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Comment by tacosx | Hacker News Reader

21 years ago was the first time I saw malware delivered over advertising on the web. 1998. I started blocking ads by manually managing my hosts file that day, for the most part I haven't look at ads since.

I'm still not sure why we're now basing our entire economy around advertising crap to people that they don't want or need, the web was ad free and worked great for many years before all this nonsense.

The fact that most all of the smart people in tech have been subsumed into ad tech is one of the most depressing things I could have possibly imagined 21 years ago. What a massive misuse of resources.

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The people seeing the adds aren't the consumer, they are the commodity. The value of an ad isn't just in selling a product. Ad networks are great at collecting behavioral data. That data is quickly becoming more valuable than the products in the ads.

If I click on an ad for funeral services I might buy something but probably won't. But I may have just confirmed that a close relative just died. That factoid is worth something to a great many people beyond the local funeral parlor who paid for the ad. I should expect real estate agents and quack financial advisers to be knocking on my door by the end of the day.

Relevant comic: https://i.redd.it/lm4pvrl6q5q01.jpg

Found via https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/8a3oku/bra...

Too funny, but sooo TRUE!! What has the world come to, or better yet, what have we allowed?

>I'm still not sure why we're now basing our entire economy around advertising

I see 3 models for websites: completely donation based, advertising based, or subscription based. Many sites would have trouble getting the donations they would need to operate. Subscription based means only rich people can afford to use it. Advertising means poor people get the same functionality as rich people.

There have been some very interesting experiments in this area. Going back to the 90s, smaller website once gathered together to form communities under a single subscription fee. In some advanced groups each website was given a share based on traffic. This allowed a single reasonable subscription to back a great many independent websites.

As with most things on the internet, the porn industry did it first.

>a single reasonable subscription

That subscription might be reasonable for a middle class person in the US, but way too expensive for the average person in a poorer country. Ads put everyone on the same footing.

And if you want to do research on a topic across many different websites, it'll happen that they won't all be in the same community, so you'll have to pay subscription fees to many different communities, sometimes just for a single page view.

Google Contributor is (was?) a good idea, and for a while I really enjoyed using it. It was nice to visit a page and see the "thanks for being a contributor" messages instead of visually aggressive ads.

Of course it was canceled at some point, and now it looks like there is some meager effort to require sites to opt-in somehow.... I can't tell if any sites have actually done so.

Too bad, because I really liked the old experience.

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