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Comment by Nifty3929 | Hacker News Reader

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> We've adopted a model where we expect most content we consume to be free, paid for by ads.

I didn't adopt this. I wasn't consulted about it, and whenever possible I (and many others) voice very strongly our hatred of this model. We want it gone and will do everything in our meager power to avoid/disrupt/disengage from it.

> We want it gone and will do everything in our meager power to avoid/disrupt/disengage from it.

What do you do to avoid it? I assume some combo of ad-blockers, etc. What else is covered in "everything"

The power being as meager as it is, sometimes its just posting comments in HN hoping that the tech elite see them and have it trigger some sort of deep introspection along the lines of "are we the baddies?" leading to a complete rethink and undoing of the ad/surveillance construct.

ads targeted to me are more likely to convince me to spend money - so it's in my interest to make sure ads know less about me so I make less impulse purchases?

Also, well targeted ads catch your attention more, so they have an higher chance to distract you from whatever you are doing.

Buying something because you saw it in ads is a wrong choice. If you need something, it is better to make an objective comparison and choose the product with the best properties. I think that for a rational buyer ad should be worthless.

Product makers don't want you to make a rational choice though. For example, take speakers: cheap ones do not have a response curve published at all (so assume worst), and more expensive ones often have a small blurred graph that is averaged to an octave, doesn't show the deviation between different samples of a product and is only for on-axis sound.

And guitars have no spec regarding sound at all except for trivial things like scale length, weight etc.

The best concert I ever saw was one I wouldn't have known about if I hadn't caught a TV commercial for it the week before.

A moderately intelligent adult can understand that ads are biased and can separate the fact from the opinion. I want to know if there's a new pizza place that opened near me, that's a fact. I can resist taking their claim that it's the best pizza ever at face value. I don't need to fear it.

Advertising contains information. We can own the responsibility for deciding which information is valuable and which isn't.

Literally every source of information that lets you know about the existence of a product is, by definition, an ad. How do you make a rational decision about something you don’t know exists?

Hobby forums? I've been blocking ads for 20 years so it's difficult for me to imagine someone using an ad to learn about anything they want to be even slightly informed about. The main thing "sponsored" links or information tells you is that the thing you're looking at is trying to scam or manipulate you. If you want to actually learn about something and find good products, you look for people who are interested and knowledgeable in that area.

That's so obviously false. There are wikipedia pages about products, and they are not ads, either by definition or extension or induction or by anything. You don't know what "ad" means.

Maybe look up the actual definition of a word before talking about what it means by definition.

Was Wikipedia your first exposure to some product you previously didn’t know existed? Your “counterexample” makes no sense. Also, I’m pretty sure I make more money from advertising than you do, so I’ll stick with my understanding of what it is, thank you very much.

Before you look up something on wikipedia, you need to know that it exists in the first place.

You go to an imaginary price comparison website, choose "speakers" for example, and see all the kinds of products that exist. What do you need an ad for?

Don't you see "sponsored" products at the top? But I agree not everything is an ad, just most of stuff.

Is the wikipedia page a about eg. Coca Cola an ad?

Did you not know what Coca-Cola is before you read its Wikipedia article?

You could find the link to the Coca-Cola page at some other page, for example, "Dangerous chemicals".

I learned about products from different non-ad sources (HN, personal blogs, maybe even wiki). What's your point?

If you saw a product in an ad, but aren't aware of any alternatives because you didn't see ads for them, that kind of limits your choices.

Where is this choice?

I don't have control over what certain qualities ad companies deduce and store about me. I can't even ask them to pretty please show me fewer ads if I give them all my data.

Do you think someone with a Google account, using every one of their products and being tracked every which way sees less advertising across the web, as opposed to someone without an account?

I do, however, have direct control over whether ads are shown to me or not, through blockers.

This is the only leverage I have in this unfair deal, so I'm damn well going to exercise it.

I don't think the advertisement companies (or rather, their lawyers) like to see it as consumer that pay for content by watching adds. Any transaction between a company and a consumer of monetary value need to be accounted and taxed, and advertisement based industries has an EU exception that explicitly states that content/products that has advertisement attached is not a transaction, since the viewer may watch 0 seconds, watch the whole add, or anything between, and thus there is no expectations of payment between a producer and consumer. There is also none of the usually consumer protection when dealing with such products.

The model that those companies deploy is that they give away, for free, the product, in the statistically prediction that enough people will happen to watch the ads in order to make it profitable. That is the deal.

Frankly, because the “high value” ads are intrusive and gross.

Getting retargeted for something I bought two months ago on Amazon is annoying. Having Facebook notice I’m no longer in proximity to my wife’s phone and target forensic accountant and dating ads to me is creepy. It’s gross and offensive when it turns out we’re not together because she’s just succumbed to cancer.

Best is no ads. Second best is ads for things that I have no interest in, that I'm never going to buy anyway. Anything else has the potential to influence my buying decisions, which I don't want.

You don’t need to track individuals to provide contextually useful adverts based on the website and webpage someone is on.

I don't care what ads they want me to see. Only that they are blocked.

I get straight up porn (for porn games and explicit AI gf chat apps) sent to me. I report it each time. What else can I do about it?

Ads per se are not the problem. The problem is, they tracking and loading Gigabytes of data and make every website slow.

Do you understand why the Cambridge Analytica scandal was a scandal? Advertisers target you in their interest, not yours.

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