12 ms·

Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

• maxden 2y ago
  for interest, also posted in 2019 when it was published. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20577142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20577142
• seydor 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • xg15 2y ago
    The classic food industry defense against nutrition labels/regulations: In a way, everything is poison, so it would be unfair if we had to label ours.
  • PatronBernard 2y ago
    This one's ruining the planet though. Most advertisements serve to make people buy stuff they don't need.
  • krageon 2y ago
    Are you implying that kindness and advertising are basically the same? I can't imagine anyone being this reductive but I can't figure out a different way to read it.
    • guappa 2y ago
      Not all religions are about kindness. And the kind ones usually aren't about universal kindness.
    • fipar 2y ago
      I think both you and the poster you’re responding too are oversimplifying things. Some parts of some religions encourage followers to be kind to some others. Some parts encourage them to discriminate, assimilate, or even kill (also some) others. While I’m an atheist, I don’t buy the narrative that religion is the root of all evil, and I recognize that there are several good outcomes of some religions (e.g., help people come out of addiction), but if you think religions are all about kindness, I think you may just not have been looking around enough.
• lapcat 2y ago
  (2019) Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20577142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20577142
• dmvjs 2y ago
  surveillance is a cancer
  • coldtea 2y ago
    commercial (private sector) surveillance is driven by advertising. state surveillance is driven by control. but even state surveillance often piggybacks on commercial surveillance
    • dmvjs 2y ago
      the internet is a surveillance machine
• FrustratedMonky 2y ago
  I think the list of reasons sounds a lot like just typical facets of 'capitalism'.
  • cscurmudgeon 2y ago
    I would rather live with ads than with literal bread lines my family stood in decades ago, in a socialist state (that funnily had more govt propaganda than ads).
    • OtomotO 2y ago
      How about none of these? Why do I always need to choose the lesser evil and never good?
      • cscurmudgeon 2y ago
        Show me a large scale society that hasn’t have both. This over commercialization may be needed as a buffer against hyper scarcity
        • OtomotO 2y ago
          I don't need to show anything. Anything newly invented wasn't shown before it was, well, invented. So what stops us humans from not living in crappy dictatorships and not in shitty capitalism?
      • SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
        Because you’re stuck in a conceptual framing where the existence of things you don’t like is subject to your choice. You’ll never be satisfied if your benchmark for good is that every market transaction in the country should be something you’d endorse, or that nobody should ever show you a piece of content you don’t want to see for their own benefit.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • 2y ago
• sjamaan 2y ago
  It's weird. Everybody finds ads obnoxious (at least some of the time), yet it's allowed and not only that, it's proliferated in recent years. You'd think something universally disliked would be legislated away. I wish more people would realize the root cause of all this spying is advertising. Simply banning advertising would get rid of all this shit more effectively and with less overreach and compliance headaches than the GDPR.
  • somenameforme 2y ago
    Things which most of everybody agrees hurt society, but bump up the GDP tend to be tolerated to an extreme degree. The focus on datums, instead of why we even wanted those values to go up (or down) in the first place, is one of the major failings of modern governance.
  • cscurmudgeon 2y ago
    http://radleyice.com/chairman-mao-and-the-sparrows/ http://radleyice.com/chairman-mao-and-the-sparrows/
  • WJW 2y ago
    There's at least one group who doesn't find the ads annoying, and that's whoever is purchasing the ad space. That could be a business, a nonprofit, some government agency or even a charity. Advertising is a vital part of the sales funnel for them, and it is what allows them to feed their children and pay the mortgage.
  • wruza 2y ago
    How to tell advertising from sharing experiences?
    • coldtea 2y ago
      any "sharing of experience" whose purpose is in buying a specific product or a ticket or service, it's advertising...
    • bondarchuk 2y ago
      Maybe something like this: When the one displaying the picture (or whatever), the one providing the picture, and the one viewing the picture are three different parties, and money flows from the person providing the picture to the one showing it. It's not perfect but I think this definition would include e.g. billboards, newspaper ads and most internet ads, while excluding non-advertising integrations of third-party data (e.g. when a navigation company buys maps from a mapping company to show to their client, it does not fall under this definition because money flows the other way).
• resource_waste 2y ago
  Disney and Nintendo are among this most disgusting companies I can imagine. As an adult, you see ads and know they are ads... (sometimes, astroturfing is different) But children? They see characters and do not realize they are corporate mascots. By adulthood these are classics and nostalgia inducing.
• fouc 2y ago
  More precisely - advertising is a cancer on the internet. It's responsible for killing the early internet. It should have been banned decades ago. But no, people wanted "free". Except there is no such thing as a free lunch.
• iammjm 2y ago
  Here I was perfectly happy with how things are. Alas, thanks to the advertisement now I've realized all the imperfections of my life that can only be remediated by the advertised products
  • hasbot 2y ago
    Mick Jagger told us back in '65: https://genius.com/The-rolling-stones-i-cant-get-no-satisfaction-lyrics https://genius.com/The-rolling-stones-i-cant-get-no-satisfac...
  • psychoslave 2y ago
    Don’t worry, I have a therapy about that very specific topic, just sign this NDA and this check over here.
• bell-cot 2y ago
  Well, yes. "No limits" or "more is better" of anything is horrible for society. In a strong, cohesive society - that is understood, and all sort of limits are enforced. (Socially more than legally, typically.) In an incoherent and divided society, a wide variety of malignancies flourish. At least for a while. Such societies tend to be short-lived, and jumping to a suitable new host can be difficult.
• diego_moita 2y ago
  Every form of manipulation of people through information is a "cancer": advertising, political ideologies, religion, escapist entertainment, etc. The problem is that truth is very hard to establish for those that don't want and don't understand logic. They're "cancers" that people want because they're comfortable with it. Also, if we try to control these cancers by restricting what information is allowed we will create an authoritarian society.
  • coldtea 2y ago
    >Every form of manipulation of people through information is a "cancer" Not really. Everything that can change minds (including discussion, the news, and art) is a form of manipulation of people through information. Who draws the line what's good manipulation and what's bad manipulation (or, which is the same, what is legit mind changing and what's not)? Nah, advetising is a cancer all of its own
  • superfunny 2y ago
    "The problem is that truth is very hard to establish for those that don't want and don't understand logic" Not every truth is revealed through logic.
    • perching_aix 2y ago
      What truths are not revealed through logic in your opinion?
  • perching_aix 2y ago
    Do you consider escapist entertainment malicious in nature, or were you not using the word "manipulation" in a malicious sense? Or is this not an applicable modeling of what you were saying? How do you define escapist entertainment specifically, provided you do consider it malicious? I struggle to think of a form of entertainment that isn't on some level a possible escape.
  • jounker 2y ago
    That is a false dichotomy. We can certainly place restrictions without resulting in an authoritarian society. We can ban billboards. (Some states do this). We can ban gambling and drug ads. We can place ownership limits on media markets. There are all things we have had in the us at various times and in various places.
• resource_waste 2y ago
  Apple used to seem particularly egregious because their marketing used Spin and exploited status insecurities. They would put the word "Security" or "Privacy" on the screen. They never claimed they were good at security. They just said "Security". It was implied. Factually, they had little to stand on. They also did the thing car markers do, where they exploit status insecurities. They were wholly successful, a lower-class person cannot own an Android phone without getting flack. Meanwhile, an upper-middle class person doesnt have this burden. I can drive a crappy car and I'm seen as prudent. A lower class person drives a crappy car and is seen as poor. All of this comes from marketing the status position of a company.
  • taurknaut 2y ago
    > They were wholly successful, a lower-class person cannot own an Android phone without getting flack. Who gives a fuck about status if you can't use imessages
• someothherguyy 2y ago
  This analogy seems weak. In general, this post argues one way while ignoring all the good advertising does. Do cancers typically do good things at their baseline?
  • Jenk 2y ago
    "all the good things advertising does" is doing a lot of the leg work without much being specified.
    • superfunny 2y ago
      Here's a good that advertising does: letting people know how your product or services address some pressing need.
      • GeoAtreides 2y ago
        explain what pressing needs this BMW adv addresses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8UPg6hyDBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8UPg6hyDBg
        • GuB-42 2y ago
          The pressing need to have an electric car you enjoy driving. It may not be your need, but to some people, it is. It doesn't mean there are no problems with ads today.
        • robertlagrant 2y ago
          You've confused an individual instance with the general category to an extraordinary extent here.
          • GeoAtreides 2y ago
            you know, I was just making a point, not compiling an exhaustive list of the ads that are not about pressing needs
• colesantiago 2y ago
  Would seeing this on HN count as advertisement? I also see HN Jobs that I did not ask for, would this also count as advertisements / marketing? How would say, Daring Fireball [1] earn income from this cancerous mode of operation? Should this publication stop charging $11K a week to stop shilling products we don't need in your RSS feed? So then it follows that all of these are 'cancer' by the author's definition. How do we solve this once and for all to satisfy the author? The only way to stop this would probably be to "close your eyes?" or perhaps maybe adblock, although we cannot adblock billboards, or this isn't really a big enough problem in the first place. Solutions to this would be much welcome. [1] https://daringfireball.net/ https://daringfireball.net/
  • taurknaut 2y ago
    > The only way to stop this would probably be to "close your eyes?" or perhaps this isn't really a big enough problem in the first place. The idea of banning advertisements never struck you? That seems like the obvious way forward.
    • quectophoton 2y ago
      88x31 banners (ads) on Neocities, or artists I follow mentioning they have new merch (ads), or HN (website whose sole purpose is to let people advertise), don't bother me enough to ban them.
      • taurknaut 2y ago
        All we have left is a dumpster fire supported by ads. > HN (website whose sole purpose is to let people advertise) I don't think anyone comes here to read the advertisements (which is what paid job postings with no comments? I'll pass.). The closest you get are the "who's hiring" threads. Calling that an advertisement when both parties clearly want to engage seems wildly disingenuous. Advertisements are necessarily forced on people. There isn't a single person in human history whose life was improved by an advertisement (except the people hosting the ads, of course).
• jonnycat 2y ago
  I fully agree with the sentiment, and yet marvel at the apparent lack of alternatives for so many business models. I'm mildly surprised, for example, that micro-payments for web content are still not a (widespread) thing. Consumers hate ads, but they hate paying for things even more apparently.
  • keiferski 2y ago
    It's not really clear to me that consumers hate ads. It seems like more of a tech niche opinion; most people are perfectly fine with watching TV commercials (and look forward to them at the Super Bowl) and don't mind using ad-tier streaming plans. Ad blockers are used by a tiny, tiny percentage of total browser users. And so on.
    • somenameforme 2y ago
      Look at literally any poll on the topic - people hate ads universally, with advertisers not far behind. And ad blocker usage has skyrocketed. It's now up to ~30% of all internet users [1] with younger people starting to approach a majority. And it should go without saying that the only reason that's not near 100% of users is because most people don't know they exist and/or don't feel comfortable installing one. [1] - https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users
      • keiferski 2y ago
        This link claims that 39% of people over the age of 56 use an ad blocker. Sorry, but color me skeptical. I could but wrong, but I am highly skeptical of that statistic. This report also doesn't seem to clarify what is meant by "ad blocker," specifically, which makes the whole thing pretty suspect. Looking into the sources they provide, at least one of them doesn't mention ad blockers at all, even though the related image is about people blocking ads. So, yeah, I'm not considering this to be reliable information.
        • somenameforme 2y ago
• froh 2y ago
  (2019) > Advertising as currently practiced [... is] a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them. Limited to honestly informing people about what's available on the market, it can serve a crucial function in enabling trade. In the real world however, it's moved way past that role. > Real world advertising is not about informing, it's about convincing. Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest. It also became more effective. In the process, it grew to consume a significant amount of resources of every company on the planet. It infected every communication medium in existence, both digital and analog. It shapes every product and service you touch, and it affects your interactions with everyone who isn't your close friend or family member. Through all that, it actively destroys trust in people and institutions alike, and corrupts the decision-making process in any market transaction. It became a legitimized form of industrial-scale psychological abuse [...] And then it supports and complements this with a long list of findings. I wonder if there are some approaches to hedge advertisement back into it's useful and valuable purpose and limit the highly, as the article puts it, "cancerous" impacts?
• alexfromapex 2y ago
  It is a form of violence and needs to be treated as such.
• 6stringmerc 2y ago
  I'm particularly glad to see the "Destroying culture" segment, though brief, as it touches on my main objection to modern advertising. In the piece, he mentions how an old work was re-purposed and "ruined" for him - though the phrasing sounds extreme, I completely understand. The concept described, as I interpret it, is about sparking an internal pleasure center for the purpose of inserting a commercial prompting to engage. This is especially problematic with "wants" type purchases - luxury items, status, etc. - compared to "needs" where a specific company is trying to differentiate itself from the pack. I remember the hullaballoo when the Rolling Stones licensed "Start Me Up" to Microsoft. Last night, during the Superbowl, Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal reunited for a mayonnaise commercial aping a scene from "When Harry Met Sally" and I chuckled to myself how it was probably missing 2/3s of the viewership on the reference. Using Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life" by Carnival Cruise lines only sparks memories for me of Danny Boyle's "Trainspotting" and obviously they don't care. Same goes for when "Lord of the Rings" trailers had the Kronos Quartet playing under them, specifically the track featured in "Requiem for a Dream." Honestly my breaking point was for a car insurance commercial where an accident occurred and the driver pulled an entirely new car from the trunk of the damaged car to represent the ease of returning to the prior state. It felt so absolutely deceptive I never will let it go. But that's not even the low point. Pharmaceutical companies are now portraying "mini-movies" with the full narrative arc to create the sensation that a full and happy life is possible if only you ask your Doctor about some random-ass pill for a condition likely best treated by a change of lifestyle. The one I have in mind is a football coach where he's a family man, a teacher, and then gets a commemorative portrait unveiled at a game because he's so beloved. The culture damage of these bastardizations of narrative and story are a runaway freight train - always in slow motion mind you - and every time you see a historical figure selling you something, just remember that they're dead and couldn't complain. If it wasn't for Crispin Glover's lawsuit win all those years ago, Kurt Cobain might be selling anti-depressants and Jimi Hendrix a Kia or something.
• keiferski 2y ago
  In a world of finite attention, some form of advertising will inevitable appear. Unless your critique of advertising includes a solution to the attention problem, it's not useful. Then you might say, well there should be some regulations that prevent advertisers from doing X bad thing or saying Y exaggerated statement. Most of these exist already, and if they don't, the legislation required to ban such practices would be easier to implement than legislation "banning advertising" writ large, whatever that actually means in practice.
  • cess11 2y ago
    Just like you can demand that corporations provide correct product information on the packaging, you can easily demand that they only communicate in that way around their products. The difference between advertising and product information is that the former is deceitful.
    • keiferski 2y ago
      Communicate in what way? And at what point are you going to differentiate between "art" and "not art"? These are rhetorical questions, because their implementation is a pipe dream. Getting rid of "advertising" would require the most draconian anti-speech laws imaginable.
      • cess11 2y ago
        Corporations aren't people, they have no right to speech. You can go ahead with a career in Warhol simulacras if you want.
        • keiferski 2y ago
          According to the Supreme Court, they do. Regardless, this isn't really an answer. What metrics are you using to determine if an ad is misleading? Take for example the early 2000s BMW ads which were short films with various celebrities and actors. Are these "misleading" and not allowed? Again, these aren't even remotely implementable ideas without complete state control over the media.
• hermannj314 2y ago
  What about advertising for cancer screening? That type of advertising is shown to be cost effective and saves lives [1]. So advertising can be a good thing and a literal cancer-preventer to society. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4018507/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4018507/
  • Levitz 2y ago
    Well yeah, and cutting someone open can save his life in the context of a surgery. The vast, vast majority of the time and the vast, vast majority of money spent on ads is nothing like this.
  • oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
    I guess it depends upon where you draw the line between advertising and informing. The broad definition of "advertising" doesn't restrict it to commercial use, but I think the most common understanding of what it is would. Also, the author makes it clear that they're referring to this sense of the word: > [advertising is] a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them.
    • quectophoton 2y ago
      > The broad definition of "advertising" doesn't restrict it to commercial use, Example: The Merriam-Webster for example defines "advertisement" as, literally, as "1 : a public notice". Still, > but I think the most common understanding of what it is would. ... is probably the reason for their "especially" paragraph and examples, right below the definition.
      • pindab0ter 2y ago
        I understand that defining advertising is hard, but "1 : a public notice" is so broad as to be almost meaningless as a definition.
        • 2y ago
• deleted 2y ago
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• deleted 2y ago
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• Xenoamorphous 2y ago
  Advertising sucks. But subscriptions suck even more as they increase inequality.
• apwell23 2y ago
  i thought Cancer is Cancer on society
• turblety 2y ago
  > This is why my kid isn't going to watch YouTube. If and when we decide to show her any children's show, it'll be from a manually curated set of videos downloaded and streamed from a NAS. In my opinion, it's irresponsible to expose children to modern advertising. I think we need to be careful with this approach. It's also irresponsible to not expose them to modern advertising. Unfortunately, modern advertising does exist, and if they are exposed to it first as a teenager, or worst as an adult, they are likely to be scammed/convinced to buy things they don't need. Maybe a better way is, instead of banning anything, to supervise and explain to our children what they're seeing.
  • somenameforme 2y ago
    The problem is that advertising is insidiously effective. Most people don't think ads work on them, yet the results of ad campaigns demonstrate that's plainly false. And this is even more true for children who have extremely poor reasoning and logic abilities, and are going to be being targeted by ads specifically designed to exploit their instinctive impulses. This is unlikely to be a battle that parents can win. I think this is vaguely akin to exposing your child to gambling and explaining the impulses/desires it creates so they don't get addicted to it. But that's just not how it works.
  • TeMPOraL 2y ago
    TFA's author here. > Maybe a better way is, instead of banning anything, to supervise and explain to our children what they're seeing. Now that I have 3 of them, and the oldest is almost 6, I guess I need to update the article on how this panned out. Long story short: replacing Spotify and YouTube for music with yt-dlp + Audacity (to cut out ads, padding, channel jingles and other nonsense, + normalize volume) worked to an extent, and I built up a small library for my eldest daughter, which I then reused with the younger ones. However, once the oldest one went to kindergarten, she immediately contracted the Paw Patrol fever, and we couldn't continue keeping our kids oblivious to children programming anymore. I mean, you can try and fight Paw Patrol, but you can't win in the end, and the more you resist, the harder it gets for your kid to make friends. Same with other major franchises. It's the same kind of problem as teenagers and smartphones, just couple years earlier. Anyway, from that point on, curating a local library stripped of advertising became too much of a hassle. Instead, we embraced Netflix and YouTube - I just keep the ad-blocker running to reduce ad exposure, but since advertising is everywhere and can't be avoided, we focus on teaching our kids how to process it. As evidenced by TFA, I do have some strong views on advertising in general, but I'm not dumping them on my kids. Letting them see advertising as just a fact of life seems to make it less impactful. Turns out, most ads are 100% boring to my kids (after we get past the "why is the man doing ${something they never saw someone do before}" questions); my oldest one actually figured out on her own where the "skip ad" button is on YouTube and how to operate the mouse to click it and resume the song that was playing. And those that aren't boring, we actually learned to enjoy. I can go on and on, but I'll leave it for an eventual blog article.
• otikik 2y ago
  After reading the symptoms of the disease, I would say that Advertising could qualify as "Flu on Society". Adverse effects, some people might die of it, but not as fatal or devastating as cancer. Arguably advertising has some benefits for society as well. I have at least found some products that I really wanted and enjoyed thanks to their ads (not many compared to the number of ads I have seen through all my life. Still, I did find some). The author himself is falling to the "Advertising Trap" of click-baiting his potential audience.
  • canadaduane 2y ago
    I appreciate this alternate diagnosis :) At what point would you say the "flu" becomes a more virulent strain that is dangerous enough to do something more than tolerate? For example, more and more sexualized content in advertising (esp. harming teen girls [1]), or forced ads built-in to a browser sidebar (esp. harming the poor [2]), or ads on the surface of each school desk in 3rd grade (esp. harming the young [3]). Anxiety about the future, depression, etc. can be tied to advertising. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18444705/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18444705/ [2] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=cceb602fe28969baedf0d1de40aac906b7363782 https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d... [3] https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/132/5/958/31699/Children-Adolescents-and-the-Media https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/132/5/958/31...
  • TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > The author himself is falling to the "Advertising Trap" of click-baiting his potential audience. Maybe? It's provocative, but I felt (and still feel) it's an accurate metaphor. The thing that made me start thinking of advertising in these terms is a bit of trivia I picked up (from IIRC Scott Alexander's blog posts) on why big mammals like whales get much less cancer than they should per models that correlate cancer rates with body size and metabolism. Turns out, one hypothesis is that those big animals do get more cancer, and their larger bodies allow the cancer to get proportionally larger - so large, that it eventually develops its own cancer, and gets killed by it. This image of a cancer growing on another cancer was a good fit for a bunch of personal experiences I had observing social media content marketing people who happened to work in the same room as I did at the time (a spin-off from a startup I worked for), and also fit well with stories about A/B testing services, whose UI encouraged mistakes invalidating results in just the right way to make them think they're getting good value from the testing service. That made me start thinking in these terms, and from there I slowly developed a general cancer analogy, which I then put in the article you just read. WRT. cancer-on-cancer thing, the article doesn't mention it at all, though it was partly the thought behind this fragment: > It also allows the advertisers to scam each other on attribution, which isn't surprising if you consider that lying is literally their job. Cancer cells don't play well with each other unless they have to. I'll need to update the article and include a paragraph about the meta-cancer thing.
• smallerfish 2y ago
  Was in São Paulo recently, and very much enjoyed the lack of billboards. It surprises me that more cities don't follow their example. (TLDR, kagiing for a list, that 4 US states also have banned billboards.) https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/11/can-cities-kick-ads-ban-urban-billboards https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/11/can-cities-ki...
• iammrpayments 2y ago
  “any effort you spent on advertising serves primarily to counteract the combined advertising efforts of your competitors. The same results could be achieved if every market player limited themselves to just informing customers about their goods and services“ This is a really shallow view of advertising, most of the time you don’t know who is your competitor and you don’t know all the possible ways that you can inform your audience about product, and you don’t fully know what your customer wants.
  • ben_w 2y ago
    > and you don’t fully know what your customer wants. This is very true. However, as Facebook ads are showing me both dick pills and boob surgery offers, and legal advice for giving up a citizenship I don't have (and even then only available in a country I don't live in), and foreign government announcements that a breed of dog I've never heard of is now banned in that country… I'm not convinced that this is in any sense "solved" by the huge quantity of surveillance that even Facebook has. I mean, these advertising profiling errors are what I'd expect in a university student project introducing AI as a concept, not a megacorp whose main monetisation strategy is selling attention to advertisers. Even a classifier itself built by an LLM ought to do better than this when using only my name and GeoIP data.
  • thomasahle 2y ago
    > most of the time you don’t know who is your competitor and you don’t know all the possible ways that you can inform your audience about product If we look at the top 10 commercial for this super bowl[1], which is arguable the most money spent on advertising, it's Booking.com, Ram Trucks, Made by Google, Yahoo.com, Marvel Studios, Bud Light, NerdWallet, DoorDash, Doritos, Squarespace. I'm sure all of those companies know who their competitors are, and the audience already knows about their products. The ads are just trying to jump to our forefront of attention. [1] https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/most-watched-super-bowl-ads-2025-youtube-top-10-1236302276/ https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/most-watched-super-bowl-ads...
• A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
  Like cancer, I think it's possible to split ads into two categories: Benign and malignant. Benign ads are like ads for toothpaste, Febreeze, or airlines. Malignant ads are, to give but two examples, for things like gambling and pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceutical business, in particular, was much more widely trusted and had far higher public favorability ratings in the old days when their advertising to the public was severely frowned upon. Advertisements for vices are generally a huge net negative for society. Cigarettes, alcohol, prostitution/OnlyFans, TikTok and other mind-melting social media and mobile lootbox games... The less we see of them, the healthier society is. In places like the UK, where a huge volume (if not an absolute majority) of advertisements are for vices like sports gambling, you know that things have gone sideways. You can feel it.
  • silvestrov 2y ago
    I think a better wording is to say that "advertising is like bateria". Using cancer is way too one-sided as all cancers are bad. Some bacterias are bad, some are good. Most of the time we talk about bacteria it is the bad ones we think of, mostly because study of the good ones are so underpriotized and we don't understand them well. Humans could absolutely not survive without the good bacteria in the stomach. They produce some of the vitamins we need (plus other roles).
    • jtbayly 2y ago
      Could humans survive without the “good advertising”?
      • silvestrov 2y ago
        It would be very difficult for many new companies to get the word out about their new product. Innovation would suffer. If you can't advertise for the AirFryer, how do you get people to know about this new product and what it can do? Mouth-to-mouth is too slow and inefficient for most products. How often do you drop by a kitchen store just to check out if there is any new invention?
• DavidPiper 2y ago
  "The Hidden Persuaders" by Vance Packard is the only book I've read that has actively given me mental and emotional tools to resist advertising. It tells the story - with many deep, detailed examples - of how advertising went from information to persuasion across the mid-1900s, and there are some truly gross moral acts/steps along the way. It can be a little dry at times (and some has of course been superseded by Surveillance Capitalism), but if you want to acquire a genuine disgust reflex for modern advertising, I strongly recommend it.
• ekkiren 2y ago
  More like tasteless advertising practices are a cancer to society
• ekkiren 2y ago
  More like tasteless advertising practices are poisonous to society
• acc_297 2y ago
  The below section resonates: lately YouTube has figured out I am in my mid-twenties and considering for the first time how best to save money for a secure/stable future. The number of ADs I see now not so subtly implying that I can expect to “lose big” or “rent forever” if I don’t subscribe to QuestTrade/WealthSimple/… It’s just frustrating to know that someone put time and thought into making me and a million other folks in my “demographic bucket” feel anxious and worried. I’m not sure how best to address this sort of thing and I suppose I can buy my way out of most internet ads if I want to so I acknowledge we all play a part in this market. But some types of advertisements need to be highly regulated I would include Gambling, Pharmaceuticals, Alcohol on that list. But a broader class of non-luxury goods which are being advertised via a very negative framing of the consumers current situation are a social externality. They contribute to real health problems in the population and in my view that is reason enough to examine regulation. > A marketer I know has a mantra, that successful sales are all about dissatisfaction - making people aware just how their situation sucks, and then offering a way to relieve the pain.
  • Zanfa 2y ago
    > The below section resonates: lately YouTube has figured out I am in my mid-twenties and considering for the first time how best to save money for a secure/stable future. This is funny since YouTube especially has never been able to figure out my demographics. To this day it keeps showing me ads for female hygiene products, cleaning supplies, quick fashion brands or scam ads in Russian, a language I don't speak. None of this has ever been relevant to me in any way whatsoever. They should just go back to showing exclusively contextual ads, they'd have better odds of hitting a topic I might actually be even remotely in the target market for.
    • bitmasher9 2y ago
      You’re in a minority. As long as YouTube is mostly right the vast majority of the time, running identity based ads is significantly more profitable than running context based ads. Years and years ago I worked at a company selling context based web ads, and our numbers were significantly lower than identity based ads. There were a few companies willing to pay good money for certain context based ads, that we got good money from, but most went to identity based because CTR was much higher. There were also some holdout webpages that only served context based ads for privacy concerns, but largely it was a dying niche in the larger online advertising space because of key metrics like Click Through Rate.
• lanthissa 2y ago
  Maybe its just a function of growing up during the transition of physical software to advert/subscription software, but i love the advertising model. What google has done for the web; youtube, maps, gmail/gsuite, chromium/v8 are fantastic products that cost huge sums to develop, and the world gets to use them for free. Thats amazing. Its a huge gift to society that the a fantastic knowledge and productivity suite is available to everyone. I have a lot more of a problem with infinite scroll & algorithmic content delivery than advertising.
  • yetihehe 2y ago
    > Its a huge gift to society that the a fantastic knowledge and productivity suite is available to everyone. It's not a gift. It's a transaction, but you pay with your attention and data about yourself so that someone can more effectively try to sell you something you might not really need. Upside: people who don't have money can now participate in knowledge pool. Downside: thousands of other people try to make sure that those people don't ever have more money because they spend them on marketers that were the best in marketing.
  • pclmulqdq 2y ago
    Do you use an ad blocker? If so, you're not supporting the ecosystem you love. Or do you love it because it's so easy to have all of the upside while pushing the costs onto other people?
  • bilekas 2y ago
    > Maybe its just a function of growing up during the transition of physical software to advert/subscription software, but I love the advertising model. I also have been around a while, but I am the opposite opinion as yourself, mainly because I really appreciate actually owning something that I don't need to pay to continue to consume like Media which is a good example. > I have a lot more of a problem with infinite scroll & algorithmic content delivery than advertising This is basically the same thing as the advertising models that are being used except the advertising is a bit more nefarious (IMO) into manipulating you into feeling like you have to buy something, gamble a little bit or whatever it is just to remove money from your wallet to them. The products you mention are obviously great for society, this isn't for debate I think, but it's how these services are monetized, which they should be 100% but there is a disgusting extreme in play these days to my eyes. In the same service based ecconomy, I am okay with paying for Kagi for example, pay as you use without (hopefully) my data being sold to the highest bidder. There are better models possible then the one we have, I think that's somethign that should be explored.
• wouldbecouldbe 2y ago
  To be honest I think many YouTube videos are worse then the ads. Lots of the kid videos on there are pure braindead poison.
• xizst94 2y ago
  So I'm not the only one that feels sick thinking about how people "watching the Superbowl" are essentially watching ads with a sprinkle of "foot"ball.
  • globular-toast 2y ago
    I watched a bit of "the Superbowl" once and it made me feel the same way about using the unfiltered web: I can't believe anyone watches this without adblock. Then I slowly started to realise the NPCs in Idiocracy/Wall-E aren't actually fictional...
• Henk0 2y ago
  I completely agree, though I haven't been thinking in terms of the cancer metaphor myself. I have been thinking a bit about how we could limit the negative effects of both advertising and other phenomena like social media algorithms: 1. Almost all advertising is based on manipulation of human cognitive biases. There is a limited set of biases, and the mechanisms by which they can be exploited are both limited and easily detected – we can most likely train AI to do it. Therefore, it's possible to start thinking seriously about making laws that ban corporations and organisations from creating marketing that exploits these cognitive biases. 2. When it comes to social media platforms, there are two routes we could go down. Either we could regulate their algorithms the same way – or we could force social media platforms to both make their recommendation algorithms open source, and to open up their platforms to third-party recommendation algorithms that people can choose to use instead. This would be like a recommendation algorithm app store that the company has to provide to their users. You might want to select a youtube recommendation algorithm that optimises for personal development – or a facebook feed that optimises for creating real-world connections Of course corporations would fight this kind of legislation with tooth and claw, but that's how it is. I would be happy to get some thoughtful feedback on these ideas, their technical and legal plausibility, and any potential negative unintended consequences or loopholes that could undermine them
• yapyap 2y ago
  Reminds me of this Bill Hicks clip https://youtube.com/watch?v=RbAAVLcMzr4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=RbAAVLcMzr4
• EncomLab 2y ago
  Most of the arguments made are not about "advertising" per se, but the methods that SOME forms of advertising take and other methods (data mining, phishing, scams) that are either not advertising or are things that are already regulated/illegal but which enforcement actions against are low/non-existent. In the book "Fire in the Valley" about the development and early days of the internet there is a great deal of discussion and prescient predictions about where all of this would go - but the business models of walled gardens and pay walls never generated the revenue that charging for clicks did. Honestly it's hard to see how we get to this level of speed and content online without it having been funded by advertising.
  • canadaduane 2y ago
    How do we know if "this level of speed and content online" is net good?
    • ahoka 2y ago
      We know that most of the content is crap.
      • edanm 2y ago
        Most of everything is crap. Most books are crap. Most science is crap.
    • EncomLab 2y ago
      This really depends on the content you are seeking and consuming as the user. I am constantly pulling data sheets, reading papers, researching reference designs, interacting on official (and unofficial) product forums, and countless other information queries which at the start of my career were largely conducted at either company or university libraries, in person meetings, or attending conferences. That may sound great but trust me it's far better to sit at home and have the entire product specifications from a manufacturer than ordering a physical copy or spending half the day calling around to see if someone else has one available. If all you are consuming is FB, IG, X, and Reddit - I mean that's like going to a candy store and complaining there is no broccoli.
• neom 2y ago
  I teach people how to advertise for a living. This is how I teach it: an advert is simply the ability to buy a knock on someones front door. That is literally all you are doing when you buy an advert. All business activity you experience today is an abstraction of business we have already done, I'm sure back in the day people thought door to door sales people were annoying, and I'm sure sometimes they were not. From a founders perspective, you can take this door knock framework and use it for anything, want to do product research? knock on a door. Want to test a marketing message? Knock on a door. Want to boost sales? Knock on a door. Adverting done wrong can be very annoying. Thankfully people who advertise incorrectly don't usually last very long, and sadly there are indeed a lot of not great marketing folks out there, but cancer on society... hmmm. This article conflates every kind of commercial outreach with malware, psychological abuse, or brand brainwashing... “zero-sum” and purely wasteful. Ok, but in practice competition drives improvement, and customer choice is central to a functioning market, leading to innovation.
  • Const-me 2y ago
    > competition drives improvement Are you saying ads helping competition? How? > customer choice is central to a functioning market, leading to innovation. Ads suppress customer choice, along with innovations. Can you recall any recent innovative carbonated drink? Marketing budgets of pepsi/coca cola make competition and innovation impossible.
    • neom 2y ago
      Advertising is a PURE competitive move in the most fundamental sense in the business playbook, anyone who doesn't understand that doesn't understand business and therefore nor marketing nor sales. Sadly, that is a lot of people out there who profess to understand business.
      • Ukv 2y ago
        > Advertising is a PURE competitive move I think "competition" has to be directed towards a useful end, like improving the product, else it's at danger of just causing enormous waste disproportionate* to any value it is creating, like rigs for Bitcoin mining or microsecond trading. Say you're playing a game where every minute you can either create a new cube or steal two from your opponent. The direct optimal strategy is for both players to just repeatedly steal - "competing" in a sense, yet wasting time for no progress. The meta-strategy, if we as a society want to increase the number of cubes, would be to punish stealing so that players instead compete by doing useful work (creating cubes). To me the problem with marketing looks the same. It could make business sense for both Coke and Pepsi to double their marketing budgets to push flyers through every door to take each other's market share back and forth, but doing so wastes disproportionate* resources for little to no gain. Also seems as though it's one factor making it more difficult for potential new competition that has a legitimately better product but doesn't have billions to spend on ads, exclusivity deals, etc. *: There can be some value created, like slightly faster Bitcoin transactions, or people being very slightly more informed about some products. Just that the zero-sum game aspect allows resources wasted to be far in excess of the value gained (if any at all), even without externalities.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• axegon_ 2y ago
  From a personal perspective, my view on ads has done a complete 180 over the past decade. 10 years ago, I was massively in favor of ads: they were a nice way to indirectly show support to those who produced high quality content. And while I acknowledge that cloud providers have astronomical costs associated with the ability to provide so much data on request instantly, at this point the internet is borderline unusable without a hyper aggressive ad blockers - both on browser level and DNS level. Everything in the article is completely true. Especially the common characteristics: take any video for instance. I'm perfectly fine with watching a 5 second ad or endure a few banners. But much like untreated cancer, those minutes spread to the point where the vital functions get cluttered with crap. Even with the browser based ad blockers, pihole blocks almost 10% of requests. Sure, some of them are trackers, some of them are services owned by comrade elon musk which I've blacklisted but a large chunk are still ads.
• hnpolicestate 2y ago
  So I was thinking about this during the super bowl last night. I'm aware that super bowl ads are higher quality than usual ads, but not by much. I didn't mind watching commercials between game time. And it wasn't because the ads were entertaining, it's because the content was entertaining. Most YouTube content we consume is very low quality trash. In those circumstances the addition of ads becomes unbearable. If you want to make commercials and ads tolerable produce better content.
• xstefen 2y ago
  The irony of the amount of self-advertising this and in its contents is mind blowing
• dtquad 2y ago
  In Denmark it is not uncommon for people to cherish TV ads from the 1990s and 2000s as our common cultural heritage. But we have always had laws against misleading or overly distracting TV ads (down to rules about the sound levels not being higher than the regular programming). But now half of our TV channels are broadcast from West Drayton, UK so they don't have to comply with advertising regulations. On those TV channels most ads are sports betting, online casinos, mortgage companies etc. I believe advertising has a useful role enhancing market efficiency and providing information to consumers. But it has to be regulated. Misleading advertising should be as punishable as misleading information on the back of the product.
• t0bia_s 2y ago
  Advertising of product is proof that product itself is not good enough to be sold. Good thing is, that you can block it at home. Bad thing is, that if you avoid commercial advertising, you are struggle with income as freelance audiovisual producer.
  • neom 2y ago
    I'm curious how that is true? Advertising is generally a competitive move in a marketing playbook of a GTM motion.
    • t0bia_s 2y ago
      Do you buy products that has quality and you need it or because some advertisement says it?
      • neom 2y ago
        If I start to Google or Amazon new vacuum cleaners because I need one, and then all my ads in Instagram turn to vacuum cleaners, that is vacuum manufacturers competing for my business, I may or may not buy from one, but I'm likely to check them out. The great thing from an ad platform perspective is once you're down to granular targeting it's easy for smb to compete with say Dyson because of how ad pricing works.
        • t0bia_s 2y ago
          What about reviews by independend testers and user experience by trusted source? You just let Google and Amazon sell you what currently make for them more money regardless of product quality?
• somenameforme 2y ago
  One critical possibility was unmentioned. There seems to be a very strong argument that it's advertising that is driving declines in fertility rates. The entire point of the modern advertising machine is to generate endless desires and wants that one might not otherwise have, always chasing the next product - basically to create consumerist societies. The most common reason middle class+ people say they aren't having children is because they don't have enough money, but it's simply untrue. In most of every society, certainly including the US, there are plenty of people having children with far less than the incomes of these people that claim to be unable to afford it. So what they really mean is that they would rather spend their money on other things. But this is extremely unnatural. Our bodies and minds are heavily evolved to wanting to procreate - it takes a very strong force to fight back against the biological clock and it seems that advertising is just that force. I think evidence for this is widespread. Many places like Thailand have low education, low income, and low fertility (on par with Japan now). The classic explanations for declining fertility would predict high fertility in such a place. But what Thailand has is an exceptionally high degree of consumerism. And vice versa this also explains why religion often correlates strongly with fertility. There are varying views on sexuality, education, equality of the sexes, and so on - but most tend to offer a life purpose that supplants any meaningful role consumerism could have. Another bit of evidence is that fertility rates among the extremely rich are also extremely high. Again when one has billions of dollars you can't really be a consumerist because at that point there is basically nothing one could not buy, so you need to look elsewhere for meaning and fulfillment.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • someothherguyy 2y ago
    > The most common reason middle class+ people say they aren't having children is because they don't have enough money, but it's simply untrue. Source? https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/the-experiences-of-u-s-adults-who-dont-have-children/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/the-exp... This seems to say because they "don't want to"
    • 2y ago
• lordhexd 2y ago
  I HATE advertising on YouTube/Spotify/Websites but don’t really mind them on Instagram and actually sometimes quite enjoy them on TikTok. The first difference for me is that on YouTube/Spotify/Websites they obscure the content and force you to watch/see the advertisements but on Instagram and TikTok it’s just as easy to skip an advertisement as it is a video/actual content. The second difference is that usually the advertisements on Instagram and TikTok are targetted based on my preferences anyway so I’m more likely to look at it and often even interact with it. The third difference is that on TikTok especially where I actually sometimes look forward to the ads, they are actually putting the customer first rather than their product. The videos are sometimes viral content variations which are interesting to watch or short stories which have product in them. It’s the same as influencer marketing with product reviews. I make an effort to watch those if I’m looking for a product in the same category or sometimes just to know what’s currently out there, but that’s effectively also advertising just that it puts the customer first. So while I agree some forms of advertising are cancer, I appreciate others and don’t want the good kind to go away because I don’t know everything and sometimes it’s only through advertising that I discover new brands and products that have become my go tos.
• redbell 2y ago
  (2019) > SEO, AKA. gaming the search engines. Hugely popular. Often involves creating nonsense sites, and spamming websites and web forums with comments. It pollutes search results for more obscure queries, generally wasting people's time. Having this essay backdated to pre-LLMs era, I'm wondering what the author would write when he witnesses people using AI-generated content to boost SEO these days.
• chefandy 2y ago
  This is a tad reductive. If there were no ads, how would people know that products existed? Would they just see the products on store shelves? What about services? Would labels be ads? Would how stores merchandise things be advertisements? Could businesses negotiate for specific product placement? How would you find out about stores? Would store signs be ads? How about really big ones? How about at the edge of their property along a road highway? Could the sign say what the store sold? If you were to start a product guide to help people find what they need, how could you possibly afford to buy enough products to be useful and up-to-date enough while slow crawl word of mouth got the business off the ground? Would asking people to tell their friends be an ad? If not, could you pay someone to spread the word about your product? Would traveling sales reps be ads? What if they wore head to toe logo gear? Could you just pay people to do that without selling things? Manipulative advertising practices suck. Privacy destroying data-driven marketing sucks. Ads themselves often suck but I don’t see how a capitalist society could survive without them.
  • Ukv 2y ago
    > This is a tad reductive. If there were no ads, how would people know that products existed? The post does say: > > Limited to honestly informing people about what's available on the market, it can serve a crucial function in enabling trade. In the real world however, it's moved way past that role. Real world advertising is not about informing, it's about convincing. Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest. I think it's largely that incentives are in the wrong place for advertising to work as an effective means to inform people. When trying to make an informed choice on a purchase, I'll typically look for enthusiast communities or unsponsored reviews. Marketing actually tends to actively get in the way.
    • chefandy 2y ago
      > When trying to make an informed choice on a purchase, I'll typically look for enthusiast communities or unsponsored reviews. Marketing actually tends to actively get in the way. Right but where do they get their info? If there were no advertisements, would they call up companies to see what they offered? How would they know a new company existed? Would there be an online enthusiast group for toilet brushes and tape and granite blocks for curbs? How would you know if there was a new store to buy those things? Would that store having a sign that included what they sold constitute advertising? Could your local fish shop put a sign in the window advertising the weekly special? Could they post a picture of it online? Obviously circulars would be advertisements— would catalogs constitute advertisements? What would inspire any innovation at all if there was no way for anyone to discover some new competition existed? How would stores know that manufacturers and distributors existed? Is packaging advertising? Is there a limit to where you can place packages? Show them on the Internet? Do you really think those enthusiast communities wouldn’t be chock full of industry voices? Do you think they aren’t already? Do you really think your process is totally objective? There are a lot of shitty practices in marketing and advertising. Especially with data-driven marketing, I might be the harshest critic I’ve encountered. But advertising at its core is just telling people that products exist. That’s it. Capitalist societies don’t function without being able to communicate that products exist, but even communist countries have (and always had) advertising to tell people that things existed. I abhor many practices in marketing and advertising, but at some level, companies must be able to tell people that they have a product to sell. I have never encountered anybody that suggested a reasonable replacement that would work for everything from computers to condoms to lettuce to bars to bakeries to cars to cleaning services to email hosts to edge network caching to hobbyist clubs to camp grounds.
• panstromek 2y ago
  Some good points, though most of the problems are pretty well known, so it would be more helpful to try coming up with solutions. I think the real insight is in the first section: > ...so we end up with a zero-sum game instead (or really negative-sum, if you count the externalities). If you have competitors, you can't not participate. Advertising is basically a moloch trap, so it probably has to be solved by regulation to fix the incentives. Solving these kinds of problems well is pretty hard, so I think it shouldn't be surprising that they are not solved yet. > GDPR is doing an excellent job destroying some of the most privacy-invasive practices of the adtech industry I disagree pretty strongly. I plan to write a bit more detail about this at some point but shortly I think GDPR is a net negative. It places too much burden on the user, while the burden should be on the adtech companies. I also don't like how it bundles all the surveilance stuff under a single consent (per company). This is giving the user a choice to accept what they hardly know the real consequences of and also giving the companies a strong incentive to manipulate the user to get that consent. In terms of fixing incentives, GDPR did pretty much the opposite. It's also incredibly vague, so it's a nightmare to develop around, and limits legitimate use cases. The end result is that we still get surveilled, but we now also have to click through cookie banners and consent forms and small businesses have to spend enormous resources to deal with it even though it was supposed to be a measure to tackle big tech companies. Worse than that, walled gardens like Facebook and Google have advantage over normal websites, because they have to ask for consent only once during registration.
• talkingtab 2y ago
  The first comment (now) quibbles about the definition of advertising. The second comment (now) quibbles about the use of the word cancer. (there is benign cancer). Advertising (whether it uses tracking or not) can be defined as the intention of convincing someone rather than providing information. Intent is to convince. PROPOGANDA. The intent is for the target/prey/victim to be unable to distinguish the truth value. So here we have a first problem. Is the intent of the first comment on HN "Most of the arguments .. are not about 'advertising' ..." made to help me understand the article better? Or are they made with the intent of causing to me doubt the article (or even not to read it). The same question can be asked about the second question. Ad infinitum and nauseaum. THAT is STAGE 1 social cancer. I can no longer trust the intention of posts on HN. STAGE 2 is that I can no longer trust the INTENTION of any media. Do I want a recipe for cookies? Use the "garrble" to search. Can I really believe that this recipe has ever been made by the person/bot/AI that created it? STAGE 3. Human societies and Communities are founded on trust. The ability to come to a common understanding of a situation and act collectively. STAGE 3 is when communities and societies no longer function. The internet has STAGE 2 cancer and some STAGE 3. Since our society in the US depends on the internet .... Well you cannot trust anything I say, I could be an AI for all you know. And probably my definitions are wrong, my understanding of stages of cancer is faulty, etc. Here is my 2cents. The article vastly underestimates the damage and dangers, but is definitely worth a read.
  • nh23423fefe 2y ago
    > Advertising (whether it uses tracking or not) can be defined as the intention of convincing someone rather than providing information. Intent is to convince. PROPOGANDA. This is pointless moralizing pretending to be clarifying or demarcating. If I write an essay about climate change to convince you to vote/protest/purchase/boycott <anything> then I will use information to create an opinion in you. All communication exists to alter the experiences of your interlocutors. You can't hide behind "good intentions" to demarcate. Labelling persuasion as propaganda, is itself propaganda.
  • chefandy 2y ago
    One of my least favorite tendencies of software developers is assuming they can pull apart non-technical/mathematic problems involving human complexity, even at a societal scale, with a series of logical thought experiments like they’re debugging software, and that their “bug fixes” and doc updates would tidy everything up with people as effectively as it does with processes. As complex as software can be, it hasn’t a sliver the complexity of human interaction on a small scale, let alone societally. The developer mindset often isn’t effective enough in reasoning about human behavior to make effective user interfaces for software they created. When you start classifying entire categories of human interaction and societal structures in concrete stages based on a combination of a priori reasoning, gut instinct, anecdotes, and ‘common knowledge,’ there’s a good chance your words are portraying the boogie men in your head rather than any of the very significant and consequential problems in our society. There are entire fields that study complex topics you casually wield in your assessment— they’re probably a good place to start if you honestly think your gut instinct about forum posts on advertising can be meaningfully generalized to societal structures on a whole.
• andrewinardeer 2y ago
  Indeed. On my last LSD adventure where I suffered ego death it became apparent that advertising is an unavoidable and indidious artifact of capitalism. Advertisers have the audacity to attempt to steal people's attention when they really need it elsewhere. This may include billboards in such times as when their victim is controlling a 1.5MT machine at a velocity of 100km/h on the freeway. The advertisers, in this case don't even bother to ask for permission. Or when a media outlet colludes with advertisers to pretend an article is "news". The Super Bowl is basically an advert interrupted by football. God knows how problem gamblers or drinkers manage to consume media without being triggered with all the gambling or alcohol ads. It's a disgrace.
  • robertlagrant 2y ago
    > it became apparent that advertising is an unavoidable and indidious artifact of capitalism It's an artifact of humans, not of capitalism. Plenty of people[0] use advertising who aren't capitalists. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_in_the_Soviet_Union
• ngriffiths 2y ago
  There are two major things missing: 1) No one actually likes this stuff, and it still exists everywhere, so it must be worth it. I feel like the article is a broad list of the author's least favorite aspects of today's information/social/economic environment. But those are just the cost of consuming all our favorite content for ~free, right? It's like saying "I think this price is oppressive, and although I am willing to pay for it, I think we should all try really hard to lower the cost." The privacy stuff stands out because it isn't transparent to the user, which is maybe the worst part about it. Like if everyone knew what data they were providing and exactly how it was used, it wouldn't feel so abusive. 2) The size of the company has to be a major factor here. If your local shop takes out an ad in the local newspaper, I don't care what weird psychological tactics they use, does it really hit the same way? "That's just the shop down the street, why are they being so weird." Conversely, is there any ad from a massive company that doesn't come across as "this is how we want you, our loyal subjects, to see the world?"
  • danaris 2y ago
    > so it must be worth it. ...To someone. That doesn't mean it's worth it to society. No one actually likes muggings, and they still exist everywhere, but that doesn't mean that our society would be worse off without muggings. No one actually likes the flu, and it still exists everywhere, but that doesn't mean that our society would be worse off without the flu. The idea that "it's still around/common, therefore it must be valuable" requires subscribing pretty hard to a version of free-market ideology that ignores a lot of objective reality.
    • ngriffiths 2y ago
      I don't see it as subscribing to free-market ideology - more like "every bad thing has a certain prevalence, and that prevalence is a policy choice." The flu exists because we don't aggressively isolate/contact trace people who get the flu, but it isn't that prevalent and results in few deaths because of how much we invest in vaccination, hygiene, and medical care. The muggings continue because we don't spend the insane amounts on law enforcement and surveillance that would really be required to eradicate them. Also, these examples are different in another way - few people get mugged or get the flu, but literally everyone consumes ads daily. I think a lot of people dislike ads but I'm not sure I agree that there is a strong desire to dramatically reduce or change them - people seem happy to complain but pretty hesitant to pay actual money to reduce them.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• disambiguation 2y ago
  The chicken and egg problem of this is that many early / young websites turned to advertising as a way to keep the lights on. This makes something like a federated ad-free internet a flimsy proposition. Which only leaves walled gardens and charity. I think we won't see change until ad blocking becomes mainstream.
• capitanazo77 2y ago
  Cáncer in chatgpt will be the MOST destructive cancer ever. That’s because it sounds like a friend you trust and tell your secrets. “Sounds like you’re depressed, here’s recommendations from travelapp”
• p3rls 2y ago
  Eh, I run an ad-supported website that employs and has had to fire people because of adblocker fluctuations before. I would kill to get a few regular sponsors and not need an ad platform but I've been literally able to only find one sponsor after almost a decade. No one wants to pay without tracking, especially in emerging markets/niches.