6 ms·

I'm So Tired of Ads

94 points by speckx 5mo ago

MyMemoryfails 5mo ago
Same, for same reason i refuse pay for services, in past paying for service would mean they wouldn't track you and sell your data, but thats not longer the case. Since that's additional profits for companies. Luckily there's few exemptions services which im happily paying since its proven they dont collect your data so advertisers can't prey on you when you're at lowest. Like did you know, just by obtaining credit card, your shopping history is sold? And you can't reject this, at least i haven't managed to do so. Yet in EU we're banning cash, where's option so i can buy my grocies without insurances knowing i bought candies for weekends so they'll hike insurance up.
bediger4000 5mo ago
Advertisers end up corrupting ad supported media, too. Before ads, Google keyword search was ok. After ads, it decayed, because catering to advertisers was how they got payed. It looks like ads will corrupt our only hope, AI.
lesuorac 5mo ago
I will point out at no point in the article does he complain about seeing advertisements for golfing tees in his Golf magazine subscription. IMO, the real problems with ads are 1) They just aren't relevant to you. No I'm not going to start drinking AG1 ... 2) There's no information about the product. How do I even know if AG1 is a good idea?
- nickff 5mo ago
  I agree with you, and think that despite all the hype about targeting and data mining, platforms like YouTube are horrible at determining people’s interests. Re-targeting does seem to ‘work’ better, but it is also extremely wasteful because many of the people seeing the ads have already made their purchase decision.
- Rygian 5mo ago
  Ads not only need to be relevant to me. They also have to be presented to me only when I am interested in the category of the advertised product or service. Otherwise they're just spam. (Consider the typical "you just bought a new fridge, so let's show you ads of fridges".)
- Retr0id 5mo ago
  The only kind of ad I don't find objectionable is the kind where someone makes a genuine recommendation, with no money changing hands. Or if money did happen to change hands, the same recommendation would've been made without it. As a random example of the latter, it doesn't bother me too much when electronics youtubers are sponsored by PCB manufacturing companies.
- al_borland 5mo ago
  Modern tech companies think the solution for ad relevance is data collection. This is the justification used by Google, Meta, and others for trying to learn as much about a user as possible. I think the golf magazine example is the way ads should be. Eliminate all data collection and advertise based on context. It doesn’t make any sense that a YouTuber making construction videos is advertising for AG1 and VPNs, but it would make sense to advertise for Home Depot. This is more in line with how advertisements work on traditional broadcast TV. I know a guy who used to run a forum for the saltwater fish tank hobby. He was mostly regional people. His site had ads from local businesses that these people actually used. Each year he’d host various events and these same companies would show up to sell coral and whatever else. It was a 2 way relationship, connecting willing buyers with local businesses. Exactly what marketing and advertisement should be. I don’t see a lot of ads thanks to using Kagi, YouTube Premium, and some other paid services. I won’t subscribe to a streaming service that will also show me ads, I draw a hard line on this. I think I’d be slightly less opposed to ads if the business of data collection behind them wasn’t so creepy and off-putting. The ad-to-content ratio also has to be reasonable. I think everyone of a certain age has had the experience of flipping through a magazine and finding out it’s 80% ads. That’s not pleasant.
iterance 5mo ago
Lord Dunsany, 1915, wrote "WHAT WE HAVE COME TO": When the advertiser saw the cathedral spires over the downs in the distance, he looked at them and wept. "If only," he said, "this were an advertisement of Beefo, so nice, so nutritious, try it in your soup, ladies like it."
- jorgen123 5mo ago
  That is literally the entire short story. The second last from "Fifty-One Tales". See here at Gutenberg: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/7838 https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/7838
nehal3m 5mo ago
I see some tenuous connection between advertising and extinction of our species. It goes something like: One: Human psychology tends to ascribe more weight to negative things than positive things in the short term. In the long term this generally balances out, but in the short term it's more prudent in a biological sense to pay attention to the rustling in the bushes than the berries you might pick from them. This is known as the [negativity bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias). Two: The modern gatekeepers of social interaction, Big Tech, employ blind algorithms that attempt to steer your attention towards spending more time on their platforms. These companies are the arbiters of the content we experience daily and what you do and don't see is mostly at their discretion. The techniques they employ, in simple terms, are designed to provoke what they call 'engagement'. They do this because at the end of the day FAANG have not only a financial interest, but a fiduciary duty to sell advertisements at the behest of their shareholders. The more they can engage you, the more ads they can sell. They employ live A-B testing, divide people into cohorts and poke and prod them with psychological techniques to try and glue your eyeballs to their ads. Extrapolated conclusion: These companies have a financial and legally binding interest to divide the population against itself, obstructing politics and social interaction to the point where we might not be able to achieve any of the goals that we need to reach to prevent oblivion.
dabinat 5mo ago
A lot of sites are essentially unreadable. There are things flashing at you, videos that autoplay, and the page will reload every 30 seconds and you lose your place. And even if ads are respectful of user experience, there is a cognitive load to having the content you want to consume bombarded with unrelated content, especially when it’s trying to manipulate your emotions in some way. Site owners don’t have a right to complain about people using ad blockers because their insistence on money over user experience is the reason everyone is installing them. A lot of the time I just read sites in Reader Mode. There are no ads or distractions and it seems that site owners haven’t figured out how to block or detect it yet.
- convolvatron 5mo ago
  its funny, I was trying to read something the other day, and I kept scrolling around and dismissing things, bobbing and weaving as the layout kept rearranging itself, doggedly trying to keep my place in the text. and I realized its like a video game. we've actually been trained to try to keep your eyes on the actual content and go through a series of skilled motions just to be able to read it.
- orwin 5mo ago
  Some website exists where ads are entirely self-hosted (at worst they are affiliate links), and if you self-host your ads, ublock default filters don't catch them. Which is my response: host the ads you run yourself, then we'll talk.
testing22321 5mo ago
I’ve used Adblock aggressively for the last 10 or 15 years. I don’t have a TV, don’t read magazines or the newspaper, don’t listen to the radio. I essentially don’t see or hear ads in my life.
- prmoustache 5mo ago
  There are still physical printed ads on billboards you can't really avoid, as well as all the branding from anything else you encounter in the streets: cars, bicycle, shops, drink coasters at the bar/pub, etc which are by essence advertising. Also many cultural things are full of product placements, all movies, many songs, event sponsoring, etc. As much as I do to avoid ads (using adblocker, priorizing gemtext caches of news sites, avoiding FM radio and buying my own music) I can't say I avoid it completely.
  - hoppyhoppy2 5mo ago
    Billboards are illegal in my state. Can't really avoid? More like they don't really exist (unless I travel).
  - internet2000 5mo ago
    Branding is not advertising and it weakens your point to imply it is.
    - prmoustache 5mo ago
      Branding is just long term marketing while advertising is short term. The end goal is the same.
  - testing22321 5mo ago
    I live in a place with no billboards. Nobody in this town would wear overt branding.
Shuang1 5mo ago
I use an adblocker and I have for a while now. Every so often I hear a moral argument about why adblockers are bad (ads support free internet, etc) but to be completely honest, I simply don't care anymore. Advertising is in such a malicious state that yes, I'm going to put my own experience quality over whatever collective good there is in watching ads.
- matheusmoreira 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - ligne 5mo ago
    I hate ads as much as anyone but they are not in any way comparable to rape. Please have some sense of proportion.
    - _doctor_love 5mo ago
      Please don't post comments like this. The only thing it can trigger is a flame war. It won't go anywhere productive. Friends, ignore this thread. Move on. Don't engage.
      - decremental 5mo ago
        [dead]
  - bheadmaster 5mo ago
    What would constitute "consent" to being communicated information to? With physical contact, speech can signal consent or lack thereof. How would you consent to speech itself?
    - fsflover 5mo ago
      If I intentionally search for a "new car" or go to a page reviewing cars, then I give my consent to receive new information about it.
basilikum 5mo ago
I just simply do not load, let alone look at ads. Physical ads are pretty virtually the only ads I actually have to see, but there are not thaaat many here.
jmugan 5mo ago
Even my daughter's dance recital this weekend had them. In between dances they frequently paused to play an ad on the big screen to the right. It was incredible.
- touwer 5mo ago
  Please tell me you're joking
  - jmugan 5mo ago
    I wish I were
- OptionOfT 5mo ago
  This takes place in Belgium: This reminds me of a time in high-school when I was ~12 and I learned that in the USA they were allowed to have brands in school books, like John buys 12 can of Pepsi, drinks 1 bottle, gives 3 away, how many does he have left. (note that I was 12 when I learned this, not that this reflects the level of math I learned at the age of 12).
parpfish 5mo ago
i'm curious what will happen to online ads as more and more internet traffic is done by bots. eventually, advertisers will catch on that humans are driving their impressions and will pull back, right? as soon as people realize the diminishing value of buying ads on random internet platforms... what next? ads have subsidized almost everything online. will we start paying for basic services, or will there be some other new mechanism for us to sell our attention in exchange for somebody else's web hosting?
- enoint 5mo ago
  Won’t bot-aware ad scripts simply inject a prompt with today’s list of fine products and services?
Nifty3929 5mo ago
Would you be willing to pay a small sum per piece of content? Maybe 10c per video or article? Maybe 1c for a short or something? Assume that it’s anonymous and frictionless (big assumptions, but this is just a thought experiment).
- nerdsniper 5mo ago
  Are websites really getting $0.10 for my single page view of a news article? $100,000 for every 1 million people who view the article? I’ll pay whatever the ad revenue is. It’s not $0.10 - it’s not even $0.01
- mikestew 5mo ago
  This has been brought up since the first banner ad went up 30 years ago, and rehashed to death on a variety of forums. The fact that no one has implemented a successful product tells me all I need to know. If that isn't convincing enough, consider that Spotify does the same thing with music, and from what I've read, Spotify is the only one making any money with that scheme. Because your "1 cent" is generous: try 0.001 cent.
  - upboundspiral 5mo ago
    Spotify rigs their system to benefit the large label companies and anyone with a critical mass so the people that "matter" say 'good enough' and the people with no voice get screwed. I suspect an honest implementation could actually work - that is, only if all the people that "matter" would not boycott this fair implementation and go off and do their own thing.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
Mallory_Ringess 5mo ago
Just block them everywhere you can and ignore them when you can't or - when they're too annoying - close whatever medium tried to push the bulshytt [1] on you. They're trying to influence you and the more you show you're annoyed, the more they notice they've succeeded in reaching you. Block and cover [2], block and cover. For the rest, live on. [1] https://anathem.fandom.com/wiki/Bulshytt https://anathem.fandom.com/wiki/Bulshytt [2] Yes, I sometimes just cover them with my hand if I happen to use a device without functional content blocking.
IAmGraydon 5mo ago
We all feel this way, but a wholistic view includes acknowledging what we receive in return for our time spent viewing ads. The author starts off the article by referencing getting up in the morning and wanting to watch a 10 video but having to spend several minutes viewing ads. They fail to mention how the person who spent their time creating that video should be compensated. Will he pay for the video? I doubt it. He wants it at no cost. This has another name: entitlement. He’s upset because no one will give him the things he wants for free, so he’s throwing an obvious tantrum about it. How about proposing a better model? I don’t have the answer, but I have a feeling we gravitated to the ad-supported freeware model because it’s actually the best and most efficient middle ground. It allows us to exchange our time for creators’ time without the inconvenience of turning it into money first. It removes a step.
willio58 5mo ago
I hate ads to the point I either pay or use other means to avoid ads in basically everything I use - NPR (I pay, happy to support) - Podcasts (I skip ads, using a client that supports that) - Movies/TV/Music (I self-host, thank you open source community!) - Twitch (I pay 1 creator 6$/mo and must watch 40+ hours per month) I don’t have mainline social media downloaded on my phone, I sometimes visit reddit.com and see the ads that aren’t blocked by ad block but I find myself visiting less often recently anyway. All of this to say, pay a bit and put in some work and you can avoid 95% of ads
internet2000 5mo ago
Adblock and don't watch Youtuber/Podcaster slop. Presto.
k310 5mo ago
If an ad is targeted, it's unwanted personal surveillance. If it's not targeted, it's meaningless crap. If it's from DuckDuckGo, like its search results, it's based on either crude geolocation or recent movies of similar names, bizarrely, when I search for specific technical terms. I have to qualify searches with multiple negations to get anything of interest to someone with more than high school education and interests. A lose-lose proposition. I block all ads with extreme prejudice and disable javascript very often to get rid of nag screens. I turn off javascript very often. A word to web devs. I hate your crap. (Repost) Since the rise of "social media" driven by clicks on ads, quality has almost entirely been replaced by quantity. And now, creativity has been farmed out as well. I still believe in quality. George Monbiot said it years ago. Advertising is a poison that demeans even love – and we're hooked on it. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/24/advertising-poison-hooked https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/24/advert...
- prinny_ 5mo ago
  > A word to web devs. I hate your crap. I would like to say I agree with the proposition of your post and your arguments, but as a web dev please don't mix the state of the web with what the median web dev considers a good UI/UX. We don't make the Jira tickets and if you have worked in a corporate environment you know very well that arguments like "but the UX/accessibility" hold very very little value in the context of most decisions.
  - k310 5mo ago
    I know, don't shoot the messenger. Orders are orders. I was kind to bosses except for the four times I left summarily, with a few choice words, or not. They were grasping at straws, a massive ego trip, their boss's ass, or just a move from engineering to (mis)management. But I ramble. Most stuff ain't worth arguing over. This time.
firstcommit 5mo ago
Jack in the Box Bacon Bacon Cheeseburger 90s Commercial (1999): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1v-16QUESk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1v-16QUESk
ChocMontePy 5mo ago
I use uBlock Origin and sometimes I have the opposite problem: I find out that a good movie came out months ago but I missed all the ads that flooded the internet because of my ad-blocker.
- loloquwowndueo 5mo ago
  If that’s how you found out, you didn’t miss out on much, did you? You watch it, and that’s it.
  - goodmythical 5mo ago
    If the only reccomendation that reaches me was paid for, it is definitionally not good enough to have garnered any personal reccomendation.
    - loloquwowndueo 5mo ago
      Right. Also, if there’s any social pressure to watch a new movie as it’s in theatres whatever, said pressure likely comes from people one knows, so still no need to expose yourself to ads to step in the loop.
throwaway2037 5mo ago
From the second paragraph, if anyone is unaware of "Big Bill Hell's Cars", I highly recommend that you watch the original (fake) advert here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rsEs4HWXeY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rsEs4HWXeY Definitely not safe for work! Know Your Meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/big-bill-hells https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/big-bill-hells > This highly over the top commercial was originally produced as a joke in 1990 for a faux award show put on be the Advertising Association of Baltimore called The Ad Follies. The AAB searched for agencies willing to produce ad spoofs mocking the top agencies in the city despite the impending threat that people working on these spoofs may place their jobs in jeopardy for doing so. The production was conducted at television studio WBFF and all of the footage originates from car manufacturer promotional videos and generic stock footage. The writer and narrator of the copy are still both unknown. > The video was never intended to be shown outside of The Ad Follies show because of the vulgarity and the possibilities of being viewed by the mocked. Copies were only distributed to people who worked on production and to WBFF employees following the screening.
MBCook 5mo ago
I see very few ads and my life is SO MUCH better for it. I see how other people love and I can’t understand how they can stand it. I only watch TV where I can pay the service for an ad-free tier. Every podcast I can I subscribe to to get rid of ads if I listen to it regularly. I had an ad blocker, of course. No ads in my music streaming. YouTube Premium, and I skip embedded ads. Any ads I see are infuriating. I’m pissed at Apple starting to shove them in my face more and more. App Store is whatever. But MAPS??? I chose Apple because they DIDN’T do stuff like that. But gotta grub that money to make the stock keep going up for no sane reason. I’m all for regulating the advertising industry more somehow. I realize there is value to advertising at times, but they have managed to piss me off far enough I don’t care.
jppope 5mo ago
I don't really see that many ads to be honest. I'm not on social media (except HN), I use Adblock, plus I just don't consume a lot of the media that the general population does. I totally understand what the article is about though... I went on to my wife's instagram and her ad load is unbelievable. She probably has to look at 1 ad for ever 3 reels or images or whatever the hell they call them. I couldn't imagine having to see that many ads. Last quick note - part of the reason why I avoid that kind of media, and use the tech to block it. I had a professor in college who pointed out that the purpose of ads is not to sell something, its actually to make you unhappy.
- mschuster91 5mo ago
  > I don't really see that many ads to be honest. I'm not on social media (except HN), I use Adblock, plus I just don't consume a lot of the media that the general population does. If you are in any urban area, your eyes will be blasted with "PURCHASE ME! PURCHASE ME!" visuals all the time, you cannot escape it. Just take a trip via Munich Main Station to transit from the regional trains to the subway [1]. It's not enough that the entire passenger transit area is lined with shopfronts with all sorts of lights, screens and other attempts to get your attention, it's not enough that there are huge flatscreens with video everywhere, no... even the concrete pillars are covered with ads nowadays. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/drehscheibe/comments/1tijdui/das_mit_der_werbung_an_m%C3%BCnchen_hbf_nimmt_echt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/drehscheibe/comments/1tijdui/das_mi...
GarnetFloride 5mo ago
The thing that drives me the most nuts is when it is just that one ad, shown over, and over and over again, sometimes twice in a row, which just makes me note to never, ever buy from them ever. Though I did notice last week lots of unique ads for a while. They were wildly inappropriate to me. It was actually funny to get ads for wheat seed by the ton (I don't live in a wheat compatible location), followed by private plane time-share(don't travel that much). How those are supposed to go together stump me.
Ankaios 5mo ago
Apple's behavior regarding ads is especially annoying to me. I deeply dislike that they allow Uber and Lyft to advertise via iOS notifications. Apple should inflict massive penalties on them for that anti-user behavior. Apple also advertises their own TV shows through notifications, which I view as an even worse breach of etiquette. On top of all that, I avoid the iOS app store as much as possible because it's an advertising-infested mess. I'm sure I'd have more apps on the phone if I trusted the app store more.
- OptionOfT 5mo ago
  They're supposed to introduce a setting that allow you to disable these promotional pop-ups. But many apps don't, and Apple doesn't seem to enforce it. It should be an iOS level flip: no promotional messages.
bradgranath 5mo ago
I actively avoid products that are advertised to me. It’s an easy shortcut to “Tell me your shit sucks without telling me your shit sucks.” I honestly don’t understand the type of advertising that does not seek to inform, but rather annoy you into buying the product. Has never made any sense to me at all.
rdm_blackhole 5mo ago
Ads in my opinion are not the problem. The problem is the expectation that services/apps/radio/tv-channels need to be free when we know that there is nothing really free in this world (except maybe the air we breathe?). This is the same problem that Firefox is facing. If you listen to the crowd here on HN, Firefox is either evil or dumb or both to take money from Google, yet at the same time, these same people would scream bloody murder if Firefox was a paid only browser that cost 5.99 a month because everything these days is a subscription and this is terrible. Every product requires maintenance and has ongoing costs. Let me ask you, do you work for free? If not, then why should they? So instead of spending hours debating over the value of ads in apps and sites, on the radio and so on, what is the solution if: - ads are a no go - subscriptions are bad - donations are unreliable and cannot ensure the proper remuneration of the creators And let me say, that is is not a comment supporting ads, I am genuinely asking what the solution is because I just don't see it.
jm4rch 5mo ago
Click all the ads. Buy none of it.
woopsn 5mo ago
I hate ads but they're intrinsic to media culture, fact you need 10 minutes of video media to wake up, go to the bathroom, at work, to decide dinner with your spouse, and then immediately when you get home etc. I'm not judging but you are not really going to great lengths to avoid ads.
DavideNL 5mo ago
This reminds me of a time long ago when i first found out about uBlock Origin “Medium mode” [1] Daily browsing, searching, reading webpages and such is a lot better when using it. It’s amazing to see how many webpages you can just read without any 3th party scripts being loaded at all. And in case you do need them, it’s a simple keyboard shortcut to load them (= Relax mode). Other than that, i stopped “consuming” many kinds of media that have ads in them (radio stations, media streaming, etc.) If it has ads, i simply dont’t use it. [1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium-mode https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...
ianmarcinkowski 5mo ago
I started using a self-hosted RSS reader (which is how I found your article) with curated lists of things. I used to read Google Chrome's feed articles but they are a trash fire of bullshit now. Next, I'm going to try search indexing my own version of a very small Internet and possibly leaving Firefox because they are becoming nearly as dong-thirsty as Chrome. My dad called me yesterday in a tiff because some crazy idiot on a random streaming app he somehow downloaded to his Samsung phone was trying to convince him to listen to a song on Spotify and he couldn't even figure out how to follow the directions in the ad. Or maybe it was Samsung AI making something up? Or maybe he's been hacked and it wasn't even my dad? I can't even tell anymore. This coincided with the 80th ducking permission/password/2fa popup of the day on my phone, so I was cooked.

94 points by speckx 5mo ago

Same, for same reason i refuse pay for services, in past paying for service would mean they wouldn't track you and sell your data, but thats not longer the case. Since that's additional profits for companies. Luckily there's few exemptions services which im happily paying since its proven they dont collect your data so advertisers can't prey on you when you're at lowest. Like did you know, just by obtaining credit card, your shopping history is sold? And you can't reject this, at least i haven't managed to do so. Yet in EU we're banning cash, where's option so i can buy my grocies without insurances knowing i bought candies for weekends so they'll hike insurance up.

bediger4000 5mo ago

Advertisers end up corrupting ad supported media, too. Before ads, Google keyword search was ok. After ads, it decayed, because catering to advertisers was how they got payed. It looks like ads will corrupt our only hope, AI.

lesuorac 5mo ago

I will point out at no point in the article does he complain about seeing advertisements for golfing tees in his Golf magazine subscription. IMO, the real problems with ads are 1) They just aren't relevant to you. No I'm not going to start drinking AG1 ... 2) There's no information about the product. How do I even know if AG1 is a good idea?

nickff 5mo ago
I agree with you, and think that despite all the hype about targeting and data mining, platforms like YouTube are horrible at determining people’s interests. Re-targeting does seem to ‘work’ better, but it is also extremely wasteful because many of the people seeing the ads have already made their purchase decision.
Rygian 5mo ago
Ads not only need to be relevant to me. They also have to be presented to me only when I am interested in the category of the advertised product or service. Otherwise they're just spam. (Consider the typical "you just bought a new fridge, so let's show you ads of fridges".)
Retr0id 5mo ago
The only kind of ad I don't find objectionable is the kind where someone makes a genuine recommendation, with no money changing hands. Or if money did happen to change hands, the same recommendation would've been made without it. As a random example of the latter, it doesn't bother me too much when electronics youtubers are sponsored by PCB manufacturing companies.
al_borland 5mo ago
Modern tech companies think the solution for ad relevance is data collection. This is the justification used by Google, Meta, and others for trying to learn as much about a user as possible. I think the golf magazine example is the way ads should be. Eliminate all data collection and advertise based on context. It doesn’t make any sense that a YouTuber making construction videos is advertising for AG1 and VPNs, but it would make sense to advertise for Home Depot. This is more in line with how advertisements work on traditional broadcast TV. I know a guy who used to run a forum for the saltwater fish tank hobby. He was mostly regional people. His site had ads from local businesses that these people actually used. Each year he’d host various events and these same companies would show up to sell coral and whatever else. It was a 2 way relationship, connecting willing buyers with local businesses. Exactly what marketing and advertisement should be. I don’t see a lot of ads thanks to using Kagi, YouTube Premium, and some other paid services. I won’t subscribe to a streaming service that will also show me ads, I draw a hard line on this. I think I’d be slightly less opposed to ads if the business of data collection behind them wasn’t so creepy and off-putting. The ad-to-content ratio also has to be reasonable. I think everyone of a certain age has had the experience of flipping through a magazine and finding out it’s 80% ads. That’s not pleasant.

iterance 5mo ago

Lord Dunsany, 1915, wrote "WHAT WE HAVE COME TO": When the advertiser saw the cathedral spires over the downs in the distance, he looked at them and wept. "If only," he said, "this were an advertisement of Beefo, so nice, so nutritious, try it in your soup, ladies like it."

jorgen123 5mo ago
That is literally the entire short story. The second last from "Fifty-One Tales". See here at Gutenberg: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/7838 https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/7838

nehal3m 5mo ago

I see some tenuous connection between advertising and extinction of our species. It goes something like: One: Human psychology tends to ascribe more weight to negative things than positive things in the short term. In the long term this generally balances out, but in the short term it's more prudent in a biological sense to pay attention to the rustling in the bushes than the berries you might pick from them. This is known as the [negativity bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias). Two: The modern gatekeepers of social interaction, Big Tech, employ blind algorithms that attempt to steer your attention towards spending more time on their platforms. These companies are the arbiters of the content we experience daily and what you do and don't see is mostly at their discretion. The techniques they employ, in simple terms, are designed to provoke what they call 'engagement'. They do this because at the end of the day FAANG have not only a financial interest, but a fiduciary duty to sell advertisements at the behest of their shareholders. The more they can engage you, the more ads they can sell. They employ live A-B testing, divide people into cohorts and poke and prod them with psychological techniques to try and glue your eyeballs to their ads. Extrapolated conclusion: These companies have a financial and legally binding interest to divide the population against itself, obstructing politics and social interaction to the point where we might not be able to achieve any of the goals that we need to reach to prevent oblivion.

dabinat 5mo ago

A lot of sites are essentially unreadable. There are things flashing at you, videos that autoplay, and the page will reload every 30 seconds and you lose your place. And even if ads are respectful of user experience, there is a cognitive load to having the content you want to consume bombarded with unrelated content, especially when it’s trying to manipulate your emotions in some way. Site owners don’t have a right to complain about people using ad blockers because their insistence on money over user experience is the reason everyone is installing them. A lot of the time I just read sites in Reader Mode. There are no ads or distractions and it seems that site owners haven’t figured out how to block or detect it yet.

convolvatron 5mo ago
its funny, I was trying to read something the other day, and I kept scrolling around and dismissing things, bobbing and weaving as the layout kept rearranging itself, doggedly trying to keep my place in the text. and I realized its like a video game. we've actually been trained to try to keep your eyes on the actual content and go through a series of skilled motions just to be able to read it.
orwin 5mo ago
Some website exists where ads are entirely self-hosted (at worst they are affiliate links), and if you self-host your ads, ublock default filters don't catch them. Which is my response: host the ads you run yourself, then we'll talk.

testing22321 5mo ago

I’ve used Adblock aggressively for the last 10 or 15 years. I don’t have a TV, don’t read magazines or the newspaper, don’t listen to the radio. I essentially don’t see or hear ads in my life.

prmoustache 5mo ago
There are still physical printed ads on billboards you can't really avoid, as well as all the branding from anything else you encounter in the streets: cars, bicycle, shops, drink coasters at the bar/pub, etc which are by essence advertising. Also many cultural things are full of product placements, all movies, many songs, event sponsoring, etc. As much as I do to avoid ads (using adblocker, priorizing gemtext caches of news sites, avoiding FM radio and buying my own music) I can't say I avoid it completely.
- hoppyhoppy2 5mo ago
  Billboards are illegal in my state. Can't really avoid? More like they don't really exist (unless I travel).
- internet2000 5mo ago
  Branding is not advertising and it weakens your point to imply it is.
  - prmoustache 5mo ago
    Branding is just long term marketing while advertising is short term. The end goal is the same.
- testing22321 5mo ago
  I live in a place with no billboards. Nobody in this town would wear overt branding.

Shuang1 5mo ago

I use an adblocker and I have for a while now. Every so often I hear a moral argument about why adblockers are bad (ads support free internet, etc) but to be completely honest, I simply don't care anymore. Advertising is in such a malicious state that yes, I'm going to put my own experience quality over whatever collective good there is in watching ads.

matheusmoreira 5mo ago
[flagged]
- ligne 5mo ago
  I hate ads as much as anyone but they are not in any way comparable to rape. Please have some sense of proportion.
  - _doctor_love 5mo ago
    Please don't post comments like this. The only thing it can trigger is a flame war. It won't go anywhere productive. Friends, ignore this thread. Move on. Don't engage.
    - decremental 5mo ago
      [dead]
- bheadmaster 5mo ago
  What would constitute "consent" to being communicated information to? With physical contact, speech can signal consent or lack thereof. How would you consent to speech itself?
  - fsflover 5mo ago
    If I intentionally search for a "new car" or go to a page reviewing cars, then I give my consent to receive new information about it.

basilikum 5mo ago

I just simply do not load, let alone look at ads. Physical ads are pretty virtually the only ads I actually have to see, but there are not thaaat many here.

jmugan 5mo ago

Even my daughter's dance recital this weekend had them. In between dances they frequently paused to play an ad on the big screen to the right. It was incredible.

touwer 5mo ago
Please tell me you're joking
- jmugan 5mo ago
  I wish I were
OptionOfT 5mo ago
This takes place in Belgium: This reminds me of a time in high-school when I was ~12 and I learned that in the USA they were allowed to have brands in school books, like John buys 12 can of Pepsi, drinks 1 bottle, gives 3 away, how many does he have left. (note that I was 12 when I learned this, not that this reflects the level of math I learned at the age of 12).

parpfish 5mo ago

i'm curious what will happen to online ads as more and more internet traffic is done by bots. eventually, advertisers will catch on that humans are driving their impressions and will pull back, right? as soon as people realize the diminishing value of buying ads on random internet platforms... what next? ads have subsidized almost everything online. will we start paying for basic services, or will there be some other new mechanism for us to sell our attention in exchange for somebody else's web hosting?

enoint 5mo ago
Won’t bot-aware ad scripts simply inject a prompt with today’s list of fine products and services?

Nifty3929 5mo ago

Would you be willing to pay a small sum per piece of content? Maybe 10c per video or article? Maybe 1c for a short or something? Assume that it’s anonymous and frictionless (big assumptions, but this is just a thought experiment).

nerdsniper 5mo ago
Are websites really getting $0.10 for my single page view of a news article? $100,000 for every 1 million people who view the article? I’ll pay whatever the ad revenue is. It’s not $0.10 - it’s not even $0.01
mikestew 5mo ago
This has been brought up since the first banner ad went up 30 years ago, and rehashed to death on a variety of forums. The fact that no one has implemented a successful product tells me all I need to know. If that isn't convincing enough, consider that Spotify does the same thing with music, and from what I've read, Spotify is the only one making any money with that scheme. Because your "1 cent" is generous: try 0.001 cent.
- upboundspiral 5mo ago
  Spotify rigs their system to benefit the large label companies and anyone with a critical mass so the people that "matter" say 'good enough' and the people with no voice get screwed. I suspect an honest implementation could actually work - that is, only if all the people that "matter" would not boycott this fair implementation and go off and do their own thing.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

Mallory_Ringess 5mo ago

Just block them everywhere you can and ignore them when you can't or - when they're too annoying - close whatever medium tried to push the bulshytt [1] on you. They're trying to influence you and the more you show you're annoyed, the more they notice they've succeeded in reaching you. Block and cover [2], block and cover. For the rest, live on. [1] https://anathem.fandom.com/wiki/Bulshytt https://anathem.fandom.com/wiki/Bulshytt [2] Yes, I sometimes just cover them with my hand if I happen to use a device without functional content blocking.

IAmGraydon 5mo ago

We all feel this way, but a wholistic view includes acknowledging what we receive in return for our time spent viewing ads. The author starts off the article by referencing getting up in the morning and wanting to watch a 10 video but having to spend several minutes viewing ads. They fail to mention how the person who spent their time creating that video should be compensated. Will he pay for the video? I doubt it. He wants it at no cost. This has another name: entitlement. He’s upset because no one will give him the things he wants for free, so he’s throwing an obvious tantrum about it. How about proposing a better model? I don’t have the answer, but I have a feeling we gravitated to the ad-supported freeware model because it’s actually the best and most efficient middle ground. It allows us to exchange our time for creators’ time without the inconvenience of turning it into money first. It removes a step.

willio58 5mo ago

I hate ads to the point I either pay or use other means to avoid ads in basically everything I use - NPR (I pay, happy to support) - Podcasts (I skip ads, using a client that supports that) - Movies/TV/Music (I self-host, thank you open source community!) - Twitch (I pay 1 creator 6$/mo and must watch 40+ hours per month) I don’t have mainline social media downloaded on my phone, I sometimes visit reddit.com and see the ads that aren’t blocked by ad block but I find myself visiting less often recently anyway. All of this to say, pay a bit and put in some work and you can avoid 95% of ads

internet2000 5mo ago

Adblock and don't watch Youtuber/Podcaster slop. Presto.

k310 5mo ago

If an ad is targeted, it's unwanted personal surveillance. If it's not targeted, it's meaningless crap. If it's from DuckDuckGo, like its search results, it's based on either crude geolocation or recent movies of similar names, bizarrely, when I search for specific technical terms. I have to qualify searches with multiple negations to get anything of interest to someone with more than high school education and interests. A lose-lose proposition. I block all ads with extreme prejudice and disable javascript very often to get rid of nag screens. I turn off javascript very often. A word to web devs. I hate your crap. (Repost) Since the rise of "social media" driven by clicks on ads, quality has almost entirely been replaced by quantity. And now, creativity has been farmed out as well. I still believe in quality. George Monbiot said it years ago. Advertising is a poison that demeans even love – and we're hooked on it. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/24/advertising-poison-hooked https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/24/advert...

prinny_ 5mo ago
> A word to web devs. I hate your crap. I would like to say I agree with the proposition of your post and your arguments, but as a web dev please don't mix the state of the web with what the median web dev considers a good UI/UX. We don't make the Jira tickets and if you have worked in a corporate environment you know very well that arguments like "but the UX/accessibility" hold very very little value in the context of most decisions.
- k310 5mo ago
  I know, don't shoot the messenger. Orders are orders. I was kind to bosses except for the four times I left summarily, with a few choice words, or not. They were grasping at straws, a massive ego trip, their boss's ass, or just a move from engineering to (mis)management. But I ramble. Most stuff ain't worth arguing over. This time.

firstcommit 5mo ago

Jack in the Box Bacon Bacon Cheeseburger 90s Commercial (1999): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1v-16QUESk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1v-16QUESk

ChocMontePy 5mo ago

I use uBlock Origin and sometimes I have the opposite problem: I find out that a good movie came out months ago but I missed all the ads that flooded the internet because of my ad-blocker.

loloquwowndueo 5mo ago
If that’s how you found out, you didn’t miss out on much, did you? You watch it, and that’s it.
- goodmythical 5mo ago
  If the only reccomendation that reaches me was paid for, it is definitionally not good enough to have garnered any personal reccomendation.
  - loloquwowndueo 5mo ago
    Right. Also, if there’s any social pressure to watch a new movie as it’s in theatres whatever, said pressure likely comes from people one knows, so still no need to expose yourself to ads to step in the loop.

throwaway2037 5mo ago

From the second paragraph, if anyone is unaware of "Big Bill Hell's Cars", I highly recommend that you watch the original (fake) advert here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rsEs4HWXeY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rsEs4HWXeY Definitely not safe for work! Know Your Meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/big-bill-hells https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/big-bill-hells > This highly over the top commercial was originally produced as a joke in 1990 for a faux award show put on be the Advertising Association of Baltimore called The Ad Follies. The AAB searched for agencies willing to produce ad spoofs mocking the top agencies in the city despite the impending threat that people working on these spoofs may place their jobs in jeopardy for doing so. The production was conducted at television studio WBFF and all of the footage originates from car manufacturer promotional videos and generic stock footage. The writer and narrator of the copy are still both unknown. > The video was never intended to be shown outside of The Ad Follies show because of the vulgarity and the possibilities of being viewed by the mocked. Copies were only distributed to people who worked on production and to WBFF employees following the screening.

MBCook 5mo ago

I see very few ads and my life is SO MUCH better for it. I see how other people love and I can’t understand how they can stand it. I only watch TV where I can pay the service for an ad-free tier. Every podcast I can I subscribe to to get rid of ads if I listen to it regularly. I had an ad blocker, of course. No ads in my music streaming. YouTube Premium, and I skip embedded ads. Any ads I see are infuriating. I’m pissed at Apple starting to shove them in my face more and more. App Store is whatever. But MAPS??? I chose Apple because they DIDN’T do stuff like that. But gotta grub that money to make the stock keep going up for no sane reason. I’m all for regulating the advertising industry more somehow. I realize there is value to advertising at times, but they have managed to piss me off far enough I don’t care.

jppope 5mo ago

I don't really see that many ads to be honest. I'm not on social media (except HN), I use Adblock, plus I just don't consume a lot of the media that the general population does. I totally understand what the article is about though... I went on to my wife's instagram and her ad load is unbelievable. She probably has to look at 1 ad for ever 3 reels or images or whatever the hell they call them. I couldn't imagine having to see that many ads. Last quick note - part of the reason why I avoid that kind of media, and use the tech to block it. I had a professor in college who pointed out that the purpose of ads is not to sell something, its actually to make you unhappy.

mschuster91 5mo ago
> I don't really see that many ads to be honest. I'm not on social media (except HN), I use Adblock, plus I just don't consume a lot of the media that the general population does. If you are in any urban area, your eyes will be blasted with "PURCHASE ME! PURCHASE ME!" visuals all the time, you cannot escape it. Just take a trip via Munich Main Station to transit from the regional trains to the subway [1]. It's not enough that the entire passenger transit area is lined with shopfronts with all sorts of lights, screens and other attempts to get your attention, it's not enough that there are huge flatscreens with video everywhere, no... even the concrete pillars are covered with ads nowadays. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/drehscheibe/comments/1tijdui/das_mit_der_werbung_an_m%C3%BCnchen_hbf_nimmt_echt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/drehscheibe/comments/1tijdui/das_mi...

GarnetFloride 5mo ago

The thing that drives me the most nuts is when it is just that one ad, shown over, and over and over again, sometimes twice in a row, which just makes me note to never, ever buy from them ever. Though I did notice last week lots of unique ads for a while. They were wildly inappropriate to me. It was actually funny to get ads for wheat seed by the ton (I don't live in a wheat compatible location), followed by private plane time-share(don't travel that much). How those are supposed to go together stump me.

Ankaios 5mo ago

Apple's behavior regarding ads is especially annoying to me. I deeply dislike that they allow Uber and Lyft to advertise via iOS notifications. Apple should inflict massive penalties on them for that anti-user behavior. Apple also advertises their own TV shows through notifications, which I view as an even worse breach of etiquette. On top of all that, I avoid the iOS app store as much as possible because it's an advertising-infested mess. I'm sure I'd have more apps on the phone if I trusted the app store more.

OptionOfT 5mo ago
They're supposed to introduce a setting that allow you to disable these promotional pop-ups. But many apps don't, and Apple doesn't seem to enforce it. It should be an iOS level flip: no promotional messages.

bradgranath 5mo ago

I actively avoid products that are advertised to me. It’s an easy shortcut to “Tell me your shit sucks without telling me your shit sucks.” I honestly don’t understand the type of advertising that does not seek to inform, but rather annoy you into buying the product. Has never made any sense to me at all.

rdm_blackhole 5mo ago

Ads in my opinion are not the problem. The problem is the expectation that services/apps/radio/tv-channels need to be free when we know that there is nothing really free in this world (except maybe the air we breathe?). This is the same problem that Firefox is facing. If you listen to the crowd here on HN, Firefox is either evil or dumb or both to take money from Google, yet at the same time, these same people would scream bloody murder if Firefox was a paid only browser that cost 5.99 a month because everything these days is a subscription and this is terrible. Every product requires maintenance and has ongoing costs. Let me ask you, do you work for free? If not, then why should they? So instead of spending hours debating over the value of ads in apps and sites, on the radio and so on, what is the solution if: - ads are a no go - subscriptions are bad - donations are unreliable and cannot ensure the proper remuneration of the creators And let me say, that is is not a comment supporting ads, I am genuinely asking what the solution is because I just don't see it.

jm4rch 5mo ago

Click all the ads. Buy none of it.

woopsn 5mo ago

I hate ads but they're intrinsic to media culture, fact you need 10 minutes of video media to wake up, go to the bathroom, at work, to decide dinner with your spouse, and then immediately when you get home etc. I'm not judging but you are not really going to great lengths to avoid ads.

DavideNL 5mo ago

This reminds me of a time long ago when i first found out about uBlock Origin “Medium mode” [1] Daily browsing, searching, reading webpages and such is a lot better when using it. It’s amazing to see how many webpages you can just read without any 3th party scripts being loaded at all. And in case you do need them, it’s a simple keyboard shortcut to load them (= Relax mode). Other than that, i stopped “consuming” many kinds of media that have ads in them (radio stations, media streaming, etc.) If it has ads, i simply dont’t use it. [1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium-mode https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...

ianmarcinkowski 5mo ago

I started using a self-hosted RSS reader (which is how I found your article) with curated lists of things. I used to read Google Chrome's feed articles but they are a trash fire of bullshit now. Next, I'm going to try search indexing my own version of a very small Internet and possibly leaving Firefox because they are becoming nearly as dong-thirsty as Chrome. My dad called me yesterday in a tiff because some crazy idiot on a random streaming app he somehow downloaded to his Samsung phone was trying to convince him to listen to a song on Spotify and he couldn't even figure out how to follow the directions in the ad. Or maybe it was Samsung AI making something up? Or maybe he's been hacked and it wasn't even my dad? I can't even tell anymore. This coincided with the 80th ducking permission/password/2fa popup of the day on my phone, so I was cooked.