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Comment by refulgentis | Hacker News Reader

> Advertising is fundamentally corrosive to society

Interesting, why?

Because they want to make you do stuff that is not in your best interest. They want to create a need that you don't actually have, and they do so by applying psychological pressure. They are a festival of fomo. They're pollution for your mind and distort your sense of reality.

In a knowledge economy your attention is your highest commodity, and ads want to take all of it.

One of the strongest rules I have for my household is that my children don't see any ads. I pay for Netflix, Youtube, and Spotify and use adblockers on all devices. And my tv is not connected to anything that can deliver flow tv - the biggest mindrot of all.

How else do you find out about new stuff, or recommendations, or things you never considered before?

How do you find out about new movies, concerts, etc.?

Most customers don't know themselves that a solution to their problem (which they might not even notice) exists.

Manipulative ads are bad, yes. But ads that expand your knowledge of what's available in the world are good in my opinion.

I wanted to know about headphones that have high sound quality yesterday and you know what I did to find out? I googled it.

I found out about ChatGPT and became a paying subscriber in january 2023, because it was all over hckrnews, youtube, twitter and tech media in general.

New stuff and recommendations are everywhere. They are even a form of entertainment themselves. I watch several tech channels on youtube just to see what cool new stuff there is. There are channels and websites for movies, books, home renovation, hobbies and anything really if you want to know more.

No ads needed.

I think that's a good point, and it does make me doubt my initial comment.

One issue now, on a world without ads, is what incentive would also those actors have to provide you with that information? Search engine, review websites, YouTube channels, etc. Of course, we could pay them for this information. They could also have affiliate links, but doesn't then it become an ad?

I think we hate ads now simply because they are implemented poorly and there's a lot of low quality, deceiving ads for useless products.

I play table-tennis a lot, and my shoes are always wet after a session, I usually left them outside to dry, but it doesn't work in bad weather (which is common here). I then saw an ad for shoe-fresh (a dry rack/sanitizer for your shoes), I got one, and it has completely solved this problem. Maybe I could have found about it in a different way, but this is how I found it.

Another example is computer games. I got No Man's Sky recently because it was discounted on Steam, and I always wanted to try it. I would consider the pop-up you get when you launch steam, and the discounts showed in the store to also be "ads". I am enjoying the (still buggy) game so far.

If you want to buy a specific Steam game on discount, you can just add it to watchlist and get a notification when it has one.

If you want to buy some random games because they are discounted, you can just go to the corresponding section in the Steam store.

The point of the popup is to distract you from whatever you're doing right now to get you to make an impulse purchase, as opposed to a well-researched one. That's exactly how people end up with Steam accounts that have literally hundreds of never-played games in them.

You're talking about placed ads. The OP was talking about all advertising.

Viewing a review on a site where the reviewer got sent a set of headphones to review is also advertisement. It's just not a placed ad.

No ads needed for you.

Just like you can visit hacker news and see all the stories right there, do they just manifest through out the day? Or is there a group of people trudging through the new stories to pick which ones to elevate?

Having worked on the product side, I can tell you that when you google a product looking for organic reviews, what you are seeing is the sprouts of seeds planted by advertising.

Trust me, try and launch an amazing product with no advertising.

Then do it with a standard set of web ads, wait a few months, and go see the people on reddit talking about your product despite you never doing more than buying standard website/social media ads (not sponsored posts, just regular ads)

I am right now launching a sass product that I develop using advertisement. I have launched many products in the past. I used to be a concert organizer and band manager in my youth. All the times I have driven around town to hang up posters... I went to business school. I know advertisement.

Advertisement is 99.999% bad people doing bad things to you.

> How else do you find out about new stuff, or recommendations, or things you never considered before?

Personally, I chat with friends over a beer and talk about new things. More often than not, my friends have great recommendations on things to try — both old and new.

> How do you find out about new movies, concerts, etc.?

I go check the movie listings / concert venues’ schedules. Or look up the schedule for a band I like. I don’t constantly browse the lineup; only when I get the itch to go to a show.

Normally I’m the one engaging research into new experiences, and it seems to be going fine. The other month I was reading Troy by Stephen Fry. When I finished, I thought it would be nice if he covered the Odyssey, so I looked it up and saw he is releasing an ebook for it in the Spring. In the meantime, I decided to read the Iliad. I wasn’t sure which translation would be good, so I searched online and found that Emily Wilson has a great translation. And now hopefully a reader has benefited from m y suggestion here.

Most ads related to these fields seem to me that they are designed to sell me something I don’t necessarily want or need. I feel capable of taking action and looking up things that do interest me. It may be different for areas outside of entertainment, but I’d have to think on that more.

True, that one time in 1996 where I actually found out about a useful, high quality product from an advertisement was pretty nice.

They incentivize collecting sensitive data about people.

They incentivize businesses to maximize for engagement which generally promotes harmful content over informational content. Empty informational calories.

I'll add: in practice its goal is not to solve a problem, but to create a need.

Good point. I suppose the theoretical utility of advertisement is to supply information to consumers about what the market offers so consumers can seek out suppliers that fulfill their demands. Supplying that kind of information to consumers provides utility for both the supplier and the consumer. This goal can also be accomplished without unsolicited advertisement but using directories where consumers can look up suppliers based on their needs.

Unsolicited advertisement tries to induce a sense of demand in consumers which they didn't have to begin with. This is done using many different tactics, e.g. by disguising the true cost, exaggerating the benefits or simply misinforming. This tips the utility in favor of the supplier while making it harder for the consumer to navigate the market.

To be fair advertising without collecting sensitive data does exist. I think the collection of sensitive data is a more serious issue so let’s not say all ads are abusive in that way.

However, I agree with the position that all ads with some small exceptions are a negative thing. I think the incentives behind advertising are inherently perverse because of what they are at their core, an attempt to manipulate (if they work then a successful attempt!). They are dishonest and inauthentic by design. It’s possible to create an ad that is like “hey this thing exists and this is strictly what it does without any exaggeration” but that basically never happens because the people who make ads have no external incentive to do that.

I think a much more ideal situation is where a user searches for something on a search engine, or an LLM or whatever, and they are shown as unbiased as possible results. This way the people making good products get their exposure and the people looking stuff get the stuff they want. Of course there’s a lot of problems in practice with that as well.

I don’t claim to have a solution, and I don’t think making an add is like super immoral, but I think ads are a scourge on our society and culture.

Yes, I agree, and I also don't think that ads in printed newspapers and magazines are a problem, for example.

If I were to propose a general law to regulate advertisements, then it would be that if you serve content that qualifies as being an advertisement to a user, then the choice of advertisement must be independent of any data about that user. This includes the username and any details the user has entered or which has been collected as the user has been using the service, and also any ephemeral data associated with the session such as IP address. That is, the choice of ad is completely parametric in the user; if two users request the content from different locations, then they should in principle be served the same ad (ignoring other state such as ad impression counters which would still be allowed).

This would probably not be good for the ad-tech industry but I think it could remove many of the perverse incentives leading to excessive data collection.

Noam Chomksy’s critique is that the advertising industry’s main goal is to ensure that uninformed consumers make irrational choices. Essentially it undermines the market, due to the fact that in theory markets are efficient when people make rational decisions. Subject to advertising, people may pay more for a lesser quality product.

You just need to ask yourself: would/do advertisers lie if they could/can get away with it? And the answer is "faster than you can blink".

For me, it's because it's carefully crafted to be as manipulative as possible. It uses modern psychological tricks to influence our thought and behavior in ways we are unaware of and largely powerless against. The intention behind an ad is not to inform but to influence, in a way that benefits somebody's wallet at the expense of societal well-being. It's a reprehensible, psychopathic motivation to be pursuing.

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