The problem is not "ads". The problem is in the "ad-funded" business models. The ad-funded economy is one of the main contributors to the destruction of the fabric of our communities.

Ad-funded business models make it impossible for the people to "vote with their wallets", so all of the good things about any kind of market dynamics are removed, and we are left only with its disadvantages.

- It treats everyone as "eyeballs", removing any need for a content producer to care about quality. As long as it generates clicks it goes. It has turned even the most reputable of media channels into tabloids.

- By having no regard for quality, it's a tragedy of the commons.

- By removing any chance of nuance, it makes all of the audience to be bucketed into "pass/filter" algorithms, and the only concern is to make sure that the content is so bland and innocuous that no one within their bubble reach can complain about it.

- It has taken mass-consumerism and general public conformity to 11.

- Big Tech turn all of that crap into profit no matter what.

- It is feeding and coddling the coming and current generation of techies into lame drones with no imagination and will to affect actual change. It's creating an army of people who think that the status quo is good.

I don't think it is too much of a stretch to think of how the "ad supported" content economy is correlated with the increased polarization of people, the growing tribal divide and the isolation of individuals. I honestly think that we should be treating the majority of "ad supported" websites as heavy polluters of our minds and our societies.

You can't pick out the issue with large corporations sinking billions of dollars into trying to manipulate your behavior?

No, I can't. There are many things that influence my behaviour and that is low down on the list of influences that worry me. Even Hacker News is probably a worse influence than the average ad. What do you think is the problem here?

And it isn't billions, you need to normalise by audience size. Any company spending billions to influence my behaviour is bankrupt, I don't have enough money for them to make that back.

Okay, so you actually can pick out the issue. You just don't mind being manipulated by corporations. Fine, but strange that the angle you took was "aw shucks geez guys I'm so confused about all this".

If a dog gives someone puppy eyes, the common response is to play with the dog. If a corporation waves something that people want at them, the response is to buy it.

But one of those things would get a broadly supported "aw, how wholesome!" from the crowd. The other appears to get actual, honest, anger. It is unclear to me why the difference in responses is so large.

Everything a person encounters influences them, and generally people are comfortable with good and bad influences in their lives. The fact that corporations are motivated to sell things doesn't even mean their influence is bad. The fact that I bought a rice cooker because it was being advertised to me doesn't change the fact that I am better off owning the rice cooker. I bought it because it improves my life. So why the hate on ads?

Ads are a plague, no doubt. That’s why they need to use such heavy handed tactics to get you to see them, like holding your attention hostage before you can see the video clip that you actually wanted to see.

You have just normalized this absurdity because it’s been around for so long. Ads are terrible for people’s mental health, because the best way to sell a product is to create a need for it. In other words, by making you feel incomplete and insufficient.

I don't want ads on my web pages and TV in the same way I don't want ads in my novels, on my bedroom ceiling, in my bathroom, in my car, in my mail, the same way I don't want to be proselytised to, recieve junk mail, spam, view propoganda, etc.

once you understand not desiring one, you can understand not wanting the rest, since they're all fundamentally the same thing.

The thing is: you paid for your bedroom ceiling, your bathroom and your car. You also paid for your computer & screen, but you did not pay for the content you're watching on it.

I am entirely with you on not wishing any ads at all, anywhere. I just think that it's not realistic to remove ads entirely on the open web today.

This should not be an excuse for the way ads are being run today. It is fundamentally broken. Incentives and attributions should be changed.

There's a couple of issues with this line of thinking, but I'd also just observe that this split is technically an additional tangent. My point up above was that of course people understand why people don't like advertising, and that most people don't like advertising themselves. It's not some unknown or alien thing on which to feign ignorance. Indeed it borders on universal human experience. Like the old quip about "everyone understands atheism, I just believe in one less god than you", practically everyone understands an inherent distaste for advertising, some just want less advertising than others and some actively want to produce and push it on others while not having it forced upon themselves. After we've established that, now we get into if or when it's ok or justified.

Firstly, I'd urge everyone to deny the initial premise. The right or desire to be free of or avoid advertising has nothing inherently to do with the act of paying money or being able to amass or claim property rights over things. That's not why i hate junk mail. That's not why I don't want to be proselytised to. That's not why i shouldn't have to view propoganda. Of course, the addition of private property rights issues is one more barrier that advertising would have to overcome in order to be deemed acceptable, but on the contrary, i think a better premise is to start with WHY or WHEN advertising should be allowed, given that it is almost universally loathed or objected to. I wouldn't want to live in a world where people are subjected to advertising because they haven't payed for things or own things or content. That's dystopian.

At the very least, I think people should have the ability to say no, and for that desire to be respected and not interferred with. I think there's good grounds for advertising, or at least many types of advertising, to not be allowed in many public areas or via many public resources. I have no problems with companies or organisations not delivering material or allowing access to general consumer goods as a consequence of saying no to advertising, but that's different to users saying "no i don't want ads and I don't want to be tracked" and having the companies go "but I'm gonna do it anyway and you shouldn't be ad blocking".

Finally, I always come back to what the web is, or at least what it was, in that I deny the underlying unspoken premise that the web is there to run business models or pay money for content to be put on it. If businesses can make it on the web, good for them. But if they can't, the web is more important than business.

To be clear, the internet and web and content came first, then the businesses arrived and co-opted it for their purposes. Now the narrative is trying to be rewritten so that you can't possibly let people consume material on the web for free without people paying for it via advertising.

So let me be clear: I pay for my computer. I pay for the bandwidth of my ISP. This allows me access to a public network of computers where I can make requests to other computers on the network to send me information. People can also pay to put content up on that network to be requested by others, but no one forces them to do so, AND, no one forces them to answer my computer's request for content. When i use an ad-blocker, the main activity is for me to determine client-side that there are certain computers I don't want to talk to, and certain content I don't want to see. In an ideal world I wouldn't be tracked also, but that's just an additional abuse or manipulation of the system.

Several years after this whole system had been operating just fine, companies arrived and started trying to make money, and today we have a feigned victim-complex retcon narrative about how people not paying for content should view ads.

On the contrary, if companies do not want me viewing their content: don't put it up on a public open network that's publicly searchable, publicly addressable, and that responds to my requests for that content. Put it behind a paywall, put it behind authorisation, put it on your own intranet or network.

Keep the open web as the web. Keep it open. Keep it in good faith and respect user's explicit preferences. The hosting computer decides what content it wants to make available and who it wants to talk to. And my computer decides who it wants to talk to and what content it wants to see.

And in an ideal world, advertising should be delegated to the bare minimum of places because the starting assumption should be that most users, rationally, justifiably, and understandably, don't want it.

How is it confusing? Some people don't want ads in their faces. Especially when they are generally bullshit.

Many of the best and brightest minds of our time are being employed by megacorps that exist solely to devise new ways to trick grandmothers into clicking on an ad that claims “This one weird trick that doctors don’t want you to know”. How is that not pathetic? How is that not a giant waste of human potential? If the Soviet Union had funneled their computer science students to thinking of ways to manipulate boomers, we would call it evidence of their moronic inefficiency.

And our names were Tyler Durden.

Yea this confuses me too. Many advertisements have made me aware of things that I would be interested in but didn't know about. Marketing and advertising can be valuable to those on the receiving end.

If people genuinely thought this, there could be a market where people pay money to be advertised to or targeted towards.

In many ways this is what trade magazines are/were, but the absence of a general market for such generalised interest is so absent its the kind of witness evidence that is deafening in its silence.

Online ads benefit the little guy. Nike and others can afford billboard and TV ads. If you've ever tried starting up a small Shopify business, online ads are all you're going to get.

The problems are the power Facebook and Google have over the ad market, that increases ad costs for businesses by a lot (I've read, one third, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's more). But online ads are a lifeline for small businesses. Regulate the big players, and keep the ads flowing. Some people here want ads to be abolished, but you'd just strengthen existing brands, i.e. huge multinationals. That's all it would achieve.

That's why real issue with Brave, frankly. I still use Brave as my default browser because it's the only one that allows me to allow all ads by default, and only turn on Brave Shields for specific websites. Even uBlock Origin deprecated their default-allow, and it now breaks many websites completely if you try it. But I don't like "anti-ad" sentiment.

Sad state of affairs. But people who oppose Big Tech domination, and also want ads abolished, don't realize that doing so would prevent millions of small businesses from getting off the ground. Chrome's killing the open web, but might be saving the "open economy" by trying to disincentivize adblocking (by blocking "annoying ads" by default, and implementing ManifestV3). It's a mess.

I think noone argues against ads being useful, when dosed properly. Same like sleeping pills for example. The problem is that ad-based business can not resist the temptation to "overdose" the user. This is how we got in the situation that infuriates so many people (almost a billion devices use an ad-blocker). People just do not want to see so many ads everywhere.

Let's take Brave for example. Open home page of brave.com and you get:

"The best privacy online

Browse privately. Search privately. And ditch Big Tech."

And a nice screenshot.

The problem is this is not what Brave works/looks like when you open it the first time.

By their own research [1], on your first run Brave will immediately "phone home" 80(!) times. The original post discussed here talks about mundane features like installing an extension not working without contacting their servers about it.

Then, the user is immediately welcomed by ads for several crypto services right there in the browser on the right hand side (curiously hidden on their home page screenshot). I guess that:

"Browser that shares your private information with us and shows you ads you do not really want" would not fly well as a tagline.

Having this behavior turned on by default is where user frustration begins and is later then just amplified by even worse behavior, again incentivized by the fact that the business model is simply dependent on ads, like the other big tech.

[1] https://brave.com/popular-browsers-first-run/

They could have been, but there's too much abuse going on in the advertising space. In regards of online advertising: it's distracting, manipulative, infringes privacy and wastes bandwidth. Online life without ads is like going out to a park, out of the city center. You just can't believe how noisy it was before.