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Comment by WarmWash | Hacker News Reader

The more you ad-block and tracker block, the more scammy the ads when you take down the guards.

People who never do any sort of blocking are the most valuable ad-targets, and hence get the highest bids when their views are auctioned. They get Toyota, Coke, and Downy ads.

Scam advertisers are bottom feeders and the "advertiser of last resort". Google doesn't really care that much about people with blank profiles, and why would they, these people use their services and contribute nothing back. I don't think Google is vindictive, but it just doesn't make business sense to put a lot of resources into cleaning up ads that pay google nothing and mostly go to people who temporarily disabled their ad-block.

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> doesn't make business sense to put a lot of resources into cleaning up ads that pay google nothing

If we lived in a sane world, Google would be held accountable for every scam they advertise. It doesn't matter if you think someone deserved to get scammed for using an ad blocker, because they never would have been scammed if Google didn't choose to put them in danger for the sake of profit.

"But they can't possibly review every ad before publishing" they say. If that's the case, then they should scale down the amount of ads they allow until it reaches a manageable scale (eg every single ad can be reviewed by a human employee). They might make less money, but it's an expectation we have of nearly all industries (eg commercial truck drivers have to follow extra restrictions in addition to regular speed limits)

Yes. "At our scale, we can't possibly do X" is a reason to not scale. It's not a reason to dodge doing X.

If we lived in a sane world, people would simply pay for what they use. Then we could avoid all this confusion, and google would have large (monetary) incentive to protect it's customers.

Google and Meta are entirely within their rights to make YouTube, Search, Facebook and Instagram into paid services for all users. Nobody is forcing them to advertise or to participate in criminal fraud with scam ads.

They are heading pretty steadfastly into multi billion dollar lawsuits the way they are going.

Multi-billion dollar lawsuits aren't such a disincentive when they are making hundreds of billions in profit every year.

>If we lived in a sane world, people would simply pay for what they use

This is some proper, indoctrinated, corporate bootlicker mentality.

95% of the phones on the market will spy on you, send your data back to the mothership, and they will sell your data to 3rd parties, and they cost $1400-$2000. You pay for the phone which is not even yours after the purchase, and then you still get ads, spied on, and your data sold. Google has a very large monetary incentive already to protect their customers and they do jack shit about the malware/adware in the play store.

TVs are even worse. LG TVs were just found to spy on you and nearby devices while they are off. Do you think those TVs are free? No, they also cost a fortune.

The current state of the world is that even if you pay you will get ads, spying, and malware. Get your head out of your ass.

Yep, if Google lost money/owed damages every time someone got a fraudulent Google ad, you better believe those ads would be squeaky clean.

Sergey's flotilla needs a new vessel this year though, so can't do that.

Sergey also needs another few billion to spend on lobbying against the billionaire taxes.

> "But they can't possibly review every ad before publishing" they say. If that's the case

It's not, it never is; it's a lie on the level of "Poland attacked first". Say, if someone was offering you $40+ billion every 3 months to solve the issue, do you think you could? It's a ridiculous question, of course you could.

> "But they can't possibly review every ad before publishing" they say.

That defense doesn't work either way as they (and Facebook) also reject manual reports from users.

> it just doesn't make business sense to put a lot of resources into cleaning up ads that pay google nothing and mostly go to people who temporarily disabled their ad-block

I see where you are coming from, but getting burned by a scam Google advertised to me just pushed me to cutting Google out of my life completely. If it were the occasional bad actor slipping through I might have been more forgiving, but the scam that got to me had become well known for at least the last 18 months. If Google doesn't care enough to keep the well known bad actors off their service, then I protect myself & my family by blocking Google.

Low quality ads should be the bottom of the barrel. Actual criminal activity should not be anywhere in the barrel.

That might make sense, but to clarify, my dad has disabled his ad blocker a few months ago by accident, so he’s fair game. An older guy too, I guess that’s why there were so many scams.

That sucks, I'm not sure why that would be without deep diving your fathers computer. I'm sure you agree these corporations are greedy, and definitely don't like leaving money on the table, so it's odd when their automated systems miss creating a profile. Profiles translate straight to revenue.

I can also assure you that scammers don't payout more than Coca-Cola or Proctor and Gamble for ads.

> these people use their services and contribute nothing back

What a wildly twisted statement. More accurate to say these users refuse to be exploited and thus have little monetary value.

That's interesting to note. So the fact that there is less data about someone makes them a preferred target for the bottom of the advertising bucket. Is there an equivalent in the paper world? I remember those old paper magazines that were constantly about aliens or other conspiracies. Maybe the same effect?

They aren't preferred targets so much as they are the cheapest targets.

These scam ads are trying to play the numbers game that email spammers do. So they just bid on everyone at the minimum bid. For people with fleshed out ad-profiles, the big advertisers that pay decent money will buy those slots. The auctions almost never fall through.

For people with no profile, no one bids, and the auction falls through to the scammer who will pay $0.00001 for their ad to load.

So ironically, the (second?) best way to remove scammy ads from google is to keep loading ads from google.

You're missing the fact that all ads are scammy and I don't want to see any of them. There's nothing that makes a Downy ad more honest or relevant to me than an ad for BigCoin Online Casino - it's all worthless trash that conveys zero genuine information about the product. At least the bottom tier ads are honest about what they are.

That's totally fine, but then the correct action is to not visit sites that have ads then.

The protest of the ad-economy is boycotting ad based services. Not using those services while blocking the ads. That just sends the signal that there is demand for free shit, which is both obvious and meaningless.

It's the best time to do this if you're serious. You can stay off the phone, mitigating all those ads, then simply pay for a streaming platform tier that doesn't show ads and the supermarket end caps are essentially the only advertising you get

There's nothing scammy about an ad for a Snickers bar. You can purchase it and it will be what they said it would be. As opposed to real scam ads where you try to purchase something and they steal all your money.

Let's be truthful and honest. It's something to not like ads - I don't like ads - but you have no reason to muddle and distort a sensible conversation.

> these people use their services and contribute nothing back

Each and every single human on the planet has made a contribution to Google in the form of their data — whether they wanted to or not! What more must we give for the great and all-knowing Google to contribute ANYTHING back to the commons? Remember when CAPTCHA was meant to crowd source the deciphering of old books for the good of all?

Remember “Do no evil”?

I mean for fucks sake are you a Google agent? Or even a human?

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