry goods, you're pretty much immune to those problems. Incidentally, those happen to be products that never get advertised for.

JacobJans 8y ago
That is not necessarily true, as industrial food companies increasingly push for larger yield per acre, they do not account for the objective quality of the product. They're looking to maximize their profit; and quality is just one metric among many others that have an impact on this.
- tofof 8y ago
  Exactly. I've taken to buying 'organic' carrots that are smaller and have had the leaves left on simply because they taste like.. well, carrots. The huge carrots in the 2 lb bag mass-market bag are tasteless in comparison. I'm otherwise as far away from the normal target audience of 'organic' foods as you can get; I'm decidedly pro-GMO, etc.
- Marsymars 8y ago
  Yes, absolutely, but this typically feels like companies responding to market preferences of consumers for the cheapest/brightest fruits/vegetables, rather than the feeling I get from companies marketing typical packaged products, which is of malicious deception.

johnisgood 8y ago

As I see it, the issue is that ads are being sold to us as something that is for our own benefit, and then go on to collect data for personalized ads that we do not even want. It is not shocking that content providers want money, but perhaps it would be better if it would not be forced, and if developers would not actively try to make it more and more difficult for us to get rid of. You could just ask instead. Wikipedia seems to do fine.

andrepd 8y ago

To me ads are fundamentally about misleading you, manipulating you, or in short: making you do something that you wouldn't do otherwise. This to me is morally wrong on a base level. Advertisement is an attempt to attack/manipulate your vulnerable mammal brain to make you do something against your interest (be it buying a product, voting on someone, etc). In other words, to do something that you wouldn't do rationally, or wouldn't do without this prodding.

pmontra 8y ago
Exactly. I don't remember the words but my parents were like "it's an ad, don't believe it." It was the time of TV commercials and little else but I think it's still a good piece of advice now.
JacobJans 8y ago
This is a very immature view of advertising, that, unfortunately many advertisers share -- and it leads to scummy ads, with no eye on the long term relationship with the person viewing the ad. However, many ads are not deceptive in any way, and instead simply offer something of value to people who may be interested, without any deceit, psychological trick, or ulterior motive. Just because there are bad ads does not mean that all advertising is bad.
- jackstraw14 8y ago
  I'd say the ads are still deceptive even if they weren't created with that intention. It doesn't need to be sneaky, but if it's unsolicited then the consumer didn't opt for their attention to be steered toward it. edit: removed example as it distracts from the point.
  - i_cant_speel 8y ago
    You are still using the reasoning of "Here is an example of a bad ad, therefore all ads are bad."
  - BenderBRod 8y ago

danaliv 8y ago

Thing is though, the state of the internet—all that shady stuff Facebook does—is because of ads. Ads aren’t something you can pluck out of a social/technical context and talk about as though they’re in a vacuum. When a site’s existence depends on ad revenue, every single product decision becomes tainted by “how can we hook people?” I can’t find the article now but there was a great one a while back about this very topic. The thesis was that the environment produced by advertising—not the ads themselves, but their effect on everything around them—is nothing short of psychological warfare. So it’s not just whether “ads” are good or bad. And it’s not enough just to block them. They are like a virulent symbiote. They seep into every aspect of the platform they live on, because the platform’s survival depends on them. And then the infected platforms poison their users, ad blockers or no.

foobiekr 8y ago

Ads in their current manifestation are inseparably connected to both the surveillance practices and the security-busting delivery of potential malware to user devices. Google and others could put a stop to both of these, but there is zero possibility they will do so. Ads themselves are .. not innocent, but not in-and-of-themselves evil. I rather like turn of the century advertising because it's mostly statements about products and their advantages. It wasn't until the Bernays/Freud era that ads switched from trying to persuade you as to the product's merits to trying to manipulate the consumer by essentially selling an identity. That practice is comparably dark.

tokyodude 8y ago

It is us that's the problem. We keep using these services. Your groceries getting worse remind me that I used to enjoy Blue Diamond almonds. I'd get them at the local Walgreens. Then Walgreens decided to replace them with their own "Nice" brand. They were crap. Not even remotely the same quality, first bag was barely cheweble, and of course not the same flavors. They did the same with Q-Tips, replacing them for "Nice" cotton swabs. Again, complete crap, cotton falls off, not as thick, sticks break easily. But even worse, almost no one except me cared. If people cared it wouldn't last because people would stop buying the crap brand and Walgreen would get the message but most people don't care This came up with my roommate who basically always bought the cheapest spaghetti sauce. When I asked her if why that one she said effectively "any spaghetti sauce is the same as another so I just always get the cheapest" to which I was shocked. They aren't remotely similar to my taste buds and also now understanding why everything gets worse, because most people apparently are fine with anything or can't tell the difference or don't find the differences important. It's the same for FB. Most of my friends are unlikely to ever leave. Whether it's because it doesn't bother them or because they don't think about it or because they just take it all for granted, it seems to be a combination of all of those which effectively means FB gets no signal to make things better. Heck, as another example the complaints are loud here about the MacbookPro's keyboard/touchbar/weight etc but sales are higher than ever which means the complainers are not remotely a signal to change things.

thaumaturgy 8y ago

> I imagine an argument could be made that all and any ads are terrible. And I'll be happy to make it. Advertising in its most optimized form is terrible, and it's terrible in ways that most people aren't even conscious of. Even in the relatively plodding print and television markets, modern advertising relies on numerous principles of human psychology to subtly alter the way you think about a product, a company, or yourself [1] [2]. Worse still, these tactics are being used on children, in a society which otherwise broadly accepts that mind-altering substances are especially harmful to youth [3]. Advertising is furthermore in a codependent relationship with the content it's injected into. For the advertising to be successful, it has to compete against the content for your attention. Likewise, the content needs to compete against its ads for your attention too. The natural result of this co-opetition between ads and content has been the clickbait headlines and junk content that are ubiquitous now, that everyone hates but can't seem to avoid [4], and this is having deep and powerful impacts on how we all view the world. Recently, other organizations -- like nation-states -- have realized that they can use all of the psychological effects understood by the advertising industry against a population which willingly accepts advertising while believing that it's immune to its effects. These organizations are weaponizing advertising, making us hate each other over our politics [5] and further dividing us ideologically [6]. And these are just advertising's intentional effects, the stuff that works the way that the advertising industry wants it to work, or as well as they can figure out right now anyway. Sometimes they get it wrong, especially when it comes to trying to market products to people using the vast wealth of personal information that we unknowingly provide with every page view. When this data model makes mistakes, it ends up marketing an endless stream of baby-related products and services to parents whose child didn't survive birth [7]. The future of the web is not dependent on advertising. Some are arguing that the future of the web, and maybe even the health of our society, depends on weaning ourselves off of the advertising tit [8]. Some of us grew up along with the web and remember what it was like before its unfortunate marriage to advertising, and we hope that it comes to its senses and gets a divorce while it still has a chance at a healthy relationship with society. Advertising is inherently unhealthy for our psychology. It can't help it. Like everything else, it wants to be as successful as it can, and its success depends on how effectively it can manipulate us while fooling us into believing we're not being manipulated at all. [1]: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ulterior-motives/201008/what-does-advertising-do https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ulterior-motives/201... [2]: https://prezi.com/2cekh73hothi/psychological-effects-of-advertising/ https://prezi.com/2cekh73hothi/psychological-effects-of-adve... [3]: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/140/Supplement_2/S152 http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/140/Supplement... [4]: https://medium.com/@tobiasrose/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511488de https://medium.com/@tobiasrose/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511... [5]: https://fathom.info/fakebook/ https://fathom.info/fakebook/ [6]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-ads/majority-of-divisive-facebook-ads-bought-by-suspicious-groups-study-idUSKBN1HN2KV https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-ads/majority-of-... [7]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18665048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18665048 [8]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-is-the-internets-original-sin/376041/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/adver...

acrispino 8y ago

If "no shit" is an appropriate response to advertiser behavior, I'd want "no shit" to also be an appropriate response to users installing ad blockers, instead of whining: https://www.adweek.com/digital/yahoo-exec-calls-out-mobile-ad-blocker-destroying-ecosystem-169820/ https://www.adweek.com/digital/yahoo-exec-calls-out-mobile-a...

asdkhadsj 8y ago
Agree 100%. Ad blockers are akin to piracy which has been a natural force on the consumer side. Legalities aside, if you make consumers UX miserable enough they often work through it - and I support that. My comment was mainly in the context of ads being discussed as some anti-consumer device. Where as I view them as a natural part of the payment ecosystem. Too many ads are akin to products being too expensive - and unsurprisingly shift consumers towards "piracy". It's a natural battle.

cortesoft 8y ago

I think advertising has value, but there is a really good article about why targeted advertising is bad: https://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/ https://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/ The tl;dr is basically that one of the key aspects of advertising is signaling (i.e. we stand behind our product so much that we can waste this much money advertising it to you)... with targeted advertising, it becomes so cheap display an ad to only a few people that you lose that signal, and you have no way of knowing if a product is total crap or not.

smsm42 8y ago

It's not shocking content providers want money. It is somewhat shocking that their way of making money is making user experience worse and essentially engaging in low-grade war with their users - not outright war, but sneaky cold war stuff, where you officially friends with them but unofficially spy on them, steal their secrets, subvert their actions to your benefit, make their life worse if it can make yours a bit better, and so on. It's not exactly how we commonly view customer-provider relationship.