[duskdozer]

To me, that doesn't seem hugely different than current advertising. "non-regret" is a low bar. It's still, of course, treating increased purchasing/consumption as a good thing. And it still has the same characteristic of pushing users toward inferior, more expensive items because it makes someone more money that way. As in, if you have items A and B, and a user gains 1 value from A at a cost of 100, but would gain 10 value from B at a cost of 50, a "good ad" could make the user purchase A instead of B, which is a relative negative impact on their life. Additionally, it doesn't address the harms caused by "track[ing] the viewer"

[eucyclos]

I have no counterargument to your first point, but to your second, an ad for product A is "good" only for the person selling A, it's bad for the person buying (assuming a and b are in the same product category). Since the person buying a or b presumably has an ongoing relationship with the content creator being paid to show the ad, showing a "bad" ad is also bad for the host because it reduces the odds the customer will follow another ad on their network n the future. The catch is that the person selling A can outspend the person selling B, but there's an obvious solution: don't auction ad spaces. If vendor A and B are paying the same fixed amount per impression, B's superior offer is going to take over the market pretty quickly, and the content creator hosting ads will be naturally incentivised to show B's ads.

To your third point, I don't think all tracking is created equal - if it were, there'd be no instinct to post on social media at all, but in fact privacy and publicity are complex things with overlapping sets of advantages and disadvantages. Tracking probably feels purely disadvantageous because the people doing the tracking are in thrall to "A vendors", but if the tracker is incentivised to work with "B vendors" instead it becomes a much more nuanced issue.