Yeah. Advertising ruins everything. Everything. They are directly and indirectly responsible for the poor state of consumer technology today. Privacy violations? Advertising. Borderline unusable websites? Advertising. Deliberately addictive social media? Advertising. Almost everything that's wrong with computing today is fueled by this industry's entitlement to our attention.

> Imagine how more efficient things could be if this cancer was eradicated once and for all.

Yes!! What I wouldn't give to see this entire industry banned from existence. It would solve so many problems it's ridiculous.

Well first you're going to have to convince people to pay for the things they use. History has shown us they have practically zero interest in doing so. People would rather trade their attention for free stuff than their money for priced goods and services.

The industry has grown out of this human behavior, not vv.

[edit] Humans have a limited capacity for making purchasing decisions. This is why in 20+ years nobody has made a successful micropayments based product or platform. Further, simply paywalling software or services means 99% of people will not use it. People also are uncomfortable with a system that just withdraws money from their account to pay people - and a universal subscription model isn't particularly tenable due to the competing interests of market participants.

If you can solve this problem with something other than ads, I will be your first investor because you're going to be the richest human on earth.

It's easy to say "ads bad" - ok, but the real question is what are we going to replace them with?

> It's easy to say "ads bad" - ok, but the real question is what are we going to replace them with?

I don't know and at this point I don't think it even matters. Every single time I discuss ads here on HN I learn new reasons to hate it. Some days ago I read a story about a politician who deliberately slowed down traffic so people would be forced to "contemplate" this garbage. The sheer audacity of these people never fails to impress me.

It's irredeemable and the fact that there's currently no alternative is no reason not to get rid of it. We really should just do it and let the chips fall where they may. People will figure out a way to make money. They have to, because the alternative is to go bankrupt. Maybe they'll make less money and that's absolutely fine.

> People would rather trade their attention for free stuff than their money for priced goods and services.

How would you explain the fact that people paid for cable and premium cable channels (e.g. HBO) in the past when free network TV has always been an option?

> How would you explain the fact that people paid for cable and premium cable channels (e.g. HBO) in the past when free network TV has always been an option?

The issue you're failing to separate out is that you're talking about entertainment with television. Websites are largely not comparable in entertainment value, and most are not entertaining at all. People will pay a lot for entertainment. That's why blogs are worth $... today and Netflix is worth $226 billion. If people would pay so much for eg blogs (or, again, any other comparable content), there'd be a $100 billion company extracting that monthly payment for producing volumes of written content on websites. Some blog network would have actually succeeded and become a global content juggernaut.

Most of the content online is not of high quality and people will not pay for it, or they'll pay so little for it as to be a sad joke.

Which website compares to the joy and value people extracted from Friends, Seinfeld, MASH, Fresh Prince, I Love Lucy, and dozens of other prominent TV shows from the past ~50 years. Much less the even higher production shows like Sopranos or Game of Thrones. There may be a select few and they're billion dollar services like Reddit with huge volumes of low value content. Do millions of people still talk lovingly about some websites from 2006 like they do decades later about I Love Lucy? Hell no they don't, only a tiny niche group of people does that.

People go back and watch movies over and over again for decades. They listen to the same songs/bands/albums regularly for decades.

Does the average person go back and dig up long dead websites and go through them start to finish on Archive.org, like they do old TV shows they enjoyed (Quantum Leap, ALF, Golden Girls, whatever). Hell no they don't, again, only a very very tiny group of people would do such a thing.

Most online text content is not very entertaining, even in the best case scenarios, that's the difference between the concepts.

Is there lots of funny, amusing, entertaining text content on eg Reddit? You bet. And people will pay pennies for it - if at all - because it's of low value compared to high quality, higher production value entertainment. They'll pay what it's worth, a pittance.

I don’t necessarily disagree, but substack would seem to be an example of quite a bit of success for writers.

Easy - they paid for cable because it was an orange to OTA's apples. You'd only get a few OTA channels, and even then, not all of them would come in clearly. People paid for cable because it offered more channels. Most channels would still show commercials. Relatively few paid for premium channels, but it wasn't because they were commercial free (they were), it was because they offered better content (newest movies), in a time when piracy wasn't nearly as accessible.

Cable channels were also subsidized by advertising. You pay a decent amount of money per month to get access to exclusive content, but that cost still doesn't cover the costs of producing the media. If cable bills were double or triple the price, even without ads, many people probably would have been pushed to "free" TV.

Exclusive content. That's why I pay for HBO anyways.

While I agree that killing advertising is effectively impossible I'm not sure I agree that the problem is that people aren't willing to pay for things.

I think advertising dollars paying for services that users use is a convenient excuse that companies use to justify it, but it isn't an imperative for why it should exist.

If you can't get people to pay for your service when they know the real price maybe your service shouldn't exist, or shouldn't exist at the scale it does now.

That being said your main point that the industry grew organically based on human behavior certainly seems true. Banning advertising (like banning lobbying or corporate contributions to elected officials) is an impossible game of whack-a-mole. It can't be defined tightly enough to be outright banned (are you going to ban telling people you sell something they might like?) and the value derived from it is large enough that people will get creative when you ban the outcomes.

That being said I do think the most egregious versions should be regulated. Ads to kids, deceptive mail or email ads that look like invoices or bills, ads that are obviously lying about features or benefits, but enforcement is incredibly difficult. I'm not especially optimistic.

You can effectively kill it or curtail its noxious effects by banning common negative externalities of it.

The GDPR, though having a massive enforcement problem, disallows targeted ads and all the privacy violations typically associated with them.

You could make websites liable for the ads they display, automatically killing the "bottom of the barrel" of advertising such as chumboxes (Outbrain/Taboola/etc) and similar low-quality trash because the cost to review & audit these ads would outweigh any potential profits.

You could revoke Section 230 protection for social media companies that manipulate the reach of content to increase engagement (which is why every social platform switched from a chronological feed to an algorithmic one) as to discourage the practice and prevent them from profiting off intentionally pushing harmful or even illegal content to increase engagement.

> Well first you're going to have to convince people to pay for the things they use

> People would rather trade their attention for free stuff than their money for priced goods and services.

No, I don’t think this is true. I think this is something people in adtech tell themselves to sleep better at night. There’s lots of money in ads and free stuff, but there are many companies doing quite well by having customers pay for stuff.

Netflix is worth $200B plus, more than the ad tv networks. Those networks said for years that customers won’t pay and need ads. They were wrong. And I’d also add that they wanted more. They charged for cable channels and still sold ads.

People want choices and don’t mind paying for value.

Ads are bad for people.

I will say, I find it interesting that newspapers never developed an equivalent to "the daily paper."

Even in the 2000s I remember newspapers not costing more than a dollar or two. I would personally prefer a one-off payment of some small amount to get the website for the day or X amount of articles instead of some god-awful subscription that has to be cancelled via some shitty call center process where they try to stop you twenty times.

Nah, the video game industry has micro-transactions down to a science.

I guess it depends on your definition of micro, I meant sub-$1.

But what happens when nobody sees the ads anymore? I run enough ad blockers that I never see ads on the Internet. I don’t watch broadcast/commercial TV. I don’t listen to broadcast radio. In my area, public advertising like billboards are very rare. It really isn’t difficult to live a life with very little ads.

> But what happens when nobody sees the ads anymore? I run enough ad blockers that I never see ads on the Internet.

Hopefully their return on investment will approach zero and they will stop putting ads on everything.

people keep saying things like this but really it's a question of what's available

music piracy is basically over thanks to spotify, apple music, youtube, bandcamp, etc

hardly anyone i know torrents movies anymore due to netflix, hbo, hulu

everyone has a phone plan instead of hopping around on free wifi constantly

people pay for lyft/uber instead of just skipping fare on the train

there exist social networks and communities that are effectively fee-supported. somethingawful and metafilter are some siloed examples, but there's the fediverse and stuff like mastodon where essentially people either join a specific community/clique that's funded by members or host their own instance.

i'm convinced what keeps most people on the main advertiser-controlled networks is they are run by huge corporations with service monopolies and network effect. remember, whatsapp got big on a dollar per year subscription

Don’t forget fake news and talk show hosts willing to say anything that gets people talking all for the purpose of selling crap products at exorbitant markups.

Democracy be damned, there’s money to be made on dietary supplements!

Devil's advocate: Advertising allows people to invest large amounts of money into products that don't charge end users. It allows largely equitable access to hugely powerful and complex information systems like Google search at no direct monetary cost to users.

Most people put the value of Google search on the order of thousands of dollars per year [1]. Imagine Google was a paid service: think of the academic disparity between the children of wealthy students who had access to Google and poorer students who do not.

1. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/04/25/how-much...

Google? You mean the billion dollar company that subverts web standards and gets away with it due to their browser monopoly? The one that nearly kills websites the second some advertiser becomes "concerned" over some content? The one that demonetizes actual creators for arbitrary reasons?

They are very much part of the problem. Google search? It's bad and gets worse every day because of advertising -- Google has stopped trying to fight SEO spammers.

Compromise suggestion: product placement?

Mix the ads inside the content so that the ad delivery mechanisms don't get in the way.

Advertising is to your eyeballs like spam is to your inbox.

Exactly! We ban spam, why can't we ban these advertisers? Make no sense to me.

Advertising is mind hacking. Mind malware. It's about infecting people's minds with ideas nobody asked for. Why is it bad when some spammer does it but fine when advertisers turn our societies into a literal cyberpunk hell? Why does their "commercial interests" somehow legitimitize their industry? Nobody consented to it. Why do they think they can violate our minds without our consent?

Unfortunately, like the real cancer, it has too many forms and too many causes to have a simple way of eradicating it. And unlike the real cancer, nobody is seriously investing into fixing it. Maybe some kind of paradigm shift is required to make the approach of "we hold data about you that you need hostage so we could sell you stuff and control your behavior" no longer acceptable. After all, you wouldn't accept if the car dealer would be the only one who had access to your car mileage or maintenance records, and would only tell you any information about it after you listened to the sales pitch. People would be grabbing torches and pitchforks if that happened. But for other businesses the same behavior is seen as OK.

>car dealer would be the only one who had access to your car mileage or maintenance records

So yea, I have the next billion dollar idea. The gas gauge app. $3.99 a month to know how much farther you can travel. Also, we remove the gauge from inside the car.

Any car that has a screen could have a built-in diagnostic tool displaying all the trouble codes, live data from sensors, etc. The computer behind the screen already has access to said data as it's connected to the various data buses.

But yet even in 2022 the best we can do is "service engine soon" and getting more information than that requires an expensive visit to the dealership.

I think there are apps that could read OBD-II codes? Though usually they're kinds cryptic and fixing them often beyond what an average motorist could do.

I wish I thought you were joking. With subscription services now needed to remotely start your car, we're almost there.

Shhhh... seriously; GM and others from the car industry might get the idea and actually implement such a travesty.

Ooh lord, this reminds me of Mint and their useless email alerts. Every alert is along the lines of “You’ve been charged a foreign transaction fee! Log in to see what / who / when / how much!”. This is obviously to drive engagement at the expense of UX and, you know, actually making a useful service. I absolutely abhor this practice and I’ve written a few feedback emails to explain as much. As if mining all my transaction data wasn’t payment enough, I must also endure irrelevant marketing for yet another credit card or home loan I don’t need. It’s further annoying that despite having a complete view of my finances, they can still fail so stupendously at showing me any ad with even the slightest relevance. I personally feel that although we live in this age of unprecedented consumer data, the actual useful insights leveraged by companies to sell things are still in their infancy. I basically see all consumer data collection companies as ripping off a few parties: advertisers they’re selling the data to, and in turn, companies paying to run “targeted” ads, and of course, consumers. There is a huge consumer appetite for RELEVANT products that could make their lives better or solve even the smallest inconvenience, and yet that appetite is met instead with a deluge of poorly-designed, ill-conceived, ready-for-the-dumpster products. Some people are starting to push back, but it’s a massive problem with no easy solution. Related: https://www.pinkbike.com/news/mechanics-petition-for-repaira...

> Imagine how more efficient things could be if this cancer was eradicated once and for all.

Do you mean we should build a starship, Ark B, put all marketers into it, and send them all to a very distant planet?

Or at least offer an option to pay to remove the annoyances.

HBO was a great example of this in the pre-streaming days.

"Want to see great shows and movies with no commercials, pay the extra for cable + HBO and you won't have to seem them again.!"

This default, "it's all free BUT you have to see ads and there are no alternatives" seems to be the problem. The apps described in the article are effectively recognizing this consumer surplus/need and acting on it.

The problem is that once you segment your customers into paying and non paying. The non paying customers become much less valuable to advertisers and the paying customers become much more valuable.

So the service needs to charge even more, which makes paying customers even more valuable in a feedback loop. The usual result is that eventually the service can’t help themselves and starts showing paying customers “a few” ads. Then the definition of a few gets larger and larger.

> The non paying customers become much less valuable to advertisers

I can see this being true, but I'm curious why. Is this because the advertisers know the paying customers have the cash to pay for the service?

Outside of a very few markets that prey on desperate people's last dollars (payday loans, etc), most advertising's objective is to get people to buy something - advertising to those who can't afford it is useless.

Advertisers want the attention of people with disposable income. If someone's paying for something as superfluous as a streaming service, then they must have more than enough money to spend on whatever they want to sell.

The more you pay in general, the more they want you to pay them specifically.

It doesn't work. Paying to avoid ads makes you more valuable to advertisers. They will offer more money for your attention and some executives will eventually think they're leaving money on the table by not doing it.

The problem with advertising is that the price of an ad view directly correlates with how wealthy the viewer is. Being able to opt-out would essentially make the advertising platform worthless as the only audience would be broke people who can't afford to pay to opt-out and are thus very unlikely to be able to afford your product.

The only way would be if regulation either mandates a reasonably-priced ad-free tier (priced at the average revenue from an ad-viewing user) or other restrictions (GDPR but actually enforced, the website being liable for the ads it shows, etc) that would make advertising completely unprofitable.

> The apps described in the article are effectively recognizing this consumer surplus/need and acting on it.

Presumably, AA is pissed off because the people that value their time enough and have the skills to set up and use an alternative are people they'd very much want looking at their ads, much more so than the plebs who already use the website and see the ads.

I always liked this bit:

"Industry could not benefit from its increased productivity without a substantial increase in consumer spending. This contributed to the development of mass marketing designed to influence the population's economic behavior on a larger scale.[24] "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising#20th_century

Was it Ray Bradbury that said something like the only difference between the rich and the poor in the future will be the number of ads they see?

Exactly. Personally I don't differentiate between carbon-based and silicon-based eyes. They're both eyes.

Also, banning silicon-based eyes should be declared a massive, massive ADA violation.

That's a fairly bizarre and Byzantine approach to legalizing screen scraping. If we want to make screen scraping affirmatively legal, we can simply do that.

We don't need to anthropomorphize HTML/JSON parsing as equivalent to human vision, and then declare any efforts to restrict that vision to be a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Lol.

We should just make it legal, but this seems like a convenient "backdoor" way to do it - either the company site is fully screen-reader enabled 100% or scraping is allowed of any kind.

It isn't bizarre; screen scraping and re-presenting information to the user in a way that is convenient for them is absolutely essential to many assistive technologies.

Perhaps I misunderstood.

The airlines are already legally required to make their websites accessible in the United States, including to screen readers, by virtue of the Air Carrier Access Act. They already all comply with this.

Unrelated to screen readers, American Airlines and Red Ventures are involved in a dispute about the _legality_ of screen scraping. The dispute involves lawsuits, but does not involve technological measures to obfuscate or otherwise obstruct screen readers, or even screen scraping.

Your comment seemed to suggest that we should make _screen scraping_ legal by considering it the same as vision, and that any efforts -- including legal efforts -- to prevent screen scraping should run afoul of the ADA.

That was my understanding, and that's indeed a bizarre view.

If your point was limited simply to making screen readers accessible, then I think your point is perfectly fine, but kind of a non sequitur, because this dispute is not about technological measures to control screen scraping, it's about legal measures.

Is a website considered a private space (maybe not, but you agree to a TOS when you fly AA)? If so, you should have the right to say how your space is used by others, regardless of if we believe marketing is ethical or not. If AA doesn't want their data being used anywhere else, sounds like they should have the right to do that, just like we have the right to remove people from our private spaces if they do things against our rules. You also have the choice not to fly AA.

Their servers are their own private spaces. That's the line. I will not do anything that subverts their control of their own computers. I will not make their servers execute my code. Their website, however, is just data they sent to my computer.

They have exactly zero right to dictate what I do on my computer. Their HTML is being rendered on my computer and I absolutely reserve the right to delete or modify elements in any way and for any reason. Their javascript is executing on my computer and I absolutely reserve the right to delete and modify functions if I deem necessary.

The issue with this sentiment, in my opinion, is that users have access to this data by logging in and they've provided the app with that access by providing their credentials. Unless a court is going to go down the road of preventing users from sharing their own information, I don't see how AA can do anything about this. If you can view this info in a web browser, you can scrape it.

They'll invent some "acceptable use policy" document that says you can only talk to their servers using their software which of course does what they want, namely monetize your attention by showing you ads. Then they'll trick and coerce people into accepting or signing it.

Complete bullshit but it's totally something these judges would understand. One would think these people would actually protect consumers from corporation abuse...

It's pretty outrageous that to fly with a given airlines you give up X many rights of online use.

This seems to fit the definition of an unconscionable contract pretty well.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscionability

I'm always kind of reminded of Louis C.K's old bit about how humans learned to literally fly, and it turns out the whole experience sucks.

Isn't the whole point of that bit that we've become spoiled and indifferent, to the point where we no longer appreciate how amazing and futuristic our world has become?

I think you're right, but it's hard to argue that flying is both an amazing human achievement and is also just the worst.

Edit: Wow, re-listening to the bit, my memory definitely failed me. Basically a rant on how we should be grateful that airline companies are even able to get a plane in the air. I think we can do better, personally.

> Imagine how more efficient things could be if this cancer was eradicated once and for all.

people dont like paying and they dont mind ads. they enable a lot of products and services that would otherwise not exist. ads might be a net negative, but they certainly have at least some positives.

Specifically the airline industry, all industrial complexes, or adapting/adjusting copyright and intellectual property laws?

Edit to add: Do you really have to downvote, don't you have something better to do with your click?

i assume they mean advertising.

Ah thanks, I didn't catch that aspect at first - threw off my interpretation.