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Comment by chacham15 | Hacker News Reader

This is a very pessimistic view of the world. Not all ads are attempts to hijack your brain. For example, if you were already thinking about buying a specific keyboard and then saw an ad for that same keyboard with a 10% discount, that ad would have actually provided positive value to you. You save money for the thing that you already want. Not all ads are like that, but the example goes to show that there is a spectrum and that its not black and white.

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Assuming the premises of your scenario (that the ad didn't change anything about you to make you more likely to buy the keyboard, or adversely influence you in any other way), the display of this ad is a disaster for the advertiser. Advertisers will work as hard as they can to make that not happen.

Not true. If I know you want a keyboard and that you can buy it from 100 different stores, I would probably give you a discount to buy it from me as long as it still makes me money.

This is true. However, I do think that there are a few (possibly rare) cases where advertisements can cause a mutual benefit.

If I intend to purchase a product of a certain category, and would like to choose one with a particular property, but am under the assumption that no such product exists, and I see an ad for such a product, correcting my impression, I may, as a result, purchase that product instead of competitors which don't have the property that I desire, which satisfies both my own wants, and the wants of the company advertising the product.

This has happened to me at least once.

However, most ads that I see do not provide me with any new information, and the strategy of having ads follow users around after the first time they see it seems somewhat contrary to this type of benefit, and I don't totally understand why it is understood to be effective.

Saving 10% on a keyboard on a very rare occasion isn't worth the dangers of advertising (privacy, malware, brainwashing).

I wasn't really talking about the 10% savings thing, so I'm not sure how this is relevant to what I said?

I do agree that the malware risk that current ad systems cause is bad, and it would probably be good if consumers behaved in such a way that the sort of ad systems that are a malware risk were no longer more financially viable.

However, I don't think I have any substantial objection to the style of ads on project wonderful, which do not allow embedding any extra JavaScript or anything like that, only permitting an image, a link, and a hovertext value, iirc. No tracking or malware risk there I think. Or, at least negligible risk.

If you have a proposed improvement on how to lead people who desire a product to discover that said product is available, I'd be interested in hearing it?

I think that most ads aren't leading people who desire a product to that product -- they are creating desire for products that people don't really need.

Most of the ads I see at the moment are on YouTube/Gmail and they are for things like junk food, "make money online" scam artists, and other garbage. Sometimes there are unblockable content ads on news sites that pretend to be news, but are really just paid content.

It certainly seems true that the vast majority of times that some person sees some ad, that that impression is not connecting a person who desires some product to that product, and furthermore, I quite doubt that that could plausibly be otherwise, at least assuming any substantial amount of people seeing advertisements.

However, I don't think that by itself is sufficient for a condemnation of advertisement in general.

If the cost to the viewer (and the advertiser) of the ad impressions which [do not connect a consumer desiring a product to that product] is sufficiently low, then it could be possible for both consumers and advertisers to benefit on average. (Not to say that it is currently the case that they do.)

This is true even if the advertisers were to only benefit from the ad impressions which connected a consumer desiring a product desiring a product to said product.

So, I guess the question would be, whether or not the costs to consumers (and advertisers) when [not connecting people desiring a product to the product] can be made sufficiently small to make it a mutual benefit.

Of course, if that by itself was enough to lead to a mutual benefit, one could wonder why it would be included as part of something else that the consumer wishes to look at, rather than just being something that consumers might look at separately from other content. One possible reason could be that seeing it as part of other desirable content decreases the cost to the consumer when the product is not one that they desire. I'm not sure how much credence to assign to that reason.

Thinking on this, I suspect that direct mutual benefit between the advertisers and consumers would not in practice be a sufficient reason by itself for (e.g.) websites to tend to have ads on them, even if ads were restricted to have many fewer problems for consumers.

So, I think that it is likely that if not for the inconvenience of removing ads from websites they view, the main reason that consumers might deign to allow the ads to display on the webpages they view would be because of the benefit it provides to the owner of the website.

So, I guess I would recommend blocking ads which create more of a cost to you than you consider worth it in order to provide the benefit to website owners get from the ads being displayed to people who reason similarly to you?

It is my opinion that for a certain fairly restricted set of types of ads, that the average cost to me is sufficiently low that I am willing to incur it.

However, don't get me wrong: I definitely support the freedom to block whatever ads you wish (unless you have made a contract to do otherwise or something like that).

I think that ideally, the only ads that should be profitable should be the ones which impose extremely low costs on the viewer, and occasionally provide some benefit to the viewer (even if this is rare enough that the only reason the viewer deigns to see them is so that the website owner benefits).

I'm never thinking about buying anything that I see in an ad. I don't own much more in life other than some books, my computers, and a few clothes. I prefer to take my own initiative on what I buy, and the less I buy, the better.

Ah, you unique snowflake :)

It’s astounding when people think that advertising doesn’t affect them. And yet companies continue to pay billions for adverts...

There's no need to be condescending, and there's a much simpler solution to avoid being influenced by ads.

It's called making data-driven decisions.

Step 1: Find a set of products that solve your problem based on independent reviews, e.g. what Stiftung Warentest writes.

Step 2: Use several price comparison engines, e.g. idealo, Preispiraten, Hardwareschotte to find the cheapest option for the products.

Step 3: Order there.

If you methodically follow this algorithm, you are immune to making ad-based decisions.

But does anyone actually follow that algorithm 100% faithfully? We are not machines, fortunately.

If you don't have enough money, and can only barely afford to buy something, then yes, very much you will follow it religiously. You will try to buy the most reliable for the cheapest price, because you can't afford the product failing, nor can you afford paying too much, and you don't want to go back to getting food from the food bank so you can spend your grocery money to replace the broken washing machine.

Of course if you're a SV programmer earning 5-10 times the average wage, you don't care about this and buy overpriced shit every day, but many people follow this to the letter.

I'd argue that we and our minds have enough weaknesses in comparison to machines, that it is not fortunate that we aren't more like machines. We'd be far less vulnerable to making the kinds of mistakes that only human minds can make.

It's a good idea, but I don't think that it will stop being influenced by ads.

Human behavior is contagious, and advertisers know that. That's why actors in commercials pretend to be just another person like the viewer while lying about performing some action or behavior that the advertisers want the viewer to copy. I don't think that it's possible to suppress that behavior-imitating instinct completely. Humans are generally not very rational creatures -- not even the self-proclaimed rational ones.

Many ads are not just about some product that one might really need, like a keyboard or other equipment that is essential for a person's work. Many ads I see are about junk food, bad lifestyle choices, and trying to convince the public that bad entities are actually good entities (example: greenwashing).

I think people who use ad blockers, like myself, KNOW all about how advertising works. Oh yes most certainly WE KNOW. That is why some of us choose to block them.

I limit my exposure to marketing as much as I can.

> It’s astounding when people think that advertising doesn’t affect them.

I know that advertising affects me. That's one of the reasons why I block ads at every opportunity.

If you want to buy a keyboard, then you visit sites from where keyboards can be bought. Meanwhile, when you are doing other things, you shouldn’t be seeing advertising, least of all ads specifically targeting you. You seem to find it hard to understand that ads are aesthetically unacceptable to intelligent people. Do you see ads on the pages of a novel you are reading in a paper book?

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