I don't mind the concept of ads. I didn't really mind early ads on the web. They were a lot like magazine ads, the website owners would run ads in the same broad interest category as their site. Then early AdTech happened and went fucking insane. Google's early text ads, before the DoubleCkick reverse takeover, were a sane reaction to insane web ads. Google's ads too went insane.
Now ads aren't just ads but crazy tracking mechanisms. Because of the opaque system of ad brokers they're also a malware vector because no one vets anything because money. They also very helpfully push me towards monthly data caps by loading megabytes of extra scripts on every page load and things like auto-playing videos.
So while I don't mind advertising conceptually, fuck ads and AdTech. I do everything possible to block ads just to make browsing usable, to say nothing of privacy or malware. I just hit the good ol' Back button whenever I get a "disable your adblocker" message. Disabling ad blocking doesn't just mean I see ads, it means I can barely read a web page and have to run megabytes of scripts that do who knows what.
Exactly that. If ads were like they were back in the early days I wouldn't feel forced to run an adblocker to protect myself from the malware they've become.
Definitely agree. Blocked ads since 2003 or so, when they started going crazy. I even remember the name of the site I used for CSS ad blocking - https://www.gozer.org/mozilla/ad_blocking/
> They were a lot like magazine ads, the website owners would run ads in the same broad interest category as their site.
Funnily enough, this is targeted advertising. Before the current shitshow, ads were targeted, then came tracking and they became targeted in a different manner. Now we block trackers and people decry "but how will they target ads?!". Well, the same way they did before.
There's an interesting article regarding behavioral observations on personalized advertisements, though it's in Korean. Summary for those who doesn't want to use a translator (KR to EN performance is typically bad):
* Generation Z's reaction to ads personalization category (from Google and FB) is somewhat positive in that they don't really care about its creepiness but think more accurate categorization on each personality as a better thing. The report thinks that they consider it as more of utility rather than just privacy invasion.
* More interestingly, sometime they "guide" ad targeting systems to show information that matches to their interests to save their efforts on searching for perfect matches. Honestly, I was super surprised since I haven't thought about this kind of usage even though I'm working on ads.
* Some of them (though the tone indicates that it's not majority?) does not skip video ads to "pay" a subscription fee for creators who they want to support. I saw some similar cases even in the US though.
* Sometime they're actively looking for explicitly sponsored reviews, which is actually an ad. It's because they sometime decide to buy specific products before watching its ads. This inversion of causality seems very odd to me, but the rationale is that they just want to better understand the product and don't care whether it's an ad or not.
It's written by a marketer who seems to be negative about personalized ads and genuinely surprised by these observations. Honestly... I still cannot get this but yeah, it seems there's some people who consider personalized ads as a tool.
I hate ads. They hijack my attention and they promote things for the companies that have the most money to spend on screaming at me about their products. I wish the advertising industry simply disappeared.
In fact if I had three wishes they would be 1. End poverty and allow everyone in the world to pursue their dreams while still being able to live acceptably well. 2. Make it impossible for anyone to amass more than some to-be-determined ceiling amount of times more money than everyone else. 3. Make advertising simply stop existing - everyone forgets what it is and it is never invented again.
It’s not surprising considering that employees and founders of ad funded companies hang out here. In this case, jedberg (correct me if I’m wrong) was an early employee at Reddit, which is almost entirely ad funded.
I’m not saying he’s being malicious - he probably genuinely believes he likes personalized ads. The “self” or “ego” is a very tricky thing. It can rationalize almost anything to maintain its world view. Everyone likes to think they’re doing good in the world. When faced with the fact that may not be the case, it’s natural to rationalize it away. It takes an extreme level of awareness to be objectively neutral whenever your “self” is involved.
I'm sure there are some forums where people who sell ads like them too. :)
But what can I say, I'm a realist. I spent a lot of years working on a website supported by advertising. I understand not everyone will or can pay for the websites they enjoy, and advertising is a good second option.
And if we're going to have to live in a world with ad supported websites, I'd rather those ads be good.
You're defining "good" here to mean "effective at manipulating me to spend money", which is strange! I'd rather not be manipulated into buying things I didn't realize would finally fill the gaping hole inside my soul until two seconds ago. Would be perfectly content seeing ads for, I don't know, farm equipment until I happily perish of old age never once experiencing the fomo of not possessing a theragun.
I'm defining good as "informing of things I didn't know existed". I consider advertising just another news channel.
Copying from my comment above, here are some examples of things I've bought. I like trying out new things because I can afford it, but I don't always have time to go out and look for them.
So examples of things that I've bought from Instagram ads:
The comma2 (autopilot for my Honda van). I knew OpenPilot existed, but until I saw that ad, I didn't know there was a product I could buy with it already installed. I liked the idea but didn't have time to get it all set up on my own. The existence of a commercial product vastly improved my life. I've already used it for over 1000 miles of self driving in just a couple weeks. It's a night and day difference when driving. I suppose I would have eventually heard about the product, but I'm glad I heard about it when I did.
The most recent Pride lego set. I would have never known it existed, but I'm glad I know now, because I want to give my kids something fun to build that sparks a conversation about Pride and what it means and why it's important.
The end doesn’t justify the means. Finding out about some cool stuff doesn’t justify the insane amount of collection of ones personal data by hundreds of companies in a manner which is basically impossible for a person to reasonably prevent.
That's what FLoC is trying and failing to do according to basically every analysis, including this one. Ads can exist without having to be based on users' personal data, as they were for 100+ years before (even on the internet itself, they used to be based on the content of the site rather than users' personal data)
Most content is being produced by end users that are paid nothing. In the early says of the internet, when there was no advertising, there was plenty of content. But what made the internet truly exciting was not the "content" but the potential ability to communicate and share with people anywhere in the world without expensive telephone calls or slow postal service. Think of the internet not as a "destination" but as a medium. It is a way to reach someone, like a telephone line, but with much greater capabilities. (Originally, that is how we accessed it, over telephone lines.) The internet is not a collection of popular websites run by companies that spy on you for the purposes of online advertising. They are just middlemen exploiting that desire of users to connect with each other. They sit in the middle and spy on everything. The internet is a medium, not a collection of middlemen. When you remove the ads, the "business model" of the middlmen disappears, and the incentive for spying is reduced.
It'd just be nice to have a little more control, for starters. So advertisers try to figure out what we want by what websites we visit and are not too good at it. They could also just ... ask? I'd like to have an ad service that I can tell what I'm actually interested in these days, and that forces the companies to provide lots of information about the product they are advertising for (documentation and stuff). So if I see an interesting ad, I can easily find out if its actually something I want. And money only flows if I actually buy something, affiliate-link style.
Unfortunately asking users doesn't usually work out well. My favorite example is from Netflix. They asked users, "What movie needs to be on the service for you to consider it a good service with good movies that you would want to see repeatedly". A lot of people answered "Schindler's list". But when you looked at those same user's actual viewing, they never once watched Schindler's list, but they watch Jackass multiple times. So what they really wanted was Jackass, but either were too ashamed to admit it, or didn't actually understand their own preferences.
FWIW, I feel like a good restaurant serves wine. I don't drink wine, but if your restaurant doesn't serve it, and I am tasked with choosing between two restaurants based on some quick glance at their menu sections and photos of their interior (as of course I am not informed about either: I am supposed to come up with some quick heuristic), it might not matter if you have the world's best hamburger (what I am actually going to order at your fancy restaurant, along with a glass of plain soda water, as I am a philistine). So I dunno: that could still be consistent, given the question phrased the way you did.
Yeah the difference between the things we know we should want, and the things we actually want in the moment. Its incredible in how many ways the brain can be annoying ;-)
I strongly believe that gaping holes did exist in peoples souls waaaay before ads were invented.
Don't know, though ... when I asked the all-knowing internet if "gaping holes did exist in people's souls before ads were invented", the first search result is a link to the Harry Potter Fandom-Wiki article about Dementors:
"Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth. They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them... Get too near a Dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. If it can, the Dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself... soulless and evil. You will be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life."
I understand the reasoning, but I prefer schlock versus the cross-site data required to serve me personalized ads.
With the internet at our disposal I don't understand why anyone would ever click on an ad. If you need or want something, a quick search on even the worst search engine is outrageously more informative.
Personalised ads imply data collection, privacy violations and tracking across websites. That doesn't sound like a good deal. Especially as personalised ads are just as annoying and unhelpful because the algorithms are simply useless. No, when I bought a game I don't want to buy the Collector's Edition one day later. And that won't change over the 3 months I'm getting the same stupid recommendation. Might as well show me literally a random product, I'd be more likely to buy it.
I used to like the idea many years ago (think 10-15 or so) since if i'm going to see ads might as well have them be about stuff that interest me - which can actually be useful now and then.
But the thing is, what i wanted was for Google to let me actually choose what sort of ads i see, not try to guess.
I mean there are only a few on HN who dare to post this contrarian view. 99.98% of people on HN still hate Ads. To the point they want to cancel people working on Google Ads or in Adtech industry.
99% of nerds hate ads, but 99% of consumer aren't nerds.
Now ads aren't just ads but crazy tracking mechanisms. Because of the opaque system of ad brokers they're also a malware vector because no one vets anything because money. They also very helpfully push me towards monthly data caps by loading megabytes of extra scripts on every page load and things like auto-playing videos.
So while I don't mind advertising conceptually, fuck ads and AdTech. I do everything possible to block ads just to make browsing usable, to say nothing of privacy or malware. I just hit the good ol' Back button whenever I get a "disable your adblocker" message. Disabling ad blocking doesn't just mean I see ads, it means I can barely read a web page and have to run megabytes of scripts that do who knows what.