Do you have any better models for providing expensive-to-run services to everybody, and not just the select few who are willing/able to pony up the cash directly?

Every single wall-of-text criticism of ad based monetization on HN contributes nothing new, is full of thinly-stretched analogies (like your "cigarette smoke"), and rarely suggests an alternative, and even more rare a workable one.

If you’re not going to read things you dismiss, please don’t reply. It just adds unhelpful noise.

> “Do you have any better models for providing expensive-to-run services to everybody, and not just the select few who are willing/able to pony up the cash directly?”

The whole point is that if these services cannot be self-sustaining without monetization of ad injection, then the service is thereby demonstrably harmful to the people it delivers the service to.

Whatever value proposition the service is claiming, whether it’s news delivery, a communication feed with friends, whatever, if it cannot be self-sustaining without ads then it is a non-business thing; it is not a business at that point, because predicating the financial viability of a thing on the activity of injecting a harmful substance into customers’ lives instantly renders it a non-business... a thing that the market has demonstrated to be unwanted and worthy of losing money unto the point of shutting down as a side-effect of it not being viable outside the scope of hurting people.

We can definitely debate about degrees of the problem, as long as such debates are based on measuring and quantifying the harmful effects of ads and associated privacy intrusion, and are not disingenuously framed in terms of a customers purported self willingness to endure ads for the service. It’s not a thing a person can in principle be informed enough about to give that consent; it’s a vehicle of psychological harm where the perpetrators have a huge asymmetric information advantage and a huge lobbying advantage.

In all earnesty and seriousness, it is exactly like the kind of harm perpetrated by cigarette companies, with asymmetric knowledge of bodily harm and limitless marketing budgets and a supply of die-hard customers ready to say how willing they are to make that harm trade off to consume the product.

I skimmed your post, and read the first, last, and a few in-between paragraphs. It's incredibly verbose, repetitive, and wordy, and repetitive to the point of not helping you make your point. I'm not dismissing your point without reading it, though.

> The whole point is that if these services cannot be self-sustaining without monetization of ad injection, then the service is thereby demonstrably harmful to the people it delivers the service to.

You make this assertion, which is a huge one, then fail to really support it at all. You leave no room for nuance, and ignore the value that people do derive from free services like Facebook or Google. Your initial assumption is "ads are bad", and anything that has ads is therefore bad, and that's where your train of thought ends. It’s adding nothing to the discussion.

This appears to precisely be a statement that you are dismissing it without reading it.

> “You leave no room for nuance”

Again, had you read the post, you’d have seen you’re wrong on this, as I granted that it would be possible to debate about the degrees of harm that different kinds of ads and associated data tracking can cause, as long as that debate is not based on any notion of self willingness of consumers to claim they are OK with the ad-harm-for-free-service trade off, since it is not possible for anyone on the consumer side of that equation to have enough of the information to make such a claim.

If instead it is based on actual quantified measures of harm, then you could ask whether there’s a way to make thresholds and classify some ad-based services as “safe enough for consumption” likely through clear regulation.

Also, without resorting to let-me-google-that-for-you link spam about all that has been written about ads causing harm, I also think there is a philosophical divide here that your mind seems entirely closed to.

It is totally fair to simply say “all ads are bad” or perhaps a slightly more qualified version “all ads based on personalized targeting criteria or narrow behavior-defined audience segmentation are bad.” For example, someone may just hold that targeted, personalized ads violate an intrinsic right to privacy, or that they come with unacceptably high risks that such behavioral data will be misused or stolen, and that a person should, morally, have a right to control the spread of that information or know the extent to which it was used to possibly manipulate them.

These things can just be statements of universal rights, and not necessarily rooted in any other observable outcome. Many people consider being targeted by behavior for an ad to be the harm, intrinsically.

This could in fact be a moral stance akin to saying “things that cause diseases are bad” in the smoking debate.

Pushing back and replying by saying “things that cause diseases are bad” is but a mere assertion is a pretty self-evidently vapid and useless reply. It’s basically table stakes of even entering the discussion at all to take as a premise that causing diseases is bad enough that unless the offsetting value was gigantic, such causes should be controlled and prevented.

It’s no different with ads. Lazy claims of oh but the value people get to stay connected or watch TV for free just don’t cut it. That approach doesn’t need rebuked, it’s just wrong. Baldly asserting that it’s wrong is perfectly fine.