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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

The only way out of this is to make ad platforms liable for scam ads. At the moment it's simply too profitable to print lies.

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Kids today learning about the FTC and standards... we used to be a real country, with real laws that actually helped real people.

Bernie Sanders on reversing America's decline

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/05/we-can...

Yep, one of the big problems is the penalty for any corporate crime today is not enough. Often the crime is more profitable than the penalty hurts.

If you want to fix ads, make a malicious ad cost the ad network triple the amount they got paid to display it. Corporations are psychopathic by design, if you want to fix them you need to make it an actual financial risk to do something bad.

And then heck, if you want to make stopping the original bad actors more effective, make the platforms pay up those damages but empower them to recover that loss if they can get it from the malicious advertiser.

You'll see platforms doing more vetting of content, doing more KYC, and focused on reducing their own risk.

One only needs to look at the Grok-generating-nudes fiasco to see that potential financial liabilities are a pittance to huge companies. We need to jail CEOs whose companies break the law.

You can just get away with fraud:

Former CEO of Volkswagen AG Charged with Conspiracy and Wire Fraud in Diesel Emissions Scandal

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-ceo-volkswage...

> He remains a fugitive in the United States and is wanted by the Environmental Protection Agency on charges including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to violate the Clean Air Act, and multiple counts of wire fraud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Winterkorn

No there is another way. We can ban advertising completely.

How else do you make your product known? In many markets, there are just too many competitors, and so the only way to make any money at all is to advertise. I also hate ads, but I also think there is a better way, and better regulation would go a long way to making ads more bearable.

> there are just too many competitors

This ought to be a signal that the market is already being served, that it is unlikely to be a big opportunity to make more money.

Even with advertising, what you have in such a market is an all-pay auction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-pay_auction

The end point is nobody makes any profit on apps, because all the money that ought to be profit goes to paying for a bidding war on ad slots.

"The market" is no longer your local neighborhood, it's often the entire globe.

I know that.

In fact, more than know, I assumed the only category under discussion were at a minimum nation-scale, what with local knowledge not requiring online advertising as a sign on a building is enough for local neighbourhoods.

You should never see an ad without seeking it out, so catalogs or something I guess. It's not my problem frankly. If having ads is so important they should have been more careful with them.

I miss catalogs! And I'm not sure that works for every kind of product. You forgot to mention door-to-door sales (not a thing outside of the US AFAIK) or cold-calling potential customers (only applicable for certain types of products), good old word-of-mouth (need to get lucky and reach "influencers"), or throw tupperware-type parties. There are surely other methods as well.

Re: being careful

Any system created by humans will be abused unless regulated. And even then, there will always be loopholes which will be abused until punished (and even punishment might not be a proper deterrent if it can be calculated as a cost of business. (Yes I'm arguing for and against you, just thinking out loud basically ;)

edit: grammar

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