5 ms·

> I propose a sane rule for all humans: if you see an ad somewhere, or if you suspect a hidden ad ('influencers' trying to promote something), close the tab imm

> I propose a sane rule for all humans: if you see an ad somewhere, or if you suspect a hidden ad ('influencers' trying to promote something), close the tab immediately and never return to that site. But this very site has lots of ads on it. Up until a few days ago, there was an "Apply to YC Fall 2026" link at the bottom of every page, and the front page usually has ads on it too [0]. So it seems tricky to strictly follow your proposed rule while simultaneously posting here. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#:~:text=Another%20kind%20of%20job%20ad%20is%20reserved%20for%20YC%2Dfunded%20startups%2E%20These%20appear%20on%20the%20front%20page%2C%20but%20are%20not%20stories https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#:~:text=Another%20...

abirch 2mo ago
The difficult thing is people don't want to pay for things. Ads are a way to mitigate that so that people/companies can capture some value that they create.
- techdmn 2mo ago
  Yes and no. It's hard to escape ads even by paying for things, with cable TV being a common (though increasingly outdated) example.
  - nekusar 2mo ago
    In European countries websites (various, mostly news), I'm seeing more of "Accept all cookies and ads" OR "sign up and pay".
    - account42 2mo ago
      Always remember the third option: "close the tab and don't give them your time" If they are willing do sell you to data harvesters then that won't be the only unethical thing they are willing to do. Be thankful that they have voluntarily outed their publication as untrustworthy and move on.
  - sbarre 2mo ago
    What you pay(paid) for cable TV was never enough to actually cover the total cost of the service you were receiving. You were splitting that cost with the advertisers. This is not a defence of advertising, just a reality check on this bad example.
    - fn-mote 2mo ago
      This might be true if cable companies did not make a profit. In the US, at least, I think the lack of competition (almost monopoly pricing in most areas) has led to exactly the opposite situation - plenty of profits for the cable providers. Do you have evidence for the claim that the monthly fees are not enough to cover the cost of providing the service? I tried to find numbers but couldn’t, so I’m left with a macroeconomic argument. Better details would be welcome.
    - account42 2mo ago
      It was enough when cable companies were new. And your argument fails because entertainment is not priced to cost anyway.
  - ptaffs 2mo ago
    the example is good and those ads are less awful because the same ad it sent to a demographic, rather than an individual, eg everyone in Michigan get the same ad or everyone watching Friends at 8pm in Cincinnati gets the same ad. Facebook's specialty is targeting a user with an ad. And a side effect or bonus is that few others see it to talk about how inaccurate it might be.
    - account42 2mo ago
      They may be less awful but they are still awful and we should not accept them.
- miki123211 2mo ago
  Ads are progressive taxes in disguise. If you make the kind of content that costs a lot to create but almost nothing to copy, you have a dilemma: Set the price too high, and you aren't getting any money from the poor at all at all, even though they're willing to pay far above your copying costs. Set the price too low, and you aren't extracting as much profit from the rich as you could be. Ads let you serve the same product to everybody, regardless of income, because they pay for the product indirectly, by buying the advertised products. Rich people have more money and buy more products, so they, in effect, pay more for the same content. poor people pay less. I think this is a beautiful system in many ways. Ads give us access to all the world's music, plenty of educational content (on Youtube), including from the world's topmost universities, international texting, picture messaging, phone and video calls of unlimited duration, even some movies and TV. And it's all free, which it wouldn't be if not for ads. If we banned ads, many people just wouldn't be able to afford to talk to their family or listen to their favorite artists every day.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 2mo ago
    >Ads let you serve the same product to everybody, regardless of income, It may be true that if they just put a little bit of fecal matter in the soup that they could give the soup away for free... but why would I want to eat shit soup? Even if you were to tell me that rationally there's so little shit in the soup that I couldn't notice the taste, and that there'd be no statistically significant health risks from it, why would I eat it? "Both rich and poor pay the same amount for this soup" doesn't sway me either. And never mind that me, looking from the outside inward, I see them cranking up the shit percentage constantly. If banning fecal matter in soup means the world has less soup, I've already made peace with that consequence. >phone and video calls of unlimited duration, Perhaps I'm so old now that I've lost the plot, but my phone calls (what few I make) are paid for explicitly and directly. Them being unmetered has nothing to do with advertisement revenue. Care to explain?
  - nathan_compton 2mo ago
    I think you mean progressive pricing in disguise. The problem is that they are also a psychological attack. I believe that we should, generally, as a society, discourage communication in bad faith, and ads very, very easily fall into that category. So perhaps in a local sense it is worth it for the reasons you suggest, but I think the mass dependence of our society on advertising makes our lives worse.
- yoyohello13 2mo ago
  Unpopular opinion but if people don’t want to pay for a thing, it’s probably not worth a whole lot to n the first place.
  - RestlessMind 2mo ago
    That's for people and businesses to decide. Market clearly values Facebook a lot, over a trillion dollars in fact.
    - yoyohello13 2mo ago
      IDK. I haven't interacted with Facebook in over 5 years and my life is better for it. Facebook's value prop to me personally is negative.
    - account42 2mo ago
      The market would also value sacrificing children to moloch if that were allowed.
      - RestlessMind 2mo ago
        your comment is irrelevant and in fact contradictory in the context of the parent comment I was replying to: "if people don’t want to pay for a thing, it’s probably not worth a whole lot " What is "worth" is ultimately decided by the market. What should be allowed, like sacrificing children, is decided by the society. Two very separate topics.
- jccc 2mo ago
  I don’t think this is right. There are plenty examples of people happy to pay for things online. But people also really like to get things for free. And there’s plenty of interest in exploiting this fact to get something out of those people without them knowing it.
- MSFT_Edging 2mo ago
  Even when you want to pay for things, the companies will find ways to extract more money from you. Plex lifetime pass is now over $700 dollars My dashcam that used to let me use the app to locally pull down videos now requires an account to view the files on my camera that is putting out it's own password protected wifi network, just so the company can harvest more data and track me easier. This device cost several hundred dollars. Streaming services introduce ads anyway and increase the cost. You used to be able to buy complete functional software like Microsoft Office and the Adobe suite. All this is because companies cannot be statically profitable unless they're entirely privately owned. All companies need to constantly increase profit, which means even if you're happy to pay for something, eventually the company will squeeze you hard enough that you no longer want to pay for it anymore.
  - elzbardico 2mo ago
    Plex is just a nice UI and a DB wrapping lots of open source libraries and tools, you could replace it with a few days of AI assisted coding.
    - swat535 2mo ago
      You can replace Plex with all its features and polish in a couple of days with AI?..
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    - mistyvales 2mo ago
      Or just use Jellyfin
      - MSFT_Edging 2mo ago
        I use both.
    - MSFT_Edging 2mo ago
      I run both Plex and Jellyfin. The joy of Plex is I can log in on my work machine to listen to my music without having to install and client-side software, running personal VPNs, worrying about the security merit of the Jellyfin log in screen on a public facing service running on my home server, etc. On my home network? Jellyfin all day except for random encoding issues.
- pocksuppet 2mo ago
  Nobody wants to pay for anything, but if they have to pay to get what they want, they do.
guhcampos 2mo ago
I draw a line on advertising for myself: if it's just letting me know a service or product exists, it's fine. It's a business necessity. If I ever start a business, I need a way to communicate to potential customers that my business exists, that's fair use. When the ads start being misleading, manipulative, emotional, irrational - then we're out of the fair use field and into the "this should be a crime" field.
- fsckboy 2mo ago
  usage: >I draw a line on advertising for myself the typical phrase in English, "I draw the line at advertising for myself" would mean that is the thing that has gone too far, something you will not accept. you used a slightly different phrase, but it is still where I draw the line.
8note 2mo ago
That ad has somebody accountable for it. ads like whats on facebook have no such accountability, and facebook doesnt take accountability for what its algorithm pushes in the name of getting a higher click through rate.
stronglikedan 2mo ago
That assumes there's no such thing as nuance.

abirch 2mo ago

The difficult thing is people don't want to pay for things. Ads are a way to mitigate that so that people/companies can capture some value that they create.

techdmn 2mo ago
Yes and no. It's hard to escape ads even by paying for things, with cable TV being a common (though increasingly outdated) example.
- nekusar 2mo ago
  In European countries websites (various, mostly news), I'm seeing more of "Accept all cookies and ads" OR "sign up and pay".
  - account42 2mo ago
    Always remember the third option: "close the tab and don't give them your time" If they are willing do sell you to data harvesters then that won't be the only unethical thing they are willing to do. Be thankful that they have voluntarily outed their publication as untrustworthy and move on.
- sbarre 2mo ago
  What you pay(paid) for cable TV was never enough to actually cover the total cost of the service you were receiving. You were splitting that cost with the advertisers. This is not a defence of advertising, just a reality check on this bad example.
  - fn-mote 2mo ago
    This might be true if cable companies did not make a profit. In the US, at least, I think the lack of competition (almost monopoly pricing in most areas) has led to exactly the opposite situation - plenty of profits for the cable providers. Do you have evidence for the claim that the monthly fees are not enough to cover the cost of providing the service? I tried to find numbers but couldn’t, so I’m left with a macroeconomic argument. Better details would be welcome.
  - account42 2mo ago
    It was enough when cable companies were new. And your argument fails because entertainment is not priced to cost anyway.
- ptaffs 2mo ago
  the example is good and those ads are less awful because the same ad it sent to a demographic, rather than an individual, eg everyone in Michigan get the same ad or everyone watching Friends at 8pm in Cincinnati gets the same ad. Facebook's specialty is targeting a user with an ad. And a side effect or bonus is that few others see it to talk about how inaccurate it might be.
  - account42 2mo ago
    They may be less awful but they are still awful and we should not accept them.
miki123211 2mo ago
Ads are progressive taxes in disguise. If you make the kind of content that costs a lot to create but almost nothing to copy, you have a dilemma: Set the price too high, and you aren't getting any money from the poor at all at all, even though they're willing to pay far above your copying costs. Set the price too low, and you aren't extracting as much profit from the rich as you could be. Ads let you serve the same product to everybody, regardless of income, because they pay for the product indirectly, by buying the advertised products. Rich people have more money and buy more products, so they, in effect, pay more for the same content. poor people pay less. I think this is a beautiful system in many ways. Ads give us access to all the world's music, plenty of educational content (on Youtube), including from the world's topmost universities, international texting, picture messaging, phone and video calls of unlimited duration, even some movies and TV. And it's all free, which it wouldn't be if not for ads. If we banned ads, many people just wouldn't be able to afford to talk to their family or listen to their favorite artists every day.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2mo ago
  >Ads let you serve the same product to everybody, regardless of income, It may be true that if they just put a little bit of fecal matter in the soup that they could give the soup away for free... but why would I want to eat shit soup? Even if you were to tell me that rationally there's so little shit in the soup that I couldn't notice the taste, and that there'd be no statistically significant health risks from it, why would I eat it? "Both rich and poor pay the same amount for this soup" doesn't sway me either. And never mind that me, looking from the outside inward, I see them cranking up the shit percentage constantly. If banning fecal matter in soup means the world has less soup, I've already made peace with that consequence. >phone and video calls of unlimited duration, Perhaps I'm so old now that I've lost the plot, but my phone calls (what few I make) are paid for explicitly and directly. Them being unmetered has nothing to do with advertisement revenue. Care to explain?
- nathan_compton 2mo ago
  I think you mean progressive pricing in disguise. The problem is that they are also a psychological attack. I believe that we should, generally, as a society, discourage communication in bad faith, and ads very, very easily fall into that category. So perhaps in a local sense it is worth it for the reasons you suggest, but I think the mass dependence of our society on advertising makes our lives worse.
yoyohello13 2mo ago
Unpopular opinion but if people don’t want to pay for a thing, it’s probably not worth a whole lot to n the first place.
- RestlessMind 2mo ago
  That's for people and businesses to decide. Market clearly values Facebook a lot, over a trillion dollars in fact.
  - yoyohello13 2mo ago
    IDK. I haven't interacted with Facebook in over 5 years and my life is better for it. Facebook's value prop to me personally is negative.
  - account42 2mo ago
    The market would also value sacrificing children to moloch if that were allowed.
    - RestlessMind 2mo ago
      your comment is irrelevant and in fact contradictory in the context of the parent comment I was replying to: "if people don’t want to pay for a thing, it’s probably not worth a whole lot " What is "worth" is ultimately decided by the market. What should be allowed, like sacrificing children, is decided by the society. Two very separate topics.
jccc 2mo ago
I don’t think this is right. There are plenty examples of people happy to pay for things online. But people also really like to get things for free. And there’s plenty of interest in exploiting this fact to get something out of those people without them knowing it.
MSFT_Edging 2mo ago
Even when you want to pay for things, the companies will find ways to extract more money from you. Plex lifetime pass is now over $700 dollars My dashcam that used to let me use the app to locally pull down videos now requires an account to view the files on my camera that is putting out it's own password protected wifi network, just so the company can harvest more data and track me easier. This device cost several hundred dollars. Streaming services introduce ads anyway and increase the cost. You used to be able to buy complete functional software like Microsoft Office and the Adobe suite. All this is because companies cannot be statically profitable unless they're entirely privately owned. All companies need to constantly increase profit, which means even if you're happy to pay for something, eventually the company will squeeze you hard enough that you no longer want to pay for it anymore.
- elzbardico 2mo ago
  Plex is just a nice UI and a DB wrapping lots of open source libraries and tools, you could replace it with a few days of AI assisted coding.
  - swat535 2mo ago
    You can replace Plex with all its features and polish in a couple of days with AI?..
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - mistyvales 2mo ago
    Or just use Jellyfin
    - MSFT_Edging 2mo ago
      I use both.
  - MSFT_Edging 2mo ago
    I run both Plex and Jellyfin. The joy of Plex is I can log in on my work machine to listen to my music without having to install and client-side software, running personal VPNs, worrying about the security merit of the Jellyfin log in screen on a public facing service running on my home server, etc. On my home network? Jellyfin all day except for random encoding issues.
pocksuppet 2mo ago
Nobody wants to pay for anything, but if they have to pay to get what they want, they do.

guhcampos 2mo ago

I draw a line on advertising for myself: if it's just letting me know a service or product exists, it's fine. It's a business necessity. If I ever start a business, I need a way to communicate to potential customers that my business exists, that's fair use. When the ads start being misleading, manipulative, emotional, irrational - then we're out of the fair use field and into the "this should be a crime" field.

fsckboy 2mo ago
usage: >I draw a line on advertising for myself the typical phrase in English, "I draw the line at advertising for myself" would mean that is the thing that has gone too far, something you will not accept. you used a slightly different phrase, but it is still where I draw the line.

8note 2mo ago

That ad has somebody accountable for it. ads like whats on facebook have no such accountability, and facebook doesnt take accountability for what its algorithm pushes in the name of getting a higher click through rate.

stronglikedan 2mo ago

That assumes there's no such thing as nuance.