zlacker

Personally, what I'm interested in is not seeing ads. I think the notion that more relevant ads are somehow better for the user is mostly industry propaganda. Ad targeting is about finding people more susceptible to manipulation into spending money. User satisfaction is at best an epiphenomenon of the ad industry, and at worst is directly counter to their goals.

>>wpietr+(OP)
If you don't want to see ads, why not run an adblocker or avoid visiting sites that show ads? There's no good option right now, if you have a paywall people will complain and almost no one will visit your site, and if you have any ads at all people will complain about that too. (I remember an HN article about a guy who had a banner advertising his own product on his personal blog, absolutely no tracking, that got added to uBlock adblocking lists.)

If you want you can use duckduckgo with ads disabled in settings, visit HN and wikipedia and stackoverflow (although they have the #hireme thing), pay $10/month for youtube and spotify premium so you don't see ads there, etc. And then use ghostery to disable third-party cookies and things of that nature. What more do you want the industry to do?

>>anchpo+Qm
Personally, I want the advertising industry to not exist. Moral question of for-profit manipulation aside, I think if you look at net societal benefits versus total cost, it's pretty easy to see that we could find better things to do with the ~$1 trillion that it consumes. That day won't come any sooner just by me running an ad blocker.

>>wpietr+QM
If this is truly what you want, then what is your suggestion for financing the existence of sites that wish to stay afloat? Paywalls don't work.

>>wpietr+QM
To be fair in your last two comments you went from "I don't want to see ads" to "I don't want anyone to see ads."

That's a pretty big philosophical difference.

>>dontbl+E41
Wikipedia doesn't have ads or paywalls.

>>mulmen+Ua1
It absolutely has ads, for a few weeks every year, for itself.

>>zamfi+Zb1
people tautologically define ads as only that which they don't wish to see

>>mulmen+Na1
Only if you look at the first sentence. In the rest of my first comment, I am pretty clearly talking about the problems of the industry as a whole.

>>dontbl+E41
Paywalls don't work? Tell that to the WSJ, the NYT, Netflix, Disney, and so on. They all do just fine.

>>zamfi+Zb1
Those are solicitations for donations. Wikipedia isn’t selling anything.