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.
Advertising is mind rape. They're trying to force their brands and products into our minds without our consent. Any possible moral argument against ad blocking is overridden by the sheer intrusiveness and entitlement of advertisers. Our attention belongs to us, it's not theirs to sell to the highest bidder. Ad blocking is legitimate self defense.
"mind rape". How absurd and inflammatory. The notion of consent here is just ridiculous. Nobody is forcing you to use the Internet, you're happy enough to consume free online services, but then melt down when you see an ad.
> you're happy enough to consume free online services
Of course. If HTTP servers want to send me free web pages, I'm only too happy to consume them. If they send me ads alongside those pages, the ads will be deleted. If they don't like it, they can return 402 Payment Required instead.
Just because somebody handed me a free magazine filled with ads doesn't mean I can't rip out the ad pages and throw them in the trash. I'm allowed to keep only the pages I want and discard the rest.
> melt down when you see an ad
I don't see ads, uBlock Origin does a really good job at filtering them out. Highly recommended.
My extreme arguments are generally reserved for businesses who are profiting off the abuse. People demonstrating could definitely fall into the unwanted noise category depending on what you believe, but I'm not going to go extreme on them for it.
Besides, demonstrations are easily avoided and ignored. They go to the public square to demonstrate. They don't generally go to your house. Advertisers absolutely would go to your house. They are the sort of people who would calculate the exact viewing angle you have when you look out the window of your home and then set up a billboard covering that exact area so as to mine out every last dime your eyeballs can possibly give. They're the sort of people who'd set up hidden cameras in the house across the street purely so they can monitor you to estimate the number of times you look out your windows every day, all so they can sell the chance to be seen by you to some highest bidder.
You-know-it-when-you-see-it might be a good boundary. It's different for everyone, surely.
Personally I find the Protect The Children charity workers and anti-abortion protesters in large city squares to be right on the line of "mind mild-assault."
TBH the charity people are worse than the anti-abortion protesters because they force images of unfortunate kids into my mind and makes me feel bad. The anti-abortion people are almost quaint to me.
People actively seek information. People don't seek out advertising noise. They avoid such audiovisual pollution quite actively, so much so that corporations get paid in order to force the noise in front of people's eyeballs.
It's that forceful nature that violates consent. I came to HN to see comments from technologists on random stories as well as cool Show HN posts. So someone showing off a project here isn't advertising, it's just the exact information I asked for. It's when that person pays money to put his project in front of me while I'm browsing news or something that it turns into a massive problem.
The key is to differentiate noise from signal, advertising from information. Advertising is always noise they add to signal in order to get paid. Our brains aren't supposed to be sinks for their noise. Our cognitive functions are absolutely sacred.
There is no moral argument anymore. Every ad peddler online has broken every TOS imaginable to feed its AI training models, at a scale a human couldn't accomplish in a million years.
The current state of things is entirely the fault of the advertising industry. They've acted like users' banner blindness is an obstacle to be defeated, rather than a constraint to build around. Faced with something the users cannot change, they continue to pile up increasingly hostile techniques that only work for a short while before users start to automatically ignore them.
I'm curious where the one-sided arms race ends. Probably a return to subscriptions that frustrate users but are at least sustainably funded.
I understand the moral argument, yes tell me about your product or company from time to time, can be interesting or even funny sometimes but it should stop there.
I always use an adblock where possible. 1. I've seen too much ads trying to straight up serve malware. 2. I'm definitely not okay with the ad-industry data aggregation tracking my every move online.
Plus the algorithm is kinda dumb: I see you bought a mattress, how about another one, every day, for the next months? I was curious once about a product I would never buy but now, weeks later, I still have ten companies paying ads for the same product, each one claiming to be the real deal.
I still use google news on mobile, no adblock there, some publications are okay, others are, well... I take a screenshot when there's 0% of content on the screen → OnlyAds/NoContent folder.
I mean, that’s pretty rich coming from the folks willfully engaging in human rights violating surveillance to overwhelm you with obscure useless nonsense that is literally an assault on your time, attention and mental health all for the 0.00001% chance of a vague hope you’ll click or tap their lie of an ad for snake oil that doesn’t work and is designed to steal your credit card number anyway, all just to make them rich so they won’t have to get a real job in the first place.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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".)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Advertising is mind rape. They're trying to force their brands and products into our minds without our consent. Any possible moral argument against ad blocking is overridden by the sheer intrusiveness and entitlement of advertisers. Our attention belongs to us, it's not theirs to sell to the highest bidder. Ad blocking is legitimate self defense.
"mind rape". How absurd and inflammatory. The notion of consent here is just ridiculous. Nobody is forcing you to use the Internet, you're happy enough to consume free online services, but then melt down when you see an ad.
> you're happy enough to consume free online services
Of course. If HTTP servers want to send me free web pages, I'm only too happy to consume them. If they send me ads alongside those pages, the ads will be deleted. If they don't like it, they can return 402 Payment Required instead.
Just because somebody handed me a free magazine filled with ads doesn't mean I can't rip out the ad pages and throw them in the trash. I'm allowed to keep only the pages I want and discard the rest.
> melt down when you see an ad
I don't see ads, uBlock Origin does a really good job at filtering them out. Highly recommended.
How far would you push this argument?
Is it mind rape to hold up a political sign in a public square, because they are forcing their opinions into other people who happen to be there?
My extreme arguments are generally reserved for businesses who are profiting off the abuse. People demonstrating could definitely fall into the unwanted noise category depending on what you believe, but I'm not going to go extreme on them for it.
Besides, demonstrations are easily avoided and ignored. They go to the public square to demonstrate. They don't generally go to your house. Advertisers absolutely would go to your house. They are the sort of people who would calculate the exact viewing angle you have when you look out the window of your home and then set up a billboard covering that exact area so as to mine out every last dime your eyeballs can possibly give. They're the sort of people who'd set up hidden cameras in the house across the street purely so they can monitor you to estimate the number of times you look out your windows every day, all so they can sell the chance to be seen by you to some highest bidder.
You-know-it-when-you-see-it might be a good boundary. It's different for everyone, surely.
Personally I find the Protect The Children charity workers and anti-abortion protesters in large city squares to be right on the line of "mind mild-assault."
TBH the charity people are worse than the anti-abortion protesters because they force images of unfortunate kids into my mind and makes me feel bad. The anti-abortion people are almost quaint to me.
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?
People actively seek information. People don't seek out advertising noise. They avoid such audiovisual pollution quite actively, so much so that corporations get paid in order to force the noise in front of people's eyeballs.
It's that forceful nature that violates consent. I came to HN to see comments from technologists on random stories as well as cool Show HN posts. So someone showing off a project here isn't advertising, it's just the exact information I asked for. It's when that person pays money to put his project in front of me while I'm browsing news or something that it turns into a massive problem.
The key is to differentiate noise from signal, advertising from information. Advertising is always noise they add to signal in order to get paid. Our brains aren't supposed to be sinks for their noise. Our cognitive functions are absolutely sacred.
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.
I hate ads as much as anyone but they are not in any way comparable to rape. Please have some sense of proportion.
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.
[dead]
There is no moral argument anymore. Every ad peddler online has broken every TOS imaginable to feed its AI training models, at a scale a human couldn't accomplish in a million years.
That's where I've landed as well.
The current state of things is entirely the fault of the advertising industry. They've acted like users' banner blindness is an obstacle to be defeated, rather than a constraint to build around. Faced with something the users cannot change, they continue to pile up increasingly hostile techniques that only work for a short while before users start to automatically ignore them.
I'm curious where the one-sided arms race ends. Probably a return to subscriptions that frustrate users but are at least sustainably funded.
> There is no moral argument anymore.
There never was.
There were just a few people profiting from ads trying to gaslight you into believing there was.
I understand the moral argument, yes tell me about your product or company from time to time, can be interesting or even funny sometimes but it should stop there.
I always use an adblock where possible. 1. I've seen too much ads trying to straight up serve malware. 2. I'm definitely not okay with the ad-industry data aggregation tracking my every move online.
Plus the algorithm is kinda dumb: I see you bought a mattress, how about another one, every day, for the next months? I was curious once about a product I would never buy but now, weeks later, I still have ten companies paying ads for the same product, each one claiming to be the real deal.
I still use google news on mobile, no adblock there, some publications are okay, others are, well... I take a screenshot when there's 0% of content on the screen → OnlyAds/NoContent folder.
“[…] moral argument […]”
I mean, that’s pretty rich coming from the folks willfully engaging in human rights violating surveillance to overwhelm you with obscure useless nonsense that is literally an assault on your time, attention and mental health all for the 0.00001% chance of a vague hope you’ll click or tap their lie of an ad for snake oil that doesn’t work and is designed to steal your credit card number anyway, all just to make them rich so they won’t have to get a real job in the first place.
Moral argument. Right.
The moral argument is less absurd from the people who actually run the web site and are just looking for a way to be compensated for their effort.
It still doesn't quite hold, and the fact that it's being handed to them by the companies who get most of the profit is a big red flag.
But it's at least understandable why the site owners don't see themselves nearly as badly as we see the ad companies.
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/advert...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
If that’s how you found out, you didn’t miss out on much, did you? You watch it, and that’s it.
If the only reccomendation that reaches me was paid for, it is definitionally not good enough to have garnered any personal reccomendation.
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.
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.
Please tell me you're joking
I wish I were
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.
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
Definitely not safe for work!
Know Your Meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/big-bill-hells
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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_mi...
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."
That is literally the entire short story. The second last from "Fifty-One Tales". See here at Gutenberg: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/7838
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
[2] Yes, I sometimes just cover them with my hand if I happen to use a device without functional content blocking.
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?
Won’t bot-aware ad scripts simply inject a prompt with today’s list of fine products and services?
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?
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".)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
Click all the ads. Buy none of it.
Jack in the Box Bacon Bacon Cheeseburger 90s Commercial (1999): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1v-16QUESk
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.
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.
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.
Billboards are illegal in my state. Can't really avoid? More like they don't really exist (unless I travel).
Branding is not advertising and it weakens your point to imply it is.
Branding is just long term marketing while advertising is short term. The end goal is the same.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Adblock and don't watch Youtuber/Podcaster slop. Presto.
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.