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Comment by darkwizard42 | Hacker News Reader

I think you are espousing an "ADS ARE INHERENTLY BAD" mentality that just doesn't resonate with people. I want to know about the best services that are useful for me. I do not want to be advertised women's swimsuits on Instagram (I'm a male with no interest in purchasing said item). When I see ads that are useless its infuriating. However, when I see an ad for Allbirds or a cool new leather jacket, I feel very much inclined to explore or purchase a product that I will genuinely be happy with. So, ads aren't inherently bad, they become bad or unfulfilling when they aren't personally relevant or become overly invasive in experience or content.

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It resonates with me, because I view ads as (intrinsically) mentally intrusive. I find seeing any ad, regardless of its relevance, infuriating; the advertiser is paying someone, not me, to place a thought or perception into my brain that I do not want there.

If I decide that I want to purchase a new jacket, for example because I'm traveling to a much colder climate, I want to be able to seek out (ideally unbiased) information about jackets and make my own decision.

Some of that might be in the form of advertising, but I will have made the decision to seek it out, rather than my plane ticket purchase being mined and then targeted with a clothing company ad.

I consider it to be equivalent to someone unexpectedly spooning food into my mouth, then arguing "Well, you have to eat anyway, why are you complaining?" It violates my sense of agency.

Perhaps I have a higher desire for agency than most?

Do you believe you are being force-fed thoughts any time you hear or read anything anyone else expresses? Seems to be just as much the case whether on not that expression is part of an ad.

I personally have a pretty strong desire for agency. I’m also conscious that my understanding of the world is entirely constructed by the sum of my interactions with said world, and advertising is only a tiny part of it. I’m thankful for the sensory input this world provides me - without them my brain would have nothing to do and my agency wouldn’t be very useful.

It sounds like you are suffering a lot because your experience of advertising in the world is incompatible with your opinions about advertising. I can see two ways to solve this problem:

1) Adjust your opinions about advertising, so that you think of them as part of your voluntary engagement with the world around you, not something that is being forced on you.

2) Remove advertising from your life.

Please don't discount how deep the rabbit hole goes with adtech.

I spent over a decade in adtech. I have several patents from > 8 years ago for metadata-based ad targeting.

While I agree with you that it is better to see relevant ads over irrelevant ads, the datastores that enable fine-grained behavioral targeting is, simply put, just too much power for any corporation (or government) to wield.

Corporations directly profit from larger data stores. The more invasive the data extraction, and the more available it is to their true customers, which are advertisers, the more they profit. The advertiser dashboards and ability to explore potential audiences based on targeting, both on G and FB, are astoundingly detailed.

I try to convince everyone in my life to run an adblocker and stay off FB.

One of the richest sources of metadata about you and your loved ones are your photos. I quit my day job to build a self-hosted, life-scale photo store, partly as a passion project, partly driven by disgust and penance from prior adtech work.

> One of the richest sources of metadata about you and your loved ones are your photos. I quit my day job to build a self-hosted, life-scale photo store, partly as a passion project, partly driven by disgust and penance from prior adtech work.

This sounds interesting. Do you have any links you can share?

Or perhaps an ad supported blog?

First and foremost - ads do not require personal information. Newspapers, television, and blogs have thrived on non-personalized ads for decades. The advent of targeted ads (the dam getting blown to hell) is what made general ads unfavorable (personalization and the absolute saturation of ads in every aspect of our lives).

/rant

That said, given that ads are a psychological trick to get you to purchase something (often something that you don't need in the first place), you're right: I do consider ads to be inherently bad.

"But mah blog isn't sustainable without ads" - If your blog depends on collecting a heap of pennies generated by psychological manipulation of your viewer base, your blog provides a net negative value to your viewers.

/end rant

Newspapers, television, blogs, direct mail, billboards, etc. all rely on a modicum of audience targeting. Don't pretend that P&G would naively pay for laundry detergent ads in Playboy magazine because they didn't know who the magazine's audience was.

As with all things, it scales with technological advancements, which also includes new responsibilities (that this article is mentioning).

There’s a marked difference between targeting ads based on the surrounding content and targeting ads based on my age, gender, location, browsing history, purchasing history, religion, job, income, and social network.

Claims that they are equivalent feel like an attempt to normalize such invasive ad targeting.

Nothing in my comment said they were equivalent - As with all things, it scales with technological advancements, which also includes new responsibilities (that this article is mentioning).

"However, when I see an ad for Allbirds or a cool new leather jacket, I feel very much inclined to explore or purchase a product that I will genuinely be happy with"

You've been trained to buy things and don't even realise it. What would happen if you didn't see that ad for the jacket, would you go without clothes? Heck, maybe you'd go visit a store and meet new people. Or you'd save more money.

The whole premise that we need advertising to make us happy is ridiculous.

There’s a difference between ads targeted to information you provide explicitly (age & gender when you signed up, etc) and information that is obtained by stalking you across the entire internet.

I’m all in for the former, but the latter should be made illegal.

Retargetting is a curse that needs to be eliminated. The idea of following people for up to (30?) days without an easy opt out is just so wrong. Just because I visited your website doesn’t mean I care to buy what you sell, no matter how long you stalk me.

> When I see ads that are useless its infuriating.

Yeah, me too. The difference is that nowadays all the platforms, services, devices, and tracking are being used intrude into every single corner of life. They are constantly tracking you, analyzing you, studying your every move. And they are trying to interpose into every waking moment of your life.

The day that my guitar tuner app for Android showed me an ad in the middle of tuning my guitar (which usually takes 20 seconds), intruding to the very thing that I need most to unplug from this shit show, I just about lost my mind.

Fuck advertisers. I hope that whole ecosystem implodes.

Targetted ads are inherently bad, and that resonates with most people I've talked to about it. I want to be able to specifically search for things that solve my problems; I don't need a torrent of competing products that I have no interest in distracting me from reading a cool article. I blacklist products advertised to me, refuse to buy them, because I hate the snake oilery the advertising profession has become. And, Google is evil and has perpetuated and propagated (and profiteered) the monetization of personal information, and bolstered that environment by sabotaging the open web.

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