Hacker News Reader

Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

I don't really care if companies -- of any size -- can reach me or not. If I want a service they provide, I will actively seek them out.

Large companies already have a huge advantage over small/new companies in that they have much more money to spend on marketing and advertising. If anything, banning paid advertising helps level the playing field.

People will still find out about small and new businesses if paid advertising was banned. In fact I learn about most smaller players through word of mouth and other non-paid sources.

View on HN

>If I want a service they provide, I will actively seek them out.

The problem is there are some services you don’t even know exist that could be much better than how you’re currently solving a problem. Think prevention vs treatment of a problem.

For a concrete example:

I learned about a dog groomer that comes to your house this way. Maybe it should have been obvious there would be some that made house calls but searching Google maps for groomers tends to return the ones with locations that you drive to.

Dog hates the car. Problem solved with a thing I didn’t know existed.

Advertising is the cure worse than the disease in this case. I'm willing to have a slightly worse service occasionally if it means I'm not being bombarded with corporate propaganda. If a service is bad enough, or my desire for something is great enough, I will seek it out.

If you're relying on ads to tell you how to solve your problems you're implicitly trusting that the information provided in ads is factual and unbiased, and that the problem in question wasn't entirely manufactured by the industry that is now showing you ads (see also: manscaping, engagement rings, vehicle AI integration, etc)

I don't mean to be rude but I genuinely can't think of any service I've learned about through advertising. Do you have an example? I actively seek out product reviews and trailers for things I already know I want but I don't think an ad has changed my mind, just changed whether I buy A or B

How would you know? If you heard about it through word of mouth, and the person you heard it from heard it from an ad…

Good point. Friends, family, and colleagues keep telling me to buy stupid things they see from online ads all the time. They're probably pushing me towards an equal number of non-stupid things and I just don't notice.

In my personal life I pretty much never see ads and I like it that way, but thanks for giving me something to think about.

Do you have strong examples of this?

Like, the SlapChop is a good counter example I think. The commercial demos the item, makes it looks useful, uses hot sales tactics, a bunch of people think "it's just 20 bucks, and chopping stuff sucks", buy one, and now we've got a bunch of SlapChops in the landfill because in practice they're finicky and more annoying to use than just a knife.

To me, it seems like by volume commercials mostly fall into trying to convince you you want/need something that's ultimately not that useful vs inform, and the vast majority of actual useful things I've found via actively searching, or via word-of-mouth / seeing it at a friend's house.

When you seek them out, how will you find them?

Not through ads - you can be sure of that!

In the old days, if I wanted someone to remove a tree stump in my yard, I would ask my neighbor who had a stump removed who did it for them, or open the yellow pages.

In the modern age, I would open google maps (where companies can, for free, volunteer to be listed), or google.com and search.

The yellow pages are ads, and in a sense a company having a webpage which is indexed by google is advertising, but advertising in an index of services is wildly different from paying an influencer on tiktok to do a dance video that just happens to have a tree stump being removed in the background, as if by accident, with the company name visible.

I think anti-advertising people are largely fine with a yellow-pages-like list of companies, with a search engine that indexes company websites, with word-of-mouth questions and reports about what services exist out there.

Will it be harder for a new company that spends $10 on a purse made in vietnam and $20MM on advertising to convince consumers it's a necessary fashion item worth $20k to take off? Yes, absolutely. Will it be harder for a plumber in my area to get business? Honestly, probably about the same, people who need a plumber will usually look at the list of businesses offering the service in their area, and a new plumber can easily get added to google maps and slap together a site.

Who is paying for Google to run the search system or maps in this world?

Those are indeed very useful things.

It's true that people often spend their money on frivolous or unnecessary things. But sometimes people pay for useful things too!

I pay for kagi, and that works okay.

I would prefer if this search-engine / company-directory were government funded, and thus paid for via my taxes.

It's a useful service for the people, and having the government also be able to validate businesses are real legal entities seems quite useful, so making it tax funded seems pretty ideal.

Ditto for an up-to-date map, that's a generally useful thing to the populace, and the government really is the best authority on what streets are still usable, what towns exist, etc.

Most people can't afford to pay for Kagi.

A government funded maps program would be great same with a government funded search engine that had to try and compete with international search engines with more resources.

You can choose not to use Google though and avoid their ads.

You can choose not to use any service that uses ads and only use ones that allow you to pay for ad free experiences.

Banning ads removes that possibility for others when you can solve the problem today for yourself.

> You can choose not to use any service that uses ads and only use ones that allow you to pay for ad free experiences.

Ads are so incredibly pervasive I effectively cannot.

There's stores I go to which only post their hours on instagram. There's friends I communicate with where my only communication avenue is instagram.

When I walk outside of my door I see billboards and ads, when I install an app required for my daily life, it's full of ads. iPhone, android, and windows all have ads by default littered throughout default apps.

We live in a society, and becoming a weirdo who refuses to use anything that doesn't run on my linux-phone will isolate me from that society. It's perfectly possible to criticize a thing and imagine alternatives without first becoming richard stallman.

You could call the store or your friends, no ads there.

What are these apps that are required for your daily life?

My iPhone doesn't have any ads by default outside of the app store.

You're imagining a complete restricting of society and you're not even willing to do without a few apps and Instagram.

> You could call the store or your friends, no ads there.

If everyone called the store to check if they're open instead of looking on instagram, the employee would never get time away from the phone to actually serve customers, you're suggesting something ridiculous. Text and phone calls aren't replacements for each other either between friends.

> What are these apps that are required for your daily life?

The app I have to use to buy train tickets has ads in it, mostly for fashion items sold at stores within train stations.

The app for checking train schedules is full of ads, and while there are open source apps on android for this, on iPhone you can't sideload open source apps so there's no ad-free alternatives. Releasing an app on iOS costs $100/year for the developer, so the incentive is not to make free open source apps. I really miss android. The iOS app store has so much completely garbage adware, and I can't even code up simple ad-free apps for myself without buying a macbook.

The app I have to use to send support requests to my landlord (an app dedicated to just that purpose) has a couple banner ads. The corporate landlord requires using it, and will not respond to phone calls.

My cell phone company's app, which is the only way to check my plan's remaining data, has a truly incredible number of ads.

.... and that's just off the top of my head. They're everywhere.

But even if all my apps were ad-free, the billboards posted everywhere, on busses, in trains, on buildings, are inescapable.

Instagram has been around less than 15 years. I'm suggesting you do what people did for the previous 100 years. You're not willing to do that to avoid ads? You're not willing to call or text your friends?

Instagram would be gone without ads, what would you do to fill the gap then?

Buy your tickets at the station? Use the train company website for the schedules?

Does your landlord or phone company have a website? What phone company is running third party ads in their app?

> Instagram has been around less than 15 years. I'm suggesting you do what people did for the previous 100 years. You're not willing to do that to avoid ads? You're not willing to call or text your friends?

The fact that instagram is relatively recent doesn't matter here, what matters is the social norms. You're a social outcast if you don't use ad-ridden software.

I'm not willing to be a depressed loner with no friends in order to avoid ads, if that's what you're asking. Just because I can unalive and no longer see ads doesn't mean that I have to like seeing them.

Social norms have changed, and I can't fix that by myself. I'll happily argue that social norms being ad-funded and brainwashing the populace, myself included, is bad though.

> Does your landlord or phone company have a website?

The cell phone provider's website has just as many ads as the app, they're equivalent. There isn't a webpage for my landlord.

Plenty of people manager to avoid being social outcasts without using Instagram. Keeping up with your friends pictures and reels is hardly a needed part of friendship. Call, text, message your friends, organise to hangout, put their birthdays in your calendar.

You're not willing to make literally the smallest of sacrifice to get what you want in avoiding ads. You've chosen a discount mobile network, go with a premium one to avoid ads.

If you're not going to be willing to pay for these things today how will your life be when you're forced to because they are no longer subsidised by advertising?

Imagine this: instead of the search engine space being 90% focused on ads and 10% on providing a good search experience, you could have one that is focused on finding the thing you're looking for.

You can have that now if you subscribe to Kagi but it costs money to operate and use. So without advertising you're choosing to make it impossible for poorer people to search.

I don't see that argument having much heft. The people who are worried about their view being soured by billboards aren't the ones who are worried about what happens to poorer people. They move in different circles.

I really can't believe that someone who frequents Hacker News can ask this question.

If by any chance this is a legit question, i feel the answer would be too obvious: asking people, googling, going to a store you think could sell the thing you want, etc. There are many many pretty obvious ways of finding out about stuff, without needing to have a corporation "reach out" to me and shove their shit everywhere in the form of ads.

Google doesn't exist in this world remember

Yes, i remember. I remember Google the search engine being a thing before it became an ad-ridden space.

Search engines are useful things. They can still exist on a world without ads.

Google existed before ads by losing investor money. Who is paying for it when ads are banned?

This a thread about imagining a world without ads. If we're trying to envision that, it surely is not too hard to imagine how such a useful service for society as a search engine could be funded by other means, right?

There are many many examples of useful services (both private and public) in our own world that manage to exist without the need to get plastered by obnoxious ads.

People get upset at the idea of using government money to feed the starving. Why do you assume they would be ok with spending billions to create a search engine?

The reality is you can choose to have your dream reality right now. Pay for Kagi, pay for ad free streaming or buy bluerays, stay of social media or subscribe direct to your content providers in patron.

We don't need to remove free access just so a few people can go ad free. Those people can already do it they just choose not to

And, just to expand a bit on this, what i find puzzling about the stance of "how will you find out about stuff without ads" is that it goes totally contrary to my contemporary experience.

Nowadays, when i want to find out about something, i don't just query Google about it, i usually make sure to add "site:reddit.com" to that query, precisely to avoid getting swamped by unuseful ads on the search results and instead have a change at getting to actual data from actual people. In this sense, ads are not only not useful for finding out about the stuff i want: they are actually hampering my ability to do so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com