I'm sorry that you're being bombarded with this, it'd be nice if Facebook provided topic blocking for ads beyond alcohol and parenting.
I'm sorry that you're being bombarded with this, it'd be nice if Facebook provided topic blocking for ads beyond alcohol and parenting.
If some ad-supported sites have to go under, well, that's just the cost of social progress.
There's that one city in Brazil that did away with them...
Then you must not have yet had the pleasure of being exposed to the massive, blindingly-bright displays playing animated ads near many major cities.
It was a darkish night, and while I was looking the board board switched to an ad with a mostly-white background. It was like looking into 1000 suns. I was temporarily blinded with those purple spots in my vision and actually rolled onto the shoulder near the wall before recovering.
In the US, billboards are banned in four American states (Vermont, Maine, Alaska and Hawaii) and various other counties or cities. Generally speaking, these are places that put high value on tourism driven by natural beauty (which, of course, roadside billboards tend to undermine).
In photo sharing communities where there is less focus on the "social" aspects, ads are often less of a problem. From what I see, for instance, Instagram is not used as a primary resource by a lot by professional / semi-pro photographers. Many of them build online portfolios to catalog their work, and I imagine most photographers would not be terribly thrilled to see bra ads or any other ads being inserted into their portfolio of works. So these people more go to sites like Smugmug and Zenfolio. Which as far as I know is ad-free, but also isn't zero cost to set up either.
Intrusive, often creepily-targeted advertising seems to be the norm now for any large social-focused Internet business. It's what keeps things "free". The question, I guess, is what is a good alternative model? Something has to pay for the server / bandwidth costs and upkeep. Coming up with a better business model (or at least one that focuses on different values, such as the atypical billboard bans) is the only real way to "get rid of the ads".
http://www.billboardliberation.com/
Their website could use some work so maybe that'd be a good way to contribute.
The people who come to HN are what's valuable to me, not the specific web property.