Hacker News Reader

Comment by spaceboy | Hacker News Reader

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads—and that's ok: https://www.ybrikman.com/writing/2014/08/10/the-best-minds-o...

Also relevant: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-04-14/this-tech...

View on HN

I don't understand this obsession against ads on HN. The only countries that don't have ads in the streets are North Korea and before that the Soviet Union. It's a great way to let people know about your business and participate peacefully into the free exchange of goods and services with our other fellow human beings. And in computing it allows to offer amazing services to the poorest for free (google, facebook etc). In Peru for example where I used to live, students had to buy expensive books before or just couldn't find good source of education for free easily to help them with their studies, they now can and it really changed people's life (eg my wife's :)).

Edit: no need to downvote just because you disagree...

Because most ads are done poorly, are manipulative, and hide the "real" cost of a service. It's also based on an increasingly outdated economic system that needs to change.

How is advertising outdated? It's basically as old as capitalism itself. Have something to sell? You need to advertise it.

The financial side is. We no longer need most things to be subsidized by advertising.

Really? That's still how most people consume content (news, social media etc) on the internet. You'd be shocked to learn that most people in Latin America for example use the ad supported version of Spotify and those with no Spotify in their country use ad supported pirate sites.

We still can have those or equivalent services without advertisements. We only use them because it's the model we know, not because it's the most appropriate model.

How do you know it's not the most appropriate model? Do you think Facebook and Google wouldn't switch to another more appropriate model? Whatever that means.

Whatever happened to paying for services? I can't even do that now if I want to avoid staring at what someone else thinks I'd spend money on.

I agree, online ads are annoying for a number of reasons. I'm curious what pay model you're envisioning. Content providers paying Disqus? Disqus users? I can see the former possibly working, as Disqus is providing the service to them.

Frankly, I can't tell you the last time I found comments on an article to be valuable. I spent the last half hour trying to work out the model before realizing I wouldn't pay a dime for it.

But I'm also not the likely demographic, so I'm left with my foot in my mouth! I can say I would pay for HN if it came to that, weird as that would be, preferably in a flat fee because it's easier to budget. HN is the only similar service I use.

Most people worldwide don't even have a credit card to pay online. If anything you should celebrate the fact that you are so privileged that you would rather pay for something most could not even dream to afford.

Those folks aren't the target of ads in general, either.

Internet ADs in real life would be like having cardboard banners appear in the middle of the street, and you would need to change car every 5 years as the banners get thicker and harder to penetrate.

Online advertising is is a collective delusion where ad networks collect more and more personalized metrics about a particular session-device pair, so that they can hoodwink their clients (i.e. people who want to advertise) into paying more for "targeted" ads, while the viewers of those ads are inevitably confronted by one of the following outcomes:

a. they ignore the ad

b. they ignore the ad and think negatively about the product

c. they mentally register the ad and it builds positive brand awareness but don't click through

d. they clickthrough if the offer/proposition was compelling enough anyway

In effect, online advertising is like being paid to be promoted on a dating site: if you're attractive or interesting enough on your own, you probably don't even need it but it may help you get matched with a different user than if you hadn't gotten promoted; and if you're not very compelling you're quite possibly flushing money down the drain while your competitors are eating your lunch. It fools the hopeless and the underdogs, while creeping users out, and ultimately affects the landscape little; it's the ultimate rent-seeking.

Everybody has different concerns and constraints.

I run an ad blocker because I mostly want to stop third parties tracking me around the web. Then, after I ran an ad-blocker for a while, I got used to the web feeling zippy.

Aside from privacy concerns, there are also security concerns. Ad networks have been used to distribute malware.

I had my kids to install ad-blockers on their phones because they share a pool of data. It's not that unusual for a page containing a few kilobytes of text and images to contain twice as much ad related bloat.

The problem I have with ads right now is that the ecosystem for web ads specifically is poisonous. People who have ad inventory don't manage it well or respect the product they are making in enough cases that it hurts the market as a whole. On the other side I can't name an ad network that does web advertising in a reputable way. Furthermore there are some bad actors who exploit technology to abuse advertising on top of the product owners and the ad networks. With traditional media advertising was always a weird market but there was a respect of the product/business ad inventory that caused a push back. There is also a lot of sponsored advertisements right now which is a decent go-between but also is managed poorly. It's very easy to burn both sides of the bridge.

Admittedly having worked in advertising to an extent it's always going to be a grey market, but web advertising just seems to be a bit darker. There isn't enough money going around to refuse dodgy actors on the mid-low scale and that hurts the whole market.

The problem is that internet ads are very different to IRL advertising. They are executing code in your browser, and have been a source of countless exploits. Not to mention that they are incredibly bloated.

Reddit does this correctly -- they only self-host ads that they've vetted. I have no problem unblocking ads on reddit, but that's the only website I can think of which has non-scummy advertising practices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com