Ads are an attack, aimed at your brain. They try to inject malware into your thinking, manipulating your worldview and your actions.
That's horrible, worse than attacking a machine with malware, damaging persons and societies.
Decades of ad propaganda have tricked people into seeing them as something 'normal'. But we shouldn't accept being under constant attack of brain worms.
I propose a sane rule for all humans: if you see an ad somewhere, or if you suspect a hidden ad ('influencers' trying to promote something), close the tab immediately and never return to that site.
> I propose a sane rule for all humans: if you see an ad somewhere, or if you suspect a hidden ad ('influencers' trying to promote something), close the tab immediately and never return to that site.
But this very site has lots of ads on it. Up until a few days ago, there was an "Apply to YC Fall 2026" link at the bottom of every page, and the front page usually has ads on it too [0]. So it seems tricky to strictly follow your proposed rule while simultaneously posting here.
I draw a line on advertising for myself: if it's just letting me know a service or product exists, it's fine. It's a business necessity. If I ever start a business, I need a way to communicate to potential customers that my business exists, that's fair use.
When the ads start being misleading, manipulative, emotional, irrational - then we're out of the fair use field and into the "this should be a crime" field.
the typical phrase in English, "I draw the line at advertising for myself" would mean that is the thing that has gone too far, something you will not accept. you used a slightly different phrase, but it is still where I draw the line.
ads like whats on facebook have no such accountability, and facebook doesnt take accountability for what its algorithm pushes in the name of getting a higher click through rate.
The difficult thing is people don't want to pay for things. Ads are a way to mitigate that so that people/companies can capture some value that they create.
Even when you want to pay for things, the companies will find ways to extract more money from you.
Plex lifetime pass is now over $700 dollars
My dashcam that used to let me use the app to locally pull down videos now requires an account to view the files on my camera that is putting out it's own password protected wifi network, just so the company can harvest more data and track me easier. This device cost several hundred dollars.
Streaming services introduce ads anyway and increase the cost.
You used to be able to buy complete functional software like Microsoft Office and the Adobe suite.
All this is because companies cannot be statically profitable unless they're entirely privately owned. All companies need to constantly increase profit, which means even if you're happy to pay for something, eventually the company will squeeze you hard enough that you no longer want to pay for it anymore.
I run both Plex and Jellyfin. The joy of Plex is I can log in on my work machine to listen to my music without having to install and client-side software, running personal VPNs, worrying about the security merit of the Jellyfin log in screen on a public facing service running on my home server, etc.
On my home network? Jellyfin all day except for random encoding issues.
I don’t think this is right. There are plenty examples of people happy to pay for things online.
But people also really like to get things for free. And there’s plenty of interest in exploiting this fact to get something out of those people without them knowing it.
Always remember the third option: "close the tab and don't give them your time"
If they are willing do sell you to data harvesters then that won't be the only unethical thing they are willing to do. Be thankful that they have voluntarily outed their publication as untrustworthy and move on.
the example is good and those ads are less awful because the same ad it sent to a demographic, rather than an individual, eg everyone in Michigan get the same ad or everyone watching Friends at 8pm in Cincinnati gets the same ad. Facebook's specialty is targeting a user with an ad. And a side effect or bonus is that few others see it to talk about how inaccurate it might be.
This might be true if cable companies did not make a profit.
In the US, at least, I think the lack of competition (almost monopoly pricing in most areas) has led to exactly the opposite situation - plenty of profits for the cable providers.
Do you have evidence for the claim that the monthly fees are not enough to cover the cost of providing the service?
I tried to find numbers but couldn’t, so I’m left with a macroeconomic argument. Better details would be welcome.
If you make the kind of content that costs a lot to create but almost nothing to copy, you have a dilemma: Set the price too high, and you aren't getting any money from the poor at all at all, even though they're willing to pay far above your copying costs. Set the price too low, and you aren't extracting as much profit from the rich as you could be.
Ads let you serve the same product to everybody, regardless of income, because they pay for the product indirectly, by buying the advertised products. Rich people have more money and buy more products, so they, in effect, pay more for the same content. poor people pay less.
I think this is a beautiful system in many ways. Ads give us access to all the world's music, plenty of educational content (on Youtube), including from the world's topmost universities, international texting, picture messaging, phone and video calls of unlimited duration, even some movies and TV. And it's all free, which it wouldn't be if not for ads.
If we banned ads, many people just wouldn't be able to afford to talk to their family or listen to their favorite artists every day.
>Ads let you serve the same product to everybody, regardless of income,
It may be true that if they just put a little bit of fecal matter in the soup that they could give the soup away for free... but why would I want to eat shit soup? Even if you were to tell me that rationally there's so little shit in the soup that I couldn't notice the taste, and that there'd be no statistically significant health risks from it, why would I eat it? "Both rich and poor pay the same amount for this soup" doesn't sway me either.
And never mind that me, looking from the outside inward, I see them cranking up the shit percentage constantly.
If banning fecal matter in soup means the world has less soup, I've already made peace with that consequence.
>phone and video calls of unlimited duration,
Perhaps I'm so old now that I've lost the plot, but my phone calls (what few I make) are paid for explicitly and directly. Them being unmetered has nothing to do with advertisement revenue. Care to explain?
The world's topmost universities (e.g. Yale, MIT) publish those same lectures on their own websites along with other course materials. We could demand public universities do the same for all courses. If they weren't part of monopolized platforms already, by now we'd probably have widespread p2p video chat (we already had p2p calling with Skype; we've regressed in that area), and it'd be unmetered just like phone calls. Music, movies, TV could be mostly free if we had retained the original 28 year copyright period, making everything up to 1998 available, or we could even shorten it to 10-15 years.
The things you list are all free or nearly free to run with modern technology. It's not ads that make it possible. Ads enable market capture that prevents other low-cost alternatives from proliferating. They raise costs to society.
> by now we'd probably have widespread p2p video chat
we still have it. WhatsApp video chat is the most widely used video chat app.
> we already had p2p calling with Skype; we've regressed in that area
Skype was barely present on mobile and got acquired by Microsoft before Mobile took off. Then it was as good as dead. So we have in fact progressed massively that anyone in Asia with a crappy handset and a decent connection can still have a video chat with anyone else in the world.
> Music, movies, TV could be mostly free if we had retained the original 28 year copyright period
And world would be so much better if no one was greedy. The fact is that we have not retained original copyright period and the reasons are beyond adtech, so what are you gonna do about it? Also, that doesn't solve the problem of long-tail content which is massively entertaining.
> The things you list are all free or nearly free to run with modern technology
Lol wut? Try running your own Youtube and you will discover massive technical problems (storage, network bandwidth, content moderation, discovery etc).
> Ads enable market capture
Google tried YT premium and look at its adoption numbers. It starts at 89 INR in India (less than a USD) and yet its adoption is minimal. 89 INR is cheap for at least a few hundred million Indians. People simply prefer ads over paying up.
My point here is that the reason any of this stuff is possible is because the underlying technology makes it extremely cheap. It's not ads that make it so anyone on Asia can have a video chat on a cheap phone; it's that even cheap phones are absurdly powerful and bandwidth is plentiful. Signaling a p2p call is cheap, and phone companies already do it for voice calls. Wasn't WhatsApp the one that had something like 100M-1B MAU charging $1/year on hardware from a decade ago? The actual cost of these things is trivial.
Ads don't make it possible for people to have cheap access to movies. The fact that it costs literally nothing (c.f. bittorrent) to distribute them does. Especially for older recordings that were already paid for generations ago. It actually costs more resources to centralize distribution to serve ads.
Yes it is expensive to run a giant worldwide monopoly on video distribution. But that's not necessary. And some of those problems (e.g. content moderation, discovery) don't exist when self-publishing or curating partners.
People taking ads over paying is exactly why they are anticompetitive. They allow below cost services, destroying competition from companies that just want to fairly offer a service, leading to everything having ads and surveillance, eventually driving up costs of everything.
> because the underlying technology makes it extremely cheap
underlying technology doesn't materialize out of thin air though. Google and Facebook have invested lots of dollars and engineering hours into making Youtube or Whatsapp video a seamless smooth experience for billions of users. That's why the technology seems cheap now. Early on, there were big concerns about Youtube profitability.
> it's that even cheap phones are absurdly powerful
Again, thanks to Android which was funded indirectly by ads.
> c.f. bittorrent
That is plain old theft.
> And some of those problems (e.g. content moderation, discovery) don't exist when self-publishing or curating partners.
Curating partners have economies of scale. That's how you get Youtube. And for self publishing, you can see that most of the "self publishers" on internet are at the mercy of adtech giants (Google and Facebook) for distribution.
> destroying competition from companies that just want to fairly offer a service
That's why I cite Youtube premium. Google offered an ad-free option at a fair price and yet hardly anyone wants to pay for that.
The underlying technology enablers are from companies like Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, TSMC, Micron, all sorts of ISP/cell providers, etc. They're the reason why computers are over 10x faster than they were 10-15 years ago, storage is 1000x faster, networks are 100x faster, etc. The technology is cheap because of actual technology companies. You don't need a centralized service for video calls. You need lots of bandwidth between endpoints and some relatively modest signaling servers (similar to voice calling, which already existed).
Bittorrent does not equate to theft, and the point is it demonstrates that actually distribution costs nothing. The production of most media was paid for generations ago. It can be free or extremely cheap because it's literally free on the provider side. The thing that costs money is monetization.
The fact that self-publishers are at the mercy of ad companies is the point. The ad companies destroy every market they infect. Because they use predatory pricing.
> The underlying technology enablers are from companies like Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, TSMC, Micron, all sorts of ISP/cell providers, etc
And they exist because of demand from the consumers. All those providers have no incentive to invest and upgrade their offerings if there is no demand. Said otherwise, without the likes of YouTube and Whatsapp video chat (and many other ad-funded social media apps), we would be stuck in 2010-era infrastructure.
> You don't need a centralized service for video calls.
Need is a funny word. You need a centralized effort to enhance the user experience of video calls which is very expensive. And very companies have resources to pull that off and offer a great experience for free. Only 3 I can think of - Google, Facebook, Apple (via Facetime). Only Apple is not ad-funded and they keep it to their devices only which is for rich people. Ad-funded products at least made it available to the entire populace.
> The ad companies destroy every market they infect. Because they use predatory pricing.
I gave you a counter-example to your thesis about Youtube Premium which was offered at a reasonable price. Its failure shows that predatory pricing is an excuse - real reason is that people simply prefer to not pay.
Those companies have been developing hardware with exponential improvements for generations now. They wouldn't have stopped if not for youtube. Youtube and Whatsapp became possible because of them, not the other way around.
Phone companies are literally a concrete, non-theoretical demonstration that call signaling doesn't need to be centralized for a good experience. There's also already XMPP which works like email: you can add your contacts and just start video calls over it just like you can just send emails. It works today. It scales today. You can use it right now, but the monopolists lock everyone into their networks.
Your "counter-example" proves my point: giving youtube away for free canabalizes youtube premium.
Video isn't free to host, not at scale. Look at how much providers charge for "video on your own site" services. Sure, you can bypass these providers and implement everything yourself, but that isn't going to be much cheaper. Storage, transcoding and egress just cost what they cost.
Movies and TV are video, hence they couldn't be free and without ads, just like they aren't on YT. Music seems much more believable.
P2P technology assumes no firewalls, plenty of IP addresses (and no CGNAT), no intermittent connectivity and no energy saving measures. P2p works well if you have a desktop connected directly to the internet via a dial-up modem with its own IP address, it works decently on an always on ADSL connection behind a router, on a cellular connection which mostly stays powered down to save battery life, it doesn't work at all.
"Not at scale" is kind of the point; there's no need for one company to host everything. If I were so inclined I could host Netflix quality streaming off my home Internet connection to my entire neighborhood with a selection of thousands of movies for about the capital cost of a new iphone.
Centralized services aren't going to make intermittent cellular connections somehow work for video chat. You need reliable bandwidth to the endpoints for that. AFAIK cellular devices are almost all ipv6 already.
I brought up p2p in that context, but if one wanted to also do movies, my understanding is three's already software you can put on a raspberry pi/SBC/spare computer to act as a torrent->stream relay.
The fact is "implement everything yourself" is already done. There's already off the shelf free software for this stuff.
I think you mean progressive pricing in disguise. The problem is that they are also a psychological attack.
I believe that we should, generally, as a society, discourage communication in bad faith, and ads very, very easily fall into that category. So perhaps in a local sense it is worth it for the reasons you suggest, but I think the mass dependence of our society on advertising makes our lives worse.
your comment is irrelevant and in fact contradictory in the context of the parent comment I was replying to: "if people don’t want to pay for a thing, it’s probably not worth a whole lot "
What is "worth" is ultimately decided by the market.
What should be allowed, like sacrificing children, is decided by the society. Two very separate topics.
Ads are an attack aimed at your computer too. They download malicious code to spy on you and gather intelligence data about everything you like, you visit, you buy,... it is malicious software hacking into your computer. The fact that some of the richest companies in the world are the criminals does not make it less of a crime.
The propaganda part is, of course, also totally true. Lies, manipulation, etc. has been normalized when a few years back will have been considered a crime.
But Zuck has to put high-quality beef on his table which involves raising Wagyu and Angus cattle on a diet of macadamia nut meal and local beer. Zuck is not gonna do charity.
> Ads are an attack aimed at your computer too. They download malicious code to spy on you and gather intelligence data about everything you like, you visit, you buy,... it is malicious software hacking into your computer.
The ads themselves don’t do that. Some networks running those ads might.
There is some utility to ads. Knowing that my favorite shop has a promotion, that a movie, game or book I've been waiting for is out, or something other that might interest me has some usefulness. The problem isn't the ad per se, it's optimization through A/B-tests and the like, mass psychological experiments with all the rigor of scientific studies and none of the academic ethical safeguards for human subject experimentation.
I agree with this take. Sites used to sell banner space, negotiate a price and place the ad themselves. There was human review of what was being placed. Now apps and sites just let ad providers inject whatever they want, seemingly without oversight from the app owner and different ~~ads~~ payload depending on who's viewing. I have no issue with the tech blog I'm reading advertising the web host they use and support, or a wiki site advertising merch for the subject of the wiki. I'd bet those kind of ads get better returns on their investment too. What I find unconscionable is when my kids are playing some kids game on a tablet and they're bombarded with ads for GTA-like games idealizing violence and meaningless chaos interspersed with overly sexualized dress-up games or even political advertisements depending on your geolocation. Totally outrageous and I am eternally grateful for people like R. Gorhil (uBO) and Steven Black (for his curated hosts lists) that at least help me mitigate as much as I can, knowing that without 100% standing over the shoulder of my kids at all times when they touch a device it's almost impossible to otherwise avoid.
All those cases can be served you you voluntarily signing up to relevant notifications. The problem is the push model that incentivizes companies to show you things that will serve them and not you.
The way push notifications work today is a result of said optimization. Smartphones didn't start out with constant notifications, nor did any major desktop OS have them built in the way they do today.
Nah. We should normalize public services and resources to develop knowledge and tools, that are made freely available. Provide incentive programs and reward those that take on such initiatives.
There are many such services where I'm from. And the feeling when using them is refreshing. You're not looking for an ulterior motive to be misinformed. They're responsive as they don't load a 10 MiB JavaScript blob to track your interactions "for marketing".
The software solution and hosting is not remotely as expensive as the lab work needed to gather the nutritional information.
If this was made by a private company, it would be a subscription service, without a doubt. You'd find certain brands but not others because of deals under the table. It would have user profiles for collecting and selling data, not to mention integration with fitness and weight loss services. You might also wonder if part of the data is incorrect because of all that darn expensive lab analysis. Heck, maybe some CTO figured they could "predict" this information with an LLM.
Here, it is covered by taxes, benefit all, full page load in about 0.2 seconds (or 0.5 seconds for nutritional value). This is how the internet could be.
So, steal from everyone (taxation) whether they want to support or use government-run Facebook, give the money to government-run Facebook, and everything will be great because Government?
What incentive does that mechanism have to spur innovation for government-run Facebook? Does the government fund two Facebooks and scale funding based on market share? Or, like what virtually always happens in government, does it metastasize, realize it's actual "customer" isn't its "users" but is actually the government itself, and act accordingly to protect and grow its own budget?
Everything about a subscription model is better. If it sucks, don't pay for it, and if no one thinks its a worthwhile bargain then they run out of money and it dies. Efficient. If people do like it, then great.
Not sure to what extend, if at all, I should engage here, as you do have some strong preconceptions that probably makes it less likely productive.
> Steal from everyone (taxation) [...] give the money to government-run Facebook, and everything will be great because Government
Not touching this. As an exercise, take it upon yourself to figure out how much it cost per meter (or, I assume more familiar to you -- football field) for the road you last used, and where that money came from.
> government-run Facebook?
Yes. But, it depends what you think Facebook is, which I'm assuming isn't what Meta does with Facebook. They are in the business of collecting, profiling, and selling to data brokers, and influence to foreign countries or private interests. All of this is of negative value to both end user and society. In a world with a "government run Facebook", it wouldn't exist.
So what is the service Facebook actually provides then? A way to manage communities and events. A way to find, connect, and communicate with others. And it would absolutely be a good case for something that could easily surpass the value of services provided by "facebook", if done right, without incentive beyond making good services.
Not sure if you've noticed or paid much attention. None of the most important services do product development guided by <improving the service>. Google wouldn't have replaced Play Music. Your search result might be immediately useful but that would make you move on. I'd also wager that your YouTube client doesn't automatically skip the sponsor segments.
> So what is the service Facebook actually provides then? A way to manage communities and events. A way to find, connect, and communicate with others.
I don’t have Facebook or use any social media (except LinkedIn) and yet I still plan events, connect, and communicate with others. I have not touched a mainstream social media site since probably 2013.
We don't need Facebook, and we especially don’t need to spend a bunch of money on a poorly run government Facebook either.
The point you are raising is a non sequitur to theirs. The fact that you can do these things without Facebook is not mutually exclusive with others using Facebook with the same intentions.
The OP was responding to "government run Facebook?" and the premise is "we need Facebook-style technology to do XYZ things like plan events" but for-profit Facebook fills that need with these negative repercussions: "collecting, profiling, and selling to data brokers, and influence to foreign countries or private interests." and then argues that it follows that a government run Facebook should exist to handle the things that the OP is asserting are necessary without any of the identified downside.
The flaw in the premise is that you need Facebook or a government fun Facebook to do any of the things the OP suggested. You don't. And I'd argue not only should we not have a government fun Facebook, we shouldn't have Facebook or other social media to begin with.
I'm sure the OP is going to come in now and say that wasn't their premise. I'm simply responding to the words that they wrote. No matter how it is framed or how the goalposts are moved, you simply do not need Facebook nor do you need a government run Facebook.
It does, in precisely the way I described. Your comment was not engaging with the point they brought up.
> The flaw in the premise is that you need Facebook or a government fun Facebook to do any of the things the OP suggested.
This is not in their premise. Nobody "needs" it for those things, I will grant and have granted. Regardless, some still "use" it for those things. OP never said people can't replace it with other means to do what Facebook currently does for them, just that they apparently don't want to, as revealed by their use of Facebook for the doings in question. If you still think that's wrong, please point me to the passage in their comment which contradicts it, because I am failing to find it.
> I'm sure the OP is going to come in now and say that wasn't their premise.
Funny. I now wonder if I'm going to be dismissed as a sock puppet.
If it is of any consolation. You are spot on, and saved me the effort (which had run out). I'd recommend to leave it alone as well, as it isn't worth it to try and explain logical fallacies. Or, heck, you do you. I'm just too old for it
Just saying "that's a logical fallacy" doesn't make it so. Running away from challenges to your stated opinions or arguments doesn't make them correct either.
If you really want to play this whole "logical fallacy" game, then I can start demanding sources and specific definitions of words used too and you can spend hundreds of characters defining specific terms so that your own discussion points aren't themselves some variation of a "logical fallacy".
Folks who toss those things around usually don't know how to use them correctly (as we see here with you and others) or they hide behind them when their various points are met with challenges they can't overcome.
It's more that you are being too obtuse to be worth the engagement. You see it as running away from a challenge. I see it as leaving an area because it's become unpleasant. I already told you that you're here for an argument, and I'm not interested. Define the situation however you want, and feel good about it, for all I care.
> It does, in precisely the way I described. Your comment was not engaging with the point they brought up.
Ok that's incorrect because I did engage with the point they brought up in that comment, and then even quoted it specifically.
> This is not in their premise. Nobody "needs" it for those things, I will grant and have granted. Regardless, some still "use" it for those things. OP never said people can't replace it with other means to do what Facebook currently does for them, just that they apparently don't want to, as revealed by their use of Facebook for the doings in question. If you still think that's wrong, please point me to the passage in their comment which contradicts it, because I am failing to find it.
If that was their premise I would just reject it off-hand as the equivalent of just saying stuff. People use Facebook. Cows moo. Sometimes it rains on Tuesday. Who cares?
The point isn't whether or not people use or need Facebook, what was in question and being discussed was the negative aspects and whether some other version of a Facebook could be swapped in to have the "good" parts of Facebook without the "bad".
For example:
> government-run Facebook?
> Yes. But, it depends what you think Facebook is, which I'm assuming isn't what Meta does with Facebook. They are in the business of collecting, profiling, and selling to data brokers, and influence to foreign countries or private interests. All of this is of negative value to both end user and society. In a world with a "government run Facebook", it wouldn't exist.
Underlying this is the presumption that we should have a service like Facebook, and the question is who should run it and what the effects might be. You can see the OP outlining these negative effect here for yourself.
My point is I disagree with the need to solve this problem by creating what will inevitably by giant software conflagrations that ultimately, in my view, do not serve any real purpose because not only does the government version serve no purpose, the private market version doesn't either.
If you want to actually challenge my point instead of engaging in "nuh uh that wasn't the premise" you could just say well other people think they need it or really want it and you're just stating an opinion, or something along those lines.
It's sad that people today can't digital equivalents to things like the telephone network or the postal service existing without a private company being able to profit from them. What we consider infrastructure is still stuck in the 20th century.
The earlier link you provided is indeed refreshingly quick to navigate. What a joy that’s unnecessarily rare. It renders like trash and is unusable on my intentionally-not-updated iPhone, but still. Yay.
“Provide incentive programs and reward those that take on such initiatives.”
We have that too, we call it capitalism. It’s not very unique, but we heavily market it under the “land of opportunity” moniker. Do a thing of value and your reward is the lion’s share of that value. “You get what you’re given” seems to make some countries happy, but I’m sure you can understand the appeal of “you get what you earn”, even if neither of them matches the brochure. The scholars can debate the pros and cons of it, and where it goes wrong, but you’re talking about investment reward structures like it’s a fresh concept coming out of Scandinavia.
On that note, let’s set aside the endless conversation around “government Facebook” and talk foundational: Size, diversity, and population. It’s funny when I see comments from micro->small nation states with relatively homogeneous citizens throwing up their hands like “Everyone should just agree on what to have for dinner, like we do.” Oh I’m sure you’re aware that ‘America be big’, maybe even visited New York and were impressed by all those not-tall non-blonde people waking around, but perhaps without fully appreciating that it alone has a 50% higher population than your whole country. Something more your speed would be the Atlanta metro area, which still has a ~10% higher population. Getting everyone to happily chip in a few bucks on a half pepperoni/vegetarian pizza (or, I assume more familiar to you — “Grøt med smør eller rørte bær”) is a lot easier when everyone can be fed by that pizza.
But that leads to the larger point: we don’t have as much of a problem getting our Norway sized cities to provide various communal welfare services to the local residents, the problem is in scaling that up to 65 Norways.
You got it. A company with 15% of the foodservice market somehow supplies 100% of the food in 100% of restaurants and 100% of Americans eat at them 100% of the time. We should probably just pay a tax and have the government take it over so your imagination becomes our reality.
I'll grab onto the very first thing you've said as it seems to be a basis for the rest - taxation isn't fun, but low taxes don't guarantee anything. Look at Hong Kong - one of the lowest tax rates in the world, but it doesn't really mean the citizens have more free income. The government still needs money to function, and the main source is land sales instead. The landlords have taken over instead and insane rent for smallest places is now the actual tax. And then it's reflected further in the price of the food or products, where rent is the biggest business expense.
The money just goes into private hands instead. Is that really the better option here? Innovation isn't necessary if you have a de facto monopoly - and frankly, Facebook is a good example; nothing it has done in 10 years was actually an improvement to the service or humanity.
It would be alright to socialize the good parts and get rid of the bad ones.
All that achieves is companies introducing ads to boost revenue for next quarter's earnings.
For a concrete example: LINE (most widely-used messaging app in Japan) has paid subscriptions, and even the highest tier subscription doesn't reduce ads. Other services (e.g. YouTube Premium) reduce ads, but do not eliminate them, no matter how much you pay.
Also, they still do the stalky part. Even if the paid service does remove the manifestation of ads on that site/service, chances are the tracking still happens so they can immediately target if you stop paying (instead of resuming collection at that point) and so the information can potentially be sold to 3rd parties or new owners (if the site/service itself is sold) or accidentally leaked (directly due to dumb decisions like sending the wrong data somewhere or indirectly due to dumb decisions resulting in poor security a black-hat can exploit).
> Other services (e.g. YouTube Premium) reduce ads, but do not eliminate them, no matter how much you pay.
Hmm curious to know where you live that you still get Youtube-supplied ads with YT Premium?
Because "ad-free" is literally the headline feature.
Unless you're talking about in-video ads and sponsorships added in by the video creators themselves, and then that's not something in YT's control (although they provide the "skip commonly skipped sections" feature in Premium that helps with this).
This would not be enforceable. Do you understand the scale of Youtube?
Also why would YT get involved in the content of videos themselves, beyond legal moderation requirements?
That's a slippery slope in itself, and it would just lead to a cat-and-mouse game where creators try to incorporate sponsorships in less obvious/visible ways, which is a net bad thing for the audience.
Now at least creators are required to disclose when their videos contain sponsored segments or paid advertisements. What you propose would take away that accountability.
As it stands, you can see when a video includes ads, and you can choose to not watch it. That's your choice.
I pay for content: gig and cinema tickets, merch and digital albums from artists I like or know. I buy loads of books, magazines, digital and physical games, art I can hang on my wall. I've even started a bit of a CD collection.
At times I've had Spotify, Netflix and Mubi subscriptions. As a UK-resident with a TV, I pay for the BBC.
I feel I more than adequately contribute to cultural production.
In some ways, the current situation suits me fine. I take the free stuff where I'm technically capable. I'll block the ads, pirate to my hearts content, use yt-dlp, BPC, userscripts.
I'm not not paying for stuff, but I've enough financial pressures already, thank you very much. I don't see why I should send all my money to (mostly) US corporations, who've farmed and resold user-generated content.
Go to a better movie theater and they don’t do that. Alamo Drafthouse movies have the old please keep quiet message, but if you show up 5 minutes late you’re missing part of the movie if they even let you in.
The closest Alamo to where I used to live in the USA is 2 states away. My choices were AMC, Regal, and Cinemark. And now that I moved, my choice is to either go to the only cinema around me (with ads), or try to fish something from the treacherous waters of the bay.
Part of this is baked into the experience though, if "ads" here are trailers for upcoming films. I don't know if theaters are now showing ads for products, I haven't been in forever.
I am willing to accept trailers but the split is closer to 25 minutes of random shit + 5 minutes trailers. Let's be generous and say that I'm misremembering & it's actually 20 + 10. That's still 20 minutes of ads that I'm paying to watch.
Personally if I had experienced that I would just take my business elsewhere. Companies will keep pushing boundaries like this if the worst outcome from them is that for some customers they won't be able to extract the additional profit.
> Decades of ad propaganda have tricked people into seeing them as something 'normal'.
also wait, we're talking about a US company, should we be paying a US company, for "content"? Is all "content" produced by these US megacorps, I don't think so, they're purely extractive
what are you gonna do, make more Marvel movies? lol
We are already paying for the externalities from ad tech. We’ve got entire worlds of predatory information behavior and near zero defenses for humans.
If you are on HN, you hopefully know enough to keep yourself clean and safe, but the rest of humanity is essentially getting mugged, defrauded and addicted 24/7.
You think Meta would spy less on us and show us less ads if we payed to access their services ? They would just keep doing what they've been doing for ages and they would have even more money to keep their enshitification going.
We are already paying too much for all the services with subscription. Like Spotify, Netflix and others...
It could be made a question of legislation. If it was forbidden, and the "cost of business" too high for them to dare, then it can work. We would need to do more than touch them with the satin gloves we are using now though.
What do you think the constant reminders of "hey hey hey, use these autogenerated vibes based playlists that are more profitable to us because we filled them with AI generated fake artists" are?
Meanwhile spotify also has at least two autogenerated playlists of the songs you have chosen to play more than a few times. Literally "Here's the songs you recently took an interest in", and they do not fill your front page with that autogenerated playlist!
Because that copy they are shoving in your face is not Informing you of useful Features or Inviting you to try something we made, but is instead managed by the marketing department.
If you turn off personalised ads in the EU for insta they hijack your scrolling to give you "ad breaks" which is actually a really neat feature because it reminds me I've started doom scrolling and I close the app
I for one pay for content I enjoy, when it's reasonably priced and available to pay for. Two sources of print journalism, a few dozen patreons, paid youtube, etc - not to mention one-off purchases like books. [1]
And I'd encourage other people who can afford to, to do the same.
I'm not sure how scalable my approach is within the status quo, though - I've never seen a subscribers-only article go viral on social media, and almost all of my subscriptions began with me enjoying a generous free tier. And I've tried a number of micropayment systems but none of them seem poised to take off for various reasons.
I will add though, that the freemium model does not necessarily have to cease existing. Some platform for written articles can have articles available at no cost, and then put a paywall in front of other articles. I don't see the problem with that. It will be a careful balancing act of content creators, how much is in the freemium section, so that they attract a sufficient number of readers/fans/supporters.
Only if we can also normalize not double-dipping via payment and ads. Too often, paying money to avoid "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product" just turns it into "You're paying for the product and you're still the product".
How can we normalise it even MORE? We are paying for digital products MONTHLY and they get more expensive and lose features AND we have to watch the ads too.
What does "normalize" mean here? I don't think consumers have to do anything in this situation. If a business model isn't making enough money, it's on the business to change.
If someday Google puts Youtube behind a hard paywall, no more "free with ads," I'd pay for it. I already pay for Nebula. But if I can get around the ads with uBlock, why wouldn't I? Just on principle? Because it's not fair that their business model doesn't make the revenue they want?
There is a large cohort of people who will complain about ads but also don't want to pay. My little microSaaS is monetised with ads but I offer option to pay if you don't like the ads. Still get plenty of complaints about the ads.
Yes. Anyone who has ever shipped a free mobile app can tell you that a $1 "remove all ads for life" offer will convert very poorly, even on sticky apps that people use every day.
(Disclosure: my employer owns an ad network. Opinions my own.)
> if you see an ad somewhere [...] close the tab immediately and never return to that site
I would even extend this: if you are bugged by an ad, avoid the product, the vendor and tell everyone why you do so. Also tell it to the vendor, why you avoid their product (aggressive, non blockable ads at facebook for example).
This doesn’t just apply to ads. It’s been a single piece of a larger systematic attack on your thinking.
Have people become more or less free over time as technology and progress came to help improve our lives and make things easier or more efficient? The average person, the same one most exposed to ad propaganda, are also exposed to propaganda in various forms in other areas of life. Even tv and music serve as propaganda for thinking malware and “worms”.
Spend a moment analyzing some popular mainstream music from the last decade for themes of culture, worldviews and others.
The big gotcha here is this: many people think OTHERS are under propaganda; and you yourself are not. And now you can get censored for pointing things out about this on social media.
In Covid I posted a nazi scientists quote on propaganda and got censored. Try it yourself.
> They try to inject malware into your thinking, manipulating your worldview and your actions.
Isn't your comment an attack as well by that line of thinking? Am I attacking you by arguing that people nowadays are way to quick to consider something "damaging" "attacks".
It's way worse than that, it's an attack to the entire society.
The vast majority of ads lie; therefore, they are actively harmful. They create a situation where being surrounded by false things is normal. They promote the improvement of tools to make deception and tracking better and better.
On top of that, they install evil incentives for the medias, the news, and business models, influencing consumption, public options and opinions.
Finally, they concentrate power in those who already have enough money to pay for ads. You may have the better product, but a big player with better PR will win.
Ads are one of our most destructive creations. It's much, much more dangerous than it looks.
This. At least you can switch them off on the web but now big-ad is putting bright flickering digital billboards in sight of every public place. Politicians won't do a thing because they're some of the biggest customers. Obey.
It's insane to think how much brain power, computing power, electricity and component lifecycle wear have been wasted through the years, yelling random stuff at me; or even worse than random; often stuff that is directly harmful to me.
As somebody who – not entirely willingly – is working mostly remote, the only interruption in the day I have from the outside world is the sudden loud inane noises of commercials.
I hate how normal ads seem to be to young people (under age 30). Just seeing TikTok videos secondhand on YouTube the videos seems stuffed with people pushing crap. YouTube channels none are without ads either by YouTube or by the channel owners.
Plus the "oh you have an add blocker!!" whining if you dare try to slow the firehose of ads coming at you. Yes I do have an ad blocker because it seems my entire existence is fodder for your website or app's ad machine to capture and use.
Lets be fair, here. Traditional TV was ~40 minutes of content with 20 minutes of ads. I still remember televised holiday movies "presented with limited commercial breaks by Folgers, where the best part of waking up..." or whoever was sponsoring it. Radio stations had to power their transmitters and pay their staff, so they had ads. Newspapers use ads to keep themselves affordable. This has always been a business model.
Also some TV shows had ads written in. USA network was pretty bad with this with ("White Collar" comes to mind - there are some pretty obvious Ford advertisements in a few eps, "Burn Notice" had very obvious alcohol placements.)
You say "was" as if it was a thing of the past. But public broadcasting still exists in many countries in Europe, including radio and TV. They have either less or no ads and their quality is much higher than that of purely ad-funded private stations that nowadays are sometimes even completely automated.
Hard disagree. At least commercial entertainment providers have to work to retain their customers, unlike public broadcasters where they get funded (either via taxes or forced licenses) no matter how many people dislike them.
It sounds like you are speaking from a theoretical perspective. In practice, there is not enough money in radio ads to put any effort in producing material of decent quality. As an objective metric, I found in Germany that the private stations literally broadcast at half the bitrate of the public stations where I tested it.
No I speak from a practical perspective. Publicly funded radio and televisions is pure cancer. I don't care about the bitrate they use to encode their crap when it's crap in the first place.
Yes I was there it wasn't as bad as now. TV or radio it was never the same three ads over and over and over. And the media is now truncated so cram in more ads. Plus the time between ads is shorter. So it's basically ads with a brief TV show in between mostly ads.
>Traditional TV was ~40 minutes of content with 20 minutes of ads.
No! This is utterly false! TV for much of American history was about 9 minutes of advertising per hour of content. Then Cable came out with no ads at all. The US does not have a legal limit, so as our culture got more and more hyped about squeezing every single dime out of counterparties, companies have been increasing advertising.
In the 60s, companies were willingly leaving money on the table.
In the UK, you are still limited to only 9 minutes per hour of advertising.
I grew up under communism. On TV, we had full movies without ads. There was 3-5min ad segment right before main evening news, that was it.
I could not understand how people can watch movie interrupted 10x by an add break.
Not wishing the return of communism, but yeah, I would simply ban all ads. No useful purpose to the society, whatsoever. Treat it like smoking and other drugs. Yes, can fill the coffers, but overall it is detrimental to the society.
If you want info about something you need, there are catalogues, consumer groups, enthusiast forums and internet search in general. Yes, the ads can be used to create new needs. Overall (if you really think what this achieves), that is a bug, not a feature.
Yes, there will be ways to sneak-in ads in a shady way, but that can be prosecuted. And the scale of exposure matters, a lot.
Facebook may have won this round, but AI tilts the balance overwhelming in favor of ad blockers.
consider: you can (in principle) scrape the entire screen, find the ads with machine vision and paste black rectangles over them. or simply have an AI use playwright to scrape the page and rerender it for you. these are excellent, pro-user use cases for AI.
Your first line is just as true of every single internet comment you have ever read, including your own.
> I propose a sane rule
You know this is untenable. You would be unable to use search engines for over a decade, or walk into a Target, or a gas station, or almost any public square if you truly believed this. You don't believe it. You're being hopelessly histrionic and that's not productive for anyone.
my least favorite part of flying is the part where i'm strapped to a chair during taxi with a screen and speaker inches from my face and they use that moment to force a few ads into my eye socket. it feels very Citizen Kane.
pumping gas is another one that takes advantage of captivity to force ads. i hate it.
I just can't take this seriously. I grew up with TV being literally 1/3 ads and there was absolutely no way to skip them. People complained idly, but nobody really had a problem with it because we knew that TV isn't free. Nothing on the internet comes close to that level of ad intrusiveness, but I often hear unhinged statements like "They try to inject malware into your thinking, manipulating your worldview and your actions. That's horrible, worse than attacking a machine with malware, damaging persons and societies."
Just because some people are more resilient to opium, and some people can have a good time on it, doesn't mean you should get an opium injection when you're going for a regularly scheduled doctor's appointment.
Ads are being forced on you when you're trying to do something else, like you go to facebook to see your actual friend's pictures of their kids, you're not looking for ads, and yet you get some micro-brainwashing on the side.
The true "skill issue" is that governments are too unskilled to prevent these mass mental attacks to prey upon their citizens, and haven't gotten off their ass enough to make advertisement even more illegal than other similarly harmful substances like opium, tobacco, and online gambling (both sports gambling and gacha games).
Those apps where you share pics or whatever would not exist without ads if people had to pay for them.
So I am not sure if all is bad in that sense. Bc it lets the apps for sharing without people having to pay to exist in the first place.
I am not doing any assessment regarding to the toxicity of ads. I am just trying to objectively say that this also spreads "horizontally" software for free in some sense.
> Those apps where you share pics or whatever would not exist without ads if people had to pay for them.
This is a wild assertion.
Were we not able to build roads before billboards were invented? Does your telephone company interrupt your call with ads? Does the postal service open your letters to insert a leaflet with promotional offers? What alternate universe do people who claim this live in???
They would exist, but would be less spread. I am not saying it is good or bad. I am saying that if the barrier to entry is lowest, more people can reach it.
This is a fact with almost anything that you look at around you, not only software. Any incentives in general.
Also, people prefer to have ads than to pay for something. You will say ads are worse or whatever, and you can be right. But the fact is that people that do not pay for software have no problem in being monetized. Otherwise free apps would not have users and paying apps would have a lot. But the reality is that paid apps have a higher barrier to entry from the point of view of users reached.
The only alternative to ads isn't people directly paying cash to evil private companies.
Like, the fact that instagram's average revenue per user is around $25 means that instagram ads are, on average, tricking people into buying 100s of dollars of crap they don't need.
If the ads weren't successfully brainwashing people, eventually people would stop buying ads presumably.
... But yes, I agree people will generally choose a "brainwashed consumer" tax to the tune of $300/year over paying instagram $25/year.
So, what's the solution? Advertisement should be illegal, the government should tax everyone a bit more, and taxpayer dollars should go to making ad-free social networks where people can post pictures of their dog.
Like, having highways and electricity and the internet was seen as beneficial, so the government has subsidized a huge amount of infrastructure for those things, to the benefit of all.
If being able to search the largest collection of knowledge ever created, the internet, has value to the people, the government should create or subsidize an ad-free search engine. If communicating has such value, the government should create or subsidize a messaging app that doesn't brainwash the users.
To add to this, government-run services can't absolve themselves of all wrongdoing with Terms of Service they can change on a whim. Censorship within government-run social media is subject to the restrictions placed on the government's control of speech.
(Technically, the terms are still there but they're called Titles and Statutes and other things that require a bunch of ceremony and agreement to change, not just an email.)
This reminds me of how Scientology reportedly targets intelligent people because those people think they are too smart to be sucked in.
The advertising industry has hired some of the world's best talent (tech, psychology, legal) to make you more susceptible to it. They probably love those who AstroTurf thinking they are "less vulnerable" and "ads are useful actually"
There are some cases where ads are useful for sure.
For example, I found out about the local farmer's market in my city via advertisements being hung up around town, and that helped me get fresh produce and find some community. I'm not sure if I ever would have found that farmer's market otherwise.
I also found one job via a "Who's Hiring" hacker news post, and that's obviously an advertisement thread advertising open positions.
Of course, these do not balance out the negative impact of ads, such as advertising credit cards and sports gambling and gacha gambling games to get people into debt, advertising tv shows and movies to waste people's time watching garbage, and generally advertising garbage that makes people who were otherwise happy waste money and time for no real gain in life satisfaction.
I see, these are valid. Especially in smaller communities in rural areas ads can really help bringing people together. I live in a small village since about 2 years now and have NO idea what's going on here (as I don't watch/read ads). Sometimes thats sad, but usually I want to be left alone anyway. A farmers market sounds cool though.
I'd categorize job postings a bit differently, if Facebook was full of (legitimate) job postings I think it would be less of an issue. I agree on all the gambling stuff you wrote.
You basically pointed this out already but there’s a big difference between something designed to notify you about something you might not have known, similar to what you’d find on a community bulletin board, and something trying to manipulate you into buying something you don’t need at all.
I think a lot of people use the term “ad” to refer solely to the latter category. This goes back to the origin of modern advertising (and even earlier with snake oil salesman and charlatans, which were scamming merchants using music and stage shows lol — sound familiar?) and using the term “public relations” as an alternative to “propaganda”.
That's horrible, worse than attacking a machine with malware, damaging persons and societies.
Decades of ad propaganda have tricked people into seeing them as something 'normal'. But we shouldn't accept being under constant attack of brain worms.
I propose a sane rule for all humans: if you see an ad somewhere, or if you suspect a hidden ad ('influencers' trying to promote something), close the tab immediately and never return to that site.