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Comment by ryanmcbride | Hacker News Reader

Everything with ads is garbage. All the time. It poses no benefit to humanity even a little bit.

Local advertisements can be nice. The advertisement section in the local newspaper was a thing people used to actually seek out, once upon a time. The real problem is the scaling of advertisement frameworks globally and algorithmically serving individuals or certain groups. It is strictly parasitic at that level.

If "can be nice" is the bar of quality we hold ads to, then all advertisement passes the bar. A lot of newspaper ads were for luxury tchotchkes, cigarettes, booze or gambling. Back then, advertisements had some pretty substantial downsides, normalizing entire swathes of behavior that is today considered unhealthy and exploitative.

At most, I would call advertisement a Tragedy of the Commons. But the way publicity works, it feels like the tragedy is unavoidable; all smart advertisers will eventually transgress against normalcy.

> If "can be nice" is the bar of quality we hold ads to, then all advertisement passes the bar.

No. I literally never want to see an advertisement on my computer, unless I'm visiting a local forum with local advertisements. If I want to see a product or service online, I will search for it using my search engine that does not accept payment for search rankings.

Global, digital advertising is clearly a different class of advertising than local advertisements.

I'd really like for some country to ban all ads, even if just for a while, so people could observe the quasi-experiment.

My personal bet would be the country would suffer for it quite a lot, similar to places that have banned e.g. loans, but it'd be very cool if I were wrong!

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

I wonder why you think the country would suffer?

Maybe we should look at paid media as a honeypot.

Without paid media, marketing spend gets pushed to “organic” and “content marketing” aka blog spam and other crap.

Yes.

But then, is any and all public communication about a product or a service originating from a stakeholder of said product or feature basically an ad?

depends on where the public communication is happening. On their own publicly accessible site? then no that wouldn't be advertising it would be information. In links on random unrelated websites, before videos, in the sky, on the side of the road, in bright lights on the side of a mountain, a person standing in the street with a megaphone being paid by the company? Yes, that would be advertising.

The clear mark of someone who's never owned a business and had to find customers to sell their product.

Why don’t your customers find you? Assuming you have what they want.

I suppose depends how broadly “ad” is taken to be. Is a webpage an ad? Presumably no if it’s your landing page.

OP is presumably talking about invasive ads that try to take the attention of people who aren’t looking for the product in question

What business did you own and what happened to it?

Except for socialising the entire internet age, giving poor people in 3rd world slums the same access to the same platforms as the richest 0.001%.

No one likes to acknowledge this, but there is an alternate timeline where only the rich kid in school has a Google account, reddit account, meta account, and almost all content is still produced by massive media conglomerates.

Ads suck and everyone hates them, but don't lose sight of what they enabled by hyperfocusing on the bad.

> No one likes to acknowledge this, but there is an alternate timeline where only the rich kid in school has a Google account, reddit account, meta account.

It is not at all obvious that this would be a worse timeline to live in.

Before Google, before Reddit, before Facebook, people all over the world, rich and poor, run their own sites and their own forums, allowing them to chat with people throughout the world.

Here in Serbia, even in the worst of times (sanctions, NATO bombing in 1999), people with internet access could participate in local and global fora, newsgroups etc. It was expensive to get a computer and internet access, but people were willing to pay to host a small community. Late in 90s and early in 2000s, there was a huge number of cheap "virtual hosting" providers, and even cheaper LAMP stack providers, where people would run their own phpBB or similar forum software. IRC I probably need not mention.

This "great equalising" has been nothing but a negative in the long run.

The cultural internet blip of the 90's/early 00's is never coming back. Its not a framework for a free open internet, it's an anomaly that was born from a convergence of factors that was short lived before the masses showed up. A wonderful thing to be a part of, no question I get warm fuzzies thinking about it now, but I recognize what it was. It's akin to dreaming of that time you caught Coldplay play a small london pub in 1998, and then thinking it would be so great if Coldplay could just play small pubs again. Not happening.

No disagreement there, but I do disagree that on the internet, poor and rich would not intermingle without the big tech players: they already have, and even if not for them, they would have continued.

I am not reminiscing anything here, but I do believe this counterpoint does disprove the claim to the contrary :)

Ads didn't give us Wikipedia. The vast majority of blogs and forums were not for profit. Specialised media outlets were always subscription-based. Large amounts of valuable information like research papers, technical documentation and curated databases were paywalled.

The content that ad-based websites brought was mostly clickbait designed around serving these ads.

An yet here we are, on a giant advertisement.

Its marketing all the way down. ;0)

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