Advertising is incredibly useful to me and I routinely seek it out.

- I own a home that routinely needs services. Ads help me find willing businesses.

- I own a car that needs tires. Just yesterday I looked at ads for those selling them.

- I like to buy art for my house. Ads in apps like Etsy pop up things that might interest me.

- Sometimes I look for a new job. Enough said on that one.

Believe it or not ads exist because they perform a useful social function.

Do you think ads give you a good picture of the relative quality of your options?

Whether you see an ad is entirely driven by how much the seller wants to spend to acquire your purchase. Ads give no indication of the actual quality of the service or product. In fact, companies with greater ad spending tend to be lower quality because a portion of your purchase price is going towards the advertisement at the expense of quality.

Do you really not read reviews when shopping, and just type in a search term and see what comes up? I'd be surprised if you didn't, but if you don't you should try using non-commercial speech when making a purchase decision. Level of advertisement is inversely proportional to value, so I think you'll be pleased with the results.

All your examples are far better served by opt-in "sign me up for new/interesting stuff on X" model.

No. I do not want a stream of emails from tire vendors.

That particular case is even more removed from push ads - it's something that you'd normally go and search for, not sit around and wait until the right ad shows up.

Post I responded to made numerous assertions about "ads". There was no qualification for "push ads".

Fair enough. I think that push model is what people actually hate about ads.

But then again, what percentage of ads is the kind you have to actively go and look for?

> We should strive to make anyone who gets manipulated into changing their behavior based on an ad they saw feel ashamed and stupid for falling for their tricks,

This sounds great, but:

A) how do you know/can you prove that you've been manipulated?

B) How do we know that we haven't all been manipulated? (After all, millions of people bought into this ecosystem to get away from ads, I think every person who's angry has a case that they've been manipulated)

and C) where is this social movement gonna take place? Social media, the bastion of internet advertising?

The answer is make tech less important in our lives. There's been a pattern going back decades that technology grows in scale and utility and eventually becomes corporatized to that point that it generates more income to work against its users. The answer is to live a lower tech life. Less time on phones and apps and more time in the real world.

That is an option but not tenable to most people in our modern world. How do you become informed about our world and people we care about far away without computer tech?. The better solution is free software we control and better ways to fund developers and journalists.

Say it louder: ads are socially-acceptable, corporate-sponsored brainwashing.

>We need to start a social movement to punish advertisers. Ads are pernicious and pervasive thought manipulation which systemically decrease the life satisfaction of nearly every person in society. It is a cancer.

Will never happen until we can dispel the notion that human are free agents. People will never give up this believe about themselves. Meanwhile, it's proven to be effective by virtue of it being a trillion dollar industry or something. Same thing with gambling.