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Can we just step back and recognise that the elephant in the room here is advertising? No matter your views on Google, Apple or Facebook, the issue here is nef

Can we just step back and recognise that the elephant in the room here is advertising? No matter your views on Google, Apple or Facebook, the issue here is nefarious practices predicated on the implied right for these companies to make money from you by polluting your internet experience with injected, paid for, content. I'll play devil's advocate for a second and say that "not all advertising is bad", but the fact that this even reached court should tell you what the companies involved care about. We really need to regulate online advertising. My personal opinion is that we should eradicate it and let the cards fall where they will, but that's unpopular and unrealistic for many valid reasons.

elvischidera 5y ago
Why don't these companies just offer a paid version of their products? Giving people an opportunity to back out. E.g: Pay X per month to use Google and you get no ads or tracked. YouTube does something similar, but I guess they still track you. I personally would still mostly use the free ad-supported version.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Many times they do. And then they put ads on it as well because why not make even more money? Also, paying customers are worth more to advertisers.
  - elvischidera 5y ago
    Haha true. And the amount of money made per user with ads/adtech is unbounded, so why bound it to X per month. This greed? would probably lead them to ruins.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      Exactly. It's pure greed, they will never stop. The only solutions are to make advertising illegal or technologically infeasible.
  - comeonseriously 5y ago
    We see this happening with TVs, etc. Soon cars will have it.
- jasonvorhe 5y ago
  I'm paying for YouTube Premium and I wouldn't touch their free product anymore, if they sunsetted Premium. However, almost 35% of most videos I'm usually watching also contain sponsored ads and annoying self advertising for their channel (subscribe to the channel, click the bell icon, shady VPNs, online learning portals, etc) How would regulation work here? I'm relying on Sponsorblock for now, but that doesn't work on Chromecast.
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    Right. And I don't think YouTube knows how to deal with that issue right now. They expected creators to be happy with just the money they earned from the ad revenue they passed through, but the creators found they could make more through sponsored content which is difficult problem for YouTube to tackle.
- timmg 5y ago
  > Why don't these companies just offer a paid version of their products? Youtube is a great example of that. I see post after post of people here bragging about using ad blockers on Youtube -- rather than pay. Nevermind that the creators on Youtube get screwed by this behavior. Most people on HN can afford to pay the monthly fee (easily!) But somehow they think ad blocking is more "moral". It's ads or subscription fees or all these services go away. Pick one.
  - Liquix 5y ago
    If you pay for it, YouTube will not stop collecting your interests, clicks, how long you spend hovering over each video, which comments you spend time reading, etc. They will continue to feed this data into their AI, making it smarter and building a more complete profile of you, which can then be used to manipulate your political views and change the world at large. They'll just stop showing you ads, which we can accomplish for free via an adblocker. Many people are willing to pay a premium for actual privacy (see: Apple)
    - kingcharles 5y ago
      I pay for YouTube to get rid of the ads, although the ads I saw were actually really well targetted and I enjoyed most of them the first time around (!). The thing is the data that YouTube collects actually works for and against me - it is used for evil purposes, but it also works to make my experience on YouTube more enjoyable by recommending videos that I would like.
    - timmg 5y ago
      Ad blockers don't change that. They track you for recommendations and view counts and things like that either way. I suppose you could watch Youtube in a new incognito window for every session. But I doubt that is what most ad-blockers-users are doing.
      - Nextgrid 5y ago
        The problem is that subscribing to YT Premium requires a Google account (with valid personal data - fake details won't work for payment processing), where as "freeloading" with an ad-blocker allows you to stay more anonymous without even signing in (and clearing cookies every time).
- exikyut 5y ago
  Because solving that problem is like solving for global warming: at the end of the day (and conversation), the world uses a few gazillion tons of oil and other "bad" resources for Stuff™... which is depended on by a multi-level deep, exponentially large pile of even more Stuff™, and - humanity is really, really, terribly bad at the kind of large-scale practical cohesion needed to actually go "okay we fix" and actually follow through, for as many dimensions as have developed over the past 100 years - the only collective impetus that would scale to this sort of challenge would basically amount to a cult-following phenomena (see also: world history full of inexplicable mass deaths and rituals and whatnot that make no sense, and also generally suboptimal religious practices, as a result of cults). IMO, humanity's ability to keep up with itself and chip/computer complexity kind of dovetail a bit: things were pretty hazy (ahem, okay, academic) in the 40s-50s, academic/industrial in the 60s-70s, reached a peak of industrial design/practicality around the 80s-90s, and basically "exploded in complexity" from the 90s on. Except things didn't really explode in complexity, they just exceeded our ability to "think small" and execute at the same time. Looking at the Web, I remember reading an article recently that talked about how the Web standards (HTML5 (incl. video/image format support, network I/O, etc), JS (incl. "web stdlib"), CSS (incl. animation), SVG (incl. kitchen sink), etc etc (incl. etc)) are basically tens of thousands of pages long in total, and exceed the complexity of every other protocol, technical standard, file format, architecture specification, etc - in the world, possibly combined. The article made a point of comparison with the 3G cellular protocol being much simpler than the current Web. And this is being paid for by... advertising. Chrome is basically a technology that has the "implementation commitment", if you will (it's massive, it has the R&D pedal to the floor, it's constantly refactoring, it continuously pays out massive bug bounties, etc) of something too big to fail... ...all the while it's funded by, IMHO, what amounts to a really big tech bubble. It's like, how will it crash? Something has never gotten this big before... and something has never gotten this big without anyone realizing, in particular. Chrome is just like, yeah, duh, it replaced the telephone ("my telephone exists to run Chrome"). It's a standard utility. Of course it isn't going anywhere. Will it somehow become like a broken telephone pole held up by the wires it's supposed to be supporting (https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3umd5d/buddy_of_mine_calls_me_to_tell_me_he_just_rolled/ https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3umd5d/buddy_of_mine_..., https://igorpodgorny.livejournal.com/177105.html https://igorpodgorny.livejournal.com/177105.html)? Will we all end up going back to proprietary clients a la AOL and CompuServe? Will the massive 100-to-0 in infosec investment suddenly mean hacks go through the roof 100x? It probably won't be the end of the world, since the Web is basically just a re-API-ification of desktop OSes, and apps on mobile OSes have enough traction to be a viable escape. But for now, the entire Web is funded by, basically, hot air. I do wonder if that's part of the reason behind so many JavaScript frameworks - that awareness of existential impermanence, and much subtler sense of unsustainability. IMHO, buying/using reusable shopping bags, or only using bamboo or metal straws, or buying a zero-emissions car, have much the same amount of impact as deliberately watching ads. There is absolutely no action you can take, including paying for services, that will match the trillion-dollar advertising industry. Nothing at all, not even if you were to become a billionaire. That is the problem of advertising. --- Consider the above a sort of "what if" / "is this right? how close is this?" / thought experiment, presented as though it were fact. (I tend to pose ideas to myself in this style, which I think is probably fairly common, but given the "people writing as though they're right on the internet" thing it seems useful to add something like this.)
trapped 5y ago
How are you going to support innovation and free product for those who can't afford across the world without online advertising?
longhairedhippy 5y ago
I agree with your sentiment but some of the quotes in the article from internal Google memos look pretty damning. One of interest says their "Jedi" advertising program, which was meant to subvert legitimate ad competition from other exchanges, 'generates suboptimal yields for publishers and serious risks of negative media coverage if exposed externally.' I also would like to see some changes but this seems like a case of Google actively trying to be evil. They architected their systems to choose their exchange, even if another exchange had a higher bid, and then lied to ad publishers about the practice, along with fully acknowledging it in writing! How much more self-aware could you be? How could people, in good conscience, work for a place like that?
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  It wasn't just evil, it was a calculated power move. They understood the fact it was wrong, calculated the risks involved and even the damage it would cause if they got caught. The only effective punishment for those is to calculate how much they gained from it, calculate all profits that resulted from those gains, subtract all that from them, and then apply some huge fines as well in order to leave them in an even worse position than they started. Basically reset the company to the position it was in before this move, and then make that position worse. Like rewinding a chess game but they also lose a rook or something as punishment for their audacity.
  - wsc981 5y ago
    The people that facilitated this behavior and got wealthy from it, the C-suite people, should be out in prison for this as well, as well as be forced to pay a huge fine. This should serve as an example for other companies not to behave in the same way.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      Indeed. Anything less than this is a slap on the wirst that will change nothing.
    - samhw 5y ago
causi 5y ago
Advertising is essentially just lazy attempted fraud, one person trying to convince another to give them money in exchange for something they may or may not need or want. I understand it in a more absolutist free speech country like the US. I don't at all understand why a society would ban, say, hate speech while still allowing uninformed, non-specific advertising. Seems hypocritical.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  People have free speech. If someone wants to recommend some product to a friend, they are absolutely free to do so. That's how things should work. Companies are not people. Their speech should be fully regulated.
  - causi 5y ago
    At least not without the attendant responsibilities. If we're going to treat companies like people, go all the way. When they commit crimes, send them to prison, i.e., make them fully stop any economic activity for years at a time.
- 14 5y ago
  I am not so sure about the fraud claim. I once saw an add on FB and bought the product. I am still happy to this day and do not feel the victim to fraud. But I do agree it is odd society has allowed it to go on as it has for so long. Especially in the US with their constitutional rights and freedoms. People so worried the government will sneak the smallest peek but totally don’t bat and eye when some private company mines every detail of your life. Weird.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- HatchedLake721 5y ago
  I think you misunderstand advertising if you think it’s fraud.
  - 5y ago
matheusmoreira 5y ago
Absolutely. Advertising is the root of all the evils we face today in this technological society. I too believe it should be eradicated. If not by force of law, then by literally driving their return on investment to zero by blocking all their ads to all their users by default on every browser, every application, every operating system, every router, every ISP.
- swayvil 5y ago
  Media intended to manipulate. Neither truth nor falsehood, agnostic to both. Weaponized bullshit. Sprayed willy-nilly over the population, driving us insane. Propagating down the generations, driving our grandchildren insane. Contagious memetic cancer. Perfectly legal?
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Months ago I saw someone here compare advertising to mind hacking. It's a really interesting analogy. These people want to hack our minds in order to inject their little brands. Like the bots hammering away at ports of servers, they keep hammering away at our senses until something sticks. Like an hour ago I was writing a post and reached the conlusion advertising is mind rape. I've also often thought advertising are like military psychological operations except run by civilians. I should probably start keeping track of these analogies...
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - samhw 5y ago
      It really is. They use stuff like political wedge issues to hook people in, not unlike like the payload delivery mechanism that installs the daemon which enrolls your computer in the botnet. And then they use their botnet against the actually useful targets, which aren't the wedge issues like trans people in toilets, but rather the tax breaks, going to war, electing biddable politicians, etc. Fox's viewership is one of the most potent and malign botnets in the world. It's quite a relevant metaphor, really.
tjpnz 5y ago
While the business model undoubtedly has a part to play I think the bigger issue is the lack of consequences for devising such schemes. The article's right to point out the similarities to insider trading. The only obvious difference is you don't leave the building in handcuffs.
yosito 5y ago
> polluting your internet experience with injected, paid for, content You're really understating the problem here. It's not injected content, or paid for content that's really a problem. It's that state of the art social engineering has been used to create platforms in which the ability to manipulate people and their attention, beliefs and behaviors is sold at scale.
twobitshifter 5y ago
The banner bidding in the article was intended to level the playing field for advertisers and give sites the best price for ad space. There were always going to be ads, however, Google and Facebook sought to undermine that progress which may have allowed publishers to continue to produce advertising funded media. Now we see publishers are forced behind paywalls because online advertising was unable to keep the lights on. Meanwhile Google and Facebook were able to get richer.
Tenoke 5y ago
I can imagine great benefits to eradicating advertising but I fear most of the internet can't exist without the ad revenue which might lead to an overall worse state of affairs for most people.
- fouc 5y ago
  It existed just fine in the 90s without nearly as much advertising. And honestly people need to get used to paying for services, instead of being the product.
  - bsaul 5y ago
    As much as i hate ad business, you've got to admit the 90s internet barely has anything to do with today's. It was fun and wild, but very amateurish. You can't sustain the scale of investments made on today's internet without a robust income stream.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    > And honestly people need to get used to paying for services, instead of being the product. Why? I see no reason for that, it would just lock out most people in the world from these products.
  - Tenoke 5y ago
    It existed in the 90s but many of the resources we enjoy today didn't and couldn't exist then.
- Intermernet 5y ago
  I run multiple online properties without advertising. I would (and in some cases do) support the sites I use regularly by paying them directly. I pay for YouTube to not advertise at me, and I'm a Patreon. I happily pay AWS and GCE costs. I pay for streaming services and other random hosted services. I'd love to have an advertising free option for search engines (Yes, I use DDG), Reddit, Twitter etc. I'd also like it if any news services I subscribed to removed advertising on any articles I accessed, but this still seems like it hasn't settled into their mindset, so I'm still hesitant on this particular front. I'd also happily subsidise other people's access to these sites. I'm a regular donator to Wikipedia, and I've funded archive.org . I want people to have these resources. I Just don't want them to be advertised at when they access these resources.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
_Understated_ 5y ago
I went on the hunt just before posting this to find out more about how many people click on ads and how beneficial they are (for any party, not just the advertiser) and I can honestly say I think it's all lies: the whole industry are lying to one another and, by extension, to the customers. Now, this is pure anecdotal but every result I found on DDG was from a company that either advertises, consults about SEO/ads, is Google, or otherwise part of the ad scumbaggery somewhere in the chain. The thing that got me was they all said ads are brilliant (I know, odd, isn't it?). They all had click through figures ranging from a few percent to 35%. Are you kidding me? A third of people click on ads? I couldn't find anything that said ads are shit or dangerous or even anything vaguely negative. Now, I don't see ads. Ever. I have UBlock Origin and privacy badger and other settings to prevent them from showing on my screen but the odd time I setup a PC and have to open a gaping browser, it's such an assault on the senses. I've asked on here before but is there somewhere out there in the internet that I can see unbiased research on ads. Something! Anything at all?
- dylan604 5y ago
  >I've asked on here before but is there somewhere out there in the internet that I can see unbiased research on ads. Something! Anything at all? Is this possible? If you are stating from the go that you do not trust the numbers so you are doing your own study, isn't that a bias already?
  - _Understated_ 5y ago
    Not really. I mean a study that's not from a company that sells ads or is in the chain somewhere! Any studies (I use the term very broadly) that I've seen are all net positive! I want something from, say, The German Institute of Being Really Honest, who are government-funded perhaps... a few studies from entities who don't have a dog in the fight is all I'm after. If their conclusion is that people are happier with ads then so be it... I'm happy without them, that's for sure.
- paulcole 5y ago
  It’s not like you’re unbiased either. Why can’t you believe some ads have a clickthrough of 35%? You never see ads so you don’t know how good they can be, right? Also, you see ads all the time on HN. This whole site is a marketing/advertising campaign for a VC company. Personally. I love to buy stuff and I love to click on ads for things I might want to buy.
Ericson2314 5y ago
The easiest to way end advertising is to spend more and stop running a frail economy. When aggregate demand is weak, people spend lots of money to try to redirect that demand towards them, when demand is strong people are too busy fulfilling orders to waste money on demand. Crank up the fiscal policy and reduce working hours, and banning ads will be a lot more politically feasible than it is today.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  *waste money on dredging up more orders to fill — i.e. more demand — via ads.
cblconfederate 5y ago
Not all advertising is bad or rather, Advertising is not bad, period. The way google and facebook do it is bad, and of dubious effectiveness. Most of the small specialized niche communities need to stop relying on adsense etc. They should add self-serve advertising instead, and provide adequate exposure to those who pay for it. Advertising is communication; what is terrible is when it becomes spam, and google's moneymaker relies on spamming a lot because its premise is that spamming sells. There are better ways than that.
- Intermernet 5y ago
  Advertising can be good if it becomes entirely honest and selfless. This never happens. The actual social analogue of this is known as "personal recommendation". As soon as you're paid to inform me about a product, and you subjectively promote that product's virtues over their competitor's virtues, you've become at best untrustworthy, and at worst manipulative. You may be correct in your statements, but, because you gain financially from those statements, you can't be 100% trusted. This is just the way of the world. I'm sorry you may feel otherwise.
paulcole 5y ago
If you eradicate online advertising, wave goodbye to HN. Turns out we only want to ban the ads we don’t like.
- Intermernet 5y ago
  If HN can't survive without advertising, I can survive without HN. EDIT: HN is run by a venture capital company. The hosting of HN almost certainly costs a tiny fraction of the profits of said company. Their advertising is minimal, and I'm sure the return on said advertising is minimal compared to the benefit of just running the site. @dang can correct me if this is wrong. Either way, HN is not, as far as I can see, an advertising funded site. It has financial benefit to YC in other ways.
  - paulcole 5y ago
    HN is literally advertising for a VC firm. That’s why it exists and what it is. If you ban ads from the internet, you’re banning HN. You can be fooled into believing HN is not advertising because you like it, but that doesn’t change what this site truly is.
    - dang 5y ago
      No one at YC thinks of HN that way. I certainly don't. If we did, we'd run HN very differently. You're also wrong about why HN exists. pg created it for a bunch of reasons. Some had nothing at all to do with YC (e.g. wanting interesting things to read, once Reddit stopped being that for him; and wanting to make a web app in Arc) and others did. All of those reasons are still alive today, so your interpretation is much too reductionist. It's true there are job ads for YC startups, and Launch HN threads for YC startups get placed on the front page (this is all in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). I'd like to hear what you think we should do instead. Surely you don't think HN should give nothing back to YC in exchange for funding it?
      - paulcole 5y ago
JKCalhoun 5y ago
> I'll play devil's advocate for a second and say that "not all advertising is bad" I've tried advocating for Satan in that way as well ... but could honestly find no compelling points with which to argue the case. It always boiled down to enabling one party to get money from another party irrespective of the one's party need for or ability to afford said product.
clairity 5y ago
this advertising-as-root-problem perspective seems to have some traction here, but you’re not going up far enough in the causal chain of abstraction if you stop at advertising. that’s a tried-and-true recipe for unintended consequences and ineffective solutions. ultimately, it’s money that’s at the root of the problem, but that’s too uncomfortable of a truth for most people to accept, so we try to pull up short with attempts like this. and money in turn is overloaded to encapsulate power, influence, esteem, and wealth. if we really want to inject fairness and competition into the ad business, we must accept that the quest for money, and all that it represents, is the driving force behind these kinds of behaviors, and that the only effective means of curtailing them is to ultimately rein in the drive for money (not simplistically to limit advertising). both money and ads are useful tools in context, which also means in moderation. money is an overly simplistic metric poorly correlated to what we all want, which is human worth: to be loved, respected, esteemed, and included. having been gamed for so long, it now represents, and correlates with, our vices more than worth. we need to get beyond money as this simplistic on-size-fits-all metric for human worth.
BurningFrog 5y ago
> We really need to regulate online advertising To me it's a mistake to think "we" here. You or me will never make any online advertising regulations. Making regulations is a political process, and the outcome will be determined by those with political power. So the question is if you want them to regulate online advertising?

elvischidera 5y ago

Why don't these companies just offer a paid version of their products? Giving people an opportunity to back out. E.g: Pay X per month to use Google and you get no ads or tracked. YouTube does something similar, but I guess they still track you. I personally would still mostly use the free ad-supported version.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
Many times they do. And then they put ads on it as well because why not make even more money? Also, paying customers are worth more to advertisers.
- elvischidera 5y ago
  Haha true. And the amount of money made per user with ads/adtech is unbounded, so why bound it to X per month. This greed? would probably lead them to ruins.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Exactly. It's pure greed, they will never stop. The only solutions are to make advertising illegal or technologically infeasible.
- comeonseriously 5y ago
  We see this happening with TVs, etc. Soon cars will have it.
jasonvorhe 5y ago
I'm paying for YouTube Premium and I wouldn't touch their free product anymore, if they sunsetted Premium. However, almost 35% of most videos I'm usually watching also contain sponsored ads and annoying self advertising for their channel (subscribe to the channel, click the bell icon, shady VPNs, online learning portals, etc) How would regulation work here? I'm relying on Sponsorblock for now, but that doesn't work on Chromecast.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Right. And I don't think YouTube knows how to deal with that issue right now. They expected creators to be happy with just the money they earned from the ad revenue they passed through, but the creators found they could make more through sponsored content which is difficult problem for YouTube to tackle.
timmg 5y ago
> Why don't these companies just offer a paid version of their products? Youtube is a great example of that. I see post after post of people here bragging about using ad blockers on Youtube -- rather than pay. Nevermind that the creators on Youtube get screwed by this behavior. Most people on HN can afford to pay the monthly fee (easily!) But somehow they think ad blocking is more "moral". It's ads or subscription fees or all these services go away. Pick one.
- Liquix 5y ago
  If you pay for it, YouTube will not stop collecting your interests, clicks, how long you spend hovering over each video, which comments you spend time reading, etc. They will continue to feed this data into their AI, making it smarter and building a more complete profile of you, which can then be used to manipulate your political views and change the world at large. They'll just stop showing you ads, which we can accomplish for free via an adblocker. Many people are willing to pay a premium for actual privacy (see: Apple)
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    I pay for YouTube to get rid of the ads, although the ads I saw were actually really well targetted and I enjoyed most of them the first time around (!). The thing is the data that YouTube collects actually works for and against me - it is used for evil purposes, but it also works to make my experience on YouTube more enjoyable by recommending videos that I would like.
  - timmg 5y ago
    Ad blockers don't change that. They track you for recommendations and view counts and things like that either way. I suppose you could watch Youtube in a new incognito window for every session. But I doubt that is what most ad-blockers-users are doing.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      The problem is that subscribing to YT Premium requires a Google account (with valid personal data - fake details won't work for payment processing), where as "freeloading" with an ad-blocker allows you to stay more anonymous without even signing in (and clearing cookies every time).
exikyut 5y ago
Because solving that problem is like solving for global warming: at the end of the day (and conversation), the world uses a few gazillion tons of oil and other "bad" resources for Stuff™... which is depended on by a multi-level deep, exponentially large pile of even more Stuff™, and - humanity is really, really, terribly bad at the kind of large-scale practical cohesion needed to actually go "okay we fix" and actually follow through, for as many dimensions as have developed over the past 100 years - the only collective impetus that would scale to this sort of challenge would basically amount to a cult-following phenomena (see also: world history full of inexplicable mass deaths and rituals and whatnot that make no sense, and also generally suboptimal religious practices, as a result of cults). IMO, humanity's ability to keep up with itself and chip/computer complexity kind of dovetail a bit: things were pretty hazy (ahem, okay, academic) in the 40s-50s, academic/industrial in the 60s-70s, reached a peak of industrial design/practicality around the 80s-90s, and basically "exploded in complexity" from the 90s on. Except things didn't really explode in complexity, they just exceeded our ability to "think small" and execute at the same time. Looking at the Web, I remember reading an article recently that talked about how the Web standards (HTML5 (incl. video/image format support, network I/O, etc), JS (incl. "web stdlib"), CSS (incl. animation), SVG (incl. kitchen sink), etc etc (incl. etc)) are basically tens of thousands of pages long in total, and exceed the complexity of every other protocol, technical standard, file format, architecture specification, etc - in the world, possibly combined. The article made a point of comparison with the 3G cellular protocol being much simpler than the current Web. And this is being paid for by... advertising. Chrome is basically a technology that has the "implementation commitment", if you will (it's massive, it has the R&D pedal to the floor, it's constantly refactoring, it continuously pays out massive bug bounties, etc) of something too big to fail... ...all the while it's funded by, IMHO, what amounts to a really big tech bubble. It's like, how will it crash? Something has never gotten this big before... and something has never gotten this big without anyone realizing, in particular. Chrome is just like, yeah, duh, it replaced the telephone ("my telephone exists to run Chrome"). It's a standard utility. Of course it isn't going anywhere. Will it somehow become like a broken telephone pole held up by the wires it's supposed to be supporting (https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3umd5d/buddy_of_mine_calls_me_to_tell_me_he_just_rolled/ https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3umd5d/buddy_of_mine_..., https://igorpodgorny.livejournal.com/177105.html https://igorpodgorny.livejournal.com/177105.html)? Will we all end up going back to proprietary clients a la AOL and CompuServe? Will the massive 100-to-0 in infosec investment suddenly mean hacks go through the roof 100x? It probably won't be the end of the world, since the Web is basically just a re-API-ification of desktop OSes, and apps on mobile OSes have enough traction to be a viable escape. But for now, the entire Web is funded by, basically, hot air. I do wonder if that's part of the reason behind so many JavaScript frameworks - that awareness of existential impermanence, and much subtler sense of unsustainability. IMHO, buying/using reusable shopping bags, or only using bamboo or metal straws, or buying a zero-emissions car, have much the same amount of impact as deliberately watching ads. There is absolutely no action you can take, including paying for services, that will match the trillion-dollar advertising industry. Nothing at all, not even if you were to become a billionaire. That is the problem of advertising. --- Consider the above a sort of "what if" / "is this right? how close is this?" / thought experiment, presented as though it were fact. (I tend to pose ideas to myself in this style, which I think is probably fairly common, but given the "people writing as though they're right on the internet" thing it seems useful to add something like this.)

trapped 5y ago

How are you going to support innovation and free product for those who can't afford across the world without online advertising?

longhairedhippy 5y ago

I agree with your sentiment but some of the quotes in the article from internal Google memos look pretty damning. One of interest says their "Jedi" advertising program, which was meant to subvert legitimate ad competition from other exchanges, 'generates suboptimal yields for publishers and serious risks of negative media coverage if exposed externally.' I also would like to see some changes but this seems like a case of Google actively trying to be evil. They architected their systems to choose their exchange, even if another exchange had a higher bid, and then lied to ad publishers about the practice, along with fully acknowledging it in writing! How much more self-aware could you be? How could people, in good conscience, work for a place like that?

matheusmoreira 5y ago
It wasn't just evil, it was a calculated power move. They understood the fact it was wrong, calculated the risks involved and even the damage it would cause if they got caught. The only effective punishment for those is to calculate how much they gained from it, calculate all profits that resulted from those gains, subtract all that from them, and then apply some huge fines as well in order to leave them in an even worse position than they started. Basically reset the company to the position it was in before this move, and then make that position worse. Like rewinding a chess game but they also lose a rook or something as punishment for their audacity.
- wsc981 5y ago
  The people that facilitated this behavior and got wealthy from it, the C-suite people, should be out in prison for this as well, as well as be forced to pay a huge fine. This should serve as an example for other companies not to behave in the same way.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Indeed. Anything less than this is a slap on the wirst that will change nothing.
  - samhw 5y ago

causi 5y ago

Advertising is essentially just lazy attempted fraud, one person trying to convince another to give them money in exchange for something they may or may not need or want. I understand it in a more absolutist free speech country like the US. I don't at all understand why a society would ban, say, hate speech while still allowing uninformed, non-specific advertising. Seems hypocritical.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
People have free speech. If someone wants to recommend some product to a friend, they are absolutely free to do so. That's how things should work. Companies are not people. Their speech should be fully regulated.
- causi 5y ago
  At least not without the attendant responsibilities. If we're going to treat companies like people, go all the way. When they commit crimes, send them to prison, i.e., make them fully stop any economic activity for years at a time.
14 5y ago
I am not so sure about the fraud claim. I once saw an add on FB and bought the product. I am still happy to this day and do not feel the victim to fraud. But I do agree it is odd society has allowed it to go on as it has for so long. Especially in the US with their constitutional rights and freedoms. People so worried the government will sneak the smallest peek but totally don’t bat and eye when some private company mines every detail of your life. Weird.
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HatchedLake721 5y ago
I think you misunderstand advertising if you think it’s fraud.
- 5y ago

matheusmoreira 5y ago

Absolutely. Advertising is the root of all the evils we face today in this technological society. I too believe it should be eradicated. If not by force of law, then by literally driving their return on investment to zero by blocking all their ads to all their users by default on every browser, every application, every operating system, every router, every ISP.

swayvil 5y ago
Media intended to manipulate. Neither truth nor falsehood, agnostic to both. Weaponized bullshit. Sprayed willy-nilly over the population, driving us insane. Propagating down the generations, driving our grandchildren insane. Contagious memetic cancer. Perfectly legal?
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Months ago I saw someone here compare advertising to mind hacking. It's a really interesting analogy. These people want to hack our minds in order to inject their little brands. Like the bots hammering away at ports of servers, they keep hammering away at our senses until something sticks. Like an hour ago I was writing a post and reached the conlusion advertising is mind rape. I've also often thought advertising are like military psychological operations except run by civilians. I should probably start keeping track of these analogies...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - samhw 5y ago
    It really is. They use stuff like political wedge issues to hook people in, not unlike like the payload delivery mechanism that installs the daemon which enrolls your computer in the botnet. And then they use their botnet against the actually useful targets, which aren't the wedge issues like trans people in toilets, but rather the tax breaks, going to war, electing biddable politicians, etc. Fox's viewership is one of the most potent and malign botnets in the world. It's quite a relevant metaphor, really.

tjpnz 5y ago

While the business model undoubtedly has a part to play I think the bigger issue is the lack of consequences for devising such schemes. The article's right to point out the similarities to insider trading. The only obvious difference is you don't leave the building in handcuffs.

yosito 5y ago

> polluting your internet experience with injected, paid for, content You're really understating the problem here. It's not injected content, or paid for content that's really a problem. It's that state of the art social engineering has been used to create platforms in which the ability to manipulate people and their attention, beliefs and behaviors is sold at scale.

twobitshifter 5y ago

The banner bidding in the article was intended to level the playing field for advertisers and give sites the best price for ad space. There were always going to be ads, however, Google and Facebook sought to undermine that progress which may have allowed publishers to continue to produce advertising funded media. Now we see publishers are forced behind paywalls because online advertising was unable to keep the lights on. Meanwhile Google and Facebook were able to get richer.

Tenoke 5y ago

I can imagine great benefits to eradicating advertising but I fear most of the internet can't exist without the ad revenue which might lead to an overall worse state of affairs for most people.

fouc 5y ago
It existed just fine in the 90s without nearly as much advertising. And honestly people need to get used to paying for services, instead of being the product.
- bsaul 5y ago
  As much as i hate ad business, you've got to admit the 90s internet barely has anything to do with today's. It was fun and wild, but very amateurish. You can't sustain the scale of investments made on today's internet without a robust income stream.
- Jensson 5y ago
  > And honestly people need to get used to paying for services, instead of being the product. Why? I see no reason for that, it would just lock out most people in the world from these products.
- Tenoke 5y ago
  It existed in the 90s but many of the resources we enjoy today didn't and couldn't exist then.
Intermernet 5y ago
I run multiple online properties without advertising. I would (and in some cases do) support the sites I use regularly by paying them directly. I pay for YouTube to not advertise at me, and I'm a Patreon. I happily pay AWS and GCE costs. I pay for streaming services and other random hosted services. I'd love to have an advertising free option for search engines (Yes, I use DDG), Reddit, Twitter etc. I'd also like it if any news services I subscribed to removed advertising on any articles I accessed, but this still seems like it hasn't settled into their mindset, so I'm still hesitant on this particular front. I'd also happily subsidise other people's access to these sites. I'm a regular donator to Wikipedia, and I've funded archive.org . I want people to have these resources. I Just don't want them to be advertised at when they access these resources.

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_Understated_ 5y ago

I went on the hunt just before posting this to find out more about how many people click on ads and how beneficial they are (for any party, not just the advertiser) and I can honestly say I think it's all lies: the whole industry are lying to one another and, by extension, to the customers. Now, this is pure anecdotal but every result I found on DDG was from a company that either advertises, consults about SEO/ads, is Google, or otherwise part of the ad scumbaggery somewhere in the chain. The thing that got me was they all said ads are brilliant (I know, odd, isn't it?). They all had click through figures ranging from a few percent to 35%. Are you kidding me? A third of people click on ads? I couldn't find anything that said ads are shit or dangerous or even anything vaguely negative. Now, I don't see ads. Ever. I have UBlock Origin and privacy badger and other settings to prevent them from showing on my screen but the odd time I setup a PC and have to open a gaping browser, it's such an assault on the senses. I've asked on here before but is there somewhere out there in the internet that I can see unbiased research on ads. Something! Anything at all?

dylan604 5y ago
>I've asked on here before but is there somewhere out there in the internet that I can see unbiased research on ads. Something! Anything at all? Is this possible? If you are stating from the go that you do not trust the numbers so you are doing your own study, isn't that a bias already?
- _Understated_ 5y ago
  Not really. I mean a study that's not from a company that sells ads or is in the chain somewhere! Any studies (I use the term very broadly) that I've seen are all net positive! I want something from, say, The German Institute of Being Really Honest, who are government-funded perhaps... a few studies from entities who don't have a dog in the fight is all I'm after. If their conclusion is that people are happier with ads then so be it... I'm happy without them, that's for sure.
paulcole 5y ago
It’s not like you’re unbiased either. Why can’t you believe some ads have a clickthrough of 35%? You never see ads so you don’t know how good they can be, right? Also, you see ads all the time on HN. This whole site is a marketing/advertising campaign for a VC company. Personally. I love to buy stuff and I love to click on ads for things I might want to buy.

Ericson2314 5y ago

The easiest to way end advertising is to spend more and stop running a frail economy. When aggregate demand is weak, people spend lots of money to try to redirect that demand towards them, when demand is strong people are too busy fulfilling orders to waste money on demand. Crank up the fiscal policy and reduce working hours, and banning ads will be a lot more politically feasible than it is today.

Ericson2314 5y ago
*waste money on dredging up more orders to fill — i.e. more demand — via ads.

cblconfederate 5y ago

Not all advertising is bad or rather, Advertising is not bad, period. The way google and facebook do it is bad, and of dubious effectiveness. Most of the small specialized niche communities need to stop relying on adsense etc. They should add self-serve advertising instead, and provide adequate exposure to those who pay for it. Advertising is communication; what is terrible is when it becomes spam, and google's moneymaker relies on spamming a lot because its premise is that spamming sells. There are better ways than that.

Intermernet 5y ago
Advertising can be good if it becomes entirely honest and selfless. This never happens. The actual social analogue of this is known as "personal recommendation". As soon as you're paid to inform me about a product, and you subjectively promote that product's virtues over their competitor's virtues, you've become at best untrustworthy, and at worst manipulative. You may be correct in your statements, but, because you gain financially from those statements, you can't be 100% trusted. This is just the way of the world. I'm sorry you may feel otherwise.

paulcole 5y ago

If you eradicate online advertising, wave goodbye to HN. Turns out we only want to ban the ads we don’t like.

Intermernet 5y ago
If HN can't survive without advertising, I can survive without HN. EDIT: HN is run by a venture capital company. The hosting of HN almost certainly costs a tiny fraction of the profits of said company. Their advertising is minimal, and I'm sure the return on said advertising is minimal compared to the benefit of just running the site. @dang can correct me if this is wrong. Either way, HN is not, as far as I can see, an advertising funded site. It has financial benefit to YC in other ways.
- paulcole 5y ago
  HN is literally advertising for a VC firm. That’s why it exists and what it is. If you ban ads from the internet, you’re banning HN. You can be fooled into believing HN is not advertising because you like it, but that doesn’t change what this site truly is.
  - dang 5y ago
    No one at YC thinks of HN that way. I certainly don't. If we did, we'd run HN very differently. You're also wrong about why HN exists. pg created it for a bunch of reasons. Some had nothing at all to do with YC (e.g. wanting interesting things to read, once Reddit stopped being that for him; and wanting to make a web app in Arc) and others did. All of those reasons are still alive today, so your interpretation is much too reductionist. It's true there are job ads for YC startups, and Launch HN threads for YC startups get placed on the front page (this is all in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). I'd like to hear what you think we should do instead. Surely you don't think HN should give nothing back to YC in exchange for funding it?
    - paulcole 5y ago

JKCalhoun 5y ago

> I'll play devil's advocate for a second and say that "not all advertising is bad" I've tried advocating for Satan in that way as well ... but could honestly find no compelling points with which to argue the case. It always boiled down to enabling one party to get money from another party irrespective of the one's party need for or ability to afford said product.

clairity 5y ago

this advertising-as-root-problem perspective seems to have some traction here, but you’re not going up far enough in the causal chain of abstraction if you stop at advertising. that’s a tried-and-true recipe for unintended consequences and ineffective solutions. ultimately, it’s money that’s at the root of the problem, but that’s too uncomfortable of a truth for most people to accept, so we try to pull up short with attempts like this. and money in turn is overloaded to encapsulate power, influence, esteem, and wealth. if we really want to inject fairness and competition into the ad business, we must accept that the quest for money, and all that it represents, is the driving force behind these kinds of behaviors, and that the only effective means of curtailing them is to ultimately rein in the drive for money (not simplistically to limit advertising). both money and ads are useful tools in context, which also means in moderation. money is an overly simplistic metric poorly correlated to what we all want, which is human worth: to be loved, respected, esteemed, and included. having been gamed for so long, it now represents, and correlates with, our vices more than worth. we need to get beyond money as this simplistic on-size-fits-all metric for human worth.

BurningFrog 5y ago

> We really need to regulate online advertising To me it's a mistake to think "we" here. You or me will never make any online advertising regulations. Making regulations is a political process, and the outcome will be determined by those with political power. So the question is if you want them to regulate online advertising?