Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)
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The number of ADs I see now not so subtly implying that I can expect to “lose big” or “rent forever” if I don’t subscribe to QuestTrade/WealthSimple/…
It’s just frustrating to know that someone put time and thought into making me and a million other folks in my “demographic bucket” feel anxious and worried.
I’m not sure how best to address this sort of thing and I suppose I can buy my way out of most internet ads if I want to so I acknowledge we all play a part in this market.
But some types of advertisements need to be highly regulated I would include Gambling, Pharmaceuticals, Alcohol on that list. But a broader class of non-luxury goods which are being advertised via a very negative framing of the consumers current situation are a social externality. They contribute to real health problems in the population and in my view that is reason enough to examine regulation.
> A marketer I know has a mantra, that successful sales are all about dissatisfaction - making people aware just how their situation sucks, and then offering a way to relieve the pain.
This is funny since YouTube especially has never been able to figure out my demographics. To this day it keeps showing me ads for female hygiene products, cleaning supplies, quick fashion brands or scam ads in Russian, a language I don't speak. None of this has ever been relevant to me in any way whatsoever.
They should just go back to showing exclusively contextual ads, they'd have better odds of hitting a topic I might actually be even remotely in the target market for.
Years and years ago I worked at a company selling context based web ads, and our numbers were significantly lower than identity based ads. There were a few companies willing to pay good money for certain context based ads, that we got good money from, but most went to identity based because CTR was much higher.
There were also some holdout webpages that only served context based ads for privacy concerns, but largely it was a dying niche in the larger online advertising space because of key metrics like Click Through Rate.
I use two browser addons, uBlock origin and SponsorBlock.
I truly detest advertising and have been avoiding it with a passion for about 20 years through adblocking, aggressive unsubscribing, etc. But regulating advertising is only a quick fix to a much more dangerous problem of user disempowerment.
For tech-savvy people, most ads can be blocked, that is, until you insist on using proprietary software to access social media platforms or stream movies or stuff like that. DRM is the ultimate enemy here.
While the regulation of advertising is very quick, it is also quickly abolished if decision makers change. Regulation around user choice and user empowerment along with media literacy is a much more sustainable and more robust solution than regulation of specific ad types, places, messages or genres. (I'm thinking of the policy templates for regulating alcoholic beverages or sugary products in the EU.)
We see the fragility of the content-wise regulatory approach in parts of the US where online gambling has been legalized. I cannot find the article now, but this policy change led to an absurd amount of advertising, to which consumers were extremely vulnerable.
Advertising would not have been such an effective shortcut into the brains of so many consumers if those consumers had had the freedom, tools and education to easily decide what kind of advertising they want to be exposed to (and what kind of accompanying tracking they find tolerable).
The second comment (now) quibbles about the use of the word cancer. (there is benign cancer).
Advertising (whether it uses tracking or not) can be defined as the intention of convincing someone rather than providing information. Intent is to convince. PROPOGANDA.
The intent is for the target/prey/victim to be unable to distinguish the truth value.
So here we have a first problem. Is the intent of the first comment on HN
"Most of the arguments .. are not about 'advertising' ..."
made to help me understand the article better? Or are they made with the intent of causing to me doubt the article (or even not to read it).
The same question can be asked about the second question. Ad infinitum and nauseaum.
THAT is STAGE 1 social cancer. I can no longer trust the intention of posts on HN.
STAGE 2 is that I can no longer trust the INTENTION of any media.
Do I want a recipe for cookies? Use the "garrble" to search. Can I really believe that this recipe has ever been made by the person/bot/AI that created it?
STAGE 3. Human societies and Communities are founded on trust. The ability to come to a common understanding of a situation and act collectively. STAGE 3 is when communities and societies no longer function.
The internet has STAGE 2 cancer and some STAGE 3. Since our society in the US depends on the internet ....
Well you cannot trust anything I say, I could be an AI for all you know. And probably my definitions are wrong, my understanding of stages of cancer is faulty, etc.
Here is my 2cents. The article vastly underestimates the damage and dangers, but is definitely worth a read.
This is pointless moralizing pretending to be clarifying or demarcating.
If I write an essay about climate change to convince you to vote/protest/purchase/boycott <anything> then I will use information to create an opinion in you.
All communication exists to alter the experiences of your interlocutors. You can't hide behind "good intentions" to demarcate. Labelling persuasion as propaganda, is itself propaganda.
When you start classifying entire categories of human interaction and societal structures in concrete stages based on a combination of a priori reasoning, gut instinct, anecdotes, and ‘common knowledge,’ there’s a good chance your words are portraying the boogie men in your head rather than any of the very significant and consequential problems in our society. There are entire fields that study complex topics you casually wield in your assessment— they’re probably a good place to start if you honestly think your gut instinct about forum posts on advertising can be meaningfully generalized to societal structures on a whole.
One choice is simply denial, but I do not like myself when I choose that. Another is not to act because there is never a guarantee that our actions will not be wrong. The stand up choice in my mind is to own up to our mistakes and failures and fix things to the extent we can.
We have developed a business model for the internet that is indeed a cancer on communities, on societies. On the lives of those around us. This was not with evil intent - which would be inexcusable. We just did not know better. But now we do. To ignore this fact, deny it, etc is understandable. But you now know this to be true or that it is possibly true. And in order to be stand up people we need to understand whether this harms others. And we fix it.
And really is the Advertising business model the best we can do?
Like a lot of developers my age, the first programming book I read all the way through was the brilliant Learning Perl by Larry Wall. Likely the most quoted passage from that book isn't about programming, but about programmers: "The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris." The book was funny, and that passage was intended to be humorous commentary on the bravado a little beneficial Dunning-Krueger can give us when approaching a problem in unfamiliar space. It's a joke about starting a projects and not letting daunting tasks kill your optimism: it's not a set of maxims that developers should model their life philosophy on.
One invaluable thing I got from my formal design education was not trusting my assumptions about the needs, perspectives, motivations, and capabilities of other people, or the complexities of the systems in which they operate. In many ways, this directly opposes Wall's Laziness, Impatience and Hubris. This is why interface designers make better interfaces than developers. It's all about pushing back against your own perspective and trying to untangle the messy human element to see what people really need-- in the case of software, what they need to most effectively and efficiently solve their problems-- and how best to provide that for them.
But it's a yin/yang thing. A whole lot of problems in this world have only been solved because someone didn't realize they were trying to solve an insolvable problem, until they did it. But there's a real danger in operating under the assumption that we've got this pan-topic expertise that allows us to slice through any subject with a few quick swipes of our super duper ultrabrains using a few mental calculations based on a couple assumptions and approximate a couple of things about human behavior based on the way we understand it, intuitively. That's lost on a lot of developers and engineers-- especially younger ones. (And after working with developers as a designer rather than as a developer for a while, I understood how infuriating that could be.) When it comes to things like advertising, where people are so heavily peppered with them, and quite possibly have worked on their technical underpinnings, they assume that they "understand advertising" instead of understanding their conscious experience with advertisements.
There are lots of terrible odious things that happen in marketing and advertising and you'll rarely find someone as critical of them as me. As a developer, I've come close to quitting jobs in protest of putting in some creepy telemetry in things I developed, and successfully skewered those initiatives. However, the pushback against advertisements generally is misguided. It's a huge topic that people paint with a broad brush based on their experience with ads. If you're interested in my thoughts, I was pushing back against someone that said we simply could do away with advertisements in this over-long comment:
I believe we humans have little tolerance for being helpless. Seriously. To the point where we would rather ignore things. It is like coal. Who wanted to dwell on the damage of coal as a power source when there was no alternative? At least that is how I explain the weird ways humans react.
So then we get to why there is not an alternative to the current internet business model- tracking people and selling them as targets. Why is there no alternative? Perhaps it is because of the mismatch between internet service businesses and our financial system?
The internet is characterized by a staggering number of very, very low value transactions. It is 1 million $0.00001 transactions. There is a finite cost. If I post on HN, if I send an email. There is a very small but nevertheless real cost. But how can I pay $0.0001 to send my email? There is no cost effective way to do that. The cost of a single credit card transaction is much higher (Stripe says 2.9% + 30 cents).
So instead of people paying for a service, third parties pay to target customers. Why would you want to target a customer? While there is some legitimate interest, but targeting is easily used to exploit people. Even when there is some reason the effects can be deadly. The NYT is the source of news for many people. But the advertisers are most interested in one demographic - the very wealthy. So the NYT has a parade of articles about what kind of second vacation home $1 million will buy you in Portand, Maine. Or Edmonton, or Pais. But in Portland, Maine, there is an astonishing problem of homelessness. Does the NYT run articles about "The damage your $1 million second vacation home is doing to the people of Maine"? Nope. Because the target demographic does not want to read that, and the advertisers for $600 boots will not want their ad place near it. Etc.
I think the problem is real. I think the side effects are far more damaging that we can tolerate considering. Appreciate your thinking.
In the book "Fire in the Valley" about the development and early days of the internet there is a great deal of discussion and prescient predictions about where all of this would go - but the business models of walled gardens and pay walls never generated the revenue that charging for clicks did. Honestly it's hard to see how we get to this level of speed and content online without it having been funded by advertising.
If all you are consuming is FB, IG, X, and Reddit - I mean that's like going to a candy store and complaining there is no broccoli.
So I'm confused as to why you think advertising has driven the development of the internet[1]. Take for example investments in bandwidth - that's largely to meet the needs of TV/video and later gaming [2] - both with direct revenue streams independent of advertising ( and any advertising revenue they traditionally got has been eroded, not enhanced by the internet ).
The other major sites where things like Amazon or existing media outlets.
Note I don't include youtube in the above - as the most popular content is in effect stolen ( music, old TV shows etc ), and then resold with ads.
[1] Internet companies yes, the internet less so.
[2] When BBC iplayer went live in the UK ( ~2007 ) ISPs complained that it was taking up to a third of their entire bandwidth and they wanted the BBC to fund their capacity expansion. The BBC said, nope - it's you that made you bandwidth availability promises to your customers.
You are conflating the content and the delivery method. It's like saying "most of the stuff you buy can be delivered by a bicycle, so interstate highways are not important.
Sure Youtube and tik-tok consume huge bandwidth - but I'd argue if that was the only thing available on the internet then people wouldn't be paying their ISP bills.
The internet was growing massively before Google worked out how to make serious money with online ads.
> Honestly it's hard to see how we get to this level of speed and content online without it having been funded by advertising.
I don't understand what this means. Most content online that isn't user generated (forums, blogs, wikipedia, YT, short form video etc) is junk. Most of it is made for free. The distribution has costs - but it's extremely unclear the costs couldn't be solved in different ways. Serving text is ultra cheap. Torrents distribute way more video than industry is happy with. We didn't need to take this path.
Maybe, maybe not. But that juice has absolutely not been worth the squeeze.
If we had gone (or stayed) peer to peer we could have done it, rather than going the expensive client server model. Server farms require funding; peer to peer doesn't.
So advertising can be a good thing and a literal cancer-preventer to society.
> [advertising is] a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them.
Example: The Merriam-Webster for example defines "advertisement" as, literally, as "1 : a public notice".
Still,
> but I think the most common understanding of what it is would.
... is probably the reason for their "especially" paragraph and examples, right below the definition.
I understand that dictionaries are not encyclopedias, but a little more is warranted IMO.
However all “good” ADs are less effective than they could be when the population experiences a nearly unavoidable torrent of “not good” ADs.
People are savvy and broadly know the difference but on a subconscious level likely begin to perceive PSAs with more skepticism than is warranted when so much advertising masks itself as helpful advice when in reality it is selling a service based on nonsense statistics or bad faith argument.
I think some kind of pushback from society against the worst forms of advertising is needed.
The vast, vast majority of the time and the vast, vast majority of money spent on ads is nothing like this.
The first difference for me is that on YouTube/Spotify/Websites they obscure the content and force you to watch/see the advertisements but on Instagram and TikTok it’s just as easy to skip an advertisement as it is a video/actual content.
The second difference is that usually the advertisements on Instagram and TikTok are targetted based on my preferences anyway so I’m more likely to look at it and often even interact with it.
The third difference is that on TikTok especially where I actually sometimes look forward to the ads, they are actually putting the customer first rather than their product. The videos are sometimes viral content variations which are interesting to watch or short stories which have product in them.
It’s the same as influencer marketing with product reviews. I make an effort to watch those if I’m looking for a product in the same category or sometimes just to know what’s currently out there, but that’s effectively also advertising just that it puts the customer first.
So while I agree some forms of advertising are cancer, I appreciate others and don’t want the good kind to go away because I don’t know everything and sometimes it’s only through advertising that I discover new brands and products that have become my go tos.
This is a really shallow view of advertising, most of the time you don’t know who is your competitor and you don’t know all the possible ways that you can inform your audience about product, and you don’t fully know what your customer wants.
This is very true.
However, as Facebook ads are showing me both dick pills and boob surgery offers, and legal advice for giving up a citizenship I don't have (and even then only available in a country I don't live in), and foreign government announcements that a breed of dog I've never heard of is now banned in that country…
I'm not convinced that this is in any sense "solved" by the huge quantity of surveillance that even Facebook has.
I mean, these advertising profiling errors are what I'd expect in a university student project introducing AI as a concept, not a megacorp whose main monetisation strategy is selling attention to advertisers. Even a classifier itself built by an LLM ought to do better than this when using only my name and GeoIP data.
If we look at the top 10 commercial for this super bowl[1], which is arguable the most money spent on advertising, it's Booking.com, Ram Trucks, Made by Google, Yahoo.com, Marvel Studios, Bud Light, NerdWallet, DoorDash, Doritos, Squarespace.
I'm sure all of those companies know who their competitors are, and the audience already knows about their products. The ads are just trying to jump to our forefront of attention.
[1] https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/most-watched-super-bowl-ads...
Benign ads are like ads for toothpaste, Febreeze, or airlines.
Malignant ads are, to give but two examples, for things like gambling and pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceutical business, in particular, was much more widely trusted and had far higher public favorability ratings in the old days when their advertising to the public was severely frowned upon.
Advertisements for vices are generally a huge net negative for society. Cigarettes, alcohol, prostitution/OnlyFans, TikTok and other mind-melting social media and mobile lootbox games... The less we see of them, the healthier society is. In places like the UK, where a huge volume (if not an absolute majority) of advertisements are for vices like sports gambling, you know that things have gone sideways. You can feel it.
Some bacterias are bad, some are good.
Most of the time we talk about bacteria it is the bad ones we think of, mostly because study of the good ones are so underpriotized and we don't understand them well.
Humans could absolutely not survive without the good bacteria in the stomach. They produce some of the vitamins we need (plus other roles).
If you can't advertise for the AirFryer, how do you get people to know about this new product and what it can do? Mouth-to-mouth is too slow and inefficient for most products. How often do you drop by a kitchen store just to check out if there is any new invention?
> Consider, for example, that great Hat seven-feet high, which now perambulates London Streets; which my Friend Sauerteig regarded justly as one of our English notabilities; "the topmost point as yet," said he, "would it were your culminating and returning point, to which English Puffery has been observed to reach!"—The Hatter in the Strand of London, instead of making better felt-hats than another, mounts a huge lath-and-plaster Hat, seven-feet high, upon wheels; sends a man to drive it through the streets; hoping to be saved thereby. He has not attempted to make better hats, as he was appointed by the Universe to do, and as with this ingenuity of his he could very probably have done; but his whole industry is turned to persuade us that he has made such! He too knows that the Quack has become God. Laugh not at him, O reader; or do not laugh only. He has ceased to be comic; he is fast becoming tragic.
(From Past and Present, 1843)
I think you mean tumors because all cancer is malignant. There’s no benign cancer.
> you know that things have gone sideways. You can feel it.
What you’re feeling is your totally subjective value system bumping up against things that don’t jibe with it.
> these things are acceptable, and these things are not
You’re just taking those values and applying them to everything and everyone else. Febreeze gives me migraines, airlines are often totally shit companies, and toothpaste is a million of the same product full of a bunch of worthless gimmicks. Pharmaceutical ads depend on the pharmaceutical, and what you consider ‘vice’ ads are mostly for products used responsibly by many millions of people even if abused by many. Just because they make you uncomfortable doesn’t mean they should make everyone else uncomfortable.
You are thinking of tumors, not cancer.
Take lite beer, for example. Ignoring the issue of whether beer fits into your "vice" category, you could make a case for benign advertising of lite beer: "Hey, there's this kind of beer that has less calories than regular beer. If you like beer but worry about the calories, maybe this is for you."
Or you can have malignant advertising for it: "Drink this brand of lite beer, and all the pretty girls will be all over you. Drink some other brand and you'll be all alone like a loser." Stealing a quote, from which I don't have the source handy: This kind of advertising tries to make the person you are envy the person you could be with their product. In other words, it tries to steal your satisfaction and then offers to sell it back to you. That's malignant no matter what the product is.
Example with airlines: airlines stealing each other's customers just raises the price for the tickets (by the amount paid for advertisement) without net benefit for the consumer.
The only advertisement I can consider a good one is a shop sign on the shop/restaurant and perhaps a sign on a nearby crossing to direct me there.
Logically, a 'really good deal just became available' should be a useful one (information - wise), but that has been gamed to such an extent...
Here's another airline advertisement: "Look how much fun the people are having flying on our airline."
One gives actual information about something that is now available that wasn't before. The other is a zero-sum game with the other airlines.
You could argue that the original Google search ads fall into this category ( before they were changed to look more like search results ) - ie they much more likely to be directly relevant, indeed helpful, to the search activity.
Consumers hate ads, but they hate paying for things even more apparently.
This report also doesn't seem to clarify what is meant by "ad blocker," specifically, which makes the whole thing pretty suspect. Looking into the sources they provide, at least one of them doesn't mention ad blockers at all, even though the related image is about people blocking ads. So, yeah, I'm not considering this to be reliable information.
The Reg gives 52% of all Americans [1], b2.ai (who sells anti ad block services) gives 45% in North America [2], and so on. Most sources seem to fall in a 30%-50% range, with all sources agreeing that uptake on adblockers has rapidly and dramatically increased. People hate ads.
[1] - https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/27/america_ad_blocker/
According to a survey of 2,000 Americans conducted by research firm Censuswide, on behalf of Ghostery, a maker of software to block ads and online tracking, 52 percent of Americans now use an ad blocker, up from 34 percent according to 2022 Statista data.
2. Both of them, and indeed all of these studies seem to be funded by ad blocking companies. That alone makes them suspect.
I can buy the idea that the advertising industry is under pressure from built-in restrictions pushed by Apple, et al. But the idea that 52% of the American population even knows what an ad blocker is, much less has one installed, is completely absurd.
From a quick search, that percentage is comparable to the number of people that: own an iPhone, drink coffee everyday, or own a pet.
You can corroborate these data pretty much anywhere and everywhere. For a silly one I dug up here's [1] PewdiePie in 2016 talking about already seeing a 40% adblock rate as reflected by a non-scientific poll but also in his revenue stats, up from 10%-15% in past years. And it's certainly way higher now - obviously though that sample is going to trend young and probably technically above average.
But really, the thing about ad-blocking is that it's the ultimate in viral tech. Anytime I meet somebody who's not using ad-block I tend to introduce them to the Brave browser and the result like 99.9% of the time is 'omg I didn't even know this was possible.' Those are now people who will probably never go without ad-blocking again and some percent of whom will likely then go on to introduce others to it. There is literally no downside to using an ad-blocker and a million upsides. People just simply don't know about them and/or think they're somehow difficult to use.
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20160304044704/https://pewdie.tu...
The idea that the number of people using an ad blocker is equivalent to the number of people that drink coffee every morning, subscribe to Netflix, or have a pet makes no sense whatsoever, and if that were the case, you'd see vastly more discussion and general awareness of the concept.
There's a huge difference between extremely-high-production-value Superbowl ads and regular TV ads.
There's another huge difference between regular TV ads and some of the ads you can get on YouTube (example: someone I follow decided, For Science™, to actually watch the entirety of a 5-hour ad they got on YouTube for...I think it was one of the Lego Movies? It consisted entirely of an endless repetition of the same 3-minute-ish song).
There's also a huge difference between what people are willing to tolerate in order to reduce some of the often-absurd financial burden they're being put under, and what people actually like, or are genuinely content with.
"Revealed preference" theory is a bunch of motivated reasoning.
There are of course other problems, fraud, money laundering and the like, which extract taxes, and and a whole patchwork quilt of national regulations, which extracts a lot more.
Things like crypto look, feel and smell like money laundering. I don't think there's a technical solution here. The problems are social and regulatory.
I think we need to be careful with this approach. It's also irresponsible to not expose them to modern advertising. Unfortunately, modern advertising does exist, and if they are exposed to it first as a teenager, or worst as an adult, they are likely to be scammed/convinced to buy things they don't need.
Maybe a better way is, instead of banning anything, to supervise and explain to our children what they're seeing.
I think this is vaguely akin to exposing your child to gambling and explaining the impulses/desires it creates so they don't get addicted to it. But that's just not how it works.
> Maybe a better way is, instead of banning anything, to supervise and explain to our children what they're seeing.
Now that I have 3 of them, and the oldest is almost 6, I guess I need to update the article on how this panned out.
Long story short: replacing Spotify and YouTube for music with yt-dlp + Audacity (to cut out ads, padding, channel jingles and other nonsense, + normalize volume) worked to an extent, and I built up a small library for my eldest daughter, which I then reused with the younger ones. However, once the oldest one went to kindergarten, she immediately contracted the Paw Patrol fever, and we couldn't continue keeping our kids oblivious to children programming anymore.
I mean, you can try and fight Paw Patrol, but you can't win in the end, and the more you resist, the harder it gets for your kid to make friends. Same with other major franchises. It's the same kind of problem as teenagers and smartphones, just couple years earlier.
Anyway, from that point on, curating a local library stripped of advertising became too much of a hassle. Instead, we embraced Netflix and YouTube - I just keep the ad-blocker running to reduce ad exposure, but since advertising is everywhere and can't be avoided, we focus on teaching our kids how to process it.
As evidenced by TFA, I do have some strong views on advertising in general, but I'm not dumping them on my kids. Letting them see advertising as just a fact of life seems to make it less impactful. Turns out, most ads are 100% boring to my kids (after we get past the "why is the man doing ${something they never saw someone do before}" questions); my oldest one actually figured out on her own where the "skip ad" button is on YouTube and how to operate the mouse to click it and resume the song that was playing. And those that aren't boring, we actually learned to enjoy.
I can go on and on, but I'll leave it for an eventual blog article.
The author himself is falling to the "Advertising Trap" of click-baiting his potential audience.
For example, more and more sexualized content in advertising (esp. harming teen girls [1]), or forced ads built-in to a browser sidebar (esp. harming the poor [2]), or ads on the surface of each school desk in 3rd grade (esp. harming the young [3]). Anxiety about the future, depression, etc. can be tied to advertising.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18444705/ [2] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d... [3] https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/132/5/958/31...
Maybe? It's provocative, but I felt (and still feel) it's an accurate metaphor.
The thing that made me start thinking of advertising in these terms is a bit of trivia I picked up (from IIRC Scott Alexander's blog posts) on why big mammals like whales get much less cancer than they should per models that correlate cancer rates with body size and metabolism. Turns out, one hypothesis is that those big animals do get more cancer, and their larger bodies allow the cancer to get proportionally larger - so large, that it eventually develops its own cancer, and gets killed by it.
This image of a cancer growing on another cancer was a good fit for a bunch of personal experiences I had observing social media content marketing people who happened to work in the same room as I did at the time (a spin-off from a startup I worked for), and also fit well with stories about A/B testing services, whose UI encouraged mistakes invalidating results in just the right way to make them think they're getting good value from the testing service. That made me start thinking in these terms, and from there I slowly developed a general cancer analogy, which I then put in the article you just read.
WRT. cancer-on-cancer thing, the article doesn't mention it at all, though it was partly the thought behind this fragment:
> It also allows the advertisers to scam each other on attribution, which isn't surprising if you consider that lying is literally their job. Cancer cells don't play well with each other unless they have to.
I'll need to update the article and include a paragraph about the meta-cancer thing.
1. Almost all advertising is based on manipulation of human cognitive biases. There is a limited set of biases, and the mechanisms by which they can be exploited are both limited and easily detected – we can most likely train AI to do it. Therefore, it's possible to start thinking seriously about making laws that ban corporations and organisations from creating marketing that exploits these cognitive biases.
2. When it comes to social media platforms, there are two routes we could go down. Either we could regulate their algorithms the same way – or we could force social media platforms to both make their recommendation algorithms open source, and to open up their platforms to third-party recommendation algorithms that people can choose to use instead. This would be like a recommendation algorithm app store that the company has to provide to their users. You might want to select a youtube recommendation algorithm that optimises for personal development – or a facebook feed that optimises for creating real-world connections
Of course corporations would fight this kind of legislation with tooth and claw, but that's how it is. I would be happy to get some thoughtful feedback on these ideas, their technical and legal plausibility, and any potential negative unintended consequences or loopholes that could undermine them
1) No one actually likes this stuff, and it still exists everywhere, so it must be worth it. I feel like the article is a broad list of the author's least favorite aspects of today's information/social/economic environment. But those are just the cost of consuming all our favorite content for ~free, right? It's like saying "I think this price is oppressive, and although I am willing to pay for it, I think we should all try really hard to lower the cost."
The privacy stuff stands out because it isn't transparent to the user, which is maybe the worst part about it. Like if everyone knew what data they were providing and exactly how it was used, it wouldn't feel so abusive.
2) The size of the company has to be a major factor here. If your local shop takes out an ad in the local newspaper, I don't care what weird psychological tactics they use, does it really hit the same way? "That's just the shop down the street, why are they being so weird." Conversely, is there any ad from a massive company that doesn't come across as "this is how we want you, our loyal subjects, to see the world?"
...To someone.
That doesn't mean it's worth it to society.
No one actually likes muggings, and they still exist everywhere, but that doesn't mean that our society would be worse off without muggings.
No one actually likes the flu, and it still exists everywhere, but that doesn't mean that our society would be worse off without the flu.
The idea that "it's still around/common, therefore it must be valuable" requires subscribing pretty hard to a version of free-market ideology that ignores a lot of objective reality.
The flu exists because we don't aggressively isolate/contact trace people who get the flu, but it isn't that prevalent and results in few deaths because of how much we invest in vaccination, hygiene, and medical care.
The muggings continue because we don't spend the insane amounts on law enforcement and surveillance that would really be required to eradicate them.
Also, these examples are different in another way - few people get mugged or get the flu, but literally everyone consumes ads daily. I think a lot of people dislike ads but I'm not sure I agree that there is a strong desire to dramatically reduce or change them - people seem happy to complain but pretty hesitant to pay actual money to reduce them.
Or a society where people's drug addictions are treated as a medical problem, and poverty is fought with the same fervor that we fight "terrorism" and "drugs".
> Also, these examples are different in another way - few people get mugged or get the flu, but literally everyone consumes ads daily. I think a lot of people dislike ads but I'm not sure I agree that there is a strong desire to dramatically reduce or change them - people seem happy to complain but pretty hesitant to pay actual money to reduce them.
People consume ads like I consume mosquitos in the summer.
> people seem happy to complain but pretty hesitant to pay actual money to reduce them.
First, you have to look at this in the context of the actual economic situation of the average American, which has been, more or less, getting steadily worse in a relative sense for roughly 40-50 years.
Second, you can't actually say this with any degree of rigor because in the vast majority of cases, there isn't an option to pay money to reduce the ads. Sure, I could subscribe to YouTube Premium to reduce the number of ads on YouTube—but it wouldn't eliminate sponsored segments of videos, most of it (all of it? I don't actually know the economics off the top of my head) goes to Google rather than to the creators of the videos you watch, and it doesn't do anything about ads outside of YouTube.
Even if you were to subscribe to every single service that has an option to do so to remove ads, you would still be seeing intrusive online ads constantly (assuming you weren't using an adblocker). You would still have your personal data sold and sold again to try to squeeze every last drop of profit out of you for people already more wealthy than God.
And, as can be seen on places like Netflix and Amazon Prime, there's zero guarantee that subscribing will actually keep the ads away permanently.
Given all that, why would most people give up another $9.99 a month just to reduce the number of ads on Yet Another Website?
I don't have a good grasp of the broad economic trends, but the accessibility of ~free, high quality, valuable knowledge (as well as entertaining content) online has exploded in this time frame. That may be unrelated to wages but it certainly has to do with demand.
> Second, you can't actually say this with any degree of rigor because in the vast majority of cases, there isn't an option to pay money to reduce the ads.
Maybe, but this seems like a problem that could have been solved if it were actually profitable to do so, no? I mean, I guess it's possible that we're in some local minimum where it's really hard to set up a less terrible system. But the simpler explanation is people would rather "pay" with attention than money. I'm honestly not sure though.
I believe I covered that too, but maybe not explicitly enough. The root of the problem is that engaging in bad practices is a) allowed, and b) is profitable on the margin. In a competitive environment, this creates a zero-sum game, and that alone is enough of an explanation. Quoting myself from the article:
If you have competitors, you can't not participate.
> But those are just the cost of consuming all our favorite content for ~free, right?
It's not like we're being given much of a choice. Most people have less money than they need to satisfy even just the reasonable needs and wants, so being extremely price-sensitive is the default state for customers. In this environment, "free with ads" is a one-way strategy: it's impossible to compete on price with "free", so once someone goes for this model, all their direct competitors are forced to follow suit. It's why I see "free + ads" as an extremely anti-competitive move: it prevents any other business model from working.
> The size of the company has to be a major factor here. If your local shop takes out an ad in the local newspaper, I don't care what weird psychological tactics they use, does it really hit the same way?
It can be a factor, but I think its effect is often inverse. Large companies are a big, fat target for lawyers and regulators; there's only so much they can get away with these days. Small businesses can and do get much more scammy without repercussion, because their impact is much smaller and localized, and they're individually too small a target for the legal system to bother.
Also let's remember that, while small local companies are small and local, there's also a lot of them. And even as their "weird psychological tactics" affect only few people in each case, it isn't much of a consolation when you're one of those people.
This is how I teach it: an advert is simply the ability to buy a knock on someones front door.
That is literally all you are doing when you buy an advert. All business activity you experience today is an abstraction of business we have already done, I'm sure back in the day people thought door to door sales people were annoying, and I'm sure sometimes they were not.
From a founders perspective, you can take this door knock framework and use it for anything, want to do product research? knock on a door. Want to test a marketing message? Knock on a door. Want to boost sales? Knock on a door.
Adverting done wrong can be very annoying. Thankfully people who advertise incorrectly don't usually last very long, and sadly there are indeed a lot of not great marketing folks out there, but cancer on society... hmmm. This article conflates every kind of commercial outreach with malware, psychological abuse, or brand brainwashing... “zero-sum” and purely wasteful. Ok, but in practice competition drives improvement, and customer choice is central to a functioning market, leading to innovation.
Are you saying ads helping competition? How?
> customer choice is central to a functioning market, leading to innovation.
Ads suppress customer choice, along with innovations. Can you recall any recent innovative carbonated drink? Marketing budgets of pepsi/coca cola make competition and innovation impossible.
I think "competition" has to be directed towards a useful end, like improving the product, else it's at danger of just causing enormous waste disproportionate* to any value it is creating, like rigs for Bitcoin mining or microsecond trading.
Say you're playing a game where every minute you can either create a new cube or steal two from your opponent. The direct optimal strategy is for both players to just repeatedly steal - "competing" in a sense, yet wasting time for no progress. The meta-strategy, if we as a society want to increase the number of cubes, would be to punish stealing so that players instead compete by doing useful work (creating cubes).
To me the problem with marketing looks the same. It could make business sense for both Coke and Pepsi to double their marketing budgets to push flyers through every door to take each other's market share back and forth, but doing so wastes disproportionate* resources for little to no gain. Also seems as though it's one factor making it more difficult for potential new competition that has a legitimately better product but doesn't have billions to spend on ads, exclusivity deals, etc.
*: There can be some value created, like slightly faster Bitcoin transactions, or people being very slightly more informed about some products. Just that the zero-sum game aspect allows resources wasted to be far in excess of the value gained (if any at all), even without externalities.
Here is how: You have to admit and understand you are competing, you have to have a sense of where your competition is, and then you have to find out how to put yourself around them like chess, so they wake up and realized they lost. Once you have a monopoly, you immediately become susceptible to competition from startups, because realistically monopoly required you to have a product that is generally applicable to very many people. Your horizons and timelines at that scale are 5-10 years into the future, you can't wiggle around easily, you pre-paid $100MM of ads in airport skyways. If you rest on your laurels, you will die, apple is a good example of a business that doesn't compete it just ever-iterated itself with consumer insight, blackberry the other side of that.
That is why late stage business is so complex, you're being attacked everywhere, so you need 10 product lines, 250 features, 300 geographies, localization, etc etc. Say Starbucks totally loses Canada to Tim Hortons, what do they do? Spend $500MM to outcompete Tim Hortons in a market that they can't win or just leave and focus on new markets. This is business, outside of a few lux brands who have it as a strategy, nobody is spending money just to piss people off and annoy them, people who don't want to buy have ALWAYS been annoyed by sales, but that isn't necessarily a sales thing, and it is why targeting matters.
I don't claim that advertising is an illogical move from a business's self-interest perspective, but that it involves a zero-sum game that allows the resources wasted on it to greatly exceed any value it produces for society. It's a way to "compete" without doing useful work, and as a society we'd typically want businesses to compete by doing useful work instead of, for instance, building bigger and bigger Bitcoin-mining rigs.
I think any real business person would agree that is true. That is to say some things that look like businesses are not, and they go away pretty quickly. Then some societies say "what fits into that bucket but we want to hedge out edge cases" and then you exclude stuff, say healthcare. In a perfect system, the utility would have responded to the bitcoin miners by spinning up a huge solar farm that not only solved the BTC but helps everyone else too, an unfair capitalist will tell you a totally deregulated market will create those conditions over time, I'm skeptical of that aspect of capitalism hence I say it's an unfair point, but I don't firmly take a position because we don't have perfect systems so it's hard to know.
> Ads suppress customer choice, along with innovations. Can you recall any recent innovative carbonated drink? Marketing budgets of pepsi/coca cola make competition and innovation impossible.
...I don't think this is actually reasonable to ascribe to advertising.
This is a problem with hyperconsolidation.
Competition is driven by having many players in the market who are all within spitting distance of each other's overall size, however you want to measure it. Once consolidation shrinks the number of players down to a handful or less, that's when competition and innovation are stifled.
You say it yourself: the problem isn't that there's advertising. It's the marketing budgets of Pepsi and Coke. Which are (probably, didn't look it up) larger than the annual budgets of some countries. That couldn't happen if they weren't utterly unchallengeable juggernauts.
Yeah, and ads is the main mechanism why. Ban ads of carbonated drinks, and pepsi/coca cola will become no different from any other manufacturer of that stuff. They do have economy of scale for their advantage, but I don’t think it will help them much. The price/weight ratio of their product is rather low, and technically pipes are way more efficient at moving water than semitrailers.
Without marketing, it would make economic sense to produce these drinks locally at smaller scale. An example of similar commodity (in terms of the price/weight ratio) unaffected by ads is concrete. Roughly speaking, there’re 100 coca cola bottling facilities in US, versus 2000 concrete plants.
...Nnno. Mergers and acquisitions are how you consolidate. It doesn't matter if you show 10 million more ads than your nearest competitor; you're not going to somehow end up owning them unless you buy them out somehow.
The laws and regulations surrounding M&A were loosened several decades ago, and that has, very clearly and directly, led to the level of consolidation we have today.
The effects of ads and the effects of this on ads are both byproducts.
Claim that advertising suppresses customer choice is hard when you consider the flip side: in a competitive market, effective advertising compels companies to innovate and differentiate their offerings. Yes, the massive budgets of giants like Pepsi and Coke can sometimes make it seem like smaller players are edged out, but actually that isn't what happens, it’s the pressure to capture consumer attention that drives these companies to continually refine their messaging and, by extension, their products. Competition in advertising forces all players to up their game, trust me, there is an annoying savvy 26 year old junior marketing manager out there causing problems for someone in a brand bigger than them, that is often the job in fact. Also, the more targeted you get the CHEAPER your advertising often becomes, I can't run $50MM ads a year against "men in america" because I can outspend Nike and Toyota, but I can spend $500mth on men between 18-26 who like tennis and live in the zipcode 90210.
sure, the medium has chaned from literl knocking on physical doors to digital but still advertising is a tool when used effectively both informs customers and drives competition. could should and will debate the ethics and side effects of current practices but dismissing advertising as a cancer on society is silly, take aim at capitalism then.
(edit: per the comment above above, I just went down to the bodega to get a drink, there are SOOO many new soda's I've never heard of before, heck I'm standing in front of a kombucha coffee infused soda, made in Canada too the advert tells me, I think I'll try it, go Canada!)
You’ve described ads perfectly. I hate people who comes to my house to sell me stuff. As you say, advertisers are annoying scammers.
In a strong, cohesive society - that is understood, and all sort of limits are enforced. (Socially more than legally, typically.)
In an incoherent and divided society, a wide variety of malignancies flourish. At least for a while. Such societies tend to be short-lived, and jumping to a suitable new host can be difficult.
I also see HN Jobs that I did not ask for, would this also count as advertisements / marketing?
How would say, Daring Fireball [1] earn income from this cancerous mode of operation? Should this publication stop charging $11K a week to stop shilling products we don't need in your RSS feed?
So then it follows that all of these are 'cancer' by the author's definition.
How do we solve this once and for all to satisfy the author?
The only way to stop this would probably be to "close your eyes?" or perhaps maybe adblock, although we cannot adblock billboards, or this isn't really a big enough problem in the first place.
Solutions to this would be much welcome.
The idea of banning advertisements never struck you? That seems like the obvious way forward.
> HN (website whose sole purpose is to let people advertise)
I don't think anyone comes here to read the advertisements (which is what paid job postings with no comments? I'll pass.). The closest you get are the "who's hiring" threads. Calling that an advertisement when both parties clearly want to engage seems wildly disingenuous. Advertisements are necessarily forced on people. There isn't a single person in human history whose life was improved by an advertisement (except the people hosting the ads, of course).
Most forums such as this have a 'mute' button so you can choose not to see certain topics and posts by certain people. Not sure why HN doesnt have this, but it solves your 'problem' of forum posts being 'advertising' whilst at the same time explaining the difference between the two, choice.
EDIT: Oh I see youve edited your post. I wont be changing mine to address your new points. Try to keep a conversation going, stop editing to add points after people have replied.
It would be great for HN to not only "hide" the jobs all the time but an account level "hide ads" or "hide YC ads" function in the account so that I don't have to see the woven job ads on the site that act like HN posts.
This shouldn't be limited to forums, but should also be extended to other sites.
Should newspaper ads be opt-in even though you pay for them?
For example the Daily Mail. When you go to view an article on their site they give you the choice of viewing the article instantly with ads, or subscribing for ad free. I think this is great and all ad funded media should offer the same.
I believe advertising has a useful role enhancing market efficiency and providing information to consumers. But it has to be regulated. Misleading advertising should be as punishable as misleading information on the back of the product.
Then you might say, well there should be some regulations that prevent advertisers from doing X bad thing or saying Y exaggerated statement. Most of these exist already, and if they don't, the legislation required to ban such practices would be easier to implement than legislation "banning advertising" writ large, whatever that actually means in practice.
The difference between advertising and product information is that the former is deceitful.
These are rhetorical questions, because their implementation is a pipe dream. Getting rid of "advertising" would require the most draconian anti-speech laws imaginable.
You can go ahead with a career in Warhol simulacras if you want.
Regardless, this isn't really an answer. What metrics are you using to determine if an ad is misleading? Take for example the early 2000s BMW ads which were short films with various celebrities and actors. Are these "misleading" and not allowed?
Again, these aren't even remotely implementable ideas without complete state control over the media.
Why not in the same way it's determined for product information on the packaging?
No, it just requires the state to have control over corporations, which it has, since it's the one creating them.
Corporations aren't fictions, they are organizations of people and resources...just like the government.
You also didn't answer my question: where is the line between art and advertising drawn? If I make a movie and use BMWs in it, and BMW gives me those cars for free to use, am I breaking the advertising law?
As I said in the initial comment, all of these proposed solutions are absolute nonsense. If you dislike advertising's effect on the world, come up with a better way to manage the attention problem. Government control of the media isn't one of them.
It's common all over the world to regulate content in advertising. In many places corporations manage to self-regulate, in some the state steps in instead. Ads aimed at kids being prohibited is an obvious example, ads for gambling being heavily regulated another.
That's not an ad in the sense I've discussed, but yeah, if you ask me you should pay for the cars.
You're inventing consequences for restricting ads that are quite unnecessary so I'm not so sure I'm the one with a nonsense problem.
I thought that was a rather clear argument in what I wrote but apparently I was mistaken.
This seems odd. A corporation in this sense is a group of people deciding what to do. Should a group of people not be able to speak because a group of people is not a person?
If you're going to claim it's "the people making up the corporation" deciding what to do or say, then why can't I sue[0] the individuals who make up the corporation if I think that what they do or say is harmful to society?
And conversely, if the group of people thinks that what they're doing and saying is so valuable and normal, why are they forming a corporation to do it, rather than just working together as independent citizens to do it? Because a corporation has a specific legal meaning, and that meaning does not, in any way, fundamentally include "being a legal person", regardless of what Supreme Court justices with obvious glaring holes in their ethics have said.
[0] And expect not to get thrown out immediately because of limited liability. Yes, pedantically, I know you can sue for basically anything; that's clearly not the point here.
I'm more talking practically - what does it mean for a corporation to be silent? A corporation is already held to a higher standard than an individual; e.g. it can be sued for false advertising for anything it says. Given that, shouldn't corporations be able to "speak" (or rather the people in the corporation speak or instruct people to make videos/billboards etc)?
Advertising as contrasted to information is deceitful, manipulative. It's what happens when two brands use the same factory but make people think one product is boring and for poor people and the other one is for sexy, richer people. The proliferation of this kind of mass communication comes from the project to invent and spread desires people otherwise wouldn't have, to satisfy the amount of productivity we've developed over the last century or so. Make people want stuff they don't need and rationally can't defend being in demand of, basically.
Unless you have a good reason to confuse these many meanings of the word, maybe you shouldn't?
This is what is confusing the many meanings of the word. There's no point doing terminology redefinition and then saying "See? Thing bad!" That's not the purpose of this conversation; that's just what you tried to do in an individual comment.
See how far you can take it.
> Should a group of people not be able to speak because a group of people is not a person?
Corporations shouldn't have a right to exploit them for deceitful promotion of their products, however.
And it wasn't because the ads were entertaining, it's because the content was entertaining. Most YouTube content we consume is very low quality trash. In those circumstances the addition of ads becomes unbearable.
If you want to make commercials and ads tolerable produce better content.
The problem is that truth is very hard to establish for those that don't want and don't understand logic. They're "cancers" that people want because they're comfortable with it.
Also, if we try to control these cancers by restricting what information is allowed we will create an authoritarian society.
Not really. Everything that can change minds (including discussion, the news, and art) is a form of manipulation of people through information. Who draws the line what's good manipulation and what's bad manipulation (or, which is the same, what is legit mind changing and what's not)?
Nah, advetising is a cancer all of its own
Not every truth is revealed through logic.
How do you define escapist entertainment specifically, provided you do consider it malicious? I struggle to think of a form of entertainment that isn't on some level a possible escape.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20577142
I remember the hullaballoo when the Rolling Stones licensed "Start Me Up" to Microsoft. Last night, during the Superbowl, Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal reunited for a mayonnaise commercial aping a scene from "When Harry Met Sally" and I chuckled to myself how it was probably missing 2/3s of the viewership on the reference. Using Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life" by Carnival Cruise lines only sparks memories for me of Danny Boyle's "Trainspotting" and obviously they don't care. Same goes for when "Lord of the Rings" trailers had the Kronos Quartet playing under them, specifically the track featured in "Requiem for a Dream."
Honestly my breaking point was for a car insurance commercial where an accident occurred and the driver pulled an entirely new car from the trunk of the damaged car to represent the ease of returning to the prior state. It felt so absolutely deceptive I never will let it go. But that's not even the low point.
Pharmaceutical companies are now portraying "mini-movies" with the full narrative arc to create the sensation that a full and happy life is possible if only you ask your Doctor about some random-ass pill for a condition likely best treated by a change of lifestyle. The one I have in mind is a football coach where he's a family man, a teacher, and then gets a commemorative portrait unveiled at a game because he's so beloved. The culture damage of these bastardizations of narrative and story are a runaway freight train - always in slow motion mind you - and every time you see a historical figure selling you something, just remember that they're dead and couldn't complain. If it wasn't for Crispin Glover's lawsuit win all those years ago, Kurt Cobain might be selling anti-depressants and Jimi Hendrix a Kia or something.
But no, people wanted "free". Except there is no such thing as a free lunch.
> Advertising as currently practiced [... is] a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them. Limited to honestly informing people about what's available on the market, it can serve a crucial function in enabling trade. In the real world however, it's moved way past that role.
> Real world advertising is not about informing, it's about convincing. Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest. It also became more effective. In the process, it grew to consume a significant amount of resources of every company on the planet. It infected every communication medium in existence, both digital and analog. It shapes every product and service you touch, and it affects your interactions with everyone who isn't your close friend or family member. Through all that, it actively destroys trust in people and institutions alike, and corrupts the decision-making process in any market transaction. It became a legitimized form of industrial-scale psychological abuse [...]
And then it supports and complements this with a long list of findings.
I wonder if there are some approaches to hedge advertisement back into it's useful and valuable purpose and limit the highly, as the article puts it, "cancerous" impacts?
That’s because it sounds like a friend you trust and tell your secrets.
“Sounds like you’re depressed, here’s recommendations from travelapp”
It doesn't mean there are no problems with ads today.
I put up polite, attractive, informative ads in forums that I think will have people who might come to my shows. Not everyone will; the large majority won't. But some of these are web sites that talk about theater, where my ad spend pays for the site itself to exist.
I recognize that the ads we most notice are nothing like that. But the idea that all ads are automatically a bad thing misses out on the fact that the original purpose of ads, as cited in the article, does still exist. If you waved a magic wand and got rid of ads my theater probably wouldn't exist. No big loss, I suppose, but the world is very slightly poorer for it.
What good?
Let's say you are the inventor of the chainsaw, you need to tell lumberjacks that chainsaws exist, that's advertising. Otherwise you won't sell any and your invention will be lost, while lumberjacks will continue struggling with inefficient tools.
Isn't there an insurmountable conflict of interest when the person doing the informing is also the person who directly benefits from the product being 'useful' to as many people as possible?
You are probably not going to find a job if you don't tell anyone you need a job, job hunting is also advertising.
It's 2025. You could list it on your website, have it searchable in search engines, and aggregators for your product category, have independent and user review sites, and lots of other solutions that don't involve advertising.
I don't want anyone telling me they have something to sell I didn't ask them to tell me, and when I wasn't looking for such products actively (i.e. not because I searched somewhere else for a similar product).
>Even if it goes through independent reviewers, the reviewer has to be reached somehow, that's still advertising
No, it's not, unless the reviewer is paid or gets benefits for making your product look good.
And a great difference with "independent reviewers" is I can go to them (watch their videos, read their blog, go to their website, or whatever).
Advertising, on the other hand, cames to me. And increasingly I can't even skip it or get rid of it.
They also take the form of a review. Not a praise, or a video/image unrelated to the product, trying to sell it to me via sex, cool imagery, etc.
1920 called, they want their argument back!
Anyway, the last thing this society needs is encouragement to buy even more crap they never asked for. We can be something better than "that shithole strip-mall where everyone is an ignorant consumer who worships ronald reagan". As much as the evidence points to the contrary, I do believe we are capable of more.
what about the value lost from the people who work in advertising that have skills applicable to more productive industries
Cancers are tissues gone rogue. The original tissue does in fact tend to do “good things”.
There are a few transmissible cancers, but the vast majority of them are your own tissues twisted to only consider their own personal survival and short-term gains at the expense of the rest of the organism.
I mean, true, a cancer will probably destroy its host organism. But what about the cells whose mutations allow them to think outside the box, and replicate and expand beyond their wildest dreams by throwing away the limits imposed by overbearing genetic regulations and expectations of the organism? Isn't that a good thing?
The problem is this whole thing could have been gamified into something people want to participate in: I am looking for baby stuff, so its time to launch up The Buy Game. Only inside this game do I see ads for things I am very specifically signalling I am looking for, limiting what I see to what I want, and mayyybbeee I can click on "i feel lucky" to see something new. SOME kind of participatory signal or a negotiation, not shoved down my throat forcefully
Instead it has to be this fucking war, where I know full well I am not going to buy anything i see an ad for, in fact I now keep lists of the most annoying companies to make sure I never ever buy from them. I am considering spending the remaining years of my life making tools to help people get away from this shit
What google has done for the web; youtube, maps, gmail/gsuite, chromium/v8 are fantastic products that cost huge sums to develop, and the world gets to use them for free. Thats amazing. Its a huge gift to society that the a fantastic knowledge and productivity suite is available to everyone.
I have a lot more of a problem with infinite scroll & algorithmic content delivery than advertising.
It's not a gift. It's a transaction, but you pay with your attention and data about yourself so that someone can more effectively try to sell you something you might not really need. Upside: people who don't have money can now participate in knowledge pool. Downside: thousands of other people try to make sure that those people don't ever have more money because they spend them on marketers that were the best in marketing.
I also have been around a while, but I am the opposite opinion as yourself, mainly because I really appreciate actually owning something that I don't need to pay to continue to consume like Media which is a good example.
> I have a lot more of a problem with infinite scroll & algorithmic content delivery than advertising
This is basically the same thing as the advertising models that are being used except the advertising is a bit more nefarious (IMO) into manipulating you into feeling like you have to buy something, gamble a little bit or whatever it is just to remove money from your wallet to them.
The products you mention are obviously great for society, this isn't for debate I think, but it's how these services are monetized, which they should be 100% but there is a disgusting extreme in play these days to my eyes.
In the same service based ecconomy, I am okay with paying for Kagi for example, pay as you use without (hopefully) my data being sold to the highest bidder.
There are better models possible then the one we have, I think that's somethign that should be explored.
When it's done well, I agree with this sentiment, but the vast, vast majority of online advertising is done terribly. It almost always has a negative impact on my use of the hosting site.
2. “What google has done for the web; youtube, maps, gmail/gsuite, chromium/v8 are fantastic products that cost huge sums to develop, and the world gets to use them for free”
That is a financially “free”, sure. But the world doesn’t get to use it for free at all really, we pay by giving google our statistics and my god, first of all the amount of statistics collected would surprise most people, yeah you hear about “big businesses are collecting your data” but to see what data they can collect through like a webrequest can actually make it feel real. The world does not get any Google product for free, not in the whole sense of the word at least. To sum it up best I’d say Google and businesses like it have you get used to a (financially) free product, to such an extent that you integrate it as one of the base pillars of your online existence and then they enshittify that ‘free’ version to such an extent that they kind of threaten to pull that pillar away unless you pay.
(1.) which I also don’t love, cause subscription models also feel like you don’t own anything but in the case of a YouTube it’s more sensible than buying individual videos if ads weren’t a thing.
If there were no ads, how would people know that products existed? Would they just see the products on store shelves? What about services? Would labels be ads? Would how stores merchandise things be advertisements? Could businesses negotiate for specific product placement? How would you find out about stores? Would store signs be ads? How about really big ones? How about at the edge of their property along a road highway? Could the sign say what the store sold? If you were to start a product guide to help people find what they need, how could you possibly afford to buy enough products to be useful and up-to-date enough while slow crawl word of mouth got the business off the ground? Would asking people to tell their friends be an ad? If not, could you pay someone to spread the word about your product? Would traveling sales reps be ads? What if they wore head to toe logo gear? Could you just pay people to do that without selling things?
Manipulative advertising practices suck. Privacy destroying data-driven marketing sucks.
Ads themselves often suck but I don’t see how a capitalist society could survive without them.
The post does say:
> > Limited to honestly informing people about what's available on the market, it can serve a crucial function in enabling trade. In the real world however, it's moved way past that role. Real world advertising is not about informing, it's about convincing. Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest.
I think it's largely that incentives are in the wrong place for advertising to work as an effective means to inform people.
When trying to make an informed choice on a purchase, I'll typically look for enthusiast communities or unsponsored reviews. Marketing actually tends to actively get in the way.
Right but where do they get their info? If there were no advertisements, would they call up companies to see what they offered? How would they know a new company existed? Would there be an online enthusiast group for toilet brushes and tape and granite blocks for curbs? How would you know if there was a new store to buy those things? Would that store having a sign that included what they sold constitute advertising? Could your local fish shop put a sign in the window advertising the weekly special? Could they post a picture of it online? Obviously circulars would be advertisements— would catalogs constitute advertisements? What would inspire any innovation at all if there was no way for anyone to discover some new competition existed? How would stores know that manufacturers and distributors existed? Is packaging advertising? Is there a limit to where you can place packages? Show them on the Internet? Do you really think those enthusiast communities wouldn’t be chock full of industry voices? Do you think they aren’t already? Do you really think your process is totally objective?
There are a lot of shitty practices in marketing and advertising. Especially with data-driven marketing, I might be the harshest critic I’ve encountered. But advertising at its core is just telling people that products exist. That’s it. Capitalist societies don’t function without being able to communicate that products exist, but even communist countries have (and always had) advertising to tell people that things existed.
I abhor many practices in marketing and advertising, but at some level, companies must be able to tell people that they have a product to sell. I have never encountered anybody that suggested a reasonable replacement that would work for everything from computers to condoms to lettuce to bars to bakeries to cars to cleaning services to email hosts to edge network caching to hobbyist clubs to camp grounds.
Hopefully from first-hand experience with the product, and not just from ads.
> If there were no advertisements, would they call up companies to see what they offered?
Searching product listings on a website is more common than a phone call, and if you're a reviewer you might want to sign up to industry mailing lists and press releases to get notified of new offerings. Generally speaking I believe this is what reviewers are doing already, opposed to just waiting to randomly get a targeted Facebook ad for products to review.
I wouldn't typically consider cases where you solicit information and receive it to be an ad. You give a broad definition of ad ("just telling people that products exist", which would seemingly include even independent reviews and word of mouth) - and while it's up to you if you want to hold that definition, you should note that nobody's suggesting eliminating all that.
> Would there be an online enthusiast group for toilet brushes and tape and granite blocks for curbs?
There are online enthusiast groups for, say, DIY, that'll likely have advice on tape and edging stones. Doesn't need to be hyper-specific to one product.
> Do you really think your process is totally objective?
For determining what product to buy? No, it'll never be. But I do think it's better to at least try to get information from sources with well-aligned incentives, and I do think that companies spending billions on manipulation campaigns often makes doing so more difficult, despite increased informedness being the supposed benefit we get in return for the colossal waste of resources and time.
> What would inspire any innovation at all if there was no way for anyone to discover some new competition existed?
My argument wasn't that there should be "no way for anyone to discover some new competition existed" - my argument was that incentives are largely in the wrong place for ads to work as an effective means to inform consumers, since the company producing the ads has no reason to give unbiased information (and only really has reason to avoid outright lying because of restrictions already placed on advertising). Compare to an independent reviewer, where the incentive is hopefully (albeit not always) to give a relatively unbiased review to attract a readership. There can also be incentive there to review new/niche products that others are not yet reviewing.
> There are a lot of shitty practices in marketing and advertising. Especially with data-driven marketing [...] I abhor many practices in marketing and advertising, but at some level [...]
I'd claim that the problematic practices have not just arisen by coincidence - they stem from misaligned incentives. Also, while it'd certainly be beneficial to stamp out those practices, there'd still be the issue that resources are being wasted on what is largely a zero-sum game, instead of competing through more preoductive work (steal market share back and forth by improving the product, not just by repeatedly convincing people).
Some mediums are: banners, paid testimonials, email mailing lists, video spots, catalogs, flyers, packaging, sponsorships, signs, car wraps, phone tree preamble or hold messages, etc. Even something that just displays a brand name or logo can be advertisements. You did not solicit any one of those exposures. They are ALL being put in front of your face by someone that wants to sell you something. Who sees those messages and how (TV spot vs YouTube spot vs Disney+ spot) is more of a marketing concern than advertising itself but it's all related enough for this discussion.
Messages are anything about the product or company, beginning with the name of the model "TACTIKILL XTERMINATOR 4000" or "NatureStop Gentle Reducer Premium" to statistics about the product to product descriptions to claims of efficacy or quality or usage recommendations, or sexy models smiling and enjoying their incredible life thanks to that laundry soap.
Both the medium and the message, independently, can be entirely benign or manipulative. There are laws in most countries that are pretty barebones about what they can't do-- e.g. spam for medium, and making false claims for messaging. A ultra-targeted Facebook Ad or sneaky TikTok influencer sponsorship can include completely unbiased data about the product. A catalog listing or sponsored whitepaper can include absolute bullshit and manipulative plays on emotion.
Ads don't just target end-consumers. Distributors, parts manufacturers, manufacturing machine manufacturers, packaging companies, suppliers of raw materials and intermediaries, transportation and logistics companies, warehouses, etc etc etc all have to explain why their product is worth buying over another. A lot of that is subjective.
For some entities, using an app container on DO or Heroku is a great solution because they don't have to manage some things themselves. Even if it doesn't save them money, it might be a QoL increase that makes sense in the context of the person using it. Their simply stating that their product is easier to use could be construed as biased-- if you need granular control over static files, those solutions are not easier to use by many people's estimation. For a lot of people whether or not they're easier to use depends on how comfortable someone is with deployments. Someone less familiar with coding than deployments probably would find heroku more irritating than useful.
If you think people exclusively want a bullet list of features rather than a TL/DR about why that company thinks it's a better choice, you're wrong. Especially with the bazillion things in our lives less consequential than web hosting. Straws. Contact lens solution. Gum. Candles. Wine. Shirts. If Red Kap is saying that their industrial work shirts are extremely durable, I want to know that rather than having a list of materials in the blend, the fabric weight, the composition of the thread, whether or not the armpits are gusseted, etc. Then I can take a look and decide myself if the company has the same idea of durable that I do. My life would be measurably worse if they could not give their subjective take on why those facts matter, and if I need to buy a shirt quickly before a camping trip, I don't want to go looking for a shirt forum and deciding whether or not those people are full of shit. Groupthink is a huge problems in online enthusiast communities as it is. It's just a different source of people trying to push their perspective except now the reward is their feeling like a know-it-all. Is it more objective? Yeah. Is it so much more objective that I want to look
Targeting can be good to a very limited extent, or bad to a great extent. I'm glad I get advertisements for a new local coffee roaster pop up in some social media feed. The chance of me driving down that little side street in that neighborhood is slight, and the same is probably true for my friends. The local newspaper is a shitty clone of USA Today and expensive so I don't subscribe to it, and they probably wouldn't even cover it anyway. The local food reviewer social media accounts, I know for a fact, are essentially hawking places for money without disclosing it. The local food forums/blogs/etc are full of cranks and blowhards and it's impossible to know if anything is really good or bad. I'm glad I see that instead of advertisements for stethoscopes and scrap metal recycling services which also target industries common in my area. I am not glad companies are trying to sneakily inject advertising into everywhere I go and that data brokers are doing their best to build the creepiest psychological profile possible. I'm happy to see a video of someone talking about something they like. I'm not happy about seeing a video where someone was paid to say they like it without disclosing that.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to sell something if you live in a capitalist society. That's the way capitalist societies function. (Even then, communist countries have and always did have advertisements to just let people know that things existed. Even if there was less manipulation involved in them, they still had to show people why something was worth buying instead of just giving them statistics and hoping people's nerdy friends would explain it to them.)
The problem is not advertising, or wanting to sell something, or even marketing. The problem is manipulation, unfair business practices, and lying. Trying to address those things by criticizing advertising itself would be like trying to reduce junk mail by banning mail. There are fundamental problems that need to be addressed but saying advertisements can just go away a) completely ignores what advertisements actually do in our society and why they exist, and b) completely ignores the guarantee that greedy people will still use greedy and manipulative business practices to get an unfair advantage because advertisements aren't the source of greed or the only way people can be greedy.
Sure - but many actions are economically logical yet wasteful or destructive, and as a society we can adjust fines/tax rates/tariffs/subsidies/etc. such that the more constructive choice becomes the one that's also in the best financial self-interest of the company. Encourage improving the actual product with R&D instead.
That's not to say marketing spend should necessarily drop to $0, but I do believe it'd optimally be a tiny fraction of what it is now. There's no good societal reason for the Monopoly Go mobile app to have a $500M marketing budget, for instance.
> Advertising is nothing more than a company communicating about their product [...] Independent reviews and word of mouth aren't advertisements because they don't originate from the company. If they pay someone to review their product then it is an advertisement.
This has improved in precision over "just telling people that products exist", though I'd still claim that there are ways companies can communicate about their product that I wouldn't consider an ad - like an ingredients list label, for instance.
No bright line, but I'd consider the distinction of "receiving information I solicited" (like with the reviewer signing up to an industry mailing list) vs "someone is paid to shove this in my face" to be an important factor.
> If you think people exclusively want a bullet list of features rather than a TL/DR about why that company thinks it's a better choice, you're wrong. Especially with the bazillion things in our lives less consequential than web hosting. Straws. [...]
Not sure where the idea that it should be exclusively bullet point lists comes from - an independent review can just as easily have a TL;DR or a numeric rating, and online stores typically aggregate customer reviews.
> I am not glad companies are trying to sneakily inject advertising into everywhere I go and that data brokers are doing their best to build the creepiest psychological profile possible. I'm happy to see a video of someone talking about something they like. I'm not happy about seeing a video where someone was paid to say they like it without disclosing that.
Agree.
> The problem is not advertising, or wanting to sell something, or even marketing. The problem is manipulation, unfair business practices, and lying.
I'd claim the problem advertising has is analogous to bitcoin mining. In theory there's probably some small fraction we could reduce it to where it'd have net-positive impact, by using some resources but providing value in facilitating payments. But unfortunately, there's a zero-sum game aspect to it where the "economically sensible" choice can be to effectively throw vast resources into a black hole - "competition" not directed towards achieving a useful end and growing out-of-control disproportionate to any value it might provide. There's also, piled on top of that, bad practices like restarting coal-fired plants - but critically the issue persists even if it was wasting renewable energy instead.
I think you see the bad practices of ads, but not really the zero-sum game aspect. Monopoly Go's $500M marketing spend remains enormously wasteful even without any deceptive or obnoxious practices.
> ...so we end up with a zero-sum game instead (or really negative-sum, if you count the externalities). If you have competitors, you can't not participate.
Advertising is basically a moloch trap, so it probably has to be solved by regulation to fix the incentives. Solving these kinds of problems well is pretty hard, so I think it shouldn't be surprising that they are not solved yet.
> GDPR is doing an excellent job destroying some of the most privacy-invasive practices of the adtech industry
I disagree pretty strongly. I plan to write a bit more detail about this at some point but shortly I think GDPR is a net negative. It places too much burden on the user, while the burden should be on the adtech companies. I also don't like how it bundles all the surveilance stuff under a single consent (per company). This is giving the user a choice to accept what they hardly know the real consequences of and also giving the companies a strong incentive to manipulate the user to get that consent. In terms of fixing incentives, GDPR did pretty much the opposite.
It's also incredibly vague, so it's a nightmare to develop around, and limits legitimate use cases. The end result is that we still get surveilled, but we now also have to click through cookie banners and consent forms and small businesses have to spend enormous resources to deal with it even though it was supposed to be a measure to tackle big tech companies. Worse than that, walled gardens like Facebook and Google have advantage over normal websites, because they have to ask for consent only once during registration.
I would kill to get a few regular sponsors and not need an ad platform but I've been literally able to only find one sponsor after almost a decade. No one wants to pay without tracking, especially in emerging markets/niches.
But children? They see characters and do not realize they are corporate mascots. By adulthood these are classics and nostalgia inducing.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/11/can-cities-ki...
> SEO, AKA. gaming the search engines. Hugely popular. Often involves creating nonsense sites, and spamming websites and web forums with comments. It pollutes search results for more obscure queries, generally wasting people's time.
Having this essay backdated to pre-LLMs era, I'm wondering what the author would write when he witnesses people using AI-generated content to boost SEO these days.
Why do I always need to choose the lesser evil and never good?
Anything newly invented wasn't shown before it was, well, invented.
So what stops us humans from not living in crappy dictatorships and not in shitty capitalism?
The US can afford to feed everyone and still not be 'Socialist'.
I think you are confusing 'Capitalism' with 'Cruelty'. What if I were to tell you, you don't have to be cruel in order to virtue-signal your faith in 'Capitalism'.
It tells the story - with many deep, detailed examples - of how advertising went from information to persuasion across the mid-1900s, and there are some truly gross moral acts/steps along the way.
It can be a little dry at times (and some has of course been superseded by Surveillance Capitalism), but if you want to acquire a genuine disgust reflex for modern advertising, I strongly recommend it.
state surveillance is driven by control.
but even state surveillance often piggybacks on commercial surveillance
I wish more people would realize the root cause of all this spying is advertising. Simply banning advertising would get rid of all this shit more effectively and with less overreach and compliance headaches than the GDPR.
It's not perfect but I think this definition would include e.g. billboards, newspaper ads and most internet ads, while excluding non-advertising integrations of third-party data (e.g. when a navigation company buys maps from a mapping company to show to their client, it does not fall under this definition because money flows the other way).
Advertising is a core activity of capitalism, which our western governments protect and further at all costs. Until we leave capitalism as a system behind, advertising will keep growing.
In my experience most people actually don't, and any anti-advertising strategy has to come to grips with this fact. For example I really can't stand radio ads so when I'm in the car with somebody and the radio starts playing ads I will ask if they can turn it off. Usually they will be pretty surprised, ask "why" etc. I think many people are genuinely able to "tune it out" and not be annoyed by ads.
In most of every society, certainly including the US, there are plenty of people having children with far less than the incomes of these people that claim to be unable to afford it. So what they really mean is that they would rather spend their money on other things. But this is extremely unnatural. Our bodies and minds are heavily evolved to wanting to procreate - it takes a very strong force to fight back against the biological clock and it seems that advertising is just that force.
I think evidence for this is widespread. Many places like Thailand have low education, low income, and low fertility (on par with Japan now). The classic explanations for declining fertility would predict high fertility in such a place. But what Thailand has is an exceptionally high degree of consumerism. And vice versa this also explains why religion often correlates strongly with fertility.
There are varying views on sexuality, education, equality of the sexes, and so on - but most tend to offer a life purpose that supplants any meaningful role consumerism could have. Another bit of evidence is that fertility rates among the extremely rich are also extremely high. Again when one has billions of dollars you can't really be a consumerist because at that point there is basically nothing one could not buy, so you need to look elsewhere for meaning and fulfillment.
Source?
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/the-exp...
This seems to say because they "don't want to"
Most people are going to think they're talking about all people, as you did here. The age sample is also probably intentionally biased. Having the age range be 18-49 is illogical. The reasons for an 18 year old not planning to have kids matter far less (from a social point of view), and have far less meaning/certainty, than an e.g. 30 year old saying the same. Most studies are broken into reasonable age buckets because of this. 18-49 is not reasonable for fertility issues.
Even with their heavily biased sample, they only get 57% of their "young" group saying they just don't want to (and only 31% of the older group), whereas you get 79% saying they want to "afford the things they want", 75% saying "saving for the future", and so on.
You say this then go on to shit on it and then only agree with parts that support your argument?
> they are unlikely to ever have children
This reports the same thing:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/19/growing-s...
> That study is 'p-hacked'
Not typically how p-hacking is used?
> Having the age range be 18-49 is illogical
It looks like they selected the buckets on the criteria of being adults and physically able to have children.
> 18-49 is not reasonable for fertility issues
I guess? It probably made the survey easier to conduct though.
> Even with their heavily biased sample
Why is their sample biased? It was a survey of that population.
This is essentially what p-hacking is. By organizing variables in a certain way, you can create statistically significant results to say basically whatever you want them to say. A huge tell-tale sign of p-hacking is constraining one's sample in ways that don't really make sense and/or are likely to be misleading. The thing we were discussing is 'why people aren't having kids.' This is very different than why 'people who don't plan to ever have kids aren't having kids.'
Do you know what statistically significant results means?
But again the one tell-tale sign somebody like me would notice from your study is 'why in the world would you limit it to that sample'? Well because that sample gives you the answer you want! It's science, baby!
Its like saying you are p-hacking an election. I don't understand what you mean.
It'd be akin to if I claimed (as I do) that the party in office has no meaningful effect on the economy, and you responded 'Uh, yeah they do! Democrats have a majorly positive effect on the economy. Look at this study!' [President only, employment only, excluding recessions]. That survey you linked to is not just presenting the survey. It's presenting a rather specific and odd subsampling.
You weren't happy with the population it sampled from. You thought the buckets should be sized differently. You called this p-hacking.
I provided another survey from a larger population with a similar response to the first one I shared. You didn't acknowledge it.
You still haven't provided a source.
The relationship between economics and fertility is widely accepted, but surveys have been hijacked by clickbait. Going the other direction with studies is also difficult because it's well established and taken as a given, rather than studied. But this [2] seems to be some older foundational study on the topic. ctrl+f for "opportunity cost." Essentially the more people earn, the more they lose out by having children, which is seen as a major deterrent to having children. In other words, they don't see themselves as having enough money to afford what they would lose by having children, so prioritize earning more, to buy more things, over having children.
[1] - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/padr.12535
Advertisers have the audacity to attempt to steal people's attention when they really need it elsewhere. This may include billboards in such times as when their victim is controlling a 1.5MT machine at a velocity of 100km/h on the freeway. The advertisers, in this case don't even bother to ask for permission.
Or when a media outlet colludes with advertisers to pretend an article is "news".
The Super Bowl is basically an advert interrupted by football.
God knows how problem gamblers or drinkers manage to consume media without being triggered with all the gambling or alcohol ads. It's a disgrace.
It's an artifact of humans, not of capitalism. Plenty of people[0] use advertising who aren't capitalists.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_in_the_Soviet_Union
Good thing is, that you can block it at home. Bad thing is, that if you avoid commercial advertising, you are struggle with income as freelance audiovisual producer.
They would put the word "Security" or "Privacy" on the screen. They never claimed they were good at security. They just said "Security". It was implied. Factually, they had little to stand on.
They also did the thing car markers do, where they exploit status insecurities. They were wholly successful, a lower-class person cannot own an Android phone without getting flack. Meanwhile, an upper-middle class person doesnt have this burden. I can drive a crappy car and I'm seen as prudent. A lower class person drives a crappy car and is seen as poor. All of this comes from marketing the status position of a company.
Who gives a fuck about status if you can't use imessages