Comment by naikrovek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by naikrovek | Hacker News Reader

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> Honestly, I generally defend Meta/targeted advertising in these threads

These kinds of things now point me in a direction where I consider advertising alone to be immoral and want it banned. I should have to request information when I want it, rather than being exposed to it at all times on every available surface.

There are only three ways this can go: 1) more frequent and more spookily relevant ads, increasing the number of people who feel that ads should be illegal because of the law breaking required to make it happen. 2) ads don’t change and everyone quickly learns to ignore them. 3) ads go away, replaced by an easy to use marketing information delivery system where only adults can request information unsupervised.

Meta do #1 because #2 and #3 mean the capitalist line doesn’t go up and the end of Meta, respectively. Meta view both of those as the same thing: the end of Meta.

“What about all the businesses which need advertising to survive?”

If they need advertising to survive they’ve been on borrowed time long enough already.

Advertisements encourage the shit Meta is doing. What kinds of similar things are they doing that we haven’t discovered, yet?

> These kinds of things now point me in a direction where I consider advertising alone to be immoral and want it banned.

I (personally) think that's going too far. Targeted advertising has been really, really good for small businesses, and given that local newspapers are basically dead and TV/radio are expensive, these business kinda have to use Meta/Google et al.

And that's fine (IMO obviously). The actual problem here is the insatiable drive for growth from public companies/the markets, coupled with wide-scale equity ownership within the companies concerned leads to people doing mental stuff like the OP to drive those numbers up.

A bunch of this is fixable by massive, massive fines (on the part of the EU). The better solution would be for the US to introduce GDPR/DMA like regulation, as US based companies are more likely to follow their home countries laws, but that's not gonna happen any time soon.

The structural problems are harder to resolve, maybe lengthen vesting schedules and/or move back towards dividends to encourage longer-term thinking and approaches.

Targeted advertising has been good for small business in the same way that the mob is good to small business that pay up. The main reason businesses need to rely on advertising to reach people is because people are already being bombarded by competitors.

Sorry what? Like, basically all businesses need to advertise, and unknown ones (i.e. small and new businesses) need to do this much more.

Coke will be fine if they stop buying TV spots (for a while, at least) but I'm pretty sure Linear/Datadog etc wouldn't be the size they are now without advertising.

> The main reason businesses need to rely on advertising to reach people is because people are already being bombarded by competitors.

Fundamentally, advertising is a way to tell potential customers you exist. Most people don't seek out new products, how do you think small businesses would grow in a world with no advertising?

This is a valuable thread to pull thank you: how about differentiating targeted, sticky advertising vs context based advertising. On my local paper website, I value being shown local stuff (to your point on small business). On security websites, show me security products. On HN, Show me tech and science.

The ADD incidence rate being 10x for adults since 2005 (not to even mention kids), we'd all appreciate relevance to what we're exploring/thinking about/learning, rather than the genuine nuisance of nagging for something out of context because we're tracked all around the web.

Public ads should be illegal and customers should go to a catalog when they want to see ads.

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