Vietnam bans unskippable ads | Hacker News Reader

Vietnam bans unskippable ads

saigoneer.com

1,580 pointshoherd813 comments

I just uninstalled a game from my mobile phone this morning that had heavy ad usage. It was interesting to note the different ad display strategies. From least to most annoying:

- display a static ad, have the "x" to close appear soon (3-10 seconds)

- display an animated ad, have the "x" to close appear soon (3-10 seconds)

- display a static ad, have the "x" to close appear after 20-30 seconds

- display an animated ad, have the "x" to close appear after 20-30 seconds

- display several ads in succession, each short, but it automatically proceeds to the next; the net time after which the "x" to close appears after 20-30 seconds

- display several ads in succession, each lasts for 3-10 seconds but you have to click on an "x" to close each one before the next one appears

I live in the USA. The well-established consumer product brands (Clorox, McDonalds, etc.) almost all had short ads that were done in 3-5 seconds. The longest ads were for obscure games or websites, or for Temu, and they appeared over and over again, making me hate them with a flaming passion. The several-ads-in-succession were usually British newspaper websites (WHY???? I don't live there) or celebrity-interest websites (I have no interest in these).

It seems like the monkey's-paw curse for this kind of legislation is to show several ads in a row, each allowing you to skip them after 5 seconds.

My favorite most annoying ad tactic is the trick slowing down progress bar. It starts off fast making it seem like it’s going to be, say, a ten-second ad so you decide to suffer through it… but progressively slows so you notice at like the 20 second mark you’re only 2/3 of the way through the progress bar, so probably less than halfway done. Murderous rage.

Mr. Beast on youtube is guilty of that. Matt Parker of Standup Maths fame did an in-depth look at how that works. Whoever came up with that type of progress bar must hate people in general.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc0OU1yJD-c

Not the only thing he's guilty of.

explain

It's all a scam.

A fantastic video from Matt, as usual.

Yet another data point on why nobody should be wasting a second watching Mr Beast content. Complete algorithmically optimized garbage.

I recall Mr Beast showing up in a Colin Furze video for a few minutes and Mr Beast was very clearly incapable of being a normal person. He was obviously out of place, being in full makeup and styled, and couldn't seem to be bothered to actually engage or express real interest in the subject. I think the guy has replaced his real persona with some manifestation of the YouTube algorithm. If he's not actively making money, he's just a shell.

That Colin Furze cameo was so weird.

From what I can tell, based on an excerpt of an interview with Colin, Mr Beast had a bunker-related video and visited Colin's bunker. As a viewer of Colin's channel and not Mr Beast, it seemed very strange, but makes more sense if there was a more substantial collaboration taking place in a different video stream.

They somehow got him doing a cameo on this upcoming Survivor season and it's going to be terrible.

Luckily the recommendation system does work to some extent. I'm glad I don't get to see any of that stuff on my youtube. Opening the front page in a private view is a scary place of hyper-optimised drama and attention seeking.

It's scary imagining people getting sucked into that :/

If you turn off you watch history in account settings, then youtube.com is just a passive-aggressive black screen telling you to turn it back on. It’s beautiful.

When you click over to subscriptions, you see only the stuff that you subscribed to, and nothing else.

Recommendations on a video are based on you subscriptions and the current video, and nothing else.

I could never go back.

Fully agreed.

The day youtube disables the "turn watch history off," is the day I'll stop using youtube.

I, too, could never go back.

This is basically what I do in NewPipe! Just a good ol' chronological list of my subscriptions, nothing else. Ahh if only everything could be this 2006...

> Opening the front page in a private view is a scary place of hyper-optimised drama and attention seeking.

Huh? Opening the front page of youtube in a private view (with no existing youtube history) shows you a completely blank page.

The blank page where it asks you to enter a search? This is a recent change I think. I want to say the last year or 2.

This must have changed at some point. It used to show popular videos in a private window.

You can still get a glimpse of what is out there by watching a specific video in a private window and looking at the recommendations.

It used to be very good, but now the personalized recommendations kind of suck. Seems like they enormously regressed, and basically do the 2009 move of just shoving the last type of video you watched in your face 37 times.

ahhh and i thought it was just me. cancelled my subscription and figured YT was just not caring anymore as a way to drag me back.

nah turns out it sucks for everyone.

Mr Beast not looking like a normal person next to Colin Furze is impressive.

That guy is so over the top that I cannot bear watching his videos, despite them theoretically being exactly up my alley. I like tinkering videos, I like his ideas, and the high-quality results, but I hate his mannerisms.

Every time see Mr Beast (I don't watch any of his stuff, just accidentally see promos on Prime sometimes), he reminds me of Homer Simpson's forced smile in the Simpsons' espiode "Re-Nedufication" [0].

[0]: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c8/84/8e/c8848e81afa88a42bd4d...

MrBeast is a hack, but its worth pointing out that all "progress bars" are bad design. You could make the same complaint against most of the progress bars in MsDOS. There was never a consistency in timing so you can never really use them to gauge how much time is left.

We’re not talking about a measure of computational progress here. We’re talking about visually representing how much time has elapsed out of a fixed duration. This is exactly where progress indicators shine, the total time for the thing to happen is perfectly specified in advance.

The difference between a lot of OS/app progress bars for IO (and sometimes CPU) operations and these timers, is that the total length of time for a lot of IO operations is often unknown with any accuracy so you have to use a heuristic to guess the current % done.

For instance: when reading/writing/both many files of differing sizes on traditional drives there is an amount of latency per file which is significant and not always predictable. Whether you base progress on total size or number of files or some more complicated calc based on both, it will be inaccurate in most cases, sometimes badly so. Even when copying a single large file on a shared drive, or just on a dedicated system with multiple tasks running, the progress is inherently a bit random, the same for any network transfer. Worse are many database requests: you don't get any progress often because there is no progress output until the query processing is complete, and the last byte of the result might arrive in the same fraction of a second the first does¹. The same for network requests, though IE (at least as early as v3) and early versions of Edge did outright lie² there to try make themselves look faster than the competition.

The progress bars in videos are a different beast (ahem): the total time is absolutely known, any inaccuracy is either a deliberate lie or gross incompetence.

--------

[1] I once worked on a system that kept logs of certain types of query so it could display a guess of how long things were going to take and a progress bar to go with it, but this was actually more irritating to the users than no progress display as it would sometime jump from a few % directly to done or sit at 99% for ages (in the end the overly complicated guessing method was replaced by a simple spinner).

[2] It would creep up, getting as far as 80%, before the first byte of response is received. This also confused users who thought that something was actually happening when the action was in fact stalled and just going to time-out.

> [1] I once worked on a system that kept logs of certain types of query so it could display a guess of how long things were going to take and a progress bar to go with it, but this was actually more irritating to the users than no progress display as it would sometime jump from a few % directly to done or sit at 99% for ages (in the end the overly complicated guessing method was replaced by a simple spinner).

In the Tiger era, the OS X start-up progress bar worked this way—it kept track of how long boot-ups would take, and then displayed its best guess based on that.

Many progress bars or other indicators lie, and the incentive is always to make it look good at the beginning, so that’s what we end up seeing most, whether it’s these ad ones (which thankfully I’ve never seen) or installers or especially something like Uber that always lies about how quickly someone is coming to make it appealing and then stretches it out. Even the thing in your car that tells you how much range you have left before refuelling (except it starts showing more than you actually have). I think in all cases it’s probably possible to give a more realistic estimate but it’s counter to the goals of whoever designed it.

> Whoever came up with that type of progress bar must hate people in general.

My first thought is that the person has a strong grasp of their profession and they love money. A hack like that has to have a really high value/effort ratio.

I was forced to do this as a developer of Flash websites in the early 00's.

I loved making custom progress bars really fun so people didn't mind watching the huge sites download.

I HATED when they had me mess with the time so that it got to 90% really fast and then spent AGES finishing the last 10%.

We all know the Microsoft progress bars reached 99% easily and had an infinite last % in the '90s. I'm still not convinced that was by accident.

Zeno’s progress bar.

If you watch him on Joe Rogan’s podcast he gives a full overview of how every single tiny detail down to colors, length of scene cuts, facial expressions, language, total length of videos, time of day for release, thumbnails, sound effects, music is extensively A/B tested to not only optimize for the algorithm but for hijacking people’s attention as well. That weird creepy face with the outline and uncanny smoothing aren’t by accident. Everything is intentional because he obsessively tests anything that might give him even the slightest edge in a sea of videos. The content itself barely matters.

This seems like innately hostile behaviour. Not to other video creators, but to his audience. Stripping as much as he can using data and mathematics is the kind of thing engineers do to pull more out of a machine, not something you do when you're creating informal communications to other humans.

With enough humans, it starts to look like a machine

Attention engineering is how the charts are topped. Media producers knew this decades before the social media, and perfected it by the late 90's. Avoiding extremely popular stuff is just common sense if you want any real authenticity.

Oh, but then you’re the much-maligned hipster.

I introduced myself to my now wife as an accidental hipster:

- I brewed my own kombucha (I have GI issues and I am so lactose intolerant that even kefir and yoghurt would give me a reaction)

- I ride a bicycle everywhere (I exercise daily and like to stay active, bicycle is often the fastest way around London)

- I buy expensive locally farmed produce (the quality is usually night and day vs other sources)

There were plenty of other signals by which I superficially seem like a hipster but my wife would attest I'm the opposite of an actual one.

In the words of my ever wise mother "keep the good bits, leave the rest"

What's the downside?

If the right type of mate uses those traits to find their type of mate there’s no downside.

I can't think of any. The upside is that people who think it's weird to not reflexively consume mass-market garbage identify themselves voluntarily, which makes it much easier to avoid them.

It’s basically drug dealing. Which is fine if you’re doing it for fun, but doing it to make money develops the most antisocial parts of a person

> when you're creating informal communications to other humans.

What he’s creating is fame and money for himself, the fact that it’s by doing videos is incidental. That’s why he also got into ghost kitchens, a game show full of corner cutting, and a theme park in Saudi Arabia open for under two months.

in other words his business model is fuck you pay me

at least 50 cent, who got into rap strictly for the money, made something fairly entertaining

At least 50 cent didn’t make TikTok style music with single polished part and junky rest of the song. Nowadays his goals looks almost innocent

>That weird creepy face with the outline and uncanny smoothing aren’t by accident.

I take your point, but I am still baffled why people find this appealing.

Novelty goes a long way, old enough YouTube video are optimized for their time period and end up looking stylized in their own ways.

Fashion swaps styles fast enough most people can’t afford full wardrobes before it changes, which by default keeps each style looking fresh.

Maybe not appealing but interesting. Distinct enough from the rest of the thumbnails on the page to trigger an impulsive tap or click.

Appealing isn’t the goal. Catching someone’s attention is the goal. (Nobody thinks the balloons on the cars at the car dealership look good but statistics prove that balloons sell cars.) Then, triggering someone’s curiosity, which is more where the copy comes in. (You can increase your click count with this one weird trick!)

You’re subject to it every bit as much as me or anybody else, but for whatever reason, we have different triggers than the Mr. Beast crowd. People that think they’re immune to it after having it pointed out to them are likely just less aware than most how their emotions are being manipulated by things they don’t even consciously perceive. Sales guys love people like that.

If you're aware of it and think you're susceptible then you can make it impossible to be influenced by it. Ie, You can disable all 'related videos'/feeds/home page on Youtube with Unhook, and sponsored segments with SponsorBlock. I'll probably never see a Youtube thumbnail for the rest of my life, throw in Adblock and your exposure is extremely limited.

> Sales guys love people like that.

You can also easily never speak to them. I know they exist, but as a consumer I can't think of anytime I've had a sales interaction with a salesperson. I understand that some people do, and might even actively seek a salesperson - but if I go to a physical store I already know what I want to buy before I get there and the only interaction I might have is to ask how to find the thing I want.

I know it's a common argument/appeal to authority that advertising must work, because companies are still doing it - but there are economists who think that it might not[0].

[0]: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...

> Ie, You can disable all 'related videos'/feeds/home page on Youtube with Unhook

This is not specific to YouTube. It’s billboards, product placement, etc etc etc.

> You can also easily never speak to them. I know they exist, but as a consumer I can't think of anytime I've had a sales interaction with a salesperson

Ok, so you make every major purchase online, probably don’t own a car, never purchased a home or lived in a city where its extremely difficult to rent without a realtor, never go out to restaurants or bars in the US where the service staff essentially works on commission in the form of gratuity… sure thing.

Thinking Sony would sell just as many products entirely based on word of mouth is absolutely absurd.

And as an aside, conversion measurement is der rigueur in digital advertising— for obvious reasons, companies don’t publish it. It is the basis for A/B testing which uses large sample sizes to see which presentation is more likely to make people do or not do something. It’s easier than ever to tell where someone was exposed to something and the click trail they took to end up on a purchase screen. I don’t, nor have I ever worked in digital marketing, but this information is extremely easy to find. Additionally, the Freakonomics guys are no strangers to vibing their way through topics they know nothing about and mistakenly assuming their brief thought experiments and unchallenged researchers have uncovered something useful. It’s not like they’re never right, but they’re no stranger to unforced errors in their analysis and you’d be wise to not rely on them as a source.

I somewhat suspect our difference here is cultural divide - I've never been to the US, but none of the things you mentioned have involved salespeople in my experience in Europe.

I live in a city, have a car (bought second hand), buy things in person, go to restaurants. We have no tipping or gratuity, apartments have a fairly standard application process and often it's a previous tenant showing you around because they want you to take over their lease, unless the apartment is empty.

It doesn't have to be appealing, it has to make you click.

Car crashes are not appealing, and yet it is something most people are tempted to look at. Many people think of dopamine as the pleasure hormone, not really, it is the motivation hormone, pleasure is one way to achieve that, but so is horror.

It makes evolutionary sense, if something horrible happens, you better pay attention, to get prepared so that it doesn't happen to you.

I don't know the details of the psychological response to Mr Beast thumbnails, and I think neither does My Beast himself, the analytics say it works and that the only thing that matters to him.

Guests smoking weed A/B tested too? :)

It seems we're living a Max Headroom episode.

How do you A/B test on YouTube?

Youtube lets you A/B test thumbnails as a creator and see response rates, for instance.

https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/393332200/you-can-...

posted 12/8/2025, 11:24:26 AM

So like a month ago. How did Beast A/B test before then?

Hasn't this been around for ages?

They give access to these features to their partners before general release, but this A/B feature has existed for quite some time now. I’ve seen various Patreon tech creators run those A/B tests and see them discuss them in their creator Discords.

A small number of creators have had testing tools provided by YouTube for years.

He also changes the thumbnails and titles of videos once published, sometimes up to dozen times in the first day.

He also has dozens of channels for different languages, so can test thumbnails and other tweaks with those.

There's also the tactic of having different ad behaviours during the same video. The first will be a 30s unskippable ad, the second will be a single skippable one, the third will be 3 ads, one of which you can skip, etc. It's ok on a mobile or if you're at your desk, but if you're watching from a distance it gets really annoying...

Kind of like a genius idea. Though there should be a special place in hell for app owners who want this in their app.

I'm fond of the ones with a fake close button, so tapping it just launches the ad's site. Instant uninstall and 1-star.

(Yes, I know it's mostly the ad's fault, but there's no practical way to punish them directly. So force apps to pick better-behaving networks.)

IME it's a real close button but the ad opens the thing when it closes, regardless of how it closes.

A common trick is that the first click on the X will go to the ad, but if you return and click the X again it will close, gaslighting you into thinking you just misclicked the first time.

Another trick that I’ve noticed on the Reddit app is that the tappable area is much larger for ads than normal posts. If you tap even near the ad it will visit the ad

Also making the hit area smaller than the close graphic itself is a popular one.

No, I mean there are ads with a "close button" in the corner, and then a few seconds later the real close button will appear and it'll weirdly overlap it. Because the first one was fake, just part of the image asset of the ad.

They're very very clearly click-fraud tricks, and most platforms will ban them if they're caught. But by clicking on the ad, it closes the ad, and there's no way to go back and report them, nor incentive for ad-viewers to do so. By design, IMO.

The whole industry runs on scams like this, there's no incentive for large platforms to proactively block any of them because they lead to money moving through them, where they can extract their rent. They only move against the most egregious, to keep fraud at the same barely-acceptable level as all the others.

> The whole industry runs on scams like this

Wasn’t there an article here a few days ago about Facebook specialising in hiding such malicious ads from testers and law enforcement to maximise gains?

Yep: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-created-playbook...

And here's the HN discussion about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46446838

Yes. Basically the internet version of the Volkswagen emissions scandal.

  if(testdetected == 1)
  ecm.lowemissions
  else
  lmao.fuckyouregulators

the difference is that the average rube and/or average lawmaker have some basic understanding of how cars work.

petrol goes in, toxic gas comes out, so make toxic gas less.

most of them have 0% understanding as to how data mining works or how online ads (and scams) function

It was about advertising for scams, not tracking. That's easier to understand than a car.

As a sometimes designer, i don’t think there’s any distinction between punishing the ad and the company. The company bought the ad, probably directed its creation, and decided what its criteria was for success. 1-star away as far as I’m concerned.

I think they mean they leave a 1 star review on the app that was displaying the ad, who probably didn't directly do any of that.

They did work with a bad ad network though so it's a valid enough reason to complain imo.

Yeah, good call, but I honestly have no problem with that 1-star either. They can’t say “well we just opened the garbage conduit and pointed it at your face… we didn’t actually MAKE the garbage.” Those ads are part of their app experience, now. They published it, so they’re ’re responsible for it. If it sucks I give it a sucky rating.

Yep. There's no other way to maybe-convince them to get a different ad provider, because they're the ones that chose it (probably because it paid the most).

I feel the same way about newsletters.

“Hey you bought socks that one time! Want more socks??” -> Unsubscribe.

“Hey it’s your weekly sock news! What’s new in socks!” -> But I unsubscribed! Haha no, you only unsubscribed from the “product releases” list. Not the “weekly news” list or our 10 other fabulous mailing lists!

-> Report all emails from this domain as spam. May god have mercy on your soul, cute socks.

This is exactly something I hate about the current state of things.

Interacting with a company/organization immediately turns into a lifelong "legitimate relationship" that supposedly entitles them to contact you forever and ever.

Recently bought a GE oven. It had a minor problem and had a few service appointments. Not a huge deal, life moves on.

Meanwhile, near immediately, they would love a review! They want Participation in OUR new oven.

It's overwhelming, and most frustrating is it seems 'communication' is rapidly become a one way st.

I "love" the ones that randomly decide to reactivate literally years after unsubscribing and never interacting with the business again. The other day I randomly got an email from a yoga studio I once bought my wife a gift card from. We moved and neither of us has been there since 2021. Why on earth am I suddenly getting spam 5 years later. I get similar messages from hotels many years later too. Sometimes ones I didn't even end up staying at, just browsed. You can sense the desperation through the monitor.

I now militantly use apple’s “hide my email” function for this reason, though it doesn’t really work when you “need” to give your email address in person (I have a “junk” email address that’s normally turned off on my devices for those people)

This is usually against ad network rules, so if you're willing to go out of your way a bit, you can screenshot those ads and report directly to the ad network

QA is something an employee should do, not me.

Difficulty is when you don't know what ad network it is, the app hides the ad network they use, and refuse to disclose who it is.

You got served an ad from "one of our partners". That's all you'll get to know, and there's no mechanism to even report the app's shitty behavior to Google or Apple (and they don't care when the app becomes too large, either).

Which is often not possible because clicking an ad generally closes the ad. And there's no incentive for users to report, by design IMO.

They could have a separate ad-reporting UI in every ad-running app (so you can report stuff later), and they could reward valid reports by skipping all ads on their network for a month or something, but doing that would reduce fraud, and that means reducing their profit. So none of them do it.

I'd say they probably need an oversight committee with teeth, to strongly punish every single violation (so the networks develop functional defenses), but they'll probably just VW-emissions-fraud their way around it.

I'm not sure that is mostly the ad's fault. Hitting a target on a touchscreen is hard to do. This seems like it's the phone's fault first to me.

(If you're using a mouse, forget what I said. But I haven't run into an ad where the close button didn't close it... if you were able to click the close button.)

On iOS I have seen ads with very small close buttons, so clearly intended to cause people to miss-click. Buttons should be 44x44 pixels, it’s recommended in the human interface guidelines [0].

——

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

You mean like this:

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...

Reminds me of Setup.exe

As a full mea culpa, I once implemented this years ago for an open-source project (non-ad-related) that could have an unpredictable number of steps with unpredictable timing. We went with an algorithm that would add a % of the remaining progress on each status tick, so, while it would inevitably decelerate, at least users would know that the processing wasn't just frozen.

It was a compromise that let us focus our limited attention on the things our project could uniquely do, without needing to refactor or do fast-and-slow-passes to provide subtask-count estimates to the UI. I'd make those same choices again, in that context. But in an ad context, it's inexcusable.

I've done something similar with a progress bar back in the early days. The task needed to do 10 things, so when each one completed the bar would move 10%. So the bar indicated completion in terms of things that needed to be done but not really in terms of time. It was quick and dirty and we had higher priorities but someone insisted on a "progress bar" so that was the easiest thing.

That’s perfectly acceptable, in particular if you also display “step x of 10”, so the user knows the bar doesn’t indicate time.

If the only purpose is to show progress and you don’t known the total number of steps in advance, it’s better to show information about the current step and/or substep. Otherwise when your processing actually freezes, the UI would still happily show an advancing progress bar. That’s worse than even just showing a spinner animation or similar.

If it froze and ceased emitting ticks, it wouldn't advance any more - but the larger point is well taken!

The Windows file copying progress bar prepared me for that one. I don't trust progress bars anymore.

Uber (and many other apps probably) do a similar thing. A completely deceptive progress bar that's basically an animation that's AB tested for lowest perceived wait, rather than being an actual progress bar in any sense of the word!

Everything is trying to scam you nowadays jfc

The positive version of this is clocks in escape rooms. You set the countdown timer to be slightly faster for the first 45 minutes and slightly slower for the last 10, so that people get more of a taste of time pressure towards the end and a higher chance of a "photo finish" which makes for a great fun story.

I have fallen asleep watching youtube many times. I swear i have woken up in the middle of 20+ minute ads. I thought it was a news article about china when it was an ad. Who knows when the skip button appeared. The few times i have seen these, it has always been a literal fake news show about china.

I've seen these advertisements too, also only when my phone had been playing unattended for some time.

I have a (unsupported, unsubstantiated) theory that YT detects phones of "sleepers" and pushes more profitable content with the understanding it won't be skipped.

I've got a few spare phones, maybe I'll run an experiment.

With YT, it might be an account-specific metric. Ie: flagged as a frequent sleeper. This would not surprise me, since they track just about every other metric possible against your account.

You can have multiple YT accounts on a single gmail acct, but I don't think that'll fool them. They know where you initially logged in from. So you will likely need multiple gmail accounts to do this kind of experiment.

Good shout.

They don't have SIMs, they'll be connected to a VPN router, and I'll create new Gmail accounts for each device, from each device.

I don't think they specifically target people who tend to go to sleep. But, having worked in the ad engineering, I can imagine they do know how often specific users skip ads and target ads based on that property.

I'm not sure why it would specifically be targeting "sleepers"... there are a lot of reasons why someone might not skip ads... people who are sleeping are probably the least valuable of them.

It could just as well be something super valuable -- like an unattended kiosk device playing youtube to a crowd of people.

Regarding the kiosk, I wholly expect that an unattended device with YT on auto play will ratchet up the length/frequency of ads as long as they're never skipped.

Someone who falls asleep watching YouTube will skip ads, unless they're asleep.

The idea is that if YT can infer that someone is asleep (location, no movement, no sound, low light, night) that they can show the longest, most skip-inducing ads that they've got since they know they won't be skipped.

The difference between the kiosk and the sleeper is that if the sleeper gets a 20 minute ad at 2pm while they're eating lunch, they'll skip it. YT is incentivized to show the most profitable ad that someone won't skip.

The value in identifying sleepers isnt showing a long ad, it's showing a long ad with the certainty that it won't be skipped.

Sure, but why would I, as an entity buying advertising space, pay the same amount when YouTube is just going to try to show them to people who are asleep, that can't see the ads, and thus would have no effect anyway?

Your question boils down to "If I was buying a product from a company, and they made it worse, why would I pay the same price for it?"

Because YouTube has a functional monopoly on online video advertising in a huge number of markets.

Enshitification is not just for YouTube's viewers and creators.

They also do this with kid’s content on YT but they make it look like a show basically. Might not happen on YT Kids, I basically never use either, but the few times we pulled up YT proper I’ve seen it happen. Get a few videos deep and they slip them in

> I have fallen asleep watching youtube many times.

Interesting new opportunity for YouTube here. Detect your usage patterns and near bed time show you increasingly boring content until you fall asleep, then fill your head with subliminal messages in these long ads.

Why would they help you sleep and take a gamble on subliminal anything working when they can just do it when you're awake?

I'm just spitballing sci-fi here, but maybe subliminal ads work better and their metric asston of computational models have told them so.

I suspect that they are already doing that (or something like it) as I've seen certain content appear at specific times/days.

One of the smarter product decisions they made was to tweak the algorithm to show different types of content based on time (and device). If it’s past 9:30pm and it’s the bedroom tv it suggests vastly different stuff than 6:30am on the living room tv. And for good reason! I’m not watching some slow “adventures through the milky way at light speed” video when I’m waking up!

It’s very smart about that stuff!

I'm a heavy YouTube watcher (My rewind said I watched 4500 different channels last year) and agree too. The content I get recommended is different day vs night. It's also device dependent (even when logged into same account) - my TV and phone definitely have a slightly different algo.

I fall asleep to YT sometimes watching speed runs when I have a hard time sleeping. When I wake up it is mostly running live streams of religious chants going in a loop. Hindu, muslim, orthodox christian. Or some strange genre of a Japanese anime girl making sounds.

Shortly before I started paying for YouTube, I remember seeing one of those ultra-long ads. The ad seemed interesting, so at first I didn't want to skip it. As soon as I saw that it was a looooong ad I got into the habit of checking the length of an ad before I even considered if it's worth watching.

Now I just pay for Youtube. I'm a lot happier that way.

Time is money. Ten minutes of daily YouTube ads adds up to 5 hours a month. Premium costs $14, roughly an hour's work at minimum wage. Trade one hour of labor for four hours of free time. That's 48 hours back each year for $168. It's a no brainer. Even if your wage is half of 14 dollars, you would still gain 24 hours back and it would still be worth it.

or install ublock origin and keep your money and the time!

while depriving google of revenue AND costing them money

win, win, win and WIN

Also decreasing the likelihood of content that you like watching gets made? The creator is being paid from that ad revenue too.

Or maybe they will move to a platform that respects them. Gotta start somewhere.

They're on YouTube because it's the platform that gives them the greatest chance of success. What other popular video platforms do you know that give you 55% of the ad revenue?

if my viewing actively cost the video creators money from me watching I'd probably feel guilty and stop

but this isn't the case, I'm completely cost neutral to them

but it does directly cost Google money... and I'm perfectly fine with that

I'm not making a moral judgement here. I'm talking about sending a signal that this type of content is valuable to make, leading to more content of that type being made.

I watch YouTube on many devices through the app. At the time, I was using YouTube music.

I've seen bands release music in those long ads, a complete movie, a 2 hour podcast, and tons of the fake news stuff. I think for some its a unique way to advertise and get exposure, others is just YT farming adtime.

I can tell you how the ad companies will implement this. For Rewarded ads (the longest ones, that are at least 30 seconds, and sometimes as high as 60 seconds), they'll move to that succession model, but the succession will take you at least 30 seconds. Oh you skipped an ad after 5 seconds? No worries, here's another ad. You watched the first ad for the full 30 seconds? No more ads for you.

It'll probably be a win for them.

If it's a win they would do it already, no? There's no law against it, is there.

I've worked for two companies that did mobile ads, and one other that did web ads.

The web ad company was hampered by poor engineering and management that had big glory projects that were poorly conceived or too ambitious; they no longer exist.

The first mobile ad company was constrained by ethics and prioritized a better experience over earning that last fraction of a percent (though most people on the outside would disagree on principle).

The second mobile ad company had a decent API designer early, and managed to capture a specific role in advertising. That role gave them access to data that ended up being wildly useful for purposes other than it's original intention, and they've done well based on that. But they are completely mired in in-fighting, executives who only bother to come in and be seen for quarterly results, and they don't do *anything* unless someone else does it first. They don't have a functional legal department and engineers are afraid that their head will be on the block if something goes wrong, and everyone is afraid of killing the golden goose.

So no, I suspect it hasn't happened because almost nobody thought of it, and the people that did are too afraid to be a trailblazer.

And we've already seen the precursors for it. Chaining multiple short ads together to add enough value to be worth it for an in-game reward is the beginning of it. It's not a very far leap.

Some "news" sites are so annoying about their ads, I just close the tab and google for someone else's version of the story. I block sites that show up in my news feed often but display more nag than content.

I'm sure in their mind, they don't care about me leaving. Apparently more than enough people put up with it to keep the site viable.

lite.cnn.com is the best lightweight news site I know of, though it is still CNN and probably more US-focused.

There is also https://text.npr.org

impressive... let's see the page source

I discovered that the samsung good lock sound assistant lets you mute all sound from specific apps and allow specific apps to never have their sound be interrupted. So it mute games and have audiobook players to always play audio and this lets me listen to audiobooks while playing games and never have the adds interrupt audio.

You likely turned off any privacy invading feature and didn’t let the app track across apps.

The fact you are getting irrelevant ads is a good thing that indicates that is probably working.

What about the ones that automatically open the Play Store to the app they're advertising after the ad? I would've thought it's against Play Store ToS to manipulate view count, but clearly Google has a conflict of interest.

I have a turn-based game that I play with remote family and after I play my turn, I swipe the app off (force close) so I don't have to see the ads. It used to be that I could just switch away to skip the ads but they must have gotten wise to that because one day it stopped working.

I know plenty of folks here make lots of money off it, but ad tech is straight up malware. I got lucky and found uBlock Origin many years ago so I did not get slowly boiled in worsening ad tech. I can't believe what people put up with just to not pay a few dollars for software they use daily. Not to even mention that the worst part of it all is ad tech has ruined the internet beyond repair.

Because a few dollars here and there very quickly adds up, especially for people in poorer countries. It's also much harder to get people to spend money online. I bet if you could physically buy the suffrage for $1-5 people would be far more likely to pay for it.

You missed one of the worst: mandatory interactive ones.

My wife is a sucker for these horribly generic flashy F2P puzzle-ish games. There are these ads that pop up every N action or something; some of these look like a mini-game and are actually an ad for another of those F2P games, and you have to play the mini-game that showcases some dumb simple mechanic of the game it advertises for a little bit before you can dismiss the ad.

Some come complete with two trivially easy levels ONLY 20% OF PLAYERS CAN PASS SOLVE THIS that glorify you OMG YOU HAVE SUCH HIGH IQ then one impossible that taunts you into installing the game.

The predatory dark patterns are so obvious they should be trialed to oblivion but no apparently this kind of abuse is legal.

whoa -- I've never run into these. I've seen interactive puzzle ads, but the "X" to close always pops up in 20-30 seconds.

I noticed an interesting hybrid – you get an interactive ad, if you interact with it, complete the level, engage with the ad etc. you get the close button immediately, if you idle you have to wait ~30 seconds. Feels very deplorable to me.

Google's AdMob has been doing these. Often it's something simple like completing a puzzle. I hate that I prefer these ads because it shortens the time until I get back to my game.

I don't think I'm especially stupid and I try very hard not to interact with ads more then I have to, but I have often found it impossible to escape those ads without ending up being delivered to the app store page.

Maybe I didn't notice the X in some part of the display or whatever, but even if by making a concerted effort to not do it, you still "convert", their click though stats must be crazy.

Some of these ads are annoying, almost all of the them are dumb, but if you think they're abusive, I don't think you know what the word abuse means.

abuse

noun

/əˈbyo͞os/

1. the improper use of something.

the word is ab-use and it means to misuse

If you don't think lying/tricking/manipulating people is abusive, then you might want to reflect on that.

You don't have to play it. You can but you don't have to. The skip or close button will appear after a set amount of time (like in any video ad). It feels like you need to play or you'll be stuck but you won't.

My absolute favorite is the smaller “picture in picture ad” that gives you a way to immediately dismiss it with a “X” that looks like microfiche - the cynic in me assumes that this is so the average user will fat-finger it by mistake making it look like a conversion.

This is why instead of specific legislation that winds up being a cat-and-mouse game with companies, the practice of creating specialized agencies with a general charter and delegating the specifics to them is often employed.

But it's also why this administration is dismantling those agencies as fast as it can -- without them the legislature will always be hopelessly behind on proper regulation.

"This administration" being the US, I assume. Note that the article is about Vietnam.

The funny thing is that any company that has their ad displayed to me like this makes me just hate them.

So what? People hate lots of companies but still they give them their money.

If are using Android, it's easy to block these ads with apps like Netguard or even PCAPDroid

Then can use the game without annoyance of ads

As it happens, the data collection, surveillance and ad serving strategies of the mobile OS vendors and their unpaid "app developer" independent contractors are still subservient to application firewalls and/or user-controlled DNS

This could change one day, it's within the control of the mobile OS vendors, but I have been waiting over 15 years and it still hasn't

In a lot of these games you need the 'coins' you get from watching the ads to progress.

I uninstall all games with any ad usage.

The latest was "I Love Hue". It let me play 10 levels (nice) and then put ads in. If they had just asked for $1 before showing the first ad I might have paid but as soon as I saw the ads I just uninstalled.

Note: IMO "I Love Hue" is a $1 game. I'm happy to pay $$ for bigger games and often do though on Switch/Steam, less on mobile.

My wife played one of those unscrew games which showed lots of ads in between runs. I convinced her to buy the ad-free package for $5, so she doesn’t have to endure those ads.

While the game indeed was ad-free after that, there was no progress possible anymore as everything suddenly cost 3x the virtual coins than before. Basically forcing you to shell out even more money to buy their stupid coins.

We’ve refunded the IAP and that was that.

i don't understand why more tech savvy people don't use on-device DNS blocking like with RethinkDNS

they appeared over and over again, making me hate them with a flaming passion

I wonder how much risk there is to brands due to this sort of thing? I tend to feel the same way; are we just uncommon?

The only place I see ads is Amazon Prime Video (b/c I'm still irked they changed the deal and added ads). I've come to hate those companies whose ads I see over and over and over again and I've resolved to never buy anything from them. I even used one of their products regularly and switched to a competitor due to their ads.

Can't measure it thus does not matter

(It absolutely matters imo)

what's sad is that it's not the company who is causing you to see that ad fill, few companies want you to be spammed back to back with the same ad. it's the low ad fill rate on the platform or target for you meaning the company is one of the few ads in the pool. I look at it as they're trying to support the type of content you watch but not many people are. or trying to sell to you specifically.

early on in streaming there'd be so little fill you'd be getting mad at say blizzard for spamming ads in a games related place but they were the only one buying ads and supporting those streams. it's not blizzards fault taht the rest of the advertisers didn't trust that channel and.

A particularly egregious offender is Kalshi ads. They regularly play for a minute, sometimes up to two minutes before they can be closed.

I would not be surprised if the incentives are in place for ad networks to push for longer ads and for advertisers to create longer ads.

> It seems like the monkey's-paw curse for this kind of legislation is to show several ads in a row, each allowing you to skip them after 5 seconds.

As is often the case I think that means the restrictions should just get even more strict, e.g., "no ad may ever be longer than X seconds and no app may ever show more than Y seconds of total ads within any 24-hour period". Then add some extra clause like "any attempt to circumvent or subvert these rules is punishable by fines up to 10x the company's gross annual revenue, plus asset forfeiture and prison for executives". People at companies should be deathly afraid of ever accidentally crossing the line into abusive behavior.

I'm OK with a unobtrusive banner ad. I hate forced ads that get in the way of my flow (whether it's gaming or reading or work). I hate forced ads that can't be skipped.

I understand the reason for these (they often have an IAP that will remove ads, so the more annoying the ads the more likely folks will be tempted to buy it). But doesn't make it ok. I usually just leave a one star review and uninstall.

Some time ago, Google AdMob started using a new format ads - two videos, one immediately after another, unskippable for the first 60s, sometimes more. You know how they called them? "High-engagement ads". On some level, it's hilarious.

There's also the tactic where the layout of the page/app reflows after a second or two, changing where the ads are. It drives me up the wall. Go to tap on a button, SURPRISE, an ad popped in where the button used to be 10ms before you touched the screen and now you're forced into some company's site whether you wanted to see it or not.

This is my biggest frustration with ads. It will surely cause fake statistics for ad campaigns too: 99% of time when I click ad, it is by mistake.

And just so we're attacking the problem from both sides: the dark pattern on the advertisers side is the inability to easily opt out of in-app ads when advertising on Google's display network. For the reasons you listed, in-app ads generate an incredible amount of low quality clicks, yet Google makes it very hard to exclude yourself from that ad inventory.

The only way I've found to do it so far is to manually exclude yourself from every individual app category. IIRC there are over a hundred categories and you need to manually go through and select every category to exclude your ads from mobile apps.

> It seems like the monkey's-paw curse for this kind of legislation is to show several ads in a row, each allowing you to skip them after 5 seconds.

We should just ban all online ads then. I honestly think we would be better off. Yes, some things that used to be completely free would start costing a little bit, but I don't think we would lose much of value, really. And there would still be lots of different ways that consumers could discover goods and services if we didn't have online ads, it would just be via directories where consumers could go and search for products instead of consumers being bombarded with information noise all the time.

The freemium ad-revenue model is a local maximum which results in a whole lot of shittiness.

My most favorite annoying thing about ads is the 'x' close button. They make it very small almost impossible to be perfect. I end up clicking the ads 50% of the times. Been running PiHole at home network for almost 8yrs happily. The ads come into play only when I am traveling.

For people with iPhones I recommend an "Apple Arcade" subscription, especially if you have kids. All games included in Arcade are ad free. They have a big enough collection.

My favorite mobile game ad was for Jeep, which was 3 seconds of the word JEEP on a black background. My wife and I laugh about it, but we remember it. It was actually really effective in that regard.

My second favorite was for some pirate game, but the ads were basically the setup for an adult movie, with tons of hammy overacting. I thought they were so funny, I was really sad when they stopped.

I've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads. The incentive to create services (especially in social media) that strive to addict their users feels toxic to society. Often, it feels uncertain whether these services are providing actual value, and I suspect that whether a user would pay for a service in lieu of watching ads is incidentally a good barometer for whether real value is present.

Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's fun to think about sometimes.

The world would definitely be better without ads. All ads are poisonous. All of them first convince you that you and your life as it is is not good enough, and that in order to be happy again you need to spend money to buy a $product.

And the worst part is, from a societal point of view - it doesnt matter if $companyA wins over $companyB, if the reason they won is that there was more Geico ads than Liberty ads etc.

We allow every space to be overrun with these things, wasting our time and infecting our brains and in the end its zero-sum for the companies and negative-sum for us. No value anywhere is created.

The bigger problem is those fake "realistic robot dog" ads, and all the other ai-faked products.

Why YT and Google in general would want to be associated with such scammery, I do not know.

>Why YT and Google in general would want

They want the numbers to always go up. Scam ads pay just like non-scam ads.

Hence why companies have to be forced not to be assholes with legislation.

They get paid per ad. Whether the product actually works is not their problem, unless they get a lawsuit. IIRC Facebook did lose a lawsuit over scam ads, but continued doing the process it was sued for, because it's so profitable, and just added a check so those ads don't get shown to regulators.

As much as I hate ads, I don’t know that it’s so simple.

There are products that do solve legitimate problems people have. Maybe there is less of that now, but in this past this was very true, and advertising helped make people aware that solutions to their problems have been developed. The first washing machine, for example.

The problem comes when the advertisement manufacturers problems that didn’t previously exist.

If a product is really that good than people will legit recommend it. It's not a problem at all.

Depends on the niche, really. I despise ads, but I can also admit to having learned about products from them that I have subsequently purchased and been pleased with.

Sometimes the ad lets me know about an entire type of product that I didn't know existed but found very useful, and I probably didn't even by the actual brand that was advertised.

If you consider the general concept of "letting people know what products are available for purchase", I think it's hard to disagree that it's a reasonable thing to do. That doesn't excuse the manner in which it is done today, of course, but that core functionality is not fundamentally evil.

There are still tests and reviews and content where people can show products without being paid by the people producing these products.

Even without being paid, unless someone is advertising the product somewhere the reviewer won't know it exists to review. And if the reviewer is being sent free product or solicited directly by the producer, that's still advertising. It may be more trustworthy if the reviewer is strict about not letting the producer have editorial control, but you better believe that the company is sending out free products to reviewers because that gets the product in front of eye-balls just like any other ad. The cost of the free review product is the price of the ad.

It does also happen that people get stuff to review and have to send it back of course.

Sure, but that’s still not free. The company is spending time, money and resources on soliciting the reviews, sending units out, receiving units back and then scrapping or selling those units as refurbs/open box. They’re not spending that money unless they think it’s going to drive sales / awareness. It’s still advertising.

So the company that can afford to send the most stuff to the most reviewers win?

> unless someone is advertising the product somewhere the reviewer won't know it exists

Why? If I need something I search for available options and find them e.g. on the producers web presence. Then I buy one or more and review them.

Advertising isn't the general concept of letting people know what products are available for purchase. It's more specifically doing this for money and showing it to people who don't want to see it. One might quibble about exactly what the word "advertising" encompasses, but that description covers the bad stuff pretty well, whatever name you want to give it.

I'd boil it down to: if you added a "don't show this" option, would anyone use it?

A catalog that comes in the mail because you requested it is not advertising, since you requested it. Products mentioned on the front page of this site aren't advertising, because they're organic, and it's part of what I'm here for. Classified ads, despite the name, don't really qualify since they're in a separate section that nobody reads unless they're specifically seeking out those ads.

A useful product doesn't have "don't show this" buttons because it would be completely pointless. I seek it out because I want it. I don't get upset at the company that made my office chair foisting it on me, because they didn't. I ordered the chair and got what I wanted.

But ad companies don't resist "skip" buttons because they think they're pointless because everyone loves their products. They resist "skip" buttons because they know people don't want to see their shit. Their entire business model is based around forcing people to see things they don't want to see, but might accept as part of a package deal for seeing the stuff they do want to see.

That is the stuff that should be completely destroyed.

> and showing it to people who don't want to see it.

So, do superbowl ads not count as ads because a non-negligible portion of the viewership wants to see them? Or are you saying that there needs to be a non-negligible fraction of the viewers who don’t want to see it for it to be an ad?

There's a spectrum. Movie trailers are closer to the "not ads" portion of the spectrum, although when shown in theaters they are much more ad-like than when made available online.

There are probably a decent number of football fans who would use a "skip ads" button if they had one for the Super Bowl, so they're still some way toward the "ads" end of the spectrum. But they're certainly less objectionable than most TV ads.

In the end it doesn't really matter. That's under 0.1% of TV viewing and it's a unique situation. Yes edge cases exist, edge cases always exist, but that's a very tiny one.

If a definition can be changed in a way that makes it both simpler and removes an edge case, I think that is often (but not always) a sign that the change may be a good one.

(Though, that doesn’t imply that the best available definition won’t have any edge cases like this.)

I think it works better to define whether or not something is advertising based on, rather than whether the viewer wants to see it, instead by whether those putting the media where it is intend for viewing it to be (as far as they can make it) a requirement for something else.

Though, I’m not sure that even that should be considered a requirement. It seems to me like the things businesses paid money to get put on the million dollar website, should count as “ads”. I don’t see why we should define “ads” to refer exclusively to objectionable ads.

Definitions aren't that important. What's important is figuring out what contributes to society and what ends up just looting our attention.

A good (but not perfect) guideline is that voluntary transactions are beneficial to both parties because otherwise they wouldn't participate, and transactions where one party doesn't actively agree to it are often bad because the other party has no incentive to make it otherwise.

That's why I focused on whether the viewer actually wants it. If I seek it out, then it's useful or at least entertaining. If I don't, then it's probably a net negative for me.

I agree that that the criteria you gave is probably more relevant for the issue at hand, sure.

And, while definitions may not be super important (as you say), and while it is often fine to redefine a word within some context, I do think the definition I gave is probably closer to how people usually use the word “advertisement”.

My inclination is to stick on an adjective though, and refer to, say, “unwanted ads”, rather than say that the ads in a classified section “aren’t ads”.

I haven't really, most of the products I've bought after advertising were low quality.

I do have some very high quality products that were recommended to me through friends. Like one local lady that makes really quality outfits. She doesn't advertise at all because she's already overwhelmed with orders as she's so good.

How does the first person find the product to recommend it, though? There has to be SOMEONE who tries the product without being recommended by a previous customer.

I wonder if there's a middle ground, where you only have statement based, textual ads. Amusing ourselves to Death (great book btw), discusses how until the 19th century, ads were basically just information dense textual statements. The invention of slogans and jingles was the start of the slow downfall in ads.

I interned at an ad agency once, and I really enjoy creative advertising, but frankly there's just way too much advertising in this world.

I just wanted to second recommend Amusing Ourselves to Death. A very good and short read that I find continually relevant applying the same ideas to social media.

Damn! I have been reading about Amusing Ourselves to Death on here since weeks and I assumed it was a new book from a contemporary author! I'll get it now, thanks for being the one who finally got me to :)

> until the 19th century, ads were basically just information dense textual statements.

I'm curious how does this account for "town criers" and the like? And there seems to be quite a few examples of less "information dense textual statement" in some of the articles on Wikipedia about advertising [1] [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_card

I'm not an expert, but looking at those articles, most of the illustrated and colour designs seem to have become popular in the 19th century, though I do see a few illstrated examples from the 18th century as well.

This is what a fucking store is for. They have catalogs. You could ask for one. If they think people will want something they will try to sell it and will tell you about it if you go looking.

I see this pro-ads argument all the time and it’s so obviously-stupid that I’m truly baffled. Is this the kind of lie ad folks tell themselves so they can sleep at night?

There are also ads for services. I used to be a photographer, and without my little Facebook/Instagram ads people would have had to largely rely on word of mouth, meaning the more established photographers would absolutely dominate my little rural market even when their photography was worse.

Also, I'm not sure we want a world where only the largest corporations get to sell things. That's what would happen if people could only find things through stores and catalogs, especially pre-internet.

If I go looking for a directory of [service, in my area] that’s hardly an ad! If those include, say, reviews and pricing info, great! Yes, please!

I definitely don’t want that directory to be skewed with ads in favor of those with the most money, or who have decided to burn the most of their limited resources on ads instead of improving their services, lowering their prices, or hell, just taking more profit. The ads were the biggest problem with the good ol’ yellow pages.

Even in the phone books of old, you had ads as part of the directories... Businesses paid for those listings... Even today's equivalent, yelp, etc. are trying to sell add-on services to the businesses and can harm your businss if you don't pay up for the features.

Right, and in this new ad-free world, those things works not be allowed, and all businesses would be on a level playing field, with none privileged over the others simply because they have a larger advertising budget.

I own ten thousand businesses, all of whom employ me as a contractor. All businesses being on a level playing field puts me at quite an advantage!

If people are using their advertising budget unethically, you should expect them to find new unethical ways to use their advertising budget once you've eliminated the existing ones. Rather than playing whack-a-mole, take a step back, and see if you can fundamentally change the rules of the game. Why is advertising bad? What do you want to happen? Fixing the "how" too firmly, too soon, is an effective way to produce bad policy, no matter how good your intentions.

There's no such thing as a level playing field... you think EVERY brand can fit on store shelves for discovery?

This is entirely a human construct, we can absolutely make it a level playing field if we collectively choose so.

What a sad comment.

Until you try to grapple with real world problems like limited shelf space, limited directory space, how the ads (ahem sorry, directory entries) should be sorted, how to deal with setting boundaries around local directories, etc.

Good thing there is no fundamental law of the universe forcing merchants to stock every single good ever invented.

Without advertising (or marketing of some kind), how do you propose for any new product to EVER reach a store shelf.

You convince the store owner in person, this was kinda the case throughout all of humanity until very recently.

It's not society's problem to ensure corporations are able to take prime real estate by abusing their customers.

They can meet with every shop owner and argue why their products should be sold, although if you ask me I bet the shop owner knows exactly what their customers want so once again where is the benefit for society here? That some greedy people aren't able to make a buck abusing human psychology?

Once again, what is the benefit for society here?

But that's marketing/advertising/sales... as would be printing catalogs that the seller pays for.

You can make it more level, but in any system constrained by the physical world, you can never make it completely level.

Ever notice that there used to be a lot of businesses with names like "A+ Heating and Cooling" or "AAA Chimney Sweeps"? That was because being at the top of the phone book's alphabetical listing was more likely to get you business since a lot of people would open to a section, start at the top and start calling.

There's only so much shelf space to go around, eventually decisions will be made about who can put their products on a given shelf.

Any large business with the ability to produce multiple different products will inherently have the advantage of getting more shelf space assuming you want to display all products.

But even assuming you just wanted your shelf space to be a bunch of "per company" catalogs, businesses with more money to spend on glossier catalogs, or brighter inks, or more variations so thicker catalogs will have an advantage.

Then there's names and numbers. Hooked on Phonics gets a leg up on every other competing reading program because they got the phone number that is 1-800-ABC-DEFG, no one else can have that number. The lawyer who gets 1-800-555-5555 (or other similarly easy to remember number) has a leg up on anyone with a random number out of the phone company's inventory.

But I'm curious, what would this perfectly level field you envision look like? How would these sorts of problems be solved?

Your definition of ad is too narrow then, because those are all different types of ads. A store advertising its goods or even having billboard ads saying the store is at such and such street is, well, an ad.

Directories aren’t ads. The crucial feature would be that nobody would have to pay to get listed, or only a small nominal fee that anyone can afford. Like in a phonebook.

Paying for placement is what makes an ad. And that’s what would have to be prohibited.

> The crucial feature would be that nobody would have to pay to get listed, or only a small nominal fee that anyone can afford

You see the contradiction.

You’re essentially saying no bad ads, only good ads, without defunding the difference. (Anyone can afford a Google or Meta ad in the way they could a White Pages listing.)

I see no contradiction. Google or Meta ads are not a catalog. They are imposed on people who didn’t decide to browse a catalog, and also you can’t browse all Google/Meta ads as a catalog. A catalog listing products or businesses doesn’t constitute ads, just as a phonebook doesn’t.

I'd interpret this as a proposal for two new laws:

1. No non-invited display of paid messaging, period. If you go to a directory and ask for a list of people who paid to be part of that directory, it can show it. If you play a game, watch a movie, take the bus, or search a non-paid directory of sites they simply cannot show you things they were paid to show you. I think I'd call this making attention-theft a crime.

2. No payment for priority placement in paid directories. A paid directory has to charge the same (small, nominal) fee to everyone involved.

> No non-invited display of paid messaging, period. If you go to a directory and ask for a list of people who paid to be part of that directory, it can show it

How would you distinguish someone asking for the directory versus asking for something else with said directory (which are totally not ads, pinky promise) displayed alongside?

> I'd call this making attention-theft a crime

Someone standing up to make a political speech in a public square is now a criminal?

> A paid directory has to charge the same (small, nominal) fee to everyone involved

This is just ads with a uniform, "small, nominal" fee. Uniformity is objectively measurable. Smallness and nominalness is not. Presumably you mean these directories have to be published at cost?

> How would you distinguish someone asking for the directory versus asking for something else with said directory (which are totally not ads, pinky promise) displayed alongside?

You making sending the directory with something else unconditionally illegal, you either get the directory or the something else, not both at once. This is also necessary for the second part where you require everything in the directory paid the same amount.

> Someone standing up to make a political speech in a public square is now a criminal?

Only if they were paid to do so.

> This is just ads with a uniform, "small, nominal" fee. Uniformity is objectively measurable. Smallness and nominalness is not. Presumably you mean these directories have to be published at cost?

Personally I think uniform is more important than either small or nominal. It means that the person creating the directory can't be bribed to direct your attention to certain parts of the directory - i.e. steal it. Rather it's your choice to get the directory in the first place and pay attention to it, and everything inside it is at an equal playing level. I don't really care if it's at cost or if making directories is a profit making venture.

I'm not entirely sure what the original proposers intent was with the "small and nominal" part though. They might have wanted something more like "at cost".

Fixed fee highly favors big players. Not even sure why you want fixed fee. Either remove fee at all or charge higher for bigger players or charge based on sale rather than listing.

By the same I mean equal non-discriminatory pricing - not necessarily "fixed" rather than "by sale" or "by view" or what have you but that if it's "by view" then it's "x cents per view" with the same x everyone and if it's "3% of referred sale revenue" it's that for everyone.

The purpose being that because every item in any paid directory has paid the directory the same, the directory has no (monetary, at least) incentive to direct your attention towards sub-optimal listings. As an attempt at forcing the directory to sell itself as a useful directory of services, rather than as an object which sells its users attention to the highest bidder.

> Anyone can afford a Google or Meta ad in the way they could a White Pages listing.

If I go buy a Google or Meta ad with the same negligible budget, I can get my product shown to 50 people and then the money runs out.

That's completely different from getting onto a phonebook-like list where everyone that visits can see my company's offer.

I think they’ve made the difference pretty clear?

Rather than coverage being spend based, it’s a low, static price to be listed in the directory, with near zero extra differentiation other than what you choose to put in your little square/rectangle.

What does "defunding the difference" mean? layer8 and phantasmish absolutely said what the difference was.

companies have to pay to get their products on shelve in many grocery stores

Who is maintaining and paying for this directory?

Those who are interested in knowing what services exist.

It's absolutely wild to me that people can have experienced any amount of the Internet and not think "word of mouth" will absolutely wholly suffice to fill the role of informing people about products. Of course many, many people would create and maintain all kinds of lists and review all kinds of products without being paid to. We know this would happen because it has, and it does, even with the noise of advertising around. The early Web was mostly this, outside the academic stuff and, I guess, porn & media piracy. Without ads clogging everything up, it might even be possible to find these folks' websites!

The early web very quickly gave rise to curated directories of information and stopped working on word of mouth. Yahoo was a directory before it was a "search engine". AOL was a curated walled garden. Web rings were a thing, great for playful discovery, terrible for finding a specific thing. Heck for that matter, web ring banners are arguably just interactive "banners ads".

Word of mouth also requires a high degree of trust in the person spreading the word. Otherwise you get things like youtube "review" channels that are just paid reviews. Or the reddit bot farms where suddenly everyone in a given part of the web is suddenly dropping references to their new Bachelor Chow™ recipes. You can't even trust the news. We all know about submarine ads, but even without that, you can't ever be sure if you're hearing about some new thing on the news because it's really the best/popular, or because they just happen to know a lot of the reporters.

> The early web very quickly gave rise to curated directories of information and stopped working on word of mouth.

Weren't those better before ads got involved?

> Web rings were a thing

Aren't those literally word of mouth?

> Otherwise you get things like youtube "review" channels that are just paid reviews.

That would be illegal under the laws we are discussing, presumably.

> Weren't those better before ads got involved?

The directories? Ads were part of those pretty early given that they were modeled on real world directories like the Yellow Pages in the first place. Here's a webarchive of yahoo from 1996[1]. Note the big broken banner at the top with the link text "Click here for the Net Radio Promotion". AOL was pretty much always full of ads, and don't forget the old AOL "keyword" searches which were ads by another name.

> Aren't those literally word of mouth?

Sure, and they were pretty lousy at helping you find information, which is why people stopped using them in preference to search engines, even though search engines had ads. Heck one of the selling points of Google originally was that their ads would actually be relevant to you and the things you were searching for.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/19961022175643/http://www10.yaho...

They won't. Notice that Angies list doesn't operate on the "customer pays for the list" model. That's because any directory service that depends on the searcher paying suffers from the problem that once you've found what you're looking for, you have no reason to keep paying for the directory. If I need a lawn guy, I only need to find one, and then I have their number. Why am I going to keep paying the "Lawn Guy Directory" $5 a month after I found someone?

And if you're going to charge on a per-query basis, I note that Kagi isn't nearly as well funded or well known as Google, and that's with them offering an "unlimited" tier. And a per-query model disincentivizes me from using the service in the first place. The more digging I do, the more it costs me, so the more likely I am to take the first result I get back.

Even the most classic "direct to the people who are most interested" advertising model where the consumer pays money for the ads (magazine ads) still is almost entirely subsidized by the advertisers, not the consumer.

And who puts together this magic directory, without pay?

If I need a photographer, I'm going to go and search for one. If no one is allowed to advertise to me, then both the small and large players in the space are on an even playing field. Your photography website or Facebook page will be just as searchable or indexable as before, as will business directory sites that can help people find services they need, along with reviews and testimonials.

Banning advertising could actually make it easier for new entrants.

Capitalism always hides behind the petty business owner/store owner/craftsman. Then the haute bourgeoisie takes the bulk of the profits.

Maybe every advanced social system has a propensity towards totalitarianism. Similar criticisms can easily be foisted on feudalism, mercantilism, socialism, anarchism, etc. I think in Western Liberal Capitalism there's still space for a middle class. More, it appears the peculiar features of this system have enabled it to unlock tremendous social vigor and provide for the People historic material wealth. Perhaps what's missing in this system isn't material...

I’m at a loss as to what these abstract to the heavens responses even mean to reply to. What I commented on was the propaganda tactics of capitalism. The topic in itself wasn’t even about the merits of it (but see the last sentence). What you get in response though are these chin-stroking platitudes about but maybe all social systems have their faults, and ah but look at how full and bountiful my fridge is because of this social system.

Cadre, I can't help you. If the guy says meta advertising works for him, I'd take his word for it.

Nobody is immune to propaganda.

Back then you'd have physical bulletin boards where you could either freely pin your handwritten note/"ad" onto or you'd have someone do it for you. Still technically an ad though.

It's the big players who have the most money for ads, buy up all billboards, internet and TV ads, etc. A small shop can't afford to do that. If ads were completely banned (in all forms including the bulletin boards) then everyone would have to rely on the word of mouth not just small businesses.

I also think that fields like photography are just highly competitive regardless of ads so it's then mostly a networking game.

Brands pay stores for shelf space. How would you stop that in practice?

Impossible to solve I’m sure. Probably lower priority than stopping them from putting lead in bread and selling cocaine snake-oil elixirs, or forcing them to list basic nutritional information on food packaging. Alas, we lack the tools to make businesses do or not do things.

By making it illegal? Brands can still compete on price and quality.

Grocery stores are a low margin business. If you make selling shelf space illegal, they lose that revenue and will have to raise food prices to stay in business. This isn’t a good outcome. I also question if the shelves would even changes much. They will probably prioritize their high margin products, which doesn’t sound any better.

Where does the money to pay for shelf space come from if not the money we pay for food?

In theory, sure. In practice, the food makers aren’t going to lower their prices to the stores, they will just stop paying the shelf fees.

What’s the legal way to arrange things on a shelf?

So instead of buying ad space we can now buy catalog space and reinvent the wheel.

The principle would be that companies aren’t allow to buy placement. It would be like a phonebook.

Yes, instead they register 1 million businesses that will all be listed in the phonebook.

That would require regulation, as a catalog maker isn’t going to turn down what is effectively free money. This also doesn’t translate well to a physical store with more constraints on space.

I recently got a catalog where everything was on pretty even footing. There was the occasional photo with someone wearing stuff, but it was a smattering of random brands, big and small. Nothing in it looked paid for. It was a catalog of stuff made in the US. The meat of the catalog was text that listed 1 item in a category per brand, when the brand may have had hundreds. A brand with literally one product was indistinguishable from a major brand. I actually found this quite frustrating as a potential buyer. If I was interested in a category I had to manually go to every single website to see what they actually had and if it was something I was interested in. There was no way to cut through the noise, other than my own past experience with companies that had some brand recognition (from advertising elsewhere).

How do you sort the directory? Alphabetical can be gamed with names like A1 Locksmith. Chronological favors incumbents or spammers depending on direction.

Which company is on page 1?

There are no successful economies without ads.

Ads are a necessary evil for effective market discovery. They should be heavily regulated but you can't effectively operate a market economy without one.

You're right, but I think this just highlights the issue with market economies.

There is this capitalist lie that money is a stand-in for "value provided to society". So, when you provide value, society gives you money, and you can use this money to ask society for value back.

Which sounds great. And truly, I do believe that people should have to contribute to society if they expect society to support them, but the problem with this lie is that, despite how capitalists make it sound, the market was not designed with this ideal in mind, instead we have imposed it onto the market after-the-fact in order to justify why the market is good and worth keeping around.

But the real truth is that money does not reward the person who contributes the most value, it simply rewards the person who makes the most money. Money is not "value", money is power. And the system rewards profit no matter how it's acquired.

This means that you can provide a good service that people want, but you still need to advertise and compete in order to be rewarded for your contribution.

It also means that you can do something valuable, like cleaning up all the trash off of a beach, but that doesn't mean that the market will reward you for your contribution.

And it also means that if you have a thing and you want to make profit selling it, you can run a manipulative ad campaign that convinces people that they truly need it, and the market will reward you.

> instead we have imposed it onto the market after-the-fact in order to justify why the market is good and worth keeping around

Not sure about that, markets existed since forever and are still useful even without ads.

I don't think very many people in this thread actually mean markets when they say that. Sounds like they might mean corporate controlled markets? Otherwise the comments are gibberish. Markets are just a group of people exchanging time and resources. Wanting that to go away is... Bizarre and nonsensical.

Advertising exists in some form even in ancient barter economies. It is older than currency.

Alas, well-regulated market economies are the least-worst option we have.

Saying you want some sort of discovery mechanism is different than saying the current ad tech malware landscape is a "necessary evil." It certainly is not.

Not only did I not say that, but I also agree with you completely.

I understand what you mean, but I would modify this statement a bit:

There are no successful economies without information exchange. Discovery can happen without advertising -- if you consider that the main feature of ads is that it's unwanted information distribution.

There is not any real-world economy that has implemented that information exchange in the absence of activities that would be accurately described as advertising.

Even thousands of years ago in illiterate societies people would advertise their goods/services via verbal campaigns, drawn pictures, songs, etc.

There are no successful economies without blue paint, either. As far as I'm aware, there hasn't been enough testing to say much about the importance of ads.

And even if they're necessary at some level, what if the US had 90% less ads, etc.

> There are no successful economies without blue paint

I don't think that is true. The oldest known mass printed advertising is about 2000 years older than the oldest known blue pigment.

> As far as I'm aware, there hasn't been enough testing to say much about the importance of ads.

I think if you look at some early advertising (e.g. BCE), you'll see that most have a painfully obvious functional form of just simply announcing the existence of a product/service for the world to observe.

I mean even vaguely vaguely modern-style economy. And you know that's not the point. The point is there's a lot of things that are omnipresent but also not important to the economy.

> I think if you look at some early advertising (e.g. BCE), you'll see that most have a painfully obvious functional form of just simply announcing the existence of a product/service for the world to observe.

That doesn't tell us how important it is to have advertising.

And it doesn't tell us how important it is to have advertising anywhere near current levels.

All that can be regulated though. In many jurisdictions, it's forbidden for lawyers or pharmaceutical companies to advertise their products with it being regulated what counts as an advertisement and putting oneself into the phone book or putting a big sign with “Lawyer” on one's practice is allowed but putting oneself into a magazine or on television is not.

And it should be.

Isn’t the catalog an ad?

The issue is that anti-ad zealots won’t acknowledge that advertising is a spectrum. You can go full blown horrendous dystopia or enter into a commerce-free hermit kingdom where private property is banned and resources aren’t traded efficiently, with the end result being that everyone is poor because nobody trades anything with anyone.

A sign for your store that identifies you is technically an ad. A brand logo printed on your product is technically an ad. A positive review is basically an ad. What lengths are we going to go to ban ads?

Be honest: you’ve never bought a single useful thing that you found out about via an ad and ended up glad you saw an ad for?

That is important because the wealth of nations is often predicated on the populace being able to trade their labor.

For example, in recent years North Korea has developed their own Amazon-like delivery website for food and goods and has expanded intranet smartphone service because, obviously, fast communication and ease of transmitting a desire to buy or sell is helpful for growing an economy and keeping the nation from starving. Otherwise, why would they adopt an imperial capitalist concept like that?

Just because something lies on a spectrum where some actors are totally doing the right thing (and others, well...), doesn't mean we shouldn't take a conservative approach to regulating that thing. No-one can legally exceed 70mph in their fancy new ADAS car with tiny stopping distance, just in case someone tries to do so in their beat-up 1950's Dodge.

It's important to strike a healthy balance, even if it inconveniences some honest people (although we're talking about people who work in advertising...). I don't think you can claim we have a healthy balance currently.

ETA: catalogs are not ads in this context; people seek out catalogs when they want to find something, which already makes a huge difference

Yes, the store has a catalog. They want you to see the catalog, so they pay someone to tell you that the catalog exists.

Catalogs are ads.

I don’t think all ads are the same, and I feel like you are choosing to pretend the ads you don’t mind aren’t ads at all.

You say “that is what a store is for”… well, how would you even know a store exists to go check it out? In the physical world, you would walk by and see the store and be curious to check it out… well, what is a store front other than an ad for the store? Putting your name, product, and reasons you will want their product on the store front IS AN AD. You wouldn’t walk into a store front that was completely blank, with no information about what they are selling.

And even that simple advertising is impossible online. If I create a new online store, how will people ever know it exists? There is simply no answer that doesn’t in some way act as an ad. I would love to hear how you would let people know your store exists in a way that isn’t just an ad in another form.

So stores are just one form of ads then, let’s ban stores too while we’re at it.

> I see this pro-ads argument all the time and it’s so obviously-stupid that I’m truly baffled.

If you're truly baffled by a view that many people share, you're probably missing something.

How do you solve discoverability, especially of a new type of product or category? I invented this new gadget call "luminexel". People don't know what it is yet, because it's new. How do people find it in a catalog?

Or the thing I sell is fairly technical and needs more space for descriptions / photos to communicate what it is. Do I get more space in the catalog?

Ideally discoverability would be wholly solved by organic word-of-mouth recommendations. First from yourself as the only person who knows this product category exist then from the people who accepted your recommendation, had it solve their problem and finally saw fit to recommend it themselves.

I’ve yet to see a single product that isn’t related to domains existing products solve problems for. That is, I’m aware of any time in history a wholly new category emerged suddenly.

So your question seems like pure fantasy to me — like asking how we’ll slay dragons without ads. I don’t know, but I don’t think that’s a thing which actually needs doing, either.

New products within an existing category show up in catalogs, review articles, etc just fine without ads. As does your highly technical product, for which people in the relevant industry already know the information and/or are already used to narrowing their search to a few products and then requesting additional information.

Your pro-ad arguments seem to be solving problems that don’t actually exist.

> How do you solve discoverability, especially of a new type of product or category? I invented this new gadget call "luminexel". People don't know what it is yet, because it's new. How do people find it in a catalog?

You make a post on Hacker News titled “Show HN: I made this cool thing called Luminexel, check it out!” Some people will think it’s really cool and tell their friends about it. Eventually it will end up on some “curated list of awesome things” website.

> You make a post on Hacker News titled “Show HN: I made this cool thing called Luminexel, check it out!”

So, place an ad in other words.

It’s not an ad if you’re not paying someone to forcibly show it to other people.

So if I put up posters in my neighborhood for my PC fixing service, it's not considered ads, but if I pay someone else to put the same posters up, they're suddenly ads?

what if I payed a content marketing expert to craft my blog post and title in such a way that drew attention? Would that be paying for

My man that’s an ad

Many posts on HN are ads. We’ve just collectively decided that some of them are OK

Not everyone lives close to stores.

Not a counterpoint to the comment re: catalogs .. even less so in this modern age of ordering and shopping online.

I grew up 1,000 km+ from any significant stores and shopping - everything we wanted we got via browsing catalogs, building order lists, and either ordering in via road train or taking a few days off to travel > 2,000 km with car and double axle multi tonne capacity trailer.

Magazines, phone books, friends, stores. You know you could go to a store (or call them on the phone!) and talk to a person. "Hello, I am trying to find a thing to help me with X."

Turns out that products that work well tend to get remembered, and ones that don't get forgotten.

Magazines and phone books are often largely ad-supported. They largely wouldn't exist without some amount of advertising.

Mmmmmno?

Go to any bookstore and open practically any paid magazine. Count how many pages are ads. It's far from a small percentage. Some I've looked at recently were practically 1/3 to 1/2 ads. This isn't far from how things were decades ago.

Yellow pages (phone books) were essentially entirely advertising. They didn't just list businesses out of the goodness of their heart, they took listing fees. This is a form of advertising!

Call what store? How do I know a store even exists to call it? How do I find out the store’s name and phone number? How do I find out where the store is located?

You say products that work tend to get remembered, and sure, for existing products with a market you might be right… people would continue buying those things even with no advertising.

But how did the FIRST person who bought the product find out about it? Someone has to try it once before you can even know the product works. How would a new product enter the market?

> Call what store? How do I know a store even exists to call it? How do I find out the store’s name and phone number? How do I find out where the store is located?

Maps exist. Search engines exist. Have you been stuck in a cave the last 50 years?

I have never in my several decades of life seen and ad for anything and thought "I need to get that".

I remember having that experience as a kid - seeing an ad for Action Man™ during my Saturday morning cartoon block, and feeling that I need that toy right now. My dad then explained to me that these advertisements are carefully crafted to elicit this response from kids, and that I should always think critically about the messaging in ads.

Not even movie advertisements like trailers? Or job ads? Housing ads?

I've definitely investigated and eventually purchased things I first learned about through an advertisement.

Mind, usually that was from print ads in things like magazines/newspapers, the occasional direct mail ad like the old Fry's electronics mailer or movie trailers. Online ads are overwhelmingly ugly attention grabbers for things I have zero interest in or no time for when displayed.

It would be interesting to be able to define if an advertisement is still an advertisement in the sense the OP was referring if it is something sought out.

I myself usually choose to watch trailers for movies, look at job ads and housing ads when I actually want to watch a movie, change job or move house. What pisses me off is the 99% of ads in my life that are just blasted in front of me online and in public.

It's probably silly and the answer is just that they are, but they at least meet two different types of advert to me, personally.

I would partially agree with OP in that I can't believe any adverts I've ever seen have influence a purchase from me. I actually quite often blacklist brands and products for aggressively marketing to me.

I sincerely do not believe this. I suspect that you have a very specific definition of ad that is far narrower than I do, but I do not believe you never once saw a movie trailer and decided to go see the film, or saw a billboard or sign for a restaurant while out on vacation and decided to check it out. Or that you never went to the grocery store to pick up the steak that was on sale this week. Or that every single tech purchase you have ever made in your life was exclusively and solely on the word of mouth recommendation of your close friends, all of whom had previously purchased identical products with their own money.

Look I'm not saying you can't live a low ad lifestyle. I don't have cable or network TV and run ad-blockers on every device I own. And yet I can look around my home and see numerous products purchased at least in part due to an ad. The Retroid Pocket sitting on my table, the M series laptop sitting in front of me. The Sony TV across the room, the game consoles under it. Heck the dog at my feet was the one I adopted because I went to an adoption event being sponsored at a local business. Even when I'm seeking a specific product out and then seeking out information, I'm looking for reviews and a lot of those reviews are given sample/free product for the purposes of making their review. That's an ad. I might be able to place more trust in that review if the reviewer doesn't give the product manufacturer editorial control they way they'd have in a sponsorship, but you can be damn sure if sending free product to independent reviewers wasn't paying off in terms of higher sales, the manufacturer wouldn't be doing it.

If you waited for an ad to solve your "legitimate problem" you didn't have a problem to begin with imho

You might not know it is a problem and that it is solvable.

Yes but the amount of that happening is nowhere near enough to justify the ad-world we are living in.

Why would I care then? If people lived until now without it it can't be that big of a problem. Electricity, a car, a fridge, &c. solve legitimate problems. 99% of things being advertised today create the problem they solve and trick you into thinking you really need to solve this problem in your life

> If people lived until now without it it can't be that big of a problem

That’s a very weak argument that can justify anything. Why do you need electricity, a car, a fridge? There have been people living without these for thousands of years. Of course there are bad ads and useless products (probably 99% of them), but not all ads are useless.

No, there are very few markets in which all of the buyers have perfect information.

It is extremely common in the science/technology sector that buyers aren't looking for a solution to a problem they have because they are under the impression that a solution doesn't exist.

The archetypal business-school case study for this is the story of Viagra. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/03/27/viagra...

But it applies to most new technology in a less dramatic sense.

If the implication is that the ad industry helps to address the problem of buyers having imperfect information, that couldn't be more wrong.

The entire point of the ad industry is to muddy the waters and psychologically manipulate consumers. It's not even remotely interested in informing, it's interested in propagandizing.

Obviously a gigantic industry has more than a singular impact on society. I only mentioned the one impact above because that was specifically the topic of discussion.

There are also many reasons that the ad industry needs to be tightly regulated, of which your point is one.

> No, there are very few markets in which all of the buyers have perfect information.

This is solved by 5 minute of searches on the web in 99% of cases really. I never in my life bought something because I've seen an ad about it, meanwhile I solved countless of my problems by thinking about the issue and looking for a solution online or talking to people about it

Absolutely! But, you're missing the cognitive part of this. People don't search for things that they don't think exists.

Having a problem and having a solution to that problem are two different things.

I occasionally get the hiccups. When it happens, it’s a problem. There are many home remedies that exist, but nothing has ever actually worked. I was watching Shark Tank one day, which is basically a bunch of ads, and there was a guy selling the Hiccaway. Several years after seeing this, I decided to give it a shot. I’ve used it 2 or 3 times now and it’s instantly stopped my hiccups. I feel a little weird for a while afterward, but at least the hiccups stop.

This was a legitimate problem and I waited for an ad to solve my problem, because nothing else I tried worked, and I didn’t know this thing existed until I saw the ad. I’ve also never heard anyone talk about it outside of Shark Tank, so word of mouth clearly isn’t doing much either (at least in my circles). The topic of hiccups doesn’t come up that often. Everyone gets hiccups, but they aren’t out there actively looking for solutions. It’s just something that happens, and it sucks.

Man if hiccups are a "legitimate problem" then indeed we are fucked... let's pollute everything irl and on the web with ads to solve these "problems"... where do we draw the line ? Because it sounds like we'll have an infinite amount of problems and we certainly don't have an infinite amount of resources

btw you can also try looking for solutions on your own, like going to a doctor, searching online ? type "hiccups solution" online and hiccaway is on the front page.

Humans are wired to have problems. If all your basic problems are solved (shelter, food, etc), you will start inventing problems. This finding and solving of problems has led to all the development in human society, for better or worse.

It has been this finding and solving of problems that led to our standards for what solves a problem increasing as well, for better or worse again.

I think everyone has looked for hiccups solutions at some point in their life, found them not to work, and gave up. That’s why I think this is a decent example. Adults aren’t actively searching for hiccup solutions. They gave up long ago, and most of the time, it isn’t something they think about. But when they happen, they kind of suck. Depending on when they happen, like before a big presentation, they can also be a major problem. People tend to overlook it, because they know there isn’t a real cure.

I’m not arguing for more advertisements or hiccup commercials 24x7. But there is value to some way of creating awareness of new things that are actually useful. Most advertising is trying to manufacture problems or just keep a product you already know about in the front of your mind. This is probably 95% of advertising. My argument is for a way to surface that 5%.

The fix is actually fairly simple IMO, though will never be implemented. Make all ads passive, e.g. require people to explicitly ask to see them. For example, when I want to see what new video games are around, I go to review sites and forums. It's opt-in.

Making all ads only legal in bazar-like environments, banning all other forms of "forced" ad viewing, and also banning personalized ads completely, would go a very long way to fixing the issues. Hell, we can start with simply banning personalized ads, that alone would effectively destroy the surveillance economy by making it illegal to use that data for anything other than providing the service the customer purchases.

But you are buying into viewing ads when you use services that show you ads.

Also, ad bazaars sound great until you realize that every locality needs to have their own bazaar. Seeing ads for New York barbers is kind of useless when you're in Los Angeles. Now you have a million ad bazaars and that's the only advertisement allowed. A little bit of corruption and your ads outshine all your competitors in that locality and they go out of business, since signs are an ad too.

Also also non-personalized ads mean that the only things that can be advertised online are digital goods or things that are available globally. Basically, it will work for Amazon and AliExpress but that's about it. And adsls in Russian or Japanese or Korean or German or French or Swedish or Portuguese aren't going to be that useful for you, are they? Ads in English but for a product in another country might be even worse.

Word of mouth. It is okay for a system to be inefficient, especially when the tradeoff for efficiency is a poison pill (ad tech is definitely this).

Part of the issue may also be that to many companies rely on selling ads as their main source of revenue and there simply isn't enough money in "good ads" to fund all the services we've come to expect to be free.

There simply isn't enough ads for soft drinks, supermarkets or cars to reasonably fund the tech industry as it currently exists. Ad funded Facebook, perfectly fine, but that's not a $200B company, not without questionable ads for gambling, scams and shitty China plastic products.

Platforms should have higher standards, accept lower profit margins and charge users if needed, rather than resort to running ads for stuff we all now is garbage.

Historically, yes. People in their 70s might remember that time. But language has moved on. Advertising now means manipulation. The ad market is priced for that. The rare cases of someone wanting to use advertising channels to put out actual information now have to pay a premium.

Can you remember the last 3 times when ads showed you products that solved your problem? I cannot.

The closest experience I have had was with ads for new restaurants, of which two turned out good and one - not good. Also, twice last year, I saw trailers of new movies I wasn't aware of at the moment. However, I am sure I would later discover it via reviews or word of mouth.

And mind that it was not problem solving, just an entertainment suggestion. I can live comfortably without new restaurants, or I will eventually discover them via other channels.

Ads should be centralised state department and run through only approved and regulated bodies at regulated sites.

As much as I hate ads, if you don’t make yourself known to potential customers you’re very screwed

Most of the YT ads are AI rubbish. I can't imagine those fake "realistic puppy" ads generate any sales whatsoever. Same for the monocular that can zoom into a book title from a mountain range away. And nearly all the other YT and news feed ads one typically sees.

Frankly, they should be illegal. If a physical store did that in Canada, it certainly would be. I'm surprised Canada hasn't reacted to these overabundant fake-product ads.

Is there not always some sort "marketplace" where people see what's being offered one way or another?

I don't think we need ads for discovery, I see it more as a nefarious way to occupy space in people's conscious.

>Is there not always some sort "marketplace"

How exactly does that work for virtual products?

If they provide value, people will seek them out.

How? If you don't advertise, no one can see you.

Just one counter example: gh.de

Not really a counter example: gh.de is a pure advertising platform.

If I need something, I’ll find it.

How did people that had something to sell do it before advertising?

The problem again is greed. The organic way is too inefficient so advertising needs to come in and make people rich instead of letting the product do the convincing naturally, word of mouth and so on.

Advertising is as old as humanity itself. Asking what people did before advertising doesn't make sense.

Also, word-of-mouth advertising is, as the name suggests, a form of advertising.

Not that I ever use it but there are apparently services like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_Hunt people use to seek out new products.

But as sibling comment said, if it's really good, people will find it eventually.

Funny you mention Product Hunt because it's pay-to-play too, there was a whole controversy a decade ago exactly now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10739875

Catalogs - offline and on-line, commercial and government. Deprived of constant noise and overstimulation of advertising, people will actively seek such information out, whether because they have a problem to solve, or just out of curiosity. All we're talking about here is switching from current "push" model of advertising back to "pull" model.

Who here never browsed a product or company catalog they found, just because they were curious?

I can almost feel the calm just imagining the world you're describing.

That’s not a problem for the customers though. Capitalism twists our incentives toward prioritizing return on investment over quality of life. Especially now with the internet, I literally never need ads. I just search for the solution to the problem I’m having. No push needed (or wanted).

> I literally never need ads. I just search for the solution to the problem I’m having. No push needed (or wanted).

I want to agree with you, but you only think you're not seeing ads. Obviously, the SEO corruption has made everything you search for distorted by irresistible economic incentives of tilting the search results and search engine in favor of promoters.

Oh I agree. I don’t want or need to see ads, I currently do though.

Yes, and if you ban ads then you can expect a lot more underhand marketing as the companies peddling their goods will try and find another way to reach you.

How do you search? Google? That's typically part of marketing spend. It may not be pure ads as in I pay google, they display my ad. But it's still a company spending money to get their result to the top so you are more likely to see it.

Ads solve the discovery problem. Without ads, people still try to solve the discovery problem and try to get your attention. Are those methods still ads?

> Without ads, people still try to solve the discovery problem and try to get your attention. Are those methods still ads?

examples?

- Paying for product placement on store shelves and movies

- SEO optimization to get to the top of the search result page

- Paying influencers to use their product

- Paying people to post on forums about the product

- Sending / sponsoring reviewers

Adverts I specifically request are fine. Trailers for example -- I specifically go to youtube to find trailers.

Or I'll go to rightmove if I want to look at adverts for houses. I'm happy to spend both time and even money on seeking out new products.

But it seems that people have a parasitical relationship with adverts, they can't imagine a world where there aren't wall to wall adverts on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and written in the sky.

Adverts should be for my benefit, i.e. I can turn them on or off.

Even as a consumer I am legitimately happy that I’ve seen ads for some products.

Now sure, it probably happens about once a quarter, and for that I watched probably hundreds if not thousands of ads, so was it worth it, I don’t know, probably not.

As a consumer, I am fully willing to swallow the opportunity cost of blocking advertisements. I'm not afraid of having unspent money sitting around.

Obviously, if you could just delete the ads without changing anything else the world would be better, but that's not how it works.

Lots of businesses sustain themselves on ad revenue - would the world be a better place if we had no ads, but

- TV was twice the cost

- Google, YouTube, etc. (insert your favorite ad-supported website here) didn't exist or cost a monthly subscription

- All news was paywalled

- Any ad-supported website providing basic information (e.g. the weather) was paywalled or didn't exist

- etc etc

Given that companies often spend a significant fraction of their budgets on advertising, I wonder if some products would be cheaper if advertising was banned. Sure, maybe some ad-supported services would be paywalled, but it might end up being a wash in the end.

At the very very very least, every ad-supported service should be required to offer an option to pay and see no ads. I do pay for services I use regularly when they offer it as an option to avoid ads.

Companies spending money on advertising is just another way of acquiring customers. If they were unable to do that, they would need to resort to other, more costly ways of acquiring customers. I doubt that higher costs would result in lower prices for customers.

I actually think so, yes, the world would be better off with everything you listed happening.

When we used to pay for newspapers, the informational value of the news was a lot higher, news and news-like social media posts were not the primary tool to spread stupidity.

> When we used to pay for newspapers

Some newspapers were 50% advertising. You still had to pay for them.

Yes. I'm not even sure it's a question anymore. Yes it would be a better world.

Not even because of the first order consequences of the ads, but because since there are ads, we have an entire media ecosystem based on grabbing your attention.

So that TV displays series and movies meant for people with the attention span of a goldfish. This applies to Netflix and Hollywood by the way. All of it. Even music changes for radio, meaning more ads.

Google, Youtube, etc, along with news, along with social networks, depend on ragebait, being the first to spout whatever factoid, true or false, polarization of thought and basically a good chunk of what is very evidently wrong in today's society.

I trust we could support a weather app with donations. For the rest? If I could remove either ads or cancer from this world I would sit a long time thinking about the decision, but gut feeling? Ads. The actual cost of the ad industry is enormous and incalculable, not even mentioning the actual purposes ads serve.

As for the rest, I'm very much a fan of the Bill Hicks standup bit regarding the subject.

>The world would definitely be better without ads.

I don't have the proof but I'm guessing that this is provably wrong. Without advertising in some existance it would be nearly impossible to start a business which means everyone would be peasants farming for subsistence living. I think the problem is that the propose of ads has become divorced from product. The issue is poor regulation not the existence of ads.

Think about it, how as a small or competitive business owner would you get people to buy your soda vs coke/pepsi without advertising in some way? The issue is that coke/pepsi know they have a simple product so they blast ads not to sell their product but to adversarially drown out competitors before they can exist. Tons of advertising has counter agenda purposes like this rather than selling a product, its propaganda not advertisement. There are probably tons of unenforced laws already about this but IANAL.

Why would it be impossible to start a business? You would still be able to list your business in mediums where potential buyers willingly go and search for products and services. If anything, it would level the playing field, paying more for ads would not mean you getting your poorer services more visible buy paying more for ads.

Do you know the very concept of prices and price tags is one of the first advertisements?

The very concept of fair pricing is an advertisement. In nearly all of history the merchant would charge what they judged you could pay. but keep those noses up HN.....

Definitely the world wouldn’t be better without all ads, because that would be a clear violation of free speech.

However ads should be limited only to communication channels that are optional to engage in. As for example, an ad on YouTube, a private video platform, should be perfectly fine. That’s part of the product. On the other hand, ads on a highway, on the street, should not be allowed. I have not given permission for them to enter my personal mental space. I’m fine with shops advertising their presence, but not full fledged advertising on roads, streets, etc.

If free speech is you rolling up with a megaphone to yell promotional nonsense at me, then it's my free speech to vote for you to get banned I think.

That’s exactly my point. Free speech but only when the receiver has agreed to participate in that medium.

You guys did not read past the first sentence?

Free speech does not mean you get to yell at me. In the same way, banning ads where they are shown to users without their consent would not mean violation of free speech.

ads aren't free speech, but corrupted speech

Furiously seconded. Ads are just a tax that we pay both with our attention and then with our wallets. Every dollar that a company forks over to Google is a dollar they recoup by passing the costs on to you, for absolutely no benefit whatsoever to the product you're paying for. Destroy this heinous rent-seeking industry.

You are ignoring the value of discovering a good or service. Increasing the customer acquisition cost for a company to infinity doesn't make them lower their prices. It makes them go out of business because they have no customers.

People are really out here acting like we didn't have a functioning economy before we invited ad companies in to parasitize global commerce. I don't give a fuck if it means "less discoverability", if I could snap my fingers and make every ad company disappear tomorrow, the world would be a better place.

When did we have a functioning economy without ads? Was it the 1980's when some of the most classic children's shows were 30 minute commercials for toys? Was it the 1960s when Charles Schultz was lamenting the commercialization of Christmas in the Charlier Brown special? Maybe the 1910's when Uncle Sam famously wanted you to join the army? Was it the 1890's when Montgomery Ward and Sears were sending out mail order catalogs? Was it the 1860's when you could learn that "The Best Glass of Ale In the Globe" was available at Isabella Nesbitt's Inn[1]? Town criers and traveling medicine shows date back to at least the 1700's.

Less intrusive ads? Less frequent ads? Sure I can get behind that (though, I can turn off a TV, can't turn off the town crier). But ads have been a part of us since the first person with something to sell wanted to sell it.

[1]: https://bailiffgatecollections.co.uk/gallery-category/victor...

They said "ad companies" not the entire concept of ads.

What is an "ad company" though? If it's someone you pay to advertise your product for you, well that's something town criers often did for merchants so "ad companies" are at least that old.

I don't know exactly what definition they meant, but I'm confident that a crier doesn't count as an ad company.

Geez, if you think people don't like banner ads or billboards, you should see what they think of town criers.

Criers are expensive. And I'd say that mattress shop guy qualifies and he doesn't bother me that much.

I would happily take a deal that gets rid of all tv and video ads and replaces them with as many independent criers as companies are willing to pay.

I will note we effectively have that law already for political text spam. No robo-texting it has to come from a “real” person. Doesn’t seem to have changed the amount of text spam I get, they just all start with “This is Bob from People Against Things …”

You could probably hire a lot of “town criers” on fiver for the cost of a 30 second TV spot.

When I say I would accept town criers to get rid of those ads I mean literal town criers. Not people sending me mail, email, texts, or calls. People being kinda loud and/or holding up big signs in public places. They can offer me a flyer when I walk by, I suppose.

Sure I get it. I just don't think your annoyance level is going to go down that much. It wont take many sign twirlers on every corner, or people driving up and down your neighborhood at all hours of the day with a "ad truck" to be more annoying than the worst of youtube's advertising. Imagine if every fedex or ups truck and amazon van you see was also blaring a loud speaker advertising businesses. Door to door salesmen are less prevalent because other forms of advertising are cheaper, but if you can't do those other forms of advertising, door to door becomes economically competitive again. I'm pretty sure a "town criers only" world would be significantly more grating and annoying than you think. Imagine "liberty tax" sign holders during tax season, but all the businesses and all the time.

> people driving up and down your neighborhood at all hours of the day with a "ad truck"

I doubt that would be an efficient use of money, and that doesn't really seem like crier behavior.

And is that kind of noisemaking legal in most places?

If I need to specify the criers only use their own voice, then consider that specified.

> Imagine if every fedex or ups truck and amazon van you see was also blaring a loud speaker advertising businesses

Blocking that double use is part of why I tossed "independent" into my earlier post.

And door to door salesmen coming onto my property definitely don't count as criers.

> I doubt that would be an efficient use of money

It works for ice cream trucks, and when you ban all other forms of advertising, it's not like there's any more efficient places to spend that ad money.

> Blocking that double use is part of why I tossed "independent" into my earlier post.

So we'd just wind up with fleets of "independent contractors" doing deliveries for part of their income and advertising for the other part. It's not like a bunch of those vans and trucks aren't already contractors in the first place.

It is what enables global commerce.

>You are ignoring the value of discovering a good or service.

This has very little value to me. I'm buying my wife a new car next year and I won't be perusing adverts to find what to buy. If I did I would be thoroughly mislead as the adverts are full of aspirational bullshit.

Adverts encourage people to eat unhealthy food, take unneeded drugs, drink, smoke, buy more house than they need and replace perfectly functional consumer goods. They make everybody's life worse (apart from the advertisers).

Commerce won't stop without them. I've mostly eliminated them from my life but that hasn't stopped me from spending my money.

>All ads are poisonous

This is a silly and short-sighted blanket statement. People used to love getting catalogs, which are just big books full of ads. In the right context, people appreciate being informed of products that can help improve their lives.

Exactly. I hate seeing ads when I do not want to, and I love going out and buying a furniture catalogue. The difference should be obvious.

How are the ads that local grocers and restaurants mail to me telling me of sales or giving me coupons which let me get things I'd be buying anyway for less money poisonous?

If you were going to be buying it anyway why does it even matter what the price is? Why can't they just list it at the coupon price for everyone?

Let me clarify. When I said I'm going to buy it anyway I didn't necessarily mean at that time. There are many things that are in the "do not need to go out and buy it now but I do need to buy it in the near future" category.

I would normally get those at the store I normally buy that kind of thing when I'm there to get other things. E.g., most groceries come from the big Walmart Supercenter near my house. If I get a flyer in the mail from the Safeway that is on the other side of town, and see they have a good sale price on one of those things, I might stop by that Safeway when I'm in that part of town on other business and get it.

just get a list of shops and compare their prices instead of waiting for an ad popping up in front of you for each product you buy when you actually would prefer to watch something else?

The problem is not ads. The problem is SPAM.

There are plenty of legitimately well-intentioned ads that can connect someone who needs a good/service with someone that supplies it and everyone wins.

The problem is that we use a nearly totally free unregulated market where anyone can advertise anything anywhere.

edit: I'm not saying we should necessarily try to optimize for good ads over bad ads or even assuming that is possible. I would settle for just somehow reducing the total volume of ads to help make email, snail main, voice mail, and other methods of communication more usable.

Hard disagree, without any ads the only way to find out about new things is via word of mouth, which would make many valuable products never get off the ground. Ads done badly are poison but ads done well educate people about new things they can benefit from and drive the entire economy. I have had many experiences where I’ve seen an ad that I genuinely think is interesting and was enlightening to find.

> All ads are poisonous.

Yeah but the lethal dose is pretty high. 1 ad won’t kill you.

Unfortunately there can never be just 1 ad without regulation.

Advertisement also more or less puts a wrench in the theory of capitalistic competition in that companies would be incentivized to create the best product for the lowest price supposedly. They're now just incentivized to create the best ad campaign which costs money and does not improve the product in any way.

Also, the existence of crippleware, where companies actually invest resources into removing features from a product is interesting. It would be interesting if we were to live in a world were both advertisement and crippleware are forbidden. It's already forbidden in many jurisdictions for various public function professions such as medical services or legal services so it's not as though it couldn't be implemented.

I don't think that's impractical - isn't it exactly what YouTube Premium offers, ad free viewing for £12.99 a month.

I watch quite a lot of content on YouTube and really should sign up for Premium but I feel that the shockingly irrelevant ads I get presented with on YouTube are trying to drive me to sign for it - they're certainly not going to get me to buy anything!

YouTube has been increasing both the amount, frequency and length of ads in their video's for a long time now. They know people will keep using them anyway because of the network effect, and people who are really fed up with these ads will buy premium anyway. For them it's a win/win.

It's a decent deal.

Comes with YouTube Music for 15$.

I probably use YouTube more than any other website, for about 10 minutes my premium subscription had expired and u rushed to throw money at Google to turn it back on.

Musicians complain about low streaming payouts, but 30 years ago I'd pay $40 ( inflation adjusted) for 15 songs and only like 3 of them.

Now I can listen to 500 or 600 unique songs a month + music that would of had to be imported for that 15$.

If I actually like an artist I'll buy an album as a keepsake.

Don't pretend that its just YouTube forcing the ads on you. The creators can choose where ads go in their videos.

The "creators" are complicit, and are in fact directly responsible for the worst aspects of the platform. Especially with most popular and well-known ones, the content itself is typically a very long, insidious ad, which makes the platform-supplied ad breaks a breath of fresh air in comparison.

Yet, most content on YouTube these days are sponsored by the companies trying to sell you a crap.

And with 'Native ads' it's nearly impossible to have ad-free experience nowadays.

SponsorBlock works very well for skipping in-video ads.

>most content on YouTube these days are sponsored by the companies trying to sell you a crap.

Because YT doesn't pay shit to content creators, hence being part of creating this.

The people making the content need to make a living too, as much as ads suck.

At least on youtube premium it has a feature to "Skip commonly skipped section".

I think it would have been a better world without ads. There would be more competition which would improve products and thus outcome for customers.

Also most of the demand of goods is artificially created by ads, so there would be less production of crap and thus less resources wasted.

It would also mean a whole industry of people would do something else that is potentially not as detrimental to society.

The money spend on the digital marketing industry was estimated at 650 billion USD 2025. For comparison that is equivalent to the whole GDP of countries like Sweden or Israel.

While I agree that the world would be better without ads in their current form, we should think why are ads required and what are the benefits.

The main issue is how you discover a new product. The main benefit to society is/could be faster progress. The main downside to society could be unhappy people that consume crap.

I think smart people should think about alternative solutions, not just think "ads are the problem".

I personally have the exactly same issues as above when I look for example for open source libraries/programs for a task. There are popular ones, there are obscure ones, they are stable ones, etc. The search space is so big and complex that it is never easy.

My personal preference would be a network recommendation system. I would like to know what people I know (and in my extended network) are using and like - being it restaurants, clothes or open source software. I have 90% of friends (or friends of friends) satisfied with something - maybe I should try. Of course it is not a perfect system, but seems much better than what we currently have...

That's a great idea for a dystopian sci-fi story: you can opt out of ads, but your product choices are publicly broadcast instead.

Oh man this is a nice idea, I will try to add on somethings which I can think about from the top of my mind

To be really honest, even if things were publicly broadcasted, The amount of choices of products we make in each day would be huge.

So no random stranger would go and look for your product choices. What would matter are the close friends and family or perhaps when one becomes really famous?

Would the fundamental idea of anonymity go away from all internet? Like if someone posts a youtube video or even a yt comment, would I get to know what they ate for dinner?

Can ads still be blocked? If my product choice is an LLM lets say, would my prompts be choices as well that will get leaked with the conversation to everyone?

To be really honest, Govt.'s (snowden showed us) already can know about your product choices pretty good enough and the internet/infrastructure behind it is pretty centralized nowadays as well

Sure there are alternatives but how many people do you see using beyond the tri-fecta of cloud and how those choices come downstream to us consumers if services run there

I feel like this is gonna be a classic example of Hawthorne effect (Had to look the term for that) meaning that people will behave differently now that they are being observed.

Also do you know that its not any technical limitation which limits it but financial incentives.

There is no incentive to having your product choices be publicly broadcasted but for the services, there is an incentive of money if they show you ads and which they end up showing to ya.

If there was an financial incentive for the servers to create this choice itself of opting out / public broadcasts option, they probably would be reality.

> how you discover a new product

Buying magazines for trusted 3rd party reviews used to be way more common, far better experience than trying to sift through SEO slop these days.

> I personally have the exactly same issues as above when I look for example for open source libraries/programs for a task. There are popular ones, there are obscure ones, they are stable ones, etc. The search space is so big and complex that it is never easy.

And adverts don't help determine what the best tool for your problem is. They determine which product spent the most on adverts.

So yes, adverts do not help you with decision making at all.

> My personal preference would be a network recommendation system. I would like to know what people I know (and in my extended network) are using and like - being it restaurants, clothes or open source software. I have 90% of friends (or friends of friends) satisfied with something - maybe I should try. Of course it is not a perfect system, but seems much better than what we currently have...

I can think of a hacky solution where your friends can share their (trustpilot?) or alternative accounts username and then you can review what they are reviewing/what they are using etc.

The problem to me feels like nobody I know writes a trustpilot review unless its really bad or really good (I dont know too much about reviewing business)

I feel like someone must have built this though

Another part is how would you get your friends list? If its an open protocol like fediverse, this might have genuine value but you would still need to bootstrap your friends connecting you in fediverse and the whole process.

And oh, insta and other large big tech where your friends already are wont do this because they precisely make money from selling you to ads. It would be harmful to their literal core.

> My personal preference would be a network recommendation system.

Random question: do you have a personal site where you write about things you recommend? Because that's the solution IMO. And that's the network you're talking about: it's the web. You find enough people you trust and you see what they recommend. The issue is that in modern society 99% of the people consume and 1% are fucking influencers getting paid to promote crap.

I was thinking (theoretically) we should strive for a more efficient system that could include more people. There are plenty of simpler and less efficient to achieve the same goal.

For example I have for example a list of restaurants that I share with people that visit my city (plenty of tourist traps around), but it is cumbersome to manage/share. Does not feel like a solution.

I think it is largely a Marketer's fantasy that people get up in the morning with a goal of "discovering new products." I don't want to discover new products. I especially don't want to while I'm trying to do something else that I actually WANT to do. If I need a new product, I will deliberately go out and look for it. I don't need marketers doing drive-by product announcements while I'm just trying to live my life.

The question of "how do people spontaneously discover products" is invalid. It's just not something people want in their lives.

> The main issue is how you discover a new product.

We live in the information age.

How did you learn about your programming languages? Ads?

I learnt Basic, C++ in that order because at the time there were the only options (Basic because of a computer like Sinclair that only had basic, C++ because there was the only thing offered as a course at a computer club around).

Programming languages are easier to discover because they are a reasonable number (tens) you can asses, they are very important (if you are in the field), so you can invest a lot of time in choosing and following the trends.

I will not spend the same amount of time deciding about everything...

One thing that I prefer something like ads/reviews (and in fact works well enough in my case): cultural events in the city I live.

Ok, but do you agree that we should put ads in designated places (and out of sight, generally) where people can look them up whenever they find it convenient rather than the other way around where companies just shove them in your face at random times?

Open source software (mostly) don’t have ads, and that doesn’t seem to be a problem in practice. Good projects become known by word of mouth, people blogging about it, etc. If anything, it exemplifies that ads aren’t required.

> I think it would have been a better world without ads. There would be more competition which would improve products and thus outcome for customers.

How would people learn about various choices?

> How would people learn about various choices?

By going to a website where they can learn about various choices.

It could be similar to ads, but with higher truth value to it.

AND most importantly, the user would view the information when THEY want to see the information, not when the marketeer wants to shove it in their face.

> By going to a website where they can learn about various choices.

Who pays for the website? In the end, a world without ads gets very pricey very quickly.

Millions of ad haters would gladly pay for the website!

But seriously, you think there is no money in a website for showing ads?

who paid for product catalogues in the past? who gives free samples to journalists for testing?

It’s a well-established fact that my world would be much better without ads.

People won't pay a few bucks a month for YouTube. They won't pay to keep their favorite sites online. They won't pay for their news. Without ads, a lot of things wouldn't exist.

No I won't pay for premium because even if I pay for it I still get ads in the content itself.

Fix that and then I'll pay.

Until then I just block the ads and the sponsors.

YT makes it easy to skip embedded ads now. They mark places where people skip past and shortcut it so you don't need to watch them.

Sponsorblock exists as well.

Sponsorblock is great but only works in the browser. Most people view YT on other devices.

Revanced Youtube's app support sponsorblock as well.

Yes and Tubular and SmartTubeNext (Android TV!) and Grayjay too. Many options

Tubular is a clone of Newpipe by the way, newpipe's devs didn't want to allow the sponsorblock plugin so it had to be forked.

so you just dont think people making video content should make money in any way? if you hate ads that much dont watch any creators that have sponsored content. oh wait, the only way they can make videos that good is because they make money and are professionals. doh!

No, I think they shouldn't be double dipping. If I pay for premium I want no ads whatsoever. Not for the content creators to sneak some in anyway.

And no I don't tend to watch many with sponsor crap in them because they aren't actually very good (think the low-quality crap from LTT etc). The best channels (EEVBlog is one notable one) don't have sponsors at all because they're made for love.

What I am not doing is watching the sponsorship segments anyway. So yeah I use sponsorblock. And I use Ublock origin or revanced to remove the ads too because there's way too many now.

ok so you actually dont think they should be single dipping because you use ublock origin and sponsorblock?

No but if they weren't double dipping with the sponsors I'd pay for premium.

It's just that as it stands it makes no sense to do so. I still get ads so there's nothing in it for me. And if I use sponsorblock I might as well go the full way.

It's really on YouTube that they have let this situation be created. They should have stopped sponsor segments the moment they arrived.

I don't like ads either. Who does? I really don't mind unless they are hard-cut and aren't made by the creator themselves. What's your solution here? A new policy that prevents creators from doing sponsor spots? We all know what the result of that would be.

> A new policy that prevents creators from doing sponsor spots? We all know what the result of that would be.

Well or not show the sponsors to premium users. They could simply upload a separate premium version. Don't forget, these content creators are already getting a lot more money from YT when a premium user views their vids. So they're not entitled.

They can walk away but where would they go?? Besides, more and more people are using sponsorblock since it's become totally insane with these.

There are already numerous competitors to YouTube. Of course they have collectively like 1% marketshare, but that's because it's basically impossible to compete against YouTube right now. But if YouTube died, these sites would rapidly become fully competent replacements - all they're missing is the users.

How would they pay for the infrastructure required to support all those users? I can't stand ads, but when I was younger, no way would I have paid for YT Premium (though to be fair, ads are much, much worse now).

Let me pay usage based, with full transparency in hosting, infra, and energy costs. Like a utility.

Subscription services are like hungry hungry hippos, you give them $10 a month and next year they want $100.

I honestly think if everyone starts paying, it will only make them remove the free tier quicker. I think society is better with youtube free, even if ads are annoying.

Bandwidth transit prices, peering, and other data for for ISPs and the like tend to be highly classified (lol), but it's very close to $0. Take Steam for instance. They are responsible for a significant chunk of all internet traffic and transfer data in the exabytes. Recently their revenue/profit data was leaked from a court filing and their total annual costs, including labor/infrastructure/assets/etc, was something like $800 million. [1]

Enabling on site money transfers (as YouTube does) and taking a small cut from each transfer (far less than YouTube's lol level 30% cut) would probably be getting close to enough to cover your costs, especially if you made it a more ingrained/gamey aspect of the system - e.g. give big tippers some sort of swag in comments or whatever, stuff like that. It's not going to be enough to buy too many [more] islands for Sergey and Larry, but such is the price we must all pay.

[1] - https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valves-reported-prof...

>these sites would rapidly become fully competent replacements

they wouldn't. For two reasons. Without the capital (that to a large extent comes from ads) nobody could run the herculean infrastructure and software behemoth that is Youtube. Maintaining that infrastructure costs money, a lot. Youtube is responsible for 15% of global internet traffic, it's hard to overstate how much capital and human expertise is required to run that operation. It's like saying we'll replace Walmart with my mom&pop shop, we'll figure the supply chain details out later

Secondly content creation has two sides, there aren't just users but also producers and it's the latter who comes first. Youtube is successful because it actually pays its creators, again in large part through ads.

Any potential competitor would have to charge significantly higher fees than most users are willing to pay to run both the business and fund content creators. No Youtube competitor has any economic model at all on how to fund the people who are supposed to entertain the audience.

And that's extremely harmful. In theory we have democracies. In practice, if you have the capital, you get to decide for what products and services the world's resources are used for.

A peer comment said something similar to which I responded to here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46522719

However, you brought up the distinction between consumers and producers, but I'd argue that such a thing doesn't inherently exist. YouTube was thriving before Google when it mostly just a site for people to share videos on. Here [1] is one of e.g. Veritasium's oldest videos. What it lacks in flare and production quality, it makes up for in content and authenticity.

You don't need 'creators', you simply need people. And I think a general theme among many of the most successful 'creators', is that they weren't really in it for the money. They simply enjoyed sharing videos with people. Like do you think Veritasium in that video could even begin to imagine what his 'channel' would become?

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2g1H5wPmUE

This makes me wonder how the system makes any money. Presumably the same people that won't pay a few bucks a month for YouTube won't buy things from ads either. So how do the ad companies make any money on them?

They will actually. Youtube premium has had explosive growth after YT started pushing more ads and blocking ad blockers. People pay for streaming services quite regularly. And youtube has one of the strongest platforms/content bases to sell a subscription.

Youtube is more like modern Cable TV though, there's huge value there for the price. I like visiting Twitter and Reddit occasionally for news, I've been using both since they launched, but I wouldn't pay for either of those. I could easily make the choice to cut that out of my life.

Maybe, but on the otherside, ads make available a huge amount of media and services to people who would otherwise be unable to afford it. Like, I suspect a non-trivial percentage of people wouldn't have email if it weren't for gmail and other free w/ads services.

Most internet services are very low cost to offer for any company that has some infrastructure setup already. So for instance 'back in the day', before Google hoovered up everybody's email, what would typically happen is you would get an email address with your ISP.

But that also bound you to your ISP in a way, because switching ISPs meant switching emails. It is better to have then separated.

ISPs could be required by law to allow the porting of email addresses, just like it happens with mobile phone numbers.

How would that work? The email address generally has the ISP's domain name in it.

Similar as it happens for phone numbers, where there is internal routing of phone calls between providers. A customer can be at a different provider with their phone number than the provider who “owns” the containing block of numbers.

> So for instance 'back in the day', before Google hoovered up everybody's email, what would typically happen is you would get an email address with your ISP.

Well, no, not even close. You'd get an email address from your ISP. You still do; nothing about that has changed.

Among the things that haven't changed is that you were more likely to use a free online email service, most notably Hotmail or Yahoo.

Maybe. Or maybe we could fund those services from all the money we'd save without advertising.

Assuming a zero sum economy, which is a pretty poor assumption.

We aren’t even mining asteroids near Earth’s orbit. Space colonization is a ketamine dream. There’s no extraterrestrial economy. Earth is all we have. One pie.

Because we are spending our resources on stupid shit like tiktok virals funded by ads.

A pie that includes sand which is now turned into GPUs that can solve complex problems described in English. Value that was unlocked fairly recently from “one pie”.

Tell me, is the deployment of that famous talking sand at all resource-constrained?

Of course: Everything is resource-constrained. That’s why it’s called economics.

The question was whether the “pie”—total economic output—has a meaningful upper bound on growth because we only have a whole planet full of resources to exploit as our minds and capabilities allow.

The answer is no, and history bears that out.

If a company is willing to spend $5 to force you to watch an advert, then they are expecting more than $5 from you in return.

Sure, but a lot of that is 1) just influencing what type or brand you get of products your going to buy anyways, and 2) only an average, presumably wealthier consumers are "subsidizing" poorer ones, since they have more spending to be influenced.

> ads make available a huge amount of media and services to people who would otherwise be unable to afford it.

They don't. Follow the money: why do ads power free services? The advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the scenario where they run the ad as compared to where they don't. The viewer must be spending more money in response to having seen it

If the viewer doesn't have the money to pay the first party fair and straight (say, a video website), they also don't have money to splurge on that fancy vacuum cleaner in addition to the website and advertisement broker getting paid, no matter how many ads you throw at them

Ads are useful for honest products, like if I were to start a company and believe that I've made a vacuum cleaner that's genuinely better (more or better cleaning at a lower or equal cost) but nobody knows about it yet. However, I don't see the point in money redirection schemes where affluent people inefficiently pay for public services (if they're indistinguishable and the company shows ads to both, thereby funding the poor people's usage). Let's do that through taxes please

>The advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the scenario where they run the ad as compared to where they don't

They don’t necessarily make more money from every user though.

I addressed that above. If that's the point, the people with disposable income who view the ad subsidise the ad broker and the website as a hidden charge on a product which they probably didn't need. It doesn't get less efficient than that. I'd rather that people living under the poverty threshold get subsidised directly

Advertisers/brokers will also do everything to optimise to whom the ad is being shown to not waste they money. Poor people can't turn it into arbitrary cash, they can just waste time on video sites and freemium games while they barely (or don't) have enough money to make ends meet

I guess I am very much in the "let's pay fair and square" corner, both for websites/services and for taxes/subsidies where needed. I don't see it working reliably or efficiently any other way in the long run

"They don't. Follow the money: why do ads power free services? The advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the scenario where they run the ad as compared to where they don't. The viewer must be spending more money in response to having seen it"

The first part is true, the second part pretty obviously isn't. Advertizers expect to net $ from ad buys, but most advertising isn't trying to increase a consumers total spending, its trying to drive that spending towards the companies products.

To give the most obvious example, the largest category of advertising is for food and beverage products. But no one thinks that if those ads all suddenly disappeared, people would stop buying food.

That makes sense, though you're still paying for the service or product that includes advertising as part of buying the third party product such as a beverage. If you can't afford the service or product then you're down to off-brand products that don't run ads

Then we'd be living in a world that didn't require you to have an email in order to do anything like have a job or a social life, which is probably a good thing

Probably not too popular of an opinion on HN but email in my opinion would be a great example of a service that could be run by the government. Just like postal service (at least in some parts of the world)

There was something like that in Germany called de-mail. It was official and receiving and reading a mail was considered legally binding (invoices, etc.)

It could have been great but the implementation lacked encryption and had wild security issues. So nobody used it and it was shut down

I've often wondered what would happen if we _taxed_ advertising [0]. The same rationale applies: it'll never work, and it'll never even be tested, but I agree, it was fun to think about.

[0]: https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-adver...

You're forgetting a very important problem: hard to implement. Sugar in drinks and CO2 emissions are easily measured. The definition of what's an ad is much harder.

>what's an ad is much harder.

Not really that much harder, and would immediately cover the worst offenders. I mean we already have disclosure laws on product placements and ads.

He talks about a Pigovian tax for ads, which is interesting. I don’t have any thoughts other than “yeah good idea.”

But, something I haven’t fully worked out but have vague suspicions about: are ads actually a tax-favorable business model under the current system? We watch ads in exchange for some service, if it wasn’t an ad-supported service we’d have to pay money for it, and that transaction would be taxed.

Of course, the transaction between the ad network and the company placing the ad is taxed. But it seems like they could have a lot of play, as far as picking where that transaction takes place…

Ads should at least be taxed as heavily as if we had paid for the thing with money, IMO.

In Thailand signs are taxed based on its size, text language (Thai only, No text or multilingual text and Thai text are placed lower than other languages, Multilingual text), and static/dynamic (I assume this applies to both digital and trivision).

This also not only for advertising but also normal signs like the logo of the business on buildings. You'll see most people circumvent the more expensive multilingual rate by adding small Thai text at the top of the sign.

Unrelated, but another interesting fact is that some bus stops in Bangkok are completely funded by an advertising company. Of course, they'll get the ads space for free as a result, and they only offer it in viable locations. The current governor doesn't like this idea and settle for a less fancy bus stop paid by public money.

I pay for YouTube Premium, which would in theory pull me out of the perverse incentive structure around an ad-based model. Yet I feel like I still get pushed toward all the same “features” of ad-funded accounts. I find it incredibly frustrating and keep sending feature requests and reporting site issues as a result.

Can you explain what features you're talking about? Do you mean stuff like "shorts"?

The video feed, notifications, and the whole UI are still structured to maximize engagement, instead of giving paying users better control.

Autoplay keeps turning itself back on. I’ve probably turned it off a dozen times now.

The other autoplay, where it starts playing stuff while browsing. I’ve tuned this off many times too.

The massive thumbnails so I can only see 2 thumbnails on the screen, I’m not sure what the advantage is here other than better tracking what you linger on. They also get bigger on the active row, so if I see a video I might want on the 2nd cut off row, then make it my active row, the thumbnails get bigger and I can’t see it anymore. I lose context due to this all the time and it drives me nuts.

Shorts, yes, but not just Shorts in the Recommendations, but Shorts dominating search results, where it almost doesn’t show traditional videos anymore. In the browser you can filter search results for videos vs shorts, but not on the AppleTV.

It keeps showing big banners with a demo video next to it for features Premium users can get… it’s an ad for something I’ve already signed up for. I report these as spam.

The games. I’ve never once played one, yet they are prominently displayed in my recommendations.

I think as a Premium user I should be able to choose what screen the app opens into, or what is on my home page. I’d like my watch later list, for example. Instead, it just randomly mixes some of those into the recommendations and it may or may not make it clear which ones those are.

I know there is more, and some big ones I’m missing, but those are some of the things they come to mind.

The problem isn't fundamentally advertising - it's stuff like toxic and anti-user advertisements, and the ad industry not knowing what the word "privacy" means.

I would disagree on this. The reason is that the main point of most ads is to induce artificial demand. When successful this is essentially making people think their lives are missing something, repeatedly. I think it is fairly self evident that at scale this simply leads to social discontent, materialism, and the overall degradation of a society.

There are endless studies, such as this [1] demonstrating a significant inverse relationship between ads and happiness. The more ads, the less happy people are. And I think it's very easy to see the causal relationship there. And this would apply even if the ad industry wasn't so scummy.

[1] - https://hbr.org/2020/01/advertising-makes-us-unhappy

I think there is a fundamental problem with an ad-subsidized service. Even ignoring the privacy issues inherent to the way modern advertising works in practice (which you probably shouldn’t ignore), the mere presence of an advertiser as a third party whose interests the service provider must consider creates malign incentives.

I also think providing a service for free is fundamentally anti-competitive. It’s like the ultimate form of dumping. And there are many studies showing that people are irrational about zero-cost goods, so it’s even harder to compete against than might be expected.

Arguably, the advertiser is not merely a third party whose interests the service provider must consider, but rather the actual paying customer (and much more of the second party) whose interests the service provider must satisfy to make revenue. That to me puts into perspective the absurdity of this business model: the user is not the customer, the product or service itself is not the product but only a means to keep offering the actual product to the paying customer.

Yes, I mean from the consumer perspective. You're right that the user of an entirely ad-funded service isn't the real customer. They're still at least somewhat the customer when they're still providing some of the revenue though.

the fundamental problem is capitalism

I mean, infinitely so. I don't give a shit that you (the royal you, not literally you :p) and your business can't find their target demographic without ads, they are psychological manipulation of the worst kind and they should be eradicated from existence with prejudice. There is NO type of advertisement that is okay in my mind, whether it be a 5x5cm image in a black and white newspaper or the ubiquitous cancer that we're inundated with daily on the internet, none of it should exist. Moreover, if your business isn't possible without ads, then good riddance. Maybe at some point in the past I would've been okay with the "innocuous" ones like the newspaper ones, but the advertising industry and the psychotic, soulless ghouls that inhabit it have changed my opinion forever on it.

For every "innocent" and well intentioned ad out there, there are quite literally a billion cancerous ones that rely on pure deception to make the biggest buck out of you. Ads are the driving force behind the cancerous entity that is Meta and all the ills that they've brought upon the world such as actual fucking genocides. The "people" I've had the displeasure of meeting that come from advertising backgrounds have all been soulless psychopaths who would sell their own family for a bit of cash.

I mean just look at the type of shit they come up with in this very thread. It's all just games on how they can circumvent these kinda rules. "Oh you'll force me to let people skip my brainwashing? I'll just put up 20x more ads to make up for it!" Who even talks and thinks like this other than ghouls?

Better from whom? As a user, maybe. But if you're trying to compete, it's incredibly useful to get exposure. For instance, suppose you run a competitor to Salesforce and you want to buy the Salesforce keyword because you provide a better product. I don't know how you would bootstrap that otherwise.

If anything the big businesses use advertising as a protection moat. As a small business, I would def prefer to be in a world that allows me to advertise, even if I have to compete for things like my own name

> If anything the big businesses use advertising as a protection moat. As a small business, I would def prefer to be in a world that allows me to advertise, even if I have to compete for things like my own name

These two sentences are contradictory. Big business uses it as a defensive measure, yet you think a small business can use it as an offensive measure. It's an absurd outcome of the SEO of the last two decades that people think it's fine to pay for get traffic using your own keywords. Stockholm syndrome.

I can see how it's contradictory on its face, but the reality is pretty nuanced.

Large brands continue to run ads to enforce brand loyalty and keep their image fresh. For a lot of companies, dropping advertising will lead to reduced sales.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/cmo/2024/12/18/why-cutting-adve...

However, as a new entrant to a consumer facing market, how is one supposed to drive new customers to try their product? Just being a bit better or a little cheaper isn't necessarily going to win over a lot of people if they never bother trying it due to existing brand loyalties. So you've got to do some amount of advertising to build some kind of awareness to the product and get people to try it.

That doesn't necessarily mean unskippable video advertisements or whatever, but one should try and do some kind of marketing push to get awareness of your product up other than hoping presence on some store shelves will result in enough sales fast enough to keep your company alive.

If you have to advertise - shove your product in people's faces - to keep sales, your product is not supplying enough real value, does not have staying power, and you should lose.

"Just being a bit better or a little cheaper isn't necessarily going to win over a lot of people if they never bother trying it due to existing brand loyalties"

This is a feature, not a bug. Brand loyalties are built when products are reliable and good. Your product should be enough of an improvement to make people move of their own accord.

If your new product solves frustrations present in an incumbent, on a long enough timescale, your product will come out on top.

If both products are presented equally in a marketplace, the better one will win. If your company does not survive because you can't shove it in people's faces, this is a good thing.

> If your new product solves frustrations present in an incumbent, on a long enough timescale, your product will come out on top.

I've got numerous examples where this didn't happen because of other brand awareness. Neato had a very competitive and better bot vacuum to iRobot for years and yet they failed to gain traction. A large part of that would be because everyone knew about iRobot's offerings and yet ask any random person if they've ever heard of Neato Botvac and you'll get crickets. You're imagining an ideal world where clear better performers always win. This doesn't often happen in practice.

How did everyone know about irobot's offering?

What if in the stores, botvacs and irobots were presented right next to each other with the same amount of real estate?

First mover advantage, brand awareness, word of mouth, early reviewers, etc. People then build a brand connection of "robot vacuum" == "roomba", everything else is just a fake imitation.

Imagine you're a normal random consumer and not an electronics nerd. You've heard people on the morning TV news show talk about these robot vacuums and showed a Roomba. You have a friend that got one last Christmas and said their Roomba was pretty cool. You go to the store, and you see a few Roombas and some other brands you've never heard of. You're probably only going to spend a few minutes looking at the shelf. Which one are you likely to get?

And in the end iRobot managed to coast on that brand connection of "robot vacuum" == "roomba" for a lot of people for nearly 20 years. It really only took until competitors were way cheaper and way better that got people to really start to switch. Their products have not been competitive for over a decade and yet they've only finally died. That power of linking a brand to a specific item or service is powerful, and its not purely push advertising and forced video ads that build it.

Its somewhat the same thing for Google. Sure, they do some amount of advertising especially at top of line events, but overall it seems their direct outbound marketing is kind of low overall. They spend a bunch of defaults and continue to build the connection that to search the internet is to Google, even as they continue to inject more paid results and the quality declines. Other competitors are out there which are comparable or better, but even with them heavily advertising they fail to unseat that brand connection.

“Users” are the only people who matter. Companies are artificial constructs and, in an ideal world, would never be prioritized over the public.

If I search for "Salesforce alternative" and something that isn't Salesforce shows up, great! That's what I want!

If I search for Salesforce and something that isn't Salesforce shows up above Salesforce, the tool I'm using is wrong and I will assume that the promoted product is a scam.

This happened to me yesterday when installing the mobile version of Brotato. Some other game appeared above Brotato in the Google Play store. I already hate Android but this only makes me hate it more. Google already gets an unjustified cut of the money I'm paying for the game, yet on top of that they serve me the wrong result at the top.

And if I am not searching for Salesforce or alternatives, and an ad for Salesforce or an alternative gets pushed into my face, the ad is wrong and the advertiser is wrong.

It's infuriating, the other day I had to download an app to pay for parking. What the fuck do I need the top choice to be a competing parking app? That won't do me any good when the place I'm parking need the one I searched for and who the hell goes "oh, an exciting new parking app? I'm gonna drive around until I can find a place that uses it so I can park there!"

>Google already gets an unjustified cut of the money I'm paying for the game

Brotato is free to distribute their game outside the Play Store as well, Android isn't locked down. If the cut was unjustified why would they give money away to Google for free? The reasons are actually extremely similar to the reasons ads benefit society.

They kinda created this fake locked down market that people expect to be able to be used, same as Apple, compared to say, just downloading apps normally like on a computer.

Also "sideloaded" apps cannot be automatically updated, although personally I think it would be better if nothing could automatically update lol

I'm also not the biggest fan of Steam. But at least on Steam if I search for Brotato it's the top result, Steam is not tied to the OS so if gamers and game makers decided they hate Steam they could jump to some other market (as opposed to, say, the built-in Microsoft store in Windows that thankfully seems to be failing), and Steam has helped drag Linux into the 21st century in a good way.

> For instance, suppose you run a competitor to Salesforce and you want to buy the Salesforce keyword because you provide a better product. I don't know how you would bootstrap that otherwise.

Why would you assume I'm providing a better product? Ads are predominantly needed by those providing worse products, because spending money on marketing has much better ROI than actually creating a good product.

In reality, even if I provide a better product than Salesforce, they will outcompete me by their ad-buying power.

A big part of advertising on Google is making sure your own brand is the top result. This is essentially extortion from Google. Companies are burning money on something that should be the default result in Google.

When crypto was genuinely new, and I was young, I had hope that one day we might actually embrace micropayments. Turns out I was not only young, but stupid.

Ignoring the cryptocurrency angle for a second (to avoid distracting knee-jerks)...

Have you thought deeply about why micropayments have not been embraced?

All transactions include several kinds of costs. Reducing the monetary costs to zero does nothing for the other costs.

Enthusiasm for micropayments is very similar to enthusiasm for cutting the price of something from $5.001 to $5.00000001. It's a 0.02% decrease in the price! They make about as much sense as saying "hey, if I can buy 80,000 plastic ninjas for $500, I should also be able to buy one ninja for $0.007".

ads

Yes. And AML/KYC. Advertisements don't bear the burden of AML/KYC, but micropayments do.

AML/KYC costs money, enough to make truly micro micropayments impossible.

I think my tolerance for ads would be higher if algos stop showing repeat ads, or limit same ad from playing more than X times to user.

Why not. Just run with it sometimes. Get people to argue for ads.

> Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's fun to think about sometimes.

Yeah, sure. Get them to convince you how impractical it is. How the economy relies on it. How things “wouldn’t work” without it. Then you/they have just argued themselves into the position that society relies on this shitty practice to sustain itself. Then in turn: why ought we live like this?

There is a huge chunk of companies who do not pay to advertise their products or services, because their value offering is good enough to not need to. And a huge chunk who does very little advertisement for the very same reason.

For example, when was the last time you saw a TV or YouTube ad for a motorcycle from any of the big Japanese brands? The products are so mature and the value proposition is so good that they don't need to. And that's a 70 billion dollar annual market.

I was just in the Philippines, tons of ads for Japanese motorcycle brands. In places where competition and usage for the product or service is high, there will be ads, and lots of it. You use motorcycles as an example, but it probably isn't a very good example.

When I first visited Latvia, I thought it was a charming side effect of communism that store names were quite small on the façades. Was there an ethic of abjuring crass commercialism? Then I noticed the shadows left by larger store names above the small Latvian store names. It wasn't that Marxism Leninism called for demure commercial logos. The Latvians had just taken down the Russian signs. Commercial promotion is, I suppose, a condition of life,

> I've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads.

Of course. Ads make us buy more things. Things we don't need most of the time.

Think of the environmental win if we banned ads tomorrow!

Nice linguistic explanation of social media just been coined as ‘ultra processed language’

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQh50UKkt10/?igsh=MWx6ZW41ZHV...

No need to wonder: the world would certainly be better without ads. Advertising is psychological manipulation. They should be illegal.

And don't whine about "how will new companies find customers?" They'll figure it out. Capitalism always finds a way. Business interests should always be secondary to the needs and safety of real people.

Billboards are outlawed in Alaska.

It's not ads IMO, it's just reality. Remove the ads, people (instagram/tiktok/youtube) still get influence by "strive to addict their users"

Without adverts, the platform has less incentive to maximise engagement. They won't send you push notifications, they won't implement short form video, etc. My gym/ISP/email provider don't design their services on making me spend the whole day using them. If anything they don't want me using the service at all but I myself want to.

Absolutely. The world would be vastly better off without 2 things:

- Ads. Lower quality products/services perform better with more/better ads.

- Venture Capital. Services out-compete others by using free money early on, killing the free market.

> often wondered whether the world would be better without ads

You’d probably have to compromise on free speech, since the line between ads and public persuasion is ambiguous to the point of non-existence.

Better middle steps: ban on public advertising (e.g. no billboards, first-party-only signage). Ban on targeted digital advertising. Ban on bulk unsolicited mail or e-mail.

I haven’t given it enough thought, but would a ban on selling ad space do the trick?

You can self promote, but you can’t pay third parties to do it for you and you can’t sell it as a service.

> would a ban on selling ad space do the trick?

How would you define ad space?

> You can self promote, but you can’t pay third parties to do it for you and you can’t sell it as a service

An acid test I've found surprisingly powerful is that of the founders promoting the Constitution through pamphleteering. They wrote the pamphlets themselves. The historical record is silent on whether they paid for their printing or distribution. (The papers could publish due to subscribers and paid advertising.)

If your rule would let them pamphleteer, it should be fine. If it would not, it probably needs work. I have not yet seen a definition of advertising that satisfactorily isolates this.

Someone who prints something for a third party isn’t selling ad space.

Everyone could self promote, they just couldn’t contract someone to do it for them. Employees could promote for their employer, but it couldn’t be subcontracted out. And you can’t pay a company to put up your ad on their billboard or their website, etc.

Ignoring how this might be enforced, would it be enough to let people express themselves while cutting out the impact of negative externalities of advertising?

> would it be enough to let people express themselves while cutting out the impact of negative externalities of advertising?

I think it's doable. But I haven't seen the scalpel yet.

In the meantime, we have clean lines we can run up towards. Banning ads (basically, commercial speech) in public space. Banning commercial bulk mail. And banning targeted commercial advertising (beyond the content it sits).

> whether the world would be better without ads

What if we made advertising illegal? (simone.org)

1975 points by smnrg 9 months ago | 1409 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269

> Lei Cidade Limpa (Portuguese for clean city law) is a law of the city of São Paulo, Brazil, put into law by proclamation in 2006 that prohibits advertising such as outdoor posters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

Billboard ads are banned in cities in New Zealand. Have been for a long time

It'd be great if all public ads were banned and digital ads were the only form. That way those who are savvy enough can also block the digital ones and live a completely ad-free life.

My annoyance is that regardless of how I lock ads out of my own home and devices, I will still always see ads for McSlop and Coca Cola everywhere I walk in my city.

My experience is that people who make sweeping claims like "all advertising should be banned" have never run or managed a small business. There is simply no way to survive as one of the little guys without some kind of marketing.

people still would buy food in their favorite shops, so they probably will survive - perhaps even with higher profits as zero-sum ad spending is gone

Instead of ads, we could have websites mine bitcoin in javascript. I feel like this would be better for everyone, especially in a world of AI agents.

People don't care. Youtube has an option to watch it without ads, most people don't. I refuse to watch ads and pay for the ad-free versions of the streamers. Lots people won't pay. Would the average person pay $10/m for ad free social media? Or pay for add free search? Pretty sure there are search engines that you can pay that are ad free.

What needs to be regulated is ads that you can't avoid. You can avoid online ads by paying ad free versions or not browsing certain sites(eg: instagram, FB). Billboards need to go away, and some cities have outlawed them.

>Would the average person pay $10/m for ad free social media? Or pay for add free search?

At some point, yes. But by that point they switch to the next service with ads and the cycle repeats.

Its also important to note that many can't pay for such services. I.e. minors. So they don't get a choice unless their parents sympathize. That helps indoctrinate the next gen into accepting ads. I think that late Millenial/early Gen Z was a unique group that grew up with minimal ads (or easy ways to block ads) before smartphone hoisted most control from them.

Yeah but people also get addicted to things like cigarettes and gambling. Sometimes people need a little help to avoid harmful things.

I am often frustrated by ads/sponsored content on YouTube that I cannot buy. Youtuber present me nice product targeted for US audience. I am in Europe. No way I can use it or buy it. I would do it sometimes, but I cannot. Still I have to watch such ads.

I dont think there is a practical way to prevent this case.

That's the funny part, ads would be less annoying if they were hyper-targeted, which means there was more supply of ads and worse privacy. There's been a number of times I've found useful stuff from ads, but it's rare and almost never on Youtube.

Youtube is the one site worth paying for not to see ads and sponsorblock extension skips the live reads.

As an experiment, think of a space that is improved by ads.

I'm imagining a world where ads on screens generate enough revenue to mean that rail and bus services are free. It would be annoying, but free public transport would also reduce car volumes improving transport for all.

It's unlikely ads would ever actually fund any meaningful real world product or service like public transport. The most they can fund is some crappy apps, websites and digital platforms, and most of the time they can barely do that.

It's only a matter of time before our ad-driven tech economy pops when they realise how much fraud is committed by the adtech companies, how little return these ads really give, and peoples susceptibility to ads further declines, causing them to exhaust even the most invasive and penetrative advertising techniques.

A nice idea I saw was a service where you can get a free/discounted public transport ticket for doing some squats or other exercise in front of a machine. Something like that would shift a lot of money from handling healthcare for the inactive over to providing free public transport.

How about a world without money?

New businesses would never get off the ground. Advertising is probably one of the things that will never go away in a capitalist society.

It would be much, much better:

- Improved incentive for the IT and medias industry. Users and viewers are the customers again.

- Removal of the culture of normalized lying that infects everyone to the point people don't see it anymore.

- Natural selection of product by actually asking people for money. Can't pay 2 euros / month for facebook? It deserves to die.

- Redirection of resources from marketing to useful things. Billions going back to R&D, quality control, etc.

- Brand forced to rely on quality and word of mouth again. No more temporary product trick. No more "one month brand lifetime" hack. No more "PR will save this disaster".

- Improved skin in the game. And you will see less reputation-damaging behavior because of this. Think twice about doing A/B testing, fake sales, use too many notifications. You need those saavy power users to spread the word now.

- Disappearance of old and new artificial social norms solely created by marketing firms to sell stuff that parasites our reality. No need for everybody to look the same, no need for diamonds for engagement rings, no "whole white family having breakfirst in a big house and everything is clean and they are all happy and hot" to sell coffee, no "big red guy with a beard" created by coca cola.

- Getting back on specs. You can't sell perfume and cars on an vague idea anymore.

- Children won't get conditioned from a young age to want stuff they don't need, think ideas they don't really have, and adopt behaviors that are harmful for them just so that a marketer can get 3% more engagement.

- Creating massive volume of bad content will not be a successful strategies anymore, since it's not about displaying ads. So content quality go up.

- Streets get nicer, with no more ads display. Clothes as well, with no more big logo making you look like a billboard.

- No more ads in your mail box! And you can redirect the money from the gov marketing budget to actually find email spammers as well.

- Removal of a huge means of accumulation and centralization of power. Right now, it's pay to win, and the more money you have, the more you can run ads, the more you can sell. Which means a small local shop cannot easily compete with a big one. But without ads, it's actually close to its own clients, and has an advantage to get their attention organically.

- People get back some part of their attention span.

The benefits are not superficial; they are immense!

Ads are a plague on our societies.

Evolving as humans requires us to find a way to ban them.

I doubt I will see it in my lifestyle, but we need to get rid of this parasite if we want to go to the next level.

Of course it would be better.

You're dead right, it would be the one killer move to remove a lot of perverse incentives, fix the internet, possibly even social media, and all live in a happier world. The whole economy would stop paying the ad tax to Google and Meta.

And it's not that impractical : just make a consumer-run search engine for products and services.

People already complain about having 10 differently monthly subscriptions for internet stuff. If you remove ads people will need 30 to do the same stuff they do now.

or micro payments or something different which will work better.

Not a great regulatory move, in my opinion. But I really wish ad companies would implement this rule across the board. If you can't sell me on your ad in 5 seconds, it's unlikely you can sell me on your product in 15 or 30 seconds. And if your product is of any interest to me whatsoever, I'm happy to continue watching the ad. I sit through movie trailers and tech ads all the time, even with an option to skip. But I have no use for seeing the entire Dawn dish soap's aw-shucks, faux-folksy ad play out. In five seconds, you can remind me that dawn exists, fulfilling the main purpose of the ad, and I can get on with the content I'm actually interested in.

> Not a great regulatory move, in my opinion.

Why?

Its market distortionary and makes global advertisers have to customize for the local audience, some might not bother

Good?

Not as good when you just end up having to pay more for services right

The incentives are better aligned though, so long as they are not undermined (by moving the target) Ala cable tv.

Nope still good

Isn’t that presumably the point of the Vietnamese government whenever they set new requirements?

To make it harder for people who dont care about Vietnam to do business.

Ad skipping should be handled at the platform level and not left to individual advertisers to control. Regulations like this make such an outcome more likely.

Mobile ads in the US are heinous. Each one has a different mechanism for skipping, the skip buttons are micro sized and impossible to tap, some of them don't even work.

Standardization should have been up to the platforms selling ads, but they haven't done it. It's past time for local authorities to step in and protect consumers from predatory behavior.

why is it a bad thing if global advertisers have to customize? If they're global, they should have the resources. Anyhow none of our concerns

Can you spell out more what’s wrong with distorting a market or customizing for local audiences?

Simply put, fuck the "market" (aka: uber-rich people). The market should serve us humans, not the other way around.

Ive heard this garbage excuse since Reagan took a wrecking ball to regulations. Not making effective regulations is ALSO a market distorting thing, that encourages the absolute worst behaviors. And now with Citizens United, its $1 = 1 vote.

But no, "marrrrrkeeeeetttttt"

> market distortionary

I am unsure what you are trying to say here. But if you mean to refer to "market distortion", I cannot see how that can be happening.

The reason is that these rules are supposed to be applicable universally to every company in the same way. And as such, they do not create any market distortion in one way or the other. Because everyone has to play by the same rules. Those are as fair market conditions as one can get, in my opinion.

> some might not bother

Why should that be a problem? If someone does not like the regulation in a particular jurisdiction, it is fine. No one is forcing them to operate there.

The main point is the following: If they want to operate, they have to play by the local rules. Just like everyone else.

I would assume that the global advertisers are already having to customize for the local audience since the spoken language is Vietnamese.

Markets are not a natural phenomenon and are themselves the result of complex social arrangements, involving coercion. So, the market is the result of "distortions" before and after various regulatory measures.

> market distortionary

So what if it is?

> makes global advertisers have to customize for the local audience

My understanding of advertising is that there is already substantial customization for local audiences.

Second order effects.

Many advertisers may avoid advertising or lower their ad budgets. This means the tech platform makes less revenue. This means the platform and the video creator both make less revenue. This means less videos get created.

All of these happen at the population level.

I hate ads, but regulations that are for things that aren't public health (including mental health), anti-monopolization, etc. are probably bad for innovation and growth.

You have to balance regulation and over-regulation.

Too many people think removing ads means they'll still continue to get content for free, they just won't have to watch ads.

At best, it's as you said, the platform and creator make less money (Youtube gives 55% of ad revenue to the creator). This would naturally lead to less content eventually.

At worst, video content becomes unsustainable without a subscription.

> This would naturally lead to less content eventually

I, personally, am drowning in "content".

> I, personally, am drowning in "content".

Until the content is utterly captivating and speaks to your soul in a way even your closest friends and partners can't, we haven't hit peak content.

You know that one movie you see every decade or so that you can't get out of your head? The one that left you flabbergasted, that you've watched at least half a dozen times, and that you frequently and fondly remember? It touched your mind and soul and fit your tastes like a glove.

THAT is peak content, and until we are swimming in it, we're not there yet. Most of what we have today is utterly disposable and ephemeral - transient dopamine activation instead of philosophically world shattering indelible experiences.

We have a long way to go.

Why would you ever expect or even want us to be 'swimming' in such emotionally activating content? The reality is that people will just get desensitized and there will be the same proportion of dreck and the same discoverability problems as ever. Your argument is dopamine junkie logic, sitting around waiting for a dealer to bring you something stronger instead of putting effort into searching out or making things that satisfy you.

Because I want to.

I don't care what you want. I know what I want.

I don't see how less video time for people would harm innovation.

If you, like me and most people I know, hate ads, why would it be a bad thing to limit it?

What are we expecting to actually accomplish with all this platform growth thing?

Most people don’t hate adverts, at least not enough to do something about them (subscribe to YouTube premium, install an adblocker, install a pi hole)

I would argue that limiting the amount of unrequested product evangelism shoved into users' eyeballs is a valuable public and mental health initiative. I wish we could have seen the alternate reality where ad-revenue was not the most lucrative business model for the internet.

Regulation is always too slow and too stupid. By doing this, you'll chase the ads into embedding themselves into the content itself. And that's just the start. Creators are already doing this, and now we're seeing tooling emerge to support it. Wait until the platforms get in on the game.

I say this as a proponent of antitrust regulation against tech giants and a privacy advocate against tracking, storing, and correlating user activity.

Everything needs to be kept in balance. Regulation is a blunt instrument and is better used to punish active rule breaking rather than trying to predict how markets should work.

Break up Google. Don't tell content marketplaces how to run ads. They know their customers far better than old politicians do.

If ads become onerous, alternatives emerge. Different channels, platforms, ad blocking. It's a healthier ecosystem that doesn't grow ossified with decades old legalese. Regulations that actively stymie the creation of new competition.

Now every new video and social startup in Vietnam has to check a bunch of boxes.

> By doing this, you'll chase the ads into

IMO regulation never was or is going to force this shift: it's already happening in unregulated ad markets, and is going to keep evolving in that direction because it's simply more effective/lucrative than ads done other ways.

> Break up Google. Don't tell content marketplaces how to run ads.

I'm all for breaking up megacorps, but there's no way a government like Vietnam can effectively accomplish that. The entire regulatory weight of the EU (90% of the non-US first-world consumer base) can't break up Google, so inflicting a series of wristslaps that hurt Google more than any small startup is the best way.

I'm no expert on the region, but I can't imagine a small video/social startup in Vietnam will be hurt more than Google by being forced to show a skip button after 5s on their ads — and generally speaking ads as a business model generally doesn't work all that well or mean much for small startups (<1M MAU), their survival and scalability hinges more on VC money and product-market fit than ad arbitrage.

> Many advertisers may avoid advertising or lower their ad budgets. This means the tech platform makes less revenue. This means the platform and the video creator both make less revenue. This means less videos get created.

this all sounds great. ideal, even.

If your revenue comes from parasitical strategies it's negative sum and the economy is better off without it.

Are you seriously trying to argue the world is better off without YouTube?

I derive incredible value from YouTube. It wasn't always great, but it is recently full of extremely good educational content, tech talks, independent journalism, how-tos, independent film and animation, and so much more.

I'd wager that you use and benefit from a lot of services that are paid for via advertising. Even public transit is subsidized by advertising.

Parasitic strategies != ads

The regulation was about unskippable ads, not ads in general.

I agree with the op and I don't agree that we are better off without YouTube. It's not hard at all to understand the op, so I'm not sure why you misread them and jumped to conclusions that all ads are parasitic and asked if we're better off without YouTube. Was that rage bate or did you really think the op was talking about all ads?

In London public transport accounts for about 10% of the ticket price. For 20p I’m bombarded with flashing moving images as I travel around. It’s sickening and shouldn’t be allowed in public spaces.

There was a fight back at Euston station recently

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2987kvp3no

I never get a taxi in New York thanks to the adverts. Sadly the general population thinks their time and attention is worthless and accept adverts. People actually watch commercial tv, which steals 20 minutes of your time every hour to brainwash you.

You know perfectly well that's not what I wrote. Putting words in others' mouths is a form of lying, and not conducive to discussion.

>Many advertisers may avoid advertising or lower their ad budgets.

Great. Once that happens, we can work on regulation to kill even more advertising.

Just a hip-shot, not a considered position. When I hear "regulation", I think "threat". Either of violence (any physical touch), or financial garnishment. So, to me, ads that last longer than five seconds do not rise to the level of threatening anyone.

But assuming that they did, the situation seems like one where there could be any number or ways of following the letter or the law, while flouting the spirit of it. I don't dare imagine the creative ways these people will come up with to make entertainment even worse than it already is. So for areas that seem to require miles and miles of caveats and very specific rule-making, my gut reaction is that the regulatory path isn't the right one until we can break down the scope into something that simple regulations can accommodate without loophole. Put more simply: if it seems like people will just find ways around the problem, my assumption is just that we're not targeting the right problem yet and we need to break it down further, if regulation is the right solution at all.

But that is pretty assumptive, so - again - it's just a first feeling. Doesn't pass my vibe check.

I personally like descriptive regulation over prescriptive regulation.

Instead of prescribing exactly what you should do, describe the outcomes you want, and let case law fill in the rest of the owl. That's the only way to prevent violations like this.

To be fair, the main disadvantage of this approach is that law is much harder to understand. You can't just read the law as it is written, you also have to familiarize yourself with all the rulings that tell you how that law should actually be interpreted.

Vietnam does not follow common law (i.e. case law) , it follows civil law (same as other Europe and Asia countries)

Think the best argument against it is that it makes advertising less valuable, which in turn limits the how many "paid for with advertising" services will be available and how good those services will be.

Especially in a developing country where consumers ability to pay for such things is going to be limited, that will presumably deprive some margin of the population of media/services that are currently ad supported.

I am fine with advertising becoming less valuable. I fully appreciate there is a lot of media I take for granted due to advertising. Yet, ever since I was a small child the goal of advertising was to influence consumer behavior more than selling products or brand identity, which is extremely toxic. Once consumer gullibility wears off the dollars poured into advertising always find a way into political lobbying and policy influence campaigns, which is really just more of the same.

Funny, I would say making advertising less valuable is big win.

Heh, advertizing, individually has become less valuable because there are so many ads everywhere on every surface to the point that people mentally adblock half their day away.

One of those mythical "win win win" scenarios

Why would I an advertiser pay $1 to show an advert to someone that doesn’t have $1 to spend on my product.

If they do have a dollar to spend then why wouldn’t they spend it on what they wanted to watch in the first place rather than spend it with me, the advertiser.

I'm much less concerned about being sold in 15-30 secs as much as the "ads" that are paid promotional programming that runs >30 minutes in the middle of a video that is <30 minutes.

Nothing makes me quite as irrationally angry as a 30 second ad on a one minute video

I don't know why you feel it is irrational at all. That a perfectly rational reason to be angry about the state of ad injection

That stuff is so bizarre! I can understand how an advertiser might try to sneak an infomercial onto an ad campaign, and I can understand how it might be attempted on accident. But I can't understand why an ostensible ad platform would ever allow you to upload a 30 min. ad without lots of flags going up and needing some approval.

> and needing some approval.

and here shows just how bad the rot is. I would assume that buying that much "air time" to have your longer content played would come a quite a premium. I would also not be surprised if selling those premiums come with a bonus. There's a reason those paid-programming shows run with no commercials. The cost of airing it paid for all of the ad pods during that block of air time, plus extra for being special snowflake.

If these long content "ads" are flukes, then that also shows the rot of the ad market that this isn't handled as an exception.

> But I really wish ad companies would implement this rule across the board. If you can't sell me on your ad in 5 seconds, it's unlikely you can sell me on your product in 15 or 30 seconds.

When talking about how ads "don't work on you"; it's very important to remember that just like every single other human you're not immune to propaganda.

I did not claim, nor imply, that ads do not work on me. In fact, I alluded to the opposite in my closing line: " In five seconds, you can remind me that dawn exists, fulfilling the main purpose of the ad[...]"

> the main purpose of the ad

I recognize that showing me the name of the product is the most valuable part of an ad, by far. It's entirely about repetition which breeds enough familiarity for trial, and enough personal affirmation if the trial is a positive one.

But, that aside, if I'm looking for a skip button before the 5 seconds is up, I either do not purchase the product (I'm not sold: I don't buy), or I'm already a purchaser of the product and I'm either a fan (Your ad didn't sell me: I was sold, beforehand) or I'm not (I'm not sold: I don't buy it anymore). It wasn't a statement about ads not working on me, it's a statement about a personal, practical response to ads that I am conciously aware of because I'm already looking for a skip button.

I think I was speaking equally to anyone else reading the thread, but also I should have pointed out that the longer you watch an ad, the more familiar you will become with accepting and expecting the product being sold. There's no way to get around the time spent. Just because the first 5 seconds have the largest proportional impact, doesn't mean the last 25s won't also have an impact.

But even if everything I said was incorrect, and you actually are immune, just like you describe... everyone else isn't, and they're being targeted as much as you are.

I didn't describe being immune. Again, 100% the opposite.

> Not a great regulatory move, in my opinion.

> But I really wish ad companies would implement this rule across the board.

I genuinely don’t know how you could get your wish without regulation. You can’t expect all players in the ad game to follow self enforced rules if there’s any possibility that not following a self-imposed rule (“all ads must have a skip button”) will bring a competitive advantage. As soon as one player decides to take that advantage, all will. Back to square one.

LOL, it's because they started with "regulations bad" and then went the usual technocrat/libertarian move of let the markets decide. And then rehashed the exact same arguments in favor of regulation.

Takes like this amaze me. It's like they've suddenly forgotten what the entire advertisement industry is like. Ads are designed to take advantage, manipulate, and even trick. Then this person comes along and suggests the industry should do the right thing.

In what world would that ever be a possibility? It's like asking a dictator nicely that they relinquish some of their power!

Regulation is only a policeman. It doesn’t innovate.

Competitive markets do innovate. I watch YouTube live instead of Twitch (many streamers double stream) precisely because the former has skippable ads.

I’m guessing you haven’t taken even one semester of the relevant economics. Isn’t it great to be an internet commenter?

Both YouTube and Twitch have increased the amount of ads they serve over the last 5 years, not decreased. So, I’m not even sure if the “competition” between those two makes ads better for anyone. Imo, the objective of competition in adspace is “who can target better to increase click rate”, not “who can make the experience better for the user”.

Even the technofeudalist lords have to deal with reality: they add more enforced ad time, I reduce Youtube usage. Disney+ puts long unskippable repeated ads, I watch what I want then unsuscribe. They're supposed to play a long-term game, but they're too greedy, and humanity can live without Youtube or Disney+.

You're free to pay for youtube and not see ads. I personally don't know how people use it without paying. It's no different from a streaming service like Apple TV and it's clear Youtube wants to go that direction, but people treat it like it should be entirely free or lightly ad supported only.

Netflix as a streaming provider was paid from the get go and only provides professionally made content. It's closer to the way we normally buy things or something like an internet subscription.

For youtube, different people are going to have different reactions to their business model.

You think one semester of economics entitles you to belittle people like that? What in a libertarian mind is doing that?

There are very real people who major in economics in college and come in with their economic opinions they'd like to confirm, and just argue with the professors.

"Economics" as we talk about it is basically a farce. It's more vulnerable to confirmation bias than any other social science.

> Isn’t it great to be an internet commenter?

Said completely unironically...

Yeah. I'm happy to watch ads if I'm interested in the product. Sometimes i even want to rewind to see a part i missed but youtube doesnt let me. No idea why

I’ll sit through a trailer. The first time.

When it comes up the 10th time though there’s no way I’ll be watching the film it advertises, no matter how much I might have done after the first time.

> Not a great regulatory move, in my opinion. > But I really wish ad companies would implement this rule across the board.

You don't see how these are conflicting viewpoints? What do you think would compel a company to act in some way that is not in line with its short term financial interests? Sheer luck?

Long term financial interests, mostly. I know the ads run on my network will never, under any circumstance, be allowed to appear without a skip button within 5 seconds. Immediately, if possible. The only conditional is when the skip button appears, not if. And that's divorced from the copy; the component that plays the ad doesn't care what copy is running, it controls the skipability.

If an advertiser does not like those terms and is willing to forgo my users for that position, more power to them. I have every confidence that I will still find advertisers and, in my experience, they will be higher quality advertisers for the demographics of my users. Artists tend to advertise in cheap space that they know other artists will be viewing. You get the idea.

What has me curious is why you see those two as conflicting viewpoints? I didn't need a government to regulate me. Just common sense and care for my users. I'm not going to subject them to noisy or obnoxious ads, nor am I going to subject them to content that may not be suitable for everyone, and so I'm also not going to subject them to overly long ads. It seems, to me, that you have a profound lack of faith in the platforms you use. Which I can understand as a practical realization about the current apex platforms. But I don't know why it would blind you to the possibility of reasonable people acting reasonably.

I see them as conflicting viewpoints because as a general rule companies do not focus on

> Long term financial interests, mostly.

It's great that you as an individual feel otherwise (I do too), but there are larger macro forces at work which compel firms to act the way they do: pursue short term growth at all costs. The counter-balance to this is either a strong regulatory environment, or a hope and prayer that a majority of companies suddenly gain a strong CEO who feels otherwise and is not obligated to satisfy shareholders who don't. Only a few such CEOs come to mind, and they're looking increasingly short for this world.

Well, you can already see my hope and prayer. I don't think it's unlikely to come about as you do; rather I think that in the long run the market will eventually reward the better behavior, as any good capitalist believes. But rest assured that I also want a strong regulatory environment. The only winning long term strategy is to be twice as forgiving as you are punitive. So that means forgive a lot, but still punish when applicable. Given that, I think good laws derived from sound reason, voted on by a free public are a great way to both guide and punish all entities, including corporate ones. I just don't think that this regulation is the kind that is derived from sound reason.

I think there are so many issues with this type of regulation that circumvention will be inevitable and, like with so many other things, lead to a worse outcome overall. I think good regulation will look different altogether, but it's hard for me to imagine what it will look like. My best guess is that it will target different choke points, or target them in different ways. Maybe like... subsidies for content creators that enforce a 5-second limit on ads? It's not something many have control over now, but a platform would instantly become more attractive to content creators if they were allowed to dictate that.

Seems like that would have some sour ramifications as well, but it's just off the top of my head. The point is, I'm not against regulating the hell out of these giant industries, or these industry giants. I'm all for it. I just want it to actually work/make things better.

As much as this may have unintended consequences, I can appreciate the motivation. I can't let my kids play iPhone games unless I turn the device into Airplane mode. Almost all these pay to play mobile games have 60 second interstitials after each level that can't be skipped. It's insane. I've taught my kids how to force kill the game and reload to get out. Definitely depressing compared to the PC shareware days I grew up with.

As a fellow parent, I cannot recommend Apple Arcade enough. My son is only allowed to play games that come from AA. These games aren't allowed to have any ads or in-app purchase. In return, you pay seven measly bucks a month (though I have it included as part of a package since we use iCloud and Apple Music and Apple TV+ anyway).

The games in AA are either made for Apple Arcade (some great indie type games) or, very commonly, they are basically 'de-fanged' ones from the regular App Store, with all the IAPs and ads ripped out. Where there is an in-game currency that normally is scarce without paying, they'll either just give you a bunch of it to start with, or you will earn it naturally while playing.

I agree with you that the number of ads and purchase-pushing mechanics in all regular App Store/Play Store games is insane. It's all because a few whales who do buy these purchases are what pays for the whole thing.

Know of an equivalent for Android?

I'm leaning towards letting the kid play games only on an XBox and never on the phone. Even if I get rid of the ads, I don't want the games to be accessible wherever they are. Whereas with a TV, they need to situate themselves in a dedicated place to play games.

I haven't used it much, because I was dragged kicking and screaming back to iOS by family inertia (photo library and iMessage), but there is this which bills itself as the same idea:

https://play.google.com/store/pass/getstarted

> only on an XBox and never on the phone. ... I don't want the games to be accessible wherever they are.

I couldn't agree more that a carry-anywhere gaming (or worse, social-media) device is too corrosive to childhood.[1] My eldest is only 7, so unsurprisingly he doesn't have a phone, and uses an iPad. The size of it has a nice side-effect that it's impractical to carry around, so it's only used at home and in the car.

When he's older, I plan to give him a phone that can only text and call.

[1] Sure, some of us had things like Game Boy, but consider how long those batteries even lasted, how bulky and limited the devices were, how expensive games were, how there were zero ads... It's really far from the same thing. I'd be fine with him having a thing like a Game Boy.

Could consider getting them one of those retro handheld emulators and giving them real games.

At this point, I've just decided that I'm going to actually pay for my games on iPhone.

Stardew Valley cost me $15 on iPhone a few years ago, which is a lot for an iPhone game, but I don't regret it at all. It's a direct port of the PC version, meaning it's a complete experience, but also not a single ad. No attempts to get me to spam my friends, no prompts for me to buy gems to make my crops grow faster, no need to watch an ad to unlock fighting in the mines. It's a game that I paid some money for and then I got to play. What a concept!

I have a borderline-irrational hatred for ads and will very actively go out of the way to avoid them. I understand the whole "no free lunch" economic theory, so you could argue that they're a necessity in some cases, but at this point I'm in a stable enough position to justify paying a few bucks to play games uninterrupted.

Outside of Stardew Valley, I play Binding of Isaac and Organ Trail. Both of them cost a few bucks but both also give you a complete, ad-free experience.

> Organ Trail

Sounds interesting :)

It’s great. Zombie themed tribute to Oregon Trail.

Requiring skip is good, but the part about focusing on illegal ads is better. If all ads were for soda, cars, and other legitimate products, that would be one thing, but so many ads are for straight up scams these days.

Considering how unhealthy soda is to consume, I'd ban those ads in a heartbeat right along side tobacco and alchohol. The UK just banned all TV and online junk food ads and I'm alright with that.

> The UK just banned all TV and online junk food ads

Unbelievable, when you consider the sheer volume of betting ads they have.

Yeah but the gov relies on that income. £2.0-£2.5 billion

Is that the income from gambling advertising or the income from gambling?

This is also why taxes on vices should always, always, always be revenue neutral. Lawmakers should never have to choose between reducing demand for a vice and revenue.

or maybe we can let people think for themselves

Soda ads are actually banned in some jurisdictions so it's not really a cleanly legit product. You can make the same argument for ICE cars.

Marketing for cars and soda isn't that far off from actual scams. Ads are a big part of why (especially American) car and food culture is so toxic. The ad-driven demand for sugary drinks and large, impractical, environmentally unconscientious cars has almost certainly caused more death and misery than many actual scams.

Is this just a really ubiquitous typo (google finds multiple headlines with the same spelling), or is the rendering of "Vietnam" into English spelling somewhat unstable?

Never seen it before today...

The only real results on Google are the article and this HackerNews post...

Did you search "vienam" with the quotes? duck duck go turns up a number of articles (albeit in at least one case the typo is in the metadata, not the article itself)

It is just this article.

ubiquitous? "Vienam" (with quotes) shows this page as the first result.

Definitely a typo, see "vietnam-news" in the same URL.

About a decade ago, a mobile gaming company I was at, accidentally shipped a full-screen ad without the art asset for the close button, so the button was invisible. The ad basically forced users to visit the in-app store for a moment before they could close it.

The sad part is that day we broke all previous daily revenue records.

Pretty sure this is a form of ad fraud and the people who paid for those ads would be really mad at you e.g. if it were a CPC campaign

"accidentally".

It seems that quite a few mobile gaming companies make this mistake. Or they "accidentally" set the click area of the button offset from the graphic, or very very small.

I don't understand why we don't have a law that specifies an operating-system level input that will always close an ad.

No hunting for tiny X's. No shifting DOM to dodge clicks. Hit Esc and it stops. For iOS and Android force it as part of the UI, like the volume buttons, back/home buttons.

Translated source: https://thuvienphapluat-vn.translate.goog/phap-luat/ho-tro-p...

Online advertisements only. I was curious how they were going to implement that on TV!

It doesn't mention how much time must be in between ads

The law also prohibits advertisements that harm "national security" or "negatively affects the dignity of the Party Flag, leaders, national heroes [etc.]". Wonder if that's the real purpose here

> Wonder if that's the real purpose here

I don't think so. Vietnam has been making great progress with privacy and digital rights laws, at least in paper. I haven't been following how well they actually enforce them though.

More likely there's a split in the government between a progressive faction who created this law and the old school side, and they probably had to add that text to get it into law.

An aside: One of the best uses for AR that I can imagine is real life ad-block. I’d wear AR glasses all the time if it would automatically replace billboards and other ads with landscapes.

What a shit world but hey I'd probably buy that if I had to live there.

I can't stop thinking about this rental apartment building in my city that's on indigenous land so regulation around advertising doesn't apply (BC) and they have a huge electronic billboard right in front facing probably couple dozen windows.

I feel bad for the people living there, negatively about anyone advertising there and negatively about otherwise very environmentally conscious land owners for allowing this.

They shouldn't be surprised if ads are shown more often.

Yeah - it seems like this will cause a series of 5 second skippable ads that still sums up to >many seconds of unskippable ads (unless that's banned, in which case they will just see ads more often, as you say)

I expect it will make the experience worse rather than better because the publishers will try to maintain their inventory (how many seconds of ads they show per minute watched)

You mean a regulation will cause unintended consequence? Color me shocked

Then a new regulation is needed; one that caps the ratio of seconds of ads to minute watched.

And what do you think the consequence of that new regulation will be?

Just ban unrequested ads altogether

Do you think YouTube will continue to be available in a country that does this? Or free Spotify?

Is that good? Or bad?

Good

Do you think the constituents in this country would vote for a law explicitly banning YouTube?

Are advertisers just really dead set on making our lives harder? It's a minor inconvenience, but I'm amazed anyone would go to such lengths to do it.

I understand there's money involved, but surely those who offer products must see that it's increasingly counterproductive?

This could turn into the online video equivalent of the Burma Shave road signs.

> Typically, six consecutive small signs would be posted along the edge of highways, spaced for sequential reading by passing motorists. The last sign was almost always the name of the product.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burma-Shave#Roadside_billboard...

I am shaken to my core (sorry, wife hates that phrase, so I have to use it everywhere) at how many posters here see ads.

I'm of the opinion that if you're seeing ads on your hardware, which you paid for, your computer is broken. That advertisements are always evil, always wrong, and never morally just. And everything possible should be done to avoid, remove, or deface them.

To that end:

Andriod:

  - Root your damn phone! And install AdAway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdAway)
  - Firefox + uBlock
  - Don't install malware/spyware (Arguably, Android is spyware, but custom ROMs fix it.)

iOS:

  - AdGuard (free, works well, but not perfect, enable the "extra" filters)
  - Don't install malware/spyware (Arguably, iOS is spyware, but Apple thinks you're a simp, so Good Luck.)

Windows (note, I don't actively use Windows, so these are the things I've collected and used in the past, no idea of their current state):

  - Seriously, you probably shouldn't be using Windows, but I "get it" sometimes you have to.
  - Don't install malware/spyware
  - https://christitus.com/windows-tool/
  - https://old.reddit.com/r/WindowsLTSC/wiki/index
  - https://windhawk.net/
  - https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
  - https://wpd.app/
  - https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

Linux:

  - Firefox + uBlock and done.
  - OpenSnitch if you run random executables from the Internet.

Firefox as a whole:

  - https://github.com/arkenfox

I used to think this. and I do run some of your suggestions.

But how is the internet economy supposed to function without these micro transactions, in the form of ads. A lot of the abundance in software and technology we've seen in the past decade is possible only through this mechanism.

I too struggle with this. It's not like people can't publish things on the web without ads. If the author/artist wanted it to be free, the ads wouldn't be there. So people who use ad blockers are either making a moral choice to consume a paid service for free, or are ignorant of how the internet economy works.

There is an argument to be made that advertisements are so detrimental to the user experience and mental health of the recipient that they are morally justified in blocking them. However, that is debatable when you consider the alternative, which is that the medium you are consuming may not exist at all if not for the advertisements published along with it.

The day I stopped giving half a fraction of a shit was the day Google served me malware in an ad. It was one of those fake "Download" buttons on a very popular open source tool. I wonder how many people have been harmed by that.

> medium you are consuming may not exist at all

I've realized that's not my problem. It's not like most of the internet is healthy anyway. It's psychologically manipulative and designed to keep you fearful, angry, spiteful, jealous, and above all, depressed.

Fuck Google. Fuck Meta. And fuck every single last person working for them.

If a medium doesn't exist because of the lack of ads and you think it's a loss, you should have paid for it (which overall is cheaper than paying though ads).

> If the author/artist wanted it to be free, the ads wouldn't be there.

That's a logical leap. The artist can want both things.

There are two payments involved:

1. The user pays with his time/attention

2. The ad company pays the site

In most cases, the author doesn't mind getting the payments from number 2 even if you skip 1. Many, many sites explicitly point out they don't find a it a problem if you install an ad blocker.

I don't have ads on my site. I'm OK with you consuming it for free. If I put ads one day, I'll still be OK with it, because I know I'll get some money regardless. It's practically free money.

I will not miss the vast majority of sites I go to that serve ads if they all decided to shut down and/or go paid only. I should be spending a lot less time on the Internet/phone to begin with!

I struggle with this too. I struggle less when I remind myself of how much the tech sector has grown in the past 20 years. Not even just in power and control over critical infrastructure, but in wealth.

                              Market Cap by Year
   Year       0                  1                2                3                  4
   2025   Nvidia (4.6T)    Apple (3.9T)      Google (3.8T)    Microsoft (3.5T)    Amazon (2.6T)
   2020   Apple (2.3T)     Microsoft (1.7T)  Amazon (1.6T)    Google (1.2T)       Meta (777M)
   2015   Apple (598M)     Google (534M)     Microsoft (440M) Berkshire (324M)    Exxon (325M)
   2010   Exxon (369M)     PetroChina (303M) Apple (296M)     BHP (244M)          Microsoft (239M) 

             Some Billionaires...
   Year       Musk    Page    Bezos   Ellison  Zuck  Buffett
   Current    714B    257B    251B    244B     227B   148B
   2024       195B    114B    194B    141B     177B   133B 
   2023       180B     79B    114B    107B      64B   106B
   2022       219B    111B    171B    106B      67B   118B
   2021       151B     92B    177B     93B      97B    96B
   2020        25B     51B    113B     59B      55B    68B
   2016        11B     35B     45B     44B      45B    61B
   - There are currently 19 people worth more than $100bn!
     - 4 of them are not American (Arnault, Ortega, Ambani, Helu)
     - 27 of the top 50 richest are non-Americans
     - 57 of the top 100 are non-Americans
   - Bill Gates was first worth $100bn in 1999, becoming the first centibillionaire

It is hard to feel bad when we've seen such an explosion of wealth, especially over the last 5 years. I mean we had a fucking pandemic and all the big players doubled (or nearly) their market caps. We constantly hear about how these companies are having "money issues" but then keep announcing record profits and record bonuses to CEOs.

  > A lot of the abundance in software and technology we've seen in the past decade is possible only through this mechanism.

So I don't agree that it is *ONLY* through this mechanism. Or that if it is that it needs to be done to this degree. It is hard for me personally to take pity when we're on the verge of having the first trillionaire. Honestly, I don't care about a wealth cap and I don't think there should be. It isn't a zero-sum game. But I do care about the wealth floor. It is hard to think of that floor when just the top 5 richest made $887B last year and $1.47T in the last 5 (2024 was a "good" year. Musk is 519B/689B so 368B/781B excluding) and average people are feeling the pressure.

If times were good for the rest of us I honestly couldn't care less if Musk became a trillionaire. Good for him ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. But while wages are stagnant, while the job market is very competitive, we have major layoffs, while inflation is hitting average people hard, and while they keep pretending they can replace us all with AI; then hell fucking yeah I do care.

It ends up being a question about what is more right, than what is right. I'd feel more conflicted if we all, or the majority of us, were benefiting from the advancements. But sympathy is difficult when we look at those numbers.

https://companiesmarketcap.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...

https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/

P.S. here's a fun game for understanding how much a billion dollars is. It's difficult because that level of money generates so much interest.

Imagine you have a billion dollars. You put it in an investment account that earns 10% yearly interest, compounded daily. On day 1 you need funds, so sit on your ass and do nothing. After than, on each weekday you hire a new employee at the cost of $250k/yr and is also paid daily.

How many employees can you hire before you have less than a billion dollars?

There's a lot of variants you can run on this kind of thought experiment and I think they're helpful for understanding that level of wealth.

This is sort of my line of reasoning as well.

In my own petty way. I consider this my pushback against a system that is pushing oppressive systems onto me. But really, I'm partially glad this system works and partially annoyed that this is the cost.

Exactly. And I want you but clear, I'd have a very different opinion if either the companies and C-suite people were struggling or the average person had a significantly higher standard of living.

The dramatically widening gap with the 0.01% is just absurd. Capitalist economies need capital to flow through the system, not pool up. I mean look at Mackenzie Scott. She's trying to throw her money away as fast as possible but earns it faster than she can give it away lol. And that's only 35bn.

I just won't be guilt tripped by people who are at the top. Especially when they're calling the kettle black and just flat out lying (e.g. companies "struggling". Struggling to what? Outperform the previous year's growth? In the middle of a global pandemic? lol)

> But how is the internet economy supposed to function

If the existence of a given industry requires the annihilation of individual privacy and the elimination of free thought, then that industry does not deserve to exist. Kill the ad industry.

And in the process kill all the possibilities the internet has empowered?

Medicine being better delivered, all the research that has been accelerated because of reducing compute and storage costs, the list is infinite.

Yes, kill it all. None of that is worth the panopticon that is being built.

You will need to provide stronger justification how "medicine being delivered" hinges upon me watching a 60 second unskippable ad before a YouTube video.

Other types of micro transactions and payments are possible

Behavioral (invisible) analytics alone is the secret trillion dollar industry that online advertisers want to distract you from by focusing on the morality of ad blocking.

A good blocker should block many of those scripts too, but there's no stopping server-side analytics at scale.

Most things worth doing on the internet are either A) paid for B) garner enough good will that they can be supported via some polite pan-handling or C) cheap enough to operate that it's a perfectly acceptable hobby expense for 1 person in your community.

Streaming services and E-commerce are the classic examples for A. Wikipedia is the quintessential example for B. C includes pretty much all the social outlets: Web forums, a Matrix server, private game servers (public game servers fall under A), blogs, etc.

  > iOS:

  - uBlock Origin now exists
    - Settings > Apps > Safari > (General) Extensions > uBlock Origin Lite
  https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id6745342698

  - Alternatively, use Orion Browser (Kagi)
    - Pros: a bit better ad blocking
    - Cons: more buggy
  https://apps.apple.com/us/app/orion-browser-by-kagi/id1484498200

I'd also recommend installing Firefox, logging in, but use Safari. That way you can export a tab to Firefox where you can still get the send tabs feature.

  >  Firefox as a whole:

  Also check out BetterFox
  - https://github.com/yokoffing/BetterFox

Side Note:

Phones are also general computer systems. Fuck this bullshit of pretending they're anything less. If you don't have control over your computer, your computer is broken. You don't have to be forced to adhere to Big Tech's short comings.

  > Andriod:

  - Install Termux (from F-droid, not Playstore)
    - It is trivial to write scripts to handle a lot of things that work through third parties. Less than 100 lines. I find these scripts *better* than many app alternatives and infinitely more trustworthy. We're on HN, everyone here should be able to write basic scripts. Hell, the AI could probably do these things easily (make it use functions! Bash needs functions!)
      Some ideas to show scope of what you can do:
      - Automated backups: just a fucking rsync to your folders (god fuck Apple, why can't I rsync my pictures on an iPhone!!!!)
        - I have my script check for WiFi. If on my SSID I rsync locally. If not, I go through Tailscale. If not on WiFi I don't backup, minimizing my data usage. I'm lazy and just set the cron job to run once a day, making each backup usually pretty small but can cause larger backups when traveling 
        - rsync can also remove files from your phone if you're concerned about storage.
        - You can backup to multiple locations! Even if you use google drive or whatever you should still rsync to your local machine. Remember, Google photos doesn't save full resolution. 

      - Loss Prevention: Your phone hasn't accessed a set of predetermined WIFI SSIDs in a set time period? Send a file to a known computer (Tailscale), email yourself, or something else with the device's coordinates. Add an easing function, check battery health, and whatever info you want. Hell, even take pictures. You can also make it play music or whatever to help find it. 

      - Replicate Apple's Check In:
        - You can read GPS coordinates, SSIDs, and send SMS messages. This is a lot easier than you think

      - Enforce the actual WIFI SSID you want!
        - Phone sometimes jumping on the wrong SSID? Have no fear a few lines of code can tell it to fuck off! 
          - I had this issue living in graduate housing where a university AP was near my unit. My phone would randomly decide to join the uni's connection despite sitting a few feet from my router and having better signal strength... 
  
  - Install Tailscale and get access to your local machines remotely
    - Setup a raspberry pi at home and make an exit node that uses pihole (suggestion: check out systemd-nspawn)

How reliable are cronjobs in termux?

Does they get killed if you're low on memory?

Perhaps you could share these scripts somewhere? I'm sure other people would find inspiration from them.

Personally I use Nextcloud for all my phone and computer backups, it's working well for me.

  > How reliable are cronjobs in termux?

I mean it is no systemd... cron is cron. As long as termux is running they run. Just make sure google doesn't kill it and that it starts on boot. I haven't really had issues tbh.

  > Does they get killed if you're low on memory?

Honestly, no idea. I've never pushed my device that hard. 8GB is quite a lot for a phone.

  > Perhaps you could share these scripts somewhere?

I should have posted with my realname account. I did put them in my dotfiles but I can't share that repo without doxing myself. Is there something you're specifically interested in?

  > Personally I use Nextcloud

That seems like a good route too. Would you recommend this over my setup? I find my current setup pretty easy tbh but hey, nothings perfect and it can always be better, right?

> Just make sure google doesn't kill it

That's what I mean. How can you make sure of that?

> Is there something you're specifically interested in?

No, I already have a setup that's working for me.

> Would you recommend this over my setup?

Well, it depends. Nextcloud is a full Google Workspace replacement basically, including files sharing, office, notes, kanban, calendar, emails, chat, video calls, photo management. I use it for my business (and it's great) so I just use some spare storage for my own backups.

Probably overkill unless you want the other features.

  > How can you make sure of that?

https://netzro.github.io/posts/2025/Jun/08/setting-up-cronie...

Ok nice, noted in case I need it in the future. Thanks.

> Root your damn phone!

I did for many years, and finally gave up. With recent Androids, life in the rooted world is much more difficult:

Netflix automatically drops to a lower quality tier.

Many apps now just refuse to work on a rooted phone.

But the worst thing: If I want to update the ROM to get the latest security benefits, I have to wipe my data.

Surprised you didn't mention something like PiHole.

PiHole is fine, I guess. I'm not a huge fan of it personally because:

  - It's local network only, and while I can VPN home, I don't always want to
  - It has a high maintenance overhead, at least for me. It would block too much, then my wife would complain, and I'd have to spend time figuring out the magic rule that was breaking.
  - It's DNS-level blocking only, which is helpful but doesn't cover nearly as much ground as just uBlock can. 
  - The DNS server has annoying preconfigured caching rules, that, while I can work around, it was just more effort for something I don't want to put more effort into.

It's far easier to just install uBlock and tell my wife, if something breaks, just click the red shield icon, then click the giant power button.

But doesn't uBlock only block stuff via the browser?

I want to block ads from most apps.

A hosts file will do the same as pihole, but locally.

Buttttt, this goes back to my original post. DO NOT INSTALL MALWARE.

Because that's my first rule, I don't use apps with ads.

Generally, if I can't do a thing from a standard website, I probably don't need to be doing it. Otherwise, I have nothing against paying for a good app. For example, I LOVE AutoSleep.

On Android, it sometimes is hard to find a paying app to replace an ads app. The ads model is much more lucrative, so developers go that route.

Yeah, it's crazy. Imagine if you let people into your home every day to slap advertising posters on to your walls. This is obnoxious shit and I don't understand how people tolerate it.

I'm beginning to wonder if many people are not comfortable with simply being content. They actually want someone to come and tell them why they aren't happy. Ads do that for them.

You paid for your hardware. But did you pay for all the services you use (like search engines, games, mail, other services)?

If not, how do you think they should make money?

(I don't like ads myself).

> If not, how do you think they should make money?

Figure it out or go bankrupt, for all I care. They're the ones who chose a business model directly adversarial to their users.

Plenty of games, mail and other services work without ads already, I'm sure if we're one day lucky enough to see Google go belly up someone will fill that hole as well.

In case you wanted a more reputable source: https://theinvestor.vn/online-video-advertisements-in-vietna...

Basically banning brand advertising ads. Interesting. This will be a pain for a bunch of developers to adhere to lol.

> Basically banning brand advertising ads.

I don't get it. Could you please elaborate? Thanks in advance!

In marketing their is a distinction between direct response ads (get people to take action) vs brand ads (force people to just watch, no immediate action needed).

Unskippable ads are almost always brand ads focusing on total view time.

Interesting, I wonder if this will spike VPN traffic into Vietnam.

What's the subset of users with a VPN but no ublock?

NordVPN users sold by the "anti-hacker" ads?

Yeah probably not. A large amount of posts and videos from social medias are blocked in Vietnam, it's still a communist country with very low level of free speech and press freedom, albeit still better than China.

Source: I used to live there.

Interesting, the link title was revised, but "Vienam" spelling remains? What?

Interesting coming from a developing nation. One thing I've always thought is, it may be vible to replace ad-funded free services with paid services in developed nations where residents may be able to afford it, but developing nations may be much more reliant on such free services and could get priced out.

Higher volume of skippable ads incoming

I'm glad someone is finally pushing back on unskippable / dark-pattern ads. The "fake progress bar", tiny close buttons, and multi-ad chains are just hostile UX.

Small related thing. I built a tiny free + open-source Chrome extension ("Parsely") that lets you focus only on the content. No ad, No distraction.

I originally made it to avoid ad-heavy / attention-stealing pages when I'm reading something.

If this kind of "make the web slightly less annoying" tooling resonates, feedback/PRs welcome.

Demo page: https://parsely.obasic.app Why we built this: https://parsely.obasic.app/story GitHub: https://github.com/TeamOliveCode/parsely

Was this posted automatically or why it reads Vienam? Without the T! And the title also reads so?

I posted it with the original article title. I'm not sure who changed it, but yeah, there is a typo which also exists in the linked article.

Indeed it first had no T, and s.o. changed it. Also raises questions reg the original title.

Both here and on the source post there is a typo in the title (Vietnam instead of Vienam).

And this is why I run an ad blocker in my browser on top of a pihole for my home. The whole situation sucks, and I'm often willing to pay for an ad-free experience.

I still would never buy an X10 camera or any other of their products given how they abused pop-over/under ads. Same for Sony for other reasons... I can carry a product grudge for decades.

Obligatory "We Must Destroy X10" moment! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF8NK6eruUs :D

While on the subject, does anybody know any good ad-blocking solutions for mobile phones?

So far I have experimented with NetShield from ProtonVPN and https://nextdns.io/ with varying results. There are also features baked into certain browsers like the cookie blocker with DuckDuckGo which works extremely well, and UnTrap for Safari on iOS which allows for heavy Youtube web customisation.

Also, shout out to Playlet on Roku. A privacy focused YouTube proxy for the TV which blocks ads and even can identify sponsors, filler and credit segments and allow you to skip these.

I am not involved in any of these projects, I just think they're cool.

I am using Brave and YouTube Revanced on my android and I completely forgot what ads look like

Firefox on Android has UBlock Origin available. But that covers the browser only. I guess AdGuard and VPN might help here?

Adguard works great. UBlock on Firefox also does the job.

Firefox Focus has an extension build in that works with Safari

https://blokada.org/

Blokada 5 is free. It blocks ads and trackers system wide. It works in all games and apps I checked for the last 4-5 years.

Used to work with YouTube as well, but not any more. I use New Pipe for that.

You're experience may vary depending on block lists you subscribe to, but vanilla set up is already quite good.

So instead of one minute-long ad, I'm going to get 12 I have to manually skip? Thanks, Vietnam.

No, "thanks, company that is pushing 12 ads at you." The law is not forcing companies to treat you badly.

Oh, thank God, there’s someone with common sense who hates ads and is in a position of power to push this law through. Even if it’s only in Vietnam, it sets a precedent for other countries to follow. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with ads themselves; the problem lies with the platform owners. YouTube, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime Video, HBO, etc., use dark patterns to force users to upgrade to ad free plans. These manipulation tactics are designed to push people into more expensive subscriptions. My prediction is that once platform owners can no longer make money from unskippable ads, they’ll simply get rid of ad supported subscription tiers altogether, like we had before.

Poorly thought out and family subscription to YouTube premium in Vietnam is $6/month USD. Google is just going to pull a different lever to compensate, like just displaying more shorter ads per session.

Then there can be regulation of that too.

Indeed, just keep pulling the policy ratchet if tech tries to subvert.

It likely wouldn't take much to get YouTube to just shut out Vietnam; ads there are very cheap, so they probably weren't making much money anyway.

Minimal loss, the content can still be ripped and shared through other systems. Youtube is adversarial S3 imho. We can collectively live without Google and Youtube, without getting into the slop argument. I would take a different perspective about social contract if Google did not do Google things, and try to squeeze its users as hard as possible.

I don't think Google's gonna be hurting for this one given the fact that hitting the skip button gives Google a strong signal that a real human just watched the ad and it didn't just play to an empty room.

Yep. Ad viewability standards simply require that a video ad was 50% onscreen for a continuous 2 seconds in order for it to count as an impression. Google probably usually gets that even for skippable ads.

> Picture this: an advertiser pays premium rates for space on your site, but their carefully crafted creative sits unseen at the bottom of a page your readers never scroll to. Despite technically delivering the impression you promised, you've essentially sold empty air. This disconnect between ads served and ads seen is why viewability has emerged as the cornerstone metric in digital advertising's maturity.

> Video ads require at least two seconds of continuous play while 50% visible ... These seemingly arbitrary thresholds represent extensive research into human attention patterns.

https://www.playwire.com/blog/ad-viewability

I hate ads with all my heart. And I go out of my way to religiously block them. I employ DNS blocking (through my own adguard home server) on my whole network (I use this DNS server connected to unbound to act as recursive DNS on all devices even when I am outside home). I use ublock origin on Firefox browser (one of the forks that guts Firefox ads and privacy settings by default) and on my iPhone I use wipr + uBlock Origin lite. I have several userscripts to block ads one some websites (i.e I block HN jobs posts).

I have a mental view that gets disrupted by ads and sometimes even angry. In the rare moments which I use a computer or phone of a friend or family without those, I really can't tolerate the suffering they go through. My single best advice to people about using ublock origin and Firefox resonated with everyone of them. I use it on my parents devices as the best security measure that could be used.

Am I overreacting, maybe but I find my level of tolerance for ads is zero no matter how much I agree that some of them are good or not. Maybe this is the result of decades of self imposing dark patterns and intrusive ads do to some people. I really feel sorry for majority of internet users that do not use adblockers.

Companies are not obligated to provide you with services for free. You are free to solely use non ad supported services.

They are free to block me if they detect I am using adblocker. It is on by default. And for most services paying does not guarantee that I do not get ads.

I am not under any obligation to let my client serve their ads which is usually the number one malware vector.

And he is free to use free ad-supported services and not watch ads.

Any advance in JavaScript and outrageous browser complexity is cheered at here on HN, but waking up to the fact that their actual purpose is unskippable ads and browser monopolies is not so funny.

I often blacklist sites that cover content with unremovable ads or has unrelenting ads. They need a clear button that acknowledges I've seen it and to stop annoying me.

This is slightly off topic, but something I find myself wondering pretty regularly: if ads are pretty much universally hated by every human on earth, why do companies continue running them?

I get the obvious answer: "they work"

But do they? Do big companies have a real data-driven model to demonstrate annoying ads leading to sales?

While anecdotal, I can think of a number of specific times ads slipped through my ad blocker and I went out of my way to avoid buying anything from those companies.

I recently read about 'in thread' ads, like on Twitter, as being not as effective unless they are 'brand recognition' ads. Like, they will help you decide which one to pick when you are staring at two fungible brands on the shelf, but they will not convince you to buy something you have never heard about before, especially not from a direct click through. So while Ads work is true, in many ways, they don't in many others. The brand damage you can get from having those in-thread ads is also real: Ads target the user, not the thread, but by showing up, users associate advertisers with the thread. If you were in some argument about dictators taking over, and suddenly a product pops up, you may assign the negative energy you have toward dictators to that brand as well.

The main app I use with unskippable ads (usually for crappy games, ugh) is FlightRadar24 - since it remembers where you were on the map, I will always just swipe up and kill the app, and it's usually not to hard to find what I was looking at again after re-opening. Of course that wouldn't work with something with more state but I'm glad I can do that.

I love the picture of politicians sitting by themselves, annoyed by something as all other people are, and thinking "there's nothing I can do about it". Good on Vietnam for actually doing something about it.

I got a taste of this from an EU MEP that I proposed something to, and they replied "it can't be done because of the law". I then replied "but you make the law, it's literally your job!" - and they looked at me, blank faced. Imagine large rooms filled with people who mindlessly act within a framework they dislike, whilst being the only people who could actually change it, and not having the will to do so. It sounds like some special type of hell.

I shudder to think how many people sitting in positions of power just mindlessly continue doing a thing because of some form of complacency. Madness.

"Hurr durr we're monitoring the situation."

This is such a good step.

> Online platforms must add visible symbols and guidelines to help users report ads that violate the law and allow them to turn off, deny, or stop seeing inappropriate ads.

The fact that this even needs to be written into law to force companies into taking more responsibility with their advertisments is incredible.

When I was traveling in Asia I was sometimes on VPN and sometimes not. I noticed that when I was not on VPN I got a lot more unskippable youtube ads than when I was, even though I was using the same browser and adblockers.

Apparently Google knows how to circumvent adblockers, and they're testing these tools in certain markets.

Time for a military intervention by the US.

I not too long ago received an ad on YouTube that was an entire episode of the UK reality TV program 'Made In Chelsea'. I think it was skippable but I couldn't believe that a) someone set up an ad campaign to do this, and b) YouTube didn't detect it.

Note that this is most likely on paper only as they have zero power to enforce this on Youtube / Facebook which are the most popular ads-serving consumer services in the country currently.

The regulation will be enforce on domestic companies only.

This will push CPMs down, and therefore companies will make up for the lower earnings-per-ad by showing more ads.

You can rearrange the deck chairs, sure, but more ads might be more annoying than fewer longer ones.

Such ban, even if copied in other places, will probably lead companies to display more small ads per showing.

It might also lead to more intrusive ads, as each user now has at most 5 second to see.

Pet peeve: Skip/close button appears after a few seconds - bht it only leads to another view whose close button is hidden for a few seconds too, and sometimes in a different corner.

I like how the country is taking bold steps. This is a great move.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269

Feels appropriate: What if we made advertising illegal?

I wish the US led with stuff like this. More and more I feel like our politicians just care about enriching themselves without trying to improve our quality of life.

That’s not bad but better would be to require a default of chronological order for showing content with an option for “discover” other content but only on demand.

I feel no one really clicks on ads. I don't understand about it, but they just feel to be there so they can have a tracker for your habits

What's with the weird duck that flies out from the top right into the bottom left of the screen when you first open the article?

Good for them, now they need to take it one step further for an even shorter and better title. And we should all follow suit.

5 seconds... too slow. Ublock's better.

This is primarily targeting mobile gaming which is huge in Vietnam.

Ah yes, thanks.

Are there a total ad time percentage metric in this law too, or will they simply be watching many more smaller ads?

missing a T

viet fucking nam man - the dude

The T really ties the word together man

Unyielding fidelity to the original article title.

Faithful "to a t"

What is unyielding fidelity? noun. A steadfastness in loyalty and support, characterized by a firm and unwavering devotion to a cause, principle, or person, demonstrating exceptional persistence and reliability despite obstacles or challenges.

Without a t, it may as well be a streaming service.

It doesn't bode well for the quality of the source, if it can't even spell a country's name right!

I wondered if maybe it was about Vienna

5s is still too long. Immediate skip.

AdGuard as a local VPN also bans unskippable Ads without the pesky legal enforcement baggage.

Vietnam, not "Vienam"

So, is it vietnam or vienam ? because the headline says vienam.

I love this, I hope the rest of the world adopts it :)

US companies respond with 100 skippable ads per minute

How does television work in Vietnam? Is it all adfree?

nope but freeTV is limited to 10% total ad time, and payTV limited to 5%. Maximum ad time per hour is 4 times 5 minutes and a single movie cannot be interrupted more than two times, a show not more than 4 times. News cannot be interrupted at all and programs shorter than I think 10 minutes neither.

I live an ad-free lifestyle and it is very serene.

This "Vienam" sounds like a nice place!

It's nice to read a case of government intervention making things better for the public rather than just more surveillance and control. And from Vietnam of all places.

I'd make the case that turning their citizens into consumers like America has done could be considered a national security risk.

I know this is a deeply unpopular opinion, but I don't get humans sometimes. Why does this need regulating? Am I the only person who just doesn't use services which do this?

This is so obviously a free-market problem. The reason these ads exist is because there's a significant percentage of people who are happy to put up with them and those people mean that products can be better funded without requiring subscriptions.

If people want to use products with unskippable ads, then who cares? This "I want X without Y" regulation is so stupid. You can't have X without Y. Just go buy Z product and stop asking regulators to find ways to keep you coming back to products of consumer-hostile corporations.

Where is Vienam? Probably next to Camboia?

On the South Chia Sea

VPN use via Vietnam is about to go global.

Not sure it will be worth the 300ms latency penalty.

300ms is a lot less latency than an ad

Running ads unskippably: unspeakably sad.

(I managed to improve it.)

Running ads unskippably: unspeakably sad earning.

And then I thought the poster skipped a t

*Vietnam mandates 5 second ads

So I have only one subscription: Youtube because of family/kids and bonus YT music.

For the rest: adguard phone/pihole home, frosty instead of twitch, newpipe instead of youtube(I hate the interface), infinity instead of reddit and a lot more alternatives for social media. Also using xmanager for some apps ;). I have zero ads on my phone or my pc. I disabled the ads once for my wife, she instantly yelled at me to enable it again :).

I saw one where it was 20 seconds before the skip/x appeared, then when you hit X it pushes you to the app store, then when you hit back the x button moves to a new location, then when you hit it, it puts you into a 5 second "hey we're not done yet" ad cta... combine that with the fact the ad is showing soap opera gameplay that doesn't exist in the game - how is this even allowed?

Refreshing to see. Makes you wonder what we could achieve if we all just started to say no to enshitification of the world.

Unfathomably based

We need this too in the EU.

Actually, there should not be ads to begin with. They always waste my time. Thankfully there is ublock origin - which Google killed while lying about why they did so. Everyone knows why Google killed ublock origin (it still works on Firefox, but how many people still use Firefox?).

It's Vietnam.

2 words. adblock

I <3 Vienam

I always wondered about traditional television. People like my dad still have it. It still has a shitload of ads. They're unskippable. People don't really seam to care about those for some reason though.

A television commercial hasn't been unskippable since the advent of the DVR in 1999. If you do care about avoiding commercials, that's where you have the most power to avoid it. It's streaming where the service has full power to restrict control of navigation through the video stream.

At some point, I would imagine we will be able to request content and have an agent skip or otherwise remove advertisements, right? We'll have to wait for that, just like with a DVR, but it seems worth it to me.

My mum has a DVR so she tends to watch things later and skip the ads. For this reason our TV provider is pushing a new box which has no DVR capability and can only access things from streaming... they bill this as an advantage since you don't have to explicitly record anything. But it's all about adverts.

Finally. I've seen the ad. I never want the product or service or (most often) shitty misrepresented mobile game.

Advertising standards agencies in most Western countries are scum.

Vie(t)nam

Another step towards Blipverts from Max Headroom.

So I really hate ads and either block them or avoid the product altogether. My tolerance is very close to zero.

But is it the government's job to regulate good user experience? Are unskippable ads a social problem that must be regulated away? I am the polar opposite of a libertarian, but to me ads are the alternative to other means of monetisation. They support things that are free to use but not free to operate. The transaction is consensual and not unavoidable.

Socialists countries, always in the forefront of basic human rights.

And just like that, millions of disillusioned youth embraced communism ...

vie*t*nam?

Title should be "Vietnam", not "Vienam". I would downvote the submitter just for the reason that he posted this without correting it first.

"correting" lol

Ironic. But mine is just a dumb comment, not the title of the post.

The article title reflects the typo, it's an issue with the original publication.

So what? If something is obviously wrong it should be fixed.

Original title was

> Vienam Bans Unskippable Ads, Requires Skip Button to Appear After 5 Seconds

If we need to edit titles, could we at least take the opportunity to correct obvious typos? (Missing the t in Vietnam)

Paging @dang

Also submission titles can be edited in the first 5 minutes of posting or so.

Yikes! not sure how we missed tha.

Fixed now.

- Google just needs to tell DJT

- Vietnam get 50 % tariffs

- Change the ban

- Easy peasy for Tech bros.

Thank you for your zero value Reddit comment

fuck yes, fuck APPLOVIN

If you were giving out free cookies at the front of your store intended to thank shoppers for coming in, and someone reaches in and grabs one while running past, that's an ad-blocker. Not the most ethically justifiable[1], but legal. This law though is saying that if you have a person at the door who makes sure you are at least browsing the store before giving you a free cookie, that practice is now illegal. This is utterly nonsense to me. Does the Vietnam constitution contain a right to free VOD? How do TV broadcasters get away with it, given they're riddled with "non-skippable ads" -- about 17 minutes per hour of them!

[1] if you want to dispute this, is it just because you're thinking the store is run by a big company you don't like and that you feel rips people off? Does it change though if your mom baked those cookies to give out to try to get people to shop in her little boutique that barely makes enough money to cover rent? The point is just that it's not universally justifiable. I don't care if you block ads (I block them too) or take free samples from stores.

I'm just wondering why governments think it's a good idea to regulate ads. IMO that is something the market (e.g. the users) should take care of.

How, as a user, do I avoid getting ads shoved in front of my eyes on buses? on billboards? on subways? on tv channels? at movies? in my mail? in my email? in my search results? in my map app?

i'm just wondering what you want the "market" to do and how.

Ad driven internet content is at least 25 years old, so it’s had time to settle into the equilibrium the market will converge to. The current state of things is precisely where the market drove it to, so it seems pretty clear that the “invisible hand” isn’t going to make it better and appears to favor making it worse. This seems like an obvious case where an external force is required to push the market in a direction it doesn’t naturally want to land at.

Beyond the ad driven internet, ad driven content has been at least 150 years old. Ever seen a photo of a pre-WW1 baseball stadium? Or soccer stand? Covered in ads. Old newspapers are awash in ads. Day time TV soap operas are so named because they were sponsored by soap companies.

All a giant waste. Just propaganda blasted at our eyes and ears all day, a drum beat of distraction attacks on our attention. Almost all forms of advertising should be banned or regulated till they are as quiet and unobtrusive as possible.

Best argument I can think of is the fact that half of ads on American TV have the words "ask your doctor about ___" in them. Drugs ads should be banned.

The market inevitably trends toward the lowest common denominator. We deserve better.

You can make better. But there's a reason non-ad-supported businesses barely ever work out.

They aren't even regulating the ads, they're mandating that video platforms show content without monetization.

Live TV had unskippable ads for like the last 80 years, and somehow YouTube is different? Why?

I hate ads, I block ads, and even I think this is stupid. Idk what Vietnam's constitution is like, but I think it's absurd from a free country perspective. If I'm paying to serve you videos, why don't I get to set the terms of that deal? Nobody is forcing you to go to a specific website. If you think they're crap because of all the ads, I likely would agree with you. I think blocking them can't be criminalized, because after all it is your device you're using to remove the ads. But how can you fine or punish a company for not explicitly letting you take the content without complying with their terms?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com