3 ms·

> Ads are not of interest to users. If you think that's true, then your idea of what constitutes an ad is very narrow, to the point it leaves out a large swath

> Ads are not of interest to users. If you think that's true, then your idea of what constitutes an ad is very narrow, to the point it leaves out a large swath of reality. An ad is an informational transaction between an entity offering a good or service and a consumer that may want that service. When done poorly, it's an exchange neither are happy with. When done well, it's an exchange that both are happy with. We're all familiar with poor ads. The perfect ad is likely the signage above a retail space that let's the person looking for it know it's at that location. Even then, for those not looking for that specific store, it could be seen as unwanted (and that's also why a lot of cities limit the size of signage for buildings). You might see this as a distinction without purpose, but I think viewing things completely (and often as a spectrum) helps put into focus the specific problems that we want to combat and let us focus our efforts on things that actually make poegress in those problems, rather than ineffectually attack a symptom. Advertising isn't the problem. Poorly matched advertising is annoying, in effective, and costly. Tracking and profiling of the individual has risencin use to combat this, but has many other negative consequences. If we prevent tracking and profiling, the market will shift to some other way to match advertising, and we'll have less privacy problems (but possibly worse targeted ads). But at least it isn't overly broad and done in a way that doesn't help the real problem, tracking. Do we really want to support something so draconian that even HN's minimal advertising articles, or someone's personal blog that endorses something would fall under those regulations? If not (if for not other reason it wouldn't help anything), we should be careful how we approach this, and target the real problem.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
I think noticing a spectrum is a good first step, but a good second step is noticing the distribution of that spectrum. There is very, very few ads on-line that are "done well". There's also very few ads "done poorly", because nobody in their right mind would want to keep running an ad they're not happy with. The Internet is utterly dominated by ads that are bad for the viewer, and beneficial to the advertiser. They're all pushed (vs. pulled) or resource heavy or manipulative or outright lying or optimized to give you bad deal or tracking you to various degree, and I mean "or" in mathematical sense - a lot of ads have all of these qualities. Saying that not all ads are bad is - in the real world, accounting for the shape of the ad spectrum - like saying not all fungus you scrape off a wall is unsafe to eat.
- kbenson 7y ago
  My point is really that once we start targeting "ads", and we note that online ads seem to be bad, as you say, then we end up with regulation or legislation about what you can advertise online and how you can do it. But that won't help us when the same techniques then shift towards the real world (and they already are), and then we've got ineffective rules for the new crisis, which is companies tracking you between all the real world locations you go to get a better idea of your interests and what to offer you. I note it's a spectrum not just to protect some ads. Almost the entirety of that spectrum may be taken up with horrible ads. The important part is identifying what attributes set something acceptable (or even useful) apart from something that is not? Those are the things we want to understand and target, and we'll never even consider them if our approach is "ads are bad". How we frame the question informs our solution. The last thing I want is to replay the spam legislation of the early 2000's (not because I think there was much of a spectrum of spam from good to bad, but because the legislation was laughably ineffective.
  - onyva 7y ago
    It's a risk we probably need to take. AdTech is monetizing hate and this is already effecting the real world in a very obvious way. We're talking about ads, not content. Removing the monetization incentive is one thing, the wastefulness another, but I'm not talking about legislation, rather giving users tools to deal with them. Google developed Chrome for obvious reasons. Microsoft has no interest in protecting users, and AdBuddy (Brave) is pure evil. Mozilla's raison d'etre is doing just that.
adangert 7y ago
You are wrong, ads only waste people's time. It's just the main way that online companies have found to turn attention and time into money, and it's never great for the consumer. Usually the free market (adblocked internet searches) gives better results for what consumers are looking for rather than the targeted paid for inferior quality products of ad companies. A better service would be one where consumers pay with money to ask a service for the best recommendation of a product by an independent company. However automatic ads slapped on to every webpage are never warranted, are worse quality than the products shown without them, and are at best annoying, at worst misleading. 99% of ads do not fit into your definition of a good ad, in so far as I would catagorize your idea of a good ad just as a brokerage service, and not an ad at all. Consumers never go looking for ads, it's always the other way around. Furthermore there are multiple other ways to make revenue online that don't involve ads, such as patreon. Imagine every site, but the only ads found are for the site's own support page. The quality of that site or creator rises, while still generating revenue. In the future, I believe that products and services that are not on some sort of crowdfunding service, will be outcompeted by those who are, no ads are necessary here.
- kbenson 7y ago
  > You are wrong, ads only waste people's time. This, along with your focusing entirely on online ads, leads me to believe you failed to understand my comment, or at least what the purpose of it was. > A better service would be one where consumers pay with money to ask a service for the best recommendation of a product by an independent company. That's a different way. It may or may not be better, depending on the service and and category, and how much money you have. One possible downside is that you need to know what you're looking for. A simple example of this is movie trailers. I used to see a lot of them, and I enjoyed knowing what movies were coming out later. A few years back I dropped cable, and only use a few online streaming services now. I remember once every 6-12 months to look at movie trailers on Hulu, otherwise I really only hear about stuff from word of mouth or from some interest site that is excited about it. Entire movies come and go that I never hear of now. Is that better? I don't particularly think so. I liked the exposure of movie trailers. Could some trailers be played too much and be annoying? Yes. Do I think the entire lack of them is a better? For me, no. > Furthermore there are multiple other ways to make revenue online that don't involve ads I'm not defending the current online ad industry. I'm trying to lay down a framework that leads to a solution that works better, by trying to re-frame the conversation on the actual problem elements instead of what happens so often, which is attacking symptoms and letting the actual problem surface somewhere else, just as bad if not worse. Attacking ads will not stock tracking, it will stop ads that track you. If you care about tracking and privacy, fight against tracking and for privacy, and the problematic ads will be forced to change as well, but at least they won't just shift to real world ads that track you, or other uses of tracking people for monetization that are even worse than advertising.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

I think noticing a spectrum is a good first step, but a good second step is noticing the distribution of that spectrum. There is very, very few ads on-line that are "done well". There's also very few ads "done poorly", because nobody in their right mind would want to keep running an ad they're not happy with. The Internet is utterly dominated by ads that are bad for the viewer, and beneficial to the advertiser. They're all pushed (vs. pulled) or resource heavy or manipulative or outright lying or optimized to give you bad deal or tracking you to various degree, and I mean "or" in mathematical sense - a lot of ads have all of these qualities. Saying that not all ads are bad is - in the real world, accounting for the shape of the ad spectrum - like saying not all fungus you scrape off a wall is unsafe to eat.

kbenson 7y ago
My point is really that once we start targeting "ads", and we note that online ads seem to be bad, as you say, then we end up with regulation or legislation about what you can advertise online and how you can do it. But that won't help us when the same techniques then shift towards the real world (and they already are), and then we've got ineffective rules for the new crisis, which is companies tracking you between all the real world locations you go to get a better idea of your interests and what to offer you. I note it's a spectrum not just to protect some ads. Almost the entirety of that spectrum may be taken up with horrible ads. The important part is identifying what attributes set something acceptable (or even useful) apart from something that is not? Those are the things we want to understand and target, and we'll never even consider them if our approach is "ads are bad". How we frame the question informs our solution. The last thing I want is to replay the spam legislation of the early 2000's (not because I think there was much of a spectrum of spam from good to bad, but because the legislation was laughably ineffective.
- onyva 7y ago
  It's a risk we probably need to take. AdTech is monetizing hate and this is already effecting the real world in a very obvious way. We're talking about ads, not content. Removing the monetization incentive is one thing, the wastefulness another, but I'm not talking about legislation, rather giving users tools to deal with them. Google developed Chrome for obvious reasons. Microsoft has no interest in protecting users, and AdBuddy (Brave) is pure evil. Mozilla's raison d'etre is doing just that.

adangert 7y ago

You are wrong, ads only waste people's time. It's just the main way that online companies have found to turn attention and time into money, and it's never great for the consumer. Usually the free market (adblocked internet searches) gives better results for what consumers are looking for rather than the targeted paid for inferior quality products of ad companies. A better service would be one where consumers pay with money to ask a service for the best recommendation of a product by an independent company. However automatic ads slapped on to every webpage are never warranted, are worse quality than the products shown without them, and are at best annoying, at worst misleading. 99% of ads do not fit into your definition of a good ad, in so far as I would catagorize your idea of a good ad just as a brokerage service, and not an ad at all. Consumers never go looking for ads, it's always the other way around. Furthermore there are multiple other ways to make revenue online that don't involve ads, such as patreon. Imagine every site, but the only ads found are for the site's own support page. The quality of that site or creator rises, while still generating revenue. In the future, I believe that products and services that are not on some sort of crowdfunding service, will be outcompeted by those who are, no ads are necessary here.

kbenson 7y ago
> You are wrong, ads only waste people's time. This, along with your focusing entirely on online ads, leads me to believe you failed to understand my comment, or at least what the purpose of it was. > A better service would be one where consumers pay with money to ask a service for the best recommendation of a product by an independent company. That's a different way. It may or may not be better, depending on the service and and category, and how much money you have. One possible downside is that you need to know what you're looking for. A simple example of this is movie trailers. I used to see a lot of them, and I enjoyed knowing what movies were coming out later. A few years back I dropped cable, and only use a few online streaming services now. I remember once every 6-12 months to look at movie trailers on Hulu, otherwise I really only hear about stuff from word of mouth or from some interest site that is excited about it. Entire movies come and go that I never hear of now. Is that better? I don't particularly think so. I liked the exposure of movie trailers. Could some trailers be played too much and be annoying? Yes. Do I think the entire lack of them is a better? For me, no. > Furthermore there are multiple other ways to make revenue online that don't involve ads I'm not defending the current online ad industry. I'm trying to lay down a framework that leads to a solution that works better, by trying to re-frame the conversation on the actual problem elements instead of what happens so often, which is attacking symptoms and letting the actual problem surface somewhere else, just as bad if not worse. Attacking ads will not stock tracking, it will stop ads that track you. If you care about tracking and privacy, fight against tracking and for privacy, and the problematic ads will be forced to change as well, but at least they won't just shift to real world ads that track you, or other uses of tracking people for monetization that are even worse than advertising.