The tricky bit here is that advertisers don't need their ads to work, they just need to convince their customers they do. Even if there are reasons to question the metrics used to measure effectiveness (see e.g. [1]) this is all meaningless if ad companies still succeed in convincing people they are selling something of value. Which ironically does mean that one way or another advertising companies are good at advertising something it just might not be the thing they're getting paid for.

[1]: https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h... [1, hn]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873

This is a good point, and thanks for the links.

Sometimes it does feel like gimmicks all the way down. So much of the "digital market economy" is about generating demand, as opposed to answering demand.

Conservatively, I'm in favour of serving people's existing needs rather than making them anxious of FOMO something new. But I can see how demand-generation is more profitable: if you get to define what "useful" or "desirable" means, you're gold. "Competition is for losers."

But I see the solution as essentially the same: education and mental resilience. To move the needle back to personal agency, do the "malicious packet blocking" internally, rather than ex-post with technology.

I am reminded of Keynes' remark: "The secret of success in the stock market is not predicting which stocks will increase in value, but rather identifying stocks a majority of people think will increase in value."

> But what can we do to treat the cause, instead of just the symptoms?

By affecting the bottom line, increasing expenses and/or decreasing profits.

> If they stop working (or rather work less – it's a spectrum)

AdNauseam is an interesting attempt in this space - a browser plugin to automatically "click every ad to fight surveillance" (their words). By clicking everything, clicks become less valuable, at least in theory, but it has not really caught on.

> I feel the fix will be more along the lines of improving individual psychology and mental wellbeing, rather than entering the arms race of adversarial technology to block packet traffic (or whatever).

I agree with this. Ad blocking, ad clicking, packet blocking, is all thinking too small, always trying to catchup. It will always be behind and while useful for a niche subset of users, these kinds of technologies are more bandaids than a real solution to trigger fundamental changes to the advertising tracking industry.

What is a real, impactful solution? I don't know, but an area I have not seen explored much, considering by analogy:

Internet : Web :: Big Tech : ???

That is, the web layered on top of the Internet, as a disruptively transforming application, extracting and providing value.

Can another technology be created to build on the foundations provided by Big Tech, delivering value they provide, while avoiding their tracking/advertising downsides? I have little idea what this would look like in practice (how do you disrupt a billion dollar industry?), but if someone can crack this nut, it may change the world. Startup idea elevator pitch: disrupt Big Tech.

you have to poison the well. find a way to scramble enough of the data collected that they can trust none of it.

> The ads are valuable for a reason – they work.

I'll remind everyone that from my experience (starting a web shop and also being a target of ads) there is a lot to be said about ads. Ubers observations a few months back was no big surprise for me.

We turned off one particular network that according to their statistics were involved in most of our sales. Result: too small to measure.

Same goes for my observations as a consumer: I'm fairly certain what ad I get shown is decided not by how relevant it is but by who is dumb enough to pay the most for it without measuring results.

It's interesting that the last trend of "innovations" on the ad space make it harder for their clients to tell where exactly the clicks come from.

I've read plenty of claims that it's for increasing lock-in on their analytics platform... But why would people selling ads want to lock their clients on a free loss-leader?