Comment by Denzel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Denzel | Hacker News Reader

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Your definition of ads as "useless things which only annoy" that offer no "utility or value" is amusing. It presupposes that you know of everything that exists in the world: thus you can use search to fulfill your needs. Which, I think we can agree, no human knows everything, not even their needs. Not to mention, your search in an ad-less world will simply return... ads. Because that's what ads are meant be: persuasive arguments -- salespeople calcified in text.

Let's take this ad-less world to its logical extreme. Burn down the billboards; remove all the signs on any buildings announcing "Wal-Mart" or "Sleepy Valley Hospital", so on and so forth; design and paint every building so it's the perfect shade of uniformity; strike down any person that so chooses to wear any clothing but our perfect shade. Because anything else is an advertisement, a representation of what that property or brand has to offer... and we don't want that. Perfect. Now we can live in peaceful search-supported bliss.

The world is complex, but it's not so complex as to not understand that ads serve a purpose. Try looking at it from a different angle. Because as much as I hate useless ads, I love useful ads.

I know what you mean. I stopped listening to the radio a couple of decades ago, and while I don't miss it, I did miss the occasional good new song in the mess. The thing is... I never lost touch. How many people really work hard to isolate themselves from advertising when it can confer so much convenience?

So I, lamprey-like, gain the benefit of their feeding on the airwaves and ads, and I get the good stuff. That said, if I had no friends to rely on, I'd rather be cut off from novelty than be inundated with advertising, the latter of which I find intolerable.

I can understand your last point. The reason I urge people to use a cautious hand when using such a broad stroke of the brush (ad-blockers/calling for an ad-less world) is because I'm not sure they're considering the third-order, even fourth-order, effects of their actions.

Ads, in the broadest definition, are not going anywhere, no matter how much we push them into the shadows. As much as I hate being inundated with ads, at least I know that they're ads. Know what I hate even more? When you can't distinguish ads. So the more we tip the scale from explicit advertising, the more we welcome indistinguishable inline, sponsored, content advertising. Where you start asking yourself, are they being paid for this?

That's just one effect that we're already seeing.

I don't know whether we'll reach a steady-state for ad blocking or not. Regardless, it doesn't keep me up at night; I'm perfectly content watching others burn themselves. I just wish they'd do it quicker.

Why don't people use site-blockers instead of ad-blockers, i.e., they don't get the content if they don't want the ads. Problem solved, and we can accelerate faster to whatever point we're headed to.

Well, the truth is that people want the content without the ads, and most of them don't see a problem with that. For me, I've seen enough to know that this a closing frontier, and I just want to enjoy it while I can; before ad-blocking and VPN's are either discouraged by monopolistic practices, or criminalized. As for site-blockers... sure, it's one way to go. I used to take that approach, but the nature of ads changed a while ago, and stopped being a simple issue.

When ads don't just mean, "Hey look at this, buy this shit!", but means, "An integrated system to identify and track you, collate said data, form a profile, then sell said profile, to people who may be so irresponsible that they have loud autoplaying ads, or even malware ads..." well... then it's different.

Maybe the issue is that we need to stop talking about "Ad-Blockers". I don't know about anyone else, but my time to be reasonable and play along with advertisers and content providers was back when I had none of the power, and they were busily screwing me. Now that the tables have briefly turned, I'm supposed to be the civic-minded one?

No. I remember a time before all of this content, and if the end of advertising means an end to it (which it doesn't, but lets say that it does) then I can live with that.

Your point is not lost on me. The one thing I'll note is that ads and tracking are orthogonal. Although tracking is meant to make ads more useful in theory, there are issues in practice, as you said. Nonetheless, it's not really helpful to muddy the definition of either by placing them under the same umbrella term.

We are in agreeance, should the end of web advertising lead to the end of large swathes of content, we can live with that.

> Ads, in the broadest definition, are not going anywhere, no matter how much we push them into the shadows. As much as I hate being inundated with ads, at least I know that they're ads. Know what I hate even more? When you can't distinguish ads. So the more we tip the scale from explicit advertising, the more we welcome indistinguishable inline, sponsored, content advertising. Where you start asking yourself, are they being paid for this?

There are enough: 1) really good recorded albums, 2) good TV shows, 3) excellent films, 4) great books, 5) fun, engaging, possibly even enriching video games already in existence that I can't possibly get to all of them in a lifetime. If new media gets bad enough I can simply abandon it. Bring it on—it'll be unfortunate, but I'm already on wondering whether the effort of searching for good new media isn't less efficient than mining the past, so it's entirely possible it'll improve my life. Go ahead. I'll tune out.

> Not to mention, your search in an ad-less world will simply return... ads. Because that's what ads are meant be: persuasive arguments -- salespeople calcified in text.

The last person I'd ask for advice about what to buy is a salesperson.

Besides which, in an ad-less world, how would a search return ads? :) It would return independent and unbiased product reviews.

> Let's take this ad-less world to its logical extreme ... design and paint every building so it's the perfect shade of uniformity; strike down any person that so chooses to wear any clothing but our perfect shade

This is not a "logical extreme"; this is a straw man that fell down a slippery slope.

> ads serve a purpose

The purpose of convincing me to buy things I wouldn't otherwise have bought, which they do by lying, misrepresenting, dissembling, and psychologically manipulating. (Especially Internet advertising.) I feel no obligation to support that purpose, especially when pursued using those means.

This represents a very narrow and naive worldview of what advertising accomplishes. I don't feel as though you're coming to the table with an earnest and open mind. And therefore, at this point in time, the purpose of good advertising will remain elusive to you.

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