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Comment by pierat | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely not. Advertisements are a malignant cancer of capitalism, and will show up anywhere they are allowed or encouraged. And in a short time, they will crowd out human voices to the fake voice of "buy this shit"... And soon, even those fake voices are crowded out by louder signs of "buy this shit".

There is no ethical advertisement. At the root of advertisements are intentional psychological engineering used to manipulate people.

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I am rather belligerently anti-ad, but when I sit quietly to contemplate alternatives I must admit that in certain limited contexts, I found advertising incredibly useful in the [relatively] distant past: I would pick up the computer paper specifically for the ads, as they provided the cost lists for items sold by the various vendors on College St (Toronto), and without them such information was essentially unattainable. There were also occasions when Google's original search-relevant text ads were exceptionally welcome.

Given that there has been a context previously where it was welcome, there may well be contemporaneous contexts where ads could exist in harmony with independently motivated user objectives. Basically all of what I see today, though, ain't it.

I'm not entirely convinced of it being impossible: https://vimeo.com/233586784

Most people on HN rely on the adtech industry for their paycheck, you won’t see much agreement here.

> Advertisements are a malignant cancer of capitalism

I'm stealing this.

I'm guessing that you don't like capitalism and believe humans can actually have a nice egalitarian non-capitalistic society where everyone shares across the entire planet?

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