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Comment by realusername | Hacker News Reader

On my phone, only about half of the Youtube ads look legal. They have it all: crypto scams, ponzi schemes, fake mobile games, get quick rich schemes...

Some stuff can always slip through but to have a result like this, there's a systemic lack of checks at Google.

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I wonder how they decide who to show the scam ads to?

I get them, but only very rarely. What I'm getting recently are mainly ads for Old Spice, Walmart, Consumer Cellular, Verizon Visible, Exxon, a couple upcoming movies, Target, automobile insurance, and fundraising for the Harris campaign.

The one thing almost all the ads I have gotten on YT have in common is that they are useless. Some are useless because they are advertising something that I have no interest in. The ones that are advertising something that I am interested in are either for something I've already bought or for something that I've already evaluated and bought a competitor.

I did recently switch from T-Mobile Connect to Verizon Visible, and I learned about Visible from a YT ad, but I don't think the ad influenced my decision to switch.

The reason I left T-Mobile Connect is that I'm planning on replacing my replacing my Series 4 Apple Watch soon. I'm going to get a model with cellular this time and T-Mobile Connect does not support Apple Watch cellular so I had to look for a new carrier. That led me to a page at Apple that lists all US carriers that have watch plans [1]. Visible is on that list so I would have ended up looking at them even if I hadn't heard about them earlier from that YT ad.

[1] Appalachian Wireless, AT&T, C Spire, Cellcom Wisconsin, Consumer Cellular, Cricket Wireless, GCI, Nex-Tech Wireless, Spectrum Mobile, T-Mobile USA, UScellular, Verizon Wireless, Visible, and Xfinity Mobile.

I recently got an ad for some kind of scammy garden hose nozzle that supposedly turns your garden hose into a "military grade" (whatever that means) pressure washer but the ad had a weird conspiracy theory theme and kept talking about how the big corporations and Congress were conspiring to try to make the garden hose nozzle illegal because it was too powerful for civilian use. It was like it was trying to get the 2nd amendment crowd but it's a garden hose nozzle that you can buy from Lowes anywhere.

Also, as an aside, all of these things are sort of scams even when they're not taking a weird conspiracy theory route. While it is true that they can get decent velocity through the nozzle, it's nowhere near what a real pressure washer does because fundamentally it's not adding any energy to the fluid.

> fundamentally it's not adding any energy to the fluid.

That's just what the big corporations and congress want you to believe.

I live in California and when I try buy shower heads on Amazon I often get

> This item cannot be shipped to your selected delivery location. Please choose a different delivery location.

so there is an angle there – ship interstate and ignore California laws.

That's what eBay is for.

There are enough people with mental issues to make it a business. What you are seeing are old techniques for targeting these lower/disabled intellect individuals.

You see it and think it's ridiculous. Then you smoke enough crack and meth to develop scitzophrenia and you find yourself buying this shit every day from weird YouTube ads.

So your solution is for YT/Google/Meta to check the code, operations, finances, and business models of every advertiser that comes to them? Even if YT/Google/Meta could do this at scale, do you want them to have that power?

If Google/Meta/Youtube want to be multi-trillion dollar monopolies that have invaded every aspect of our lives then there should be some very basic corporate responsibility that comes with that power, even if its difficult and maybe even costs them a little bit of money. Lately it seems like the phrase has been inverted to "with great power comes less responsibility". If your small local TV station ran ads for cocaine and synthetic opioids nobody would be making these kinds of excuses.

Aside from YouTube, there’s an alternative for all of the services provided by Google and Meta. Fastmail, X (Twitter), a billion different messenger apps, Microsoft apps for office applications, etc etc.

A company doesn't need a literal 100% market share to have monopolistic power. Products like Google Search or Gmail that dominate their respective markets count.

Google and Facebook are ads companies. Everything they build, deploy, do, share, sell, and buy is about selling ads. Youtube is a platform to sell ads. Gmail is a platform to collect data to sell ads. Facebook is a platform to collect data to sell ads on Facebook. Both companies have "analytics" products that exist to collect more data for ads.

What competition is there in the Ad space for internet advertising?

I agree there really isn’t any for ads, it’s pretty much a duopoly now (though TikTok and Amazon are growing).

I was more referring to consumer products like email and office suites.

Yeah, all the socialized losses from business have fallen on governments and citizens to pay for it, and figure out how to do it. Superfund sites always spring to mind but we seem to have socialized costs oozing out of every business. Capitalists should abhore this type of gross inefficiency. In theory the business could solve the issues internally: cheaper, faster, better than the government could ever hope, lowering the overall tax burden and ultimately preventing problems at the source.

Regulation is very expensive because you have to enforce it. You can tax anything, though. Maybe that is a better route to promoting good behavior "voluntarily."

Or just filter out the obvious crap. They already have that power, they just need to exercise it.

Since half of the ads I see are very obvious scams, I'm saying that there's easy improvements from the wild west that it is now. Even basic checks would improve the situation.

At some point Google must have some responsibility regarding this mess, they can't reasonably say that they do not know anymore.

What do you mean "power" ? It's not like parent is asking for them to have special powers, only to vet their advertisers, like a newspaper would do. If they can't do that at scale, it's their problem and should downsize accordingly.

> So your solution is for YT/Google/Meta to check the code, operations, finances, and business models of every advertiser that comes to them?

Sure, why not?

I literally don't care if this causes them to go bankrupt. If your business doesn't work without breaking the law, your business doesn't work, and we're not obligated as a society to form our laws to make your business work.

I mean seriously, if your local convenience store was letting people sling cocaine out the back because they couldn't make a profit selling candy and sandwiches, would you be like "Oh that's okay."? Obviously not. I'm not even for drug prohibition, but applying the laws we have fairly seems even more fundamental.

That said, fears that this would cause them to go bankrupt are likely overblown.

> Even if YT/Google/Meta could do this at scale, do you want them to have that power?

They already have that power. They can put whatever conditions they want on doing business with advertisers.

Why is it taken for granted that companies should be allowed to scale beyond the point that they can still comply with laws?

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