Hacker News Reader

Comment by ujkhsjkdhf234 | Hacker News Reader

I have been groaning about income inequality a lot but it is amazing how much of this can be explained by it. People do not have the disposable income to spend on services so you make people pay with attention. Give them the carrot for free so they don't notice. On top of that, the product is free so there is no expectation of support for the end user. You're getting it for free so what are you complaining about?

View on HN

People definitely have disposable income. They can, and are willing, to go into even non-trivial amounts of debt if you're good enough.

The goal is extracting your portion of it via social engineering and other mechanisms available to you.

What would be the point of showing an ad to someone without disposable income?

Some examples, with varying levels of predation:

An ad for Pampers shown to a family with a toddler; an ad for Tidy Cats shown to a cat owner; an ad for Reese’s shown to someone who exhibits poor impulse control; an ad for McDonald’s shown to someone who works two jobs and doesn’t have time to cook food for themselves; an ad for a gambling app shown to someone using a gambling app.

>an ad for McDonald’s shown to someone who works two jobs and doesn’t have time to cook food for themselves

You're presumably trying to imply it's predatory, but if the premise is that the person "doesn't have time to cook food", how is the ad making things worse? What's the person supposed to do? starve?

Not really trying to make a point about predatory ads here, though I probably should have left out the bit about predation to that point. I just didn’t want people to think they were all intended to be as bad as the gambling example. I agree the fast food example is not any more predatory than, say, Factor but it (and that, actually) is an example of an advertisement intended to capture someone’s regular spending.

They might not have enough disposable income to pay for software but enough to pay for whatever is on the ad.

More generally, if the service is free, you're the product, and you're being sold to someone else

Both yours and your sibling comments seem to be operating under the assumption that all advertisers are some kind of idiots

Advertisers have a perverse incentive to spend as much ad money as possible. I think this is one of the few scenarios where you can attribute something to malice.

No, I operate under the assumption that advertisers can scam gullible users.

From casinos, to shady inexistent job offers, to malware, there's a whole world of -ads- targeting the final users as a victim

> There are ads running on Youtube right now that deepfake some celebrity to sell crypto.

replying to myself bc i can't to @ujkhsjkdhf234

on x.com (formerly twitter) if you don't paid for premium you get ads for drainers and scams on crypto etc too

it's overall a mess tbh, I never trusted nor liked marketing or advertising, it's just lies in disguise.

There are ads running on Youtube right now that deepfake some celebrity to sell crypto.

It would change the way they spend their nondisposable money.

Does the client know they lack disposable income? This is just as much an exercise about fleecing a client out of their adspend by giving shoddy metrics on your end.

Propaganda

In the ancient times there was an ISP selling Internet access where the catch is, you dial up via their program, and this program would have an always-on-top window showing ads...

Then again, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube started "You pay for it with your attention (and your data)" and only later have they implemented payment for being ad-free, although with Zuck's properties, the EU forced it.

It was called NetZero, although there may have been another one. I set it up for people all the time.

Perhaps interesting anecdata - I have a close friend who has a great career, plenty of assets and income, etc., but doesn't pay to remove ads in their streaming services. Thus, together we watch unskippable ads on a brilliant 70" OLED TV while resting on plush leather sofa in their beautiful loft, haha.

Nothing to do with income equality, organizations will show whatever ads they can get away with. I paid Microsoft thousands of dollars for my Microsoft laptop. The hardware and form factor are admittedly pretty fantastic. But in spite of this, Microsoft is still determined to try (and fail) to show me ads.

Money alone wouldn't fix this, as a Web where every page has a paywall wouldn't be much better either. Which in turn would concentrate most of the Web in a few services just as it is today and enshittyfication would bring the ads back sooner or later, even if you pay for the service.

> bring the ads back sooner or later, even if you pay for the service.

This has already happened for subscription TV services. Your previously ad-free subscription now has ads, but you can get rid of them again by upgrading! It’s fucking gross. It’s also of course just going to work, and become the new normal.

I got rid of ads on Netflix et al by cancelling my subscriptions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com