Hacker News Reader

Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular opinion: Ads by themselves are unethical. Whether targeted, contextual, or just randomly applied.

Ads are psychological warfare against a populace using their very nature against them. All in an effort to get them to change their behavior in a way that's going to be detrimental to them. Either they stop looking for alternatives, or they make purchases they don't need to (see: toothpaste consumption rates).

Ads are unethical, and are only considered acceptable because they have been around for so long, and because they're "easy" to use and supposedly ignore. Anyone working in the ad industry is directly supporting this unethical behavior. This isn't an "NTP is also used in cyber warfare" style of engagement, this is writing missile guidance systems levels of engagement.

View on HN

Not having ads is also unethical. Imagine trying to spread a novel idea / product to a society or an oligopoly that wants to oppress you

If society, or "the oligopoly," wants to suppress you, the ad industry isn't going to help you. They wouldn't want to run afoul of these big movers and shakers for a couple of hundreds of dollars.

Try running ads now for the KKK's new "hoods and cloaks" business if you'd like a practical example.

>Imagine trying to spread a novel idea / product to a society

If society actually wants it then they can learn about it from places that aggregate such ideas. Moreover if our lives weren't inundated with ads 24/7 then those aggregators would be in much more demand. Very very few advertisements are for novel ideas that are actually a net positive for society.

Would you say that Ads are still unethical if they're not paid for?

As just an anecdote, I'm always shocked by the amount of advertising at Burning Man. There's always people trying to get you to come to their event or join in their activity. Signs and street barkers are everywhere. There's no money and no bartering allowed, but advertising is everywhere, since ultimately attention is what is in limited supply.

If they aren't unethical in this scenario, it seems like what you're saying is that it's the underlying socio-economic system that's unethical, which would explain why all of the alternatives to ads also appear to be unethical.

What's unethical is taking advantage of an average person's psychological blind spots or weaknesses with the ultimate goal of making a profit.

In your ethical framework, are all attempts at persuading someone to change their behavior unethical? What advocacy/awareness increasing behaviors are ethically acceptable?

What if an ad is for a product that someone wants, and is beneficial to them by helping them find a product they were not aware of?

> are all attempts at persuading someone to change their behavior unethical

Same answer as a sibling comment. It's unethical to take advantage of a person's psychological blind spots or weaknesses to turn a profit.

> What if an ad is for a product that someone wants

Do they want it prior to viewing the ad? If not, the ad is creating a psychological desire for something not previously needed or wanted.

Or did they pull a trick like a sibling commenter called out - searching for "good USB drive" and providing an ad. The ad takes advantage of being shown in response to a keywords that implies a level of quality of the product that isn't substantiated. There's no technical reviews that demonstrate that it's good, or even suitable to the task at hand. The only thing that actually sets it apart is how much was paid to put it in front of the searcher's eyes.

I'm generally sympathetic to this stance, but the major drawback that has surfaced (when I've had this conversation in the past) is that discovery is a real thing that still needs to happen and ads can in fact help with that.

First in the obvious way: there are products that I have found useful that I would not have known existed if not for ads. The idea that you should only ever purchase something because you were specifically looking for it seems a bit silly, because that's not how it has played out in my life. Have I purchased stuff I didn't need, influenced by ads? Of course. But I've also purchased things which objectively made my life better, which I would not have even known existed without ads.

We are lucky to live at a point in time where most of the world's information is at our fingertips (via the internet) and we can quickly, easily, and freely find information about anything we could want. But this is ignoring the fact that a lot of this is in turn funded by ads.

e.g. when I'm trying to find something, I google it, which is free because their business model is ads. There are a lot of people who are reviewing products with high levels of trust on sites like YouTube (tech reviewers like MKBHD), but they are able to produce those videos (which I watch for free) because they too are funded by ads.

Sure, we could pay subscriptions for all those things, but as pointed out in the OP, that is a regressive funding model – it becomes harder for a poor person to find the best products if all the best product reviews are locked behind paywalls.

Your argument boils down to "content creators need to make money, and the only expedient way for them to make money is to show ads".

And you know what? Perhaps it is.

Even if that's the case, I still think it's unethical, that a bit more brainpower should be put into a funding model that isn't ads. Even if it increases friction.

The most expedient way to expand a country's border is still war, and I believe that's unethical as well.

Well you missed the first part of the argument, which is that ads can be intrinsically useful for discovery of things you didn't know you needed but would actually be useful in your life.

With regards to the second part, which you addressed, it's one thing to say "this is bad we should replace it with X". It is an entirely different thing to say "this is bad I have no idea what we should replace it with". Because nothing is black and white, so it doesn't matter how bad ads are if the thing that replaces them is then worse.

Are people hardwired out of the womb to know that your services are available and that they want them?

How do you draw the difference between an ad and not an ad?

Is a doctor telling you to brush 2x a day an ad for toothpaste? What about their suggestion that you floss more? Those are aligned with your well being, but will increase your consumption.

> change their behavior in a way that's going to be detrimental to them.

This seems obviously wrong. The implication here is that anything advertised must be bad for the target. From an econ perspective this means that you reject the idea of comparative advantage.

> How do you draw the difference between an ad and not an ad?

If it's paid promotion, it's an ad. If the doctor's doing this only because they think it's in my best interest, it's not. The FTC already has some pretty clear guidelines on this because ads are required to be clearly marked as such in many cases.

I guess I should clarify in the context of this discussion, we're defining ads as

>psychological warfare against a populace using their very nature against them. All in an effort to get them to change their behavior in a way that's going to be detrimental to them. Either they stop looking for alternatives, or they make purchases they don't need to

In this context, a doctor making a recommendation to use a particular brand (paid or unpaid) is an ad. Even a doctor generally recommending you change your behavior to consume more toothpaste is an ad.

So in this framing, how do you determine the difference between an ad and not?

Even with the narrow definition, you missed:

> in a way that's going to be detrimental to them.

A dentist recommending that I use more toothpaste may change my behavior, but not in a detrimental way. If the dentist is paid to make the same recommendation, it's more difficult to say whether they made the recommendation purely out of my best interest, so the definition begins to apply again.

This gets back to what I said about comparative advantage. The monetary transfer is only bad if you assume the company can only gain if you lose and the situation is zero sum. If you using toothpaste is good for you, and good for the company, what's the issue?

To use a more current example: would Pfizer marketing in a way that intentionally appeals to anti-vax people be mind control to their detriment?

Taking a step back, there are at least (but really I think only) two reasons for an advertisement: to raise awareness or to convince. The first clearly isn't unethical. Saying "we exist" isn't really mind control, and results in a more informed consumer. I admit that most ads that appear to do that don't just do that, but an advertisement that simply points out that Colgate is a Toothpaste brand that you can buy Is ethical. Its exactly the same as putting your logo on your box (which is a form of advertisement!) and having your box at eye level on the shelf (which is also a form of advertisement!!).

The second type convinces people that one act may be better than another (our brand > their brand, or brushing > not). These can be ethical or not, but GP stated that, essentially, advertising is always going to be detrimental to the consumer, which implies that everyone is already acting in a globally optimal way. That seems immediately suspicious, does it not?

Thanks for expanding. I agree with your delineation between raising awareness or convincing, I think. I don't think it's the most helpful way to understand ads and their potential for harm. There's another way to categorize ads - maybe orthogonal - based on whether they are presented as part of an advertising network or not. There's a fundamental difference between showing a box on a shelf and buying ads on a billboard. Or perhaps the line should be drawn at targeted ads. It's of course possible to show benign "we exist" ads via Facebook ads, or political disinformation ads in a newspaper, but it seems to me that certain methods of advertising are obviously more conducive to harmful, manipulative ads.

Also (and this is more radical), I do think it's a legitimate to want to unsubscribe, even from "we exist" ads. Attention is valuable, it shouldn't be considered an inalienable right to sneak anything you want into my consciousness for the purposes of selling. Even if you accept that it's not a zero-sum game. I recognize that this is not the status quo at all currently, but it's the feeling behind comments like the above.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com