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Comment by bertil | Hacker News Reader

That is classic Luddism: people don’t understand how something work, so they want to get rid of it rather than ask how it works and how it can be improved first.

Targeted advertising, like any recommendation system, works fine if you give if positive and negative feedback and if you can inform it at a higher level. Click-through and plenty of X-out, with a preference control like Facebook’s makes ad genuinely enjoyable. Try it for a week.

I agree this drives data gravity and a strong monopoly position – but I don’t think the solution to Standard Oil power was to ban the combustion engine.

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The problem isn't X will like product Y, so lets show ads for product Y to them. The problem is X will like features A, B, and C and hate D, so lets mention only A, B, and C to them. Y will like B and D and hate A and C, so only mention B and D to them.

If you're having trouble thinking of why someone might hate a feature of a product, the main case where this is a problem is political advertising, where features are policies. It is a problem with commercial advertising too, though.

EDIT: The other big problem is using tracking for price discrimination, but banning targeted ads wouldn't help there, you have to ban the tracking.

> The problem isn't X will like product Y, so lets show ads for product Y to them. The problem is X will like features A, B, and C and hate D, so lets mention only A, B, and C to them. Y will like B and D and hate A and C, so only mention B and D to them.

Yeah let's ignore that human flaw instead of correcting it, right? Racism doesn't need internet to exist. The issue is that people just take everything they see as face value. That's what need to change. I still remember my teachers that kept repeating DON'T USE WIKIPEDIA! The right thing to say was actually "Don't trust Wikipedia" or even more broadly, "Don't trust everything you read". Sadly we prefer the easy solution instead of the right one and they kept saying "DON'T USE WIKIPEDIA!", luckily students don't listen to their teachers that much and learned to verify their source instead (at least most of them).

features are candidates, policies are selling points.

The candidate is the product, the policies are the features.

"makes ad genuinely enjoyable"

Really? That can't be an honest statement. I've never enjoyed someone interrupting me, even if it's for something good. When it's to ask me for money, even for something I eventually need, it's infuriating. When it's every minute, I'm ready to break something.

Ads aren't recommendation systems, they're manipulation systems driven directly by money. If they were recommendation systems, they would try to figure out the general thing you want/need, show you several options, and suggest the best value regardless of how much a particular company paid. Instead, they try to figure out how likely you are to click something given to them by the highest bidders.

Well, new songs on a radio are ads. Same for movie trailers. Some people watch Superbowl ads because they are a cultural product.

In the context of the NewsFeed, you switch context between each story, so ads are not out of place — the way that they are in the middle of an article.

I find the few ads that I see enjoyable because they generally cover services that I am interested in.

Songs aren't ads (except the songs that are ads, of course), they are the final product, and I just got it for free. If I record the radio, I've gotten what I wanted (if the DJ doesn't talk over it at some point). That's why there's so much effort put into trying to stop "pirating" (DJs talking over songs is one of those measures).

Movie trailers are certainly ads but, lately, I avoid trailers for movies I know I want to see even harder than regular ads (fingers in ears "LA LA LA" type stuff) because I know they're going to spoil everything. I can't believe how many times all the twists and final scenes are shown in trailers. The Ready Player One trailer even spoiled the book for me because SPOILER I hadn't learned about Aech's real identity yet, just seeing the cast was enough to accidentally deduce it (and not just 1, but 2, "surprising" aspects of the character).

Superbowl ads did tend to be good before they became a "cultural product". Now they're all just Idiocracy level shit.

Bit of a tangent on the "song is an ad" thing: Now that our personal information is the final product, like a song is, and enough people are finally starting to realize that can lead to trouble (yet still don't want to pay for anything with money) they want exactly what media companies have been seeking for decades, DMCA and DRM for their personal information. As we all know, DMCA and DRM suck for everyone involved. They don't stop copying and inconvenience both creators and "legitimate" users far more than "pirates". The reality is simple, if you don't want your information "product" to be consumed, just refuse to give it to anyone.

Edit: "Consumed" is the wrong word, information isn't a consumable product in that it's not gone afterwards. What's the right word? Whatever it is, that's what we should be using to talk about the act of receiving information.

Edit again: "Received" is better. duh.

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