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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> That's always an opportunity for me to educate them to what's actually happening before their eyes: "look guys, this is a company (some people at work) that's working to expose their products (toys) to your eyes, hoping that you will ask your parents to spend money to buy it. They're smart, but we are smarter!".

You're stopping short of telling them about what is my real reason I hate ads. I wonder if the kids ever asked you why companies are doing it?

The reason I hate ads is because it's a legitimized way of abuse, of hurting other people. I'm gonna be a father at some point, and I dread the day I have to explain to my kid that modern civilization is in this weird state, where it's "friendly" in the sense that you don't generally have to fear strangers, but it's also overrun by malicious actors trying to suck your money and happiness dry. Our civilization pays lip service to being cooperative, yet so much of it is still adversarial.

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I've got to say, you're using a pretty wild definition of the word "abuse", as well as "hurting other people". How in the world does an ad hurt you?

The closest I can I think of is that there are some mobile games that use their ads as bludgeons to force you to buy their "remove all ads" in-app purchase, which, if I enjoy the game, I'm usually more than happy to buy, even if I resent a little being bullied. You could possibly stretch this to meet the definition of "abuse".

I don't like ads, but it's a pretty big stretch to say that it is abuse. Are you talking about ads on the web or on television or in app in particular, or are you talking about print ads or billboards or radio ads as well?

Certainly there are services which are borderline scams (and occasionally real scams) like multi-level marketing or snake oil goop, or games that arguably are designed to trick you into spending money on in-app purchases, but the fact that those services use ads does not taint ads, any more than the fact that people that work there use pencils mean that pencils are abuse.

The definition of abuse: use (something) to bad effect or for a bad purpose; misuse.

Advertising exists to get consumers to spend their money on a product they don't need (or a particular brand of a product they do need).

The argument is that if they're inspiring you to give them your money for something you don't need (in most cases, tricking you into thinking you do need it) that's abuse.

Like I said, a pretty wild definition. Is it abuse if one of my coworkers buys a BMW? I mean, the intended use of a car is to drive, not to make me want to buy one for myself.

By this definition, isn't selling a product that people don't need a worse offense? We should put all those toy manufacturers and restaurants and luxury car makers and fashion designers and barbers and perfume makers out of business.

I'm just overreacting to a rhetorical device, I know. I don't like advertising, and I express that preference in by preferring no ads where possible, but rarely am I willing to pay money up front to remove them. My intolerance of ads is not unbounded; in most places my intolerance is worth less than a dollar. I don't think advertising is an issue that we need to address as a society. The particular issue of advertising in children's games is more of an annoyance than anything else -- my kids only activate ads accidentally and then have to come to me to figure out how to get out of the trap that the ad has led them into, since closing the ad can be tricky.

Your coworker buying a BMW is not abuse, but BMW causing you to want to buy one through their marketing is.

Selling a product is passive. Advertising that product is active. A company selling a product is not abuse. However, stores serve as advertisements for the products they sell. I would say that such stores - and the salespeople within them - are abusive.

> my kids only activate ads accidentally and then have to come to me to figure out how to get out of the trap that the ad has led them into, since closing the ad can be tricky.

Advertising aside, would you agree imposing a difficult to navigate user interface is abusive? I would.

Ads that lead to a more expensive car is one thing. Ads that lead to a body image that increases the likelihood of health problems and early death is another.

I think it's counterproductive to describe the very concept of advertising as abusive. Nevertheless, a large class of advertising as practiced on television, the web, and on mobile apps should be avoided. In many cases, I don't even have to venture into the realm of morality or ethics-- they just create such a bad UX (battery drain, autoplaying bullshit, interrupting content flow, double the perceived loudness of what I'm watching) that the only sensible thing for a human to do is remove ads altogether from their viewing/reading experience. It's possible to do that with only a modicum of effort, so that's what a lot of people like me will continuing doing.

Cars represent $1.13 Trillion in consumer debt in the US on an asset that depreciates only slightly slower than fresh produce. Car debt contributes massively to the suppression of the middle class and is a burden many people take to their grave. Financial strain is a leading cause of divorce, and can often spur on depression, which has an immeasurable impact on both human lives and the economy at large.

Cars too are oversold and abusively advertised. And it really is psychological abuse, with horrific outcomes.

No you are conflating two different meanings of "abuse". The definition we should be talking about is: [verb] treat (a person or an animal) with cruelty or violence, especially regularly or repeatedly.

I believe that is what the parent comment is talking about.

There's a defensible argument that it is, in fact, cruel. It's just been normalized, which is a standard component of effective abuse. If you're in an abusive relationship (familial, romantic, employment, or whatever), it's pretty common to think this is how all such relationships work.

You're correct, that definition is more appropriate.

Companies abuse (misuse) their power over consumers. Consumers are abused by companies through marketing.

I wholly agree with my sibling commenter that it is cruel for companies to market to us with the intent of separating us from our money.

> I've got to say, you're using a pretty wild definition of the word "abuse", as well as "hurting other people". How in the world does an ad hurt you?

So, I realize this is a minority opinion, but this is close to how I feel, especially with respect to exposing my children to advertising.

Advertising is almost always an attempt to emotionally manipulate people by lying to them. There are some exceptions, like a catalog that lists objective descriptions and prices. But virtually everything else falls under that description.

Humans have the capability of reason, even though they're emotional naturally. Children, by definition, are still learning to use reason and logic and building effective habits. To expose children to a world of very smart adults trying to undermine their ability to reason or make good choices really is an act of aggression against children.

Abuse is probably too strong, but it's definitely an aggression.

No, don't backtrack. You hit the nail on the head.

It is abuse. It is manipulation. It is deceit. Mendacity at it's most essential form. It's predating on a limited resource (attention) in an attempt to push out any other options by hooking you through as high a mental form of stimulation as possible.

There is no need or excuse for that type of behavior. We just justify it because we've allowed an entire industry to spring up around it unchecked. Only halting that industry's ability to exploit unchecked in the most vulnerable populations after extraordinarily drawn out legal battles.

Tobacco and alcohol are about the only two markets I can think if with explicitly constrained marketing practices. Gambling too, in terms of game design, which I still think is close enough in desired effect to be considered a marketing practice.

Can marketing be a good thing? Yes! When the consumer is actively searching for it. In it's current form? It represents an unwanted, unwarranted invasion of privacy often foisted on users with no recourse.

Whenever I see people complaining about ads I commiserate. I worry about what happens as things like google glass actually become mainstream and I am always drawn back to this video that I think is a fairly realistic portrayal of what could be in the future: https://vimeo.com/166807261

I have a three year old and he gets so absorbed in screen time and then he goes nuts whenever we tell him it's time to turn off the tv/phone/games. Within a couple of minutes he is usually much more relaxed and I am working to curb any usage that isn't during a road trip/flight.

That is an awesome (horrific) vision of the future

Edit: the video, not your three year old :-)

Why do you keep giving him screen time when you can see it is hurting him?

> Abuse is probably too strong, but it's definitely an aggression.

Nah, call it what it is.

Consider it in the context of lotteries, how they're advertised, and who they tend to mostly affect. Or fast food. Abuse, for sure.

The problem with ads (and most of marketing too) is also that it turns into an arms race at scale and often at the expense of product quality.

Imagine two cities; one allows billboards and transit ads, one doesn't. Everything else being equal, which product wins in the ad-city? Usually the product with the ad dollars, unless there is a substantial difference in quality / price.

Which product wins in the non-ad city? The one that is better or cheaper.

The insidious thing is that brandable food products have to be processed in order to be unique. Anyone can grow an apple, but only Coca-Cola can make Vanilla Coke. So not only are we burning away attention / psyche with all these ads, we're also naturally incentivized to activities that aren't good for us or the planet.

If I had my way I'd ban it all. No advertising / marketing other than product demos and maybe search results[0]. There's too many downsides.

[0] Search is a special case because people are working to find a solution to their problem. For example, you may snore at night and search "nighttime snore mouthpiece" not knowing that there are other solutions like devices that detect snoring and automatically adjust your pillow. So in the search case the incentives are much more likely to be aligned.

I agree - except that Pompeii had adverts 2000+ years ago, now preserved in the ash. If it were possible to solve this in 2000 years, we probably would have....

Perhaps Google's original mission is the best one - accurate, impartial search.

Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, and Vermont have solved billboards.

> it were possible to solve this in 2000 years, we probably would have....

That's a terribly defeatist attitude, especially for someone who is writing a message on a colossal web of copper and forged glass, powered by lightning and runic commands, who probably doesn't live under the thumb of a king or suffer from polio, smallpox, or plague, and likely travels in a chariot drawn by elemental fire and oil extracted from the bones of the Earth, and who is far less likely to die from violence than at any point in history.

There's been a lot accomplished in the last 2000 years, and plenty of that achievement is fairly recent, scientifically and sociopolitically.

Your comment about leaning makes me think that advertising might be a positive (ish).

This situation becomes a repeated lesson that not everyone has your best interests in mind. For advertising aimed at kids the stakes are low (bugging your parents or wasting allowance on toys, games, candy, etc). Would kids/young adults be at a disadvantage if they don't learn to "tune out" that kind of manipulation?

I'm not sure it is a minority opinion, I just think it's so ingrained in us at this point we don't stop and notice. Perhaps it's having a kid, but I've recently been thinking on a regular basis that at some point in the future people will look back on the Advertising Age and wonder why anyone put up with what is essentially lying to encourage you to do something you probably don't need to.

I get why advertising exists and I think it probably did and can fill a need in a limited way but the incentives are all wrong. Ideally advertising would be a way of leading all buyers of mousetraps to the best mousetrap. Instead it is a way for the lesser mousetrap manufacturers/ the lazy/ the actively evil to foist inferior products on people via emotional appeals. We have homes filled to the brim wth crap we don't need because advertising suggests this next product will remove that existential dread or feeling of emptiness or impostor syndrome from your life.

> essentially lying to encourage you to do something you probably don't need to.

That's the best case scenario. More often than not, advertisers are actively malicious.

By that, I mean they are attempting to manipulate people into taking actions that are actively damaging to their health/finances/etc in order to enrich the advertisers. The fact that this is so accepted by society that hundreds of billions of dollars are spent doing it each year is absolutely repulsive.

Even the news/media industry is complicit in advertising. How can you tell the advertising bias in news articles etc? It's a tough problem to solve...

>Ideally advertising would be a way of leading all buyers of mousetraps to the best mousetrap. Instead it is a way for the lesser mousetrap manufacturers/ the lazy/ the actively evil to foist inferior products on people via emotional appeals.

I think this shift was largely due to the influence of the ideas of Edward Bernays, cousin of Sigmund Freud and arguably father of spin/Public Relations., which is largely a re-branding of Propaganda.

As an example of his work in an effort to get more women to smoke in public they were re-contextualized as "torches of freedom" and women were paid to smoke at the Easter Parade in New York. Somewhere along the line a shift towards selling a product (cigarettes) and selling on someone's unconscious desires and motivations. (to be seen as hip and with it)

Car marketing is one of the easiest places to see the change. Looking at early 20th century advertisements more of a focus is placed on qualitative benefits, such as cubic inches of trunk space or longevity of the engine or value for your money, compared to modern advertisements that focus convincing you that the car will make your roadtripping family happy, or make you appear successful, or environmentally conscious.

I agree, but you probably meant quantitative instead of qualitative in the last paragraph.

That said, There are plenty of car ads about how safe or reliable a car is, and hatchback ads routinely mention how spacious the trunk is. When 99% of cars are good enough for 99% of people (numbers made up) why should you buy any specific car other than the most cost-effective one? The experience that the car gives you. That's what car manufacturers are selling.

> Advertising is almost always an attempt to emotionally manipulate people by lying to them.

Advertising does not inherently rest on lying to people.

The problem is, once you strip away this you wind up with a definition of abuse that is essentially "emotionally manipulating people to feel what someone else wants them to". Which is an excellent description of the vast majority of human interaction.

> The problem is, once you strip away this you wind up with a definition of abuse that is essentially "emotionally manipulating people to feel what someone else wants them to". Which is an excellent description of the vast majority of human interaction.

Not if you notice that for vast majority of human interaction, that sentence ends with ", done in good faith and for mutual gain". Most individual interactions like this. Advertising definitely isn't.

In my admittedly sharply limited experience, at least one party to any such conversation genuinely believes they are acting in good faith and for mutual gain. This even includes things like people trying to get me to vote for a candidate I think is unsuitable. Or for a policy I think more likely to worsen the problems the canvasser wants to solve.

I think there may be more room for subtlety here. I've known plenty of marketers in my life. Most of them have genuinely believed that what they were marketing was something to improve the lives of the would-be customer and were acting in good faith to make the prospective customer aware of this. This ice cream? It'll taste good! This salad? Nutritious and filling! This video game or book? Hours of entertainment! This cheap beer? It can lubricate the social events you value!

Are there exceptions to this? Absolutely! Philip Morris springs immediately to mind. It may be excessively cynical to dismiss all advertisements as deliberately deceptive, not for mutual gain, or in bad faith is all.

Ads are more effective when they try to make the receiver feel inadequate. The vast majority of human interaction doesn’t have that goal.

I think they should ban the use of emotional sounding music in advertisements, that stuff really messes with your head cause instruments like violin or piano really grip you and paired with a paid advertisement it's hitting you with that information in a somewhat alerted state (music releases a cocktail of neurotransmitters [1])

1. http://www.audiocura.com/the-impact-of-music-on-neurochemist...

> Advertising is almost always an attempt to emotionally manipulate people by lying to them.

And lying is similar to violence in that both can be used to make you do what you otherwise would not do, and in particular can be used to make you act against your interests (an observation due to ethicist Sissela Bok). So the description of "abuse" is appropriate.

> Abuse is probably too strong, but it's definitely an aggression.

To the contrary, I think abuse is rather weak. I’d go further. Advertising is raping of the mind. Regardless of the medium (billboards, mail, spam calls, video, audio,..) the mind and senses are deviously polluted and raped with unwanted content without any consent.

The word you're all looking for is 'exploitation'. Advertisers and their clients are trying to exploit children for their personal gain.

Please don't abuse words like 'abuse' and 'aggression' by exploiting them. But even if you did, that wouldn't be an aggression.

> I don't like ads, but it's a pretty big stretch to say that it is abuse. Are you talking about ads on the web or on television or in app in particular, or are you talking about print ads or billboards or radio ads as well?

I think he's talking about all of those and the "attention economy" they represent.

Keeping up to date with what's relevant is already difficult enough, it only becomes more difficult if you got ad-interests constantly trying to perform tricks to steal your attention and time.

It's manipulation of my emotions and invasion of my privacy to extract money from me. No, it's not done at the point of a gun. But it's still reprehensible.

I just re-read Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos and the analogies between the book's AI TechnoCore and today's Ad-tech industry seem very prescient.

Have a look at adverts for toys aimed at kids during children's programming.

Does causing fatal and debilitating diseases like obesity and diabetes count?

Because there are ads selling high sugar and/or fat low nutrient foods to impressionable kids as 'fun'.

> I wonder if the kids ever asked you why companies are doing it?

Actually they ask "why" every time for every thing that I say :) My sons are not yet (to my eyes) sufficiently mature to really hear a thorough answer to "why". I try to make them asking "How?" instead. I'm a hacker, not a philosopher ;)

But, to relate to your answer, I'm not really trying to make them hating ads (thought I hate ads too, like you). Loving and hating things and people is up to them, I'm just giving context and knowledge (ok, sometimes it's hints on my own feelings on important subjects such as religion). That's of course a very personal pov on education.

I see your POV as mature and I'll strive to do that exactly - not burden the kids with my own prejudices, but instead give them context and knowledge for them to find their preferences on their own.

Ads themselves are only a symptom. I suppose I'm profoundly disappointed in some aspects of our civilization, and the values it promotes, and I want my future kids to avoid such disappointment while still being cooperative players in the world (vs. defectors, in game-theoretic sense).

What I learned while being a father of two is that there is no such thing as objectivity. I have my prejudices. And when I notice one, I tell my kids about that. Including that I probably have a lot of unknown (to me) prejudices too. And that all humans have these.

"Actually they ask "why" every time for every thing that I say :) My sons are not yet (to my eyes) sufficiently mature to really hear a thorough answer to "why". "

I am digressing a bit here, but I strongly encourage you to rethink this.

The act of hearing things they are not sufficiently mature to hear is the very best process for becoming mature in that way.

Of course I am not speaking of prurient matters or horrific tragedies (you should hand them neither Penthouse nor MAUS) but I think you should explain matters like the one at hand clearly, in an adult manner, and with adult vocabulary.

They may not understand more than 10% of it but that lack of understanding is a great challenge and the 10% they do grasp is a foundation for deeper thought.

I have three children and not only do we speak of things that are beyond their ken, with them, but we make a point not to adjust our vocabulary downward when we speak with them. They have risen to the challenge.

I agree! Maybe you misread me, or maybe it's me not having been clear enough: I do expose them to adult speech/logic/vocabulary, it's just that I encourage and arrange the meaningful dialogue to start with a "How" instead of a "Why". It's just semantic (and me hoping that it will spark a scientific interest/method).

Thank you for verbalizing something that has been on my mind a lot lately. We seemed to have reached this dystopian state where people will do all sorts of horrible things to others, but they do so with a smile on their face and we excuse the underlying behavior as "efficient" or use other forms of "market-speak" to explain away our treatment of one another. Frankly, I think it's a function of how large we've allowed our organizations (that govern our everyday lives) to become. Large organizations tend to be completely indifferent to the needs of individuals, and we need to start adopting a more proactive approach to breaking up organizations that become so big that they fail to properly serve their constituents anymore.

However, I think I agree with others that ads, in general, do not quite live up to the "abuse" term. But, for kids the term may very well fit and is one of the reasons why there was so much effort put into restricting these kinds of advertising in the past. Unfortunately, though, it seems like we've just thrown our hands up in the air and given up...

I think the vocabulary you use is a little too extreme but I agree with the general premise that ads are a generally a negative thing and we really should reconsider if we, as a society, should be so accepting of them.

I think there was a time when ads made some sense. Before the ultra-connected world being able to actually tell your potential customers that your product existed was a real problem, especially for niche products that wouldn't otherwise be mentioned in mainstream media. If you invented a new type of lightbulb and you wanted to get the word out then buying an ad was a good way to go. In French "advertisement" is called "publicity" which reflects this pretty well I think, it's about making your product publicly known. Somewhat amusingly in Portuguese the word is "propaganda".

But does it really make sense anymore? Nowadays we are overwhelmed with information. I can duckduckgo for "best lightbulb" and get pages and pages of reviews. Word of mouth is easier than ever thanks to social networks (and without having to buy "influencers" to shill your product "organically"). There's no scarcity of information anymore. If your product is good you can get all the "publicity" you need without having to buy "propaganda".

Besides for many big companies it's not even about advertising a product anymore. It's about the brand. Everybody knows about McDonalds and yet you regularly see ads that don't even try to sell you a new burger or anything, just McDonalds as a brand. They want to be a part of your consciousness, a part of your lifestyle. I think the Portuguese people got it right after all.

My company makes pluggable chat components. It's a pretty niche targeted product, and we run some Google ads on the relevant keywords.

Now you're telling me that we're doing "a legitimized way of abuse"? Seriously? Come on. Nothing in the world is this black and white.

I'm not going to write an essay in the comments about nuances of ads (though I might put one up on my blog, even if just to have something to link to in HN comments). But I assume your ads on relevant keywords target active searches, and that your company is building a quality, non-abusive product. That falls on the nicer part of the spectrum[0], but it's also not the kind of ads we're talking about here.

Even search ads could still be made more fair (most of the time, if users are searching for something, do they really want to see ads instead of organic content?), but in my quixotic crusade against the malicious market players, I'd love to first get rid of the spammy ads - both in our digital media and on our physical streets - and ads that lie to people.

Cool, I'm with you there.

You are competing for attention with others, possibly a lot less scrupulous than you.

Advertising is like prisoner's dilemma: Companies are like prisoners and if they go overboard with advertising they are like defecting. If all companies had an agreement to rein themselves in, then there will be a rogue company sucking the attention away.

Then bottom feeders are going to target children.

The worst part about the industry is its a zero sum game. All you are trying to do is redirect dollars that would go somewhere else to your thing. You don't add value in that process, you simply redirect it. And because its an arms race it drives businesses to have ludicrous overhead in the form of marketing to reach the audience of whatever actual thing of value they want to sell.

Its one of the laundry list of things I can imagine a far future enlightened species looking back at us and thinking "wow, they sure wasted trillions of hours and dollars just trying to manipulate each other into spending their money differently".

Its absolutely necessary to participate on the individual level, but on the macroeconomic level it should look to anyone as being completely absurd and a huge waste of potential. Its a lot like overspending on the military - the primary function for advertising is zero sum while for the military it is a negative value, while you hope for circumstantial value to emerge and try to use it as an excuse to justify the whole when advertisers make entertaining ads (see the Superbowl Commercials or Flex Tape) or when the military produces scientific innovation.

> wow, they sure wasted trillions of hours and dollars […]

Well, not money, because the money spent just ends up in someone else's pocket. It doesn't disappear or get consumed in the process. What we are wasting is potential value for society as a whole (the hours you rightly mention).

Hours... and natural resources, including fuels used to generate electricity and provide transportation for ads themselves and all the supporting industries. For instance, meatspace ads involve graphics designers, printing shops, producing and moving paints and paper, and moving the final ads to their destination (and then moving them to landfills).

Advertising is wasting opportunities of people by distracting and misleading them.

Advertising is like a forest. All trees have to invest in tall trunks because if they didn't they'd have no chance against other trees. So they all get as tall trunks as physically possible.

Unfortunately society has almost no use for "advertising trunks" so we should impose intelligent limits on advertising so that the mechanism of informing people what they can buy could be less like forest and more like orchard.

I'm going to venture a guess that you've never run an ad campaign before. If you had, at least a mainstream digital one, you'd find that deceptive tactics don't work all that well. People using them do it to get access to the most vulnerable set of people, who aren't usually people companies are competing to advertise to. If I make an ad that implies you'll get something free, for example, and you click on it to find no free offer, you bounce. That makes my ad unsuccessful, more expensive, and less likely to win auctions.

Of course it isn't that black and white, and I don't think that was the point. I'd interpret it as: Your company is participating in something that, when looked at as a whole, has become something that you could call a legitimized form of abuse on a societal scale.

I think this is a "piling problem".

Lot's of good faith actors putting up lots of reasonable ads still results in a massive ad flood for the individual on the receiving end.

After some point the quality stops mattering, it's the sheer quantity that feels overwhelming.

I guess this might be the first time I've heard of ads being described as a form of abuse. You are probably onto something there. Thanks

Happy people aren’t great consumers. You only buy when you feel like your life is missing something that will get you to happiness.

Therefore, Marketers’ job is to create a lack in you. To make you feel “less than” as you are currently.

That does seem like the same thing a bully would do.

Yup. A sales person I know refers to this as "creating dissatisfaction", and used this concept designing his sales pitches.

How do we stop this?

I even see this in my elderly parents, they will be promoting something they saw on TV usually pandering to them with a catchy jingle or emotional piano/violin background track.

Kids can not even begin to perceive this level of subliminal manipulation and that isn't going to change unless we remove it from their environment and constantly point out the background manipulation. How will you attack this problem with your kids?

I think this might be a case of "Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity." In that, these people literally just want your money, they don't care about helping or hurting you, for the most part, they just want to do business.

Now if you're saying "Children are not old enough to do business with shrewd adults." That's very fair.

What exactly do you mean by "you don't generally have to fear strangers"?

Read a little of The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond and you'll get some surprising answers to this question. tl;dr in many places people who couldn't prove consanguinity would essentially have to attack each other due to a prisoner's dilemma dynamic. The idea of seing a stranger and just walking past them is actually quite new.

Any random person you pass by on the street is unlikely to hurt you or harbor negative feelings toward you in particular, is unlikely to attack you if approached, and will most likely help in an emergency.

I think this is true, but the problem is the finality of that single one bad event.

If drinking water from the tap resulted in 1 out of every 400000 drinks falling over dead, people wouldn't drink water from the tap.

depends on the marketing. Death rate for driving is worse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

And a lot of people still drive

Sure they would. On average, you'd have to drink 13+ times per day, every day, for 80 years straight, to get killed by such tap water. There are plenty more things in life with worse risk profiles (e.g. cars, like 'unionpivo mentions).

> The reason I hate ads is because it's a legitimized way of abuse, of hurting other people...

Everyone on this thread hates ads, but that's a stretch there bud.

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