11 ms·

We should assume that all ads in general are scams. The noise to signal ratio is too large to care. Word of mouth and maybe trusted communities like HN is the o

by elashri 8mo ago

We should assume that all ads in general are scams. The noise to signal ratio is too large to care. Word of mouth and maybe trusted communities like HN is the only way to reliably discover new things.

rgblambda 8mo ago
That, unfortunately has pushed advertisers into guerrilla marketing tactics like posts and comments disguised as genuine user behaviour. It means we now need to parse whether what we're looking at is an ad or not. Maybe they would have done that anyway though.
TimByte 8mo ago
In practice I mostly ignore ads too but it feels like an ecosystem-level tragedy
pjc50 8mo ago
The only way out of this is to make ad platforms liable for scam ads. At the moment it's simply too profitable to print lies.
- giraffe_lady 8mo ago
  No there is another way. We can ban advertising completely.
  - lossyalgo 8mo ago
    How else do you make your product known? In many markets, there are just too many competitors, and so the only way to make any money at all is to advertise. I also hate ads, but I also think there is a better way, and better regulation would go a long way to making ads more bearable.
    - ben_w 8mo ago
      > there are just too many competitors This ought to be a signal that the market is already being served, that it is unlikely to be a big opportunity to make more money. Even with advertising, what you have in such a market is an all-pay auction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-pay_auction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-pay_auction The end point is nobody makes any profit on apps, because all the money that ought to be profit goes to paying for a bidding war on ad slots.
      - lossyalgo 8mo ago
        "The market" is no longer your local neighborhood, it's often the entire globe.
        ben_w 8mo ago
        I know that. In fact, more than know, I assumed the only category under discussion were at a minimum nation-scale, what with local knowledge not requiring online advertising as a sign on a building is enough for local neighbourhoods.
    - giraffe_lady 8mo ago
      You should never see an ad without seeking it out, so catalogs or something I guess. It's not my problem frankly. If having ads is so important they should have been more careful with them.
      - lossyalgo 8mo ago
        I miss catalogs! And I'm not sure that works for every kind of product. You forgot to mention door-to-door sales (not a thing outside of the US AFAIK) or cold-calling potential customers (only applicable for certain types of products), good old word-of-mouth (need to get lucky and reach "influencers"), or throw tupperware-type parties. There are surely other methods as well. Re: being careful Any system created by humans will be abused unless regulated. And even then, there will always be loopholes which will be abused until punished (and even punishment might not be a proper deterrent if it can be calculated as a cost of business. (Yes I'm arguing for and against you, just thinking out loud basically ;) edit: grammar
- ocdtrekkie 8mo ago
  Yep, one of the big problems is the penalty for any corporate crime today is not enough. Often the crime is more profitable than the penalty hurts. If you want to fix ads, make a malicious ad cost the ad network triple the amount they got paid to display it. Corporations are psychopathic by design, if you want to fix them you need to make it an actual financial risk to do something bad. And then heck, if you want to make stopping the original bad actors more effective, make the platforms pay up those damages but empower them to recover that loss if they can get it from the malicious advertiser. You'll see platforms doing more vetting of content, doing more KYC, and focused on reducing their own risk.
- DudeOpotomus 8mo ago
  Kids today learning about the FTC and standards... we used to be a real country, with real laws that actually helped real people.
  - wnc3141 8mo ago
    Bernie Sanders on reversing America's decline https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/05/we-can-reverse-americas-decline-heres-how https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/05/we-can...
- alsetmusic 8mo ago
  One only needs to look at the Grok-generating-nudes fiasco to see that potential financial liabilities are a pittance to huge companies. We need to jail CEOs whose companies break the law. You can just get away with fraud: Former CEO of Volkswagen AG Charged with Conspiracy and Wire Fraud in Diesel Emissions Scandal https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-ceo-volkswagen-ag-charged-conspiracy-and-wire-fraud-diesel-emissions-scandal https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-ceo-volkswage... > He remains a fugitive in the United States and is wanted by the Environmental Protection Agency on charges including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to violate the Clean Air Act, and multiple counts of wire fraud. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Winterkorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Winterkorn
matheusmoreira 8mo ago
> We should assume that all ads in general are scams. The noise to signal ratio is too large to care. Completely agree. > Word of mouth and maybe trusted communities like HN is the only way to reliably discover new things. There is no evidence that HN is not being actively astroturfed though. Sadly community filtering cannot replace trust in individuals.
- threetonesun 8mo ago
  Pre LLMs I would have said the all-text format of HN probably kept the astroturfing low, but these days I'm less sure. It's still a much less engaging format than almost any other place on the web, although again, with LLMs you can even cheaply target the lowest value returns.
  - rightbyte 8mo ago
    You could read obvious shilling here pretending to like or pay and use the boringest B2B SaaS products way back too. Trying to get a proper grasp of consensus on open forums is hopeless.
    - matheusmoreira 8mo ago
      I wouldn't say it's entirely hopeless. Just gotta know who's behind the posts. Checking for conflicts of interest is essential. HN is valuable due the fact many notable hackers post here. Makes it easier to know who we are interacting with, what they stand for and who they work for. Invite only communities like lobsters are even better in that regard. Less random accounts adding noise. Some degree of elitism is a good thing.
      - rightbyte 8mo ago
        Yeah I agree. The point I was trying to make is that you can't judge like the share of some actual collective agreeing to something from reading post on forums.
      - 8mo ago
WarmWash 8mo ago
Generally if all the ads you see are scammy, it means you probably are using some form of tracking/privacy protection. When an ad network has a strong profile on you, legitimate companies pay good money for those ad slots. When they don't really know who you are, only bottom feeders bid on the ad slots you see. In a way, it almost acts as retribution for not submitting to the anti-privacy machine.
- digiown 8mo ago
  That's why you block ALL ads. Starve the beast. If an app has ads, I do not use it, end of story.
  - WarmWash 8mo ago
    Unfortunately the "beast" is the Internet content itself. Even HN itself is a massive ad. We are lured here with tech links so YC companies can fish in curated waters for workers. That is explicitly why this board is hosted. The real fix is paying money for everything, but as evidenced by the many attempts at this, no one actually wants to pay. People overwhelmingly want to block ads and backdoor subscriptions. For example, your average techy YouTuber just doing cool geeky stuff, 50% of viewers block ads and <1% become patreon/other paying subs. This comes under some kind of misplaced guise that if everyone blocks ads, geeky YouTuber will work for free. The Internet needs a level headed reconciliation with "the beast".
    - ihsw 8mo ago
      [dead]
    - digiown 8mo ago
      > HN itself is a massive ad I don't think it is the same. There is no manipulation involved here and many people seem to be looking for jobs actively. > no one actually wants to pay Two things 1. Most content is actually pretty worthless. It's subsidized by the ad-surveillance industrial complex. Even in the pre-LLM times there is so much blogspam, content farm articles, and slop videos because of this. 2. Payment monopolies have made microtransactions uneconomical through fees, which contributes to the friction of paying. I imagine in an alternate world with a crypto or fiat based digital currency with low enough fees, there would be much more direct payments. Seriously, if you just pay one cent per Youtube video, it'd dwarf the ad income for most channels. Your attention is hilariously worthless.
Terretta 8mo ago
I can't say the AI scripted AI voiced "my wife bet my abs vs. a trip to Paris" and "I ordered this and was going to throw it away but then the heavens opened and angels descended and gave me this Alibaba tchotchke" are harbingers of the idiocracy. Because it's already here. // Adblock at DNS used to kill these Apple News ads. They're no longer suppressed. Free with their Plus all the things and aggregated my content subs but I quit using it. Had loved Texture, this now sucks.
SoftTalker 8mo ago
> maybe trusted communities like HN Emphasis on maybe. HN is large enough that scammers will try to slip in. The moderation mechanisms probably catch a lot of it but not all. My trust in anything online or in an app is very low and must be earned.
an0malous 8mo ago
There’s plenty of scams on HN, people don’t notice the successful ones
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  And YC. Scams make successful companies. Evil as well. Flock was a YC startup, as well as some cryptocurrency scams I don't remember.
askl 8mo ago
> maybe trusted communities like HN Especially on this site I would be very careful with trusting any recommendations. Probably more often than not it's the product/service of the person talking about it, so basically an ad.
testing22321 8mo ago
I have not had ads in my life in any form for two decades. I don’t have a TV, don’t listen to the radio or read newspapers or magazines. I live in a small town with no metro, no billboards. I buy things I need like milk and vegetables, I don’t buy things that require ads for me to know about. I Adblock the web aggressively.
dddddaviddddd 8mo ago
> Word of mouth and maybe trusted communities like HN is the only way to reliably discover new things. Any sufficiently trusted (online) community will find many attempts to exploit its trust for profit.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
wasmainiac 8mo ago
> trusted communities like HN Please don’t. I’ve been here for a years under different usernames. I feel more and more bots or other actors are starting to infiltrate.
- MaxBarraclough 8mo ago
  > I’ve been here for a years under different usernames The guidelines ask that you don't do this. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html : > Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    You don't have to do things that other companies would like you to do, no matter how emphatically they are stated. Just the other day I replied to a comment complaining about how LinkedIn broke Google's ToS. As if that's somehow a problem.
  - wasmainiac 8mo ago
    I’m not hoarding a library of accounts to abuse the ToS. My last account is on a dead iPhone somewhere. Things break or transfer ownership. HN accounts are quick to make, and I’m not one to collect internet points.
pbasista 8mo ago
I think that the most fundamental issue with ads and more generally with provider-curated content is that they represent what the advertiser or the provider wants. Not what you want. Even if the ads are heavily personalized, the advertiser is still the one who is trying to push an idea onto you. Similarly, even if your social media account has a lot of personal information on you, the provider is still the one who is selecting which content will appear in you "feed". I believe that these practices make people less self-aware of what they actually want. Because they mostly respond to suggestions. They do much less research into what is possible. They just say yes or no to the things they see in their ads or in their "feed". While becoming more and more distant from the reality that is happening outside the provider-managed ads or "feeds". I think that a safe way out of this is to ignore ads and "feeds" completely. And actively search for the things or content you want. Curate your interests in a way you like. Not in a way advertisers or providers want.

by elashri 8mo ago

rgblambda 8mo ago

That, unfortunately has pushed advertisers into guerrilla marketing tactics like posts and comments disguised as genuine user behaviour. It means we now need to parse whether what we're looking at is an ad or not. Maybe they would have done that anyway though.

TimByte 8mo ago

In practice I mostly ignore ads too but it feels like an ecosystem-level tragedy

pjc50 8mo ago

The only way out of this is to make ad platforms liable for scam ads. At the moment it's simply too profitable to print lies.

giraffe_lady 8mo ago
No there is another way. We can ban advertising completely.
- lossyalgo 8mo ago
  How else do you make your product known? In many markets, there are just too many competitors, and so the only way to make any money at all is to advertise. I also hate ads, but I also think there is a better way, and better regulation would go a long way to making ads more bearable.
  - ben_w 8mo ago
    > there are just too many competitors This ought to be a signal that the market is already being served, that it is unlikely to be a big opportunity to make more money. Even with advertising, what you have in such a market is an all-pay auction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-pay_auction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-pay_auction The end point is nobody makes any profit on apps, because all the money that ought to be profit goes to paying for a bidding war on ad slots.
    - lossyalgo 8mo ago
      "The market" is no longer your local neighborhood, it's often the entire globe.
      - ben_w 8mo ago
        I know that. In fact, more than know, I assumed the only category under discussion were at a minimum nation-scale, what with local knowledge not requiring online advertising as a sign on a building is enough for local neighbourhoods.
  - giraffe_lady 8mo ago
    You should never see an ad without seeking it out, so catalogs or something I guess. It's not my problem frankly. If having ads is so important they should have been more careful with them.
    - lossyalgo 8mo ago
      I miss catalogs! And I'm not sure that works for every kind of product. You forgot to mention door-to-door sales (not a thing outside of the US AFAIK) or cold-calling potential customers (only applicable for certain types of products), good old word-of-mouth (need to get lucky and reach "influencers"), or throw tupperware-type parties. There are surely other methods as well. Re: being careful Any system created by humans will be abused unless regulated. And even then, there will always be loopholes which will be abused until punished (and even punishment might not be a proper deterrent if it can be calculated as a cost of business. (Yes I'm arguing for and against you, just thinking out loud basically ;) edit: grammar
ocdtrekkie 8mo ago
Yep, one of the big problems is the penalty for any corporate crime today is not enough. Often the crime is more profitable than the penalty hurts. If you want to fix ads, make a malicious ad cost the ad network triple the amount they got paid to display it. Corporations are psychopathic by design, if you want to fix them you need to make it an actual financial risk to do something bad. And then heck, if you want to make stopping the original bad actors more effective, make the platforms pay up those damages but empower them to recover that loss if they can get it from the malicious advertiser. You'll see platforms doing more vetting of content, doing more KYC, and focused on reducing their own risk.
DudeOpotomus 8mo ago
Kids today learning about the FTC and standards... we used to be a real country, with real laws that actually helped real people.
- wnc3141 8mo ago
  Bernie Sanders on reversing America's decline https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/05/we-can-reverse-americas-decline-heres-how https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/05/we-can...
alsetmusic 8mo ago
One only needs to look at the Grok-generating-nudes fiasco to see that potential financial liabilities are a pittance to huge companies. We need to jail CEOs whose companies break the law. You can just get away with fraud: Former CEO of Volkswagen AG Charged with Conspiracy and Wire Fraud in Diesel Emissions Scandal https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-ceo-volkswagen-ag-charged-conspiracy-and-wire-fraud-diesel-emissions-scandal https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-ceo-volkswage... > He remains a fugitive in the United States and is wanted by the Environmental Protection Agency on charges including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to violate the Clean Air Act, and multiple counts of wire fraud. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Winterkorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Winterkorn

matheusmoreira 8mo ago

> We should assume that all ads in general are scams. The noise to signal ratio is too large to care. Completely agree. > Word of mouth and maybe trusted communities like HN is the only way to reliably discover new things. There is no evidence that HN is not being actively astroturfed though. Sadly community filtering cannot replace trust in individuals.

threetonesun 8mo ago
Pre LLMs I would have said the all-text format of HN probably kept the astroturfing low, but these days I'm less sure. It's still a much less engaging format than almost any other place on the web, although again, with LLMs you can even cheaply target the lowest value returns.
- rightbyte 8mo ago
  You could read obvious shilling here pretending to like or pay and use the boringest B2B SaaS products way back too. Trying to get a proper grasp of consensus on open forums is hopeless.
  - matheusmoreira 8mo ago
    I wouldn't say it's entirely hopeless. Just gotta know who's behind the posts. Checking for conflicts of interest is essential. HN is valuable due the fact many notable hackers post here. Makes it easier to know who we are interacting with, what they stand for and who they work for. Invite only communities like lobsters are even better in that regard. Less random accounts adding noise. Some degree of elitism is a good thing.
    - rightbyte 8mo ago
      Yeah I agree. The point I was trying to make is that you can't judge like the share of some actual collective agreeing to something from reading post on forums.
    - 8mo ago

WarmWash 8mo ago

Generally if all the ads you see are scammy, it means you probably are using some form of tracking/privacy protection. When an ad network has a strong profile on you, legitimate companies pay good money for those ad slots. When they don't really know who you are, only bottom feeders bid on the ad slots you see. In a way, it almost acts as retribution for not submitting to the anti-privacy machine.

digiown 8mo ago
That's why you block ALL ads. Starve the beast. If an app has ads, I do not use it, end of story.
- WarmWash 8mo ago
  Unfortunately the "beast" is the Internet content itself. Even HN itself is a massive ad. We are lured here with tech links so YC companies can fish in curated waters for workers. That is explicitly why this board is hosted. The real fix is paying money for everything, but as evidenced by the many attempts at this, no one actually wants to pay. People overwhelmingly want to block ads and backdoor subscriptions. For example, your average techy YouTuber just doing cool geeky stuff, 50% of viewers block ads and <1% become patreon/other paying subs. This comes under some kind of misplaced guise that if everyone blocks ads, geeky YouTuber will work for free. The Internet needs a level headed reconciliation with "the beast".
  - ihsw 8mo ago
    [dead]
  - digiown 8mo ago
    > HN itself is a massive ad I don't think it is the same. There is no manipulation involved here and many people seem to be looking for jobs actively. > no one actually wants to pay Two things 1. Most content is actually pretty worthless. It's subsidized by the ad-surveillance industrial complex. Even in the pre-LLM times there is so much blogspam, content farm articles, and slop videos because of this. 2. Payment monopolies have made microtransactions uneconomical through fees, which contributes to the friction of paying. I imagine in an alternate world with a crypto or fiat based digital currency with low enough fees, there would be much more direct payments. Seriously, if you just pay one cent per Youtube video, it'd dwarf the ad income for most channels. Your attention is hilariously worthless.

Terretta 8mo ago

I can't say the AI scripted AI voiced "my wife bet my abs vs. a trip to Paris" and "I ordered this and was going to throw it away but then the heavens opened and angels descended and gave me this Alibaba tchotchke" are harbingers of the idiocracy. Because it's already here. // Adblock at DNS used to kill these Apple News ads. They're no longer suppressed. Free with their Plus all the things and aggregated my content subs but I quit using it. Had loved Texture, this now sucks.

SoftTalker 8mo ago

> maybe trusted communities like HN Emphasis on maybe. HN is large enough that scammers will try to slip in. The moderation mechanisms probably catch a lot of it but not all. My trust in anything online or in an app is very low and must be earned.

an0malous 8mo ago

There’s plenty of scams on HN, people don’t notice the successful ones

direwolf20 8mo ago
And YC. Scams make successful companies. Evil as well. Flock was a YC startup, as well as some cryptocurrency scams I don't remember.

askl 8mo ago

> maybe trusted communities like HN Especially on this site I would be very careful with trusting any recommendations. Probably more often than not it's the product/service of the person talking about it, so basically an ad.

testing22321 8mo ago

I have not had ads in my life in any form for two decades. I don’t have a TV, don’t listen to the radio or read newspapers or magazines. I live in a small town with no metro, no billboards. I buy things I need like milk and vegetables, I don’t buy things that require ads for me to know about. I Adblock the web aggressively.

dddddaviddddd 8mo ago

> Word of mouth and maybe trusted communities like HN is the only way to reliably discover new things. Any sufficiently trusted (online) community will find many attempts to exploit its trust for profit.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

wasmainiac 8mo ago

> trusted communities like HN Please don’t. I’ve been here for a years under different usernames. I feel more and more bots or other actors are starting to infiltrate.

MaxBarraclough 8mo ago
> I’ve been here for a years under different usernames The guidelines ask that you don't do this. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html : > Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  You don't have to do things that other companies would like you to do, no matter how emphatically they are stated. Just the other day I replied to a comment complaining about how LinkedIn broke Google's ToS. As if that's somehow a problem.
- wasmainiac 8mo ago
  I’m not hoarding a library of accounts to abuse the ToS. My last account is on a dead iPhone somewhere. Things break or transfer ownership. HN accounts are quick to make, and I’m not one to collect internet points.

pbasista 8mo ago

I think that the most fundamental issue with ads and more generally with provider-curated content is that they represent what the advertiser or the provider wants. Not what you want. Even if the ads are heavily personalized, the advertiser is still the one who is trying to push an idea onto you. Similarly, even if your social media account has a lot of personal information on you, the provider is still the one who is selecting which content will appear in you "feed". I believe that these practices make people less self-aware of what they actually want. Because they mostly respond to suggestions. They do much less research into what is possible. They just say yes or no to the things they see in their ads or in their "feed". While becoming more and more distant from the reality that is happening outside the provider-managed ads or "feeds". I think that a safe way out of this is to ignore ads and "feeds" completely. And actively search for the things or content you want. Curate your interests in a way you like. Not in a way advertisers or providers want.