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Comment by yashg | Hacker News Reader

Everything is becoming about ads. Ads, ads everywhere. On phone, on computer, now even car. This despite everyone knowing that consumers HATE ads. It's like companies are using ads as a ransom. Pay us more money on a regular basis else we will make your life miserable with ads and more ads.

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And then, once everyone is paying more, they pull the coup de grace, and show you ads again! Netflix and Prime and Spotify started with this a while ago; I guess the temptation is just too big to let corporate greed run free.

I guess we’ve come full circle, and the next iteration will see people pirating stuff again. It’s going to be interesting to see what we can do against ads on devices like cars though…

> It’s going to be interesting to see what we can do against ads on devices like cars though

If you can find a way to get by with minimal car use, it’s amazing. Not possible for many/most, but wow is Ford trying to push people away.

> the next iteration will see people pirating stuff again

With automation the world has become amazing. The first rule of fight club applies.

> The first rule of fight club applies

You wouldn't download a car?

Well, I don’t know. Buying a dumb TV is more expensive than getting a „smart“ one these days, and I understand why. Doubt it will be different with cars.

I don't. You aren't signing some contract that the item will cost less woth ads- because it doesn't.

They charge us more for a dumb tv because they know we hate ads enough to pay more to lose them.

Ad companies have become actual Mafia.

They should be paying us for our attention. Period.

Ad replacement for radio/streams.

> It’s going to be interesting to see what we can do against ads on devices like cars though…

your speakers are connected with only two wires.

In the car industry? If they aren't yet, I'm sure they'll soon have an onboard chip decoding encrypted audio, doing a cryptographic handshake with the car to verify they came from the manufacturer and the car refusing to drive anywhere more than 1 km off the calculated shortest path to the nearest dealership until the "broken" part is replaced with a new Genuine one.

Ads are a cancer. They take valuable resources from legitimate functionality just to multiply and multiply, until the host is starved to death.

> They take valuable resources from legitimate functionality

Including our own. Ads are designed to pull our attention to them and away from what we want to be focused on. The goal is to forcibly embed something in our thoughts and/or feelings. Maybe it's a lie, or a false association, or an impression, or a fear. One way or another ads seek to manipulate us and like it or not we are all changed by them. We'll have a cure for cancer long before we get a cure for advertising.

Off-topic:

Eagerly waiting for the potty bowl to start playing ads depending on the chemical composition of the particular waste… it would go: “Your zinc ratio is low, have you tried blah blah? After my doctor prescribed blah blah I can focus on my life more and is more productive and …”

ad absurdum, therefore on topic.

I love this

That's what happens when innovation is dead and you need to pay the bills: you have to make current products profitable and the easiest way is to pack them with ads

If the current products aren't profitable already, how does does the company exist?

This doesn't really apply in the Ford case, but the real question is why we let companies burn money to get market share, killing existing sustanable businesses in the process? Once no competition is left, they raise prices and decrease quality, ending up with a worse product than we had before.

> Once no competition is left, they raise prices and decrease quality, ending up with a worse product than we had before.

That's the goal of literally every company. They all want to charge you as much as they can possibly get away with, while giving you as little as possible in return because it lowers their costs. Our society has decided that greed is the greatest virtue and the most important consideration in every facet of life. That inevitably results in a race to the bottom.

It’s not that we’ve decided that greed is virtuous; you’ll find critique of the rich throughout our culture. The issue, rather, is that the people with money intrinsically have so much more influence than everyone else, and the incentive to push things in a direction that’s favorable for them, eg direct lobbying and media bias. From an outside perspective, isn’t it insane that news outlets are mostly owned either by billionaires or corporations, given that these all have a shared interest in maintaining a specific economic status quo? It’s a major bug (or feature haha) in the system, and as a consequence effective change is often impossible. It’s not that there’s overt censorship, rather that there’s a constant pressure that pushes threatening ideas to the fringes, leaving only a residue of somewhat harmless social activism as a pressure release valve. I’m not sure how we get out of this; it’s a direct consequence of how the structure works that it’s hard to change.

> If the current products aren't profitable already, how does does the company exist?

It's all propped up on future potential gains, Amazon wasn't profitable for a decade, Uber just turner (barely) profitable last year.

As long as there is hope there will be money, the problem is that the hope river is starting to run dry

Innovation in the automotive industry is far from dead, this is just the greed from investors seeping through every pore of the company, trying to squeeze as much money as they can get away with.

Making maximum profits for their shareholders should not be the highest goal of corporations nowadays, if they're persons they've become sociopaths.

It's more like "we are going to kidnap your children to make them some brain washed slaves, extract money from you with mass spying, ask a ransom with no intention to change what we plane to do if you pay or not"

Wall Street demands infinite growth. The Fed raised interest rates above zero, so money isn't free* anymore. Treating your customers like human beings, rather than bags of money with legs that it is your bounden duty to drain dry, just isn't popular anymore.

* for a certain value of "free"

Gathering data under the disguise of presenting ads now in your car.

I just hate how disgustingly time wasting and pointless they are. Modern marketing is so piss poor.

Especially on mobile, endless ads for regular apps I already have installed but mostly for shitty ripoff trash games.

I am always 0% interested in downloading it, so why the FUCK has it become de rigeur to force the ad to be shown for 30-60 seconds.

I've read into it a little and apparently even negative reaction to an ad still has a positive effect on brand recognition, but how does this apply to shitty mobile games.

Our governments are failing us by not regulating this utter bs, it's so incensing. But then again that's all smiling politicians ever do, take money under the table while the grinning general population votes for em again and again.

Half of HN is probably working on ad tech.

Consumers don’t hate ads. HN readers hate ads. Given the choice, most people prefer ads to paying more to not have ads. FAST (free ad-supported TV) is taking over (again). It’s comparable to how a contingent of HN readers think there is a problem with using Google, while nearly everyone else uses nothing but Google.

Reference: https://seekingalpha.com/news/3735026-fast-growth-for-fast-m...

While I do agree that HN readers are not representative of the general population, and we almost certainly are more ad-averse on average, hating ads is still common overall. Don't be fooled by the fact that less-technically-skilled individuals may find it harder to block ads than we do, or are less likely to identify covert advertisements disguised as legitimate search results.

Case in point, when I was a kid my dad (of "Boomer" age, but from a country where the generational name does not apply) really, really, really insisted on muting advertisements on TV whenever they came on. He made an effort to instill in me the idea that advertisements were lies trying to sell rubbish, and even though I do not have such an emotionally charged reaction to the concept of ads as he does, I still radically block them by all means necessary.

I disagree. I hate irrelevant ads, I enjoy relevant ads.

This is unrelated to the aforementioned topic though.

Relevant ads is functional search, is it not? Ideally, search without the need to query.

I would love to see ads on the search platform which is supposed to be used only for searching something you usually end up buying. I have a clear intention there and I am looking for something. Otherwise, I don't want to see ads.

But that will likely never happen. For it to work you would need to track behavior based on other sources than that site. And it does not make people buy something that they actually don't need.

They're also 1st party and come with whatever bias the company wants to inject (less useful if you prefer searching through 3rd parties)

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