Users don't 'allow' anything: YouTube send data, the owner of the receiving device can choose what to do with that data (modulo copyright infringement, hate speech laws, etc.).

YouTube's business model is to bet that adspace included alongside videos can be sold for a profit. The price they can charge for that adspace depends on market conditions, which includes factors like the prevalence of adblocking. Blocking ads is not 'stealing', in the same way that using coupons isn't 'stealing'.

> YouTube has every right to try to punish this behavior or stop providing their service to you - such as by blocking ads, or even by deleting your account.

Obviously. That's why it's never 'your' account; it's owned by them, they can do what they want (modulo copyright infringement, hate speech laws, etc.).

I don't remember signing a contract with YouTube. They send my browser a list of "things" and their URLs required to render a page and, as my agent, my browser can freely load or ignore them.

> access, reproduce, download, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, alter, modify or otherwise use any part of the Service or any Content except: (a) as expressly authorized by the Service; or (b) with prior written permission from YouTube and, if applicable, the respective rights holders;

> circumvent, disable, fraudulently engage with, or otherwise interfere with any part of the Service (or attempt to do any of these things), including security-related features or features that (a) prevent or restrict the copying or other use of Content or (b) limit the use of the Service or Content;

> Please read this Agreement carefully and make sure you understand it.

> If you do not understand the Agreement, or do not accept any part of it, then you may not use the Service.

Even if it's not binding, it illustrates what Google intends to do (stop providing the service via an anti-adblocker script) if you do not follow their TOS.

Yes. They have complete discretion over what 'list of "things" and their URLs required to render a page' they decide to send any particular user agent (modulo copyright infringement, hate speech laws, etc.). There is no requirement that HTTP connections to 'youtube.com' should receive video data; or even HTML; or even that anything's listening on that port.

It doesn't matter what Google intends to do. Only what I do in response. TOS are not legally binding, they're a bunch of crap.

I want Google to pay my rent for the next decade, and Sundar has to offer a naked lapdance at the Pink Poodle every time they send me an ad I did not explicitly request to be shown.

Contracts are only valid if signed.

If an entire class of people were drawn to something else, such as watching Nebula or going to coffee shops, both would be more interesting than they are now.

But yes, it is their right to try. Just as it is my right to install & use an adblocker.

Personally, I agree with the 'my device, my rules' comment. If YouTube want to (try to) block me, they can go ahead. They're under no obligation to serve me video content even if I didn't block ads, so it makes little difference.

Why would any regular person empathize with the criminals in the commission of their crimes?

see: > YouTube has every right to try to punish this behavior or stop providing their service to you - such as by blocking ads, or even by deleting your account.

And ad blocking is self defense.

I didn't say that doing is is immoral, or that we should collectively feel ashamed, just that it is inherently <not paying> for YouTube, and that YT has every right to try to stop this behavior - of course, balancing kicking people off the platform with any ground they lose to competing UGC streaming services.

You seem to be assuming that watching ads would reduce the number of them, or reduce the price of Premium. All evidence is to the contrary (e.g. the presence of ads on pay-for TV, like cable)

So what if I am?

Do you do that? I hope you're consistent with your principles and watch every ad.

It’s a fine line.

A lot of ads are just shit though.

Why does Google want to charge advertisers to show ads to someone so determined to ignore them? If anything, if they force me to watch their ads and I ignore them, then Google is the one stealing from the advertisers.

I'm not going to buy an advertiser's product regardless of whether or not I'm forced to see its advertisement, and any counterargument to that must be built on the premise that advertisements can nonconsensually convince me to take action, in which case we're back to the beginning arguing about psychological warfare, where I certainly have a right to defend myself.

Here's is the quintessential example: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5... We paid $400 billion dollars to entrenched ISPs and got absolutely nothing for it.

And advertising is almost always a 3 party business deal. The merchant. The advertiser. The unwitting public. Sometimes the merchant gets screwed. Sometimes it's the advertiser. But almost always the target audience.

So when it comes to adblocking, I have zero sympathy for the advertiser or the merchant. I want zero advertisements in my life. But I get them anyway.

So sure, adblock away, but don't think that the consumer is the sole loser in the ads race: It's far worse than that.

The way that advertisements in the past has managed to avoid paying this tax is that the service or product is given away for free along side the advertisement. Since it is not an exchange of services, and the product is being giving away for free with no expectation of any money, goods or services, there is no tax to be applied.

Just this morning, I was on the toilet, about to finish up a shit. I reached instinctively to my left to grab... wait, the little roller is empty!

But...what used to be there? What was I about to grab? This is crazy, my mind is completely blank!

If only there were some kind of an unskippable 30 second movie with dancing animated bears that could remind me what product I might use adjacent to a toilet bowl to complete my biological morning ritual!

What I find more helpful is authentic experience from other consumers of that product. The authentic part is getting harder and harder to validate, of course.

I didn’t mind skippable YouTube preroll adverts. Now they are unskippable, multiple ones, and appear mid video.

Howver I don’t watch YouTube enough to justify paying more than Netflix and Disney combined just to skip adverts (but not skip the burnt in sponsor adverts)

Imagine if it were your business for a second, you’ve created a new website or a new physical product and you want to get more customers or users, what do you do? It’s not going to sell itself if nobody knows it exists no matter how good it is.

I didn’t need an ad to tell me to buy a camera. I didn’t see any ads at all! Rather, I decided “I wish I had something to take pictures with”, so I started researching how I could accomplish that thing.

And ads would not have helped me find the best camera option at all, in fact it’s probably a slightly negative signal — they must have big profits to spend lots of money on ads, compared to a company that just makes the best product and has their customers promote it for them.

Same thing with any other product. I see my coworkers using a terminal app I’ve never seen. It looks better than the normal one, so I ask them about it.

It’s very simple and not even nuanced I’m just unsure why many seem to gloss over that. Perhaps I’m more jaded than most

Or, alternatively, I noticed you recently purchased an instant pot. Would you like to subscribe to purchase instant pots monthly?

Plus ads are fundamentally inefficient sources of information. Billboard lawyers like to flood the interstates with their "Accident? call me" signage, on the off chance someone without a lawyer has an accident and looks up and sees Jacob Emrani smiling on them. Big payoff for the lawyer if they do get a job from this ad, but for the vast majority of the millions of commuters a day who pass such an ad its probably a useless waste of thought to even catch one in your periphery.

You already know you need toilet paper. There are only so many brands to choose from. Every month, you have to make a decision about one of them based on whatever factors are important to you at that time. (For me, it's usually cost, ply count, and how likely it is that someone in the house is going to flush a massive wad of it and clog the pipe.)

The point of print/radio/television ads are to groom you into associating some positive feeling with a specific choice, whether or not it's new or you know about it. So the next time you're looking at the wall of toilet paper, you recognize the bear, the colors, the jingle, the florid language about its delicate softness upon your tender starfish, and get you to feel something positive enough to get you to gravitate toward it despite its higher price. Joy, lust, anger, and vanity are easy to appeal to.

They're not trying to inform you of anything or make you a die-hard fan. They're buttering you up to tilt your next purchasing decision in their favor. That's why advertising never stops; it's an endless loop of a handful of charlatans competing with each other to coerce you into buying their version instead of the other guy's.

If I'm missing out on some product that I might like but I've never heard of because I block ads, that doesn't matter to me. If I don't know that I would want it, then I don't want for it. But generally, people talk about things worth talking about and I'd rather hear about new products from real people who don't have a commercial stake in promoting the thing.

I don't let Ads tell me what I 'might' need. I already know what I need (I might 'want' something but that is a different topic).

Ads try to convince me that I 'need' whatever it is they are 'selling'.

P.S.: I have had any number of marketing types push back (vehemently) when I expressed my distaste for oppressive ad overload with "well you tell me what the alternative is...how else am I supposed to reach customers". And I have stopped even trying to be nice about it: Figuring that out is your goddam job. My job would be vastly easier if I could just say "all that stuff about ethics, regulation, legislation and simple common decency...that's really inconvenient and I'm going to ignore it". But I don't get to ignore any of that; I still successfully do my job. So why should marketing be somehow different.

Anyone in marketing who says "You tell me how to do my job without crapping on people" is lazy and incompetent.

That doesn't mean ads are necessary though, frankly any system which depends on spending more than your competitors will never produce the best recommendations. Instead I learned to first build a list of companies in a space, then research those companies. I use things like Wirecutter, Reddit, and Productchart to help decide as well.

What I need aren't ads; I need good, user-centric, recommendation and discovery products. Sadly we fell into the local-minimum of ads instead. That said sometimes I do choose to let a company advertise to me in a specific channel (separate email or social media account) so I can keep up with their products and potential deals. That seems like a good middle ground for me.

I this is one of the reasons why Reddit became so popular

I'm not a proponent of advertising in the modern sense, but it's probably the least dishonest way that companies pay to promote their product. Professional reviewers are a good medium but it takes time to find those in a new space where you're not sure if their standards and preferences match yours

How did it we accomplish it for the earlier 99.99% of human history?

I don't think ads are what changed this.

This system doesn't make sense... the incentives for producers don't line up with reality. Producers are incentivized to find ways to break your rules and advertise as if they do it alone, they will profit massively.

I would speculate that if all ads disappeared right now, you would be without a job in mere days. Simply put economies work these days because people buy endless amounts of shit they don't need. The parts of our economies that provide necessities are minority factors today, as where you creep back over 150 years and 'needs' were the vast majority of work in an economy.

I'm definitely not saying we're in a good state currently, but breaking our current state without a state replacement plan isn't going to put us in a better position.

Typically the content I'm trying to watch (even if unsponsored) is a far superior advert. I didn't know I wanted a powered/active cooler box (and definitely don't need one) until I saw an AvE video of one last night. Now I'd quite like Makita's, and in fact now I come to think of it I did even share the link with someone who is in the market for one. But the malgorithms did their best to make me learn about and want to buy shitty VPNs and maltesers instead. If I'm watching tool/DIY videos give me the tool ads? I might actually be interested? I might warm to the brand, associating it with my favourite channels?

Not that I want to be manipulated like that, it just seems bafflingly poorly targeted whenever I do see them that it's irritating and I'm glad I block them everywhere else.

Other than paid subscriptions, which is only a partial solution.

The need comes first. If I have a need, I (re)search for solutions. The ad does not create the need.

Ads still work. They can generate a want, but if I never see the ad, I'll live happily on in blissful ignorance.

Building awareness is important for new products. Heck, I might like them. Not complaining about ads in general, just the ones that try to get between me and what I really want my to do. The ones that try to make my attention non-optional. Those must die a fiery death.

Well said. While I recognize the right of people to put out messaging, advertisers seem to put out some of the most disgusting messaging ever.

The recent pushing of incredibly obese people as all healthy and normal is a very dangerous phenom. Many of us could afford to lose a few pounds, but the idea that BMIs > 40 are healthy is going to get people killed for certain.

So it's interesting to see how much focus gets shifted onto obesity specifically while ignoring all else. It's all disgusting messaging, that young model selling you a perfume who hasn't eaten anything but an almond all day, that shredded guy telling you to buy compression shorts, those obese people telling you these pants stretch.

Given the context that:

- Dieting, on a population level, has proven to be an ineffective means of curbing obesity (the only statistically effective method is bariatric surgery)

- The message that has, throughout the obesity epidemic, been pushed is that those that suffer from obesity are to blame for their own condition, and that they are essentially less valuable human beings for it in more than a few ways

- Obesity appears to be, according to the best research currently available, a disorder of the brain

Most of the fat acceptance people are merely trying to counteract the less valuable-part of how obese people are viewed in society. It's not a single-messaged group, and some of the things that some of them say is probably not a force for the better, but the message that obese people should not be scolded, chastised or in any other way treated negatively for their condition is actually a good message which any empathetic adult should follow.

If sites want to send me useful content and additional annoying content, I’ll just render the useful bit.

If sites decide they aren’t willing to send the useful bit unless enter some other sort of arrangement with them, that’s fair on their part, I’ll evaluate their other options.

I don’t feel any obligation to render ads or make their business model viable, of course it is no problem if they decide they don’t want me around as a result!

Of course, business models might change. In that case my preferences probably will too, but I don’t think my reasoning will.

Just circling back a bit, what IS advertising? I work at a relatively unknown company - it's not in anyone's daily vocabulary. It exists, but barely. It will actually die if it's not marketed, advertised.

Now I can just go, fuck it, I don't want to work for any company that advertises. Great. Where should I work?

It’s a sad problem that we can’t expect to solve if we continue to limit our discussion around the symptoms of the diseased advertisement industry rather than the root causes of this cancer that ruins it for everyone like your company and most other small and medium sized players.

A company website that tells me what the elevator pitch is, is advertising arguably, but is not in the same category as putting a message in something I want to consume. The difference is push vs pull. If I have to seek out your message, if I ask you a question, then it's perfectly acceptable to answer.

The second you answer a question I've never asked, you are morally repugnant and harming society as a whole. It's an inevitable slippery slope to literal mental manipulation at that point. There is no "push" advertising that can NOT go that route, as it is inherently a hostile relationship, with independent competitors.

I try to quickly check if I’m agreeing to a cookie consent thing, or if it is a full TOS. But sites have so much garbage when you first show up nowadays. I’ll have to be more careful there.

If the site needs me to view content in a specific sequence, then they need to deliver it as such. Otherwise, I'll ignore (technically block) any content other than that in which I'm interested.

So basically, you won't pay for premium because Google makes money by serving ads, but you also use an Adblocker (assumption)?

Remember that you are not just paying with ad eyeballs, but also with your data. When what where how much you watch. That's nobodies business. I'd pay for not having this be in somebodys DB, ready to be exploited (and/or leaked).

They're essentially charging 80% surplus to tack on a poor man's version of Spotify. I also don't get any other improvements to the service.

If they'd just give me a feature that gives continuity of play between devices I'd pay the full monthly price without blinking.

So many small QoL improvements that would make a huge difference but instead they're too busy removing voting buttons and testing obnoxious autoplay thumbnail ads.

I have had the "continue playing from another device" feature for a good couple months at least, and it is clearly labeled as a "Premium" benefit.

Whenever I pause a video on one device, and open Youtube on another (Confirmed web desktop -> mobile app or mobile app -> web desktop, but I don't have a TV to test), the video that was playing on the other device shows up paused, as the given platform's miniplayer. Below you can see a desktop screenshot.

https://i.imgur.com/Leq2cJs.png

You could view this cynically as paying to be a lab rat, or you can also take it at face value.

Good A/B testing only works if you're measuring for the right things. When you get into the realms of "engagement is down but revenue generated is at $X" and X meets a goal, you're doing it in bad faith.

Given that a big fat ad thumbnail is a pre-selected item that fills half the screen on the YT TV client, we are left to assume that engagement resigned from Google a while ago.

>Whenever I pause a video on one device, and open Youtube on another (Confirmed web desktop -> mobile app or mobile app -> web desktop, but I don't have a TV to test), the video that was playing on the other device shows up paused, as the given platform's miniplayer. Below you can see a desktop screenshot.

This doesn't work at all for me TV -> TV. TV -> mobile device also does not work. I'd be interested to know, if you do try this with TV, whether you can get it to work.

> Good A/B testing only works if you're measuring for the right things. When you get into the realms of "engagement is down but revenue generated is at $X" and X meets a goal, you're doing it in bad faith.

Sure, and that doesn't stop people from doing it anyway. Pointless mass-gaslighting, but it makes you look busy.

Source: I just tried it on my phone right now. platform - iOS (don't know about others). Also, possibly not possible for all songs or countries in the world.

Maybe the force feeding of obnoxious podcast hosts actually attracted some users?

Although I did subscribe to Google Play Music, and it was great, until they killed it. And that was it for me and Google.

I use LMS for my small, curated personal music library, which is great: https://github.com/epoupon/lms

I tried YouTube music for a few months and it felt much more spaghetti-at-the-wall than Spotify.

My opinion is that this is because of the way that Spotify applies algorithm and curation in a highly unified way.

Spotify Radio, Release Radar and Discovery playlist are just wonderful. Right down to the ordering of the lists it accounts for broad tastes, current personal trends, building accessible gateways to new genres and so on.

YouTube Music felt a bit like the video algorithm. "You watched a Minecraft video? Prepare for the avalanche of tenuously related but quite obnoxious Minecraft content"

I am however left to assume, based on Spotify's broad success and appeal, that it hits a bit more frequently than it misses.

> If they'd just give me a feature that gives continuity of play between devices I'd pay the full monthly price without blinking.

Probably you wouldn't. Then it would be some other feature needed to open the wallet.

To restate what I already said: will I pay to remove ads? Yes. Will I pay the price they're asking when I compare to the value and quality of service / UX other services I pay for? No.

> Probably you wouldn't. Then it would be some other feature needed to open the wallet.

You're wrong, but I don't need to justify it, I stated why in the original post. There's no need to be stubborn about it.

My question is why do you compare? Just because both things are on a computer or telephone screen? I've never heard people compare with other things they purchase. Why would I pay for this cup of coffee when I get 15 minutes of use from it, when there is so much free content online? Why would I pay for this restaurant meal when I get several months of entertainment on Netflix for the same price?

People will agonize for weeks over a $5 or $10 subscription, but outside of the digital they won't think about spending the same amount on parking, a pint of beer, etc.

Since we have the idea that everything on the computer should be free, we get upset over the slightest annoyance and cancel/decide not to continue the service. But is that rational? Like people are itching for the slightest excuse to not pay.

YouTube has an enormous amount of entertainment and also educational content, like videos on how to fix things that have personally saved me at least hundreds of dollars. It's a great value IMO.

Having it hidden three menus away is archaic and not the 'continuity' I'm looking for. It's a small thing but it's a) painfully simple to implement and b) one of many of these kinds of small usability gripes that make it a lesser experience.

What specifically are you looking for? e.g. was watching a video on my computer, powered that off, opened youtube on my phone and the video I was watching was most recent thing in youtube history there with my position in the video tracked. Similarly I can use my phone or laptop to control Youtube on my TV. Seems like what you're looking for is already mostly here.

(I've been a Youtube Premium subscriber for the last year or so thus far).

'Continuity' for me means a seamless experience. For example, Netflix used to be one click and is now two or three clicks which I find to be a worse experience.

The _perfect_ version of this for me would be a "Send to device" function to send from TV to TV in different rooms. Even being able to do a quick switch via my phone as I'm in transit (like I do with Spotify) would be a worthy middleground.

Preach it. Blocking ads is tantamount to washing your hands or wearing a condom. It's simply good mental hygiene.

when click rates go down, advertisers always choose to make the ad more noticeable by making it more obnoxious. at first it was a very small movement every few seconds. then two. then more movement more frequently until there were full games in the space of an ad. sounds and video came. interstitial ads came, and full page ads which covered what you were reading as you scrolled.

so, ad blockers were developed. at first they blocked simple URL patterns and that was enough to completely block ads from those who serve them. advertisers caught on and changed how they serve ads. rapidly. adblockers had to advance to keep up.

where does it end? it can't end, because one side or the other will win and there are enough people who don't want that outcome so they keep fighting for their own side.

things that are bad often follow this pattern, it seems. if you are in an arms race of any kind you are either someone or something who wants money or authority more than anything else, or you are fighting against that force. both sides feel 100% justified in their actions. everyone nearby suffers.

— G.K. Chesterton, The New Jersusalem

http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/GKC_New_Jerusalem.html

I also think that advertising is often a crutch for incompetence. Build a good product and it can take off all on its own. People advertise for you. Or build crap and hire an industry to manipulate people into wanting your crap. Advertising is manipulation. Watch any ad and ask, “what emotion are they trying to con me into feeling?”

Advertisement is sometimes just to inform and build awareness, sometimes to build brand, but often to persuade, and sometimes it exploits unethical persuasion techniques. The gap between ethics allowed by society and your own personal ethics are very variable from place to place and person to person. For example in a lot of places it's illegal for doctors and pharma to advertise; some might consider it a good thing not to exploit hypochondriacs, but is it ethical if it results in patients not knowing about an actual cure for their condition? These things are endlessly debatable, they're very far from a black and white situation.

I don't have an answer to this question, it's purely hypothetical. And even if it is true that in this hypothetical world, good products would spread, we're still left with a prisoner's dilemma to resolve in the real world.

So I would answer you with, given the extremes defined above, that indeed advertising is a necessity since good products would otherwise rot inside the inventor's home. It being illegal (say, for example) to have ads would mean that it is illegal to even tell anyone that you invented a product.

I think there's got to be some kind of give from the anti-ad side if we want to have _things_ in the world that do stuff - because if I can't even say "I made a better product that does x,y,z" then how the heck is anyone ever gonna find out about it? Where does the word-of-mouth kick off even?

You gotta _tell_ people you made something - but that's an ad.

On average the amount of trickery in advertising will cancel out and decisions still get made based on the quality and usefulness of the products. It is just much easier to sell something useful with sneaky advertising than selling advertising in a vacuum. People not knowing about their options is one of the bigger problems in modern life. There are a lot of things I'd spend money on to change and I'm just not sure how to do it. As far as I can tell that is normal.

"I'd just prefer it be a place that people go to intentionally learn about products and services" - when I see people doing that I'll believe it is an option. Most people sit there until told to do something. Even when doing the thing is in their own interests.

How? Take the examples from above about selling beauty products to teenagers, where is the ad saying "you're perfect as you are, no need to drop hundreds of dollars on any of this bullshit"? All the ads in existence will try to extract money from them by playing up body image issues, so the noise WILL NOT cancel out on their own.

> Most people sit there until told to do something. Even when doing the thing is in their own interests.

To think that you know what's better for people than they know for themselves... Tell me, are you an advertising professional? Because your thought process is just as obnoxious.

Easy mistake, I suppose. But if you read closely, you'll notice that isn't what I said or implied.

People often know what is in their own best interests, they just don't act on it. Consider, for example, how hard it is for most people to get to the gym even after taking out gym membership. I had a running buddy once solely because the gentleman knew he wouldn't go running unless he had someone else to remind him.

People usually need a little push before they do the sensible thing. That is one of the things advertisers tap in to and why they are so valuable to a business.

The gym advertising its memberships would rather you never set foot on their premises.

Beauty products want you to feel good about yourself, but only while you're wearing their products.

McDonalds and Coca Cola do not want you to eat healthier, or enjoy their products only occasionally.

It's actually shocking to see someone frame advertisers as pushing people towards making good decisions for themselves, when we've had to explicitly ban tobacco companies from advertising how sexy and popular smoking would make you.

Name three.

There are a lot of medical devices that help people with relatively minor or uncommon issues. Even doctors don’t always know about them. The companies that make them can’t usually afford to advertise on larger platforms, but they target ads to try and reach those affected.

Local consumer-facing businesses in general need local advertising to survive. This works better for some industries than others, but keeping a competitive space healthy requires some assistance getting a newer/smaller competitor’s message out.

AWS advertising generally has been a major contributor to the success of at least two companies I worked at.

I get reminded from time to time that I could saved quite a bit on my retirement fund if I switched to one with lower fees. One day an ad will probably hit me at the right moment and I'll actually do it.

That, in general sense, violates second law of thermodynamics. More specifically, it also feels like going against some physical law with Shannon's signature on it, though its formulation escapes me.

Point being: even in cases where this "cancelling out" happens, it's not a free process. It uses energy, it uses natural resources, it uses victims' attention, it generates entropy. The more advertisers scale it, the more waste it creates.

As for "made based on the quality and usefulness of the products", that's actually the first victim of advertising - all real information gets lost in the sea of lies, while victims' attention is saturated, so they have very little headspace to evaluate competing offers.

Sorry, what? This sounds like wishful thinking not grounded in reality or data…

I spent a number of years doing market research for advertising, and I couldn't agree more. Data analysis is primarily focused on increasing "top of mind" and "unaided" awareness and linking positively-perceived properties and emotions to the product being flogged.

I got out before "social media" convinced everyone to share everything about their lives with advertisers and their enablers, but back in the day, ad agencies and the marketing departments of large consumer product companies each spend millions every year (cf. BSB Global Scan[0] as an example) collecting a tiny subset of that data.

Given the enormous amount of data available today, I imagine that the levels of manipulation have increased exponentially. And more's the pity.

[0] https://www.proquest.com/openview/46f87cae3614d373064294a43b...

However, it’s expensive. It has been a really tough uphill climb to connect to our audience and convince them the money is worth it here. In a market with marked up shitty quality products it has been a journey to position ourselves, especially since our budgets are maybe 1/10th of that of aforementioned shitty producers who outmarket us.

I honestly feel the work I am doing is near to a community service. Although still advertising our ads are honest of what the products can do.

I think that the rest of your discussion hinges on this assumption, and I completely disagree with it.

What you need actually is for people to know that your product exist.

People have needs & problem beyond the fake ones created by advertising.

People can _ask_ for what options exist to solve their problem. And that to me is fundamentally different.

Having a way for consumers to go out and pull information in about what options exist is fundamentally different from having advertising shoved down their throat.

Where do you propose people ask? Who would fulfill those queries? What formats would you allow the information to be expressed in? Would you filter out any non-objective characterization (“best car in the world”)? Would you constrain packaging (eg color, creativity, etc.) so that it isn’t attention-grabbing? Etc.

Remove the ads and make people pay to use them beyond some number of queries a month. This alone gets rid of the problem of the platform intentionally shoving ads down your throat.

Find a shitty website that SEO’d it’s way to the top and got through the cat and mouse game? Then allow people to blacklist websites so they stop appearing in results. Then as the provider investigate and downrank sites that people downrank and block often.

Maybe also preferentially treat companies that don’t load their own sites with other people’s ads and tracking scripts. Oh and tell the user how many of those trackers exist on the site.

This obviously don’t solve the problem of companies pushing ads onto you. But it:

1. Sets up your information provider to not be the biggest and worse ad pusher of them all.

2. It gives people the tools to start penalizing bad content and ads and to outright block them from their results.

This alone, I strongly believe, would be a great improvement.

Maybe they still do all that, but I'm not convinced. I see so many transparently SEO-ified sites at the top of search results that I regularly think "I wouldn't have seen that in 2008".

They recently rolled out a leaderboard where you can see the top sites people block, downrank, uprank, and pin to the top. Extremely useful.

Regardless of current issues with Reddit's business model, it does seem to have been particularly successful as a US/English repository of product knowledge, despite not having any specific strategies to deal with the problems you mention above.

The proposal that I responded to wanted a system where a consumer can express their desire for a product or service given the problem and that you get back results that don't have the smell of advertising. Put differently, these aspects I enumerated ARE attributes of advertising that the proposal seeks to eliminate.

This is opposed to the current system where they are constantly trying to barge into your life.

It’s about pulling in information when you want it versus having it pushed onto you. See my reply to your other comment.

[1] https://eucyclos.wixsite.com/eucyclos/post/making-advertisin...

This is an example of how businesses and customers can be perfectly happy without any advertising. It's not the only example, just the first that came to mind.

Put up a non-intrusive entry in a directory that people would use to reach out to you. Let them come to you.

Stop hounding people to be the repeatedly ground in impression by repetition. So much time is wasted today... When I think of all the broadcasting/transmission medium throughput that's eaten up by carrying unsolicited advertisements to people that could either A) be left unused, or used to provide better performance for everyone, or B) utilized for, heaven forbid, the public calling out for proposals from service providers!

- no qualitative adjectives

That is, you can say "Foo Corp. makes high speed Gizblams that can help you and your family deal with the challenges of flamming" without it being an ad.

BUt if you say "Foo Corp. makes the best anti-flam devices", it's an ad.

I mean sure, it's sort of bullshit, but there's some sort of idea buried in there somewhere.

“We make Foo. Foo helps you Bar the Baz. Check us out at foobarbaz.com”

Vs.

“Look at this scary Baz. Feel emotions about it. We want you feeling anxious and ill-equipped. Okay now here’s Foo. We want you feeling better. Nicer music. Smiles. Good emotions from you. What a relief. If you’re tired of being a dumb idiot who suffers from Baz all the time, we can fix you with Foo.”

. o O ( Yes, it's a reference to a thing. )

"Foo Corp. makes Gizblams." Whether or not they're high speed depends on the other Gizblam manufacturers, whether or not it can help me or my family depends on if I like it or not.

"PEPSI - When they don't have Coke."

Thanks for sharing that

It is even more complex than that. As it already happens, word of mouth can also be hijacked by advertising resulting MLM pyramid schemes.

To bring about such a world we need more than just banning advertising, we need to make it a socially repulsive behaviour.

What a strange example. Other than Apple products, I'm not sure if most people could tell you what computer they are using, or can recall seeing an ad for any of them. "PCs" are a generic, interchangeable object to most people.

I still found a computer to buy.

How?

The direct reason for this is the existence of advertisement. In a ideal (also pretty much only theoretical) world where there are no ads, only honest reviewers and comparison sites, bad products would fall pretty quickly, planned obsolesce would be suicide etc etc.

If I make a website tomorrow that details the best innovation in programming language technology, how is it ever going to find an audience unless I advertise somehow? At some point I have to go around and tell people about it either in person or via ads, either way I am advertising.

Ads on the other hand often lie by omission when it comes to the limits of a technology being advertised. They exist to get you on their product simply because the business is leveraged in it, not because its a good product, much less to share findings with potential colleagues about what you’ve discovered that might even tarnish said products initial expectations.

Advertising and marketing executives spend all their time thinking up ways to say things that are technically true if construed in the most torturous way possible while implying something else. That is a pure intent to confuse and bewilder and is the lifeblood of the industry.

We can fix this by requiring advertising to inform. Any implication that overstates your product should be false advertising. The test is simple, if your lawyer says: “Well technically…” you lose. You must be truthful, clear, and spend all of your time thinking about how a customer might misinterpret what you say over-positively and nip that in the bud. Obviously, this depends on the target demographic, and the expected viewers who might act on the ad, but the details seem solvable once you approach it from the stated concept.

Advertising should inform, anything else should be the crime of false advertising.

Advertising is a 0 sum game. Everyone doing it and no one doing it has roughly the same result. If your competitors do it and you don’t you lose.

As for advertising driving consumerism, that’s undeniable but it’s unclear to me that consumerism is a net positive. We certainly can see all the negative things it creates in society. It also distorts the market in a way that funds are directed to things that may not be as important but has better advertising.

No amount of drug advertisements will change that. Solve the root cause and the problem generally goes away, but keep putting lipstick on a pig and you just get more problems.

Advertising should be heavily taxed so companies have an incentive to innovate and make better products. All the money that goes to advertising is money that don't go to R&D and salaries.

The internet business model is an exception because there ads actually fund useful services. It's anomally, a clever hack but should really be independant public services whose goal is to expand freedom of associtaion and peer to peer discovery and exchanges and could be funded with taxes.

> The internet business model is an exception because there ads actually fund useful services.

?? Most public information services, including newspapers, radio, and television, are funded in large part by advertising.

TBH, I can't recall the last time I saw an ad for a Dell product.

Computers are actually pretty bad example of this here on HN, folks here do (or at least should) understand pretty damn well what they are buying and ads should never interfere with this process.

Patients shouldn't be researching cures for themselves, they should be given choices by professional doctors. If this process is broken fix that, and not justify amoral for-profit advertising instead.

I literally can't agree with a single sentence you wrote, it all sounds like from person way too deep in PR business justifying their jobs.

As a counterpoint, I chose my last three laptops (Thinkpads, by Lenovo) because I was fed up with the advertisement, in particular grassroots advertisement, by Apple. Lenovo did advertise to people like me, but I was already on the market for a powerful laptop and the last thing I would buy was an Apple laptop, because of all the advertisement as I said. I went with the first thing that was shoved in my face and that looked good enough for my needs.

Honestly I have no idea whose game I'm playing here. When I find the time I'll make a laptop of my own. Only of course it will end up as big as a desktop :)

Isn't this the survivorship bias? If aggressively advertising companies outcompete companies not advertising or advertising less - then if advertising wasn't an option, or if the society was more negative towards ads - then perhaps the latter category of companies would be more thrive.

It's about establishing a duopoly, tell to consumers "here is your choice" and overshadow all the other alternatives.

See Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism, dating from 1909:

<https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft>

And I do mean see it. Read the damned thing, or at least the first dozen pages or so. It's a highly-readable, information-dense, and exceedingly insightful look at the development of commercial publishing in the US at the time, and its author is a magazine publisher himself.

> No wonder that the man who realizes the significance of all these figures and the trend disclosed by them is coming to look upon the editorial department of the newspaper as merely a necessary means of giving a literary tone to the publication, thus helping business men get their wares before the proper people.

> Thus you see advertising has made possible the great complex papers and magazines of the day with their corps of trained editors, reporters, and advertising writers, in numbers and intellectual calibre comparable with the faculty of a good-sized university. Advertising makes it possible to issue a paper far below the cost of manufacturing — all to the benefit of the consumer. So far as I know there is not an important daily, weekly, or monthly in America that can be manufactured at the selling price. But, on the other hand, with the growth of advertising a department had to be created in every paper for its handling. As advertising still further increased, rival papers competed for it and the professional solicitor became a necessary adjunct of every paper, until now the advertising department is the most important branch of the publication business, for it is the real source of the profits. Because the solicitor seeks the advertiser, and, therefore, is in the position of one asking for favors, he puts himself under obligations to the advertiser, and so in his keenness to bring in revenue for his paper, he is often tempted to ask the aid of the editor in appeasing the advertiser. Thus the advertiser tends to control the policy of the paper.

> And this is the explanation of the condition that confronts most publications to-day. By throwing the preponderating weight of commercialism into the scales of production, advertising is at the present moment by far the greatest menace to the disinterested practice of a profession upon which the diffusion of intelligence most largely depends. If journalism is no longer a profession, but a commercial enterprise, it is due to the growth of advertising, and nothing else.

- Growth especially of large-city dailies and some consolidation of markets effectively gave newspapers some market leverage over most advertisers. There were still some somewhat-untouchable entities, but for the most part, a reasonably-strong editorial independence was achieved.

- It was also possible to go muckraking in another district --- outlying suburbs or cities elsewhere in a state or country, which didn't contribute advertising to that particular institution.

- Increased reliance on classified advertising and legal notices. Each of these were huge contributors to newspapers' revenues, whilst at the same time giving relatively little risk of an advertising boycott. The dawn of Internet classifieds (Craigslist gets a lot of blame, but it was pretty much inevitable, someone would enter that niche) was absolutely devastating in that regard.

There's another bit of media history that I think pairs excellently with the Holt book. It's a 1970s interview with I.F. ("Izzy") Stone, on the PBS programme "Day at Night". That's on YouTube, which is ... somewhat less accessible to me with its current shenanigans, but might be available here:

<https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g>

<https://youtu.be/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g>

In particular, Stone calls out the distinction between major city dailies, which had strong editorial independence over local businesses and politicians in the 1970s, versus small-town and rural newspapers, which were far less independent. Keep in mind that this interview occurred in the shadow of the Watergate scandal, in which two reporters literally brought down the President of the United States --- it was a high-water mark for journalistic independence and power.

I return to both these references often.

> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are ‘The Advertisers’ and they are laughing at you.

> You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

> Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

> You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs. - Banksy

It doesn't give me a lot of hope we'll be able to reclaim our public spaces from being littered with ads anytime soon.

Best statement against 1) advertising, and 2) copyright, that I can imagine.

Does this guy really not understand the difference between someone asking for money in exchange for nothing as opposed to asking for money in exchange for something of value? If Coca-Cola was advertising a Venmo address to send them money in exchange for nothing it would be much more annoying than what they currently do.

but besides that, people actually enjoy drinking soda. I certainly do from time to time, and I don't find the price unfair.

> CocaCola revenue for the twelve months ending March 31, 2023 was $43.493B

> CocaCola net income for the twelve months ending March 31, 2023 was $9.868B

> CocaCola net profit margin as of March 31, 2023 is 22.69%.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/KO/cocacola/revenu...

Which means that it costs them $1 to produce every $1.23 of soda that you purchase. This is a long-shot from being "nearly free" as you claimed earlier, and materially different from "asking for money in exchange for nothing".

That's not a cost to produce their product, or even ship it, or store it. That's strictly just "buying more customers", which has no bearing on my initial claim - that soda is extremely cheap to produce.

Again, materially different from asking for money in exchange for nothing.

That's not correct. The $1.23 you pay at the store includes wholeseller/distributor and retailer margins. The wholesale price of that soda is maybe a quarter of the retail price. So for Coca Cola the bottle the production cost and shipment to a distributor was less than 20% of the retail price.

tangent: I've been to some restaurants that charge $5+ for a fountain drink, presumably to mitigate the lost profit on alcohol. it would be interesting to know why the business model is that way, instead of just pricing a moderate profit into both food and drink.

That's only compounded by the tendency for drinks and sides to be impulse-purchases - easy up-sells that no one walked in intending to consume. And, if choosing the $5 burger has maybe embedded the idea that your place is "cheap", then so much the better, as that makes them likely to spend a little more than they would have at the other place: "I saved $2 on the burger, so I can afford an extra side!"

Tl;dr: Commodity restaurants are trapped in an equilibrium where food has to be a loss-leader for sales of drinks and fries.

Any little thing to extract just a tiny bit more money from people I guess.

> It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages."

— Adam Smith

Not multinational conglomerate monopolist meat-packing, alcohol, and shelf-stable baked goods manufacturers.

As individuals, Smith's artisans would have faced ample competition both within a community and from others nearby if they attempted to strong-arm customers or degrade products (though there was plenty of both going on, as attested by food-quality and food-purity laws dating back to Hammurabi). They lacked any appreciable ability to lock in more than a very localised monopoly absent armed force or coercion, though those too were abundantly evident (see: America's Colonies and the British East India Company, both of which Smith also writes of).

Why are you so easily fooled by the facelessness and lack of intimacy of the large company that you lose all sense on the matter? If people stopped buying meat today, the single man operations would go bankrupt in very much the same manner the 50,000 man operations would - in the latter case, however, 50,000 people just lost their income and ceased to pay taxes instead of the one man.

Care to clarify?

They were not. They were pointing out that a single-man operation has far less power to dictate market conditions than a 50,000 person conglomerate. Even when they are the only butcher in a whole village, they have nowhere near the price-setting power that a company does (even one that doesn't have the same level of monopoly).

Much of what Smith argues about is power, beginning with among the shortest, pithiest, and clearest sentences in the entire book:

"Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power."

Then there is his very long diatribe against joint stock (privately-held, shareholder-based) corporations, which Smith argues should be limited largely to the financial sector (banks and insurance). Itself an interesting distinction and one that's had me think about those areas of economic activity, and why the so-called "FIRE" sector (finance, insurance, and real estate) are linked together.

One interpretation I've arrived at is that all concern the evaluation of future value over a given portfolio: of loans, of insurance policies, and of mortgages (themselves a class of loans). These all ... have some peculiar and similar behavioural characteristics, risks, and moral and morale hazards associated with them. They also tend toward monopolistic in both scale and practices. Among the notable exceptions to anti-trust regulations against conspiring on prices is the exception for insurance underwriting boards, comprised of multiple companies, who share risk, cost, and pricing data to set premiums.

The first is limited liability to stockholders, whose losses are capped at the value of their investment and not for their full personal assets. That is, if you purchase stock in a company, neither creditors nor plaintiffs may seek compensation above and beyond what's already been invested. This is what is meant in the term "limited liability company", though the protection includes firms not described by that specific term. The protection does not apply to sole proprieterships and simple partnerships, so far as I understand (US law).

<https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/limitedliability.asp>

The second is the so-called "corporate veil", which further protects specific officers and board members of a firm from personal liability for the firm's actions in many cases. A recent notable (and notorious) example of this has been of Perdue Pharma and the Sackler Family, in which the officers (of Perdue) and the shareholders (the Sacklers) escaped most civil and any criminal liability for the deaths of 500,000 slewn for profits via the company's unwarranted and addictive opioid products.

<https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/piercing_the_corporate_veil>

<https://www.npr.org/2021/09/01/1031053251/sackler-family-imm...>

There is no corporate protection, large or small, for shifts in overall economic conditions, particularly as affects individual workers (as opposed to officers, board members, creditors, and/or investors). Though of course, large corporate interests do have much greater influence over both government policy and legislation, and often secure bailouts ... which seem rarely to reach individual front-line workers.

ProPublica has a list compiled in 2008 extending from the Penn Central Railroad (1970, $3.2 billion) to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (2008, $700 billion), Citigroup (2008, $280 billion), and Bank of America (2009, $142 billion).

<https://www.propublica.org/article/government-bailouts>

I'd strongly recommend you respond to what's actually been said by those you're responding to, and based on factual and relevant information. It makes for a more interesting discussion, even where, or rather, especially where, there is disagreement.

You mean those people? Because I just want to make sure we know who we're referring to here.

As Smith himself notes:

What are the common wages of labor, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties [(masters and workmen)], whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. ... The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of Parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it.

<https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...>

The proto-labour organisations were probably the guilds, which existed in Smith's time, and in fact he helped find alternative employment for one guy who had been blackisted by the local Hammermen's Guild (the blacksmith's union, as it were), goes by the name of James Watt. Had him set up at the University of Edinburgh, and worked on one of the fire engines there. What we'd now call a steam engine.

(And for all that, Smith utterly failed to realise what the import of that particular invention on the economic development of Britain during the 19th century would be....)

The first general unions in the UK date to the 1820s and 1830s, roughly three to four decades after Smith, who died in 1790:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union#National_general_u...>

I'd compiled a set of quotes from Karl Marx and Adam Smith a ways back and encouraged people to tell which came from whom:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26127620>

The "butcher, brewer, and baker" quote is most often seen in a form that ties it together with another passage hundreds of pages from it within Wealth. That construction was created in the early 20th century, more than 100 years after Smith wrote his work, by Jacob Viner, at the monopolist-defending University of Chicago. My understanding is that this was initially an exercise to show how much one could twist Smith's meaning by selectively editing his work. It's since come to be taken as a flat statement by Smith, as originally intended, when it is in fact no such thing.

In fact, the chapter in which the vastly over-exaggerated and greatly misconstrued phrase "invisible hand" occurs, begins with a discussion of restraint of trade by monopoly interests, including of the previously-mentioned butchers:

BY RESTRAINING, either by high duties, or by absolute prohibitions, the importation of such goods from foreign countries as can be produced at home, the monopoly of the home market is more or less secured to the domestic industry employed in producing them. Thus the prohibition of importing either live cattle or salt provisions from foreign countries secures to the graziers of Great Britain the monopoly of the home market for butcher's meat. The high duties upon the importation of corn, which in times of moderate plenty amount to a prohibition, give a like advantage to the growers of that commodity. The prohibition of the importation of foreign woollens is equally favorable to the woollen manufactures. The silk manufacture, though altogether employed upon foreign materials, has lately obtained the same advantage. The linen manufacture has not yet obtained it, but is making great strides toward it. Many other sorts of manufactures have, in the same manner, obtained in Great Britain, either altogether, or very nearly a monopoly against their countrymen. The variety of goods of which the importation into Great Britain is prohibited, either absolutely, or under certain circumstances, greatly exceeds what can easily be suspected by those who are not well acquainted with the laws of the customs.

<https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_IV...>

The late Gavin Kennedy's blog, "Adam Smith's Lost Legacy" covers this misrepresentation in depth:

<https://adamsmithslostlegacy.blogspot.com/>

(I'd need to hunt through that to find specific posts of note, though I'd encourage anyone reding this to go through it on your own.)

There's a book of the same title:

<https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9780230511194>

Kennedy's hardly the only person to point this out. John Kenneth Galbraith made much of how Smith was misrepresented during his lifetime, and Steve Keen is amongst present-day economists doing similarly, if memory serves.

Smith does best where he comments on that which he can observe directly. He's weak on ancient history and what we'd now call archeology and anthropology (Graeber's own specialisation), as well as on contemporary conditions he'd not directly witnessed --- the American Colonies, again, or China, come to mind.

But in observing and commenting on actual trade, commerce, and politics of his own time and place, there's a great deal of wisdom. His commentary on prices suggests to me a number of classes of goods & services (commodities, assets, rents, wages, skilled / privileged work, public goods, capital stock) with distinct pricing tendencies, some of which behave poorly in open markets. His commentary on the components of wages is excellent (I've mentioned this numerous times over the years on HN). His commentary on the practices of privately chartered companies operating as empires and armies abroad are telling (and little commented on by the usual vociferous "champions" of Smith).

It's useful to keep in mind that all authors and authorities have their strengths and weaknesses. The one shouldn't blind us to the other, either way.

(Graeber also has his ... excessive enthusiasms, I'll put it. But he's also intelligent, a keen observer, and doesn't fall slave to orthodoxies and convention.)

In other words, the average person isn't advertising; at least, not in an intrusive way.

Indeed, the best at any particular job probably are not advertising, because the effort they spent on advertising is effort that was not spent on the job. After buying expensive medication in the United States, I come home and the TV is showing a 90 second commercial from a pharmaceutical company with a catchy song and is overall very well made--guess I know why my medication was expensive. Do we even need advertisements for prescription medication?

Actually, one of the main innovations of the past 20 years is that advertising has become easily accessible to those who are not rich. Small businesses and individuals can easily become advertisers on FB, Google, Etc. This has helped, many, many people earn a living. Myself included. I'm certainly not a millionaire.

Is YouTube a town?

Conversely, ads are how companies are able to pay for network and infrastructure costs, pay their employees, and pay the people who create the content you watch.

> Advertisers have no morals, they're completely depraved.

Perhaps, but if you're not watching ads or paying for the service, this is a justification to avoid paying for the service you're using -- not exactly a moral high ground.

"advertising may be immoral, but it also helps pays for the content you watch, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,"

https://twitter.com/dril/status/464802196060917762

Ah, could it be that they need to first get a market share that's so significant that they can actually enforce these rules, because there are only very limited options to choose from for people?

Cry me a river about YT not being able to pay their bills. That's ridiculous.

It was clear from day one of low interest rates that those wouldn't stick around forever. This business model is a pile of s** that breaks itself.

It appears as if the most 'successful' business people actually don't think a lot about any kind of sustainability in their decisions. It's just about quick growth. And when push comes to shove, they wine that they aren't able to pay the bills anymore, because of 'evil' users who don't want to watch their crappy ads.

Ugh, no? I’m not under any obligation to watch ads, thank you very much.

You opt in when you decide to use the service. You have options:

(1) Use service and watch ads. (2) Use service and pay for it. (3) Opt out of using the service.

You are willfully choosing a fourth option: Use service but don't watch ads or pay for it or remunerate creators & developers in any way.

Would you tolerate a cafe in Ukraine having reduced prices because it informs Russia when soldiers are visiting, so Russia can use weapons on the soldiers (i.e. shoot them in the face) and Russia pays it for that?

I have bad news for you. The world is also out to get you if you classify digital advertisements as warfare. Obnoxious yes, warfare, no you can willingly avoid surfaces.

The world is out to get everyone. Just in ways we pretend don't count, so we don't have think too hard about it.

Not OP, but I block ads for similar reasons. I do pay for ad-free experiences, but

1) often I'm shown ads anyway, and 2) there's typically no privacy-preserving way to pay. So in practice paying often implies a significant loss of control over managing your privacy

So my personal take is that we're not there yet in terms of having robust viable alternatives to the ad-block experience.

This is exactly my problem. I log into as few services as possible and clear my cookies on browser exit. Of course this is supplemented by ad-blocking and blocking most 3rd-party scripts and cookies to avoid cross-site tracking. I have no way to pay for a service while maintaining that level of privacy.

Lol, then there are ads like the Liberty Mutual ads. All I know is I will never, ever purchase car insurance from that shithole from having been made to watch their obnoxious ads on loop.

I agree with the other commenter that ads have become so obtrusive that it's being dealt with in the same vein as malware. It's just malware from the techno oligarchy.

(And uh, yes, adware, but that's usually the programs themselves. A website with intrusive ads is adware, but the ads are spywares)

Fits the definition of spyware.

The larger problem is that this behaviour has been normalised to such a degree that "the world wide web" as a whole could be described as spyware.

I pay for a few subscription services and get my entertainment _mostly_ ad free. Unfortunately there’s no similar subscription I can buy to escape advertising as I walk down the street.

>The alignment was apparent in everything they did, in their words as well as their actions. They spoke of "package grab level" and "container flash time" -- of "puff limit" and "acceptance threshold." It was an "in" language of militarylike maneuvering and combat. They knew which height on a shelf was most apt to make a customer grab an item. They knew the "flash time" -- the shelf width needed for certain containers. They knew how much empty air could be "puffed" into a package to make it appear a greater bargain. they knew how much price and package manipulation the customer would accept without jarring him into a "rejection pattern."

>And we're their spies, Dasein thought. the psychiatrists and psychologists - all the "social scientists" we're the espionage arm.

The Santaroga Barrier,

Frank Herbert, 1968

I see them as environmental pollution that affects the mind instead of the body (this also includes offline ads btw, I actually wish there were adblockers for the real world).

Pollution is something that occurs because it's too costly to prevent, or the people producing the pollution simply don't care.

The effect advertising has one you isn't some externality that the advertisers couldn't be bothered fixing, the effect is the whole point.

They have an insatiable hunger for emotionally triggering junk food content. Present them with even the slightest bit of friction (ie. Like asking them to pay for the works they are consuming), and they will ironically spend hours seeking out ways to steal what you have created for free.

How much content do you pay for? If you’re expecting the commons to serve you up valuable content painstakingly written by humans, for free, you’re no better than the advertiser “pond scum” you complain about.

What benefit do freeway billboards provide to my life? How about the spam mail I get in my mailbox? The bright and flashy signs for businesses along the road?

Every time I'm on the freeway I pass a few dozen ads selling liposuction or some other expensive and unhealthy "beauty" treatment. What value are those companies bringing to the world, and why should I have to put up with their ads? Just because someone bought property adjacent to the freeway?

"If anyone here is in advertising or marketing ... kill yourself" (:

Some people use the excuse of 'scale', and "can't monitor everything", but it's not like Google and Facebook don't have the resources to solve it, it's just that they have no motivation to solve it because it's not costing them anything to be a platform for malware and scams.

While that's true, it glosses over the fact that not only is it "not costing them money," it's bringing in revenue -- those malware/scams are paid-for ads after all, aren't they?

This also ignores the in-video sponsorships and ads that creators will often include.

I also run an ad blocker, with extra rules to ban content I don't want to see, such as the terrible "shorts" mind-ebola, as well as a bunch of regexes for clickbait titles and a big ban list of channels that is updated often.

SponsorBlock to remove baked-in advertisements and other misfeatures like interaction reminders.

Now I am also using the beta DeArrow extension to disarm the thumbnails/titles a little bit by replacing them with random frames from the video.

I think the hip way to say it is "I'm between jobs" currently, but when I had a stable income source I would do eventual donations to channels of my interest, which according to some creators even a single USD is way more than the average lifetime return of a single viewer due to ads/YTP.

The only reason I haven't subscribed to Nebula / CuriosityStream instead, which seems to be a much healthier platform, is precisely because they advertise it so much. Also because I do appreciate more entertainment-y videos sometimes, not just edutainment.

    ! Nuke high contrast elements
    www.youtube.com##ytd-feed-filter-chip-bar-renderer
    www.youtube.com##yt-chip-cloud-renderer

    ! Nuke news sections and other "engagement boosting" sections of the homepage
    ! This breaks the channel page, I temporary disable the filter rules when I need to go in there. Selector can probably be refined
    www.youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer

    ! Nuke Shorts
    www.youtube.com##[is-slim-media]

Can you please share which ad blocker you use and how we might use regexes to do this? Sounds fascinating and I want to do that myself

It's basically CSS selectors, but with some very powerful ones added in too.

Check the docs for details https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Procedural-cosmetic-f...

The particular filters I use include things like:

    ! Kills "You won't believe something useless! Some subtitle"
    youtube.com##ytd-rich-item-renderer:has-text(/you won'?t .*!( .*)?/i)

    ! Kills "100 idiotic life hacks that are definite safety hazards!"
    youtube.com##ytd-rich-item-renderer:has-text(/(\d+) (.+)s/i)

Also look at the sibling comment about other distraction-removals like shorts and engagement callout taming.

The only people who make meaningful advertising money from youtube are the ones in the extreme high value advertising niches, like Swell Entertainment when she does a tech related video (though she still makes way more money from sponsorships) or all the Logan pauls making clickbait screaming content for literal children to mindlessly consume all day because their parents can't afford baby sitters because all the money goes to advertising behemoths instead of the workers.

I actually WANT youtube to be a great, pro-creator platform, where I have to pay to see people who feel that youtube gives them support and good tools to do their damn job. But that's not an option. The only option available is for me to pay youtube to remove their horrifically overbearing advertising, often from advertisers that are fraudulent, so I can watch videos from creators who genuinely hate youtube for making their lives hell.

I will not give youtube a dime until they stop viewing creators as replaceable cogs in a machine designed to grind them to dust for every second of content they can produce and then cast them aside.

I mean fuck, does youtube even send content creators documents to help them prepare their taxes? These people are all technically self employed, couldn't a behemoth like google help them get a pooled health care scheme that was affordable to middle size creators?

I don't mind compensating the creators. I do mind compensating the middleman leech in between.

Advertising is just a disgusting tax on capitalism by a few cartels.

Get a billboard ban passed in your state. It's absolutely wonderful.

Have you also cut everything out of your life that's financed through ads? So I'm expecting you to not use any Facebook, Google, Twitter, Youtube or other modern web content.

I agree that ads are manipulative. That's their very essence. But they exist for a reason. Not to enrich people, but the uphold one side of a bargin. You can't expect everything to be for free.

All of the examples exist there to enrich those running the platform, and not for the benefit of those producing content. Those companies are worth what they’re worth now because they only pass on a pittance of the advertising money they draw in.

But the platform itself needs to be paid for as well. You think Youtube should provide video hosting for free? Facebook should provide their .. social network stuff for free? Twitter should serve tweets for free? No? Then either pay or watch ads.

B) Many of these companies have such large content hosting fees because of the very nature they chose to set up under. For example: YouTube chose to centralize and host all of the videos itself, and it chose to continue pursuing that route rather than experiment with technologies that could distribute that load and make their server costs significantly decrease. Why? Because it gives them a choke point with which they can extract money and leverage over everyone else.

Further, just like I don’t have a right to tell Facebook how their computers should run, they don’t have a right to tell me what my computer has to display.

If an economically more viable alternative exists then you are welcome to create a competitor. The fact that there is no such thing is strong evidence that they've already hit the economical sweet spot.

> Further, just like I don’t have a right to tell Facebook how their computers should run, they don’t have a right to tell me what my computer has to display.

Correct. Nor do you have a right to tell them not to try to prevent you from avoiding that ads are being displayed on your computer.

It would only be evidence for that if there were multiple strong competitors to youtube that use similar methods. The dearth of competition suggests that other forces are the cause.

Consumers just don't want to pay for things they've gotten used to getting for free. You may not like it (I don't), but that's reality. Being angry at "big tech" for this is relieving the general population of their responsibility.

Vimeo wants hosting fees for significant use, there's a few decentralized platforms without ads, nebula charges and doesn't have ads. Dailymotion fits the mold but this ranking site says they get 0.4% as many visits and each visit is 1/4 as long.

I'm not saying that things should all be free, I'm saying that youtube's "economical sweet spot" is one that is basically competition-free and because of that we can't learn much about what other viable forms the market could take.

This is a simplistic take. First of all, even if it’s true now it does not make it true for all time. Blockbuster hit a real sweet spot for video rental until the tech landscape changed under their feet.

> Nor do you have a right to tell them not to try to prevent you from avoiding that ads are being displayed on your computer.

Correct. I never argued to the contrary.

The thing to keep in mind is that they need us more than we need them. The world existed and functioned before all of these companies and will continue to do so after they’re all gone.

True. I'd love to see a competitor someday whom I can just pay and then have a Facebook-equivalent and Youtube-equivalent that doesn't spam me with ads and does not collect my behavioural data to profile me.

I think people would just be shocked how much they would need to pay for their FB account if that would be an alternative offering. Back-of-the-envelope calculation: 2022 FB had a revenue of about $116bn. With about 3bn users. Let's say half of those are actually dead accounts that people almost never log into. (And that's very generous, this number is probably much higher.) That leaves 1.5bn users. To generate $116bn you'd need $77 from each of them. I know very few people who would pay that much money every year to see their aunts cooking results and their uncles Trump posts.

> Secondly, and more importantly. Economical optimal for what end? For extracting profits

Yes. That's what our market-based economies are optimizing for. Other economic models have not proven to be viable.

First of all, that’s revenue, not profit. Looking at revenue is meaningless since it’s easy to take in lots of money and still be in the red.

Secondly, a competitor to Facebook does not need to have facebook’s profitability in order for it to be a viable business model.

By your analysis we can look Twitter and gry get the amount of money that people would have to pay to Mastadon in order for Mastadon to be a competitor. Except that the analogy breaks down because because the underlying technology is different. I won’t be paying server fees to “Mastadon” I’d be paying to an instance.

Likewise, wow google drive for sending large files to people needs a lot of servers. Or, we set something up torrent style and then there is no separate server.

Yes, I'm sure google will be very happy to show videos on my platform rather than on their own first in the search results.

edit: My browser, my rules. Don't like 'em? Feel free to go out of business.

Not GP, but that would be nice. What would be even nicer is if each and every location that one of those organizations, as well as everyone who works for them or chooses to invest in them should be destroyed/die slowly and painfully.

If that were to happen, the world would be a better place.

Is that a fine enough point, or shall I elaborate further?

Edit: Fixed typo.

It's easy to think that people won't pay for such an experience. I think that's naive. There are plenty of examples of people being willing to pay for a premium experience when free/cheap options are available, like these:

- Apple convinced a LOT of non-audiophiles to pay $249 and $550 for Bluetooth earbuds and headphones (respectively).

- OpenAI is convincing millions to pay $20/month for ChatGPT+.

- Krisp makes a bunch of money over something that has a free alternative (software noise cancelling) because it's just THAT good.

- Tesla convinced a LOT of people to buy a Model 3 or Model Y over the Camry or Accord they were originally going to get.

I would LOVE to use Facebook or something like that but am not willing to have a non-governmental entity surveil my every move online in exchange, nor am I willing to be subjected to an experience that is constantly trying to get me addicted to using it.

The 'infinite growth at all costs' model has rarely been seriously challenged, and as a result its become blase to think of a smaller scale but more stable and consistently successful business, and instead everything needs to lead towards monopolized or cartel-like "Big Tech".

It's a farce.

That's true but their number will be extremely miniscule compared to freeloaders who love to consume a freely available resource!

In terms of "revenue/cost per user" metrics (which is more commonly used in IT industry), the ad model thus topples down the subscription model in the eyes of decision makers?

I don’t have ads on YouTube in my country, but my feed is still being manipulated (it’s eery to see how they want my attention). I travel or use a VPN and the experience goes straight down the drain. I could pay, but would they stop manipulating the feed or collecting my data? I’ll be using YouTube as long as they keeping it free. If it becomes paid, I will if the terms are worth it.

I do run an ad blocker, because the web has spent too long spreading viruses and malware through ads to be safe _not_ running one. But I don't mind ads conceptually; they just need to be safe, not obnoxious, and not take up more of my time than the placement is worth (ie, a 20s ad pre-roll on a 15 second video).

But every time I turn adblock off accidentally or on purpose, it’s the same generic shit unrelated to my obvious interests. Nasal sprays, supplements, car dealerships, be-a-programmer courses. I have a non-zero, negative interest in these.

There's a difficult problem of maladaptation and misleading that, to me, is coming from the meaning resulting from the repeated and well-known answer to, "who gets the money in the end", these days. I believe society would benefit from discussing value-propositions of adtech and the attention economy. I wish that we would take more seriously the social impact of our businesses, the richness or depravity which our business activity imputes.

More musing:

I used to work in adtech, not by choice, was transferred to that dept. Worked in in-app purchase tech throughout my 6-years at that co.

A trend in technology, now, seems to me to include: the crisis of Generative AI devaluing humans own ability (and effort) to recreate prior art, the dissatisfying Reddit value-exchange of creators feeling disrespected by site-operators, and the dissatisfying politics of left and right pursuits towards winning instead of promoting healthy human interdependence resulting in disaffected populace.

So in short, I think pop technology has overshot the goal.

Adtech is the simplest way to make money off provided-experiences, I believe. Subscriptions require too much buy-in, by comparison. Adtech is "just there".

This view (of the reality of content creation) imposes, I believe, an expectation upon all of us (who want to create or consume content) that there is nothing better - no better approach to celebrating human experiences than +1'ing to share one's individual influence/record-of-attention...and to me it conflates the point of life as being something to do with short-term financial success.

When it overlooks more true base human goals / pursuits of having babies, that happiness and comfort in safety, and the joy of growth.

I'd like for emoji-reactions, +1's, impression counts to be segregated more formally by businesses, so the boards of managing companies and stockholders could see also see the social impact of businesses.

I’m an ideal world there would be no ads, but we don’t live in one.

If you have such disdain for ads you should probably pay the premium or not use YouTube.

Roger that. Always turning over a full-page ad to verify that no content text would be lost.

And then there's the magazines that put the ads on right-hand pages and the content on left-hand pages.

I hate ads as much as the next guy. But that's the economic model most of the web is built on. Anybody without a youtube premium subscription who rants about youtube ads is just hypocritical. How should this be financed? Either you give your money or your eyeballs. Nobody is going to work for free so you can watch cat videos.

Please don't come with morals here. Expecting things for free is just as morally problematic.

It bothers me far less to have ads at the start of a video, between videos, or even at transition points between coherently separate segments within a video than what YouTube is now doing. That's not hypocritical.

(Tangent: I do have a YouTube Premium subscription, but for irrelevant reasons we usually watch using my wife's account and she does not have one. So I see the ads anyway. Maybe that's the reverse kind of hypocrisy to the one you mean, where I'm wasting my money instead of being stingy?)

They made people to expect stuff for free. It was their market strategy to offer basically free service to get people locked in. It is their fault they should pay for it.

It is called bait and switch which is a blatant fraud. Only that they stretched it into long years.

Now they switch by introducing pains option and making free one unusable by shoving ads every minute.

Sorry, this is just not true. If you let yourself get baited, then it's your responsibility. Don't lift the responsibility from the general populace of mostly mature adults. If they like to see ads then it's their problem.

Voting for whoever shouts louder.

Don’t overestimate being mature. I’m 35 and look at my aunts and uncles turning 65 and 70 it is so much different view from when I was 15 to 25… it is just people.

Is that why you're using a throwaway, or new account, because you know defending adtech is dubious?

It's this kind of lack of integrity people are unhappy with.

I also don't see how turning this discussion into ad hominem against myself is meaningful. Attacking that I'm using a throwaway? Seriously?

Yes, my comments may be dark. It's because my view on society is dark. It just does not help to blame big tech for the laziness of people to not want to pay and watch ads instead.

could one make an argument of it not being morally justified? maybe.

does youtube, in the way google/alphabet wants to run it suck? most definitely. Is it possible to easily work around some of the biggest stuff here? yes.

well this is what a great many people choose to do, and youtube had better accept reality and deal with it. If they make it impossible to block ads, that is probably within their rights (assuming they implement some technical solution themselves), but that will come with some consequences

Apparently most people don't care though. So, whom are you criticizing? Youtube for providing a service that's populare despite their way of financing which you personally don't like, but others don't have a problem with? Or the other viewers for not joining your boycott?

I'm quite ok with markets and capitalism. Should be regulated, but if you get your wish then there will be 300+ Americans who also want a wish. I rather have people pay for their wishes.

As a consumer, I do not care. If I can get a thing for free AND ignore your suggested content, I will do it 10 times out of 10.

If you don't want to offer a thing for free, then don't offer a thing for free.

If your business model is to offer a thing for free and then to somehow profit from that, well then it is your problem. When you give away a thing for free, expect people to take it for free.

It's the exact same logic as stealing from a roadside honesty box (or a corner shop who can't easily detect petty theft) and then saying "tough! Their business model isn't my problem! I could take it for free so clearly I should be allowed to" when morally called out for it

If I choose to view free content and not render ads, no one has lost anything. While yes, the site owner does not get the profit from "selling the ad", it is not theft in the same way if I were to walk into a store, look around, and not buy anything is not theft.

Your comment gave me one of those funny moments where you realise something that should have been obvious but you never saw it being done, or heard about it being done, and simply never thought of it...

You can just rip the adverts out of magazines. I shall be indulging in this on the rare occasions that I end up reading something of that sort when I'm out and about. Cheers.

Ultimately, this is the thing that matters. Back when I was a kid, I muted the TV or changed the channel during the ads break. Imagine if the technology had existed back then to prevent me from muting the sound or changing channels!

Imagine... just imagine if ads were broadcast directly to your brain like in Minority Report. Would people here also defend the advertisers, "you can't have stuff for free!".

Ultimately, I don't want to see ads. I'm sorry that so much of the current "freemium" web wants me to see ads, because I don't.

I pay for YouTube Premium because of several reasons, but before it I used an adblocker. I adblock the web.

When broadcast-ads-to-your-brain tech becomes real, I sure hope I'll be able to block it too.

https://www.techdirt.com/2016/01/11/forbes-site-after-beggin...

Amen. I see advertising as a personal affront to my dignity. I try to remove or deface as much advertising as I can in my life without getting into legally black areas.

The world is run by scummy, greedy and straight up evil people and they have created a global public consciousness where that fact in itself is almost impossible to spread.

The expectation by others that you are as dumb as a gorilla takes you away from what you could become.

So in that way it's evil. It divides you from what you could be.

Email, TV, various websites, etc use ad money in part to pay for and provide content.

Usually seems like a decent trade off. Not always but most of the time.

E.g. I recently talked to an acquaintance about cooking and told them there's a kitchen utensil that would solve a problem they were describing.

Ads should be performed by 3rd parties (a mix of reviews and match-making?) that get paid by both the customer and the company whenever they facilitate a useful transaction. And pay the customer when they took up their time with useless information (thus incentivizing getting out of there way when they're not doing their job).

"See the USA in your [??] ..."

"You'll wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with [??] ..."

Carpenter's They Live was great pointing out how many 'OBEY's are buried in adverts. 30 years before, Vance Packard The Hidden Persuaders was published. 2010, Eldon Taylor's Mind Programming.

Worse yet: TV tearing a great movie up into shreds punctuated with adverts (imagine doing that to famous paintings). I eventually dropped cable as a result.

"Lower than pond-scum" = all the disciples of Freud's nephew Ed Bernays.

Every shop in my town is shouting at you to come in a buy crap with flashy signs and displays. Then recently I was in Münster (Germany) where they have some old-school facades for most shops that includes standardised lettering and zero advertisements. Its so much nicer.

5 years ago I would have said ads are a necessary evil, but there's a lot of substance to your argument.

Today, I almost completely agree. Fuck ads.