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Comment by Mistletoe | Hacker News Reader

It’s refreshing to see this in the Washington Post, owned by Bezos. Tiny beacon of hope going out into the darkness.

Search ads on shopping websites are just capitalism taken to the natural end. Hopefully degradation of user experience will curb it somewhat. Our only other option is some sort of new Internet Bill of Rights being passed and I’m not optimistic lobbyists would ever allow it. We need some sort of fund for humanity that hires lobbyists with greater funds. We need voters that vote for candidates that would support the human right to freedom from manipulation from corporations.

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> We need voters that vote for candidates that would support the human right to freedom from manipulation from corporations.

Donate $3 to the Presidential Election Fund every year on your US taxes. It costs you nothing, is a single checkbox, and redirects $3 of your taxes into the fund.

Candidates that take money from the fund have additional (mostly good) limits placed on their spending.

It's not perfect, but it's free to do and creates an alternative to lobbyist funding.

https://www.thoughtco.com/presidential-election-campaign-fun...

> Candidates that take money from the fund have additional (mostly good) limits placed on their spending.

From the "Public funds received 1976-present" on this page[0], usage of these funds has steadily declined, likely because "To be eligible to receive public funds, the presidential nominee of a major party must agree to limit spending to the amount of the grant and may not accept private contributions for the campaign".

0: https://www.fec.gov/introduction-campaign-finance/understand...

Yes. The last campaign that took them was apparently McCain.

But better to be a part of a solution, if the opportunity cost is $0.

I will do this, thank you!

> Hopefully degradation of user experience will curb it somewhat.

Sometimes the ads even betray themselves. Like I, as a rule, hate ads. I block them where I can, and where I can't, I do my best to ignore them. But then you get instances where the ad _is_ what you're actually looking for. Like if you search Amazon for "iPhone", you get official first party iPhone stuff from Apple, but they're sponsored listings. My proclivity to skip ads would make me scroll right past the only quality products on the whole page, into a slew of AliExpress level garbage.

I generally look at aggressive ads as a detractor to the product. Money spent trying to bait me into making the purchase is money not spent on improving the product. I'll always pick the non-sponsored product with the highest (written) reviews. I agree that we'll need to be even more aggressive than advertisers, as their boundaries are pretty much nonexistent.

For example, I'm an avid Sonic fan, but no amount of fan service could get me to sit through the constant advertising woven into the script. I'm going to just skip this franchise entirely. Whatever happened to just slipping a sign in the background?

They have to buy their own keywords so that others aren't first in the listings right? They don't want Samsung to be the first thing you see. Hilarious and sad at the same time.

Yeah, it's one of the things I hate most about the ad ecosystem. The pro-ad argument is "they give the little guy a kick at the can", but that's tremendous bullshit. Try an example: Turn off adblock and search "Lejiled Wallet" (a very small French company which makes nice leather wallets). You'll get ads for much bigger companies (Fossil and Belroy) in the sidebar, and those ads will follow you all around the internet for months. https://i.imgur.com/lAaAdGM.png

IMO the only thing that separates this from racketeering is that it's technically legal.

The future is booking ads for other brands so they catch the ire of the customer.

If you walk into a store and say "I need a cat bed," and the store directs you to the most profitable cat bed ... is that a violation of your proposed law? How do you legislate around that? There are a thousand cat beds! They are all the same! The store that doesn't take bribes to hype certain brands goes out of business! And all we have left is Amazon! I mean, I guess that's already happened, so ... what more do they want? Does Amazon have no shame? What if they used their monopoly to sell stuff honestly? Would their whole business collapse?

We don't see what they are not reporting.

Thankfully there are many other news organizations who aren’t owned by Bezos.

Those are noble goals, but have close to zero chance of happening, and they won't address the root of the problem.

> Search ads on shopping websites are just capitalism taken to the natural end.

The issue is not just with search ads or shopping websites, but advertising in general. It's the primary business model of the modern web, and the main revenue stream for most Big Tech corporations. Considering their symbiotic relationship with governments, neither side has much incentive to change the status quo. Some change is slowly happening, but I suspect it will become much worse until it gets better.

We're lucky that ads are still somewhat blockable. Wait until browsers become WebAssembly interpreters, so that this isn't possible anymore, or for XR to become mainstream, allowing adtech to do much more invasive tracking and advertisers to buy a chance to deliver ads straight to your eyeballs. Label me a pessimist, but I don't see how any of this will be unavoidable in the near future, other than by becoming a luddite.

I opened the page and immediately got paywalled... Maybe that's the intention, create such a terrible enemy that the thought piece becomes mute.

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