Targeted advertising has become the norm on the internet, and it's hurting us | Hacker News Reader

Targeted advertising has become the norm on the internet, and it's hurting us

motherboard.vice.com

66 pointsjrepinc31 comments

It’s a bit hard to take this article seriously when there are FB and Twitter "share" buttons right under the title. I don't understand how news groups constantly criticize social media and then turn around and pay for advertisements and ask people to "share this article" on those very same platforms.

Not only that, AdBlock Plus blocked 51 tracker cookies on that page.

Y'know, maybe I'm better off without VICE in my life. This one is going into my hosts file.

You can be part of a something and still realize that it is a problem.

Not to mention the clickbait/hyperbole in the title. I strongly believe that targeted advertising has negative effects on society, but "breaking the world" screams "we want to grab and monetize your attention by activating your stress response, just like advertisers do."

Do they not see the irony? Vice sucks

Yep. We're basically reaching "peak hyperbole" in the English language. All these actors vying for our attention are resorting to more and more extreme wording to get our attention. Soon, there won't be new words to use that are more extreme!

I guess they could say "YOU WILL DIE if you don't read this article" but we already had that with "copy/paste this message or you will be visited by a demon" stuff on AOL decades ago...

I dunno... when elections and public thought can be so severely subverted by small and outside forces, I would argue that it IS breaking the world. We’re just seeing the tip of possibilities now. In 5 years there probably won’t be any commonly agreed source of truth left.. if there’s no common basis for truth then there’s zero possibility of common rule.

Sometimes you have to play by the rules even if these happen to be the rules you criticize. Yeah, they could strive for ideological purity by publishing the opinion piece in a self-printed paper magazine but this would not be a very effective way to reach people.

The people who write the article are probably very separate from those programming the CMS, and the marketing types those take their directions from.

Dr. Nathalie Maréchal's site https://nathaliemarechal.net/ doesn't seem "ad-infested", just a normal Wordpress site, 2 things blocked. She certainly seems to know her stuff, and to dismiss the words in the article instantly, just because they're on a crappy site, without even engaging with the content, is lame. Complaining about blocked ads, ie. just a small number on the screen, someone even saying they should "shut their traps", someone else declaring the (easily changeable) headline clinkbait.. come on.

In other circumstances, even outright paywalled articles sometimes just get put on sites that make them readable by someone, and then discussed or not discussed based on their merit. That in this case it's made out to be such a huge issue, that blocked ads on an article that is otherwise perfectly readable is such a "case closed" argument against anything and everything that may or may not be in the article, nah.

If it's "a bit hard to take this article seriously", that doesn't mean you just found a flaw in it, it's a flaw in your ability to take it seriously, and to distinguish between the core of something, gimmicks and circumstance.

I found it super easy to take it seriously, since I looked up the author and found so many interesting things, and links to other interesting things. I started listening to this talk by the author, https://vimeo.com/98786243 [0], and it's a bit hard to hear, the audio isn't great. So? If that kept me from listening to it, I would tell that to someone asking me if I listened to it. But why inject myself into a discussion supposed for people who did listen to it by saying I didn't listen to it, because it "was a bit hard to hear"? Like, if I was asking how to download audio, denoise and compress it, fine. But just complain, what does this add?

[0] Notice how it's not on YouTube. For which people get ~zero shit by the way; every day countless of dev talks are uploaded to YouTube, and anyone ignoring them because of that would be missing out. To hold it against speakers isn't just silly at best and at worst an excuse to deflect from the content, but for "the crowd" that IMO is "supposed to" bring empowering use of technology closer to people to just judge said people for not having means or knowledge they have is kinda fucked up.

Hey thanks for writing this out. I’ve felt similarly about quite a few hacker news discussions lately.

I worry that HN is turning into hot takes and gotchas and getting away from enthusiastic curiosity.

You have no idea how publishers are hurting financially because of the monopolized (google and facebook) market of internet advertisement is tanking. It's a bit like farmers cursing larger distributors and retailers for taxing at 200% for a gateway to consumers.

There should be a term for this type of fallacy - the idea that you're not allowed to criticize or advocate change of a system that you're part of. It's similar to when people say "If you think taxes should be higher, then send a check to the government!" - obviously, we have to live within the system that already exists, and it's not reasonable to ask someone who wants to change the system to put themselves at a personal severe disadvantage while advocating for it. The dominance of social media platforms means that many publishers are forced to encourage people to share links via those platforms.

Being judge and party?

Man, I really hate this kind of low-effort comment. Comments like it seem to be popping up everywhere around the web, and I think it’s a symptom of Reddit’s one-liner snarky monoculture infecting everything else.

To address your point:

- News sites are not a monolithic entity. The writer may not want sharing buttons, the publisher does want them, and the writer decided that getting their message heard was worth the trade off.

- The idea that only those outside or independent of a system are allowed to comment on it leads to lots of terrible scenarios in which the only people allowed to have opinions are the independently wealthy.

- Every single criticism of an idea doesn’t need to be backed up by extremist behavior. Criticizing the meat-production industry shouldn’t require one to become a hippie vegan living in the wilderness.

Not disagreement in general with your post, but being wealthy is rarely independent of your investments or the industry you made your wealth with. And that, indeed make your judgement biased. Which is not an issue since the arguments count, not who or why one give them.

Agreed completely. The only way for someone to be "a neutral observer" is to be wealthy, incapable of bias or persuasion, and not tied to the industry in question. In other words, not a human being.

> Though the rule was far from universally respected, 20th century journalism's code of ethics prohibited financial considerations from influencing news coverage.

This is a fairytale. Chomsky and Herman wrote Manufacturing Consent 30 years ago where they popped that bubble.

If you think about it for a bit, the whole Western perspective has been moulded by merchants' advertising for a few centuries now - say since the Gutenberg press was used for non-sacred texts ...

What bubble? That the various codes of ethics state what they state, even though they were "far from" being universally respected (which means it was often broken)? You're just confirming that they weren't universally respected. But that doesn't change the various codes of ethics themselves, e.g. from https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp

Journalists should:

– Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived. Disclose unavoidable conflicts.

– Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and avoid political and other outside activities that may compromise integrity or impartiality, or may damage credibility.

– Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money; do not pay for access to news. Identify content provided by outside sources, whether paid or not.

– Deny favored treatment to advertisers, donors or any other special interests, and resist internal and external pressure to influence coverage.

– Distinguish news from advertising and shun hybrids that blur the lines between the two. Prominently label sponsored content.

Meanwhile, "new media" don't even have that ethos in paper, with or without "teeth", you might say there are no principles being broken because there are no principles.

But advertising was always targeted. All those sleazy manipulative TV ads that sway angsty teenagers, targeted. Those baby faces that spin up any hormonal lady, targeted. The boobs that make plethysmographs spike, targeted. The internet just shifted the targeting balance from the form of the ad to the delivery of the ad. People may believe advertising is breaking the world, but the truth is it is people themeselves that break it.

Sure, it's just that the radius of the target's boolseye has shrunk to the point of constituting a qualitative change.

There are many many hundreds of millions of people who would never be able to afford a paid-only version of the internet. Imagine a $20/month bundle for all if Google's services, from search to Gmail, from photos to docs. Many in the developing world would find that prohibitively expensive.

> third, monetize that information by performing big data analytics in order to show users advertising that is narrowly tailored to their demographics and revealed interests

No. Big data analytics allows advertisers to target users. The "targeting' is for the benefit of the advertisers, not the users.

Perhaps targetted ads can be less manipulative and more information rich than untargeted ads.

Also, I think, if I had a product to sell, I would want to spent every penny of my ad budget to be able to get the focused attention of potential buyers who might be looking for products like mine.

Meh, it employs millions of people. Pretty much every app comes with secret trackers.

I want no part of advertising and have no need of it but clearly it pays somebody's bills.

Society as a whole is paying. I don't like paying the bill of someone whose scheme consists on capitalizing and slowly draining trust in the collective.

True and it also enables many smaller sites to function. The big players can adapt to a new revenue model easily, but for a small site maintained by 1-2 peopla it's not feasible to have and ad department or start selling ads individually.

So aside from its drawback the current automated ad system helps the little guy site owner and any tightening would only result in the small players getting eliminated with the big guys continuing to thrive.

> Google pioneered the targeted advertising business model in the late 90s

Weren't Google ads purely contextual until 2010 ish?

Oh the hypocrisy. Reading about how bad ad targeting and tracking is, while being welcomed by a huge, annoying modal, covering up half of the text I’m eager to read, with a large ACCEPT button, or the opt-out button hidden behind a link on an external page. It’s like sharing those “Delete Facebook” posts, on Facebook.

I also don't appreciate auto playing video wasting all my data and battery when I'm reading on mobile.

Why can't sites just emulate newspapers of old and statically embed non tracking ads on their pages? I'll whitelist the site on my ad blocker straight away.

This shit also causes no end of hassle to those who use screen readers or who have other accessibility problems.

This is the industry standard. I wish I had a choice to either pay with my data ("free" content), or pay with money in a subscription model. Just like Zuckerberg was asked, whether he would consider a subscription model. The formula is quite simple: monthly income divided by the number of users, that came out around $11 a month, if I recall correctly. This, of course, isn't in the interest of content providers at all. With a growing user base, the unit price of an ad is growing each month. Users wouldn't agree to an increased monthly fee based on the number of users. Greed wins. I wouldn't mind ads in principle. I hate intrusive ads. Does anyone know, why the Acceptable Ads movement isn't globally spread yet? I think this could be a middle ground for advertisers and users. https://acceptableads.com

Hypocrisy is difficult to avoid in modern world. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to criticize things we are enmeshed in. Your argument is not invalid, but I thought I'd point out.

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