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Ads are evil. They represent the efforts of a multi billion dollar industry using the output of millions of dollars of psychological research to manipulate you into buying things you don’t need. The average person has no chance against this psychological manipulation.

Burn it to the ground, and let something sane take its place. Micro payments and its kin don’t work today because ads are easier. Create a space and a need for them, and watch them flourish.

I'm fine with looking for alternatives to advertising, but so far nothing has been successful. People are choosing ads.

It’s almost like there’s hundreds of billions of dollars at play to make people incentivized to push ad ecosystems as much as possible

I think mobile ads are an obvious example of users choosing ads. Mobile apps can almost never actually charge money - people will not pay a dollar to download an app. But they'll happily accept advertisements in their app.

i avoid the app store like the plague because it's awful, but it's basically impossible to find options that aren't ad supported. and the lack of purchasing incentive has a lot of other factors into it as well aside from "i want ads". there's also massive user distrust in paying for apps because they're so often garbage in general

i search for apps these days by googling for FOSS and filtering results to reddit.

Ads are communication. Are you saying that communication is evil?

I regularly see young and naive folks online saying things like "supporting your favorite creators by buying their product isn't capitalism", or "self-promotion isn't advertising". All that cognitive dissonance must really hurt.

Ads are a subset of all communication. So no, communication as a whole isn’t evil, ads are. No cognitive dissonance required.

Nice fallacy though.

OK, advertising is communication "promoting a person, product, service, event or a job opening".

Is that kind of communication evil?

This isn't about ads which I doubt we'll ever get rid of. This is about privacy invading targeted ads (which Google enables as the 800lb gorilla ad network).

Those are evil and unnecessary (and honestly unclear in terms of efficacy these days).

The promise is that Google is some "unimpeachable authority" that preserves your privacy instead of selling you out, when in fact, they are not and they do just that.

That the modern web economy is based on this unethical behavior doesn't make it just or even an ideal economy.

No advertiser needs to know anything about me. They’re not a useful function of society and indeed are deceptive, harmful, and dangerous. Advertising needs to be put on a short leash with a choke collar until we can kill it.

> No advertiser needs to know anything about me.

They do if they want to deliver ads that are relevant.

> Advertising needs to be put on a short leash with a choke collar until we can kill it.

Kinda proving my point. Nothing in your post actually substantiates why advertising is inherently bad, you just state it as if it's true.

"They do if they want to deliver ads that are relevant."

I don't have any interest in them doing so, so this seems to work out.

I'm not interested in being manipulated, nor providing information about myself to make that manipulation more effective.

You're not really engaging with the conversation, which is kind of my entire point about the group of people (like yourself) who say "ads bad" and that's it.

I gave a case where advertising allowed me to write a blog for years, without paying any money. Indeed people make these choices all the time - mobile games are a good example where people will not want to purchase the game for a dollar but are happy to watch an ad every 30 minutes.

Unless you're willing to accept that advertising has some potential value I don't think there's any point in us discussing solutions.

Though I'd prefer no advertisements, I think it's worth distinguishing between targeted ads and those that are simply based on the page content.

If you run a technical blog and run advertisements that fit that theme, I am less adverse to that. I see the tradeoffs there, and can choose to visit your page and see your content knowing the exchange that's being made.

I was responding specifically to your concern that the advertiser would no longer be able to tailor their advertisement to me if deprived of information about me.

(My preference is to directly fund people who make things I enjoy, and I do practice that. I also think most mobile games funded by ads rely on predatory models to be profitable, which isn't really ideal. The whole thing is a mess of misaligned incentives.)

Thanks, so I think we both agree that some advertisements are fine, which is the point I've been trying to make. How do we make all advertisements "fine".

Direct payment would never have worked for my personal site, I could not pay and certainly my dozen readers weren't going to. But that site made my career. Ads allowed that.

As for what advertisers need to continue funding that, while not being awful, I think that is the interesting question.

> > No advertiser needs to know anything about me.

> They do if they want to deliver ads that are relevant.

There's a simple (and much older) alternative: deliver ads relevant to the content being seen, instead of tracking the user. If the user is reading a page about cars, deliver ads about cars (and car parts, and car insurance, etc). If the user is reading a page about My Little Pony, deliver ads about plushies. And so on.

Presumably if a user is reading about cars there's a good chance they already own a car. In effect you're saying "the existing internet can work with lower revenue for ad companies" and to that I am sympathetic.

> They do if they want to deliver ads that are relevant.

Advertisers can still attach ads to relevant content without knowing anything specific about the person who might see it. Consider an advert for a car attached to an motoring article.

> substantiates why advertising is inherently bad

I'll try tackling this. Advertising is inherently bad; it's the source of a great many of our problems.

It's inherently manipulative. It tries to persuade, coerce or deceive us into buying things we wouldn't otherwise. This is a huge driver of obesity and ill-health (pushing UPFs, alcohol, tobacco etc.) and climate change (generally increasing consumption).

By definition, it absorbs our time and attention. It interferes with our enjoyment of sports, written articles, and wastes our time sitting through video and audio adverts.

It corrupts services. It provides an incentive for companies to maximise advertising revenue instead of the best experience - take Google or Amazon, who design search to push ads rather than what users ask for. Or social networks, who use algorithms to maximise engagement instead of positive interactions. Or news orgs, which publish clickbait fury-inducing articles for the ad impressions.

It sucks a lot of our brightest workforce into useless work designing ads and ways to push them. It absorbs a lot of economic activity into zero-sum competition between rivals running to stay still.

I appreciate that, but you're not really talking about what would replace it or how the web would survive without it. Like, the reality is that ads are enabling non-ad content today, so I think it's fine to say "and it's bad for reasons XYZ" but can you not see the value?

> They do if they want to deliver ads that are relevant.

They can insert car ads on thedrive.com, tech ads on arstechnica.com, or topic-relevant ads on subreddits.

This approach appeared to "work" on radio and TV.

> Nothing in your post actually substantiates why advertising is inherently bad

Nothing says "pollute the air" like a "Go Green!" Exxon Mobile ad. Or how about those "flushable" wipes that aren't flushable and cause damage to water treatment facilities, yet continue to be a legal product [in the US]? Ads directly encourage harming the environment.

Why does "hate ads" need some form of empirical reason to rid this scourge of humanity? We all have preferences which may or may not follow a logical path.

Capitalism doesn't need defending; evil is a feature, not a bug. ;-)

I think there's an ecological angle to it. The more targeted ads can become, the more valuable any individual ad display becomes, and the fewer ads need to be delivered to support the content. People making compelling content with well targeted ads can provide less obnoxious experiences (and they will stand out vs other sites that spam the hell out of your eyes). Basically, there's a dynamic at play where when ads are less targeted, you should expect to see more ads and those ads that you see are all the more "annoying" because they're not relevant.

I really am open to whatever this Privacy Sandbox is about but I just haven't found anything that explains it. The popup I saw actually seemed sort of interesting where it's teasing this interaction where your browser is saying "Hey, you seem to be interested in these things, can I tell ads that you're interested in them?" and I really sort of like that approach. But... I don't understand where that list is coming from, how new items get added to the list after I've reviewed it, etc. I do NOT want to have to POLL some preference page to make sure things I don't want in that list creep in. Or maybe I could explicitly add things I know I am definitely interested in from a list? I'd prefer it was more upfront and asked me each time it found a new one or however it works.

So... I actually see a way this could be empowering to users if done correctly. It's my lack of high-level understanding what is going on and my experience that Google seems to have become mealymouthed lately so I have a base level of distrust. It comes off as yet another "hey you need to stop what you are doing and research something Google's doing to you" again and I don't know if I have the time for that and I have the expectation that it's going to be a waste of multiple hours to try and find any useful info from Google itself. So it may be good or bad but really I don't give a shit about learning about things at the level of a browser implementer. In the mean time it's always easy to just say "No" and nope out of Chrome.

Perhaps if Microsoft allows it into Edge then it's at least been filtered through a Google adversary.

Edit: so I decided to take a peek and yeah of course privacysandbox.com is just your typical Google goosechase. "How does this work?" answers with essentially "We don't know! Go see developer.chrome.com or developer.android.com and see if you can manage to find something there!" Literally linking to the top level of those sites rather than anything useful. Fuck you too, Google.

> fewer ads need to be delivered to support the content.

Rhetorical: What company says "new tech? I can do less of this thing that makes money!" (or government, for that matter).

> Fuck you too, Google.

That's the spirit.

Are all ads bad? Probably not, but you'd quickly learn to distust all ads of one out of 10 jumped out and tried to shoot you in the face.

There is just far too much money in trying to hoover up all of your data and sell it off to someone else for the 'bad guys' not to try it constantly. When even governments are telling you to use ad blockers to protect yourself you know the industry has long let the problem get out of control. Users are going to protect themselves.

But this work from Chrome is an attempt at limiting the ability to "hoover up" your data and sell it (ie: this pairs with disabled 3rd party cookies) without killing advertising as a whole.

> if we step back and ask "how do we allow for targeted advertising while also ensuring user privacy", I think we end up with something like this.

That's assuming that targeted advertising is acceptable in the first place. I don't agree that it is.

> That's assuming that targeted advertising is acceptable in the first place. I don't agree that it is.

That was the subject of the entire first half of my comment.