[dizzydes]

Why are people so negative about ads?

Just don't click them, this and tons of other services wouldn't exist without revenue streams...

EDIT: Based on the tsunami of responses, perhaps a hybrid offering with a paid ad-free version? Even then they would only be building a single product so directional conflict would still arise..

[Nadya]

Most forms of advertisement should be considered criminal, as most modern ads are borderline psychological warfare against a population that doesn't even understand they're at war and losing because the effects aren't immediately noticeable and are very rarely directly physical.

Tear down someone mentally until you can get them to agree to part with their money. Call them ugly, call them fat, call them depressed. Show them how boring and miserable their life is before <product> is a part of their life. But only ever indirectly - if you're too direct the negative emotions they're feeling will be associated with your product instead of themselves. Tease them with beautiful people having fun and enjoying life. This could be you if you buy <product>. Happy and successful. Surrounded by friends laughing and smiling. Remember - ending on a happy emotion makes people associate those feelings with <product> which will increase sales of <product>. Cute polar bears. Drink coke.

It's a form of assault and I refuse to pretend otherwise.

[handfuloflight]

Your criticism seems to be less about ads but rather about certain products and services that use ads for distribution and their messaging.

[Nadya]

There are very few forms of advertisement that I don't have a major problem with. Public space bulletin boards, word of mouth (non-sponsored), dedicated infomercial spaces (no videomercials w/ the comedy-like over the top failing at life to try and sell the product).

Price, product/service, why you need it and why yours over any competitors. Non-targeted ads by default unless the user opts in for targeted ads.

Mom & pop shops are totally capable of emotion-targeted advertising and it's a problem when they do it too. Corporations just use it more.

For example - how does one advertise perfume over television? A product that requires you to smell it? Emotional manipulation and promise of fantasy. Nothing to do with perfume. A proper commercial would at least try to explain the smell - maybe mention the high/low note fragrances used. Nope. Beautiful models. Lavish party. Brand name.

Fixing advertising will never happen. Advertising runs the world because it already won the war.

[pennybanks]

so you believe if your teacher or parent tell you not to over eat sugars, not to drop out of school, take care of looks, because these things will prevent you from being rich, relationship, comfort.

you believe this type of messaging shouldnt be shown because we are too mentally weak to handle it? you dont believe parents should parent their child either? you think anything that can possibly make a human form an opinion is inherently evil? do you think a company that lets say shows how boring your life is so they try to sell you a book is wrong. or a workout machine shouldnt show what it can potentially offer to your life. or basically extending your life. a school that sells prestige and highest level of education should instead never advertise so you dont feel dumb?

im not saying this is the ideal utopia. this is reality. for businesses to work they need money, for a country to prosper it needs successful businesses whether it be govt or otherwise. you want to teach kids to be able to handle reality not play victim. ofc this is just my way of seeing things. but i believe being able to use what is being offered to your advantage is what makes successful people. and ill be damned if someone in the states believes they dont have all the opportunities in the world with the most access to whatever they want with govt regulating the things you are so afraid of to at least a reasonable level. being able to identify the evil in everything thus shutting themselves off is counter productive imo and its honestly even a blessing to be able to think like this lol. many countries this cant even be a factor because these companies cant even exsist to give you these evil messages. because they dont survive in those small economies

[Nadya]

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of studies about precisely how to navigate people in aggregate and take advantage of every little bit of human psychology to maximize profits. It's not about people being mentally weak but about corporations and marketers knowing how to best break past people's mental barriers.

You are not unique among the millions of people. Advertising works - and it also works on people who adamantly believe that it doesn't work on them. Often because people think of themselves are more intelligent than the average person.

Almost nobody claims to like advertising. They might prefer advertising over subscriptions as a form of payment - but not because they like ads but because it doesn't take money from them directly but rather indirectly. Yet despite the almost universal hatred of advertisements its the worlds largest business.

Advertising would not be in the top 10 of worlds largest businesses if it didn't work on hundreds of millions of people. It bears repeating. You are not special. Neither am I. Despite my best attempts at avoiding advertising I can nearly guarantee it affects my purchasing decisions perhaps without my awareness of it at all. Subconsciously there like a parasite. Because that's how advertising actually works.

Nobody sees an ad and goes "I want <ad product>". That's not how advertising actually works but it's how people think it works. 3 months down the line you're buying beer for a party and buy a pack of Heineken without thinking too much about it. And that is when they have won.

[admax88qqq]

Seeing ads can still affect you psychologically even if you don't click them.

Also lots of ads prey on people with worse impulse control who bankroll the rest of us who don't click ads. Similar to how casinos are bankrolled by the addicts at the slot machines or many games are bankrolled by the addicts spending all their savings on in game items.

Doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy.

Plus there's something just aesthetically pleasing about an ad-free experience. I started paying for youtube premium to avoid ads and I must say its a much nicer experience.

[s3r3nity]

> Also lots of ads prey on people with worse impulse control who bankroll the rest of us who don't click ads.

This reminds me of the Mark Twain adage of "Telling a man he can't have steak just because a baby can't chew it."

I don't want to pay money & subscriptions to every site I visit because some folks don't have impulse control. Similarly, the prevalence of alcoholism in society shouldn't prevent me from having a glass of wine with dinner.

[AlexandrB]

> I don't want to pay money & subscriptions to every site I visit because some folks don't have impulse control.

You've got it exactly backwards. The reason you don't have to pay subscriptions is because of people with poor impulse control. If ads were less effective (e.g. the low impulse control people didn't exit), more sites would require subscriptions because the ad inventory would not be able to cover costs.

[kibwen]

> I don't want to pay money & subscriptions to every site I visit because some folks don't have impulse control.

I have bad news for you: the absolutely infinite capacity for greed and the subsequent enshittification means that you're going to pay a subscription fee and still get to have your brain pickled by ad-based propaganda, just like cable TV.

[criddell]

Before ads, the service has one clear goal - build the best product they can for their users.

After ads, the goal is less clear. They still need to please users, but they also have to please advertisers. The needs of users and advertisers aren't always going to be aligned, and so users should lose trust in the Perplexity results.

If I was an investor, this would make me nervous. Make something that is far better than your competitors and users will pay. If you make something that is only marginally better than your competitors, users are only going to pay at most, a marginal fee. Perplexity is signaling that their product is mediocre.

I have a 1 year subscription to the pro plan that I got for free. Unless it gets way better, I won't pay for the next year.

I do pay for Claude and think it's easily worth the $20 / month.

[lancesells]

> the service has one clear goal - build the best product they can for their users.

I don't believe this in the case of anything funded with big VC money. But let's say that Perplexity is trying to build the best product they can. They are scraping content and selling (or giving it) to their users, but at whose expense? Users get a convenient search engine and content makers get their work scraped. But now Perpelixity will let content makers pay them money so they can get traffic back to their site. This is kind of just the internet services 30 year timeline on a speedrun.

[malwrar]

Why I don’t like ads:

1. Fundamentally propaganda with little real regulatory oversight. Numerous arguments to this point and the negative impact of advertising have been made in the last several decades.

2. Tech companies seem to eventually get into the business of selling data and/or manipulating the user experience to better suit advertisement. I can’t think of a single company that has adopted advertising and not scaled it over time.

3. Security and privacy concerns inherent with letting third parties manipulate page content.

[JohnFen]

The presence of ads always degrades whatever they're attached to and are a visible indicator that you're being tracked.

But, even worse than that, when a company becomes dependent on ad revenue, then that company will always, sooner or later, start prioritizing the interests of ad companies over those of their users.

These are the reasons why I shy away from ad-supported products and services if at all possible. I prefer to use products and services that are optimized for users rather than advertisers.

[flanbiscuit]

I would allow ads if I could absolutely be assured that malware won't be served to me through them. I'm not talking about something that requires clicking on the ad themselves, because I never click on ads. I'm talking about malicious code being executed as soon as the ad is served. I know that Google is doing everything they can to try and prevent this but I don't trust that this is a solved problem.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-abuse...

https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6020954?hl=en

[ben_w]

Bitter experience.

Every time ads are allowed in, the quality degrades — products and services can be optimised for solving problems, or for ongoing revenue, but not both.

The latter comes at the expense of the former, it doesn't enable the former.

Lots of websites are basically unusable without an adblocker, being mostly advertising and hardly any content; it's not quite that bad with YouTube yet, but getting there.

[hightrix]

Simple response. Never have I experienced a "thing" (web site, app, entertainment media, etc..) that did not have ads and thought, "You know what, this would be better with ads". Additionally, never have I experienced a "thing" that has ads and thought, "These ads are really making the experience better."

Ads ruin everything they touch. They make every experience worse. Anything + ads is a worse experience for everyone than that thing without ads.

[Karrot_Kream]

There's almost nothing unique about HN as a tech news site these days. Sure you occasionally get a deep SME on the occasional deeply technical article, but the comment gravity on this website at this point is largely centered around tech-adjacent topics like this (business practices, regulations, legal action, social implications of tech.)

At this point the only thing that makes HN different from another subreddit or X or Bluesky is that the userbase values privacy highly, hates advertising, has an affinity for open software, and some other largely cultural values. If you're still using HN as a generic "high discussion quality tech news site" I think it's time to change that expectation. If you want to ask a site whose culture has evolved to hate advertising why they hate advertising, it's sort of like going to a watermelon-haters club and asking them why they hate watermelons so much.

[_ZeD_]

are you joking? advertising is - by definition - that thing made to wash your brain to make you desire things it you originally wasn't interested to.

[ThrowawayTestr]

Advertising is showing you products and services that exist. What you're thinking of is marketing.

[triyambakam]

I can't really see a difference between advertising and marketing

[ThrowawayTestr]

I just told you.

[Viliam1234]

> Advertising is showing you products and services that exist.

If advertising actually stopped there, I would have no objection against it.

[jvargas25]

Villiam, for some reason I can't respond to one of your old posts about the Velumount device. May I email you about that?

[Viliam1234]

Sure, it's viliam at bur dot sk.

[ta1243]

If a company is paying $1 to advertise to you, they are making more than $1 from you in profit

You pay for it anyway. The ones that really pay are the ones who think they are immune to the brainwashing of a trillion dollar industry.

[conception]

This seems simple - it makes the experience worse.

[add-sub-mul-div]

Successive new major leaps in technology (concurrent with a dying culture of consumer protection) lead to qualitatively worse advertising experiences.

We're going from skippable ads (cable/DVR) to unskippable ads with surveillance (streaming) to algorithmic output/content that can be influenced by advertising with no transparency or disclosure.

[what]

How were cable ads skippable? I guess you could change the channel?

[add-sub-mul-div]

You can fast-forward with a DVR.

[shiroiushi]

You obviously didn't grow up in the 80s or 90s.

[int_19h]

For ads to be effective, they need to be targeted. Any ad-supported model incentivizes identifying and tracking users across as many services as possible and data mining to build profiles.

[nwhnwh]

I hate shallow confident people.

[doctorpangloss]

Ad creatives could be 10x better, but nobody allocates the budget for it.

[dewey]

People don't want to understand that someone has to pay for all that bandwidth and free compute.

I'm using Kagi for that reason, just like I'm using Fastmail. I give someone money, they give me a service and support if needed. Seems fair and simple.

[arresin]

When the internet started it was weird to pay for something ephemeral like certain bits being delivered to you. But totally normal to pay for magazines. I think that early mindset just continued and became the new default. Electronic media just feels weird to pay for for people.

[dewey]

> Electronic media just feels weird to pay for for people.

Most people in the target audience of Perplexity probably pay for at least two streaming services (Spotify, Netflix etc.), so I don't think it's about "eletronic media" but more that search seems like a simple thing from the outside that always has been free and has a very strong player that offers a pretty good service for most people.

[dizhn]

By the end magazines were mostly ads and almost free to subscribe to.

[scarfaceneo]

The mental gymnastics required to justify ads always gets me.

They make your experience worse in every possible way.