Not the person you responded to, but I'll take a stab: > Don't those mega billboards annoy you? No. They don't impact my life whatsoever. > Don't the auto pl

Not the person you responded to, but I'll take a stab: > Don't those mega billboards annoy you? No. They don't impact my life whatsoever. > Don't the auto playing audio/video ads annoy you? The auto-playing ones like what you get on a news page, yes. The ones that play before a video on YouTube, no. > You get on the subway, there are ads (and you've paid for the ticket, it is not even you are traveling free). Don't even notice them most of the time. Sometimes they're mildly funny. Can't remember ever being bothered by one. > You switch on the TV, there are ads. I don't really watch TV (I guess that's a pretentious response), but when I do I just ignore the ads I'm not interested in. They don't annoy me. > You open a bank account, the bank sells your address and the very next week you get junk in the mail. Are you sure it's the bank doing this, and not the post office? In any case it's moving the goal posts a bit, because this is not advertising per se. It's data collection in service to advertising. I find it annoying, but not because I get junk mail. I don't find junk mail annoying, I throw it out without reading it. In fact I don't really read any physical mail. > How is it self-righteous to expect a quiet, clutter free life/atmosphere? Yeah but that's not the claim, is it? The person is saying it's self-righteous to constantly complain about advertising because it feels like a soapbox. In point of fact, I consider my life to be plenty quiet and clutter-free and I live in the same advertising-filled world you do. There are legitimate reasons to dislike advertising. Sometimes ads are a vector for spreading malware, and the peripheral incentive structures are arguably unethical (particularly concerning the use and collection of consumer data). But quite a lot of complaining about advertising doesn't treat the subject with that level of intellectual engagement or nuance. Instead it's just impassioned yelling into a void about how unfair advertising is, or how unaesthetic the world is because of it. I can see how that would become grating after a while, because on sites like HN and reddit you don't find nearly as many people e.g. crusading against climate change, disease, destitute poverty or hunger. It's actually a downvotable offense for someone to say, "Hey, I'm actually pretty okay with ads though!" This is why the person you're responding to reacted that way. It's hard to take seriously the idea that the world is "disgusting" because of billboards. That's kind of a hyperbolic way of saying the world isn't the way you want it to be, isn't it?