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Comment by trylfthsk | Hacker News Reader

I think it's a common sentiment here, but I'm turning into a more extreme anti-advertising zealot every day.

Even the large ad networks show paid content that violates what I would consider widespread ethical norms - presenting everything from hyperbolic claims to straight fraud to people with little repercussion. I'm reminded of a poignant example in television, where episodes of Jeopardy! are intertwined with their shilling quackery like Prevagen to an audience using the fear of aging. Perhaps I'm growing increasingly blind to any positive impacts of the discipline, but ethically I find it hard to separate the fraudsters from the engineers that enable them.

I guess advertising is saving me a lot of money in the end by cultivating this hatred, and though I can't change the world this screed was therapeutic.

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My mother got a new laptop, and at some point I got remote access to help her get a few things set up (password manager/ad-blocker/backups/etc). I was really amazed at what her Facebook feed looks like. Actual Facebook advertisements for literal scams. 'Michelle Obama's investment tips' for some bitcoin platform. 'Patagonia Outlet' with items at 25% of the cost, at domains like patagonia-outlet.shjss72828.sub.domain.pl, etc. I scrolled for a while and more than half of the advertisements were like this. This is what senior citizens are dealing with.

This is just not ok. I understand that screening everyone in the world's personal posts/shares for 'fake news' is a daunting task, but KYC-ing advertisers and screening/auditing ads for blatant and obvious scams or false marketing is many orders of magnitude less resource intensive... and should be required by laws with teeth.

If the costs of doing so mean that it's impossible to make a profit as an ad platform, then that business model should die.

> but KYC-ing advertisers and screening/auditing ads for blatant and obvious scams or false marketing is many orders of magnitude less resource intensive

And very easy to automate. We know they can do it. But until there is sufficient threat of action if they don't then they are happy to let their users get fleeced in exchange for the advertising $.

There is an argument that "if they crack down on the easy to detect stuff, the scams will just get more clever" but that is not at all why they aren't making more effort.

One funny thing I've noticed with facebook, is that if you start responding to such adverts with comments along the lines of "this is obviously a scam because..." responses, they start showing you more and more of that sort of scam presumably because you have shown engagement with the previous ones.

For an extra dose of cynicism keep in mind Youtube is demonetizing countless videos supposedly because advertisers don’t want to be associated with such content. Garbage ads certainly aren’t exempt from that logic, yet there doesn’t seem to be as much of a crackdown on them.

The content creators aren't paying them, the advertisers are.

So what your saying is Facebook is a grocery store checkout?

Glad I deleted mine in 2010.

> This is just not ok.

"Not OK" is forgetting to clean up your table after the meal. What these scammers are doing is simply fraud and Facebook should be liable as they enable it.

I remember when I set up my first FB ad (maybe 10 years ago?) it took a few days because some of them were manually reviewed. Fast forward 10 years and they accept any fraudster who pays them a few bucks. Just low scum, that's all.

Having less exposure to advertising, given that I watch less advertising-interrupted television than ever and have had a pi-hole running for a good couple of years, when I am exposed to advertising I'm reminded of how incredibly bottom-feeding it is.

I've said it before: Advertising is a psychological attack on human weakness.

> I find it hard to separate the fraudsters from the engineers that enable them

Paraphrasing because I can't find the original:

"What does it say of humanity to have so many of the smartest minds in the world working on making advertising more effective"

> this screed was therapeutic

Most advertising literally attempts to hack an audience’s brains, which everyone should instantly recognize as being black-hat.

At the same time, we have created super computers that run on expansion cards that are being used for that same black-hat activity. Currently measured in the 10s of teraflops of processing power.

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” –Jeff Hammerbacher

Some of these best minds are probably reading this right now, and keeping awfully quiet. :-)

Or hiding in plain sight in posts here.

https://youtu.be/xRL2vVAa47I&t=13m20s

More and more I'm seeing a general public backlash against advertising. It's been so large and so prevalent that people find it irritating enough to avoid products that are getting heavy pushes. I've found myself having a visceral "stay the hell away from this product" reaction on occasion as well.

My stance on web advertising has always been "go back to static, not in-my-face, non-animated, no audio, no javascript ads and I'll consider turning off my ad blocker."

I'm absolutely not letting my computer get infected through the ad networks, which is a separate issue really.

Advertising is the most toxic virus ruining everything it touches. TV, then Cable TV, radio, usenet, on and on. Can anything survive the destructive ravage of ads?

In my dream world, all forms of push advertising would be illegal, full stop. Meanwhile, I'll put whatever effort it takes to block everything.

I dread to think what happens when ads collide with cryptocurrencies. They’ll either wipe each other out or merge into something far horrible.

They're already dating and it looks like marriage is afoot. Plenty of ads driving people into crypto scams.

Isn't that basically what Brave is doing with Basic Attention Tokens?

Advertising is only able to exist when there's centralized entity controlling the presentation of the content. TV and radio are good examples — your receiver simply plays whatever is on air, and has no idea what's in there. Social media services like Facebook strive to control the experience end-to-end precisely because of that too, and that's the reason why public APIs for Facebook and Instagram got reduced from "enough to build a third-party client" to "you can post, getting any info for the current user requires a manual review, and you can't do anything else".

Contrast this with email and phone, the only successful federated systems. Spam is illegal in some countries, and there's a concerted effort by everyone to fight it.

When no one controls the whole experience end-to-end, there is simply no technical possibility to expose you to something against your will. This is why decentralized social media is the future. I just can't see how Facebook could survive much longer unless there's a drastic change of some sort.

Yeah, you're probably preaching to the choir here. The tracking and advertising industry has an unprecedented amount of influence and control over our lives, it's getting harder to pry your life away from their claws.

Sadly, I think things need to get much worse before they get better. People still don't understand the dangers of it, though I believe this has already become a sociopolitical problem instead of just an annoyance.

At this point I'm just generally not okay with being marketed to against my will. Especially in places that have absolutely literally nothing to do with spending money — like, you know, every single news website and every single social media service.

If I want to buy something, and if I don't know exactly what, I'd like an unbiased list of things in that category to choose from. And when I don't want to buy anything — which is, again, when I'm reading an article for example — I don't want to be reminded that economy exists AT ALL. There is no place or circumstance in my life where advertising, as it is known today, would be anything but annoyance to me. Which is why all my devices have ad blockers installed and third-party cookies disabled.

So who pays for what you're consuming?

There is no requirement, ethically, morally, or legally to look at ads.

That's not my concern, neither is it my responsibility to make sure whoever the website belongs to gets paid. Paywall it for all I care. Implicit contracts aren't a thing.

The person with the server.

It's certainly how I feel. I see virtually no advertising at all.

I use ad blockers.

Pay for YouTube premium. Use a sponsorship skip extension.

Only watch ad-free TV / streaming.

Pay for Spotify.

Use tweetdeck for Twitter.

Don't use Instagram or Facebook.

I certainly don't listen to the radio.

Where else can I possibly see an ad? A billboard? That's easy to ignore.

Imo it's all worth it.

It amazes me that we don't charge third parties to use our network resources to retrieve their assets for displaying as ads.

We should be charging vendors for traffic that is only designed to forward their business, when it happens on our own local loop.

> a poignant example in television, where episodes of Jeopardy! are intertwined with their shilling quackery like Prevagen to an audience using the fear of aging.

Episodes of Jeopardy, now temporarily hosted by Dr. Oz.

I am very much anti-advertising, at least the way it currently operates on the web and the inherent invasion of privacy but I think from a technical perspective what's happening here is very different compared with how a traditional banner advert is being displayed and it's not constructive to directly compare the two.

Latest thing that set me off was noticing Mandalorian wallpapers on my Pixel phone.

Advertising is legalized fraud. Someone gets taken advantage of and we say "Oh you fool, you should've known those claims were bullshit."

I'm even more concerned about the second order effects of so much being driven by driving clicks to ad dollars. This is obviously what causes the attention economy and maybe many of our negative trends in society. How much less attention would BS articles on anti-vax and QAnon nonsense get without all of this? How many fewer content farms that are just trying to waste my time would we have?

I would love to see how an alternative reality without advertisements would look. I'm not sure if we could ever fully accomplish this given that there always will be people willing to pay for eyeballs and people happy to take money or goods to change their messaging.

Are you objecting to the actual advertisement?

Because that is small potatoes compared to the tracking, matching and profiling of individuals. I believe that is the big threat to society (and possibly democracy)

One follows from the other. Tracking, matching and profiling of individuals isn't done for kicks, or because evil governments are asking - it's done for two reasons:

- Tune the advertising to best manipulate a particular person (think of it as a PID controller tuning inputs to a system);

- Ad attribution - i.e. determining which companies in the advertising chain should get paid when a customer buys something from someone.

Restricting the shape and form advertising is allowed to take addresses the driving factors behind privacy violations.

I recall an interesting interview I had with eyeo, which bought the original Adblock Plus extension and have since been pushing for their "Acceptable Ads".

  - Do the ads still track users?
  - Yes, but they are not unobtrusive
  - Yeah, that is not acceptable.

The sentiment definitely resonates. The way I see it, advertising is a cancer on modern society[0]. The two big tech-related social problems so frequently discussed these days - surveillance capitalism and outrage culture - are directly caused by it.

> Perhaps I'm growing increasingly blind to any positive impacts of the discipline, but ethically I find it hard to separate the fraudsters from the engineers that enable them.

There are definitely useful spinoffs - like they always are, when you throw a lot of money and a bright mind into solving tough problems. But it's hard to argue the positives here where the primary driver is a huge net social negative, and spinoffs could've been done pursuing better goals.

[0] - And I mean that - http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html.

This is not that simple, unfortunately. Advertising in itself is not bad. Why informing about a good product is something wrong? How we would have Tesla or iPhones, etc. without advertising. Nobody would know about all of those.

But something went wrong at some point.

Similarly with options - options were a great way farmers could offload risk to the products buyers, who, in exchange could get better prices.

But when options started to be used for something which is not much different from lottery bets, again, something went wrong.

This is important lesson. Capitalism is a great system, but it cannot be narrowed to greed. Capitalism requires working ethics since we are not able to regulate every aspect of life - it is practically impossible.

But ethics no longer works. Big IT companies owners were fixing employees wages, who cared. Amazon owner does not care about warehouses workers miserable work conditions. Facebook owner is ok to steer people into fights, as this increases "engagement", ads clicks and revenue.

Has it happened that Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg was asked to leave his country club or whatever place they are hanging out because of the unethical behavior? Obviously not.

> Capitalism is a great system, but it cannot be narrowed to greed. Capitalism requires working ethics since we are not able to regulate every aspect of life - it is practically impossible.

Whether it's still Capitalism at that point is an interesting question. Some people seem to call any market-based system capitalism. For others the lack of ethics is definitional.

My own view is that we probably ought to stop using the term "capitalism" entirely for the most part, and be more specific about what we mean.

Advertising itself is bad.

> This is important lesson. Capitalism is a great system, but it cannot be narrowed to greed. Capitalism requires working ethics since we are not able to regulate every aspect of life - it is practically impossible.

The market is literally a big, greedy - in algorithmic sense - optimization engine. It optimizes away everything that stands in the way of making more money. It optimizes away quality, and it absolutely optimizes away any and all ethics. Marketing and advertising are a clear example of this in two separate ways: on the object level, they're already doing everything they can that isn't strictly illegal[0]; on the meta level, you see that competing on marketing and advertising has a better ROI than actually trying to make better products.

You cannot expect a sense of ethics from a system which requires ethics as a containment vessel, and continuously tries to erode it. Much like you can't expect water to just keep flowing in a straight line, in absence of a bank or pipe that would constrain its expansion.

[0] - And enforced. GDPR demonstrates that with insufficient enforcement, otherwise reputable companies will absolutely break the law.

Maybe I'm wrong but I thought that Tesla actually never used ads. Then again with the PR they generate there's just no need to.

You picked two terrible examples. I first heard about the iphone via word of mouth as a friend had one and was showing it off at the bar.

I hear about new ones by word of mouth from collegues (from people who go out of their way to watch product releases on the apple away day or whatever it is). I hear about new gadgets by paying for someone to go to CES and look at what's new.

Tesla, and starlink, again is word of mouth, or deliberatly seeking out information on it (by visiting tesla.com for example).

You're upset about regulators, not about advertising.

It seems like you're mixing advertising = fraud, when in reality it's just people who commit fraud that use advertising because regulators can't seem to act.

I got my first Internet connection when adblock was already a thing (though I was definitely an early adopter). I don't know how ad-filled Internet looks like and I will fight tooth and nail with every tool at my disposal to keep it that way: adblocks, Pi-hole, VPNs on phones, paying for ad-free versions, it doesn't matter. I do not watch TV and I will do my best to keep ads out of all my screens.

Good for you mate, just keep in mind that a large part of your purchase decisions are still influenced by paid media (not only advertising) - as long as you're aware of that, you're safer, that's the true adblock.

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