Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Voters are also usually not responsible enough to handle democracy either, and yet here we are.

1) If you don't tell people about your product, they won't know about it and probably won't use it. Word of mouth is ok, but it is surprising how many people are left uncertain and in the dark about what their options are if they aren't directly told what their options are.

2) Without advertising, the internet collapses. Google, in particular, collapses. And takes a lot of unprofitable-without-advertising services with it. Facebook probably goes as well. Most media companies too. Once you lose all those companies I'm not sure how many normal people would agree that the internet still existed.

View on HN

The internet existed before advertising and it could continue to exist without it. People still desire instant communication and they would pay for it if a free option did not exist.

A lot of garbage like Facebook would fall and real social networks would take place with real interactions not algorithms trying to drive fake engagement.

I don't agree. The internet definitely did not exist in any form that would be today seen as sufficient ever before. The sheer scale makes it impossible, advertising is the only way poor people could afford it and pay for it without paying money at the same time (so the developer now has a new option too). The options these companies that exist thanks to ads gave to all businesses in my country are enormous and have definitely helped greatly to grow our GDP (I live in the country with the greatest number of online stores per citizen). I love Facebook and Google for the options their advertising platforms have created for people (however not being ethical is not cool at all).

There is other ways to see ads. The companies don't pay money for advertising, they pay to make poor people buy things they don't need. If they would pay the site owner directly, maybe they would not be as poor?

I doubt it. One of the interesting things about the ad funded internet is that it is effectively progressive. Rich people have more money to spend which makes their clicks more valuable which means the revenue made by ad funded companies comes disproportionately from the rich and yet poor and rich get to use the same exact internet despite the fact the it is mostly paid for by the rich.

I'm sad a lot of the top tier newspapers in America are starting to enforce their paywalls now because we are back to the state where only richer people can afford high quality news.

Almost every ad is targeted at richer people, not poor people, for obvious reasons -- right her people have money to spend. Most companies would be fine giving their product free or at marginal cost to poor people if they could require richer people to pay. That's how freemium works, when it works. That's how DVD region coding works. That's how international book publishing works. That's why airfare is so cheap in economy class.

> The internet existed before advertising

Advertising has been around for centuries, perhaps even millennia.

I mean, I think you mean "before online advertising", but that's not true either! Online advertising predates the web and even the Internet by decades; We had ads in the BBS days, and people didn't hate it. So what's going on?

China does a lot of "social" advertising and doesn't have the problems with ad fraud that the western world does: The trick is that "publishers" are responsible for what they serve. That's it.

> People still desire instant communication and they would pay for it if a free option did not exist.

People do pay for it. That's why we have slack and Cisco, and they aren't alone! The paid ones predate the "free" ones by decades too, but even the "paid" chat systems needed advertising to get those sales– we have throughout history always relied heavily on some form of sponsorship to bring products to market, so there will always be a channel for advertising.

> Advertising has been around for centuries, perhaps even millennia.

Not really, unless you stretch the definition so much that it does not make sense anymore. The problem here is the advertising industry, not the small sign on a local business, when you stretch definitions, of course the reasoning does not work anymore.

The advertising industry was not merely or limited to "a small sign on a local business" before the Internet. Not in the last few decades, or even in the last few centuries. Moving the goalposts doesn't help anyone.

The internet existed in a major fashion before there was any notable amount of advertising on the internet. The original goalpost was not "advertising did not exist in the entire world".

The discussion of the origin of advertising is a different issue. But I'd say that "advertising" as normally understood didn't really exist before mass-produced newspapers at the very least, so that's less than four centuries and nowhere near millennia.

> The internet existed in a major fashion before there was any notable amount of advertising on the internet.

We got Netscape Navigator, Yahoo! and the famous AT&T banner ad all in the same year. Even still, we had irc, email and newsgroup spam in the preceding decades (even if you can still call that "the Internet"). I would see advertising prior to this on commercial online platforms (like AOL and compuserve) -- but I can accept that this might not have been considered "the Internet".

I was thinking maybe you define the few years between "the WWW" was invented (1991, if you believe some accounts) to when it became popular (1993, maybe) as some kind of "golden era" of Internet when there weren't any banner ads, despite the fact early websites were directly advertising for eachother (a kind of "sign on the local business" perhaps?). This interpretation seems unkind though.

So I'm left thinking you and these couple other people are just wrong.

I simply can't imagine the Internet before advertising, and I doubt most people could. I have been online since the 1980s and I have in that entire time seen ads, so if you actually meant something by this statement, I'll need some help unpacking it.

I'm not counting spam, and I'm not counting sites that link to each other for free. And by "notable" I mean something like 10%, not an experiment or "it existed somewhere".

> The internet existed before advertising and it could continue to exist without it.

It would, but it would be much harder to find content, because the major search engines pretty much only show corporate content marketing pieces that are written specifically to rank well in search results.

The other day, I was looking for some essays or blog posts about a particular TV show. The first 5 pages on Google were all variations of "10 things you didn't know", "this moment made our jaws drop", "How working in an office is like [completely dissimilar situation in the show]".

The only way I was able to actually find a human-written post (completely different style from a conversion-focused copy writer's post) was when I was searching for a screencap from the show on Google images. It's easy to distinguish user-captured images from corporate, licensed images, so clicking on the source link showed me a beautifully written, hilariously annotated season review on a cheap blogspot domain. That reminded me of the early Internet, when the writing felt much more personal and relatable.

Harder to find? Wouldn't a lack of advertising money kill most of those garbage sites?

SEO is SEO. Not all of those sites are ad-supported. You could have a copy writer post an article for that TV show, for the blog of a streaming service that offers it.

There are also plenty of corporate sites offering some SaaS product that will put out semi-technical blog posts that rank high but don't give you the full picture and end with a CTA like "Want to learn more? Sign up for our webinar".

The goal is for you to arrive on their blog page, and "convert" into a customer, or fill out a contact form. The content is a means to an end, which hurts content quality.

> Google, in particular, collapses. ... Facebook probably goes as well.

You say this as if it’s a bad thing. In my personal opinion, both of these companies have ultimately done more harm than good. Maybe Facebook more so than Google, and some Google products have pushed various tech forward, but at the expense of being tracked and watched and having garbage we don’t want or need constantly punch us in the face for our attention. More people seem to be suffering from anxiety and depression and I personally think these companies are a major part of the cause. If they were to collapse, good riddance I say.

> Most media companies too.

Most media companies are garbage peddling clickbait or misinformation, or at least empty-calorie/low substance content. I read a lot of stuff online because I’m just as addicted as everyone else, but the amount that is a truly insightful, actionable or entertaining in an any way memorable way is tiny. Good riddance to these too.

>More people seem to be suffering from anxiety and depression and I personally think these companies are a major part of the cause.

That trend pre-dates Google or Facebook. Before them and Snapchat and instagram, it was text messaging. The basic ability to send messages to your friends in real-time is the problem. Individual services can make it incrementally better or worse, but it's the behaviour that's the actual problem and even very trivial modern technology enables that behaviour just fine.

Communication isn't the problem, in my opinion. Its the empty-calorie idle content consumption. All the people (myself included) in the train or bus or streets who are idly scrolling through facebook or twitter feeds, reading some low-content articles on some clickbait subject -- the kind of stuff that I can spend hours reading, but then not be able to act on or remember any of it. What's the point of consuming content if you don't remember it a day or two later? I estimate that about 90% of what I encounter online makes no difference to my life (both in terms of usefulness and entertainment) other than to consume my time, my energy, my focus and my phones battery ;) All the while, the advertisement is telling me I'm not good enough and don't have the right things.

Back in the early 2000's, I did spend a lot of time with text messaging and I did spend a lot of time on messenger applications/irc etc. The way I communicate with others hasn't changed that much: I use different apps or websites, sure, but ultimately its very similar. What has changed, though, is how much content I consume idly, just to pass the time, because my internet-addicted brain tells me I should, not because I get anything out of it. I'm slowly working on reducing it, at least.

> but it's the behaviour that's the actual problem

Sure, but what we put out there encourages certain types of behaviour and the current norms of internet use encourage an, in my opinion, unhealthy addiction to low quality content consumption.

The basic ability to send messages to your friends in real-time is the problem.

I don't think that is the problem. Sending messages to your friends still has a social contract, and abusing that privilege has repercussions.

Sending messages anonymously to unknown people is much more of a problem (e.g. robocalling).

> Voters are also usually not responsible enough to handle democracy either, and yet here we are.

What a weird way to start off. You should probably elaborate on that for it to make any sense outside of a high school economics class.

Regarding number 1: like what? I’ve never met anyone who looked really happy about seeing an ad for hot singles in their area, that they should feel insecure about how they look in lingerie, that they should go gamble.. would more than 1% of advertising be good? If an extremely large proportion of a thing is bad, then I can agree with someone calling it a scourge.

Regarding number 2: okay

> What a weird way to start off. You should probably elaborate on that

The point I'm trying to get across is that something can be critical to a functioning system even if on its own it doesn't look very impressive. Voters are the scourge of every democracy, they push for all sorts of stupid policies and usually get them.

> Regarding number 1: like what?

Literally everything? You've identified 3 product categories for products that border on scams, but literally _every_ product category advertises. I just flicked through my open tabs, and the first ad I see is for forex (www.icmarkets.com). There is no way I'd ever have heard of them without that ad; in fact thanks to this HN thread I know know how easy it is for me to get involved in forex trading :P. The 2nd is for a retail energy supplier offering me new deals. Honestly I think your 99% figure just suggests you are browsing the wrong websites. Maybe visit parts of the internet that are less sketchy.

> The point I'm trying to get across is that something can be critical to a functioning system even if on its own it doesn't look very impressive. Voters are the scourge of every democracy, they push for all sorts of stupid policies and usually get them.

I'd love if you could expand how this applies to advertising. Voters are critical to democracy. Advertising isn't critical to society, it's mostly a way for a lot of people to waste a lot of time, man-hours and natural resources on zero-sum game, while polluting the physical and mental space around us. If it were to suddenly disappear (a wide ban, perhaps), it wouldn't make much difference to anyone except people working in ad/adtech space. Sure, the Internet would get leaner, but I strongly believe that what would disappear is mostly just garbage that's just contributing to information noise.

I go further than the OP: to me, advertising is - quite literally - a cancer on society.

> Voters are critical to democracy. Advertising isn't critical to society

Advertising is absolutely critical to society. Without advertising we can't figure out what companies are selling, because they can't tell us. That puts a real crimp of having a functioning economy.

I don't have statistics handy, but I assure you that if advertising were generally banned there would be a lot less, say, smartphone owners. If you think the average person is capable of figuring out what is available from word of mouth you are grossly overestimating what a normal person is capable of.

> Advertising isn't critical to society, it's mostly a way for a lot of people to waste a lot of time, man-hours and natural resources on zero-sum game

It isn't a zero sum game. It is value add. People can't exchange money for goods and services they want if they can't find a vendor selling said goods and services.

> if you weren't allowed to advertise, say, smartphones there would be a lot less smartphone owners.

That would certainly be a net benefit to societies mental health.

Not necessarily. Mobile phones are hugely important economic enablers and poverty is bad for every kind of health, not just mental.

Mobile phones, sure. Smartphones? That's a bit more debatable. At the very least, a cheap smartphone is probably fine for most "economic" needs. What we need less of is idle high-noise-low-quality content consumption, which is also the thing that's most supported by advertisement.

Smartphones, cheap or not, are not a problem. The core benefits they bring to poor people are mobile data connection, web browser, phone connection and IMs bundled in a single device. None of that is "supported by ads". The problems of smartphones (that are beyond mobile phones) start with the application ecosystem, completely disfigured by the cancer of advertising.

Fair point. Most of us here on HN don't require smartphones for that, but I take your point. Everything you list as a key benefit for poor people doesn't require an expensive smartphone, or at least, wouldn't if adverts weren't sucking up the compute and battery power when using a web browser ;) More seriously, though, beyond those basic capabilities, which we (ie not poor people) have had as long as I've been using the internet and while crappy adverts have always existed (punch the monkey and win a prize!) online, the amount of low quality content we consume has increased substantially, largely due to social media imho, which is supported by ads and is what I'm arguing against. I don't disagree with what you said here at all.

How many work/social hours are lost to mobiles.

I know for myself a huge amount are gained, or saved. Being able to check email, keep in touch on Teams and SMS, track my meetings, etc save me a handful of hours every week. They're some of the most valuable hours too.

That's motte-and-bailey defense. Technically advertising is about informing consumers what's on the market. In reality, it's everything but. Real-world advertising is near-universally dishonest and manipulative. Getting rid of that would not preclude companies from making available (note the pull, not push, approach) information on what they're selling.

> It isn't a zero sum game. It is value add. People can't exchange money for goods and services they want if they can't find a vendor selling said goods and services.

It is. People can trivially find any goods and services they find through catalogs, phone books, trade shows, and Internet search engines. Advertising spending is mostly about shouting loud enough to get heard over shouting of your competitors - which is a zero-sum game of ever amplifying noise.

> In reality, it's everything but.

Well, if you have evidence of that then my interest would be piqued. But I must admit I suspect you're just being cynical. By far and away most of the ads I see are honest but with an agenda.

Manipulative is a debatable term. Advertisers are manipulating you in the same way I'm manipulating you right now - I have an opinion and I want you to agree with me. I don't really see how you can justify getting unhappy about that. It seems pretty reasonable given that they are ultimately funding whatever it is you are looking at at the time.

> catalogs, phone books, trade shows, and Internet search engines

Those are literally compendiums of ads, except search engines. But in this instance, the consumer is proactively searching for ads. Clearly the ad is providing some value to consumers. And the idea that consumers should attend trade shows to work out what their options are is patently absurd.

And working out exactly what search engines would look like if they were not ad supported is beyond me. I assume you'd be paying some sort of subscription free for the pleasure of basically googling ads. Seems a bit backwards.

> People can trivially...

No they can't, decisions about things outside a person't domain of expertise aren't as easy as you want to pretend they are. What the consumers really want is (a) cheap and (b) one of what everyone else has. Advertising isn't going to help with (a) but it is fantastically good at (b).

Figuring out what everyone else is doing is hard work. That is one of a couple of value-adding opportunities for an ad.

"I assume you'd be paying some sort of subscription free for the pleasure of basically googling ads. Seems a bit backwards."

Back in the day, many better mail order catalogs cost money to receive. Mostly to offset the cost of mailing them out, but partially as a form of filter, on the theory that someone sufficiently interested in a catalog to pay to get it would be more likely to actually order something.

Imagine if literally the only way to get a phone, or even find out what phones there are, was through a carrier store.

Take away advertising and the only way someone could find out about a product is word of mouth, or walking into a shop. Functionally everything would originate in shops. That means looking at the available options would be very time consuming, involve a lot of travel and be dominated by very powerful gatekeepers who would control you access to goods and information. It would revitalise the high street, that's for sure, but in a very controlling, rent-seeking way.

There are ways to optimize access to this information. Trade shows that display new products. Mail-order catalogs for companies or industry groups. Companies would find a way to make information - not ads - available for interested people to peruse. The core difference would be "pull not push", i.e. people with a problem would go looking for solutions, and very little space to compete on product information - preventing runaway zero-sum games.

Trade shows and catalogs are forms of advertising.

Also, regarding "pull not push", people sometimes don't know there is a solution to their "problem" (where "problem" might not be a real problem, per se, but maybe simply not even knowing that a given option exists).

You can define anything as advertising if you try hard enough. That's not very helpful for trying to strike a balance, though.

Of the ads I see, if we exclude the drug ads that really should not be allowed, I'd say that an extremely small fraction are telling me about solutions I didn't already know existed. The "useful" case should not be so rare.

Of course there are workarounds, but they are time consuming and therefore expensive, but also less efficient and reliable. It would be going back to the 80s, but even more locked in to physical outlets as gatekeepers. You're really just exchanging an inconvenience for a tyranny.

> That means looking at the available options would be very time consuming, involve a lot of travel and be dominated by very powerful gatekeepers who would control your access to goods and information.

You make it sound like ads are purely informational and designed to help us make an informed decision. Remember the iPhone ads touting "fastest iPhone ever" with the bottom text "sequences shortened"?

Did you buy your last computer with no research, just the ad? Do you go to McDonald's because the burgers look exactly like the ones in the commercial?

I agree that a world without advertising or news or reviews would be bad.

Your thought experiment isn't very useful for picturing a world that only lacks advertising.

Oh, ok, so it’s his/her fault for seeing the “wrong” ads? Gotcha.

> Honestly I think your 99% figure just suggests you are browsing the wrong websites. Maybe visit parts of the internet that are less sketchy.

Those are the kinds of things I see mentioned on Twitter. I use iPhone, so I don't see why I would see internet ads myself. Obviously as I am someone who doesn't like ads, I'm one to block them.

There's adblocking in mobile Safari since 2015? So there's very few ads that I see since then (the digital ads in the last month I've come across: "powered by x", "powered by y", and "you can subscribe to z at url" - I'm happy with those). Comparing life before mobile adblocking and after, I don't see that since then I've missed out on anything. People, without an interest in the success of ads, who come across an ad on their devices seem to find it irritating; haven't found anyone who didn't seem happy and kept using uBlock after showing how.

Eh.. am I living in some kind of singular utopia then?

> Honestly I think your 99% figure just suggests you are browsing the wrong websites. Maybe visit parts of the internet that are less sketchy.

This is not true and I'm gonna provide some evidence:

I am a conservative christian[0].

I get those ads as well.

My browsing habits:

- stuff linked from hn

- local news

- one mainstream newspaper

- fringe political papers from the left and right (mostly don't agree with any of them but it makes for interesting reading, a better understanding of why people are mad etc)

- christian podcast

- technical stuff (both related to work and to my technical hobbies)

- repair videos, childrens videos (when they get to borrow one of my devices)

And still I get ads for singles in my area. Extremely stupid ads. E.g.:

- when I'm at work in the middle of nowhere and I get ads with a picture of someone who is supposedly desperately looking for someone like me, supposedly living in the valley next to nowhere where there are nobody except old farmers. That kind of stupid.

For a while I tried to hit that micro x in the corner of those ads and mark them as irrelevant. Only got equally stupid ads for other equally irrelevant sites.

I don't want to remove ad income for honest writers but I've given up now and I'm ad blocking like many others here.

I've also come to the conclusion that tracking doesn't work, it is just a thing they do to scam marketers.

And I've concluded that if I were to place ads for a product I would place them based on the content of the website, -like Google used to do. If anyone wants a proven business opportunity here it is :-]

[0]: No, not embarrased by it, but I do not want to discuss that here, this is a technical forum. Just pointing out I don't visit what I consider sketchy web sites at all.

> I get those ads as well.

Yeah, everyone does. Are you suggesting you see almost literally 100 such ads for every ad advertising something legit? Because for me they are the 20% dross for 80% potentially useful ads I see.

Honestly, the businesses in your region of the woods are truly woeful at advertising, and should probably spend more money on it. Realistically, if what you suggest is true, something has probably gone wrong and your demographic has been caught in a bubble where no-one serious is advertising to you. Because those ads should be in the minority.

> Because for me they are the 20% dross for 80% potentially useful ads I see.

Lucky you. For me it seems way below 50% useful.

The closest I get to relevant ads are if I search for something like x hosting, then I'll maybe see ads for that for a while.

Im not against ads:

In fact I'd like if local shops informed online whenever their deal of the week came out (they sometimes do and that is a click from me if for some reason the ad isn't blocked).

Same goes for other interesting ads if I see them, which means max twice a year.

> Without advertising, the internet collapses.

I just can't wait for it. There are just few steps left:

1. Ads are served from same domain as content (this is now in progress)

2. YT integrates ads with main video stream, sites experiment with server side "render to canvas".

3. Adblock is using ML/AI

4. Laws are made against undisclosed sponsored content.

5. Online advertising is dead, clickbait is dead, free (now ad supported) content is dead. There are only subscription services left.

The Internet would not collapse. We pay our ISPs for a connexion. They don't give a crap whether we're using Google or not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com