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Comment by moolcool | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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

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

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

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