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Comment by edgyquant | Hacker News Reader

Even if they were the greatest company on the planet that doesn’t change that they dominate the ad market and internet and that has to change

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I wish more people understood how horrible advertising truly is.

Your life is essentially a compilation of what captures your attention. Embracing this perspective, any entity auctioning off your attention to the highest bidder is trading away a part of your life.

People don't understand what this means. They also don't understand how cynical this is in the context of a search engine. I don't have a solution to this, but man, its horrible.

This is a bit much. Attention is not that hard to control if you want to. It's sad if people allow their attention to be captured by doomscrolling/notification-clearing/etc but no more so than if they did so playing Solitaire or reading trashy magazines.

Attention really is hard to control, and most people can't do it. In fact, the only way I've learned to exert real control over attention is by practicing meditation. Regardless, the GP's point stands: we ARE the sum of our inputs.

> Regardless, the GP's point stands: we ARE the sum of our inputs

This seems too nonspecific. Influence is graded on a curve: early life experiences and childhood are formative, and the job of parents is to raise their children well. I don't think we should be equating the influence of internet ads with big experiences.

I agree, but we also shouldn't discount the thousands of little influences that affect us everyday, either. It's a bit like deflecting an asteroid: a big push early on will have the greatest effect, but thousands of little pushes later on will also deflect it. The key quality is the coherence of the impact - if they push in all directions, it may NOT have an impact. Arguably advertising is coherent in that it all seeks to increase your appetite for consumer behavior. And I would argue our parents do that to us, too, with gifts of toys and other trifles.

I agree, but I think being aware of that is how we self-determine a bit better. Facebook sucks you in with notifications, and if you notice that you can disable notifications, or (as I did) uninstall the app and just use the website.

Do you see ads to play solitaire on a regular basis but "control yourself" to not play it? I also don't see ads for magazines like I see ads for cars, food, gambling, etc. The magazines themselves contain ads, sure, but I have to have the desire to read a magazine first in order for my attention to be hijacked by an ad within.

That's naive. We all feel like we're the master of our story, but our history books show us that people are products of their time--their physical, social, and cultural environment. With determined effort, one person can fight the tide, but one person is a rounding error.

Trashy magazines are also a mechanism for auctioning off your attention to advertisers.

I don't personally feel like I notice many ads online. Maybe they are subtly influencing me but mostly I seem to avoid them. Yes I have an ad blocker but I still see ads or open things in an guest or incognito window or something which doesn't have an ad blocker. I don't think I can name an ad I've seen in the last year. Maybe a few years ago there was that Nintendo ad that took over all of youtube. Maybe I've seen a movie ad on IDMB once that caught my attention. Mostly though, it's just background noise that I tune out.

The only place I actually notice is Amazon, since it seems to often insert things I don't care about

Ads are not at all horrible. Ads help connect products with the niche markets of people that could benefit from them. Many cool products are too niche and would not be able to exist without targeted advertising. Yes, when done distastefully, ads can be quite horrible (ie ads for gambling and other vices), but when done well, both the user and advertiser benefit. This has to be true, otherwise, if users never found ads useful they would never click on them, and then advertisers would’ve never pay for advertisements since they wouldn’t benefit them.

I appreciate your perspective on the potential benefits of ads. However, I’m emphasizing a much deeper, existential concern here. Our lifes, essentially, are the sum of what we pay attention to. In this context, advertising doesn’t just sell products; it habitually redirects our attention, shaping our experiences and, consequently, our lifes in profound ways.

The pervasive nature of advertising can subtly dictate the rhythm of our lives, often reducing moments of potential introspection, creativity, or connection with others into opportunities for commercial engagement. It’s a constant auction of our attention at the cost of personal enrichment and depth of experience.

It alters our relationship with ourselves and with the world, as our attention is steadily guided away from personal priorities and towards commercial ones. This is a critical and largely unexamined impact of advertising. We are, effectively, paying the ultimate price, which is life itself. No amount of "taste" in individual ads can compensate for this.

Not to mention the way it shapes culture, inculcating children with the materialist creed of insatiable consumers before they even know what advertising is.

> Many cool products are too niche and would not be able to exist without targeted advertising.

This is not true. This is the excuse used to justify the spying.

Contextual ads work perfectly well for providing information about new or niche products. It the other, much creepier, use case for ads that want the detailed information to target tailored ads at individual users.

you're subscribing to the absolutely horrible notion that if someone is making money, its by definition a net good for society.

I wish more people understood that if you had to pay for everything on the internet, it for modern intents and purposes would be dead. Even this site itself is a marketing device.

(of course it is possible to show advertising without tracking. there's a lot of context to be had in many cases).

I find it hilarious when people complain about paywalls etc. If you want zero ads, then you have to pay. How will you pay otherwise, magic or thoughts n prayers??

then I love the "I dont want my computing resources to run ads", well then dont read the article !!

"But the internet in 1996 was absolutely amazing and totally free!!"

eyeroll

Oh, it gets worse. Tyranny amasses resources, and politics is power is marketing. Part of advertising absolutely is propagandizing humanity in the most traditionally appalling ways towards the most traditionally horrifying ends.

It's not even about 'propagandizing genocide and tyranny to make money'. For some people in power, genocide and tyranny are what you spend money ON, and the engine for making that money. Money isn't the goal, ideology is. Advertising connects naturally to that true goal, and nobody's asking where the money is coming from.

I adblock Google in part because some of the people able and willing to pay them Google-sized money to propagandize me are truly evil people that I don't want to hear from.

Influence is a part of life, and that's all advertising is. But at Google scale, and with good enough feedback (something Google and Facebook have really optimized for), influence is too effective- society-damaging levels of effective. And then it comes down to who's amassed the most money and power and also knows how to exploit those resources to work their wills.

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