Are you implying that kindness and advertising are basically the same? I can't imagine anyone being this reductive but I can't figure out a different way to read it.
I think both you and the poster you’re responding too are oversimplifying things.
Some parts of some religions encourage followers to be kind to some others. Some parts encourage them to discriminate, assimilate, or even kill (also some) others.
While I’m an atheist, I don’t buy the narrative that religion is the root of all evil, and I recognize that there are several good outcomes of some religions (e.g., help people come out of addiction), but if you think religions are all about kindness, I think you may just not have been looking around enough.
I would rather live with ads than with literal bread lines my family stood in decades ago, in a socialist state (that funnily had more govt propaganda than ads).
Because you’re stuck in a conceptual framing where the existence of things you don’t like is subject to your choice. You’ll never be satisfied if your benchmark for good is that every market transaction in the country should be something you’d endorse, or that nobody should ever show you a piece of content you don’t want to see for their own benefit.
The US can afford to feed everyone and still not be 'Socialist'.
I think you are confusing 'Capitalism' with 'Cruelty'. What if I were to tell you, you don't have to be cruel in order to virtue-signal your faith in 'Capitalism'.
Now imagine the entire society standing in such lines, even the best doctors and brightest engineers, for all basic necessities, not knowing if there's anything left by the time it's their turn.
Very odd dichotomy. Did you never consider living in a world that has no bread lines nor advertisements? That seems like the one most would choose. In this country, we have both bread lines AND advertisements!
It's weird. Everybody finds ads obnoxious (at least some of the time), yet it's allowed and not only that, it's proliferated in recent years. You'd think something universally disliked would be legislated away.
I wish more people would realize the root cause of all this spying is advertising. Simply banning advertising would get rid of all this shit more effectively and with less overreach and compliance headaches than the GDPR.
Things which most of everybody agrees hurt society, but bump up the GDP tend to be tolerated to an extreme degree. The focus on datums, instead of why we even wanted those values to go up (or down) in the first place, is one of the major failings of modern governance.
There's at least one group who doesn't find the ads annoying, and that's whoever is purchasing the ad space. That could be a business, a nonprofit, some government agency or even a charity. Advertising is a vital part of the sales funnel for them, and it is what allows them to feed their children and pay the mortgage.
Maybe something like this: When the one displaying the picture (or whatever), the one providing the picture, and the one viewing the picture are three different parties, and money flows from the person providing the picture to the one showing it.
It's not perfect but I think this definition would include e.g. billboards, newspaper ads and most internet ads, while excluding non-advertising integrations of third-party data (e.g. when a navigation company buys maps from a mapping company to show to their client, it does not fall under this definition because money flows the other way).
> You'd think something universally disliked would be legislated away.
Advertising is a core activity of capitalism, which our western governments protect and further at all costs. Until we leave capitalism as a system behind, advertising will keep growing.
>Everybody finds ads obnoxious (at least some of the time)
In my experience most people actually don't, and any anti-advertising strategy has to come to grips with this fact. For example I really can't stand radio ads so when I'm in the car with somebody and the radio starts playing ads I will ask if they can turn it off. Usually they will be pretty surprised, ask "why" etc. I think many people are genuinely able to "tune it out" and not be annoyed by ads.
Disney and Nintendo are among this most disgusting companies I can imagine. As an adult, you see ads and know they are ads... (sometimes, astroturfing is different)
But children? They see characters and do not realize they are corporate mascots. By adulthood these are classics and nostalgia inducing.
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
Well, yes. "No limits" or "more is better" of anything is horrible for society.
In a strong, cohesive society - that is understood, and all sort of limits are enforced. (Socially more than legally, typically.)
In an incoherent and divided society, a wide variety of malignancies flourish. At least for a while. Such societies tend to be short-lived, and jumping to a suitable new host can be difficult.
Every form of manipulation of people through information is a "cancer": advertising, political ideologies, religion, escapist entertainment, etc.
The problem is that truth is very hard to establish for those that don't want and don't understand logic. They're "cancers" that people want because they're comfortable with it.
Also, if we try to control these cancers by restricting what information is allowed we will create an authoritarian society.
>Every form of manipulation of people through information is a "cancer"
Not really. Everything that can change minds (including discussion, the news, and art) is a form of manipulation of people through information. Who draws the line what's good manipulation and what's bad manipulation (or, which is the same, what is legit mind changing and what's not)?
Do you consider escapist entertainment malicious in nature, or were you not using the word "manipulation" in a malicious sense? Or is this not an applicable modeling of what you were saying?
How do you define escapist entertainment specifically, provided you do consider it malicious? I struggle to think of a form of entertainment that isn't on some level a possible escape.
That is a false dichotomy. We can certainly place restrictions without resulting in an authoritarian society. We can ban billboards. (Some states do this). We can ban gambling and drug ads. We can place ownership
limits on media markets. There are all things we have had in the us at various times and in various places.
Apple used to seem particularly egregious because their marketing used Spin and exploited status insecurities.
They would put the word "Security" or "Privacy" on the screen. They never claimed they were good at security. They just said "Security". It was implied. Factually, they had little to stand on.
They also did the thing car markers do, where they exploit status insecurities. They were wholly successful, a lower-class person cannot own an Android phone without getting flack. Meanwhile, an upper-middle class person doesnt have this burden. I can drive a crappy car and I'm seen as prudent. A lower class person drives a crappy car and is seen as poor. All of this comes from marketing the status position of a company.
This analogy seems weak. In general, this post argues one way while ignoring all the good advertising does. Do cancers typically do good things at their baseline?
I put on plays. Some people would enjoy seeing them. I can only do four or five performances so I can't wait for people to rave to their friends about it.
I put up polite, attractive, informative ads in forums that I think will have people who might come to my shows. Not everyone will; the large majority won't. But some of these are web sites that talk about theater, where my ad spend pays for the site itself to exist.
I recognize that the ads we most notice are nothing like that. But the idea that all ads are automatically a bad thing misses out on the fact that the original purpose of ads, as cited in the article, does still exist. If you waved a magic wand and got rid of ads my theater probably wouldn't exist. No big loss, I suppose, but the world is very slightly poorer for it.
Informing potential customers of products that might be useful to them.
Let's say you are the inventor of the chainsaw, you need to tell lumberjacks that chainsaws exist, that's advertising. Otherwise you won't sell any and your invention will be lost, while lumberjacks will continue struggling with inefficient tools.
> Informing potential customers of products that might be useful to them.
Isn't there an insurmountable conflict of interest when the person doing the informing is also the person who directly benefits from the product being 'useful' to as many people as possible?
Yes there is, but you have to tell someone you have something to sell at some point. Even if it goes through independent reviewers, the reviewer has to be reached somehow, that's still advertising.
You are probably not going to find a job if you don't tell anyone you need a job, job hunting is also advertising.
>Yes there is, but you have to tell someone you have something to sell at some point
It's 2025. You could list it on your website, have it searchable in search engines, and aggregators for your product category, have independent and user review sites, and lots of other solutions that don't involve advertising.
I don't want anyone telling me they have something to sell I didn't ask them to tell me, and when I wasn't looking for such products actively (i.e. not because I searched somewhere else for a similar product).
>Even if it goes through independent reviewers, the reviewer has to be reached somehow, that's still advertising
No, it's not, unless the reviewer is paid or gets benefits for making your product look good.
And a great difference with "independent reviewers" is I can go to them (watch their videos, read their blog, go to their website, or whatever).
Advertising, on the other hand, cames to me. And increasingly I can't even skip it or get rid of it.
They also take the form of a review. Not a praise, or a video/image unrelated to the product, trying to sell it to me via sex, cool imagery, etc.
Somehow i feel like we can get this with employment that produces value. It'd be more productive to get people to dig ditches—ditches don't destroy our cities, roads, and services, so they produce even more value than ads do.
Anyway, the last thing this society needs is encouragement to buy even more crap they never asked for. We can be something better than "that shithole strip-mall where everyone is an ignorant consumer who worships ronald reagan". As much as the evidence points to the contrary, I do believe we are capable of more.
> Do cancers typically do good things at their baseline?
Cancers are tissues gone rogue. The original tissue does in fact tend to do “good things”.
There are a few transmissible cancers, but the vast majority of them are your own tissues twisted to only consider their own personal survival and short-term gains at the expense of the rest of the organism.
> Do cancers typically do good things at their baseline?
I mean, true, a cancer will probably destroy its host organism. But what about the cells whose mutations allow them to think outside the box, and replicate and expand beyond their wildest dreams by throwing away the limits imposed by overbearing genetic regulations and expectations of the organism? Isn't that a good thing?
(I agree with you, based on the point being made here, but I'm actually here to say I stumbled across your earlier comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828485 and wanted to say "holy crap". I apologize for interrupting your current thread, it was just too astonishing a medical recovery story for me not to say something.)
I knew it was war when i noticed how they force the advertising as ANNOYING as possible: many podcasters have tried to make it reasonable by frontloading at the start or making visual queues you can easily fast-forward. But then you can tell they have specifically FORCED the creators to make them interstitial.
The problem is this whole thing could have been gamified into something people want to participate in: I am looking for baby stuff, so its time to launch up The Buy Game. Only inside this game do I see ads for things I am very specifically signalling I am looking for, limiting what I see to what I want, and mayyybbeee I can click on "i feel lucky" to see something new. SOME kind of participatory signal or a negotiation, not shoved down my throat forcefully
Instead it has to be this fucking war, where I know full well I am not going to buy anything i see an ad for, in fact I now keep lists of the most annoying companies to make sure I never ever buy from them. I am considering spending the remaining years of my life making tools to help people get away from this shit
I also see HN Jobs that I did not ask for, would this also count as advertisements / marketing?
How would say, Daring Fireball [1] earn income from this cancerous mode of operation? Should this publication stop charging $11K a week to stop shilling products we don't need in your RSS feed?
So then it follows that all of these are 'cancer' by the author's definition.
How do we solve this once and for all to satisfy the author?
The only way to stop this would probably be to "close your eyes?" or perhaps maybe adblock, although we cannot adblock billboards, or this isn't really a big enough problem in the first place.
88x31 banners (ads) on Neocities, or artists I follow mentioning they have new merch (ads), or HN (website whose sole purpose is to let people advertise), don't bother me enough to ban them.
All we have left is a dumpster fire supported by ads.
> HN (website whose sole purpose is to let people advertise)
I don't think anyone comes here to read the advertisements (which is what paid job postings with no comments? I'll pass.). The closest you get are the "who's hiring" threads. Calling that an advertisement when both parties clearly want to engage seems wildly disingenuous. Advertisements are necessarily forced on people. There isn't a single person in human history whose life was improved by an advertisement (except the people hosting the ads, of course).
After seeing all the replies in this thread talking specifically about commercial advertisements, I'm guessing I'm misunderstanding the English word (i.e. somehow, submissions are not considered advertisement for the linked blogs, and only commercial ads are being treated as ads).
Most forums such as this have a 'mute' button so you can choose not to see certain topics and posts by certain people. Not sure why HN doesnt have this, but it solves your 'problem' of forum posts being 'advertising' whilst at the same time explaining the difference between the two, choice.
EDIT: Oh I see youve edited your post. I wont be changing mine to address your new points. Try to keep a conversation going, stop editing to add points after people have replied.
To be fair I didn't see your reply but to answer your original point.
It would be great for HN to not only "hide" the jobs all the time but an account level "hide ads" or "hide YC ads" function in the account so that I don't have to see the woven job ads on the site that act like HN posts.
This shouldn't be limited to forums, but should also be extended to other sites.
Yes, and some media outlets in the UK have started doing this.
For example the Daily Mail. When you go to view an article on their site they give you the choice of viewing the article instantly with ads, or subscribing for ad free. I think this is great and all ad funded media should offer the same.
One demonstrable solution would be to treat gambling/betting ads like cigarette ads. We have the same age restriction laws for a reason, why is it open season for gambling then?
I fully agree with the sentiment, and yet marvel at the apparent lack of alternatives for so many business models. I'm mildly surprised, for example, that micro-payments for web content are still not a (widespread) thing.
Consumers hate ads, but they hate paying for things even more apparently.
It's not really clear to me that consumers hate ads. It seems like more of a tech niche opinion; most people are perfectly fine with watching TV commercials (and look forward to them at the Super Bowl) and don't mind using ad-tier streaming plans. Ad blockers are used by a tiny, tiny percentage of total browser users. And so on.
Look at literally any poll on the topic - people hate ads universally, with advertisers not far behind. And ad blocker usage has skyrocketed. It's now up to ~30% of all internet users [1] with younger people starting to approach a majority. And it should go without saying that the only reason that's not near 100% of users is because most people don't know they exist and/or don't feel comfortable installing one.
This link claims that 39% of people over the age of 56 use an ad blocker. Sorry, but color me skeptical. I could but wrong, but I am highly skeptical of that statistic.
This report also doesn't seem to clarify what is meant by "ad blocker," specifically, which makes the whole thing pretty suspect. Looking into the sources they provide, at least one of them doesn't mention ad blockers at all, even though the related image is about people blocking ads. So, yeah, I'm not considering this to be reliable information.
Have you noticed the growing number of sites trying to be increasingly aggressive towards ad-blockers? They're not jumping through these increasingly sophisticated (and expensive!) technical hoops to try to squeeze a few more ad views out of a "tiny, tiny percentage".
The Reg gives 52% of all Americans [1], b2.ai (who sells anti ad block services) gives 45% in North America [2], and so on. Most sources seem to fall in a 30%-50% range, with all sources agreeing that uptake on adblockers has rapidly and dramatically increased. People hate ads.
1. The study is claiming 50% of all Americans based on a sample size of 2,000.
According to a survey of 2,000 Americans conducted by research firm Censuswide, on behalf of Ghostery, a maker of software to block ads and online tracking, 52 percent of Americans now use an ad blocker, up from 34 percent according to 2022 Statista data.
2. Both of them, and indeed all of these studies seem to be funded by ad blocking companies. That alone makes them suspect.
I can buy the idea that the advertising industry is under pressure from built-in restrictions pushed by Apple, et al. But the idea that 52% of the American population even knows what an ad blocker is, much less has one installed, is completely absurd.
From a quick search, that percentage is comparable to the number of people that: own an iPhone, drink coffee everyday, or own a pet.
2000 is a massive sample assuming it's reasonably representative - far larger than you'd see in an average e.g. election poll. Statistics can be counter-intuitive. The surveys are also generally carried out by survey companies, not the first parties.
You can corroborate these data pretty much anywhere and everywhere. For a silly one I dug up here's [1] PewdiePie in 2016 talking about already seeing a 40% adblock rate as reflected by a non-scientific poll but also in his revenue stats, up from 10%-15% in past years. And it's certainly way higher now - obviously though that sample is going to trend young and probably technically above average.
But really, the thing about ad-blocking is that it's the ultimate in viral tech. Anytime I meet somebody who's not using ad-block I tend to introduce them to the Brave browser and the result like 99.9% of the time is 'omg I didn't even know this was possible.' Those are now people who will probably never go without ad-blocking again and some percent of whom will likely then go on to introduce others to it. There is literally no downside to using an ad-blocker and a million upsides. People just simply don't know about them and/or think they're somehow difficult to use.
I'm really not going to keep arguing about this. I know how statistics work. The studies are clearly biased and make absurd conclusions, and I've listed about ten different problems with them - the foremost being that "ad blocker" is never defined anywhere.
The idea that the number of people using an ad blocker is equivalent to the number of people that drink coffee every morning, subscribe to Netflix, or have a pet makes no sense whatsoever, and if that were the case, you'd see vastly more discussion and general awareness of the concept.
There is relatively high general awareness of the concept! Just remember that we all live in bubbles. And the slice of life you see and know is going to have its own little biases that are not nationally reflected. For an easy one in tech, did the majority of people you know (who voted) vote for Trump?
Even ignoring the sibling comment debunking your "tiny, tiny percentage"...
There's a huge difference between extremely-high-production-value Superbowl ads and regular TV ads.
There's another huge difference between regular TV ads and some of the ads you can get on YouTube (example: someone I follow decided, For Science™, to actually watch the entirety of a 5-hour ad they got on YouTube for...I think it was one of the Lego Movies? It consisted entirely of an endless repetition of the same 3-minute-ish song).
There's also a huge difference between what people are willing to tolerate in order to reduce some of the often-absurd financial burden they're being put under, and what people actually like, or are genuinely content with.
"Revealed preference" theory is a bunch of motivated reasoning.
One problem is transaction costs; you need aggregators to sit in the middle, adding up the people paying and to be paid out. Structurally, aggregators are then in a position to extract rents. Which they will do, sooner or later.
There are of course other problems, fraud, money laundering and the like, which extract taxes, and and a whole patchwork quilt of national regulations, which extracts a lot more.
Things like crypto look, feel and smell like money laundering. I don't think there's a technical solution here. The problems are social and regulatory.
> Advertising as currently practiced [... is] a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them. Limited to honestly informing people about what's available on the market, it can serve a crucial function in enabling trade. In the real world however, it's moved way past that role.
> Real world advertising is not about informing, it's about convincing. Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest. It also became more effective. In the process, it grew to consume a significant amount of resources of every company on the planet. It infected every communication medium in existence, both digital and analog. It shapes every product and service you touch, and it affects your interactions with everyone who isn't your close friend or family member. Through all that, it actively destroys trust in people and institutions alike, and corrupts the decision-making process in any market transaction. It became a legitimized form of industrial-scale psychological abuse [...]
And then it supports and complements this with a long list of findings.
I wonder if there are some approaches to hedge advertisement back into it's useful and valuable purpose and limit the highly, as the article puts it, "cancerous" impacts?
In a world of finite attention, some form of advertising will inevitable appear. Unless your critique of advertising includes a solution to the attention problem, it's not useful.
Then you might say, well there should be some regulations that prevent advertisers from doing X bad thing or saying Y exaggerated statement. Most of these exist already, and if they don't, the legislation required to ban such practices would be easier to implement than legislation "banning advertising" writ large, whatever that actually means in practice.
Just like you can demand that corporations provide correct product information on the packaging, you can easily demand that they only communicate in that way around their products.
The difference between advertising and product information is that the former is deceitful.
Communicate in what way? And at what point are you going to differentiate between "art" and "not art"?
These are rhetorical questions, because their implementation is a pipe dream. Getting rid of "advertising" would require the most draconian anti-speech laws imaginable.
Regardless, this isn't really an answer. What metrics are you using to determine if an ad is misleading? Take for example the early 2000s BMW ads which were short films with various celebrities and actors. Are these "misleading" and not allowed?
Again, these aren't even remotely implementable ideas without complete state control over the media.
If you mean the US Supreme Court, they could just stop being insane and change that ruling, because, as I pointed out, corporations aren't people. They are fictions. It's like claiming it is a free speech issue that people in the Wheel of Time books aren't allowed to name the evil threatening the world.
Why not in the same way it's determined for product information on the packaging?
No, it just requires the state to have control over corporations, which it has, since it's the one creating them.
So your solution is to have the government control all communications coming from corporations? This is again, extremely draconian.
Corporations aren't fictions, they are organizations of people and resources...just like the government.
You also didn't answer my question: where is the line between art and advertising drawn? If I make a movie and use BMWs in it, and BMW gives me those cars for free to use, am I breaking the advertising law?
As I said in the initial comment, all of these proposed solutions are absolute nonsense. If you dislike advertising's effect on the world, come up with a better way to manage the attention problem. Government control of the media isn't one of them.
No, that's something you dreamt up for no good reason. There are a lot of constraints on corporate communication, especially for publicly traded corporations. This does not mean "the government control[s] all communications coming from corporations".
It's common all over the world to regulate content in advertising. In many places corporations manage to self-regulate, in some the state steps in instead. Ads aimed at kids being prohibited is an obvious example, ads for gambling being heavily regulated another.
That's not an ad in the sense I've discussed, but yeah, if you ask me you should pay for the cars.
You're inventing consequences for restricting ads that are quite unnecessary so I'm not so sure I'm the one with a nonsense problem.
The discussion is about eliminating ads entirely, as a concept, not restricting bad ones. Bad or deliberately misleading/lying ones already largely get punished. So I'm not sure what the issue is?
> If you mean the US Supreme Court, they could just stop being insane and change that ruling, because, as I pointed out, corporations aren't people. They are fictions. It's like claiming it is a free speech issue that people in the Wheel of Time books aren't allowed to name the evil threatening the world.
This seems odd. A corporation in this sense is a group of people deciding what to do. Should a group of people not be able to speak because a group of people is not a person?
A corporation is a group of people with very specific legal ramifications.
If you're going to claim it's "the people making up the corporation" deciding what to do or say, then why can't I sue[0] the individuals who make up the corporation if I think that what they do or say is harmful to society?
And conversely, if the group of people thinks that what they're doing and saying is so valuable and normal, why are they forming a corporation to do it, rather than just working together as independent citizens to do it? Because a corporation has a specific legal meaning, and that meaning does not, in any way, fundamentally include "being a legal person", regardless of what Supreme Court justices with obvious glaring holes in their ethics have said.
[0] And expect not to get thrown out immediately because of limited liability. Yes, pedantically, I know you can sue for basically anything; that's clearly not the point here.
I think because you're separate people it's hard to know quite what to reply to, but I don't really understand the idea that a corporation should not be allowed to speak. I'm not speaking specifically about the US, so I don't have particular large biases for or against Supreme Court decisions.
I'm more talking practically - what does it mean for a corporation to be silent? A corporation is already held to a higher standard than an individual; e.g. it can be sued for false advertising for anything it says. Given that, shouldn't corporations be able to "speak" (or rather the people in the corporation speak or instruct people to make videos/billboards etc)?
It does not need to be silent, only factual in the same sense it is in product information on the packaging and so on.
Advertising as contrasted to information is deceitful, manipulative. It's what happens when two brands use the same factory but make people think one product is boring and for poor people and the other one is for sexy, richer people. The proliferation of this kind of mass communication comes from the project to invent and spread desires people otherwise wouldn't have, to satisfy the amount of productivity we've developed over the last century or so. Make people want stuff they don't need and rationally can't defend being in demand of, basically.
For the purpose of this conversation, no. There's a world of difference between you selling a bike or 'advertising' your availability for employment, and the corporate mass communication we're discussing here.
Unless you have a good reason to confuse these many meanings of the word, maybe you shouldn't?
> Advertising as contrasted to information is deceitful, manipulative
This is what is confusing the many meanings of the word. There's no point doing terminology redefinition and then saying "See? Thing bad!" That's not the purpose of this conversation; that's just what you tried to do in an individual comment.
If constraints and precision make you confused, maybe that's a you problem. I'm not a member of the religion which stipulates that states can create people without bodies, if you are, good for you perhaps but I'd prefer you became an apostate temporarily to make it easier to converse on this topic.
I think you should apply this tactic in everyday life. Explain to people that they are being imprecise when they say 'light' and don't talk about lightweight at the same time as they are talking about brightness.
A corporation is a separate entity from those people. Usually it's legally regarded as a person, but fictional instead of physical. Hence the limitations in how you can make people answer for debts and actions that belong to the corporation.
You asked me a question, I proposed an answer to it. If I failed to express myself clearly enough, please try to explain in more detail where I did so.
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.
It leaves a lot unsaid. Advertising has a lot of connotations and cultural significance. It can evoke strong feelings for one and be a livelihood for another. Simply stating that an advertisement is 'a public notice' doesn't do it justice.
I understand that dictionaries are not encyclopedias, but a little more is warranted IMO.
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.
> This is why my kid isn't going to watch YouTube. If and when we decide to show her any children's show, it'll be from a manually curated set of videos downloaded and streamed from a NAS. In my opinion, it's irresponsible to expose children to modern advertising.
I think we need to be careful with this approach. It's also irresponsible to not expose them to modern advertising. Unfortunately, modern advertising does exist, and if they are exposed to it first as a teenager, or worst as an adult, they are likely to be scammed/convinced to buy things they don't need.
Maybe a better way is, instead of banning anything, to supervise and explain to our children what they're seeing.
The problem is that advertising is insidiously effective. Most people don't think ads work on them, yet the results of ad campaigns demonstrate that's plainly false. And this is even more true for children who have extremely poor reasoning and logic abilities, and are going to be being targeted by ads specifically designed to exploit their instinctive impulses. This is unlikely to be a battle that parents can win.
I think this is vaguely akin to exposing your child to gambling and explaining the impulses/desires it creates so they don't get addicted to it. But that's just not how it works.
> Maybe a better way is, instead of banning anything, to supervise and explain to our children what they're seeing.
Now that I have 3 of them, and the oldest is almost 6, I guess I need to update the article on how this panned out.
Long story short: replacing Spotify and YouTube for music with yt-dlp + Audacity (to cut out ads, padding, channel jingles and other nonsense, + normalize volume) worked to an extent, and I built up a small library for my eldest daughter, which I then reused with the younger ones. However, once the oldest one went to kindergarten, she immediately contracted the Paw Patrol fever, and we couldn't continue keeping our kids oblivious to children programming anymore.
I mean, you can try and fight Paw Patrol, but you can't win in the end, and the more you resist, the harder it gets for your kid to make friends. Same with other major franchises. It's the same kind of problem as teenagers and smartphones, just couple years earlier.
Anyway, from that point on, curating a local library stripped of advertising became too much of a hassle. Instead, we embraced Netflix and YouTube - I just keep the ad-blocker running to reduce ad exposure, but since advertising is everywhere and can't be avoided, we focus on teaching our kids how to process it.
As evidenced by TFA, I do have some strong views on advertising in general, but I'm not dumping them on my kids. Letting them see advertising as just a fact of life seems to make it less impactful. Turns out, most ads are 100% boring to my kids (after we get past the "why is the man doing ${something they never saw someone do before}" questions); my oldest one actually figured out on her own where the "skip ad" button is on YouTube and how to operate the mouse to click it and resume the song that was playing. And those that aren't boring, we actually learned to enjoy.
I can go on and on, but I'll leave it for an eventual blog article.
After reading the symptoms of the disease, I would say that Advertising could qualify as "Flu on Society". Adverse effects, some people might die of it, but not as fatal or devastating as cancer. Arguably advertising has some benefits for society as well. I have at least found some products that I really wanted and enjoyed thanks to their ads (not many compared to the number of ads I have seen through all my life. Still, I did find some).
The author himself is falling to the "Advertising Trap" of click-baiting his potential audience.
I appreciate this alternate diagnosis :) At what point would you say the "flu" becomes a more virulent strain that is dangerous enough to do something more than tolerate?
For example, more and more sexualized content in advertising (esp. harming teen girls [1]), or forced ads built-in to a browser sidebar (esp. harming the poor [2]), or ads on the surface of each school desk in 3rd grade (esp. harming the young [3]). Anxiety about the future, depression, etc. can be tied to advertising.
> The author himself is falling to the "Advertising Trap" of click-baiting his potential audience.
Maybe? It's provocative, but I felt (and still feel) it's an accurate metaphor.
The thing that made me start thinking of advertising in these terms is a bit of trivia I picked up (from IIRC Scott Alexander's blog posts) on why big mammals like whales get much less cancer than they should per models that correlate cancer rates with body size and metabolism. Turns out, one hypothesis is that those big animals do get more cancer, and their larger bodies allow the cancer to get proportionally larger - so large, that it eventually develops its own cancer, and gets killed by it.
This image of a cancer growing on another cancer was a good fit for a bunch of personal experiences I had observing social media content marketing people who happened to work in the same room as I did at the time (a spin-off from a startup I worked for), and also fit well with stories about A/B testing services, whose UI encouraged mistakes invalidating results in just the right way to make them think they're getting good value from the testing service. That made me start thinking in these terms, and from there I slowly developed a general cancer analogy, which I then put in the article you just read.
WRT. cancer-on-cancer thing, the article doesn't mention it at all, though it was partly the thought behind this fragment:
> It also allows the advertisers to scam each other on attribution, which isn't surprising if you consider that lying is literally their job. Cancer cells don't play well with each other unless they have to.
I'll need to update the article and include a paragraph about the meta-cancer thing.
285 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] threadSome parts of some religions encourage followers to be kind to some others. Some parts encourage them to discriminate, assimilate, or even kill (also some) others.
While I’m an atheist, I don’t buy the narrative that religion is the root of all evil, and I recognize that there are several good outcomes of some religions (e.g., help people come out of addiction), but if you think religions are all about kindness, I think you may just not have been looking around enough.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20577142
state surveillance is driven by control.
but even state surveillance often piggybacks on commercial surveillance
Why do I always need to choose the lesser evil and never good?
Anything newly invented wasn't shown before it was, well, invented.
So what stops us humans from not living in crappy dictatorships and not in shitty capitalism?
The US can afford to feed everyone and still not be 'Socialist'.
I think you are confusing 'Capitalism' with 'Cruelty'. What if I were to tell you, you don't have to be cruel in order to virtue-signal your faith in 'Capitalism'.
I wish more people would realize the root cause of all this spying is advertising. Simply banning advertising would get rid of all this shit more effectively and with less overreach and compliance headaches than the GDPR.
It's not perfect but I think this definition would include e.g. billboards, newspaper ads and most internet ads, while excluding non-advertising integrations of third-party data (e.g. when a navigation company buys maps from a mapping company to show to their client, it does not fall under this definition because money flows the other way).
Advertising is a core activity of capitalism, which our western governments protect and further at all costs. Until we leave capitalism as a system behind, advertising will keep growing.
In my experience most people actually don't, and any anti-advertising strategy has to come to grips with this fact. For example I really can't stand radio ads so when I'm in the car with somebody and the radio starts playing ads I will ask if they can turn it off. Usually they will be pretty surprised, ask "why" etc. I think many people are genuinely able to "tune it out" and not be annoyed by ads.
But children? They see characters and do not realize they are corporate mascots. By adulthood these are classics and nostalgia inducing.
But no, people wanted "free". Except there is no such thing as a free lunch.
In a strong, cohesive society - that is understood, and all sort of limits are enforced. (Socially more than legally, typically.)
In an incoherent and divided society, a wide variety of malignancies flourish. At least for a while. Such societies tend to be short-lived, and jumping to a suitable new host can be difficult.
The problem is that truth is very hard to establish for those that don't want and don't understand logic. They're "cancers" that people want because they're comfortable with it.
Also, if we try to control these cancers by restricting what information is allowed we will create an authoritarian society.
Not really. Everything that can change minds (including discussion, the news, and art) is a form of manipulation of people through information. Who draws the line what's good manipulation and what's bad manipulation (or, which is the same, what is legit mind changing and what's not)?
Nah, advetising is a cancer all of its own
Not every truth is revealed through logic.
How do you define escapist entertainment specifically, provided you do consider it malicious? I struggle to think of a form of entertainment that isn't on some level a possible escape.
They would put the word "Security" or "Privacy" on the screen. They never claimed they were good at security. They just said "Security". It was implied. Factually, they had little to stand on.
They also did the thing car markers do, where they exploit status insecurities. They were wholly successful, a lower-class person cannot own an Android phone without getting flack. Meanwhile, an upper-middle class person doesnt have this burden. I can drive a crappy car and I'm seen as prudent. A lower class person drives a crappy car and is seen as poor. All of this comes from marketing the status position of a company.
Who gives a fuck about status if you can't use imessages
It doesn't mean there are no problems with ads today.
I put up polite, attractive, informative ads in forums that I think will have people who might come to my shows. Not everyone will; the large majority won't. But some of these are web sites that talk about theater, where my ad spend pays for the site itself to exist.
I recognize that the ads we most notice are nothing like that. But the idea that all ads are automatically a bad thing misses out on the fact that the original purpose of ads, as cited in the article, does still exist. If you waved a magic wand and got rid of ads my theater probably wouldn't exist. No big loss, I suppose, but the world is very slightly poorer for it.
What good?
Let's say you are the inventor of the chainsaw, you need to tell lumberjacks that chainsaws exist, that's advertising. Otherwise you won't sell any and your invention will be lost, while lumberjacks will continue struggling with inefficient tools.
Isn't there an insurmountable conflict of interest when the person doing the informing is also the person who directly benefits from the product being 'useful' to as many people as possible?
You are probably not going to find a job if you don't tell anyone you need a job, job hunting is also advertising.
It's 2025. You could list it on your website, have it searchable in search engines, and aggregators for your product category, have independent and user review sites, and lots of other solutions that don't involve advertising.
I don't want anyone telling me they have something to sell I didn't ask them to tell me, and when I wasn't looking for such products actively (i.e. not because I searched somewhere else for a similar product).
>Even if it goes through independent reviewers, the reviewer has to be reached somehow, that's still advertising
No, it's not, unless the reviewer is paid or gets benefits for making your product look good.
And a great difference with "independent reviewers" is I can go to them (watch their videos, read their blog, go to their website, or whatever).
Advertising, on the other hand, cames to me. And increasingly I can't even skip it or get rid of it.
They also take the form of a review. Not a praise, or a video/image unrelated to the product, trying to sell it to me via sex, cool imagery, etc.
1920 called, they want their argument back!
Anyway, the last thing this society needs is encouragement to buy even more crap they never asked for. We can be something better than "that shithole strip-mall where everyone is an ignorant consumer who worships ronald reagan". As much as the evidence points to the contrary, I do believe we are capable of more.
what about the value lost from the people who work in advertising that have skills applicable to more productive industries
Cancers are tissues gone rogue. The original tissue does in fact tend to do “good things”.
There are a few transmissible cancers, but the vast majority of them are your own tissues twisted to only consider their own personal survival and short-term gains at the expense of the rest of the organism.
I mean, true, a cancer will probably destroy its host organism. But what about the cells whose mutations allow them to think outside the box, and replicate and expand beyond their wildest dreams by throwing away the limits imposed by overbearing genetic regulations and expectations of the organism? Isn't that a good thing?
The problem is this whole thing could have been gamified into something people want to participate in: I am looking for baby stuff, so its time to launch up The Buy Game. Only inside this game do I see ads for things I am very specifically signalling I am looking for, limiting what I see to what I want, and mayyybbeee I can click on "i feel lucky" to see something new. SOME kind of participatory signal or a negotiation, not shoved down my throat forcefully
Instead it has to be this fucking war, where I know full well I am not going to buy anything i see an ad for, in fact I now keep lists of the most annoying companies to make sure I never ever buy from them. I am considering spending the remaining years of my life making tools to help people get away from this shit
I also see HN Jobs that I did not ask for, would this also count as advertisements / marketing?
How would say, Daring Fireball [1] earn income from this cancerous mode of operation? Should this publication stop charging $11K a week to stop shilling products we don't need in your RSS feed?
So then it follows that all of these are 'cancer' by the author's definition.
How do we solve this once and for all to satisfy the author?
The only way to stop this would probably be to "close your eyes?" or perhaps maybe adblock, although we cannot adblock billboards, or this isn't really a big enough problem in the first place.
Solutions to this would be much welcome.
[1] https://daringfireball.net/
The idea of banning advertisements never struck you? That seems like the obvious way forward.
> HN (website whose sole purpose is to let people advertise)
I don't think anyone comes here to read the advertisements (which is what paid job postings with no comments? I'll pass.). The closest you get are the "who's hiring" threads. Calling that an advertisement when both parties clearly want to engage seems wildly disingenuous. Advertisements are necessarily forced on people. There isn't a single person in human history whose life was improved by an advertisement (except the people hosting the ads, of course).
Most forums such as this have a 'mute' button so you can choose not to see certain topics and posts by certain people. Not sure why HN doesnt have this, but it solves your 'problem' of forum posts being 'advertising' whilst at the same time explaining the difference between the two, choice.
EDIT: Oh I see youve edited your post. I wont be changing mine to address your new points. Try to keep a conversation going, stop editing to add points after people have replied.
It would be great for HN to not only "hide" the jobs all the time but an account level "hide ads" or "hide YC ads" function in the account so that I don't have to see the woven job ads on the site that act like HN posts.
This shouldn't be limited to forums, but should also be extended to other sites.
Should newspaper ads be opt-in even though you pay for them?
For example the Daily Mail. When you go to view an article on their site they give you the choice of viewing the article instantly with ads, or subscribing for ad free. I think this is great and all ad funded media should offer the same.
Consumers hate ads, but they hate paying for things even more apparently.
[1] - https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users
This report also doesn't seem to clarify what is meant by "ad blocker," specifically, which makes the whole thing pretty suspect. Looking into the sources they provide, at least one of them doesn't mention ad blockers at all, even though the related image is about people blocking ads. So, yeah, I'm not considering this to be reliable information.
The Reg gives 52% of all Americans [1], b2.ai (who sells anti ad block services) gives 45% in North America [2], and so on. Most sources seem to fall in a 30%-50% range, with all sources agreeing that uptake on adblockers has rapidly and dramatically increased. People hate ads.
[1] - https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/27/america_ad_blocker/
[2] - https://www.b2.ai/ad-blocker-statistics-2024/
According to a survey of 2,000 Americans conducted by research firm Censuswide, on behalf of Ghostery, a maker of software to block ads and online tracking, 52 percent of Americans now use an ad blocker, up from 34 percent according to 2022 Statista data.
2. Both of them, and indeed all of these studies seem to be funded by ad blocking companies. That alone makes them suspect.
I can buy the idea that the advertising industry is under pressure from built-in restrictions pushed by Apple, et al. But the idea that 52% of the American population even knows what an ad blocker is, much less has one installed, is completely absurd.
From a quick search, that percentage is comparable to the number of people that: own an iPhone, drink coffee everyday, or own a pet.
You can corroborate these data pretty much anywhere and everywhere. For a silly one I dug up here's [1] PewdiePie in 2016 talking about already seeing a 40% adblock rate as reflected by a non-scientific poll but also in his revenue stats, up from 10%-15% in past years. And it's certainly way higher now - obviously though that sample is going to trend young and probably technically above average.
But really, the thing about ad-blocking is that it's the ultimate in viral tech. Anytime I meet somebody who's not using ad-block I tend to introduce them to the Brave browser and the result like 99.9% of the time is 'omg I didn't even know this was possible.' Those are now people who will probably never go without ad-blocking again and some percent of whom will likely then go on to introduce others to it. There is literally no downside to using an ad-blocker and a million upsides. People just simply don't know about them and/or think they're somehow difficult to use.
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20160304044704/https://pewdie.tu...
The idea that the number of people using an ad blocker is equivalent to the number of people that drink coffee every morning, subscribe to Netflix, or have a pet makes no sense whatsoever, and if that were the case, you'd see vastly more discussion and general awareness of the concept.
There's a huge difference between extremely-high-production-value Superbowl ads and regular TV ads.
There's another huge difference between regular TV ads and some of the ads you can get on YouTube (example: someone I follow decided, For Science™, to actually watch the entirety of a 5-hour ad they got on YouTube for...I think it was one of the Lego Movies? It consisted entirely of an endless repetition of the same 3-minute-ish song).
There's also a huge difference between what people are willing to tolerate in order to reduce some of the often-absurd financial burden they're being put under, and what people actually like, or are genuinely content with.
"Revealed preference" theory is a bunch of motivated reasoning.
There are of course other problems, fraud, money laundering and the like, which extract taxes, and and a whole patchwork quilt of national regulations, which extracts a lot more.
Things like crypto look, feel and smell like money laundering. I don't think there's a technical solution here. The problems are social and regulatory.
> Advertising as currently practiced [... is] a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them. Limited to honestly informing people about what's available on the market, it can serve a crucial function in enabling trade. In the real world however, it's moved way past that role.
> Real world advertising is not about informing, it's about convincing. Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest. It also became more effective. In the process, it grew to consume a significant amount of resources of every company on the planet. It infected every communication medium in existence, both digital and analog. It shapes every product and service you touch, and it affects your interactions with everyone who isn't your close friend or family member. Through all that, it actively destroys trust in people and institutions alike, and corrupts the decision-making process in any market transaction. It became a legitimized form of industrial-scale psychological abuse [...]
And then it supports and complements this with a long list of findings.
I wonder if there are some approaches to hedge advertisement back into it's useful and valuable purpose and limit the highly, as the article puts it, "cancerous" impacts?
Then you might say, well there should be some regulations that prevent advertisers from doing X bad thing or saying Y exaggerated statement. Most of these exist already, and if they don't, the legislation required to ban such practices would be easier to implement than legislation "banning advertising" writ large, whatever that actually means in practice.
The difference between advertising and product information is that the former is deceitful.
These are rhetorical questions, because their implementation is a pipe dream. Getting rid of "advertising" would require the most draconian anti-speech laws imaginable.
You can go ahead with a career in Warhol simulacras if you want.
Regardless, this isn't really an answer. What metrics are you using to determine if an ad is misleading? Take for example the early 2000s BMW ads which were short films with various celebrities and actors. Are these "misleading" and not allowed?
Again, these aren't even remotely implementable ideas without complete state control over the media.
Why not in the same way it's determined for product information on the packaging?
No, it just requires the state to have control over corporations, which it has, since it's the one creating them.
Corporations aren't fictions, they are organizations of people and resources...just like the government.
You also didn't answer my question: where is the line between art and advertising drawn? If I make a movie and use BMWs in it, and BMW gives me those cars for free to use, am I breaking the advertising law?
As I said in the initial comment, all of these proposed solutions are absolute nonsense. If you dislike advertising's effect on the world, come up with a better way to manage the attention problem. Government control of the media isn't one of them.
It's common all over the world to regulate content in advertising. In many places corporations manage to self-regulate, in some the state steps in instead. Ads aimed at kids being prohibited is an obvious example, ads for gambling being heavily regulated another.
That's not an ad in the sense I've discussed, but yeah, if you ask me you should pay for the cars.
You're inventing consequences for restricting ads that are quite unnecessary so I'm not so sure I'm the one with a nonsense problem.
I thought that was a rather clear argument in what I wrote but apparently I was mistaken.
This seems odd. A corporation in this sense is a group of people deciding what to do. Should a group of people not be able to speak because a group of people is not a person?
If you're going to claim it's "the people making up the corporation" deciding what to do or say, then why can't I sue[0] the individuals who make up the corporation if I think that what they do or say is harmful to society?
And conversely, if the group of people thinks that what they're doing and saying is so valuable and normal, why are they forming a corporation to do it, rather than just working together as independent citizens to do it? Because a corporation has a specific legal meaning, and that meaning does not, in any way, fundamentally include "being a legal person", regardless of what Supreme Court justices with obvious glaring holes in their ethics have said.
[0] And expect not to get thrown out immediately because of limited liability. Yes, pedantically, I know you can sue for basically anything; that's clearly not the point here.
I'm more talking practically - what does it mean for a corporation to be silent? A corporation is already held to a higher standard than an individual; e.g. it can be sued for false advertising for anything it says. Given that, shouldn't corporations be able to "speak" (or rather the people in the corporation speak or instruct people to make videos/billboards etc)?
Advertising as contrasted to information is deceitful, manipulative. It's what happens when two brands use the same factory but make people think one product is boring and for poor people and the other one is for sexy, richer people. The proliferation of this kind of mass communication comes from the project to invent and spread desires people otherwise wouldn't have, to satisfy the amount of productivity we've developed over the last century or so. Make people want stuff they don't need and rationally can't defend being in demand of, basically.
Unless you have a good reason to confuse these many meanings of the word, maybe you shouldn't?
This is what is confusing the many meanings of the word. There's no point doing terminology redefinition and then saying "See? Thing bad!" That's not the purpose of this conversation; that's just what you tried to do in an individual comment.
See how far you can take it.
> Should a group of people not be able to speak because a group of people is not a person?
Corporations shouldn't have a right to exploit them for deceitful promotion of their products, however.
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.
I understand that dictionaries are not encyclopedias, but a little more is warranted IMO.
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.
I think we need to be careful with this approach. It's also irresponsible to not expose them to modern advertising. Unfortunately, modern advertising does exist, and if they are exposed to it first as a teenager, or worst as an adult, they are likely to be scammed/convinced to buy things they don't need.
Maybe a better way is, instead of banning anything, to supervise and explain to our children what they're seeing.
I think this is vaguely akin to exposing your child to gambling and explaining the impulses/desires it creates so they don't get addicted to it. But that's just not how it works.
> Maybe a better way is, instead of banning anything, to supervise and explain to our children what they're seeing.
Now that I have 3 of them, and the oldest is almost 6, I guess I need to update the article on how this panned out.
Long story short: replacing Spotify and YouTube for music with yt-dlp + Audacity (to cut out ads, padding, channel jingles and other nonsense, + normalize volume) worked to an extent, and I built up a small library for my eldest daughter, which I then reused with the younger ones. However, once the oldest one went to kindergarten, she immediately contracted the Paw Patrol fever, and we couldn't continue keeping our kids oblivious to children programming anymore.
I mean, you can try and fight Paw Patrol, but you can't win in the end, and the more you resist, the harder it gets for your kid to make friends. Same with other major franchises. It's the same kind of problem as teenagers and smartphones, just couple years earlier.
Anyway, from that point on, curating a local library stripped of advertising became too much of a hassle. Instead, we embraced Netflix and YouTube - I just keep the ad-blocker running to reduce ad exposure, but since advertising is everywhere and can't be avoided, we focus on teaching our kids how to process it.
As evidenced by TFA, I do have some strong views on advertising in general, but I'm not dumping them on my kids. Letting them see advertising as just a fact of life seems to make it less impactful. Turns out, most ads are 100% boring to my kids (after we get past the "why is the man doing ${something they never saw someone do before}" questions); my oldest one actually figured out on her own where the "skip ad" button is on YouTube and how to operate the mouse to click it and resume the song that was playing. And those that aren't boring, we actually learned to enjoy.
I can go on and on, but I'll leave it for an eventual blog article.
The author himself is falling to the "Advertising Trap" of click-baiting his potential audience.
For example, more and more sexualized content in advertising (esp. harming teen girls [1]), or forced ads built-in to a browser sidebar (esp. harming the poor [2]), or ads on the surface of each school desk in 3rd grade (esp. harming the young [3]). Anxiety about the future, depression, etc. can be tied to advertising.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18444705/ [2] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d... [3] https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/132/5/958/31...
Maybe? It's provocative, but I felt (and still feel) it's an accurate metaphor.
The thing that made me start thinking of advertising in these terms is a bit of trivia I picked up (from IIRC Scott Alexander's blog posts) on why big mammals like whales get much less cancer than they should per models that correlate cancer rates with body size and metabolism. Turns out, one hypothesis is that those big animals do get more cancer, and their larger bodies allow the cancer to get proportionally larger - so large, that it eventually develops its own cancer, and gets killed by it.
This image of a cancer growing on another cancer was a good fit for a bunch of personal experiences I had observing social media content marketing people who happened to work in the same room as I did at the time (a spin-off from a startup I worked for), and also fit well with stories about A/B testing services, whose UI encouraged mistakes invalidating results in just the right way to make them think they're getting good value from the testing service. That made me start thinking in these terms, and from there I slowly developed a general cancer analogy, which I then put in the article you just read.
WRT. cancer-on-cancer thing, the article doesn't mention it at all, though it was partly the thought behind this fragment:
> It also allows the advertisers to scam each other on attribution, which isn't surprising if you consider that lying is literally their job. Cancer cells don't play well with each other unless they have to.
I'll need to update the article and include a paragraph about the meta-cancer thing.