The internet became usable after implementing the Pi-Hole. So much noise, so much wasted bandwidth, so many unnecessary lookups, gone with a Raspberry Pi and a few packages.
While other commenters are getting into the technical weeds of things, the reality is that the OP is right. Ads don’t inform, they manipulate. They’re an abusive forced-marriage that we cannot withdraw from even with ad and script blockers, because so much of society is built upon the advertising sector that it’s impossible to fully escape them. People like the OP and us are mocked for moves to block billboards in space as being “alarmist” or out of touch, yet driving along any highway in the USA will bombard you with ads on billboards, on busses, on rideshares, on overly-large signs with glowing placards, in radio and television, on streaming providers who raise our rates on what used to be ad-free packages.
Advertising is cancer, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not. Let’s get rid of it.
That's the most "hacker" newsy thing to me. Whenever advertising critical articles come up, there's a large percentage of people commenting pro advertising. Yeah, I get it, you don't bite the hand that feeds you but come on. Does working in ad tech somehow influence your brains like the ones you are targeting?
My theory is that the people who fight against changing the status quo are just fundamentally opposed to change itself, not necessarily supporting the system as it currently stands. They know the ins and outs of the current system, and changing it means they have to dump knowledge and re-learn things - which they're fiercely opposed to doing. The enemy you know, over the enemy you don't, in a manner of speaking.
Those of us who can visualize futures starkly different than a continuance of the present day are a threat to those people who demand indefinite complacency and an unchanging world. Unfortunately for them, the universe is chaos and change is inevitable - so finding your own stability amidst the chaos is a skill more people need, such that necessary change might be embraced.
I've made a product. The people who use it, like it. But I have no online following or presence, and I'm really not the kind of charismatic person who could build one. All the "community" places where I could share it in good faith are incredibly hostile to self promotion, I think because of the wave of people selling vibecoded openai wrappers as language tutors.
I can pay £40 for reddit ads, and while it has negative ROI, it gives me lots of feedback that I can use to iterate. Sure, my project seems to be a commercial dead end - people find it valuable, but most people don't find it quite valuable enough to pay for the high cost of translation - but I still think those ads had a lot of value.
That said, I use an adblocker myself, I wish more intelligent people worked on rockets rather than targeting algorithms, and I do agree that ads have a negative effect in a lot of places - it's just that they do have a real (and IMO moral) utility in some places. If you banned advertising for everything, you'd just encourage bribing moderators to let you self-promote or ensure only people with existing followings can make things.
(it's https://nuenki.app, if anyone's curious)
If I want a product, it better be out of my own free will. If I wanted AI assisted ways to learn languages, I'd be perfectly capable of researching what's out there. If I see an ad, out of principle I won't pay a cent for anything, unless maybe it's literally the best thing since sliced bread.
Ads provide negative value to me as a consumer, therefore I want them banned.
But the economy! But the jobs!
What's the purpose of both of these? To address people's needs and wishes, or to plant new needs and wishes in the brain of consumers to then extract capital out of them?
If a product is worth creating it could be created, bought, and made profitable in an ad-free society as well. The problem is it's an arms race. A good product + ads will always win against an equivalent product without. Everybody has to do ads because everybody else does them. So going ad-free only works if everybody does it at once, and I believe that requires regulation. Of course I'm also not opposed to you buying ads to promote your product, I'm opposed to the fact that the market forces you to.
Trees haven't figured out how to all reach sunlight without using enormous resources to grow high. States haven't figured out how to all stay secure without spending enormous sums on defense. This situation is similar but I feel we have a good shot at saving ourselves a whole lot of trouble by heavily limiting the ways in which advertising can legally be done.