Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

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).

OtomotO2• 1 year ago

How about none of these?

Why do I always need to choose the lesser evil and never good?

micromacrofoot4• 1 year ago

my local food bank has lines every week

taurknaut7• 1 year ago

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!

sjamaan• 1 year ago

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.

somenameforme12• 1 year ago

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.

cscurmudgeon4• 1 year ago

http://radleyice.com/chairman-mao-and-the-sparrows/

WJW• 1 year ago

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.

wruza• 1 year ago

How to tell advertising from sharing experiences?

coldtea7• 1 year ago

any "sharing of experience" whose purpose is in buying a specific product or a ticket or service, it's advertising...

bondarchuk2• 1 year ago

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).

alt2274• 1 year ago

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.

bondarchuk2• 1 year ago

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.

resource_waste2• 1 year ago

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.

fouc• 1 year ago

More precisely - advertising is a cancer on the internet. It's responsible for killing the early internet. It should have been banned decades ago.

But no, people wanted "free". Except there is no such thing as a free lunch.

iammjm• 1 year ago

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

hasbot2• 1 year ago

Mick Jagger told us back in '65: https://genius.com/The-rolling-stones-i-cant-get-no-satisfac...

psychoslave• 1 year ago

Don’t worry, I have a therapy about that very specific topic, just sign this NDA and this check over here.

bell-cot• 1 year ago

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.

diego_moita• 1 year ago

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.

coldtea7• 1 year ago

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)?

Nah, advetising is a cancer all of its own

superfunny2• 1 year ago

"The problem is that truth is very hard to establish for those that don't want and don't understand logic"

Not every truth is revealed through logic.

perching_aix2• 1 year ago

What truths are not revealed through logic in your opinion?

perching_aix2• 1 year ago

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.

jounker• 1 year ago

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.

resource_waste2• 1 year ago

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.

taurknaut7• 1 year ago

They were wholly successful, a lower-class person cannot own an Android phone without getting flack.

Who gives a fuck about status if you can't use imessages

someothherguyy8• 1 year ago

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?

Jenk• 1 year ago

"all the good things advertising does" is doing a lot of the leg work without much being specified.

superfunny2• 1 year ago

Here's a good that advertising does: letting people know how your product or services address some pressing need.

jfengel• 1 year ago

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.

reginald78• 1 year ago

Things are so far gone at this point I'm perfectly willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater on this one.

coldtea7• 1 year ago

while ignoring all the good advertising does.

What good?

GuB-423• 1 year ago

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.

taurknaut7• 1 year ago

All the good advertising does? What are you referring to?

coldtea7• 1 year ago

probably meant something like the cheapening and commercializing of the arts by sponsoring them

someothherguyy8• 1 year ago

Oh you know, economic growth, jobs, efficiencies in matching producers and consumers, etc.

micromacrofoot4• 1 year ago

what good?

vipa123• 1 year ago

Good things... lol

masklinn• 1 year ago

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.

Mordisquitos2• 1 year ago

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?

hiAndrewQuinn• 1 year ago

(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.)

beefnugs• 1 year ago

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

linsomniac• 1 year ago

John Gotti died of throat cancer...

colesantiago3• 1 year ago

Would seeing this on HN count as advertisement?

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/

taurknaut7• 1 year ago

The only way to stop this would probably be to "close your eyes?" or perhaps this isn't really a big enough problem in the first place.

The idea of banning advertisements never struck you? That seems like the obvious way forward.

quectophoton4• 1 year ago

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.

alt2274• 1 year ago

Solutions to this would be much welcome.

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.

colesantiago3• 1 year ago

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.

slumberlust• 1 year ago

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?

jonnycat• 1 year ago

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.

keiferski9• 1 year ago

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.

somenameforme12• 1 year ago

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.

[1] https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users

danaris6• 1 year ago

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.

nertirs1• 1 year ago

Yep, it is mind boggling. Most people spend more on a single meal than on web content they consume in a single year.

zild3d• 1 year ago

If there was a simple way to get the food for free, a lot of people would stop paying for meals

barrkel3• 1 year ago

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.

froh• 1 year ago

(2019)

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?

alexfromapex• 1 year ago

It is a form of violence and needs to be treated as such.

6stringmerc• 1 year ago

I'm particularly glad to see the "Destroying culture" segment, though brief, as it touches on my main objection to modern advertising. In the piece, he mentions how an old work was re-purposed and "ruined" for him - though the phrasing sounds extreme, I completely understand. The concept described, as I interpret it, is about sparking an internal pleasure center for the purpose of inserting a commercial prompting to engage. This is especially problematic with "wants" type purchases - luxury items, status, etc. - compared to "needs" where a specific company is trying to differentiate itself from the pack.

I remember the hullaballoo when the Rolling Stones licensed "Start Me Up" to Microsoft. Last night, during the Superbowl, Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal reunited for a mayonnaise commercial aping a scene from "When Harry Met Sally" and I chuckled to myself how it was probably missing 2/3s of the viewership on the reference. Using Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life" by Carnival Cruise lines only sparks memories for me of Danny Boyle's "Trainspotting" and obviously they don't care. Same goes for when "Lord of the Rings" trailers had the Kronos Quartet playing under them, specifically the track featured in "Requiem for a Dream."

Honestly my breaking point was for a car insurance commercial where an accident occurred and the driver pulled an entirely new car from the trunk of the damaged car to represent the ease of returning to the prior state. It felt so absolutely deceptive I never will let it go. But that's not even the low point.

Pharmaceutical companies are now portraying "mini-movies" with the full narrative arc to create the sensation that a full and happy life is possible if only you ask your Doctor about some random-ass pill for a condition likely best treated by a change of lifestyle. The one I have in mind is a football coach where he's a family man, a teacher, and then gets a commemorative portrait unveiled at a game because he's so beloved. The culture damage of these bastardizations of narrative and story are a runaway freight train - always in slow motion mind you - and every time you see a historical figure selling you something, just remember that they're dead and couldn't complain. If it wasn't for Crispin Glover's lawsuit win all those years ago, Kurt Cobain might be selling anti-depressants and Jimi Hendrix a Kia or something.

keiferski9• 1 year ago

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.

cess1113• 1 year ago

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.

keiferski9• 1 year ago

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.

hermannj314• 1 year ago

What about advertising for cancer screening? That type of advertising is shown to be cost effective and saves lives [1].

So advertising can be a good thing and a literal cancer-preventer to society.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4018507/

oneeyedpigeon3• 1 year ago

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.

quectophoton4• 1 year ago

The broad definition of "advertising" doesn't restrict it to commercial use,

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.

acc_2972• 1 year ago

I do not disagree.

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.

Levitz• 1 year ago

Well yeah, and cutting someone open can save his life in the context of a surgery.

The vast, vast majority of the time and the vast, vast majority of money spent on ads is nothing like this.

Xenoamorphous• 1 year ago

Advertising sucks. But subscriptions suck even more as they increase inequality.

apwell23• 1 year ago

i thought Cancer is Cancer on society

turblety• 1 year ago

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.

somenameforme12• 1 year ago

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.

TeMPOraL3• 1 year ago

TFA's author here.

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.

otikik• 1 year ago

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.

canadaduane3• 1 year ago

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.

[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...

TeMPOraL3• 1 year ago

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.

smallerfish• 1 year ago

Was in São Paulo recently, and very much enjoyed the lack of billboards. It surprises me that more cities don't follow their example. (TLDR, kagiing for a list, that 4 US states also have banned billboards.)

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/11/can-cities-ki...

iammrpayments• 1 year ago

“any effort you spent on advertising serves primarily to counteract the combined advertising efforts of your competitors. The same results could be achieved if every market player limited themselves to just informing customers about their goods and services“

This is a really shallow view of advertising, most of the time you don’t know who is your competitor and you don’t know all the possible ways that you can inform your audience about product, and you don’t fully know what your customer wants.

ben_w• 1 year ago

and you don’t fully know what your customer wants.

This is very true.

However, as Facebook ads are showing me both dick pills and boob surgery offers, and legal advice for giving up a citizenship I don't have (and even then only available in a country I don't live in), and foreign government announcements that a breed of dog I've never heard of is now banned in that country…

I'm not convinced that this is in any sense "solved" by the huge quantity of surveillance that even Facebook has.

I mean, these advertising profiling errors are what I'd expect in a university student project introducing AI as a concept, not a megacorp whose main monetisation strategy is selling attention to advertisers. Even a classifier itself built by an LLM ought to do better than this when using only my name and GeoIP data.

thomasahle• 1 year ago

most of the time you don’t know who is your competitor and you don’t know all the possible ways that you can inform your audience about product

If we look at the top 10 commercial for this super bowl[1], which is arguable the most money spent on advertising, it's Booking.com, Ram Trucks, Made by Google, Yahoo.com, Marvel Studios, Bud Light, NerdWallet, DoorDash, Doritos, Squarespace.

I'm sure all of those companies know who their competitors are, and the audience already knows about their products. The ads are just trying to jump to our forefront of attention.

[1] https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/most-watched-super-bowl-ads...

A_D_E_P_T2• 1 year ago

Like cancer, I think it's possible to split ads into two categories: Benign and malignant.

Benign ads are like ads for toothpaste, Febreeze, or airlines.

Malignant ads are, to give but two examples, for things like gambling and pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceutical business, in particular, was much more widely trusted and had far higher public favorability ratings in the old days when their advertising to the public was severely frowned upon.

Advertisements for vices are generally a huge net negative for society. Cigarettes, alcohol, prostitution/OnlyFans, TikTok and other mind-melting social media and mobile lootbox games... The less we see of them, the healthier society is. In places like the UK, where a huge volume (if not an absolute majority) of advertisements are for vices like sports gambling, you know that things have gone sideways. You can feel it.

silvestrov2• 1 year ago

I think a better wording is to say that "advertising is like bateria". Using cancer is way too one-sided as all cancers are bad.

Some bacterias are bad, some are good.

Most of the time we talk about bacteria it is the bad ones we think of, mostly because study of the good ones are so underpriotized and we don't understand them well.

Humans could absolutely not survive without the good bacteria in the stomach. They produce some of the vitamins we need (plus other roles).

jtbayly2• 1 year ago

Could humans survive without the “good advertising”?

m000• 1 year ago

Advertising industry has been considered malignant long before the advent of the internet. Originally published in 1976, "Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture" by Stuart Ewen is an interesting read.

A_D_E_P_T2• 1 year ago

Thomas Carlyle was pretty hard on it in the 19th century.

Consider, for example, that great Hat seven-feet high, which now perambulates London Streets; which my Friend Sauerteig regarded justly as one of our English notabilities; "the topmost point as yet," said he, "would it were your culminating and returning point, to which English Puffery has been observed to reach!"—The Hatter in the Strand of London, instead of making better felt-hats than another, mounts a huge lath-and-plaster Hat, seven-feet high, upon wheels; sends a man to drive it through the streets; hoping to be saved thereby. He has not attempted to make better hats, as he was appointed by the Universe to do, and as with this ingenuity of his he could very probably have done; but his whole industry is turned to persuade us that he has made such! He too knows that the Quack has become God. Laugh not at him, O reader; or do not laugh only. He has ceased to be comic; he is fast becoming tragic.

(From Past and Present, 1843)

chefandy8• 1 year ago

Like cancer, I think it's possible to split ads into two categories: Benign and malignant.

I think you mean tumors because all cancer is malignant. There’s no benign cancer.

you know that things have gone sideways. You can feel it.

What you’re feeling is your totally subjective value system bumping up against things that don’t jibe with it.

these things are acceptable, and these things are not

You’re just taking those values and applying them to everything and everyone else. Febreeze gives me migraines, airlines are often totally shit companies, and toothpaste is a million of the same product full of a bunch of worthless gimmicks. Pharmaceutical ads depend on the pharmaceutical, and what you consider ‘vice’ ads are mostly for products used responsibly by many millions of people even if abused by many. Just because they make you uncomfortable doesn’t mean they should make everyone else uncomfortable.

someothherguyy8• 1 year ago

two categories: Benign and malignant.

You are thinking of tumors, not cancer.

AnimalMuppet2• 1 year ago

I think you put the split at the wrong point. It's not just what is being advertised; it's also how.

Take lite beer, for example. Ignoring the issue of whether beer fits into your "vice" category, you could make a case for benign advertising of lite beer: "Hey, there's this kind of beer that has less calories than regular beer. If you like beer but worry about the calories, maybe this is for you."

Or you can have malignant advertising for it: "Drink this brand of lite beer, and all the pretty girls will be all over you. Drink some other brand and you'll be all alone like a loser." Stealing a quote, from which I don't have the source handy: This kind of advertising tries to make the person you are envy the person you could be with their product. In other words, it tries to steal your satisfaction and then offers to sell it back to you. That's malignant no matter what the product is.

don_esteban• 1 year ago

No, even 'good' advertisement is mostly zero-sum game bad for the consumer. However, Overton window has shifted so much that people just accept them (at best as a free entertainment) without questioning.

Example with airlines: airlines stealing each other's customers just raises the price for the tickets (by the amount paid for advertisement) without net benefit for the consumer.

The only advertisement I can consider a good one is a shop sign on the shop/restaurant and perhaps a sign on a nearby crossing to direct me there.

Logically, a 'really good deal just became available' should be a useful one (information - wise), but that has been gamed to such an extent...

AnimalMuppet2• 1 year ago

Here's an airline advertisement: "We're starting direct service from $YOUR_CITY to Cancun."

Here's another airline advertisement: "Look how much fun the people are having flying on our airline."

One gives actual information about something that is now available that wasn't before. The other is a zero-sum game with the other airlines.

DrScientist4• 1 year ago

The only advertisement I can consider a good one is a shop sign on the shop/restaurant and perhaps a sign on a nearby crossing to direct me there.

You could argue that the original Google search ads fall into this category ( before they were changed to look more like search results ) - ie they much more likely to be directly relevant, indeed helpful, to the search activity.

barrkel3• 1 year ago

Brand awareness is zero sum. Spending escalates within permissible bounds, with ad inventory sellers acting like landlords, extracting rent. This mechanic is as true for benign as it is for malignant ads.

DrScientist4• 1 year ago

Here in the UK, it's still illegal to advertise prescription only drugs to the consumer. You can promote them to health care professionals ( prescribers ), but in a very rightly regulated way.

JohnFen2• 1 year ago

I disagree. I think your examples of "benign" ads are as malignant as the others.

disambiguation2• 1 year ago

Did I just read a febreeze ad?

DavidPiper• 1 year ago

"The Hidden Persuaders" by Vance Packard is the only book I've read that has actively given me mental and emotional tools to resist advertising.

It tells the story - with many deep, detailed examples - of how advertising went from information to persuasion across the mid-1900s, and there are some truly gross moral acts/steps along the way.

It can be a little dry at times (and some has of course been superseded by Surveillance Capitalism), but if you want to acquire a genuine disgust reflex for modern advertising, I strongly recommend it.

ekkiren2• 1 year ago

More like tasteless advertising practices are a cancer to society

ekkiren2• 1 year ago

More like tasteless advertising practices are poisonous to society

acc_2972• 1 year ago

The below section resonates: lately YouTube has figured out I am in my mid-twenties and considering for the first time how best to save money for a secure/stable future.

The number of ADs I see now not so subtly implying that I can expect to “lose big” or “rent forever” if I don’t subscribe to QuestTrade/WealthSimple/…

It’s just frustrating to know that someone put time and thought into making me and a million other folks in my “demographic bucket” feel anxious and worried.

I’m not sure how best to address this sort of thing and I suppose I can buy my way out of most internet ads if I want to so I acknowledge we all play a part in this market.

But some types of advertisements need to be highly regulated I would include Gambling, Pharmaceuticals, Alcohol on that list. But a broader class of non-luxury goods which are being advertised via a very negative framing of the consumers current situation are a social externality. They contribute to real health problems in the population and in my view that is reason enough to examine regulation.

A marketer I know has a mantra, that successful sales are all about dissatisfaction - making people aware just how their situation sucks, and then offering a way to relieve the pain.

Zanfa• 1 year ago

The below section resonates: lately YouTube has figured out I am in my mid-twenties and considering for the first time how best to save money for a secure/stable future.

This is funny since YouTube especially has never been able to figure out my demographics. To this day it keeps showing me ads for female hygiene products, cleaning supplies, quick fashion brands or scam ads in Russian, a language I don't speak. None of this has ever been relevant to me in any way whatsoever.

They should just go back to showing exclusively contextual ads, they'd have better odds of hitting a topic I might actually be even remotely in the target market for.

bitmasher9• 1 year ago

You’re in a minority. As long as YouTube is mostly right the vast majority of the time, running identity based ads is significantly more profitable than running context based ads.

Years and years ago I worked at a company selling context based web ads, and our numbers were significantly lower than identity based ads. There were a few companies willing to pay good money for certain context based ads, that we got good money from, but most went to identity based because CTR was much higher.

There were also some holdout webpages that only served context based ads for privacy concerns, but largely it was a dying niche in the larger online advertising space because of key metrics like Click Through Rate.

washadjeffmad• 1 year ago

Sounds like you (shouldn't) need a more advanced threat model.

Const-me3• 1 year ago

not sure how best to address this sort of thing

I use two browser addons, uBlock origin and SponsorBlock.

dorgo• 1 year ago

SponsorBlock needs an AI-version. Currently it relies on users.

Vilian2• 1 year ago

firefox mobile support extensions and revanced on android

vdnkh• 1 year ago

This is incredibly petty of me but why do people keep spelling "ads" as "ADs" lately? It's an abbreviation not an initialism

DamnInteresting• 1 year ago

It could be a backronym for Asshole Design.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backronym

chefandy8• 1 year ago

Phone autocorrect usually is the culprit for those types of typos for me. I imagine this crowd would be more likely than many to have that common abbreviation for Active Domains trained into their input methods.

fwn• 1 year ago

... some types of advertisements need to be highly regulated ...

I truly detest advertising and have been avoiding it with a passion for about 20 years through adblocking, aggressive unsubscribing, etc. But regulating advertising is only a quick fix to a much more dangerous problem of user disempowerment.

For tech-savvy people, most ads can be blocked, that is, until you insist on using proprietary software to access social media platforms or stream movies or stuff like that. DRM is the ultimate enemy here.

While the regulation of advertising is very quick, it is also quickly abolished if decision makers change. Regulation around user choice and user empowerment along with media literacy is a much more sustainable and more robust solution than regulation of specific ad types, places, messages or genres. (I'm thinking of the policy templates for regulating alcoholic beverages or sugary products in the EU.)

We see the fragility of the content-wise regulatory approach in parts of the US where online gambling has been legalized. I cannot find the article now, but this policy change led to an absurd amount of advertising, to which consumers were extremely vulnerable.

Advertising would not have been such an effective shortcut into the brains of so many consumers if those consumers had had the freedom, tools and education to easily decide what kind of advertising they want to be exposed to (and what kind of accompanying tracking they find tolerable).

lanthissa• 1 year ago

Maybe its just a function of growing up during the transition of physical software to advert/subscription software, but i love the advertising model.

What google has done for the web; youtube, maps, gmail/gsuite, chromium/v8 are fantastic products that cost huge sums to develop, and the world gets to use them for free. Thats amazing. Its a huge gift to society that the a fantastic knowledge and productivity suite is available to everyone.

I have a lot more of a problem with infinite scroll & algorithmic content delivery than advertising.

yetihehe• 1 year ago

Its a huge gift to society that the a fantastic knowledge and productivity suite is available to everyone.

It's not a gift. It's a transaction, but you pay with your attention and data about yourself so that someone can more effectively try to sell you something you might not really need. Upside: people who don't have money can now participate in knowledge pool. Downside: thousands of other people try to make sure that those people don't ever have more money because they spend them on marketers that were the best in marketing.

pclmulqdq• 1 year ago

Do you use an ad blocker? If so, you're not supporting the ecosystem you love. Or do you love it because it's so easy to have all of the upside while pushing the costs onto other people?

bilekas• 1 year ago

Maybe its just a function of growing up during the transition of physical software to advert/subscription software, but I love the advertising model.

I also have been around a while, but I am the opposite opinion as yourself, mainly because I really appreciate actually owning something that I don't need to pay to continue to consume like Media which is a good example.

I have a lot more of a problem with infinite scroll & algorithmic content delivery than advertising

This is basically the same thing as the advertising models that are being used except the advertising is a bit more nefarious (IMO) into manipulating you into feeling like you have to buy something, gamble a little bit or whatever it is just to remove money from your wallet to them.

The products you mention are obviously great for society, this isn't for debate I think, but it's how these services are monetized, which they should be 100% but there is a disgusting extreme in play these days to my eyes.

In the same service based ecconomy, I am okay with paying for Kagi for example, pay as you use without (hopefully) my data being sold to the highest bidder.

There are better models possible then the one we have, I think that's somethign that should be explored.

canadaduane3• 1 year ago

These are good. But I think there is a tipping point where the asymmetry of power (millions invested in databases, information gathering, algorithm development, etc.) pushes against the tiny power an individual has. There is no agent on the individual's side that has power (time, money, smarts) enough to counter the onslaught. It's a problem of degrees.

SpicyLemonZest3• 1 year ago

What’s wrong with that? Certainly advertisers can do bad or irresponsible things with personal data, but the mere fact that they’re shaping preferences doesn’t seem like a huge problem. It’s not like our pre-advertising preferences are an edenic blank slate.

oneeyedpigeon3• 1 year ago

I have a lot more of a problem with infinite scroll & algorithmic content delivery than advertising.

When it's done well, I agree with this sentiment, but the vast, vast majority of online advertising is done terribly. It almost always has a negative impact on my use of the hosting site.

yapyap2• 1 year ago

1. Advertising inadvertently drives the want for an infinite scroll and a better algorithm for content delivery to keep you scrolling for longer. You being on the app for longer due to infini-scroll and ‘the algorithm’ = seeing more advertisements = more money for the platforms. If you paid a monthly fee to use the app(1) the platform wouldn’t be incentivized to keep you on an infinite scroll cause they already got the money, all they would be incentivized to do is makw sure you are as satisfied with the experience as possible so you keep paying them.

2. “What google has done for the web; youtube, maps, gmail/gsuite, chromium/v8 are fantastic products that cost huge sums to develop, and the world gets to use them for free”

That is a financially “free”, sure. But the world doesn’t get to use it for free at all really, we pay by giving google our statistics and my god, first of all the amount of statistics collected would surprise most people, yeah you hear about “big businesses are collecting your data” but to see what data they can collect through like a webrequest can actually make it feel real. The world does not get any Google product for free, not in the whole sense of the word at least. To sum it up best I’d say Google and businesses like it have you get used to a (financially) free product, to such an extent that you integrate it as one of the base pillars of your online existence and then they enshittify that ‘free’ version to such an extent that they kind of threaten to pull that pillar away unless you pay.

(1.) which I also don’t love, cause subscription models also feel like you don’t own anything but in the case of a YouTube it’s more sensible than buying individual videos if ads weren’t a thing.

hasbot2• 1 year ago

It's very similar to sponsoring a TV show: instead of charging for the TV show; all costs are paid for by the advertisers and the show is shown free.

wouldbecouldbe• 1 year ago

To be honest I think many YouTube videos are worse then the ads. Lots of the kid videos on there are pure braindead poison.

xizst94• 1 year ago

So I'm not the only one that feels sick thinking about how people "watching the Superbowl" are essentially watching ads with a sprinkle of "foot"ball.

globular-toast• 1 year ago

I watched a bit of "the Superbowl" once and it made me feel the same way about using the unfiltered web: I can't believe anyone watches this without adblock. Then I slowly started to realise the NPCs in Idiocracy/Wall-E aren't actually fictional...

Henk0• 1 year ago

I completely agree, though I haven't been thinking in terms of the cancer metaphor myself. I have been thinking a bit about how we could limit the negative effects of both advertising and other phenomena like social media algorithms:

1. Almost all advertising is based on manipulation of human cognitive biases. There is a limited set of biases, and the mechanisms by which they can be exploited are both limited and easily detected – we can most likely train AI to do it. Therefore, it's possible to start thinking seriously about making laws that ban corporations and organisations from creating marketing that exploits these cognitive biases.

2. When it comes to social media platforms, there are two routes we could go down. Either we could regulate their algorithms the same way – or we could force social media platforms to both make their recommendation algorithms open source, and to open up their platforms to third-party recommendation algorithms that people can choose to use instead. This would be like a recommendation algorithm app store that the company has to provide to their users. You might want to select a youtube recommendation algorithm that optimises for personal development – or a facebook feed that optimises for creating real-world connections

Of course corporations would fight this kind of legislation with tooth and claw, but that's how it is. I would be happy to get some thoughtful feedback on these ideas, their technical and legal plausibility, and any potential negative unintended consequences or loopholes that could undermine them

yapyap2• 1 year ago

Reminds me of this Bill Hicks clip

https://youtube.com/watch?v=RbAAVLcMzr4

EncomLab4• 1 year ago

Most of the arguments made are not about "advertising" per se, but the methods that SOME forms of advertising take and other methods (data mining, phishing, scams) that are either not advertising or are things that are already regulated/illegal but which enforcement actions against are low/non-existent.

In the book "Fire in the Valley" about the development and early days of the internet there is a great deal of discussion and prescient predictions about where all of this would go - but the business models of walled gardens and pay walls never generated the revenue that charging for clicks did. Honestly it's hard to see how we get to this level of speed and content online without it having been funded by advertising.

canadaduane3• 1 year ago

How do we know if "this level of speed and content online" is net good?

ahoka• 1 year ago

We know that most of the content is crap.

EncomLab4• 1 year ago

This really depends on the content you are seeking and consuming as the user. I am constantly pulling data sheets, reading papers, researching reference designs, interacting on official (and unofficial) product forums, and countless other information queries which at the start of my career were largely conducted at either company or university libraries, in person meetings, or attending conferences. That may sound great but trust me it's far better to sit at home and have the entire product specifications from a manufacturer than ordering a physical copy or spending half the day calling around to see if someone else has one available.

If all you are consuming is FB, IG, X, and Reddit - I mean that's like going to a candy store and complaining there is no broccoli.

barrkel3• 1 year ago

The underlying point is game theoretical: ads are driven to these methods because within their niches, they're zero sum games (and negative sum for society at large due to externalities).

Honestly it's hard to see how we get to this level of speed and content online without it having been funded by advertising.

I don't understand what this means. Most content online that isn't user generated (forums, blogs, wikipedia, YT, short form video etc) is junk. Most of it is made for free. The distribution has costs - but it's extremely unclear the costs couldn't be solved in different ways. Serving text is ultra cheap. Torrents distribute way more video than industry is happy with. We didn't need to take this path.

EncomLab4• 1 year ago

All of that "free" and "cheap" stuff has not always been free or cheap - even a decade ago. In the mid-late 90's when these decisions were being made even hosting a minimal site was incredibly expensive and largely the realm of universities and big business.

pavel_lishin2• 1 year ago

No True Adsman would do this form of advertising!

JohnFen2• 1 year ago

Honestly it's hard to see how we get to this level of speed and content online without it having been funded by advertising.

Maybe, maybe not. But that juice has absolutely not been worth the squeeze.

oska• 1 year ago

Honestly it's hard to see how we get to this level of speed and content online without it having been funded by advertising.

If we had gone (or stayed) peer to peer we could have done it, rather than going the expensive client server model. Server farms require funding; peer to peer doesn't.

neom9• 1 year ago

I teach people how to advertise for a living.

This is how I teach it: an advert is simply the ability to buy a knock on someones front door.

That is literally all you are doing when you buy an advert. All business activity you experience today is an abstraction of business we have already done, I'm sure back in the day people thought door to door sales people were annoying, and I'm sure sometimes they were not.

From a founders perspective, you can take this door knock framework and use it for anything, want to do product research? knock on a door. Want to test a marketing message? Knock on a door. Want to boost sales? Knock on a door.

Adverting done wrong can be very annoying. Thankfully people who advertise incorrectly don't usually last very long, and sadly there are indeed a lot of not great marketing folks out there, but cancer on society... hmmm. This article conflates every kind of commercial outreach with malware, psychological abuse, or brand brainwashing... “zero-sum” and purely wasteful. Ok, but in practice competition drives improvement, and customer choice is central to a functioning market, leading to innovation.

Const-me3• 1 year ago

competition drives improvement

Are you saying ads helping competition? How?

customer choice is central to a functioning market, leading to innovation.

Ads suppress customer choice, along with innovations. Can you recall any recent innovative carbonated drink? Marketing budgets of pepsi/coca cola make competition and innovation impossible.

neom9• 1 year ago

Advertising is a PURE competitive move in the most fundamental sense in the business playbook, anyone who doesn't understand that doesn't understand business and therefore nor marketing nor sales. Sadly, that is a lot of people out there who profess to understand business.

danaris6• 1 year ago

While I dislike advertising a lot...

Ads suppress customer choice, along with innovations. Can you recall any recent innovative carbonated drink? Marketing budgets of pepsi/coca cola make competition and innovation impossible.

...I don't think this is actually reasonable to ascribe to advertising.

This is a problem with hyperconsolidation.

Competition is driven by having many players in the market who are all within spitting distance of each other's overall size, however you want to measure it. Once consolidation shrinks the number of players down to a handful or less, that's when competition and innovation are stifled.

You say it yourself: the problem isn't that there's advertising. It's the marketing budgets of Pepsi and Coke. Which are (probably, didn't look it up) larger than the annual budgets of some countries. That couldn't happen if they weren't utterly unchallengeable juggernauts.

fumeux_fume• 1 year ago

You have a very naive conception of advertising if you think it's simply "buying knocks on doors." For online advertising, which is where most ads are display now, you buy access to people's personal information (including minors) to target them with little oversight on what you're allowed to say. And now that ads are embedded in nearly every electronic device, it's not only hundreds of knocks on your door each day, but many of those knocks you are forced to answer. We had functioning markets and innovation well before this kind of marketing apparatus was deployed. If anything, the enshitification of many products a sign that advertising gives us less choice and worse outcomes.

neom9• 1 year ago

the door knock analogy isn’t meant to trivialize the craft of advertising, advertising done right is hard...it’s just a way to strip it down to its core: you’re paying for the chance to initiate a conversation with someone who might be interested in what you have to offer. Whether you’re literally knocking on a door or placing a targeted online ad, the fundamental idea remains the same, you're buying an opportunity to engage with someone for some reason (market research, sales, whatever). modern digital advertising leverages data to target audiences, that evolution doesn’t change the basic mechanics of the process. I am old enough to remember door to door sales people, my older sister worked at DNBNB in the UK in the 90s and did demographics by sitting in cars on streets. Go back even further, baby stroller/pram salesperson would pick neighborhoods where their product is most needed, they're not going to retirement homes (although maybe they are, grandkids spcecial!) - digital advertisers use data to identify and approach likely buyers. The issues raised about privacy and oversight are valid, but they’re problems of regulation and ethics, not of the underlying competitive nature of advertising. Also like I said, ads can be used for many different things, (I wonder how many woman who like blue live in this city, lets spend $250k to find out) sometimes a team will run $500k of ads into a segement to see how it responds before they run $5MM of ads for the quarter, that's when you get ads for weird stuff that makes no sense and you don't click it, someone is trying to look at your non-click as well as the clicks (the door opens or the door slams)

Claim that advertising suppresses customer choice is hard when you consider the flip side: in a competitive market, effective advertising compels companies to innovate and differentiate their offerings. Yes, the massive budgets of giants like Pepsi and Coke can sometimes make it seem like smaller players are edged out, but actually that isn't what happens, it’s the pressure to capture consumer attention that drives these companies to continually refine their messaging and, by extension, their products. Competition in advertising forces all players to up their game, trust me, there is an annoying savvy 26 year old junior marketing manager out there causing problems for someone in a brand bigger than them, that is often the job in fact. Also, the more targeted you get the CHEAPER your advertising often becomes, I can't run $50MM ads a year against "men in america" because I can outspend Nike and Toyota, but I can spend $500mth on men between 18-26 who like tennis and live in the zipcode 90210.

sure, the medium has chaned from literl knocking on physical doors to digital but still advertising is a tool when used effectively both informs customers and drives competition. could should and will debate the ethics and side effects of current practices but dismissing advertising as a cancer on society is silly, take aim at capitalism then.

(edit: per the comment above above, I just went down to the bodega to get a drink, there are SOOO many new soda's I've never heard of before, heck I'm standing in front of a kombucha coffee infused soda, made in Canada too the advert tells me, I think I'll try it, go Canada!)

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B• 1 year ago

an advert is simply the ability to buy a knock on someones front door.

You’ve described ads perfectly. I hate people who comes to my house to sell me stuff. As you say, advertisers are annoying scammers.

axegon_• 1 year ago

From a personal perspective, my view on ads has done a complete 180 over the past decade. 10 years ago, I was massively in favor of ads: they were a nice way to indirectly show support to those who produced high quality content. And while I acknowledge that cloud providers have astronomical costs associated with the ability to provide so much data on request instantly, at this point the internet is borderline unusable without a hyper aggressive ad blockers - both on browser level and DNS level. Everything in the article is completely true. Especially the common characteristics: take any video for instance. I'm perfectly fine with watching a 5 second ad or endure a few banners. But much like untreated cancer, those minutes spread to the point where the vital functions get cluttered with crap. Even with the browser based ad blockers, pihole blocks almost 10% of requests. Sure, some of them are trackers, some of them are services owned by comrade elon musk which I've blacklisted but a large chunk are still ads.

hnpolicestate• 1 year ago

So I was thinking about this during the super bowl last night. I'm aware that super bowl ads are higher quality than usual ads, but not by much. I didn't mind watching commercials between game time.

And it wasn't because the ads were entertaining, it's because the content was entertaining. Most YouTube content we consume is very low quality trash. In those circumstances the addition of ads becomes unbearable.

If you want to make commercials and ads tolerable produce better content.

xstefen• 1 year ago

The irony of the amount of self-advertising this and in its contents is mind blowing

dtquad• 1 year ago

In Denmark it is not uncommon for people to cherish TV ads from the 1990s and 2000s as our common cultural heritage. But we have always had laws against misleading or overly distracting TV ads (down to rules about the sound levels not being higher than the regular programming). But now half of our TV channels are broadcast from West Drayton, UK so they don't have to comply with advertising regulations. On those TV channels most ads are sports betting, online casinos, mortgage companies etc.

I believe advertising has a useful role enhancing market efficiency and providing information to consumers. But it has to be regulated. Misleading advertising should be as punishable as misleading information on the back of the product.

t0bia_s3• 1 year ago

Advertising of product is proof that product itself is not good enough to be sold.

Good thing is, that you can block it at home. Bad thing is, that if you avoid commercial advertising, you are struggle with income as freelance audiovisual producer.

neom9• 1 year ago

I'm curious how that is true? Advertising is generally a competitive move in a marketing playbook of a GTM motion.

t0bia_s3• 1 year ago

Do you buy products that has quality and you need it or because some advertisement says it?

somenameforme12• 1 year ago

One critical possibility was unmentioned. There seems to be a very strong argument that it's advertising that is driving declines in fertility rates. The entire point of the modern advertising machine is to generate endless desires and wants that one might not otherwise have, always chasing the next product - basically to create consumerist societies. The most common reason middle class+ people say they aren't having children is because they don't have enough money, but it's simply untrue.

In most of every society, certainly including the US, there are plenty of people having children with far less than the incomes of these people that claim to be unable to afford it. So what they really mean is that they would rather spend their money on other things. But this is extremely unnatural. Our bodies and minds are heavily evolved to wanting to procreate - it takes a very strong force to fight back against the biological clock and it seems that advertising is just that force.

I think evidence for this is widespread. Many places like Thailand have low education, low income, and low fertility (on par with Japan now). The classic explanations for declining fertility would predict high fertility in such a place. But what Thailand has is an exceptionally high degree of consumerism. And vice versa this also explains why religion often correlates strongly with fertility.

There are varying views on sexuality, education, equality of the sexes, and so on - but most tend to offer a life purpose that supplants any meaningful role consumerism could have. Another bit of evidence is that fertility rates among the extremely rich are also extremely high. Again when one has billions of dollars you can't really be a consumerist because at that point there is basically nothing one could not buy, so you need to look elsewhere for meaning and fulfillment.

someothherguyy8• 1 year ago

The most common reason middle class+ people say they aren't having children is because they don't have enough money, but it's simply untrue.

Source?

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/the-exp...

This seems to say because they "don't want to"

somenameforme12• 1 year ago

Your own source would be a good example. That study is 'p-hacked' to create a headline. They inexplicably limit the group they're talking about to those who say that they are unlikely to ever have children, which is a subset of the people who are not having children. It looks like they had to cull off about 60% of their sample. So a more accurate headline would be "people who don't plan to have kids say they don't want to have kids."

Most people are going to think they're talking about all people, as you did here. The age sample is also probably intentionally biased. Having the age range be 18-49 is illogical. The reasons for an 18 year old not planning to have kids matter far less (from a social point of view), and have far less meaning/certainty, than an e.g. 30 year old saying the same. Most studies are broken into reasonable age buckets because of this. 18-49 is not reasonable for fertility issues.

Even with their heavily biased sample, they only get 57% of their "young" group saying they just don't want to (and only 31% of the older group), whereas you get 79% saying they want to "afford the things they want", 75% saying "saving for the future", and so on.

lordhexd• 1 year ago

I HATE advertising on YouTube/Spotify/Websites but don’t really mind them on Instagram and actually sometimes quite enjoy them on TikTok.

The first difference for me is that on YouTube/Spotify/Websites they obscure the content and force you to watch/see the advertisements but on Instagram and TikTok it’s just as easy to skip an advertisement as it is a video/actual content.

The second difference is that usually the advertisements on Instagram and TikTok are targetted based on my preferences anyway so I’m more likely to look at it and often even interact with it.

The third difference is that on TikTok especially where I actually sometimes look forward to the ads, they are actually putting the customer first rather than their product. The videos are sometimes viral content variations which are interesting to watch or short stories which have product in them.

It’s the same as influencer marketing with product reviews. I make an effort to watch those if I’m looking for a product in the same category or sometimes just to know what’s currently out there, but that’s effectively also advertising just that it puts the customer first.

So while I agree some forms of advertising are cancer, I appreciate others and don’t want the good kind to go away because I don’t know everything and sometimes it’s only through advertising that I discover new brands and products that have become my go tos.

redbell• 1 year ago

(2019)

SEO, AKA. gaming the search engines. Hugely popular. Often involves creating nonsense sites, and spamming websites and web forums with comments. It pollutes search results for more obscure queries, generally wasting people's time.

Having this essay backdated to pre-LLMs era, I'm wondering what the author would write when he witnesses people using AI-generated content to boost SEO these days.

chefandy8• 1 year ago

This is a tad reductive.

If there were no ads, how would people know that products existed? Would they just see the products on store shelves? What about services? Would labels be ads? Would how stores merchandise things be advertisements? Could businesses negotiate for specific product placement? How would you find out about stores? Would store signs be ads? How about really big ones? How about at the edge of their property along a road highway? Could the sign say what the store sold? If you were to start a product guide to help people find what they need, how could you possibly afford to buy enough products to be useful and up-to-date enough while slow crawl word of mouth got the business off the ground? Would asking people to tell their friends be an ad? If not, could you pay someone to spread the word about your product? Would traveling sales reps be ads? What if they wore head to toe logo gear? Could you just pay people to do that without selling things?

Manipulative advertising practices suck. Privacy destroying data-driven marketing sucks.

Ads themselves often suck but I don’t see how a capitalist society could survive without them.

Ukv6• 1 year ago

This is a tad reductive. If there were no ads, how would people know that products existed?

The post does say:

> 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.

I think it's largely that incentives are in the wrong place for advertising to work as an effective means to inform people.

When trying to make an informed choice on a purchase, I'll typically look for enthusiast communities or unsponsored reviews. Marketing actually tends to actively get in the way.

chefandy8• 1 year ago

When trying to make an informed choice on a purchase, I'll typically look for enthusiast communities or unsponsored reviews. Marketing actually tends to actively get in the way.

Right but where do they get their info? If there were no advertisements, would they call up companies to see what they offered? How would they know a new company existed? Would there be an online enthusiast group for toilet brushes and tape and granite blocks for curbs? How would you know if there was a new store to buy those things? Would that store having a sign that included what they sold constitute advertising? Could your local fish shop put a sign in the window advertising the weekly special? Could they post a picture of it online? Obviously circulars would be advertisements— would catalogs constitute advertisements? What would inspire any innovation at all if there was no way for anyone to discover some new competition existed? How would stores know that manufacturers and distributors existed? Is packaging advertising? Is there a limit to where you can place packages? Show them on the Internet? Do you really think those enthusiast communities wouldn’t be chock full of industry voices? Do you think they aren’t already? Do you really think your process is totally objective?

There are a lot of shitty practices in marketing and advertising. Especially with data-driven marketing, I might be the harshest critic I’ve encountered. But advertising at its core is just telling people that products exist. That’s it. Capitalist societies don’t function without being able to communicate that products exist, but even communist countries have (and always had) advertising to tell people that things existed.

I abhor many practices in marketing and advertising, but at some level, companies must be able to tell people that they have a product to sell. I have never encountered anybody that suggested a reasonable replacement that would work for everything from computers to condoms to lettuce to bars to bakeries to cars to cleaning services to email hosts to edge network caching to hobbyist clubs to camp grounds.

panstromek• 1 year ago

Some good points, though most of the problems are pretty well known, so it would be more helpful to try coming up with solutions. I think the real insight is in the first section:

...so we end up with a zero-sum game instead (or really negative-sum, if you count the externalities). If you have competitors, you can't not participate.

Advertising is basically a moloch trap, so it probably has to be solved by regulation to fix the incentives. Solving these kinds of problems well is pretty hard, so I think it shouldn't be surprising that they are not solved yet.

GDPR is doing an excellent job destroying some of the most privacy-invasive practices of the adtech industry

I disagree pretty strongly. I plan to write a bit more detail about this at some point but shortly I think GDPR is a net negative. It places too much burden on the user, while the burden should be on the adtech companies. I also don't like how it bundles all the surveilance stuff under a single consent (per company). This is giving the user a choice to accept what they hardly know the real consequences of and also giving the companies a strong incentive to manipulate the user to get that consent. In terms of fixing incentives, GDPR did pretty much the opposite.

It's also incredibly vague, so it's a nightmare to develop around, and limits legitimate use cases. The end result is that we still get surveilled, but we now also have to click through cookie banners and consent forms and small businesses have to spend enormous resources to deal with it even though it was supposed to be a measure to tackle big tech companies. Worse than that, walled gardens like Facebook and Google have advantage over normal websites, because they have to ask for consent only once during registration.

talkingtab3• 1 year ago

The first comment (now) quibbles about the definition of advertising.

The second comment (now) quibbles about the use of the word cancer. (there is benign cancer).

Advertising (whether it uses tracking or not) can be defined as the intention of convincing someone rather than providing information. Intent is to convince. PROPOGANDA.

The intent is for the target/prey/victim to be unable to distinguish the truth value.

So here we have a first problem. Is the intent of the first comment on HN

"Most of the arguments .. are not about 'advertising' ..."

made to help me understand the article better? Or are they made with the intent of causing to me doubt the article (or even not to read it).

The same question can be asked about the second question. Ad infinitum and nauseaum.

THAT is STAGE 1 social cancer. I can no longer trust the intention of posts on HN.

STAGE 2 is that I can no longer trust the INTENTION of any media.

Do I want a recipe for cookies? Use the "garrble" to search. Can I really believe that this recipe has ever been made by the person/bot/AI that created it?

STAGE 3. Human societies and Communities are founded on trust. The ability to come to a common understanding of a situation and act collectively. STAGE 3 is when communities and societies no longer function.

The internet has STAGE 2 cancer and some STAGE 3. Since our society in the US depends on the internet ....

Well you cannot trust anything I say, I could be an AI for all you know. And probably my definitions are wrong, my understanding of stages of cancer is faulty, etc.

Here is my 2cents. The article vastly underestimates the damage and dangers, but is definitely worth a read.

nh23423fefe• 1 year ago

Advertising (whether it uses tracking or not) can be defined as the intention of convincing someone rather than providing information. Intent is to convince. PROPOGANDA.

This is pointless moralizing pretending to be clarifying or demarcating.

If I write an essay about climate change to convince you to vote/protest/purchase/boycott <anything> then I will use information to create an opinion in you.

All communication exists to alter the experiences of your interlocutors. You can't hide behind "good intentions" to demarcate. Labelling persuasion as propaganda, is itself propaganda.

chefandy8• 1 year ago

One of my least favorite tendencies of software developers is assuming they can pull apart non-technical/mathematic problems involving human complexity, even at a societal scale, with a series of logical thought experiments like they’re debugging software, and that their “bug fixes” and doc updates would tidy everything up with people as effectively as it does with processes. As complex as software can be, it hasn’t a sliver the complexity of human interaction on a small scale, let alone societally. The developer mindset often isn’t effective enough in reasoning about human behavior to make effective user interfaces for software they created.

When you start classifying entire categories of human interaction and societal structures in concrete stages based on a combination of a priori reasoning, gut instinct, anecdotes, and ‘common knowledge,’ there’s a good chance your words are portraying the boogie men in your head rather than any of the very significant and consequential problems in our society. There are entire fields that study complex topics you casually wield in your assessment— they’re probably a good place to start if you honestly think your gut instinct about forum posts on advertising can be meaningfully generalized to societal structures on a whole.

talkingtab3• 1 year ago

As is true for many people, I have found myself in the terrible situation of having acted with the best of motives, only to find later that my actions were harmful to others. The question is always, what do we do when that happens? How to we look at ourselves in the mirror? This is an ethical, not moral issue.

One choice is simply denial, but I do not like myself when I choose that. Another is not to act because there is never a guarantee that our actions will not be wrong. The stand up choice in my mind is to own up to our mistakes and failures and fix things to the extent we can.

We have developed a business model for the internet that is indeed a cancer on communities, on societies. On the lives of those around us. This was not with evil intent - which would be inexcusable. We just did not know better. But now we do. To ignore this fact, deny it, etc is understandable. But you now know this to be true or that it is possibly true. And in order to be stand up people we need to understand whether this harms others. And we fix it.

And really is the Advertising business model the best we can do?

andrewinardeer• 1 year ago

Indeed. On my last LSD adventure where I suffered ego death it became apparent that advertising is an unavoidable and indidious artifact of capitalism.

Advertisers have the audacity to attempt to steal people's attention when they really need it elsewhere. This may include billboards in such times as when their victim is controlling a 1.5MT machine at a velocity of 100km/h on the freeway. The advertisers, in this case don't even bother to ask for permission.

Or when a media outlet colludes with advertisers to pretend an article is "news".

The Super Bowl is basically an advert interrupted by football.

God knows how problem gamblers or drinkers manage to consume media without being triggered with all the gambling or alcohol ads. It's a disgrace.

robertlagrant10• 1 year ago

it became apparent that advertising is an unavoidable and indidious artifact of capitalism

It's an artifact of humans, not of capitalism. Plenty of people[0] use advertising who aren't capitalists.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_in_the_Soviet_Union

ngriffiths3• 1 year ago

There are two major things missing:

1) No one actually likes this stuff, and it still exists everywhere, so it must be worth it. I feel like the article is a broad list of the author's least favorite aspects of today's information/social/economic environment. But those are just the cost of consuming all our favorite content for ~free, right? It's like saying "I think this price is oppressive, and although I am willing to pay for it, I think we should all try really hard to lower the cost."

The privacy stuff stands out because it isn't transparent to the user, which is maybe the worst part about it. Like if everyone knew what data they were providing and exactly how it was used, it wouldn't feel so abusive.

2) The size of the company has to be a major factor here. If your local shop takes out an ad in the local newspaper, I don't care what weird psychological tactics they use, does it really hit the same way? "That's just the shop down the street, why are they being so weird." Conversely, is there any ad from a massive company that doesn't come across as "this is how we want you, our loyal subjects, to see the world?"

danaris6• 1 year ago

so it must be worth it.

...To someone.

That doesn't mean it's worth it to society.

No one actually likes muggings, and they still exist everywhere, but that doesn't mean that our society would be worse off without muggings.

No one actually likes the flu, and it still exists everywhere, but that doesn't mean that our society would be worse off without the flu.

The idea that "it's still around/common, therefore it must be valuable" requires subscribing pretty hard to a version of free-market ideology that ignores a lot of objective reality.

ngriffiths3• 1 year ago

I don't see it as subscribing to free-market ideology - more like "every bad thing has a certain prevalence, and that prevalence is a policy choice."

The flu exists because we don't aggressively isolate/contact trace people who get the flu, but it isn't that prevalent and results in few deaths because of how much we invest in vaccination, hygiene, and medical care.

The muggings continue because we don't spend the insane amounts on law enforcement and surveillance that would really be required to eradicate them.

Also, these examples are different in another way - few people get mugged or get the flu, but literally everyone consumes ads daily. I think a lot of people dislike ads but I'm not sure I agree that there is a strong desire to dramatically reduce or change them - people seem happy to complain but pretty hesitant to pay actual money to reduce them.

Ukv6• 1 year ago

Advertising is "worth it" in the same sense as sites with JS crypto miners. 10¢ of resources are wasted to cover 0.1¢ of operation costs.

TeMPOraL3• 1 year ago

No one actually likes this stuff, and it still exists everywhere, so it must be worth it.

I believe I covered that too, but maybe not explicitly enough. The root of the problem is that engaging in bad practices is a) allowed, and b) is profitable on the margin. In a competitive environment, this creates a zero-sum game, and that alone is enough of an explanation. Quoting myself from the article:

If you have competitors, you can't not participate.

But those are just the cost of consuming all our favorite content for ~free, right?

It's not like we're being given much of a choice. Most people have less money than they need to satisfy even just the reasonable needs and wants, so being extremely price-sensitive is the default state for customers. In this environment, "free with ads" is a one-way strategy: it's impossible to compete on price with "free", so once someone goes for this model, all their direct competitors are forced to follow suit. It's why I see "free + ads" as an extremely anti-competitive move: it prevents any other business model from working.

The size of the company has to be a major factor here. If your local shop takes out an ad in the local newspaper, I don't care what weird psychological tactics they use, does it really hit the same way?

It can be a factor, but I think its effect is often inverse. Large companies are a big, fat target for lawyers and regulators; there's only so much they can get away with these days. Small businesses can and do get much more scammy without repercussion, because their impact is much smaller and localized, and they're individually too small a target for the legal system to bother.

Also let's remember that, while small local companies are small and local, there's also a lot of them. And even as their "weird psychological tactics" affect only few people in each case, it isn't much of a consolation when you're one of those people.

disambiguation2• 1 year ago

The chicken and egg problem of this is that many early / young websites turned to advertising as a way to keep the lights on. This makes something like a federated ad-free internet a flimsy proposition. Which only leaves walled gardens and charity. I think we won't see change until ad blocking becomes mainstream.

capitanazo77• 1 year ago

Cáncer in chatgpt will be the MOST destructive cancer ever.

That’s because it sounds like a friend you trust and tell your secrets.

“Sounds like you’re depressed, here’s recommendations from travelapp”

p3rls• 1 year ago

Eh, I run an ad-supported website that employs and has had to fire people because of adblocker fluctuations before.

I would kill to get a few regular sponsors and not need an ad platform but I've been literally able to only find one sponsor after almost a decade. No one wants to pay without tracking, especially in emerging markets/niches.

maxden• 1 year ago

for interest, also posted in 2019 when it was published. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20577142

Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

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