4 ms·

I disagree. This is sort of like saying it’s fine to build a restaurant with two large rooms, one that has cigarette smoke piped into it, and one with fresh, cl

by mlthoughts2018 8y ago

I disagree. This is sort of like saying it’s fine to build a restaurant with two large rooms, one that has cigarette smoke piped into it, and one with fresh, clean air. You can sit in the smoke filled room for no additional charge, but you have to sign up for a subscription plan with that restaurant to be allowed in the clean air room. Now imagine that every restaurant does this. And your grocery store, doctor’s office, airplane seat and place of worship too. To escape it, you’d literally have to become an alienating, dysfunctional hermit disavowed of all kinds of modern standards of living, hypervigilant with every place you visit. So it is with ads. Nine times out of ten, there is not even any option you can pay for that is truly ad free. Even full paying subscribers are subjected to ads and have their data and consumption habits tracked to build better ad bidding techniques or demographic profiles. Ads are essentially always a toxic psychological substance, and especially so when their injection into your life is nearly impossible to fully comprehend and relies on personal data about you that is sprawling, with huge companies and teams of engineers designing ways to defeat any expected privacy you might have believed you’re entitled to. Tracking pixels, cookies, browser fingerprinting, data bartering, location tracking SDKs, etc. There’s an aspect of this where we simply need to legislate away hyper-targeted and constant, pervasive advertising, just like we would have a public health outcry if a restaurant tried to create a room artificially filled with cigarette smoke. Ads are truly not different. They are a psychological carcinogen and people should have a natural right to avoid being subjected to them while conducting everyday modern life activities. We should disallow the possibility that the only way to avoid an ad is to avoid the content / pay a rent-seeking additional fee for ad-free access, etc. It’s not acceptable to inject a harmful substance into a product and then argue customers are free to not consume it or pay extra for the harmful substance to be removed. Ads should not be viewed as a logically possible monetization instrument for reasons of sheer public health. If this means many types of businesses fold because they were only sustainable if they monetized the injection of harmful substances into their customers’ lives, then let them fold. It means they do not provide compelling enough products or services to be justified by the marketplace, and are propped up by a philistine ethical abyss in our modern economy that tries to convince people it’s above board to make money from injecting harmful substances into customers’ lives or charging a premium to avoid the harmful substance. We wouldn’t allow businesses to monetize based on injecting cigarette smoke into customers’ lives (not even if the mostly uninformed customers claimed to be OK with it). It’s frankly no different with ads.

dymk 8y ago
Nobody is going to read that wall of text, but the first and last paragraphs give me the gist if what you're trying to say. Do you have any better models for providing expensive-to-run services to everybody, and not just the select few who are willing/able to pony up the cash directly? Every single wall-of-text criticism of ad based monetization on HN contributes nothing new, is full of thinly-stretched analogies (like your "cigarette smoke"), and rarely suggests an alternative, and even more rare a workable one.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  > “Nobody is going to read that wall of text” If you’re not going to read things you dismiss, please don’t reply. It just adds unhelpful noise. > “Do you have any better models for providing expensive-to-run services to everybody, and not just the select few who are willing/able to pony up the cash directly?” The whole point is that if these services cannot be self-sustaining without monetization of ad injection, then the service is thereby demonstrably harmful to the people it delivers the service to. Whatever value proposition the service is claiming, whether it’s news delivery, a communication feed with friends, whatever, if it cannot be self-sustaining without ads then it is a non-business thing; it is not a business at that point, because predicating the financial viability of a thing on the activity of injecting a harmful substance into customers’ lives instantly renders it a non-business... a thing that the market has demonstrated to be unwanted and worthy of losing money unto the point of shutting down as a side-effect of it not being viable outside the scope of hurting people. We can definitely debate about degrees of the problem, as long as such debates are based on measuring and quantifying the harmful effects of ads and associated privacy intrusion, and are not disingenuously framed in terms of a customers purported self willingness to endure ads for the service. It’s not a thing a person can in principle be informed enough about to give that consent; it’s a vehicle of psychological harm where the perpetrators have a huge asymmetric information advantage and a huge lobbying advantage. In all earnesty and seriousness, it is exactly like the kind of harm perpetrated by cigarette companies, with asymmetric knowledge of bodily harm and limitless marketing budgets and a supply of die-hard customers ready to say how willing they are to make that harm trade off to consume the product.

dymk 8y ago

Nobody is going to read that wall of text, but the first and last paragraphs give me the gist if what you're trying to say. Do you have any better models for providing expensive-to-run services to everybody, and not just the select few who are willing/able to pony up the cash directly? Every single wall-of-text criticism of ad based monetization on HN contributes nothing new, is full of thinly-stretched analogies (like your "cigarette smoke"), and rarely suggests an alternative, and even more rare a workable one.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
> “Nobody is going to read that wall of text” If you’re not going to read things you dismiss, please don’t reply. It just adds unhelpful noise. > “Do you have any better models for providing expensive-to-run services to everybody, and not just the select few who are willing/able to pony up the cash directly?” The whole point is that if these services cannot be self-sustaining without monetization of ad injection, then the service is thereby demonstrably harmful to the people it delivers the service to. Whatever value proposition the service is claiming, whether it’s news delivery, a communication feed with friends, whatever, if it cannot be self-sustaining without ads then it is a non-business thing; it is not a business at that point, because predicating the financial viability of a thing on the activity of injecting a harmful substance into customers’ lives instantly renders it a non-business... a thing that the market has demonstrated to be unwanted and worthy of losing money unto the point of shutting down as a side-effect of it not being viable outside the scope of hurting people. We can definitely debate about degrees of the problem, as long as such debates are based on measuring and quantifying the harmful effects of ads and associated privacy intrusion, and are not disingenuously framed in terms of a customers purported self willingness to endure ads for the service. It’s not a thing a person can in principle be informed enough about to give that consent; it’s a vehicle of psychological harm where the perpetrators have a huge asymmetric information advantage and a huge lobbying advantage. In all earnesty and seriousness, it is exactly like the kind of harm perpetrated by cigarette companies, with asymmetric knowledge of bodily harm and limitless marketing budgets and a supply of die-hard customers ready to say how willing they are to make that harm trade off to consume the product.