I mean, if I am looking for a notebook, I rather have FB/IG (or Google or whatever), show me adds of a notebook that I might end up buying, instead of the generic poker/porn adds that we had on the beginning of the internet.
It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, people want everything free, on the other side, we don't want ads, so there is a clear problem here.
Can someone explain to me what the problem is? Honest question. Thanks.
Good. A well-functioning market might emerge instead.
Personal data used to create highly personalised and targeted political ads.
It's not just about whether you get a nice notebook.
That's all fine and dandy, I think. The problem starts to become a bit bigger when suddenly everyone in your household starts to see "chlamydia medication" ads everywhere they go online based on some message you sent a month ago to a friend.
> It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, people want everything free, on the other side, we don't want ads, so there is a clear problem here.
I'm not sure that's so obvious as you make it seem. There are lots of long running websites that don't survive on personalized ads created based on behavioural profiles created by data harvesters.
That's not how adverts work. Instead I get an advert for a new TV because I bought a new TV last week.
> It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads.
Adverts aren't free. The service still costs the same to provide, but on top of that you have to pay for the advert infrastructure too
Companies paying for the adverts fund the, but they only do that because they will get more money from you than the money they spend to acquire you as a customer (if they don't they go bust)
Therefore you looking at www.bmxsite.com are paying more than you would in a world without adverts
For example, the personalized advertising algorithm could deduce that someone is insecure about being fat and ugly and having no friends. Then, they get ads with the message (a bit veiled of course) "you have no friends because you're fat and ugly", and some product they can buy to ostensibly solve that. Seeing that message is not good for someone's wellbeing.
I don't like the idea of companies using biases and tricks from our human brain to sell their stuff. Ads are profitable because they use our anchoring bias, amongst others. This is disgusting and inhumane to accept to exploit our vulnerabilities for capitalist reasons. We, as a society, should seek for better solutions.
Personalized ads are better at convincing you personally, so they are worse for you than random ads, or even than content-based ads. Additionally, they depend on building a detailed profile of you, which most people are fundamentally uncomfortable with when they are aware of.
I did not know that such software existed.
The ad was good for me and for the seller.
Trade is not a zero sum game.
But then there are things that I don't want ad companies to know about. My medical history, my likely voting patterns, my political affiliations, my sexual orientation, the nature of my relationships with other people, etc. These are private, and I don't want ad companies (or anyone) to know these. Depending on the topic and where I live, it may even be dangerous to me for others to know these things.
One thing that has been made apparent by the advancements of ad-tech's excellent ability to find unintuitive patterns in consumer behaviour, is that the benign data can be used to predict the non-benign. So even if data collection is regulated to only collect benign data, or I am extra careful with where my sensitive data goes, I still have a problem.
That's why tracking on this scale is bad. That's why I hope we can build a society where we stop these practices.
Before Facebook, if you wanted to find information about a notebook, you would go to an independent forum dedicated to notebooks. These forums would typically have adverts from notebook manufacturers or computer stores - and so the ads would be relevant to what you are looking for.
Now, you wanted to learn about new notebook friends talked to you about, you opened a link and from there everywhere you go you see notebook ads. It's madness and unhelpful.
The fact that advertising sometimes actually helps in discovering a product you actually needed is a coincidence. The main point of advertising is to convince people to prefer a product for reasons other than cost/benefit.
Even in your case - did you see the ad and immediately bought the product? Or did you see the ad and then actually went and looked for reviews, competitors, tried it out yourself etc? If you did the former, you almost certainly got scammed at least to some extent. If you did the latter, then it's not the ad that convinced you, it's the reviews/personal trial/price comparison. The ad happened to show you the product existed, but the same could have happened from a mention in a comment or anything else. The ad was not designed to show the product exists, it was designed to convince you it has certain characteristics that the product may or may not actually have.
When Nazis invaded a city, first thing they'd have done was getting to people register and getting names and addresses of "undesirables".
People have not learned their lesson.
Regulation is the best chance for well-functioning markets. I highly doubt we are going to be without advertisements.
I would rather have <best case of personalized ads> rather than <worst case of random ads>. That's not an equal comparison, neither does it represent a common scenario.
> It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, people want everything free, on the other side, we don't want ads, so there is a clear problem here.
People do want ads to subsidize free internet usage, as it has been since the Internet's inception. People accept random ads or even contextual ads, but people flat out refuse targeted ads. This refusal comes out of many reasons, many of which you'll find in other comments around here.
Mine are self-determinism and privacy. I don't want someone, regardless of how well intentioned or competent they believe they are, to collect sensitive data on my habits, preferences and choices to then attempt to influence me. I like to make my own mistakes and own up to them.
Ads are not trying to inform. They virtually universally make claims that are pushed as far as possible without breaking false advertising laws. Ads never ever state limitations, for example - even though any honest information would.
Unfortunately many people seem to ignore the fact that it isn't one or the other, and we can reach a balance here.
Gmail famously scans the user emails to sell the info to third parties and sell adds
Ought be noted that while WhatsApp to my knowledgeable doesn't carry such a clause. It would be idiotic beyond belief to be led to believe that Facebook doesn't do the exact same thing
We were discussing haircuts in the morning and I showed her some photos online. 15 minutes later she opened Facebook and saw hairdresser commercial with THOSE EXACT haircuts we were discussing.
I was using iOS with no-track and adblocker on top of that. My guess is that link was made using IP address. Meta/Facebook was processing MY data to which I didn't agreed at any point. Most likely some website (which didn't ask for my permission, as I'm very anal about making sure I disagree to everything) shared this data with Facebook, Facebook linked the dots and voila.
That's my problem.
P.S. We did similar experiment 2 times, once with jewellery and once with specific types of shoes. One using Firefox Focus using home WiFi, second using 5G network. I disagreed to all cookie processing at any point.
WiFi connection was linked, 5G wasn't.
Let's say you are looking for a notebook, you are assigned to "notebook seeking" cohort. You will see "notebook ads". But the ads you will see will be the ones most profitable for your cohort.
For simplicity, let's say cohort is 100 people; if there is a one person in this cohort that is the target of an overpriced, low quality, drop shipped product, with huge margin, rest of the 99 people will be bombarded with that ad.
They don't: "We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads"
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en#:~:text=Th....
Do you have evidence that they do? I think Google said they did this a long time ago, but they stopped since email content didn't actually improve revenue on those ads. Message data just isn't very helpful for ads, they would do it if it was useful but it isn't so they don't.
I'd argue that it's impossible to have a free internet with ads. I'm old enough to have seen the internet before it was ad infested and it wasn't lacking for great content. Humans seem to have a need to share (or at least show off).
Who is paying you to post comments here on HN? I'm guessing nobody, but here you are, contributing to the internet for free.
Without ads we'd lose some things certainly, but the greater the focus there is on making money the worst everything seems to get. The best things are usually the free things, at least until greed causes enshittification to set in.
I exclusively follow technical people. Devs of the software and tools I work with, PG, indie hackers, that sort of thing.
Personalized ads are a scam. They are not personalized to you. They are personalized to the imaginary profile advertisers want to see their ads. You're just the sorry victim that nobody cares about. Some of them are outright dangerous (see the first one in the album), and your interests always come last.
That doesn't even include the primary concern: The rampant abuse of privacy and collected data.
[1] - https://imgur.com/a/NGBsEaM (one or two are mildly NSFW)
Even that is a problem for me. Advertising is manipulation, they want to change my behaviour so I purchase whatever product they are selling. So I've gone from a state of not thinking about buying something to reaching into my wallet.
I don't want any corporation to do that to me which is why I'm against advertising in general.
Please stop repeating falsehoods.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
Advertisers pay money to serve ads not out of the goodness of their hearts but because they want to earn back not only their initial investment for the ad but a profit on top. Since they keep buying ads, it means that they are able to achieve this.
This means it should always be cheaper to pay for a service directly (avoiding all middlemen involved in the advertising industry) than to "pay" with ads. In the latter you'll not only still pay, but will have to pay more to cover the overheads of the advertising industry.
If folks were truly poor then they would be denied service since nobody would pay to serve them ads. Advertisers paying to serve them ads means there's still money to be extracted out of them, money they're better off just paying directly for the service they use.
By the way, here in Europe we have universal healthcare, maybe is something the US should consider?
This is false. If you've ever run ads before, the best way to get people to convert is to offer a higher cost/benefit than competitors.
How do you think Uber grew from 0 to a 90B market cap? Magical emotional trickery? No.
Uber advertised cheaper, faster, and more convenient rides. The definition of a better cost/benefit. Hence they grew fast. I could list a million examples.
contextual advertising is placing ads in locations, pages, screens etc where people are likely already in a certain mindset (and potentially more likely to be influenced and buy) but the advertiser has no further information about them.
behavioral, profile based advertising is, in contrast, using (in principle) any and all information about you that they can grab and get legally away with using:
Citizen X2235X, device ID asx233e, geolocation X,Y, with $$ in the bank account, an estimated IQ of 98, with the following list of prior purchases, the following list of "likes" on social, has just searched for "weekend trip". Let the bidding begin.
Creating profiles of people has always been a very regulated affair (e.g. your credit score, insurance segments, medical categories etc). In the context of state surveillance profiling people has been the primary tool for oppression.
In the last decade somehow in the name of "innovation" all caution has been thrown out the window.
Its really not about ads at all.
> That's not how adverts work. Instead I get an advert for a new TV because I bought a new TV last week.
Whether that works well enough to pay for producing and distributing that BMX page depends on how big the market is for BMX-related products and how many different BMX pages are vying for the attention of people who visit BMX sites and buy BMX-related products.
For things with a large market and a small number of major sites that much of the market visits, it can work great. For smaller markets it might only work for the largest sites (if there are any). So you can easily end up with the biggest site or two getting almost all the interest-related ads, and the smaller sites only get ads for things that the general population buys.
Your ability to discover relevant products from targeted advertisement is flawed to begin with.
I can assure you, there was an Internet before ads, and it was better without them.
Edward Snowden showed that global surveillance can lead to abusive system, in which there is no privacy, and everything is accessible by governments.
It is not about your personal advertising. It is not about your grocery lists. It is about creation of abusive system.
If social media have special portals for governments (at least I know about Facebook had one for New Zealand), then it opens a gateway for abuse.
- How do you know you were not abused?
- How do you know your data was not used by China to overthrow western civilization?
- How do you know that your data was not sold to Putin?
- How do you know that your data was not used by Left, or Right political party to change election results, like in Cambridge Analytica?
Companies do not have morality. They care about money, and laws (through fines). If a service does not require capture of data, then that data should not be captured.
Ads are bringing so little revenue per user that I can't see how that can possibly be true. And even then people are paying the ads on the product they end up buying after.
Ads function at a macro economic level like a very inefficient tax scheme.
But is funny, people want all (most?) things free, nobody wants to pay for news for example, but they don't want ads at the same time.
Makes no sense at all.
And if that means ad-driven websites disappear too, I don't see that as a big loss. The best websites are not ad-driven.
God knows what they'll use it for in the future, they'll know everything about you, who you voted for 15 years ago, what joke you make 20 years ago against the now-in-charge cast, do you sympathise with communist ideas ? Did you like or hate Musk before he becomes a dictator of the now independent Republic of Texas ? Did you use grinder ? Well too bad, homosexuality is now punishable by death retroactively. Looks like you illegally contacted a doctor for an abortion in 2027, that'll be 6 months of jail and a 30k fine ;)
You don't see the problem because you live in an abnormally quiet and abnormally peaceful (for you) time. The thing is your data is forever, the state of peace not so much
Here's a video [1] by a reasonably successful YouTube guitarist, Samurai Guitarist, on the various ways a professional guitarist might make money and how effective they are. It includes a section on content creators for social media.
The content creator part is what is relevant for this thread, but the whole video is worth watching if you are at all curious what a working musician who is not a big name star might make.
He gives some numbers from back when he was at around 50k followers, after two years of working full time trying to turn content creator into something he could make a living from.
He was getting $500/month from AdSense.
He was also getting about $500 for sponsored videos but he only had sponsors occasionally. He wasn't focused on something specialized gear reviews which would have probably gotten more sponsorships, so the sponsors were more general like VPN companies or game companies.
Patreon was around $300/month.
Amazon affiliate links to products he mentioned were around $50/month.
Spotify and other streaming services that he uploaded his music to were about $30/month.
He'd promote in his YouTube videos giving guitar lessons over Skype. That brought in around $750/month.
Fiverr gigs ranged from $80-500/month.
All in all a good month would be around $3000 at 50k followers.
Value is relative. Some people value attention, showing off, the nice feeling of helping others, contributing to a community, stuff like "I made this tool to help with a task I struggled with, maybe it can help others too, I'll put it in Github" or simply having a good time. People's time is their own, and they'll use it however they want.
Genuine question but what's the harm here? Or what's the negative consequence? I understand that this is creepy, people find it uncomfortable or odd, but what about it is harmful or so negative?
There is no reason to assume that the negative effects outweigh the positive effects.
There are some forms of advertisement which are maybe bad.
I think we would be worse off if all advertising were banned.
Evil regimes have never had a problem finding lots and lots of citizens to kill in the 99% of human history before the internet.
Despotic regimes have never had a problem finding plenty of people to kill. They aren’t going to be thwarted in their pursuit of LGBTQ people because they can’t get a list of people who used Grindr.
I also used to 'boost' my high school senior posts to other 16/17/18 year olds in whatever area they're from. Not only did that work as advertising for me, all of the likes that the images got from that probably really boosted the kid's self esteem. Within the past year they made it so that I can no longer target people under the age of 18 by area.
Source - worked on ads for a few years at FAANG.
People prefer personalized ads. I know many friends who like Instagram ads, but don't care about ads on some random news site.
* Hacker News (has promoted content, but without tracking) * Lobste.rs * Wikipedia * Mastodon * Project Euler * Notabug.org * Lingva Translate * Documentation for numerous FOSS projects * Various personal blogs
Honestly, it's hard for me to find websites that I regularly voluntarily use and do contain ads.
Most forms of advertising are bad. There are maybe a few which are decent, but there are far better alternatives (such as business directories and non-paid review sites).
If you believe in the free market to any extent, you should be against advertising. The only thing advertising does is to distort the free market - by making market agents be less rational.
Also things don't have to be as extreme as literally killing all members of a minority group for this to be deemed "bad". It can be as simple as targetted influence campaigns to push certain policies/agenda. The ability to influence on mass scales has never been easier and cheaper. There are many examples throughout the world of how that influence has been used. And while yes influence campaigns have always existed in some form, the degree of targeting and the ease at which this has been made is a case where and difference in scale is a difference in kind. This is a powerful tool that I don't believe anyone should have access to. States, companies, or individuals
E-mail: Disroot (but with any provider that supports IMAP, you pretty much never have to visit their website)
Online shopping: while some of the sites may have ads, they could easily survive without ads because, well; they literally sell products
News: if HN stopped allowing links to websites with ads, I certainly wouldn't miss them
This isn't a ban on companies from collecting personal data. This is a ban for Meta (it's unclear to me if other companies are included) to process user data for the purpose of behavioral advertising.
Because you had the money to advertise, they wound up exposed to your photos; they liked them and they were able to afford you, so they booked you.
However, the cost of your services necessarily accounts for you spending money on advertising. Someone who doesn't advertise may have had the same quality and style of photography and a better price, but because of your advertising, the couple were tricked out of finding the best vendor. You distorted the wedding photography market in your area, and your customers actually got a worse deal than they maybe could have.
Or, perhaps you are actually the best photographer in your area, and no one else would have come close for that couple. You still lost money because you paid for advertising.
Even worse, someone who is worse than you at photography may come along with a huge advertising budget and become the only visible photographer in the area, scamming both you and the couple from a better deal.
If instead there had been some open local directory of wedding photographers, which may charge some fee for services but otherwise present all phtogorpahers neutrally, the couple would have still found the best deal, and you would have been able to either offer lower costs, or made higher profits.
The "whole category of business" doesn't have a right to exist, and the EU has the right to regulate it out of existence. And why shouldn't they? Because it would be bad for your employer or your stock portfolio?
Healthcare != life insurance - they're very different things. Are you deliberately conflating them because it suits your argument?
> But is funny, people want all (most?) things free, nobody wants to pay for news for example, but they don't want ads at the same time.
Again, you're conflating two groups of people because it suits your internal narrative and makes you feel superior. I don't want ads, but I'm happy to pay for things, and I'm also happy to just not use a service that wants to spy on me and sell my data like YouTube and Facebook. According to your statement I don't exist.
> Makes no sense at all.
That's because you've made it all up.
That's a more extreme example, but there are lot of other ways creative government could make the lives of people they don't like miserable or impossible.
Advertising in Inc vs Wall St Journal vs People magazine vs Wired vs TV Guide vs Car & Driver vs Cosmo vs Ebony all gave you easy ways to target different audiences. It's more targeted now, but I don't think it's multiple orders of magnitude more powerful (mostly because the reach isn't nearly the entire story; you still have to influence after reaching.)
Personal data should be toxic with high potential liability costs. This would naturally cause companies to limit their data retention and use.
It incentivizes companies to gobble up any and all data they can about people. It incentivizes companies to increase the silent intrusion into our lives. It incentivizes companies to forget their "markets" are actually people -- extracting value from markets is taking resources from people.
Hypothetical scenario - with 23andMe and other DNA profiling places being targets for lots of different kinds of data thieves, what are the chances that "leaked" datum ends up in some kind of ad profiling system? Ad companies might know you have cancer before you do because your genetics hint at it, your purchase history hints at it, your online behavior changes might hint at it. Yet instead of alerting you that you might have cancer, they use those hints to sell you "life extending supplements" or homeopathic remedies promising to fix one of the symptoms you have. They squeeze you for money while you are still alive to be squeezed because you aren't a person, you are an ad profile. A cash cow.
Ad companies are not out for our benefit, they are out for their own. Just like every other company whose goal is to make money, they will throw people/consumers under the bus to save profit. So why would we give them any more leverage over us?
But it's not about material harm, it's about boundaries. And really about which boundaries can be set. For example these days we realize being married doesn't mean the other person can force you to have sex. But that wasn't obvious at a certain point in history! The boundary couldn't be realistically set because it wasn't supported by legislation. You can't set boundaries without power.
Let's consider an example. My premise here is that boundaries depending on harm done is insufficient to motivate existing legislation-supported boundaries that basically everyone would agree with.
Imagine someone that gives everyone hugs. They are gentle, mostly. They particularly like giving you hugs, because they know you don't like it. No matter what you say, they won't stop. You can't get them to leave you alone, and your work requires you to be in that office. Actually they have access to all offices of business with open positions in your field. They even show up at and in your house. They just follow you until you get tired. You can't change your locks because the company that services your house only supports that lock. You can't get them fired. Most of your coworkers don't care that much, and some like it. A few people really don't like it and have sophisticated ways to track him so they can avoid people like him most of the time, but they spent a lot of time on boats to do that and no one will hire them. You can't do that because you are neither technical enough nor willing to forego showers and employment. If you retaliate or lash out you'll be arrested. You are complaining about it, suggesting someone makes it illegal to gratuitously touch someone who doesn't want to be touched, and someone asks you "What is the harm? I know you don't like it, but how are you being harmed?"
How do you answer?
Still, I think it's clear that data can very quickly go from harmless to harmful depending on who gets their hands on it. The Nazis absolutely did have a problem finding all the Jews they wanted to kill, and abundantly available data about the religious preferences of literally every citizen being immediately available to them would absolutely have caused much more death than already happened.
I think with a little critical thinking you can take your "the only" or "is about" statements and ask yourself if you can think of exceptions. You can, and easily.
I'm not going out of my way to avoid sites that use ads, but I also don't feel obliged to enable their business model; that's their business, not mine. I care about controlling my own desktop.
Keep in mind that there is a lot of content out there that's funded by Patreon rather than ads. And I think the quality of Patreon-funded content is generally higher, because people consciously choose to support it, rather than it having to use clickbait and other dark patterns to lure your eyeballs in.
Sure, but that would only work locally. I do weddings all across my state. Couples would also have to look through pages and pages of terrible photographers. Those photographers don't have the money to advertise because they're bad at their jobs and don't do it frequently.
Yeah, in some ideal world people would be matched up with whatever product/service is best for them all of the time. We don't live in a perfect world. People won't buy what you're advertising unless they think it's a good fit for them. Because people buy whatever you're selling, that means you can keep advertising, which means the stuff advertised tends to be what people want to buy. Right now that's the best system we have. Any other system right now would probably be like when you search for things on Amazon nowadays, absolutely riddled with cheap Chinese knockoffs.