[Nextgrid]

> What do ads pay for anyways?

Making the world a worse place? If you look carefully you’ll realize most of the harms and negative effects of technology are due to it being primarily funded by advertising and trying to maximize ad revenue.

[jayd16]

Ads seem less harmful than, say, mobile game rewards (gambling). Plenty of dark patterns in the paid space too. Banning ads would not be a panacea.

[genman]

I see again and again this non-argument on HN. Yes, if you get robbed but not killed then it is a better outcome than getting killed but this doesn't make robbing good by any measure.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

But what if you make the punishment for robbing harsher than murder? Maybe people start killing you after robbing you to get a lesser sentence. It happens in some parts of the world, if they accidentally hit you with their car they'll run over you again to finish the job because if you sue or go after them it'll be real bad. Point is we have to be careful about how we regulate things or we can shift things in an even worse direction.

[jayd16]

The claim was that the majority of tech's ills are caused by ads. By leaving that statement without analysis we're blind to other problems.

[Const-me]

Mobile games are only harmful to a relatively tiny group of addicted gamers, while internet ads have very serious consequences acting on society as a whole.

I don’t think mobile gaming companies have a potential to destroy free press, or negatively affect mental health of wide population of teenagers, or invade privacy of billions of people. They simply don’t have the scale for any of that.

[slimsag]

Ads are harmful, no doubt, but I do not think they are more harmful than the normalization of gambling in our society.

'I watched an ad, and then [my entire life was destroyed]' is quite hard to imagine, unless it's an ad for an MLM, crypto, entrepreneurship scam, or gambling.

On the other hand, I absolutely know people who started out in soft gambling who then proceeded to throw their life (and sometimes families) away trying to catch the next high with higher and higher stakes gambling until they lost everything, and then some.

We also don't really know the impact gambling is going to have in the near future. Loot boxes, online gambling, internet celebrity gambling, etc. really only became popular around ~2010 or later, and the kids who have been growing up with low-risk gambling as a daily accessible thing on their iPads have not come into adulthood yet.

[vlovich123]

Not an either or situation. We should do both.

[slimsag]

The parent comment downplayed the importance of mobile gaming/gambling. I simply rebutted.

[livrem]

> Mobile games are only harmful to a relatively tiny group of addicted gamers, while internet ads have very serious consequences acting on society as a whole

It is still unethical to even play "free"-to-play games. You are entertained at the expense of a small group of addicts that are often spending more money than what they can afford, and, at least in many games, just being logged in helps create a nicer environment that lures in those people. If you are not there to be a whale you are there to be lure for them. It might not be harmful to you to play, but you are being harmful to the addicts.

[vlovich123]

All those mobile games frequently require advertising in the first place to race their customers/victims. We should definitely ban a lot of the dark patterns which would coincidentally improve AAA games which use similar patterns (eg increasing duration of gameplay because of grinding mechanics).

[quocanh]

And the largest benefit of modern technology comes from the fact that so much of it is "free" (ad-supported). Without ads, there would simply be no effect at all.

[Jensson]

Wikipedia and stack overflow and forums like reddit and chat and similar are the biggest benefits of the internet and they are very cheap to run, you could run them based on donations. Reddit is more expensive than it has to be since they try to pivot to more ads and media, but a text forum is very cheap.

The biggest benefit from ad supported tech are search and video, the rest would be better without ads. Reddit would be a better place if they didn't try to get ad revenue etc, in those cases them chasing revenue makes user experience worse instead of better.