[Cthulhu_]

Those ads were relevant though, and (I hope) not doing thousands of requests in the background; it was an IT-related ad, on an IT-related website, targeted at a person working in IT that was interested in new servers - what really is what the better ad providers are looking for. The rest is just idk, shotgunning and hoping something sticks.

[tonyedgecombe]

I dislike relevant ads the most because they are most likely to influence my behaviour.

[strken]

There must be a point between "advertisement for useless junk" and "useful advice + an affiliate link" where the two cross over, and as far as I can tell the only differences are relevance and directness.

One example of advertising that I think is acceptable are the ads on the slatestarcodex.com sidebar, which are manually placed there by the author and targeted directly at the niche he writes in. If a computer could achieve the same precision when choosing what ads to run, and based its choices on the publication rather than the user, I think it would also be acceptable to me.

Would you find such ads equally unpalatable?

[builditand]

Ads are bad. I'm not shopping not stop. I just want to read my article or whatever I am doing at that moment.

When I want to buy something I go to a shop and being there I still don't want ads. I want accurate specs, relevant statistics, maybe pictures and honest reviews. Sometimes I could use a guide, when it's not my domain.

I never stopped in the middle of something to say "I'd so watch an ad right now".

[jalk]

So perhaps you need to find paywalled news/review outlets without ads. Someone has to pay for the articles being written, servers, bandwidth etc

[builditand]

I don't know why you think I need to do something. Perhaps you need to realize that annoying your readers is not the best way to approach the issue.

Leaving aside the assumption that somebody has to pay just because you did something, selling my visual comfort for how much? a tenth of a cent? shows me how much you value your readers.

[thecrazyone]

You're so on-point. All these rants about ads don't think about who'd pay for the content you're consuming if not for the ads.

You can't have high quality content and not pay for it - with ads or otherwise.

If you want ad-free, keep your credit card ready every time you open your browser

I'm not necessarily speaking in favor of ads. I'm just pointing out the shallow analysis which characterizes these companies as greedy or bereft of common decency who want to shove ads down your throat. It's a really unfortunate and ill-considered narrative

[builditand]

He's not on-point at all. You can find amazing content not touched by ads all over the internet.

Making money is hard but his way of doing it is nothing to admire.

[wyager]

> If you want ad-free, keep your credit card ready every time you open your browser

I'm hopeful we can smooth this experience quite a bit. In the near future, we have (as the current best extant example) in-browser Apple Pay backed by an HSM (either the touch bar or an Apple Watch). Presumably other vendors could implement something similar since at least the payment part isn't proprietary.

In the slightly more distant future, we could improve efficiency/privacy/reliability by using Bitcoin micropayment channels instead of credit cards, but same idea.

[utexaspunk]

It is, however, really obnoxious when you click on an ad once and then are subjected to ads for that same product everywhere you go for months. I clicked on an ad for a Purple mattress a while back and now that's what I see on half the sites I go to. FFS, people, I don't want the mattress, okay!?!?

[C4stor]

But most persons actually want to be influenced in their behaviours, it's the whole point of researching any subject in the first place.

Any decision we make is the result of a lot of stuff influencing our behaviours, and the border between researching information on a product and being targeted by an ad for this product is not really black and white.

If I had to chose, I'd rather be influenced by logical arguments than by a nude person taking a shower. Which only says so much about my personal values and is not really a good thing per se ^^

[Sir_Substance]

>But most persons actually want to be influenced in their behaviours, it's the whole point of researching any subject in the first place.

No, people research to make informed decisions.

[C4stor]

I genuinely fail to see the difference, since our behaviours are the way our (informed or not) decisions are observable ?

[briandear]

How can you make informed decisions if you aren’t even aware of all the available choices?

[Majestic121]

Ads are not about being aware of all available choices. It is about presenting one specific choice in the best possible way : not the best way to make an informed decision

[tudelo]

Well, if you didn't know of it before, and you were exposed to it via the ad, then do research... what's the problem? Isn't that an informed decision?

[pbhjpbhj]

I think the point is: "informed decisions [about their behaviour]".