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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

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amelius

If ads were the only type of information, we were already doomed.

For example, why do you think reviews are so important?

Also, you are reading articles through HN, not by watching ads for them first.

Then there is the age-old word-of-mouth.

Or seeing products in action with friends.

I could go on and on.

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I see that you have a very practical and scalable solution out there.

We will gush about a movie/product/service launch on television and call it news. One might even consider incentivising people to write positive reviews, we will just not call them ads. Why havent we seen any of these yet ? I have my review-blocker, post-blocker, word-of-mouth blocker startups still in waiting.

Incentivized reviews == ads == bad

Are you saying that ads are okay simply because we have no means to eradicate them?

There are farms of blogs with junk content and reviews that exist purely for ad revenue and referral marketing. Online communities have sockpuppets doing the same shit. Respected news papers have "submarine" PR pieces promoting one product or another. The fake positive reviews you mention already exist - both on blogs and sites like Amazon, App Store etc.

In this vast sea of noise, it is very hard to find good information. These massive industries keep churning out ads in a million different forms & keep blurring the lines between ad/content with a motive to sell and trustworthy content from a real person without ulterior motives.

Its a constant never-ending war on trustworthy content and erodes the webs utility as a whole. In the past 10 years the web has become more and more of an artificially curated garden to sell you shit and keep you clicking.. and despite many protests about ads, they remain invasive and pervasive.

They ignore all these concerns and keep ramping it up. So I don't think twice about using AdNaseaum.

I agree with everything you said, but carpet-bombing the crap out of all ads does not seem to be an improvement. Ads satisfy a real need, stamp it out artificially and it will come up with some other name, some other form.

This

     war against *

is too hackneyed an approach, admittedly, very popular in the US. It has not done much good anywhere.

Well using ad nauseaum is not carpet bombing or waging a war - all depends on how you define war. Its just sending a message, if enough people send the message things will change. If not, they will continue to get worse.

It depends on how it is used, but I would have no qualms about going after the egregiously annoying and inherently dishonest ads. Those are the ones where even the advertiser knows that a click indicates absolutely no intent to explore or to buy, the reader was just tricked into triggering a booby trap. Some pages are so bad that it feels like navigating a veritable minefield, you dont know where to position your mouse to read the damn article. To all who wants to go after these guys, godspeed. I dont use adblock, but I do use flashblock and nuke javascript on all except a few whitelisted sites that I keep expanding as needed.

But seriously, I am genuinely tickled that my sarcastic comments on this post was mistaken for genuine lack of knowledge regarding paid reviews and submarine articles.

My goal was to point out that if one kills one specific form-factor it will reappear in some other form-factor and it already has; to point out that the notion that reviews, articles, word of mouth can be a substitute for ads is a silly idea [0]. Paid reviews and submarine articles being some of the other form factors. Those reviews and articles are just as dishonest if not more so and ignoring them to target others rather indiscriminately is not going to result in a better web. Thats closer to a baby throwing a tantrum than anything else.

An indiscriminate war against all ads is just childish and silly. Silly is the sweeping notion that _all_ ads are essentially motivated by malice [1] and only does harm to the reader.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109873

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15110059

> One might even consider incentivising people to write positive reviews, we will just not call them ads.

Are you being sarcastic, or are you unaware that this is a real thing that happens?

How do you get reviews when people have no idea the product exists in the first place? The amount of ignorance these comments have about why marketing in general is a necessary part of business is disheartening.

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