> Who doesn't want to learn about something that will actually improve their life? I don't, honestly. If I've decided I want something, I'll seek it out. If

> Who doesn't want to learn about something that will actually improve their life? I don't, honestly. If I've decided I want something, I'll seek it out. If I've identified an area where I feel like my life is lacking, I might look for a product to help fix that. If I don't even know about something that I might want, I'm fine not having it. The problem is that I don't really trust anyone else to determine what kind of ad passes the test of "will improve people's lives". There's really no objective way to approve or reject an ad based on this kind of criterion. I'd rather we just ban all forms of advertising. > Google and Facebook, in the early days, thought they could use copious amounts of data to tailor the ads to the user such that they would only be subjected to those which are likeable No, they wanted to give people ads they thought would be effective. Google's plan was to make ads unobtrusive, mostly text-only, and thought that they would be likeable enough to be effective. But that's the key: they didn't do this because they were being nice and wanted to make the web a better place. They did it because they thought the ads would actually work better.