Comment by delichon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by delichon | Hacker News Reader

Push advertising sucks, but we can make pull much better by giving the user more control.

Imagine a protocol to publish commercial offers for any given fragment of content addressable by URI. It would describe the details of some product or service and a set of proposed terms. We could surf the web looking for relevant content and publishing related offers. Various repositories would subscribe or not.

A browser (extension or native) would optionally pull offers from selected repositories and have UI for the user to solicit/pull offers for any given piece of content styled to signal their existence, and to filter and sort them. To make it sustainable there needs to be revenue sharing with the content source(s).

Are there existing projects like this?

The same protocol could be used for independent commentary and other annotation.

The Brave/BAT experiment was similar to what you're describing. I think it failed to live up to its dreams of revolutionizing advertising because for the most part there are two kinds of people.

- I try not to think about ads

- I think about ads because I aggressively block them

I'm sure somebody out there represents a middle ground, but I think it's a pretty small demographic.

Why would I, as a user, ever opt in to this instead of just using adblock and never seeing adverts at all.

>user more control

As others said, most users don't care or don't want to see them.

This leaves the people that care being the ones who are providing the ads, and they will game the system with bots and other methods of bad acting that will make the system useless.

The problem is curation. People will mis-categorize in every way possible just to try to get eyeballs. I see this all over the web.

I hate ads until I need them, then I complain that the algorithms still suck. My wife recently reminded me I have to give Shopee time to surface good options when I don't have the exact words. I expect this to improve as their models improve.

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