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Comment by geye1234 | Hacker News Reader

It's astonishing that people accept advertising as normal and acceptable. It's psychological abuse.

Obviously this doesn't apply to classified ads or their electronic equivalents. But what we normally mean by advertising, where people are paid vast sums of money to think very, very hard about how to manipulate you to hand over money for shit you don't need, is vomit-inducing. Billboards are even worse because they deface and degrade the public landscape, and ugly landscapes can contribute to depression, anxiety, irrational anger, and other problems. They are as bad as littering.

What has made people think this is ok?

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The ads have changed. Back in my adolescence, I would read the back pages of Byte, Nintendo World, Sega something, Computer Shopper. I devoured them, there was no scorn.

These days it is ads of folks around my age doing a yoga type of a thing on a beach and stretching joyfully at sunrise.

The ads are about some meds that can cause suicidal thoughts and constipation (in small print and quick blah blah blah) but "may" help your arthritis.

Then, a $150K Ranger Rover ad, a thing I'd never want to be seen in even if I could afford it.

I've worked in digital ad tech for many years, I like ads, but I want good ads. Never bought anything from a 180 second long ad on Amazon Prime Video.

One would think that with all PII that's been gathered, a brand could scratch an itch, but nah, it's just useless carpet bombing.

I've been to France and I've seen the ads on public channels on a hotel TV. They were very innocuous compared to merde we are fed in the states.

I think it is the boiling frog experience. It has just slowly happened over time, and sometimes they push too hard and get blow back. So you step it down a notch but keep pushing forward until one day you look back and can't remember a day where there were no ads.

I have ad free household. We treat ads like a poison, like there's a fire. Over the top reaction to shut them down if they creep in. It has taught my own child to avoid ads like the plague (unlike their peers).

I have no idea how people use the Internet with all the ads, no blockers. It is just bonkers, and even at work it is an uphill battle to convince people ad-blockers should be enforced just to protect the business from malicious ads, let alone their own brains.

I want to lobby to have all adverts removed from public transport, but I am unsure how to do that in Australia, but I will work it out.

Yeah I've taught my kids to treat ads the same way, and we make a joke about quickly turning the screen off when ads come on. Of course we have UBO and Unhook installed, plus DNS blocking. I tell them what I put in my post above, that advertising is a form of deceit, manipulation to get you to act against your own interest. Naturally we don't have a TV, because why would anyone want to do that?

I don't know what I'm going to teach them about politics when the time comes, since (what most people mean by) politics is essentially a particularly malevolent and dangerous species of advertising, but at the same time I don't want to make them too cynical.

I don't know if the boiling frog thesis explains it, since it's gone from near-zero to 100 in non-western countries over the past couple of decades, unlike the west where it's built up slowly over the past century and a half.

Didn't know about Unhook, seems like a great extension to use.

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