7 ms·

Advertising as a major source of human dissatisfaction (2019) [pdf]

214 points by anigbrowl 11mo ago

mrdevlar 11mo ago
Whenever I read anything like this, I am reminded that everyone should see Adam Curtis' "The Century of Self" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoMi95tfgP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoMi95tfgP4) which is about how Sigmund Freud's nephew created the cancerous style of marketing that is ubiquitous in our society.
- sharkweek 11mo ago
  Yes, this should be required viewing in high school imo. As someone who used to think I was generally “immune” to advertising, I have come to realize the influence goes so much deeper than “see ad on TV, go buy product” and is instead a much, much darker sense of “the only way to get rid of this anxiety is to Buy More Stuff.” His more recent Can’t Get You Out of My Head is also fantastic about how we got from There to Here from WWII to present day.
- kridsdale3 11mo ago
  I watched this more than 10 years ago and it remains the singular top recommendation I have to anyone who wants to understand modern society. IT IS THAT GOOD.
- stuxnet79 11mo ago
  I watched this documentary almost 10 years ago now and it changed my life.
api 11mo ago
I'd be in favor of significantly taxing advertising for the same reason that we levy "vice taxes" on booze, cigarettes, gambling, etc. It would at the very least reduce the amount of it and select for advertising of a higher quality, cutting the noise a little.
- MattGaiser 11mo ago
  Well, we have to balance that with advertising funding a ton of things that we otherwise value but would rather not pay for. Transit, free wifi, little leagues, etc.
  - HWR_14 11mo ago
    No, we don't. Transit is primarily funded by taxes, then fares and only then ads. Ad-free municipal wifi exists in a lot of places. Etc.
  - crote 11mo ago
    How about we just tax companies, and give those things government subsidies? Same outcome, but without the ugly ads.
  - ben_w 11mo ago
    Advertising either does or doesn't cause an increase in spending on whatever is advertised. If it does increase spending on things being advertised, the absence leaves us with more money for all those other things that are currently ad-supported. If it doesn't, it's a scam. If those things supported by ads would be literally unaffordable by the consumers if not for those ads, because the consumers are so poor they have no money to spend, the fork is still true; it's just that if those ads work then they push those already-poor consumers into debt for things they'd otherwise not buy because they couldn't afford, making them even poorer.
  - morleytj 11mo ago
    The reason it pays for that is through redistribution though, right? If they weren't receiving a monetary benefit from advertising, they wouldn't run them, and the monetary benefit needs to be larger than the cost to fund those things, otherwise it wouldn't be cost-efficient to run it. By definition it shows an issue where we have a process that tricks human minds into thinking they aren't paying for something, when as a collective, we pay more for a worse service than we would have if it existed in a alternate framework.
  - venturecruelty 11mo ago
JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
Does anyone tax ad spend?
- genericacct 11mo ago
  It is actually incentivized in some cases
- HWR_14 11mo ago
  Ad spend is usually tax deductible
- nickff 11mo ago
  The UK has a 'Digital Services Tax', which is effectively an internet ad tax: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/introduction-of-the-digital-services-tax/digital-services-tax https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/introduction-of-t... You could also argue that corporate taxes do tax ads, as they're applied to advertising-based companies, though these taxes usually don't 'target' ad companies. Corporate taxes are passed on to customers, employees, suppliers, or investors; usually one of the first three (and most often the first one), as that list is in increasing order of 'captivity'.
- arjie 11mo ago
  I assume you mean some percent of ad spend as a tax? Well, the cheapest ads to run are usually the most obnoxious ones. Taxing ad spend is a bit like taxing you more the nicer the building you build on a piece of land. You're directing the incentive in the wrong direction. A minimum fee per ad run perhaps would have an effect more in line with what you're thinking, I think, though I haven't thought about it much.
amelius 11mo ago
This doesn't even address the disastrous effects of overconsumption that inevitability follow from advertising. Advertising is destroying the climate and our planet.
nathan_compton 11mo ago
I maintain a healthy depression without ads, the old fashioned way.
karlgkk 11mo ago
Between adblock, piracy, and generally avoiding services, and things that make me see ads… it’s always really jarring when I visit my parents and I’m forced to watch cable TV. It’s like being assaulted.
- kachapopopow 11mo ago
  I got assulted with a youtube ad recently I couldn't believe how bad it made me feel and I don't really know why. At least the ads on twitter are generally amusing in a way where it's some ai furries that look like kids or some outright scam, but having an ad pretend to be my friend / relate to me felt so offputting that it doesn't even make sense.
  - ben_w 11mo ago
    > At least the ads on twitter are generally amusing in a way where it's some ai furries that look like kids or some outright scam Ironic, as most of the furries I know hate GenAI with a passion.
  - nilamo 11mo ago
    They're very annoying all around on YouTube. Hit skip, wait five seconds, hit skip again... and if you don't, there's a several minute ad??!
    - hdgvhicv 11mo ago
      I see some adverts on YouTube on channels I watch, I just jump ahead (“commonly skipped section” feature). Some I actually enjoy and don’t jump over (map men ones are typically good). I don’t recognise this “wait 5 seconds” bit.
      - Telaneo 11mo ago
        That bit is for the preroll ad you get without an adblocker.
- WD-42 11mo ago
allears 11mo ago
Capitalism (at least our form of it) requires consumerism. Consumerism requires advertising. You may think it's just an annoyance, but it's the foundation of our economy. A dissatisfied consumer wants more; a satisfied consumer doesn't. Making as much money as possible off consumers is considered the highest business goal. Of course that leads to developing expertise in manipulating them.
- kelseyfrog 11mo ago
  So you saying that capitalism's current form is incompatible with an ad-free world? What's the downside?
  - allears 11mo ago
    We're living in the "downside," if you want to call it that. I was just trying to point out that advertising is pervasive for a very good reason, because our society has created strong incentives and few barriers for it. And it's required to support our economy, otherwise all that stuff wouldn't get consumed.
    - venturecruelty 11mo ago
      Is it good or bad that so many (often disposable) things are getting consumed?
FrankWilhoit 11mo ago
Advertising is, quite simply, a form of abuse. It is psychic violence that leaves no outward mark but diminishes its target by attempting to replace their perceptions, judgments, intentions with its own. A society with a pragmatic regard for its own survival would ban it outright.
- SoftTalker 11mo ago
  By what other means would people with a product or service to provide reach other people who are interested in obtaining that product or service?
  - fruitworks 11mo ago
    classifieds, directories, that sort of thing
    - SoftTalker 11mo ago
      That's advertising.
      - Telaneo 11mo ago
        A directory is no more advertising than a database is. Classifieds hasn't been a thing in newspapers since the 2000s, at least where I live. Any classifieds website isn't advertising in any meaningful sense of the term. It's much closer to a database than an ad.
      - fruitworks 11mo ago
        It's more like a phone book
  - LadyCailin 11mo ago
    Organic searches and word of mouth.
  - NickM 11mo ago
    Have you really never bought a product or service for some other reason than that you saw an ad for it? People have plenty of other ways of finding out about useful products and services. You can talk to your friends and family, or go to a store and talk to a salesperson, or look up product reviews online, or even pay for something like a Consumer Reports subscription.
RustySwarf 11mo ago
As Charlie Munger pointed out, our economy does not run on greed, it runs on envy. Why? Because advertising discovered insecurity as the most effective crowbar. Advertising is the bedrock of the consumer value system, which has been the basis for the US economy since the end of World War II. What can we as individuals do about it? Recognize advertising as hostile and banish it. Most of us, instead, are trying to assemble a worldview out of mismatched pieces of advertising, which is not working out very well. When we write and think, we are often thinking in units of advertising, which is a horrifying realization. Even the fact that this discussion is being framed in terms of Happiness and Satisfaction is downstream of those qualities being centered by the consumer value system. Previous societies might have considered integrity or duty primary.
- squigz 11mo ago
  > When we write and think, we are often thinking in units of advertising Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?
  - gsf_emergency_6 11mo ago
    As meaning more than "having an audience in mind"? Off the cuff- "Don't get high on bullshit supply" "Have a therapist handy when writing (copy)" "Be kind to therapist, learn from TikTok, chunk your (ad-)ideas" I'm gonna pay more attention to the idea that the _idea economy_ also runs on envy :) Emo-integrity is not easy but it's _always_ easier with a society (sorry Buddhists/social liberals!) Oops! Not enough chunking !!
marssaxman 11mo ago
It should not be surprising that advertising is a source of dissatisfaction, since that is literally the point: inducing a feeling of unfulfilled desire is the mechanism by which ads generate sales. It would be more surprising if advertising were found not to be a major source of dissatisfaction, since we would have trouble explaining why businesses spend so much money on it.
apengwin 11mo ago
"what is happiness? It’s a moment before you need more happiness. You don't want most of it, you want all of it" - Churchill
- chistev 11mo ago
  Oh, I didn't know that was from Churchill. Don Draper from Mad Men had a similar quote about success.
CGMthrowaway 11mo ago
Interesting finding from the paper: Newspapers & magazines drive the negative link. TV/radio/film ads show no clear effect
doctorpangloss 11mo ago
this isn't a "credibility revolution" paper, it doesn't show causality, it doesn't use randomization anywhere, and it is very much a post hoc ergo proctor hoc sort of thing some evidence of the contrary: DTC pharmaceutical ads about Zoloft, a depression medication, cause better health outcomes https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/695475 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/695475 not merely correlation but causation. the approach used here was part of a family of approaches that won the Nobel in 2012 another good one: advertising caused increases in treatment and adherence to medicine https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37275770/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37275770/ there is also a great paper that scary lawyer ads about statins CAUSE lower adherence to statins, so negative advertising causes negative outcomes. unsurprising. i'm not saying that these two papers generalize to the whole of digital advertising. it is as difficult to generalize about global digital advertising at it is to generalize about the US defense budget - they are comparable in size (about $800b/y both) and complexity of missions. it does feel good though. i'm glad this comment will get downvoted by people who are not interested in actually discussing the merits of the paper versus their vibes. instead you could look at it as a victory for the FDA, it has done a great job at regulating drugs (at least since 1965 when the SSA created medicare and the regulations started to matter) such that advertising them is mostly a good thing. You can extrapolate from there to say, well we should regulate what you can advertise instead of delegating it out to upvotes and downvotes on Facebook, which is really how bad and good ads are controlled.
- ctoth 11mo ago
  Pharma reps (advertising) consume physician time --> doctors have less time per patient --> patients don't get properly evaluated --> DTC ads "help" by telling patients what their doctor didn't have time to ---> study shows DTC ads improve outcomes --> this is cited as evidence advertising is good
xriddle 11mo ago
Yet how many of our jobs wouldn't exist without advertising ... I'm not saying it's right or wrong just a fact. Advertising is foundational to many modern industries, especially digital ones. Social platforms, media companies, search engines, news, free apps, podcasts, streaming tiers. A ton of your daily internet exists because ads bankroll the whole mess. Without advertising, half the tech economy collapses into subscription-only fiefdoms. Unfortunately if advertising vanished tomorrow, lots of companies would die, tons of jobs would evaporate, and the economy would contort into something unrecognizable.
- ben_w 11mo ago
  With GenAI, I suspect a lot that could be ad-supported will evaporate anyway. How can you get a reputation for a high-quality well-researched podcast(/youtube channel) when your voice(/face) can be cloned by the advertiser who buys a slot somewhere in your podcast(/video) to sell some snakeoil? Are those your friends you're seeing on social media enjoying ${brand} or supporting ${politician}? Or did your friends all leave the site years ago, and these are just fakes, legally licenced by the advertisers from the social media firm thanks to a clause in the TOS that's hard for non-lawyers to comprehend the consequences of?
  - hdgvhicv 11mo ago
    Martin Lewis has struggled with scammers pretending to be him (a trusted consumer champion in the U.K.) for over 20 years. American platforms refuse to do anything to stop it though. That’s not just advert, it’s fraud - fraud people like Zuck and Musk make a fortune from.
    - ben_w 11mo ago
      And now everyone can have this experience.
- yoavm 11mo ago
  You're saying that like it was a bad thing...
- 11mo ago
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
arjie 11mo ago
Advertising for content-creators is just a tool to capture value provided to people. The vast majority of people would rather pay in advertising than pay in dollars. In fact, if you use hn.algolia.com and look around you'll see that paywall complaints are far more common than advertising ones. This also applies on Reddit and Instagram and so on. So far there are a few known theoretical approaches to reward content-creators: * subscriptions/paywalls * advertising * micro-transactions Paywalls work if you have a high brand value with a relatively fixed audience that will accept a steady stream of content. The WSJ, NYT, etc. can command these. Even Slow Boring et al. can do that. But the majority of smaller brand value content creators face the terrible fact that brands have a Pareto property: the top few ones occupy almost all of customers' minds and then you're battling for a tiny portion of their attention. The subscription revenue is similar to a patronage model, and information in general has to be like this because replicating it is zero cost but obtaining it is high-cost. This means that you can easily be out-competed by the guy who just copies your stuff and posts it. You have to somehow convince your audience that it's worth paying for your next stuff. Micro-transactions are the weakest model. They are infeasible and socially unacceptable because consumers expect the full range of financial protection they have on 'macro'-transactions - and that cannot come for free. This sets a floor on micro-transactions and the overhead makes that not worth it. To make it worse, a micro-transaction-based economy has the problem that you don't really incentivize the content creator. You incentivize the guy who can best capture your attention. Either SEO or submarine Word-of-Mouth or native advertising. It doesn't matter which. That guy can always undercut the creator because he's not producing the thing he's selling. It's worse for information-things like Slow Boring etc. Matt Yglesias cannot stop someone from copy-pasting his stuff. For the vast majority of content creators, advertising is a fantastic thing. It allows this massive three-sided marketplace between consumers, content creators, and brands. It lowers the marketing effort so more creators can participate. It allows consumers to pay for content by getting things they want. It allows brands to reach consumers they want. To be honest, I think Internet Advertising and especially the real-time bidding approach is as good as one can imagine for the vast majority of people to be able to consume all the content they want. It's led to this absolute explosion of services and information that no one could ever have imagined. And the low barrier on running targeted ads has meant that even small indie bands can survive with a good marketing effort. Gone are the days when only the big multinationals were taste-makers. Now you have micro-audiences that smaller creators can reach and for whom it's worth them producing content for. Honestly, it's fantastic to see. I'm a huge fan of advertising for what it's enabled. I prefer to use YouTube Premium, and I have my subscriptions, but when I didn't have as much money it was much nicer to be able to trade by allowing brands to be seen by me. So yes, there are the shady football streaming sites that will shove porno into your face, but you know the game going there. For the rest of the world, I think the websites are correctly on the frontier of value vs. annoyance. Also, is it just me or are the results mostly statistically insignificant here? It seems like a grand claim with very weak evidence.
fpauser 11mo ago
When I realized how much ads manipulate me and my thinking, I stopped consuming radio/TV stations that send ads. This was >= 25 years ago. Additionally, I never surf without ad blocking and use DNS based ad blocking on all my devices + in our home router (nextdns). Besides this, I like to pay for the content I am interested in - which helps against ads. This is my personal mostly ad free bubble, I couldn't stand it any different.
Aurornis 11mo ago
Nobody in the comment section is apparently reading the paper, because the only subcategory that reached p<0.05 significance was newspaper advertising expenditure. When they stretch the p-value threshold for significance to p<0.1, they claim magazine advertising expenditure reached that threshold. TV, Radio, and Cinema advertising did not reach significance even at the expanded p<0.1 threshold. The methodology of the paper is also not great at all. They looked at changes in advertising expenditure and changes in happiness measures and then tried to correlate the two.
- happytoexplain 11mo ago
  This makes every single comment irrelevant/false?
  - Aurornis 11mo ago
    The comments that assume this paper supports their claims about digital, TV, or radio advertising are not as supported as they seem. Most comments are just airing opinions and grievances loosely related to the topic anyway.
- doctorpangloss 11mo ago
  I read the paper, there’s tons of interesting research showing advertising CAUSING certain effects (oftentimes good ones!) but, what’s the point of participating with that substance? People want to participate in a hand up-and-down motion on circularly adjacent partners about “advertising bad,” not learn something.
  - happytoexplain 11mo ago
    Why this bitterness in defense of advertisers of all things? Engage with the comments, rather than disparaging them all from above in a blanket statement. They all have substance regardless of the details of the study.
- kittikitti 11mo ago
  The sum of total advertising expenditure includes TV, Radio, and Cinema which did reach the threshold. It's harder to get the significance threshold when the data is split apart than on the whole.
Jolliness7501 11mo ago
Thats why I singed out from ads everywhere I could. Adblocking everywhere it's possible, no legacy radio or tv - only add-free subscriptions or free alternatives, alt-apps for youtube, no social-media like f...book, twitter or (Thor forbid) tictok. I always reject any discounts, special offers when it require to agree to "marketing cominication". I block all robocalls and if any pass throu I chase down the company behind it and file complain to authorities (in my country it's illegal to contact anyone without him/her agree for it). Not everything works of course and only ads I cannot block are OOH like billboards. I support creators directly where it's worth and pay or donate for all sites/services/apps I use frequently (if applicable).
zkmon 11mo ago
There is a basic correlation which doesn't need data or research. Advertising is about gaining people's attention and creating familiarity for a product. People's satisfaction is about gap between their expectation and actuals. Since advertising tends to increase expectations, it would lead to more dissatisfaction. This is a direct consequence.
kyboren 11mo ago
I'll take this opportunity to get on a soapbox and preach: We need to shift our understanding of digital programmatic advertising to basically the pimp/hoe model. It's population-scale digital pimping. They put your ass on the RTB street to turn tricks. You get mindfucked by--and maybe catch some viruses from--any John who wants to take a crack at you. In return, you get this nice cheap TV/YouTube/Gmail/article. It's exploitative, dirty, exposes the bitches (i.e. you and your kids) to risks, and on a population scale it poses a serious safety and national security risk to our country. RTB bidstream surveillance means that all the data used in the pimps' matchmaking services can be used by many nefarious actors to physically track and target people, including spies, politicians, and other politically-exposed persons. Would you let your kid turn tricks for a pimp to get a Gucci handbag? No? Then why would you let Alphabet pimp your kid out to get a YouTube video?
xnx 11mo ago
Before a product can solve a problem, advertising must create the problem.
talkingtab 11mo ago
OMG. This is like reading a headline that says "Cigarette Smoking is a source of dissatisfaction" It is not advertising. It is a targeted attempt by other people to persuade you to do something for their benefit, their good. Without regard to the effects on you. Do you remember the Marlboro Man persuading people to buy cigarettes? Many people made lots of money from owning that stock. Lots of people died. Lots of people got addicted. Lots of people suffered. Do you remember Purdue Pharma? They made billions after persuading doctors to prescribe their drugs. They destroyed the lives of millions of Americans. Calling that "a source of dissatisfaction" is just wrong. Targeting makes this persuasion more effective and more abhorrent. You live your life, but targeted propaganda is designed to ensure that someone else gets the benefits. As though you were some domesticated animal.
1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago
Social Comparison and the Idealised Images of Advertising (1991) https://www.academia.edu/download/49742224/Social_Comparison_and_the_Idealized_Imag20161020-6744-wgwysu.pdf https://www.academia.edu/download/49742224/Social_Comparison... Lower Life Satisfaction Related to Materialism in Children Frequently Exposed to Advertising (2012) http://www.pattivalkenburg.nl/images/artikelen_pdf/2012_Opree_Buijzen_Valkenburg_Lower_Life_Satisfaction.pdf http://www.pattivalkenburg.nl/images/artikelen_pdf/2012_Opre...
zzo38computer 11mo ago
The excessive advertising also results in waste of paper and waste of time, wasted computer power and disk space, lighted advertising making light pollution, etc. This is in addition to issues of happiness, dishonesty, etc.
kittikitti 11mo ago
Thank you for sharing this.
Telaneo 11mo ago
Sometimes, I think of how much good could be done with all the money that goes into advertisements. Even if we just put all that money in The Onion's Money Hole™, so all the ads disappear, but nothing else changes, the world would still be a better place. Now imagine how much better public transit systems we could have, or better healthcare, or better social benefits. Even if we just spent all the money on a solid 80 foot golden cock and balls, that would still be a better use of money, since it atleast isn't actively making the world a more hostile place. But no, we can't have nice things.
1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago
How French spies, police and military personnel are betrayed by advertising data https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2025/12/13/how-french-spies-police-and-military-personnel-are-betrayed-by-advertising-data_6748453_13.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2025/12/13/how-fren...

214 points by anigbrowl 11mo ago

Whenever I read anything like this, I am reminded that everyone should see Adam Curtis' "The Century of Self" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoMi95tfgP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoMi95tfgP4) which is about how Sigmund Freud's nephew created the cancerous style of marketing that is ubiquitous in our society.

sharkweek 11mo ago
Yes, this should be required viewing in high school imo. As someone who used to think I was generally “immune” to advertising, I have come to realize the influence goes so much deeper than “see ad on TV, go buy product” and is instead a much, much darker sense of “the only way to get rid of this anxiety is to Buy More Stuff.” His more recent Can’t Get You Out of My Head is also fantastic about how we got from There to Here from WWII to present day.
kridsdale3 11mo ago
I watched this more than 10 years ago and it remains the singular top recommendation I have to anyone who wants to understand modern society. IT IS THAT GOOD.
stuxnet79 11mo ago
I watched this documentary almost 10 years ago now and it changed my life.

api 11mo ago

I'd be in favor of significantly taxing advertising for the same reason that we levy "vice taxes" on booze, cigarettes, gambling, etc. It would at the very least reduce the amount of it and select for advertising of a higher quality, cutting the noise a little.

MattGaiser 11mo ago
Well, we have to balance that with advertising funding a ton of things that we otherwise value but would rather not pay for. Transit, free wifi, little leagues, etc.
- HWR_14 11mo ago
  No, we don't. Transit is primarily funded by taxes, then fares and only then ads. Ad-free municipal wifi exists in a lot of places. Etc.
- crote 11mo ago
  How about we just tax companies, and give those things government subsidies? Same outcome, but without the ugly ads.
- ben_w 11mo ago
  Advertising either does or doesn't cause an increase in spending on whatever is advertised. If it does increase spending on things being advertised, the absence leaves us with more money for all those other things that are currently ad-supported. If it doesn't, it's a scam. If those things supported by ads would be literally unaffordable by the consumers if not for those ads, because the consumers are so poor they have no money to spend, the fork is still true; it's just that if those ads work then they push those already-poor consumers into debt for things they'd otherwise not buy because they couldn't afford, making them even poorer.
- morleytj 11mo ago
  The reason it pays for that is through redistribution though, right? If they weren't receiving a monetary benefit from advertising, they wouldn't run them, and the monetary benefit needs to be larger than the cost to fund those things, otherwise it wouldn't be cost-efficient to run it. By definition it shows an issue where we have a process that tricks human minds into thinking they aren't paying for something, when as a collective, we pay more for a worse service than we would have if it existed in a alternate framework.
- venturecruelty 11mo ago

JumpCrisscross 11mo ago

Does anyone tax ad spend?

genericacct 11mo ago
It is actually incentivized in some cases
HWR_14 11mo ago
Ad spend is usually tax deductible
nickff 11mo ago
The UK has a 'Digital Services Tax', which is effectively an internet ad tax: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/introduction-of-the-digital-services-tax/digital-services-tax https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/introduction-of-t... You could also argue that corporate taxes do tax ads, as they're applied to advertising-based companies, though these taxes usually don't 'target' ad companies. Corporate taxes are passed on to customers, employees, suppliers, or investors; usually one of the first three (and most often the first one), as that list is in increasing order of 'captivity'.
arjie 11mo ago
I assume you mean some percent of ad spend as a tax? Well, the cheapest ads to run are usually the most obnoxious ones. Taxing ad spend is a bit like taxing you more the nicer the building you build on a piece of land. You're directing the incentive in the wrong direction. A minimum fee per ad run perhaps would have an effect more in line with what you're thinking, I think, though I haven't thought about it much.

amelius 11mo ago

This doesn't even address the disastrous effects of overconsumption that inevitability follow from advertising. Advertising is destroying the climate and our planet.

nathan_compton 11mo ago

I maintain a healthy depression without ads, the old fashioned way.

karlgkk 11mo ago

Between adblock, piracy, and generally avoiding services, and things that make me see ads… it’s always really jarring when I visit my parents and I’m forced to watch cable TV. It’s like being assaulted.

kachapopopow 11mo ago
I got assulted with a youtube ad recently I couldn't believe how bad it made me feel and I don't really know why. At least the ads on twitter are generally amusing in a way where it's some ai furries that look like kids or some outright scam, but having an ad pretend to be my friend / relate to me felt so offputting that it doesn't even make sense.
- ben_w 11mo ago
  > At least the ads on twitter are generally amusing in a way where it's some ai furries that look like kids or some outright scam Ironic, as most of the furries I know hate GenAI with a passion.
- nilamo 11mo ago
  They're very annoying all around on YouTube. Hit skip, wait five seconds, hit skip again... and if you don't, there's a several minute ad??!
  - hdgvhicv 11mo ago
    I see some adverts on YouTube on channels I watch, I just jump ahead (“commonly skipped section” feature). Some I actually enjoy and don’t jump over (map men ones are typically good). I don’t recognise this “wait 5 seconds” bit.
    - Telaneo 11mo ago
      That bit is for the preroll ad you get without an adblocker.
WD-42 11mo ago

allears 11mo ago

Capitalism (at least our form of it) requires consumerism. Consumerism requires advertising. You may think it's just an annoyance, but it's the foundation of our economy. A dissatisfied consumer wants more; a satisfied consumer doesn't. Making as much money as possible off consumers is considered the highest business goal. Of course that leads to developing expertise in manipulating them.

kelseyfrog 11mo ago
So you saying that capitalism's current form is incompatible with an ad-free world? What's the downside?
- allears 11mo ago
  We're living in the "downside," if you want to call it that. I was just trying to point out that advertising is pervasive for a very good reason, because our society has created strong incentives and few barriers for it. And it's required to support our economy, otherwise all that stuff wouldn't get consumed.
  - venturecruelty 11mo ago
    Is it good or bad that so many (often disposable) things are getting consumed?

FrankWilhoit 11mo ago

Advertising is, quite simply, a form of abuse. It is psychic violence that leaves no outward mark but diminishes its target by attempting to replace their perceptions, judgments, intentions with its own. A society with a pragmatic regard for its own survival would ban it outright.

SoftTalker 11mo ago
By what other means would people with a product or service to provide reach other people who are interested in obtaining that product or service?
- fruitworks 11mo ago
  classifieds, directories, that sort of thing
  - SoftTalker 11mo ago
    That's advertising.
    - Telaneo 11mo ago
      A directory is no more advertising than a database is. Classifieds hasn't been a thing in newspapers since the 2000s, at least where I live. Any classifieds website isn't advertising in any meaningful sense of the term. It's much closer to a database than an ad.
    - fruitworks 11mo ago
      It's more like a phone book
- LadyCailin 11mo ago
  Organic searches and word of mouth.
- NickM 11mo ago
  Have you really never bought a product or service for some other reason than that you saw an ad for it? People have plenty of other ways of finding out about useful products and services. You can talk to your friends and family, or go to a store and talk to a salesperson, or look up product reviews online, or even pay for something like a Consumer Reports subscription.

RustySwarf 11mo ago

As Charlie Munger pointed out, our economy does not run on greed, it runs on envy. Why? Because advertising discovered insecurity as the most effective crowbar. Advertising is the bedrock of the consumer value system, which has been the basis for the US economy since the end of World War II. What can we as individuals do about it? Recognize advertising as hostile and banish it. Most of us, instead, are trying to assemble a worldview out of mismatched pieces of advertising, which is not working out very well. When we write and think, we are often thinking in units of advertising, which is a horrifying realization. Even the fact that this discussion is being framed in terms of Happiness and Satisfaction is downstream of those qualities being centered by the consumer value system. Previous societies might have considered integrity or duty primary.

squigz 11mo ago
> When we write and think, we are often thinking in units of advertising Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?
- gsf_emergency_6 11mo ago
  As meaning more than "having an audience in mind"? Off the cuff- "Don't get high on bullshit supply" "Have a therapist handy when writing (copy)" "Be kind to therapist, learn from TikTok, chunk your (ad-)ideas" I'm gonna pay more attention to the idea that the _idea economy_ also runs on envy :) Emo-integrity is not easy but it's _always_ easier with a society (sorry Buddhists/social liberals!) Oops! Not enough chunking !!

marssaxman 11mo ago

It should not be surprising that advertising is a source of dissatisfaction, since that is literally the point: inducing a feeling of unfulfilled desire is the mechanism by which ads generate sales. It would be more surprising if advertising were found not to be a major source of dissatisfaction, since we would have trouble explaining why businesses spend so much money on it.

apengwin 11mo ago

"what is happiness? It’s a moment before you need more happiness. You don't want most of it, you want all of it" - Churchill

chistev 11mo ago
Oh, I didn't know that was from Churchill. Don Draper from Mad Men had a similar quote about success.

CGMthrowaway 11mo ago

Interesting finding from the paper: Newspapers & magazines drive the negative link. TV/radio/film ads show no clear effect

doctorpangloss 11mo ago

this isn't a "credibility revolution" paper, it doesn't show causality, it doesn't use randomization anywhere, and it is very much a post hoc ergo proctor hoc sort of thing some evidence of the contrary: DTC pharmaceutical ads about Zoloft, a depression medication, cause better health outcomes https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/695475 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/695475 not merely correlation but causation. the approach used here was part of a family of approaches that won the Nobel in 2012 another good one: advertising caused increases in treatment and adherence to medicine https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37275770/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37275770/ there is also a great paper that scary lawyer ads about statins CAUSE lower adherence to statins, so negative advertising causes negative outcomes. unsurprising. i'm not saying that these two papers generalize to the whole of digital advertising. it is as difficult to generalize about global digital advertising at it is to generalize about the US defense budget - they are comparable in size (about $800b/y both) and complexity of missions. it does feel good though. i'm glad this comment will get downvoted by people who are not interested in actually discussing the merits of the paper versus their vibes. instead you could look at it as a victory for the FDA, it has done a great job at regulating drugs (at least since 1965 when the SSA created medicare and the regulations started to matter) such that advertising them is mostly a good thing. You can extrapolate from there to say, well we should regulate what you can advertise instead of delegating it out to upvotes and downvotes on Facebook, which is really how bad and good ads are controlled.

ctoth 11mo ago
Pharma reps (advertising) consume physician time --> doctors have less time per patient --> patients don't get properly evaluated --> DTC ads "help" by telling patients what their doctor didn't have time to ---> study shows DTC ads improve outcomes --> this is cited as evidence advertising is good

xriddle 11mo ago

Yet how many of our jobs wouldn't exist without advertising ... I'm not saying it's right or wrong just a fact. Advertising is foundational to many modern industries, especially digital ones. Social platforms, media companies, search engines, news, free apps, podcasts, streaming tiers. A ton of your daily internet exists because ads bankroll the whole mess. Without advertising, half the tech economy collapses into subscription-only fiefdoms. Unfortunately if advertising vanished tomorrow, lots of companies would die, tons of jobs would evaporate, and the economy would contort into something unrecognizable.

ben_w 11mo ago
With GenAI, I suspect a lot that could be ad-supported will evaporate anyway. How can you get a reputation for a high-quality well-researched podcast(/youtube channel) when your voice(/face) can be cloned by the advertiser who buys a slot somewhere in your podcast(/video) to sell some snakeoil? Are those your friends you're seeing on social media enjoying ${brand} or supporting ${politician}? Or did your friends all leave the site years ago, and these are just fakes, legally licenced by the advertisers from the social media firm thanks to a clause in the TOS that's hard for non-lawyers to comprehend the consequences of?
- hdgvhicv 11mo ago
  Martin Lewis has struggled with scammers pretending to be him (a trusted consumer champion in the U.K.) for over 20 years. American platforms refuse to do anything to stop it though. That’s not just advert, it’s fraud - fraud people like Zuck and Musk make a fortune from.
  - ben_w 11mo ago
    And now everyone can have this experience.
yoavm 11mo ago
You're saying that like it was a bad thing...
11mo ago

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arjie 11mo ago

Advertising for content-creators is just a tool to capture value provided to people. The vast majority of people would rather pay in advertising than pay in dollars. In fact, if you use hn.algolia.com and look around you'll see that paywall complaints are far more common than advertising ones. This also applies on Reddit and Instagram and so on. So far there are a few known theoretical approaches to reward content-creators: * subscriptions/paywalls * advertising * micro-transactions Paywalls work if you have a high brand value with a relatively fixed audience that will accept a steady stream of content. The WSJ, NYT, etc. can command these. Even Slow Boring et al. can do that. But the majority of smaller brand value content creators face the terrible fact that brands have a Pareto property: the top few ones occupy almost all of customers' minds and then you're battling for a tiny portion of their attention. The subscription revenue is similar to a patronage model, and information in general has to be like this because replicating it is zero cost but obtaining it is high-cost. This means that you can easily be out-competed by the guy who just copies your stuff and posts it. You have to somehow convince your audience that it's worth paying for your next stuff. Micro-transactions are the weakest model. They are infeasible and socially unacceptable because consumers expect the full range of financial protection they have on 'macro'-transactions - and that cannot come for free. This sets a floor on micro-transactions and the overhead makes that not worth it. To make it worse, a micro-transaction-based economy has the problem that you don't really incentivize the content creator. You incentivize the guy who can best capture your attention. Either SEO or submarine Word-of-Mouth or native advertising. It doesn't matter which. That guy can always undercut the creator because he's not producing the thing he's selling. It's worse for information-things like Slow Boring etc. Matt Yglesias cannot stop someone from copy-pasting his stuff. For the vast majority of content creators, advertising is a fantastic thing. It allows this massive three-sided marketplace between consumers, content creators, and brands. It lowers the marketing effort so more creators can participate. It allows consumers to pay for content by getting things they want. It allows brands to reach consumers they want. To be honest, I think Internet Advertising and especially the real-time bidding approach is as good as one can imagine for the vast majority of people to be able to consume all the content they want. It's led to this absolute explosion of services and information that no one could ever have imagined. And the low barrier on running targeted ads has meant that even small indie bands can survive with a good marketing effort. Gone are the days when only the big multinationals were taste-makers. Now you have micro-audiences that smaller creators can reach and for whom it's worth them producing content for. Honestly, it's fantastic to see. I'm a huge fan of advertising for what it's enabled. I prefer to use YouTube Premium, and I have my subscriptions, but when I didn't have as much money it was much nicer to be able to trade by allowing brands to be seen by me. So yes, there are the shady football streaming sites that will shove porno into your face, but you know the game going there. For the rest of the world, I think the websites are correctly on the frontier of value vs. annoyance. Also, is it just me or are the results mostly statistically insignificant here? It seems like a grand claim with very weak evidence.

fpauser 11mo ago

When I realized how much ads manipulate me and my thinking, I stopped consuming radio/TV stations that send ads. This was >= 25 years ago. Additionally, I never surf without ad blocking and use DNS based ad blocking on all my devices + in our home router (nextdns). Besides this, I like to pay for the content I am interested in - which helps against ads. This is my personal mostly ad free bubble, I couldn't stand it any different.

Aurornis 11mo ago

Nobody in the comment section is apparently reading the paper, because the only subcategory that reached p<0.05 significance was newspaper advertising expenditure. When they stretch the p-value threshold for significance to p<0.1, they claim magazine advertising expenditure reached that threshold. TV, Radio, and Cinema advertising did not reach significance even at the expanded p<0.1 threshold. The methodology of the paper is also not great at all. They looked at changes in advertising expenditure and changes in happiness measures and then tried to correlate the two.

happytoexplain 11mo ago
This makes every single comment irrelevant/false?
- Aurornis 11mo ago
  The comments that assume this paper supports their claims about digital, TV, or radio advertising are not as supported as they seem. Most comments are just airing opinions and grievances loosely related to the topic anyway.
doctorpangloss 11mo ago
I read the paper, there’s tons of interesting research showing advertising CAUSING certain effects (oftentimes good ones!) but, what’s the point of participating with that substance? People want to participate in a hand up-and-down motion on circularly adjacent partners about “advertising bad,” not learn something.
- happytoexplain 11mo ago
  Why this bitterness in defense of advertisers of all things? Engage with the comments, rather than disparaging them all from above in a blanket statement. They all have substance regardless of the details of the study.
kittikitti 11mo ago
The sum of total advertising expenditure includes TV, Radio, and Cinema which did reach the threshold. It's harder to get the significance threshold when the data is split apart than on the whole.

Jolliness7501 11mo ago

Thats why I singed out from ads everywhere I could. Adblocking everywhere it's possible, no legacy radio or tv - only add-free subscriptions or free alternatives, alt-apps for youtube, no social-media like f...book, twitter or (Thor forbid) tictok. I always reject any discounts, special offers when it require to agree to "marketing cominication". I block all robocalls and if any pass throu I chase down the company behind it and file complain to authorities (in my country it's illegal to contact anyone without him/her agree for it). Not everything works of course and only ads I cannot block are OOH like billboards. I support creators directly where it's worth and pay or donate for all sites/services/apps I use frequently (if applicable).

zkmon 11mo ago

There is a basic correlation which doesn't need data or research. Advertising is about gaining people's attention and creating familiarity for a product. People's satisfaction is about gap between their expectation and actuals. Since advertising tends to increase expectations, it would lead to more dissatisfaction. This is a direct consequence.

kyboren 11mo ago

I'll take this opportunity to get on a soapbox and preach: We need to shift our understanding of digital programmatic advertising to basically the pimp/hoe model. It's population-scale digital pimping. They put your ass on the RTB street to turn tricks. You get mindfucked by--and maybe catch some viruses from--any John who wants to take a crack at you. In return, you get this nice cheap TV/YouTube/Gmail/article. It's exploitative, dirty, exposes the bitches (i.e. you and your kids) to risks, and on a population scale it poses a serious safety and national security risk to our country. RTB bidstream surveillance means that all the data used in the pimps' matchmaking services can be used by many nefarious actors to physically track and target people, including spies, politicians, and other politically-exposed persons. Would you let your kid turn tricks for a pimp to get a Gucci handbag? No? Then why would you let Alphabet pimp your kid out to get a YouTube video?

xnx 11mo ago

Before a product can solve a problem, advertising must create the problem.

talkingtab 11mo ago

OMG. This is like reading a headline that says "Cigarette Smoking is a source of dissatisfaction" It is not advertising. It is a targeted attempt by other people to persuade you to do something for their benefit, their good. Without regard to the effects on you. Do you remember the Marlboro Man persuading people to buy cigarettes? Many people made lots of money from owning that stock. Lots of people died. Lots of people got addicted. Lots of people suffered. Do you remember Purdue Pharma? They made billions after persuading doctors to prescribe their drugs. They destroyed the lives of millions of Americans. Calling that "a source of dissatisfaction" is just wrong. Targeting makes this persuasion more effective and more abhorrent. You live your life, but targeted propaganda is designed to ensure that someone else gets the benefits. As though you were some domesticated animal.

1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago

Social Comparison and the Idealised Images of Advertising (1991) https://www.academia.edu/download/49742224/Social_Comparison_and_the_Idealized_Imag20161020-6744-wgwysu.pdf https://www.academia.edu/download/49742224/Social_Comparison... Lower Life Satisfaction Related to Materialism in Children Frequently Exposed to Advertising (2012) http://www.pattivalkenburg.nl/images/artikelen_pdf/2012_Opree_Buijzen_Valkenburg_Lower_Life_Satisfaction.pdf http://www.pattivalkenburg.nl/images/artikelen_pdf/2012_Opre...

zzo38computer 11mo ago

The excessive advertising also results in waste of paper and waste of time, wasted computer power and disk space, lighted advertising making light pollution, etc. This is in addition to issues of happiness, dishonesty, etc.

kittikitti 11mo ago

Thank you for sharing this.

Telaneo 11mo ago

Sometimes, I think of how much good could be done with all the money that goes into advertisements. Even if we just put all that money in The Onion's Money Hole™, so all the ads disappear, but nothing else changes, the world would still be a better place. Now imagine how much better public transit systems we could have, or better healthcare, or better social benefits. Even if we just spent all the money on a solid 80 foot golden cock and balls, that would still be a better use of money, since it atleast isn't actively making the world a more hostile place. But no, we can't have nice things.

1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago

How French spies, police and military personnel are betrayed by advertising data https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2025/12/13/how-french-spies-police-and-military-personnel-are-betrayed-by-advertising-data_6748453_13.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2025/12/13/how-fren...