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Comment by wallacoloo | Hacker News Reader

I find movements like "responsible ads" or Adblock Plus's "acceptable ads" to be totally missing the point. Ads are, by design, intended to manipulate you. Most of us don't tolerate people or things that so blatantly manipulate us in the physical realm. If a salesman comes to my door unprompted, I'm perfectly happy to cut him off mid-sentence by closing the door. When he tries to sell something to my grandmother that she doesn't want or need over the phone, I have a right to be angry at him for trying to manipulate someone I love.

How is it that so many people agree with me here, but then eagerly defend online advertisers' rights to manipulate them? They claim that so long as the ads are unobtrusive, then no problem - even though the ads still have the same goal in the end. These people want to be manipulated. How is any of this rationalized?

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I totally agree with you here, and have noticed a variety of attempts at rationalization.

My favorite is, "Why do you hate the Internet?!?" Since many things they like are paid through via ads, they see an objection to that as an objection to, e.g., news. I think this argument is dumb in a lot of ways, but the biggest for me is that nobody would have figured another way to pay for anything.

The next is, "Why do you hate freedom (of speech)?!?" This is usually phrased in a pseudo-first-amendment way, but as far as I can tell the real claim is some sort of might-makes-right, the-ends-justify-the-means, the-rich-can-do-as-they-please nonsense. All sorts of speech is actually illegal. E.g., fraud, solicitation of murder, conspiracy to commit murder, unlicensed practice of medicine, etc, etc. Capitalism is swell and all, but turning a profit is not a license to be a dick.

Another big one is along the lines of the Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" People who work in ads or for ad-supported companies can't see themselves as doing anything wrong, ergo manipulating people for money can't be wrong.

And then there's the one I think of as "suffer, Muggles". The logic goes, "I am smart and don't notice my being being manipulated by ads, ergo all the people who are manipulated by ads are dumb and deserve what they get." It's the same shick that you see whenever people get scammed. This ignores that ads and scams are both heavily targeted; that something is obvious just means they were going for another victim.

It all makes me crazy, though. We spend something like a half-trillion dollars annually on mass manipulation. The old justification was that people needed to be informed. That made little sense; the novel informational content of a Coke commercial is approximately zero. But now with the Internet, word of mouth is frictionless, reviews are free, and search is magic. Given that ads also obfuscate and confuse, I suspect their net information content is now negative. Might as well spend that half-trillion dollars on something that matters.

Most people are actually quite happy to be manipulated. When my newborn cries because he made a poopy diaper, I come running to change it and think it's cute, because millions of years of evolution have pruned the gene pool of everyone who is indifferent to these cries. When people donate to a political party, they're being manipulated, but they happily view it as civic engagement and people power. When charities send out fundraising solicitations, they're manipulating their donors (sometimes quite blatantly), but people give anyway. When your manager gives you praise for a job well done in lieu of additional financial compensation, he's manipulating you, but most people want the praise anyway.

Questions of good vs. bad manipulation usually center around regret. When your future self looks back at your present, manipulated self, do they regret the interaction? For the door-to-door salesman, the answer is usually yes: best case you're like "I want those 5 minutes of my life back", worst case you're like "I bought something I totally didn't need". For the charitable donation, usually your future self continues to believe "I did a good deed", unless your values change significantly, and so you willingly participate in their manipulation. Advertising (particularly search advertising) is in that grey area where if you end up finding the product useful, the ad performed a vital service, while if you ended up buying something useless, you were manipulated.

We're all ignorant of something, and most of us are susceptible to manipulation in one way or another. Does anyone believe they are immune to every trick in Cialdini's book?

In general it seems counterproductive to protect people since that can tend to make the protected people weaker. But advertising is as the parent says nothing but manipulation. It takes away choice from the users, and gives it to advertisers. It's used by businesses such as car dealers to buffer bad practices -- when word of mouth doesn't work, advertise a sale.

A market of free products seems to kill ecosystems like the app store, where so much low quality free stuff is available. But would a 50 cent limit be significantly better? If advertising were eliminated would the world be better or would it just adapt to some other equally ugly configuration. With users paying at least we have that choice & price information that currently isn't there (if the service is otherwise free).

What is even more disturbing is that people in general have only a fraction of an idea of what is going on behind the scenes. It is much worse than most of you think it is.

Can you point to more details available publicly? (Do you have time to flesh this out a bit?)

You could do worse than to start with reading the open exchange spec, that should give you an idea of what's happening under water.

To be fair, many (most?) people here (myself included) either have made or are currently making a ton of money off the internet advertising business. It's tough to condemn something when your paycheck depends on it.

Thanks to the magic of cognitive dissonance I can still hold the opinion that advertising has been an enormous net negative for the internet and the world.

It's actually quite simple:

They're either the Salesman, our the Salesman is selling their product.

But look at actual tech people's own actions: they overwhelmingly use ad blockers.

What's really interesting, but no more believable, is the mental gymnastics required to not admit the simple truth:

For most people, the most acceptable advertisement is an advertisement that isn't there.

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