The below section resonates: lately YouTube has figured out I am in my mid-twenties and considering for the first time how best to save money for a secure/stable future.
The number of ADs I see now not so subtly implying that I can expect to “lose big” or “rent forever” if I don’t subscribe to QuestTrade/WealthSimple/…
It’s just frustrating to know that someone put time and thought into making me and a million other folks in my “demographic bucket” feel anxious and worried.
I’m not sure how best to address this sort of thing and I suppose I can buy my way out of most internet ads if I want to so I acknowledge we all play a part in this market.
But some types of advertisements need to be highly regulated I would include Gambling, Pharmaceuticals, Alcohol on that list. But a broader class of non-luxury goods which are being advertised via a very negative framing of the consumers current situation are a social externality. They contribute to real health problems in the population and in my view that is reason enough to examine regulation.
> A marketer I know has a mantra, that successful sales are all about dissatisfaction - making people aware just how their situation sucks, and then offering a way to relieve the pain.
> ... some types of advertisements need to be highly regulated ...
I truly detest advertising and have been avoiding it with a passion for about 20 years through adblocking, aggressive unsubscribing, etc. But regulating advertising is only a quick fix to a much more dangerous problem of user disempowerment.
For tech-savvy people, most ads can be blocked, that is, until you insist on using proprietary software to access social media platforms or stream movies or stuff like that. DRM is the ultimate enemy here.
While the regulation of advertising is very quick, it is also quickly abolished if decision makers change. Regulation around user choice and user empowerment along with media literacy is a much more sustainable and more robust solution than regulation of specific ad types, places, messages or genres. (I'm thinking of the policy templates for regulating alcoholic beverages or sugary products in the EU.)
We see the fragility of the content-wise regulatory approach in parts of the US where online gambling has been legalized. I cannot find the article now, but this policy change led to an absurd amount of advertising, to which consumers were extremely vulnerable.
Advertising would not have been such an effective shortcut into the brains of so many consumers if those consumers had had the freedom, tools and education to easily decide what kind of advertising they want to be exposed to (and what kind of accompanying tracking they find tolerable).
> The below section resonates: lately YouTube has figured out I am in my mid-twenties and considering for the first time how best to save money for a secure/stable future.
This is funny since YouTube especially has never been able to figure out my demographics. To this day it keeps showing me ads for female hygiene products, cleaning supplies, quick fashion brands or scam ads in Russian, a language I don't speak. None of this has ever been relevant to me in any way whatsoever.
They should just go back to showing exclusively contextual ads, they'd have better odds of hitting a topic I might actually be even remotely in the target market for.
You’re in a minority. As long as YouTube is mostly right the vast majority of the time, running identity based ads is significantly more profitable than running context based ads.
Years and years ago I worked at a company selling context based web ads, and our numbers were significantly lower than identity based ads. There were a few companies willing to pay good money for certain context based ads, that we got good money from, but most went to identity based because CTR was much higher.
There were also some holdout webpages that only served context based ads for privacy concerns, but largely it was a dying niche in the larger online advertising space because of key metrics like Click Through Rate.
Phone autocorrect usually is the culprit for those types of typos for me. I imagine this crowd would be more likely than many to have that common abbreviation for Active Domains trained into their input methods.
The first comment (now) quibbles about the definition of advertising.
The second comment (now) quibbles about the use of the word cancer. (there is benign cancer).
Advertising (whether it uses tracking or not) can be defined as the intention of convincing someone rather than providing information. Intent is to convince. PROPOGANDA.
The intent is for the target/prey/victim to be unable to distinguish the truth value.
So here we have a first problem. Is the intent of the first comment on HN
"Most of the arguments .. are not about 'advertising' ..."
made to help me understand the article better? Or are they made with the intent of causing to me doubt the article (or even not to read it).
The same question can be asked about the second question. Ad infinitum and nauseaum.
THAT is STAGE 1 social cancer. I can no longer trust the intention of posts on HN.
STAGE 2 is that I can no longer trust the INTENTION of any media.
Do I want a recipe for cookies? Use the "garrble" to search. Can I really believe that this recipe has ever been made by the person/bot/AI that created it?
STAGE 3. Human societies and Communities are founded on trust. The ability to come to a common understanding of a situation and act collectively. STAGE 3 is when communities and societies no longer function.
The internet has STAGE 2 cancer and some STAGE 3. Since our society in the US depends on the internet ....
Well you cannot trust anything I say, I could be an AI for all you know. And probably my definitions are wrong, my understanding of stages of cancer is faulty, etc.
Here is my 2cents. The article vastly underestimates the damage and dangers, but is definitely worth a read.
One of my least favorite tendencies of software developers is assuming they can pull apart non-technical/mathematic problems involving human complexity, even at a societal scale, with a series of logical thought experiments like they’re debugging software, and that their “bug fixes” and doc updates would tidy everything up with people as effectively as it does with processes. As complex as software can be, it hasn’t a sliver the complexity of human interaction on a small scale, let alone societally. The developer mindset often isn’t effective enough in reasoning about human behavior to make effective user interfaces for software they created.
When you start classifying entire categories of human interaction and societal structures in concrete stages based on a combination of a priori reasoning, gut instinct, anecdotes, and ‘common knowledge,’ there’s a good chance your words are portraying the boogie men in your head rather than any of the very significant and consequential problems in our society. There are entire fields that study complex topics you casually wield in your assessment— they’re probably a good place to start if you honestly think your gut instinct about forum posts on advertising can be meaningfully generalized to societal structures on a whole.
As is true for many people, I have found myself in the terrible situation of having acted with the best of motives, only to find later that my actions were harmful to others. The question is always, what do we do when that happens? How to we look at ourselves in the mirror? This is an ethical, not moral issue.
One choice is simply denial, but I do not like myself when I choose that. Another is not to act because there is never a guarantee that our actions will not be wrong. The stand up choice in my mind is to own up to our mistakes and failures and fix things to the extent we can.
We have developed a business model for the internet that is indeed a cancer on communities, on societies. On the lives of those around us. This was not with evil intent - which would be inexcusable. We just did not know better. But now we do. To ignore this fact, deny it, etc is understandable. But you now know this to be true or that it is possibly true. And in order to be stand up people we need to understand whether this harms others. And we fix it.
And really is the Advertising business model the best we can do?
> Advertising (whether it uses tracking or not) can be defined as the intention of convincing someone rather than providing information. Intent is to convince. PROPOGANDA.
This is pointless moralizing pretending to be clarifying or demarcating.
If I write an essay about climate change to convince you to vote/protest/purchase/boycott <anything> then I will use information to create an opinion in you.
All communication exists to alter the experiences of your interlocutors. You can't hide behind "good intentions" to demarcate. Labelling persuasion as propaganda, is itself propaganda.
Here I was perfectly happy with how things are. Alas, thanks to the advertisement now I've realized all the imperfections of my life that can only be remediated by the advertised products
Most of the arguments made are not about "advertising" per se, but the methods that SOME forms of advertising take and other methods (data mining, phishing, scams) that are either not advertising or are things that are already regulated/illegal but which enforcement actions against are low/non-existent.
In the book "Fire in the Valley" about the development and early days of the internet there is a great deal of discussion and prescient predictions about where all of this would go - but the business models of walled gardens and pay walls never generated the revenue that charging for clicks did. Honestly it's hard to see how we get to this level of speed and content online without it having been funded by advertising.
The underlying point is game theoretical: ads are driven to these methods because within their niches, they're zero sum games (and negative sum for society at large due to externalities).
> Honestly it's hard to see how we get to this level of speed and content online without it having been funded by advertising.
I don't understand what this means. Most content online that isn't user generated (forums, blogs, wikipedia, YT, short form video etc) is junk. Most of it is made for free. The distribution has costs - but it's extremely unclear the costs couldn't be solved in different ways. Serving text is ultra cheap. Torrents distribute way more video than industry is happy with. We didn't need to take this path.
All of that "free" and "cheap" stuff has not always been free or cheap - even a decade ago. In the mid-late 90's when these decisions were being made even hosting a minimal site was incredibly expensive and largely the realm of universities and big business.
This really depends on the content you are seeking and consuming as the user. I am constantly pulling data sheets, reading papers, researching reference designs, interacting on official (and unofficial) product forums, and countless other information queries which at the start of my career were largely conducted at either company or university libraries, in person meetings, or attending conferences. That may sound great but trust me it's far better to sit at home and have the entire product specifications from a manufacturer than ordering a physical copy or spending half the day calling around to see if someone else has one available.
If all you are consuming is FB, IG, X, and Reddit - I mean that's like going to a candy store and complaining there is no broccoli.
> Honestly it's hard to see how we get to this level of speed and content online without it having been funded by advertising.
If we had gone (or stayed) peer to peer we could have done it, rather than going the expensive client server model. Server farms require funding; peer to peer doesn't.
I watched a bit of "the Superbowl" once and it made me feel the same way about using the unfiltered web: I can't believe anyone watches this without adblock. Then I slowly started to realise the NPCs in Idiocracy/Wall-E aren't actually fictional...
I guess it depends upon where you draw the line between advertising and informing. The broad definition of "advertising" doesn't restrict it to commercial use, but I think the most common understanding of what it is would. Also, the author makes it clear that they're referring to this sense of the word:
> [advertising is] a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them.
However all “good” ADs are less effective than they could be when the population experiences a nearly unavoidable torrent of “not good” ADs.
People are savvy and broadly know the difference but on a subconscious level likely begin to perceive PSAs with more skepticism than is warranted when so much advertising masks itself as helpful advice when in reality it is selling a service based on nonsense statistics or bad faith argument.
I think some kind of pushback from society against the worst forms of advertising is needed.
I HATE advertising on YouTube/Spotify/Websites but don’t really mind them on Instagram and actually sometimes quite enjoy them on TikTok.
The first difference for me is that on YouTube/Spotify/Websites they obscure the content and force you to watch/see the advertisements but on Instagram and TikTok it’s just as easy to skip an advertisement as it is a video/actual content.
The second difference is that usually the advertisements on Instagram and TikTok are targetted based on my preferences anyway so I’m more likely to look at it and often even interact with it.
The third difference is that on TikTok especially where I actually sometimes look forward to the ads, they are actually putting the customer first rather than their product. The videos are sometimes viral content variations which are interesting to watch or short stories which have product in them.
It’s the same as influencer marketing with product reviews. I make an effort to watch those if I’m looking for a product in the same category or sometimes just to know what’s currently out there, but that’s effectively also advertising just that it puts the customer first.
So while I agree some forms of advertising are cancer, I appreciate others and don’t want the good kind to go away because I don’t know everything and sometimes it’s only through advertising that I discover new brands and products that have become my go tos.
“any effort you spent on advertising serves primarily to counteract the combined advertising efforts of your competitors. The same results could be achieved if every market player limited themselves to just informing customers about their goods and services“
This is a really shallow view of advertising, most of the time you don’t know who is your competitor and you don’t know all the possible ways that you can inform your audience about product, and you don’t fully know what your customer wants.
> most of the time you don’t know who is your competitor and you don’t know all the possible ways that you can inform your audience about product
If we look at the top 10 commercial for this super bowl[1], which is arguable the most money spent on advertising, it's Booking.com, Ram Trucks, Made by Google, Yahoo.com, Marvel Studios, Bud Light, NerdWallet, DoorDash, Doritos, Squarespace.
I'm sure all of those companies know who their competitors are, and the audience already knows about their products. The ads are just trying to jump to our forefront of attention.
> and you don’t fully know what your customer wants.
This is very true.
However, as Facebook ads are showing me both dick pills and boob surgery offers, and legal advice for giving up a citizenship I don't have (and even then only available in a country I don't live in), and foreign government announcements that a breed of dog I've never heard of is now banned in that country…
I'm not convinced that this is in any sense "solved" by the huge quantity of surveillance that even Facebook has.
I mean, these advertising profiling errors are what I'd expect in a university student project introducing AI as a concept, not a megacorp whose main monetisation strategy is selling attention to advertisers. Even a classifier itself built by an LLM ought to do better than this when using only my name and GeoIP data.
Readit News
The number of ADs I see now not so subtly implying that I can expect to “lose big” or “rent forever” if I don’t subscribe to QuestTrade/WealthSimple/…
It’s just frustrating to know that someone put time and thought into making me and a million other folks in my “demographic bucket” feel anxious and worried.
I’m not sure how best to address this sort of thing and I suppose I can buy my way out of most internet ads if I want to so I acknowledge we all play a part in this market.
But some types of advertisements need to be highly regulated I would include Gambling, Pharmaceuticals, Alcohol on that list. But a broader class of non-luxury goods which are being advertised via a very negative framing of the consumers current situation are a social externality. They contribute to real health problems in the population and in my view that is reason enough to examine regulation.
> A marketer I know has a mantra, that successful sales are all about dissatisfaction - making people aware just how their situation sucks, and then offering a way to relieve the pain.
I truly detest advertising and have been avoiding it with a passion for about 20 years through adblocking, aggressive unsubscribing, etc. But regulating advertising is only a quick fix to a much more dangerous problem of user disempowerment.
For tech-savvy people, most ads can be blocked, that is, until you insist on using proprietary software to access social media platforms or stream movies or stuff like that. DRM is the ultimate enemy here.
While the regulation of advertising is very quick, it is also quickly abolished if decision makers change. Regulation around user choice and user empowerment along with media literacy is a much more sustainable and more robust solution than regulation of specific ad types, places, messages or genres. (I'm thinking of the policy templates for regulating alcoholic beverages or sugary products in the EU.)
We see the fragility of the content-wise regulatory approach in parts of the US where online gambling has been legalized. I cannot find the article now, but this policy change led to an absurd amount of advertising, to which consumers were extremely vulnerable.
Advertising would not have been such an effective shortcut into the brains of so many consumers if those consumers had had the freedom, tools and education to easily decide what kind of advertising they want to be exposed to (and what kind of accompanying tracking they find tolerable).
This is funny since YouTube especially has never been able to figure out my demographics. To this day it keeps showing me ads for female hygiene products, cleaning supplies, quick fashion brands or scam ads in Russian, a language I don't speak. None of this has ever been relevant to me in any way whatsoever.
They should just go back to showing exclusively contextual ads, they'd have better odds of hitting a topic I might actually be even remotely in the target market for.
Years and years ago I worked at a company selling context based web ads, and our numbers were significantly lower than identity based ads. There were a few companies willing to pay good money for certain context based ads, that we got good money from, but most went to identity based because CTR was much higher.
There were also some holdout webpages that only served context based ads for privacy concerns, but largely it was a dying niche in the larger online advertising space because of key metrics like Click Through Rate.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backronym
I use two browser addons, uBlock origin and SponsorBlock.
The second comment (now) quibbles about the use of the word cancer. (there is benign cancer).
Advertising (whether it uses tracking or not) can be defined as the intention of convincing someone rather than providing information. Intent is to convince. PROPOGANDA.
The intent is for the target/prey/victim to be unable to distinguish the truth value.
So here we have a first problem. Is the intent of the first comment on HN
"Most of the arguments .. are not about 'advertising' ..."
made to help me understand the article better? Or are they made with the intent of causing to me doubt the article (or even not to read it).
The same question can be asked about the second question. Ad infinitum and nauseaum.
THAT is STAGE 1 social cancer. I can no longer trust the intention of posts on HN.
STAGE 2 is that I can no longer trust the INTENTION of any media.
Do I want a recipe for cookies? Use the "garrble" to search. Can I really believe that this recipe has ever been made by the person/bot/AI that created it?
STAGE 3. Human societies and Communities are founded on trust. The ability to come to a common understanding of a situation and act collectively. STAGE 3 is when communities and societies no longer function.
The internet has STAGE 2 cancer and some STAGE 3. Since our society in the US depends on the internet ....
Well you cannot trust anything I say, I could be an AI for all you know. And probably my definitions are wrong, my understanding of stages of cancer is faulty, etc.
Here is my 2cents. The article vastly underestimates the damage and dangers, but is definitely worth a read.
When you start classifying entire categories of human interaction and societal structures in concrete stages based on a combination of a priori reasoning, gut instinct, anecdotes, and ‘common knowledge,’ there’s a good chance your words are portraying the boogie men in your head rather than any of the very significant and consequential problems in our society. There are entire fields that study complex topics you casually wield in your assessment— they’re probably a good place to start if you honestly think your gut instinct about forum posts on advertising can be meaningfully generalized to societal structures on a whole.
One choice is simply denial, but I do not like myself when I choose that. Another is not to act because there is never a guarantee that our actions will not be wrong. The stand up choice in my mind is to own up to our mistakes and failures and fix things to the extent we can.
We have developed a business model for the internet that is indeed a cancer on communities, on societies. On the lives of those around us. This was not with evil intent - which would be inexcusable. We just did not know better. But now we do. To ignore this fact, deny it, etc is understandable. But you now know this to be true or that it is possibly true. And in order to be stand up people we need to understand whether this harms others. And we fix it.
And really is the Advertising business model the best we can do?
This is pointless moralizing pretending to be clarifying or demarcating.
If I write an essay about climate change to convince you to vote/protest/purchase/boycott <anything> then I will use information to create an opinion in you.
All communication exists to alter the experiences of your interlocutors. You can't hide behind "good intentions" to demarcate. Labelling persuasion as propaganda, is itself propaganda.
In the book "Fire in the Valley" about the development and early days of the internet there is a great deal of discussion and prescient predictions about where all of this would go - but the business models of walled gardens and pay walls never generated the revenue that charging for clicks did. Honestly it's hard to see how we get to this level of speed and content online without it having been funded by advertising.
> Honestly it's hard to see how we get to this level of speed and content online without it having been funded by advertising.
I don't understand what this means. Most content online that isn't user generated (forums, blogs, wikipedia, YT, short form video etc) is junk. Most of it is made for free. The distribution has costs - but it's extremely unclear the costs couldn't be solved in different ways. Serving text is ultra cheap. Torrents distribute way more video than industry is happy with. We didn't need to take this path.
If all you are consuming is FB, IG, X, and Reddit - I mean that's like going to a candy store and complaining there is no broccoli.
If we had gone (or stayed) peer to peer we could have done it, rather than going the expensive client server model. Server farms require funding; peer to peer doesn't.
Maybe, maybe not. But that juice has absolutely not been worth the squeeze.
So advertising can be a good thing and a literal cancer-preventer to society.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4018507/
> [advertising is] a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them.
Example: The Merriam-Webster for example defines "advertisement" as, literally, as "1 : a public notice".
Still,
> but I think the most common understanding of what it is would.
... is probably the reason for their "especially" paragraph and examples, right below the definition.
However all “good” ADs are less effective than they could be when the population experiences a nearly unavoidable torrent of “not good” ADs.
People are savvy and broadly know the difference but on a subconscious level likely begin to perceive PSAs with more skepticism than is warranted when so much advertising masks itself as helpful advice when in reality it is selling a service based on nonsense statistics or bad faith argument.
I think some kind of pushback from society against the worst forms of advertising is needed.
The vast, vast majority of the time and the vast, vast majority of money spent on ads is nothing like this.
The first difference for me is that on YouTube/Spotify/Websites they obscure the content and force you to watch/see the advertisements but on Instagram and TikTok it’s just as easy to skip an advertisement as it is a video/actual content.
The second difference is that usually the advertisements on Instagram and TikTok are targetted based on my preferences anyway so I’m more likely to look at it and often even interact with it.
The third difference is that on TikTok especially where I actually sometimes look forward to the ads, they are actually putting the customer first rather than their product. The videos are sometimes viral content variations which are interesting to watch or short stories which have product in them.
It’s the same as influencer marketing with product reviews. I make an effort to watch those if I’m looking for a product in the same category or sometimes just to know what’s currently out there, but that’s effectively also advertising just that it puts the customer first.
So while I agree some forms of advertising are cancer, I appreciate others and don’t want the good kind to go away because I don’t know everything and sometimes it’s only through advertising that I discover new brands and products that have become my go tos.
This is a really shallow view of advertising, most of the time you don’t know who is your competitor and you don’t know all the possible ways that you can inform your audience about product, and you don’t fully know what your customer wants.
If we look at the top 10 commercial for this super bowl[1], which is arguable the most money spent on advertising, it's Booking.com, Ram Trucks, Made by Google, Yahoo.com, Marvel Studios, Bud Light, NerdWallet, DoorDash, Doritos, Squarespace.
I'm sure all of those companies know who their competitors are, and the audience already knows about their products. The ads are just trying to jump to our forefront of attention.
[1] https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/most-watched-super-bowl-ads...
This is very true.
However, as Facebook ads are showing me both dick pills and boob surgery offers, and legal advice for giving up a citizenship I don't have (and even then only available in a country I don't live in), and foreign government announcements that a breed of dog I've never heard of is now banned in that country…
I'm not convinced that this is in any sense "solved" by the huge quantity of surveillance that even Facebook has.
I mean, these advertising profiling errors are what I'd expect in a university student project introducing AI as a concept, not a megacorp whose main monetisation strategy is selling attention to advertisers. Even a classifier itself built by an LLM ought to do better than this when using only my name and GeoIP data.