Everyone thinks they are not susceptible to advertising.

Advertising metrics continue to prove that they are wrong.

HN will continue to have "contrarians" who think they are smarter than everyone else, and who reflexively argue contrarian positions, like "privacy is bad, actually", not because those positions are smart, but because the speakers are addicted to being "clever" contrarians.

Less than 1% of Facebook ads get clicked. Not sure what sort of roi marketing folks have come up with to convince purse strings their ads are actually producing, but if the "marketing" department can't spin numbers to look good, might be time find a new marketing department.

Then you can get 2% of your ads clicked on.

All that said, I'd be interested in learning if my layman's perspective is garbage (which, let's be honest, it probably is).

The number is far less than 1%. Other than that, your layman's perspective is correct.

I'm in the custom apparel industry, where a lot of purchases are (were - it's dropped off) driven by facebook ads. If Facebook ads were as effective as the HN zeitgeist seems to think, there would be no other kind of commerce.

advertising is manipulation. It's not even always about a trying to get you to hand over your money, sometimes it's about pushing politics or changing opinions and public perception. You can filter advertising out of your immediate consciousness, but you can't keep it out of your subconsciousness and the ads you can't even remember have an impact on your decisions and your beliefs.

I'm trying to figure out what you're suggesting here. That we should ban advertising? That untargeted advertising is somehow socially better than targeted advertising?

Practically every commercial interaction (and most social interactions) are "manipulation" of some sort. At the moment we're trying to manipulate each other into adopting the other person's perspective. I don't understand what you find insidious about sales pitches; I'm sure they've been with us almost as long as prostitution.

> I guess this just doesn't really bother me that much. Honest question - why should it?

Because of the impact of advertising on everyone's lives and the society at large.

An incomplete list of issues: http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html.

> I generally filter advertising out of my consciousness. I've clicked on exactly one ad in my life

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_stimuli