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| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Vietnam bans unskippable ads
gverrilla wrote 2 hours 36 min ago:
Socialists countries, always in the forefront of basic human rights.
ongytenes wrote 7 hours 30 min ago:
I often blacklist sites that cover content with unremovable ads or has
unrelenting ads. They need a clear button that acknowledges I've seen
it and to stop annoying me.
bilekas wrote 7 hours 43 min ago:
This is such a good step.
> Online platforms must add visible symbols and guidelines to help
users report ads that violate the law and allow them to turn off, deny,
or stop seeing inappropriate ads.
The fact that this even needs to be written into law to force companies
into taking more responsibility with their advertisments is incredible.
motbus3 wrote 8 hours 25 min ago:
I feel no one really clicks on ads.
I don't understand about it, but they just feel to be there so they can
have a tracker for your habits
kypro wrote 9 hours 50 min ago:
I know this is a deeply unpopular opinion, but I don't get humans
sometimes. Why does this need regulating? Am I the only person who just
doesn't use services which do this?
This is so obviously a free-market problem. The reason these ads exist
is because there's a significant percentage of people who are happy to
put up with them and those people mean that products can be better
funded without requiring subscriptions.
If people want to use products with unskippable ads, then who cares?
This "I want X without Y" regulation is so stupid. You can't have X
without Y. Just go buy Z product and stop asking regulators to find
ways to keep you coming back to products of consumer-hostile
corporations.
fHr wrote 10 hours 32 min ago:
Unfathomably based
UnreachableCode wrote 10 hours 37 min ago:
While on the subject, does anybody know any good ad-blocking solutions
for mobile phones?
So far I have experimented with NetShield from ProtonVPN and [1] with
varying results. There are also features baked into certain browsers
like the cookie blocker with DuckDuckGo which works extremely well, and
UnTrap for Safari on iOS which allows for heavy Youtube web
customisation.
Also, shout out to Playlet on Roku. A privacy focused YouTube proxy for
the TV which blocks ads and even can identify sponsors, filler and
credit segments and allow you to skip these.
I am not involved in any of these projects, I just think they're cool.
URI [1]: https://nextdns.io/
SockThief wrote 5 hours 19 min ago:
[1] Blokada 5 is free. It blocks ads and trackers system wide. It
works in all games and apps I checked for the last 4-5 years.
Used to work with YouTube as well, but not any more. I use New Pipe
for that.
You're experience may vary depending on block lists you subscribe to,
but vanilla set up is already quite good.
URI [1]: https://blokada.org/
pacifika wrote 7 hours 18 min ago:
Firefox Focus has an extension build in that works with Safari
StefanoC wrote 10 hours 13 min ago:
Adguard works great. UBlock on Firefox also does the job.
jnovacho wrote 10 hours 19 min ago:
Firefox on Android has UBlock Origin available. But that covers the
browser only. I guess AdGuard and VPN might help here?
Myzel394 wrote 10 hours 22 min ago:
I am using Brave and YouTube Revanced on my android and I completely
forgot what ads look like
jacquesm wrote 10 hours 56 min ago:
Good for them, now they need to take it one step further for an even
shorter and better title. And we should all follow suit.
bwb wrote 13 hours 34 min ago:
I love this, I hope the rest of the world adopts it :)
125123wqw1212 wrote 15 hours 38 min ago:
Such ban, even if copied in other places, will probably lead companies
to display more small ads per showing.
It might also lead to more intrusive ads, as each user now has at most
5 second to see.
booleandilemma wrote 17 hours 18 min ago:
I wish the US led with stuff like this. More and more I feel like our
politicians just care about enriching themselves without trying to
improve our quality of life.
shevy-java wrote 18 hours 9 min ago:
We need this too in the EU.
Actually, there should not be ads to begin with. They always waste my
time. Thankfully there is ublock origin - which Google killed while
lying about why they did so. Everyone knows why Google killed ublock
origin (it still works on Firefox, but how many people still use
Firefox?).
anonzzzies wrote 18 hours 55 min ago:
5s is still too long. Immediate skip.
125123wqw1212 wrote 19 hours 28 min ago:
Note that this is most likely on paper only as they have zero power to
enforce this on Youtube / Facebook which are the most popular
ads-serving consumer services in the country currently.
The regulation will be enforce on domestic companies only.
fennecbutt wrote 19 hours 52 min ago:
Finally. I've seen the ad. I never want the product or service or (most
often) shitty misrepresented mobile game.
Advertising standards agencies in most Western countries are scum.
dusted wrote 20 hours 22 min ago:
So, is it vietnam or vienam ? because the headline says vienam.
nephihaha wrote 21 hours 22 min ago:
It's nice to read a case of government intervention making things
better for the public rather than just more surveillance and control.
And from Vietnam of all places.
wtroughton wrote 14 hours 47 min ago:
I'd make the case that turning their citizens into consumers like
America has done could be considered a national security risk.
stephen_g wrote 21 hours 33 min ago:
The main app I use with unskippable ads (usually for crappy games, ugh)
is FlightRadar24 - since it remembers where you were on the map, I will
always just swipe up and kill the app, and it's usually not to hard to
find what I was looking at again after re-opening. Of course that
wouldn't work with something with more state but I'm glad I can do
that.
canxerian wrote 22 hours 8 min ago:
[1] Feels appropriate:
What if we made advertising illegal?
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
catlikesshrimp wrote 22 hours 42 min ago:
Vietnam, not "Vienam"
fHr wrote 23 hours 10 min ago:
fuck yes, fuck APPLOVIN
luxuryballs wrote 23 hours 20 min ago:
*Vietnam mandates 5 second ads
henearkr wrote 23 hours 25 min ago:
Running ads unskippably: unspeakably sad.
henearkr wrote 12 hours 57 min ago:
(I managed to improve it.)
Running ads unskippably: unspeakably sad earning.
bambax wrote 23 hours 29 min ago:
Original title was
> Vienam Bans Unskippable Ads, Requires Skip Button to Appear After 5
Seconds
If we need to edit titles, could we at least take the opportunity to
correct obvious typos? (Missing the t in Vietnam)
dang wrote 22 hours 9 min ago:
Yikes! not sure how we missed tha.
Fixed now.
sedatk wrote 22 hours 27 min ago:
Paging @dang
Also submission titles can be edited in the first 5 minutes of
posting or so.
unglaublich wrote 23 hours 41 min ago:
I live an ad-free lifestyle and it is very serene.
knowitnone3 wrote 1 day ago:
2 words. adblock
knowitnone3 wrote 1 day ago:
US companies respond with 100 skippable ads per minute
aldousd666 wrote 1 day ago:
AdGuard as a local VPN also bans unskippable Ads without the pesky
legal enforcement baggage.
maelito wrote 1 day ago:
5 seconds... too slow. Ublock's better.
esperent wrote 17 hours 23 min ago:
This is primarily targeting mobile gaming which is huge in Vietnam.
maelito wrote 10 hours 59 min ago:
Ah yes, thanks.
SunshineTheCat wrote 1 day ago:
This is slightly off topic, but something I find myself wondering
pretty regularly: if ads are pretty much universally hated by every
human on earth, why do companies continue running them?
I get the obvious answer: "they work"
But do they? Do big companies have a real data-driven model to
demonstrate annoying ads leading to sales?
While anecdotal, I can think of a number of specific times ads slipped
through my ad blocker and I went out of my way to avoid buying anything
from those companies.
aldousd666 wrote 1 day ago:
I recently read about 'in thread' ads, like on Twitter, as being not
as effective unless they are 'brand recognition' ads. Like, they will
help you decide which one to pick when you are staring at two
fungible brands on the shelf, but they will not convince you to buy
something you have never heard about before, especially not from a
direct click through. So while Ads work is true, in many ways, they
don't in many others. The brand damage you can get from having those
in-thread ads is also real: Ads target the user, not the thread, but
by showing up, users associate advertisers with the thread. If you
were in some argument about dictators taking over, and suddenly a
product pops up, you may assign the negative energy you have toward
dictators to that brand as well.
archon810 wrote 1 day ago:
What's with the weird duck that flies out from the top right into the
bottom left of the screen when you first open the article?
tannhaeuser wrote 1 day ago:
Any advance in JavaScript and outrageous browser complexity is cheered
at here on HN, but waking up to the fact that their actual purpose is
unskippable ads and browser monopolies is not so funny.
explosion-s wrote 1 day ago:
vie*t*nam?
xp84 wrote 1 day ago:
If you were giving out free cookies at the front of your store intended
to thank shoppers for coming in, and someone reaches in and grabs one
while running past, that's an ad-blocker. Not the most ethically
justifiable[1], but legal. This law though is saying that if you have a
person at the door who makes sure you are at least browsing the store
before giving you a free cookie, that practice is now illegal. This is
utterly nonsense to me. Does the Vietnam constitution contain a right
to free VOD? How do TV broadcasters get away with it, given they're
riddled with "non-skippable ads" -- about 17 minutes per hour of them!
[1] if you want to dispute this, is it just because you're thinking the
store is run by a big company you don't like and that you feel rips
people off? Does it change though if your mom baked those cookies to
give out to try to get people to shop in her little boutique that
barely makes enough money to cover rent? The point is just that it's
not universally justifiable. I don't care if you block ads (I block
them too) or take free samples from stores.
nicbou wrote 1 day ago:
So I really hate ads and either block them or avoid the product
altogether. My tolerance is very close to zero.
But is it the government's job to regulate good user experience? Are
unskippable ads a social problem that must be regulated away? I am the
polar opposite of a libertarian, but to me ads are the alternative to
other means of monetisation. They support things that are free to use
but not free to operate. The transaction is consensual and not
unavoidable.
batrat wrote 1 day ago:
So I have only one subscription: Youtube because of family/kids and
bonus YT music.
For the rest: adguard phone/pihole home, frosty instead of twitch,
newpipe instead of youtube(I hate the interface), infinity instead of
reddit and a lot more alternatives for social media. Also using
xmanager for some apps ;). I have zero ads on my phone or my pc. I
disabled the ads once for my wife, she instantly yelled at me to enable
it again :).
aaronday wrote 1 day ago:
Another step towards Blipverts from Max Headroom.
alex_young wrote 1 day ago:
Where is Vienam? Probably next to Camboia?
p0w3n3d wrote 1 day ago:
On the South Chia Sea
FuturisticLover wrote 1 day ago:
I like how the country is taking bold steps. This is a great move.
apparent wrote 1 day ago:
When I was traveling in Asia I was sometimes on VPN and sometimes not.
I noticed that when I was not on VPN I got a lot more unskippable
youtube ads than when I was, even though I was using the same browser
and adblockers.
Apparently Google knows how to circumvent adblockers, and they're
testing these tools in certain markets.
Babkock wrote 1 day ago:
This "Vienam" sounds like a nice place!
engineer_22 wrote 1 day ago:
And just like that, millions of disillusioned youth embraced communism
...
dwa3592 wrote 1 day ago:
It's Vietnam.
mbix77 wrote 1 day ago:
Refreshing to see.
Makes you wonder what we could achieve if we all just started to say no
to enshitification of the world.
just-working wrote 1 day ago:
I <3 Vienam
amatecha wrote 1 day ago:
Interesting, the link title was revised, but "Vienam" spelling remains?
What?
Cort3z wrote 1 day ago:
Are there a total ad time percentage metric in this law too, or will
they simply be watching many more smaller ads?
nexawave-ai wrote 1 day ago:
Oh, thank God, thereâs someone with common sense who hates ads and is
in a position of power to push this law through. Even if itâs only in
Vietnam, it sets a precedent for other countries to follow.
Thereâs absolutely nothing wrong with ads themselves; the problem
lies with the platform owners. YouTube, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime
Video, HBO, etc., use dark patterns to force users to upgrade to ad
free plans. These manipulation tactics are designed to push people into
more expensive subscriptions.
My prediction is that once platform owners can no longer make money
from unskippable ads, theyâll simply get rid of ad supported
subscription tiers altogether, like we had before.
mmh0000 wrote 1 day ago:
I am shaken to my core (sorry, wife hates that phrase, so I have to use
it everywhere) at how many posters here see ads.
I'm of the opinion that if you're seeing ads on your hardware, which
you paid for, your computer is broken. That advertisements are always
evil, always wrong, and never morally just. And everything possible
should be done to avoid, remove, or deface them.
To that end:
Andriod:
- Root your damn phone! And install AdAway
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdAway)
- Firefox + uBlock
- Don't install malware/spyware (Arguably, Android is spyware, but
custom ROMs fix it.)
iOS:
- AdGuard (free, works well, but not perfect, enable the "extra"
filters)
- Don't install malware/spyware (Arguably, iOS is spyware, but Apple
thinks you're a simp, so Good Luck.)
Windows (note, I don't actively use Windows, so these are the things
I've collected and used in the past, no idea of their current state):
- Seriously, you probably shouldn't be using Windows, but I "get it"
sometimes you have to.
- Don't install malware/spyware
- https://christitus.com/windows-tool/
- https://old.reddit.com/r/WindowsLTSC/wiki/index
- https://windhawk.net/
- https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
- https://wpd.app/
- https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
Linux:
- Firefox + uBlock and done.
- OpenSnitch if you run random executables from the Internet.
Firefox as a whole:
- https://github.com/arkenfox
Tepix wrote 9 hours 11 min ago:
You paid for your hardware. But did you pay for all the services you
use (like search engines, games, mail, other services)?
If not, how do you think they should make money?
(I don't like ads myself).
nananana9 wrote 7 hours 10 min ago:
> If not, how do you think they should make money?
Figure it out or go bankrupt, for all I care. They're the ones who
chose a business model directly adversarial to their users.
Plenty of games, mail and other services work without ads already,
I'm sure if we're one day lucky enough to see Google go belly up
someone will fill that hole as well.
globular-toast wrote 14 hours 25 min ago:
Yeah, it's crazy. Imagine if you let people into your home every day
to slap advertising posters on to your walls. This is obnoxious shit
and I don't understand how people tolerate it.
I'm beginning to wonder if many people are not comfortable with
simply being content. They actually want someone to come and tell
them why they aren't happy. Ads do that for them.
BeetleB wrote 22 hours 3 min ago:
> Root your damn phone!
I did for many years, and finally gave up. With recent Androids, life
in the rooted world is much more difficult:
Netflix automatically drops to a lower quality tier.
Many apps now just refuse to work on a rooted phone.
But the worst thing: If I want to update the ROM to get the latest
security benefits, I have to wipe my data.
Surprised you didn't mention something like PiHole.
mmh0000 wrote 21 hours 26 min ago:
PiHole is fine, I guess. I'm not a huge fan of it personally
because:
- It's local network only, and while I can VPN home, I don't
always want to
- It has a high maintenance overhead, at least for me. It would
block too much, then my wife would complain, and I'd have to spend
time figuring out the magic rule that was breaking.
- It's DNS-level blocking only, which is helpful but doesn't
cover nearly as much ground as just uBlock can.
- The DNS server has annoying preconfigured caching rules, that,
while I can work around, it was just more effort for something I
don't want to put more effort into.
It's far easier to just install uBlock and tell my wife, if
something breaks, just click the red shield icon, then click the
giant power button.
BeetleB wrote 21 hours 16 min ago:
But doesn't uBlock only block stuff via the browser?
I want to block ads from most apps.
mmh0000 wrote 21 hours 2 min ago:
A hosts file will do the same as pihole, but locally.
Buttttt, this goes back to my original post. DO NOT INSTALL
MALWARE.
Because that's my first rule, I don't use apps with ads.
Generally, if I can't do a thing from a standard website, I
probably don't need to be doing it. Otherwise, I have nothing
against paying for a good app. For example, I LOVE AutoSleep.
BeetleB wrote 20 hours 47 min ago:
On Android, it sometimes is hard to find a paying app to
replace an ads app. The ads model is much more lucrative, so
developers go that route.
godelski wrote 1 day ago:
> iOS:
- uBlock Origin now exists
- Settings > Apps > Safari > (General) Extensions > uBlock Origin
Lite
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id6745342698
- Alternatively, use Orion Browser (Kagi)
- Pros: a bit better ad blocking
- Cons: more buggy
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/orion-browser-by-kagi/id1484498200
I'd also recommend installing Firefox, logging in, but use Safari.
That way you can export a tab to Firefox where you can still get the
send tabs feature.
> Firefox as a whole:
Also check out BetterFox
- https://github.com/yokoffing/BetterFox
Side Note:
Phones are also general computer systems. Fuck this bullshit of
pretending they're anything less. If you don't have control over your
computer, your computer is broken. You don't have to be forced to
adhere to Big Tech's short comings.
> Andriod:
- Install Termux (from F-droid, not Playstore)
- It is trivial to write scripts to handle a lot of things that
work through third parties. Less than 100 lines. I find these scripts
*better* than many app alternatives and infinitely more trustworthy.
We're on HN, everyone here should be able to write basic scripts.
Hell, the AI could probably do these things easily (make it use
functions! Bash needs functions!)
Some ideas to show scope of what you can do:
- Automated backups: just a fucking rsync to your folders (god
fuck Apple, why can't I rsync my pictures on an iPhone!!!!)
- I have my script check for WiFi. If on my SSID I rsync
locally. If not, I go through Tailscale. If not on WiFi I don't
backup, minimizing my data usage. I'm lazy and just set the cron job
to run once a day, making each backup usually pretty small but can
cause larger backups when traveling
- rsync can also remove files from your phone if you're
concerned about storage.
- You can backup to multiple locations! Even if you use
google drive or whatever you should still rsync to your local
machine. Remember, Google photos doesn't save full resolution.
- Loss Prevention: Your phone hasn't accessed a set of
predetermined WIFI SSIDs in a set time period? Send a file to a known
computer (Tailscale), email yourself, or something else with the
device's coordinates. Add an easing function, check battery health,
and whatever info you want. Hell, even take pictures. You can also
make it play music or whatever to help find it.
- Replicate Apple's Check In:
- You can read GPS coordinates, SSIDs, and send SMS messages.
This is a lot easier than you think
- Enforce the actual WIFI SSID you want!
- Phone sometimes jumping on the wrong SSID? Have no fear a
few lines of code can tell it to fuck off!
- I had this issue living in graduate housing where a
university AP was near my unit. My phone would randomly decide to
join the uni's connection despite sitting a few feet from my router
and having better signal strength...
- Install Tailscale and get access to your local machines remotely
- Setup a raspberry pi at home and make an exit node that uses
pihole (suggestion: check out systemd-nspawn)
esperent wrote 17 hours 24 min ago:
How reliable are cronjobs in termux?
Does they get killed if you're low on memory?
Perhaps you could share these scripts somewhere? I'm sure other
people would find inspiration from them.
Personally I use Nextcloud for all my phone and computer backups,
it's working well for me.
godelski wrote 15 hours 13 min ago:
> How reliable are cronjobs in termux?
I mean it is no systemd... cron is cron. As long as termux is
running they run. Just make sure google doesn't kill it and that
it starts on boot. I haven't really had issues tbh.
> Does they get killed if you're low on memory?
Honestly, no idea. I've never pushed my device that hard. 8GB is
quite a lot for a phone.
> Perhaps you could share these scripts somewhere?
I should have posted with my realname account. I did put them in
my dotfiles but I can't share that repo without doxing myself. Is
there something you're specifically interested in?
> Personally I use Nextcloud
That seems like a good route too. Would you recommend this over
my setup? I find my current setup pretty easy tbh but hey,
nothings perfect and it can always be better, right?
esperent wrote 15 hours 8 min ago:
> Just make sure google doesn't kill it
That's what I mean. How can you make sure of that?
> Is there something you're specifically interested in?
No, I already have a setup that's working for me.
> Would you recommend this over my setup?
Well, it depends. Nextcloud is a full Google Workspace
replacement basically, including files sharing, office, notes,
kanban, calendar, emails, chat, video calls, photo management.
I use it for my business (and it's great) so I just use some
spare storage for my own backups.
Probably overkill unless you want the other features.
godelski wrote 14 hours 48 min ago:
> How can you make sure of that?
URI [1]: https://netzro.github.io/posts/2025/Jun/08/setting-u...
esperent wrote 13 hours 49 min ago:
Ok nice, noted in case I need it in the future. Thanks.
suriya-ganesh wrote 1 day ago:
I used to think this. and I do run some of your suggestions.
But how is the internet economy supposed to function without these
micro transactions, in the form of ads.
A lot of the abundance in software and technology we've seen in the
past decade is possible only through this mechanism.
OkayPhysicist wrote 20 hours 1 min ago:
Most things worth doing on the internet are either A) paid for B)
garner enough good will that they can be supported via some polite
pan-handling or C) cheap enough to operate that it's a perfectly
acceptable hobby expense for 1 person in your community.
Streaming services and E-commerce are the classic examples for A.
Wikipedia is the quintessential example for B. C includes pretty
much all the social outlets: Web forums, a Matrix server, private
game servers (public game servers fall under A), blogs, etc.
akersten wrote 20 hours 17 min ago:
Behavioral (invisible) analytics alone is the secret trillion
dollar industry that online advertisers want to distract you from
by focusing on the morality of ad blocking.
A good blocker should block many of those scripts too, but there's
no stopping server-side analytics at scale.
tcfhgj wrote 23 hours 21 min ago:
Other types of micro transactions and payments are possible
kibwen wrote 1 day ago:
> But how is the internet economy supposed to function
If the existence of a given industry requires the annihilation of
individual privacy and the elimination of free thought, then that
industry does not deserve to exist. Kill the ad industry.
suriya-ganesh wrote 14 hours 2 min ago:
And in the process kill all the possibilities the internet has
empowered?
Medicine being better delivered, all the research that has been
accelerated because of reducing compute and storage costs, the
list is infinite.
nananana9 wrote 7 hours 9 min ago:
You will need to provide stronger justification how "medicine
being delivered" hinges upon me watching a 60 second
unskippable ad before a YouTube video.
sumalamana wrote 13 hours 34 min ago:
Yes, kill it all. None of that is worth the panopticon that is
being built.
godelski wrote 1 day ago:
I struggle with this too. I struggle less when I remind myself of
how much the tech sector has grown in the past 20 years. Not even
just in power and control over critical infrastructure, but in
wealth.
Market Cap by Year
Year 0 1 2
3 4
2025 Nvidia (4.6T) Apple (3.9T) Google (3.8T)
Microsoft (3.5T) Amazon (2.6T)
2020 Apple (2.3T) Microsoft (1.7T) Amazon (1.6T)
Google (1.2T) Meta (777M)
2015 Apple (598M) Google (534M) Microsoft (440M)
Berkshire (324M) Exxon (325M)
2010 Exxon (369M) PetroChina (303M) Apple (296M) BHP
(244M) Microsoft (239M)
Some Billionaires...
Year Musk Page Bezos Ellison Zuck Buffett
Current 714B 257B 251B 244B 227B 148B
2024 195B 114B 194B 141B 177B 133B
2023 180B 79B 114B 107B 64B 106B
2022 219B 111B 171B 106B 67B 118B
2021 151B 92B 177B 93B 97B 96B
2020 25B 51B 113B 59B 55B 68B
2016 11B 35B 45B 44B 45B 61B
- There are currently 19 people worth more than $100bn!
- 4 of them are not American (Arnault, Ortega, Ambani, Helu)
- 27 of the top 50 richest are non-Americans
- 57 of the top 100 are non-Americans
- Bill Gates was first worth $100bn in 1999, becoming the first
centibillionaire
It is hard to feel bad when we've seen such an explosion of wealth,
especially over the last 5 years. I mean we had a fucking pandemic
and all the big players doubled (or nearly) their market caps. We
constantly hear about how these companies are having "money issues"
but then keep announcing record profits and record bonuses to CEOs.
> A lot of the abundance in software and technology we've seen in
the past decade is possible only through this mechanism.
So I don't agree that it is *ONLY* through this mechanism. Or that
if it is that it needs to be done to this degree. It is hard for me
personally to take pity when we're on the verge of having the first
trillionaire. Honestly, I don't care about a wealth cap and I don't
think there should be. It isn't a zero-sum game. But I do care
about the wealth floor. It is hard to think of that floor when just
the top 5 richest made $887B last year and $1.47T in the last 5
(2024 was a "good" year. Musk is 519B/689B so 368B/781B excluding)
and average people are feeling the pressure.
If times were good for the rest of us I honestly couldn't care less
if Musk became a trillionaire. Good for him ¯\_(ã)_/¯. But
while wages are stagnant, while the job market is very competitive,
we have major layoffs, while inflation is hitting average people
hard, and while they keep pretending they can replace us all with
AI; then hell fucking yeah I do care.
It ends up being a question about what is more right, than what is
right. I'd feel more conflicted if we all, or the majority of us,
were benefiting from the advancements. But sympathy is difficult
when we look at those numbers. [1] [2] [3] P.S. here's a fun game
for understanding how much a billion dollars is. It's difficult
because that level of money generates so much interest.
Imagine you have a billion dollars. You put it in an investment
account that earns 10% yearly interest, compounded daily. On day 1
you need funds, so sit on your ass and do nothing. After than, on
each weekday you hire a new employee at the cost of $250k/yr and is
also paid daily.
How many employees can you hire before you have less than a billion
dollars?
There's a lot of variants you can run on this kind of thought
experiment and I think they're helpful for understanding that level
of wealth.
URI [1]: https://companiesmarketcap.com/
URI [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_...
URI [3]: https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/
suriya-ganesh wrote 14 hours 0 min ago:
This is sort of my line of reasoning as well.
In my own petty way. I consider this my pushback against a system
that is pushing oppressive systems onto me. But really, I'm
partially glad this system works and partially annoyed that this
is the cost.
crims0n wrote 1 day ago:
I too struggle with this. It's not like people can't publish things
on the web without ads. If the author/artist wanted it to be free,
the ads wouldn't be there. So people who use ad blockers are either
making a moral choice to consume a paid service for free, or are
ignorant of how the internet economy works.
There is an argument to be made that advertisements are so
detrimental to the user experience and mental health of the
recipient that they are morally justified in blocking them.
However, that is debatable when you consider the alternative, which
is that the medium you are consuming may not exist at all if not
for the advertisements published along with it.
BeetleB wrote 21 hours 54 min ago:
> If the author/artist wanted it to be free, the ads wouldn't be
there.
That's a logical leap. The artist can want both things.
There are two payments involved:
1. The user pays with his time/attention
2. The ad company pays the site
In most cases, the author doesn't mind getting the payments from
number 2 even if you skip 1. Many, many sites explicitly point
out they don't find a it a problem if you install an ad blocker.
I don't have ads on my site. I'm OK with you consuming it for
free. If I put ads one day, I'll still be OK with it, because I
know I'll get some money regardless. It's practically free money.
I will not miss the vast majority of sites I go to that serve ads
if they all decided to shut down and/or go paid only. I should be
spending a lot less time on the Internet/phone to begin with!
tcfhgj wrote 23 hours 19 min ago:
If a medium doesn't exist because of the lack of ads and you
think it's a loss, you should have paid for it (which overall is
cheaper than paying though ads).
deckard1 wrote 1 day ago:
The day I stopped giving half a fraction of a shit was the day
Google served me malware in an ad. It was one of those fake
"Download" buttons on a very popular open source tool. I wonder
how many people have been harmed by that.
> medium you are consuming may not exist at all
I've realized that's not my problem. It's not like most of the
internet is healthy anyway. It's psychologically manipulative and
designed to keep you fearful, angry, spiteful, jealous, and above
all, depressed.
Fuck Google. Fuck Meta. And fuck every single last person working
for them.
Zanfa wrote 1 day ago:
About a decade ago, a mobile gaming company I was at, accidentally
shipped a full-screen ad without the art asset for the close button, so
the button was invisible. The ad basically forced users to visit the
in-app store for a moment before they could close it.
The sad part is that day we broke all previous daily revenue records.
fireflash38 wrote 3 hours 1 min ago:
I don't understand why we don't have a law that specifies an
operating-system level input that will always close an ad.
No hunting for tiny X's. No shifting DOM to dodge clicks. Hit Esc and
it stops. For iOS and Android force it as part of the UI, like the
volume buttons, back/home buttons.
esperent wrote 17 hours 28 min ago:
"accidentally".
It seems that quite a few mobile gaming companies make this mistake.
Or they "accidentally" set the click area of the button offset from
the graphic, or very very small.
gretch wrote 1 day ago:
Pretty sure this is a form of ad fraud and the people who paid for
those ads would be really mad at you e.g. if it were a CPC campaign
itsafarqueue wrote 1 day ago:
Vie(t)nam
swiftcoder wrote 1 day ago:
Is this just a really ubiquitous typo (google finds multiple headlines
with the same spelling), or is the rendering of "Vietnam" into English
spelling somewhat unstable?
acureau wrote 1 day ago:
Definitely a typo, see "vietnam-news" in the same URL.
wild_pointer wrote 1 day ago:
ubiquitous? "Vienam" (with quotes) shows this page as the first
result.
spullara wrote 1 day ago:
It is just this article.
Fernicia wrote 1 day ago:
The only real results on Google are the article and this HackerNews
post...
swiftcoder wrote 1 day ago:
Did you search "vienam" with the quotes? duck duck go turns up a
number of articles (albeit in at least one case the typo is in the
metadata, not the article itself)
guerrilla wrote 1 day ago:
Never seen it before today...
jonplackett wrote 1 day ago:
VPN use via Vietnam is about to go global.
crims0n wrote 1 day ago:
Not sure it will be worth the 300ms latency penalty.
jonplackett wrote 1 day ago:
300ms is a lot less latency than an ad
tracker1 wrote 1 day ago:
And this is why I run an ad blocker in my browser on top of a pihole
for my home. The whole situation sucks, and I'm often willing to pay
for an ad-free experience.
I still would never buy an X10 camera or any other of their products
given how they abused pop-over/under ads. Same for Sony for other
reasons... I can carry a product grudge for decades.
amatecha wrote 1 day ago:
Obligatory "We Must Destroy X10" moment! [1] :D
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF8NK6eruUs
elashri wrote 1 day ago:
I hate ads with all my heart. And I go out of my way to religiously
block them. I employ DNS blocking (through my own adguard home server)
on my whole network (I use this DNS server connected to unbound to act
as recursive DNS on all devices even when I am outside home). I use
ublock origin on Firefox browser (one of the forks that guts Firefox
ads and privacy settings by default) and on my iPhone I use wipr +
uBlock Origin lite. I have several userscripts to block ads one some
websites (i.e I block HN jobs posts).
I have a mental view that gets disrupted by ads and sometimes even
angry. In the rare moments which I use a computer or phone of a friend
or family without those, I really can't tolerate the suffering they go
through. My single best advice to people about using ublock origin and
Firefox resonated with everyone of them. I use it on my parents devices
as the best security measure that could be used.
Am I overreacting, maybe but I find my level of tolerance for ads is
zero no matter how much I agree that some of them are good or not.
Maybe this is the result of decades of self imposing dark patterns and
intrusive ads do to some people. I really feel sorry for majority of
internet users that do not use adblockers.
xvector wrote 1 day ago:
Companies are not obligated to provide you with services for free.
You are free to solely use non ad supported services.
tintor wrote 22 hours 8 min ago:
And he is free to use free ad-supported services and not watch ads.
elashri wrote 1 day ago:
They are free to block me if they detect I am using adblocker. It
is on by default. And for most services paying does not guarantee
that I do not get ads.
I am not under any obligation to let my client serve their ads
which is usually the number one malware vector.
noAnswer wrote 1 day ago:
Time for a military intervention by the US.
tgtweak wrote 1 day ago:
I saw one where it was 20 seconds before the skip/x appeared, then when
you hit X it pushes you to the app store, then when you hit back the x
button moves to a new location, then when you hit it, it puts you into
a 5 second "hey we're not done yet" ad cta... combine that with the
fact the ad is showing soap opera gameplay that doesn't exist in the
game - how is this even allowed?
timwalz wrote 1 day ago:
'Vienam'? 'this like "Quality Learing Center"?
bArray wrote 1 day ago:
I love the picture of politicians sitting by themselves, annoyed by
something as all other people are, and thinking "there's nothing I can
do about it". Good on Vietnam for actually doing something about it.
I got a taste of this from an EU MEP that I proposed something to, and
they replied "it can't be done because of the law". I then replied "but
you make the law, it's literally your job!" - and they looked at me,
blank faced. Imagine large rooms filled with people who mindlessly act
within a framework they dislike, whilst being the only people who could
actually change it, and not having the will to do so. It sounds like
some special type of hell.
I shudder to think how many people sitting in positions of power just
mindlessly continue doing a thing because of some form of complacency.
Madness.
stodor89 wrote 1 day ago:
"Hurr durr we're monitoring the situation."
radicaldreamer wrote 1 day ago:
An aside: One of the best uses for AR that I can imagine is real life
ad-block. Iâd wear AR glasses all the time if it would automatically
replace billboards and other ads with landscapes.
barbazoo wrote 1 day ago:
What a shit world but hey I'd probably buy that if I had to live
there.
I can't stop thinking about this rental apartment building in my city
that's on indigenous land so regulation around advertising doesn't
apply (BC) and they have a huge electronic billboard right in front
facing probably couple dozen windows.
I feel bad for the people living there, negatively about anyone
advertising there and negatively about otherwise very environmentally
conscious land owners for allowing this.
Aachen wrote 1 day ago:
Translated source: [1] Online advertisements only. I was curious how
they were going to implement that on TV!
It doesn't mention how much time must be in between ads
The law also prohibits advertisements that harm "national security" or
"negatively affects the dignity of the Party Flag, leaders, national
heroes [etc.]". Wonder if that's the real purpose here
URI [1]: https://thuvienphapluat-vn.translate.goog/phap-luat/ho-tro-pha...
esperent wrote 21 hours 25 min ago:
> Wonder if that's the real purpose here
I don't think so. Vietnam has been making great progress with privacy
and digital rights laws, at least in paper. I haven't been following
how well they actually enforce them though.
More likely there's a split in the government between a progressive
faction who created this law and the old school side, and they
probably had to add that text to get it into law.
kfarr wrote 1 day ago:
As much as this may have unintended consequences, I can appreciate the
motivation. I can't let my kids play iPhone games unless I turn the
device into Airplane mode. Almost all these pay to play mobile games
have 60 second interstitials after each level that can't be skipped.
It's insane. I've taught my kids how to force kill the game and reload
to get out. Definitely depressing compared to the PC shareware days I
grew up with.
tombert wrote 14 hours 35 min ago:
At this point, I've just decided that I'm going to actually pay for
my games on iPhone.
Stardew Valley cost me $15 on iPhone a few years ago, which is a lot
for an iPhone game, but I don't regret it at all. It's a direct port
of the PC version, meaning it's a complete experience, but also not a
single ad. No attempts to get me to spam my friends, no prompts for
me to buy gems to make my crops grow faster, no need to watch an ad
to unlock fighting in the mines. It's a game that I paid some money
for and then I got to play. What a concept!
I have a borderline-irrational hatred for ads and will very actively
go out of the way to avoid them. I understand the whole "no free
lunch" economic theory, so you could argue that they're a necessity
in some cases, but at this point I'm in a stable enough position to
justify paying a few bucks to play games uninterrupted.
Outside of Stardew Valley, I play Binding of Isaac and Organ Trail.
Both of them cost a few bucks but both also give you a complete,
ad-free experience.
fainpul wrote 7 hours 58 min ago:
> Organ Trail
Sounds interesting :)
tombert wrote 5 hours 15 min ago:
Itâs great. Zombie themed tribute to Oregon Trail.
SchemaLoad wrote 22 hours 45 min ago:
Could consider getting them one of those retro handheld emulators and
giving them real games.
xp84 wrote 1 day ago:
As a fellow parent, I cannot recommend Apple Arcade enough. My son is
only allowed to play games that come from AA. These games aren't
allowed to have any ads or in-app purchase. In return, you pay seven
measly bucks a month (though I have it included as part of a package
since we use iCloud and Apple Music and Apple TV+ anyway).
The games in AA are either made for Apple Arcade (some great indie
type games) or, very commonly, they are basically 'de-fanged' ones
from the regular App Store, with all the IAPs and ads ripped out.
Where there is an in-game currency that normally is scarce without
paying, they'll either just give you a bunch of it to start with, or
you will earn it naturally while playing.
I agree with you that the number of ads and purchase-pushing
mechanics in all regular App Store/Play Store games is insane. It's
all because a few whales who do buy these purchases are what pays for
the whole thing.
BeetleB wrote 22 hours 7 min ago:
Know of an equivalent for Android?
I'm leaning towards letting the kid play games only on an XBox and
never on the phone. Even if I get rid of the ads, I don't want the
games to be accessible wherever they are. Whereas with a TV, they
need to situate themselves in a dedicated place to play games.
xp84 wrote 20 hours 16 min ago:
> only on an XBox and never on the phone. ... I don't want the
games to be accessible wherever they are.
I couldn't agree more that a carry-anywhere gaming (or worse,
social-media) device is too corrosive to childhood.[1] My eldest
is only 7, so unsurprisingly he doesn't have a phone, and uses an
iPad. The size of it has a nice side-effect that it's impractical
to carry around, so it's only used at home and in the car.
When he's older, I plan to give him a phone that can only text
and call.
[1] Sure, some of us had things like Game Boy, but consider how
long those batteries even lasted, how bulky and limited the
devices were, how expensive games were, how there were zero
ads... It's really far from the same thing. I'd be fine with him
having a thing like a Game Boy.
xp84 wrote 20 hours 21 min ago:
I haven't used it much, because I was dragged kicking and
screaming back to iOS by family inertia (photo library and
iMessage), but there is this which bills itself as the same idea:
URI [1]: https://play.google.com/store/pass/getstarted
haritha-j wrote 1 day ago:
Interesting coming from a developing nation. One thing I've always
thought is, it may be vible to replace ad-funded free services with
paid services in developed nations where residents may be able to
afford it, but developing nations may be much more reliant on such free
services and could get priced out.
blauditore wrote 1 day ago:
Pet peeve: Skip/close button appears after a few seconds - bht it only
leads to another view whose close button is hidden for a few seconds
too, and sometimes in a different corner.
gip wrote 1 day ago:
I'm just wondering why governments think it's a good idea to regulate
ads. IMO that is something the market (e.g. the users) should take care
of.
xp84 wrote 1 day ago:
They aren't even regulating the ads, they're mandating that video
platforms show content without monetization.
Live TV had unskippable ads for like the last 80 years, and somehow
YouTube is different? Why?
I hate ads, I block ads, and even I think this is stupid. Idk what
Vietnam's constitution is like, but I think it's absurd from a free
country perspective. If I'm paying to serve you videos, why don't I
get to set the terms of that deal? Nobody is forcing you to go to a
specific website. If you think they're crap because of all the ads, I
likely would agree with you. I think blocking them can't be
criminalized, because after all it is your device you're using to
remove the ads. But how can you fine or punish a company for not
explicitly letting you take the content without complying with their
terms?
anigbrowl wrote 1 day ago:
The market inevitably trends toward the lowest common denominator. We
deserve better.
xvector wrote 1 day ago:
You can make better. But there's a reason non-ad-supported
businesses barely ever work out.
platevoltage wrote 1 day ago:
Best argument I can think of is the fact that half of ads on American
TV have the words "ask your doctor about ___" in them. Drugs ads
should be banned.
porcoda wrote 1 day ago:
Ad driven internet content is at least 25 years old, so itâs had
time to settle into the equilibrium the market will converge to. The
current state of things is precisely where the market drove it to, so
it seems pretty clear that the âinvisible handâ isnât going to
make it better and appears to favor making it worse. This seems like
an obvious case where an external force is required to push the
market in a direction it doesnât naturally want to land at.
oldjim798 wrote 1 day ago:
Beyond the ad driven internet, ad driven content has been at least
150 years old. Ever seen a photo of a pre-WW1 baseball stadium? Or
soccer stand? Covered in ads. Old newspapers are awash in ads. Day
time TV soap operas are so named because they were sponsored by
soap companies.
All a giant waste. Just propaganda blasted at our eyes and ears all
day, a drum beat of distraction attacks on our attention. Almost
all forms of advertising should be banned or regulated till they
are as quiet and unobtrusive as possible.
miltonlost wrote 1 day ago:
How, as a user, do I avoid getting ads shoved in front of my eyes on
buses? on billboards? on subways? on tv channels? at movies? in my
mail? in my email? in my search results? in my map app?
i'm just wondering what you want the "market" to do and how.
oneeyedpigeon wrote 1 day ago:
So instead of one minute-long ad, I'm going to get 12 I have to
manually skip? Thanks, Vietnam.
ryandrake wrote 1 day ago:
No, "thanks, company that is pushing 12 ads at you." The law is not
forcing companies to treat you badly.
lifetimerubyist wrote 1 day ago:
I always wondered about traditional television. People like my dad
still have it. It still has a shitload of ads. They're unskippable.
People don't really seam to care about those for some reason though.
rjh29 wrote 1 day ago:
My mum has a DVR so she tends to watch things later and skip the ads.
For this reason our TV provider is pushing a new box which has no DVR
capability and can only access things from streaming... they bill
this as an advantage since you don't have to explicitly record
anything. But it's all about adverts.
add-sub-mul-div wrote 1 day ago:
A television commercial hasn't been unskippable since the advent of
the DVR in 1999. If you do care about avoiding commercials, that's
where you have the most power to avoid it. It's streaming where the
service has full power to restrict control of navigation through the
video stream.
metabagel wrote 1 day ago:
At some point, I would imagine we will be able to request content
and have an agent skip or otherwise remove advertisements, right?
We'll have to wait for that, just like with a DVR, but it seems
worth it to me.
larodi wrote 1 day ago:
Was this posted automatically or why it reads Vienam? Without the T!
And the title also reads so?
hoherd wrote 1 day ago:
I posted it with the original article title. I'm not sure who changed
it, but yeah, there is a typo which also exists in the linked
article.
larodi wrote 11 hours 43 min ago:
Indeed it first had no T, and s.o. changed it. Also raises
questions reg the original title.
833 wrote 1 day ago:
This will push CPMs down, and therefore companies will make up for the
lower earnings-per-ad by showing more ads.
You can rearrange the deck chairs, sure, but more ads might be more
annoying than fewer longer ones.
simonebrunozzi wrote 1 day ago:
Title should be "Vietnam", not "Vienam". I would downvote the submitter
just for the reason that he posted this without correting it first.
stevewodil wrote 1 day ago:
The article title reflects the typo, it's an issue with the original
publication.
anigbrowl wrote 1 day ago:
So what? If something is obviously wrong it should be fixed.
marzell wrote 1 day ago:
"correting" lol
simonebrunozzi wrote 22 hours 23 min ago:
Ironic. But mine is just a dumb comment, not the title of the post.
secondcoming wrote 1 day ago:
I not too long ago received an ad on YouTube that was an entire episode
of the UK reality TV program 'Made In Chelsea'. I think it was
skippable but I couldn't believe that a) someone set up an ad campaign
to do this, and b) YouTube didn't detect it.
srean wrote 1 day ago:
And then I thought the poster skipped a t
ApolloFortyNine wrote 1 day ago:
How does television work in Vietnam? Is it all adfree?
DooMMasteR wrote 1 day ago:
nope but freeTV is limited to 10% total ad time, and payTV limited to
5%.
Maximum ad time per hour is 4 times 5 minutes and a single movie
cannot be interrupted more than two times, a show not more than 4
times.
News cannot be interrupted at all and programs shorter than I think
10 minutes neither.
begueradj wrote 1 day ago:
Both here and on the source post there is a typo in the title (Vietnam
instead of Vienam).
jason_s wrote 1 day ago:
I just uninstalled a game from my mobile phone this morning that had
heavy ad usage. It was interesting to note the different ad display
strategies. From least to most annoying:
- display a static ad, have the "x" to close appear soon (3-10 seconds)
- display an animated ad, have the "x" to close appear soon (3-10
seconds)
- display a static ad, have the "x" to close appear after 20-30 seconds
- display an animated ad, have the "x" to close appear after 20-30
seconds
- display several ads in succession, each short, but it automatically
proceeds to the next; the net time after which the "x" to close appears
after 20-30 seconds
- display several ads in succession, each lasts for 3-10 seconds but
you have to click on an "x" to close each one before the next one
appears
I live in the USA. The well-established consumer product brands
(Clorox, McDonalds, etc.) almost all had short ads that were done in
3-5 seconds. The longest ads were for obscure games or websites, or for
Temu, and they appeared over and over again, making me hate them with a
flaming passion. The several-ads-in-succession were usually British
newspaper websites (WHY???? I don't live there) or celebrity-interest
websites (I have no interest in these).
It seems like the monkey's-paw curse for this kind of legislation is to
show several ads in a row, each allowing you to skip them after 5
seconds.
S_Bear wrote 2 hours 0 min ago:
My favorite mobile game ad was for Jeep, which was 3 seconds of the
word JEEP on a black background. My wife and I laugh about it, but we
remember it. It was actually really effective in that regard.
My second favorite was for some pirate game, but the ads were
basically the setup for an adult movie, with tons of hammy
overacting. I thought they were so funny, I was really sad when they
stopped.
baxtr wrote 7 hours 49 min ago:
For people with iPhones I recommend an "Apple Arcade" subscription,
especially if you have kids. All games included in Arcade are ad
free. They have a big enough collection.
codetiger wrote 8 hours 6 min ago:
My most favorite annoying thing about ads is the 'x' close button.
They make it very small almost impossible to be perfect. I end up
clicking the ads 50% of the times. Been running PiHole at home
network for almost 8yrs happily. The ads come into play only when I
am traveling.
ulrikrasmussen wrote 12 hours 56 min ago:
> It seems like the monkey's-paw curse for this kind of legislation
is to show several ads in a row, each allowing you to skip them after
5 seconds.
We should just ban all online ads then. I honestly think we would be
better off. Yes, some things that used to be completely free would
start costing a little bit, but I don't think we would lose much of
value, really. And there would still be lots of different ways that
consumers could discover goods and services if we didn't have online
ads, it would just be via directories where consumers could go and
search for products instead of consumers being bombarded with
information noise all the time.
The freemium ad-revenue model is a local maximum which results in a
whole lot of shittiness.
cj wrote 13 hours 18 min ago:
And just so we're attacking the problem from both sides: the dark
pattern on the advertisers side is the inability to easily opt out of
in-app ads when advertising on Google's display network. For the
reasons you listed, in-app ads generate an incredible amount of low
quality clicks, yet Google makes it very hard to exclude yourself
from that ad inventory.
The only way I've found to do it so far is to manually exclude
yourself from every individual app category. IIRC there are over a
hundred categories and you need to manually go through and select
every category to exclude your ads from mobile apps.
jdwithit wrote 16 hours 1 min ago:
There's also the tactic where the layout of the page/app reflows
after a second or two, changing where the ads are. It drives me up
the wall. Go to tap on a button, SURPRISE, an ad popped in where the
button used to be 10ms before you touched the screen and now you're
forced into some company's site whether you wanted to see it or not.
csr86 wrote 9 hours 29 min ago:
This is my biggest frustration with ads. It will surely cause fake
statistics for ad campaigns too: 99% of time when I click ad, it is
by mistake.
Vedor wrote 19 hours 48 min ago:
Some time ago, Google AdMob started using a new format ads - two
videos, one immediately after another, unskippable for the first 60s,
sometimes more. You know how they called them? "High-engagement ads".
On some level, it's hilarious.
abustamam wrote 1 day ago:
I'm OK with a unobtrusive banner ad. I hate forced ads that get in
the way of my flow (whether it's gaming or reading or work). I hate
forced ads that can't be skipped.
I understand the reason for these (they often have an IAP that will
remove ads, so the more annoying the ads the more likely folks will
be tempted to buy it). But doesn't make it ok. I usually just leave a
one star review and uninstall.
BrenBarn wrote 1 day ago:
> It seems like the monkey's-paw curse for this kind of legislation
is to show several ads in a row, each allowing you to skip them after
5 seconds.
As is often the case I think that means the restrictions should just
get even more strict, e.g., "no ad may ever be longer than X seconds
and no app may ever show more than Y seconds of total ads within any
24-hour period". Then add some extra clause like "any attempt to
circumvent or subvert these rules is punishable by fines up to 10x
the company's gross annual revenue, plus asset forfeiture and prison
for executives". People at companies should be deathly afraid of
ever accidentally crossing the line into abusive behavior.
elinear wrote 1 day ago:
A particularly egregious offender is Kalshi ads. They regularly play
for a minute, sometimes up to two minutes before they can be closed.
I would not be surprised if the incentives are in place for ad
networks to push for longer ads and for advertisers to create longer
ads.
drewg123 wrote 1 day ago:
they appeared over and over again, making me hate them with a flaming
passion
I wonder how much risk there is to brands due to this sort of thing?
I tend to feel the same way; are we just uncommon?
The only place I see ads is Amazon Prime Video (b/c I'm still irked
they changed the deal and added ads). I've come to hate those
companies whose ads I see over and over and over again and I've
resolved to never buy anything from them. I even used one of their
products regularly and switched to a competitor due to their ads.
Ntrails wrote 8 hours 36 min ago:
Can't measure it thus does not matter
(It absolutely matters imo)
socalgal2 wrote 1 day ago:
I uninstall all games with any ad usage.
The latest was "I Love Hue". It let me play 10 levels (nice) and then
put ads in. If they had just asked for $1 before showing the first ad
I might have paid but as soon as I saw the ads I just uninstalled.
Note: IMO "I Love Hue" is a $1 game. I'm happy to pay $$ for bigger
games and often do though on Switch/Steam, less on mobile.
mbirth wrote 1 day ago:
My wife played one of those unscrew games which showed lots of ads
in between runs. I convinced her to buy the ad-free package for $5,
so she doesnât have to endure those ads.
While the game indeed was ad-free after that, there was no progress
possible anymore as everything suddenly cost 3x the virtual coins
than before. Basically forcing you to shell out even more money to
buy their stupid coins.
Weâve refunded the IAP and that was that.
Natfan wrote 20 hours 54 min ago:
i don't understand why more tech savvy people don't use on-device
DNS blocking like with RethinkDNS
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote 1 day ago:
If are using Android, it's easy to block these ads with apps like
Netguard or even PCAPDroid
Then can use the game without annoyance of ads
As it happens, the data collection, surveillance and ad serving
strategies of the mobile OS vendors and their unpaid "app developer"
independent contractors are still subservient to application
firewalls and/or user-controlled DNS
This could change one day, it's within the control of the mobile OS
vendors, but I have been waiting over 15 years and it still hasn't
basisword wrote 20 hours 40 min ago:
In a lot of these games you need the 'coins' you get from watching
the ads to progress.
jonplackett wrote 1 day ago:
The funny thing is that any company that has their ad displayed to me
like this makes me just hate them.
erfgh wrote 7 hours 36 min ago:
So what? People hate lots of companies but still they give them
their money.
gtowey wrote 1 day ago:
This is why instead of specific legislation that winds up being a
cat-and-mouse game with companies, the practice of creating
specialized agencies with a general charter and delegating the
specifics to them is often employed.
But it's also why this administration is dismantling those agencies
as fast as it can -- without them the legislature will always be
hopelessly behind on proper regulation.
wizzwizz4 wrote 1 day ago:
"This administration" being the US, I assume. Note that the article
is about Vietnam.
vunderba wrote 1 day ago:
My absolute favorite is the smaller âpicture in picture adâ that
gives you a way to immediately dismiss it with a âXâ that looks
like microfiche - the cynic in me assumes that this is so the average
user will fat-finger it by mistake making it look like a conversion.
lloeki wrote 1 day ago:
You missed one of the worst: mandatory interactive ones.
My wife is a sucker for these horribly generic flashy F2P puzzle-ish
games. There are these ads that pop up every N action or something;
some of these look like a mini-game and are actually an ad for
another of those F2P games, and you have to play the mini-game that
showcases some dumb simple mechanic of the game it advertises for a
little bit before you can dismiss the ad.
Some come complete with two trivially easy levels ONLY 20% OF PLAYERS
CAN PASS SOLVE THIS that glorify you OMG YOU HAVE SUCH HIGH IQ then
one impossible that taunts you into installing the game.
The predatory dark patterns are so obvious they should be trialed to
oblivion but no apparently this kind of abuse is legal.
basisword wrote 20 hours 41 min ago:
You don't have to play it. You can but you don't have to. The skip
or close button will appear after a set amount of time (like in any
video ad). It feels like you need to play or you'll be stuck but
you won't.
pc86 wrote 23 hours 57 min ago:
Some of these ads are annoying, almost all of the them are dumb,
but if you think they're abusive, I don't think you know what the
word abuse means.
Forbo wrote 6 hours 46 min ago:
If you don't think lying/tricking/manipulating people is abusive,
then you might want to reflect on that.
bloqs wrote 13 hours 10 min ago:
the word is ab-use and it means to misuse
ImPostingOnHN wrote 15 hours 39 min ago:
abuse
noun
/ÉËbyoÍos/
1. the improper use of something.
georgefrowny wrote 1 day ago:
I don't think I'm especially stupid and I try very hard not to
interact with ads more then I have to, but I have often found it
impossible to escape those ads without ending up being delivered to
the app store page.
Maybe I didn't notice the X in some part of the display or
whatever, but even if by making a concerted effort to not do it,
you still "convert", their click though stats must be crazy.
jason_s wrote 1 day ago:
whoa -- I've never run into these. I've seen interactive puzzle
ads, but the "X" to close always pops up in 20-30 seconds.
Melonai wrote 1 day ago:
I noticed an interesting hybrid â you get an interactive ad, if
you interact with it, complete the level, engage with the ad etc.
you get the close button immediately, if you idle you have to
wait ~30 seconds. Feels very deplorable to me.
shaftway wrote 1 day ago:
Google's AdMob has been doing these. Often it's something
simple like completing a puzzle. I hate that I prefer these ads
because it shortens the time until I get back to my game.
wvenable wrote 1 day ago:
I have a turn-based game that I play with remote family and after I
play my turn, I swipe the app off (force close) so I don't have to
see the ads. It used to be that I could just switch away to skip the
ads but they must have gotten wise to that because one day it stopped
working.
pluralmonad wrote 1 day ago:
I know plenty of folks here make lots of money off it, but ad tech
is straight up malware. I got lucky and found uBlock Origin many
years ago so I did not get slowly boiled in worsening ad tech. I
can't believe what people put up with just to not pay a few dollars
for software they use daily. Not to even mention that the worst
part of it all is ad tech has ruined the internet beyond repair.
Aerroon wrote 1 day ago:
Because a few dollars here and there very quickly adds up,
especially for people in poorer countries. It's also much harder
to get people to spend money online. I bet if you could
physically buy the suffrage for $1-5 people would be far more
likely to pay for it.
immibis wrote 1 day ago:
What about the ones that automatically open the Play Store to the app
they're advertising after the ad? I would've thought it's against
Play Store ToS to manipulate view count, but clearly Google has a
conflict of interest.
inglor wrote 1 day ago:
You likely turned off any privacy invading feature and didnât let
the app track across apps.
The fact you are getting irrelevant ads is a good thing that
indicates that is probably working.
UltraSane wrote 1 day ago:
I discovered that the samsung good lock sound assistant lets you mute
all sound from specific apps and allow specific apps to never have
their sound be interrupted. So it mute games and have audiobook
players to always play audio and this lets me listen to audiobooks
while playing games and never have the adds interrupt audio.
ksaj wrote 1 day ago:
Some "news" sites are so annoying about their ads, I just close the
tab and google for someone else's version of the story. I block sites
that show up in my news feed often but display more nag than content.
I'm sure in their mind, they don't care about me leaving. Apparently
more than enough people put up with it to keep the site viable.
SoftTalker wrote 1 day ago:
lite.cnn.com is the best lightweight news site I know of, though it
is still CNN and probably more US-focused.
unleaded wrote 23 hours 20 min ago:
impressive... let's see the page source
zie wrote 23 hours 59 min ago:
There is also
URI [1]: https://text.npr.org
shaftway wrote 1 day ago:
I can tell you how the ad companies will implement this. For Rewarded
ads (the longest ones, that are at least 30 seconds, and sometimes as
high as 60 seconds), they'll move to that succession model, but the
succession will take you at least 30 seconds. Oh you skipped an ad
after 5 seconds? No worries, here's another ad. You watched the first
ad for the full 30 seconds? No more ads for you.
It'll probably be a win for them.
lucianbr wrote 1 day ago:
If it's a win they would do it already, no? There's no law against
it, is there.
shaftway wrote 1 day ago:
I've worked for two companies that did mobile ads, and one other
that did web ads.
The web ad company was hampered by poor engineering and
management that had big glory projects that were poorly conceived
or too ambitious; they no longer exist.
The first mobile ad company was constrained by ethics and
prioritized a better experience over earning that last fraction
of a percent (though most people on the outside would disagree on
principle).
The second mobile ad company had a decent API designer early, and
managed to capture a specific role in advertising. That role gave
them access to data that ended up being wildly useful for
purposes other than it's original intention, and they've done
well based on that. But they are completely mired in in-fighting,
executives who only bother to come in and be seen for quarterly
results, and they don't do *anything* unless someone else does it
first. They don't have a functional legal department and
engineers are afraid that their head will be on the block if
something goes wrong, and everyone is afraid of killing the
golden goose.
So no, I suspect it hasn't happened because almost nobody thought
of it, and the people that did are too afraid to be a
trailblazer.
And we've already seen the precursors for it. Chaining multiple
short ads together to add enough value to be worth it for an
in-game reward is the beginning of it. It's not a very far leap.
sandworm101 wrote 1 day ago:
I have fallen asleep watching youtube many times. I swear i have
woken up in the middle of 20+ minute ads. I thought it was a news
article about china when it was an ad. Who knows when the skip button
appeared. The few times i have seen these, it has always been a
literal fake news show about china.
pests wrote 1 day ago:
I've seen bands release music in those long ads, a complete movie,
a 2 hour podcast, and tons of the fake news stuff. I think for some
its a unique way to advertise and get exposure, others is just YT
farming adtime.
gwbas1c wrote 1 day ago:
Shortly before I started paying for YouTube, I remember seeing one
of those ultra-long ads. The ad seemed interesting, so at first I
didn't want to skip it. As soon as I saw that it was a looooong ad
I got into the habit of checking the length of an ad before I even
considered if it's worth watching.
Now I just pay for Youtube. I'm a lot happier that way.
bastardoperator wrote 1 day ago:
Time is money. Ten minutes of daily YouTube ads adds up to 5
hours a month. Premium costs $14, roughly an hour's work at
minimum wage. Trade one hour of labor for four hours of free
time. That's 48 hours back each year for $168. It's a no brainer.
Even if your wage is half of 14 dollars, you would still gain 24
hours back and it would still be worth it.
blibble wrote 1 day ago:
or install ublock origin and keep your money and the time!
while depriving google of revenue AND costing them money
win, win, win and WIN
gwbas1c wrote 1 day ago:
I watch YouTube on many devices through the app. At the time,
I was using YouTube music.
Aerroon wrote 1 day ago:
Also decreasing the likelihood of content that you like
watching gets made? The creator is being paid from that ad
revenue too.
blibble wrote 21 hours 11 min ago:
if my viewing actively cost the video creators money from
me watching I'd probably feel guilty and stop
but this isn't the case, I'm completely cost neutral to
them
but it does directly cost Google money... and I'm perfectly
fine with that
olyjohn wrote 22 hours 28 min ago:
Or maybe they will move to a platform that respects them.
Gotta start somewhere.
Aerroon wrote 21 hours 9 min ago:
They're on YouTube because it's the platform that gives
them the greatest chance of success. What other popular
video platforms do you know that give you 55% of the ad
revenue?
titzer wrote 1 day ago:
> I have fallen asleep watching youtube many times.
Interesting new opportunity for YouTube here. Detect your usage
patterns and near bed time show you increasingly boring content
until you fall asleep, then fill your head with subliminal messages
in these long ads.
rightbyte wrote 23 hours 51 min ago:
I fall asleep to YT sometimes watching speed runs when I have a
hard time sleeping. When I wake up it is mostly running live
streams of religious chants going in a loop. Hindu, muslim,
orthodox christian. Or some strange genre of a Japanese anime
girl making sounds.
rhdunn wrote 1 day ago:
I suspect that they are already doing that (or something like it)
as I've seen certain content appear at specific times/days.
pests wrote 1 day ago:
I'm a heavy YouTube watcher (My rewind said I watched 4500
different channels last year) and agree too. The content I get
recommended is different day vs night. It's also device
dependent (even when logged into same account) - my TV and
phone definitely have a slightly different algo.
cruffle_duffle wrote 1 day ago:
One of the smarter product decisions they made was to tweak the
algorithm to show different types of content based on time (and
device). If itâs past 9:30pm and itâs the bedroom tv it
suggests vastly different stuff than 6:30am on the living room
tv. And for good reason! Iâm not watching some slow
âadventures through the milky way at light speedâ video
when Iâm waking up!
Itâs very smart about that stuff!
stavros wrote 1 day ago:
Why would they help you sleep and take a gamble on subliminal
anything working when they can just do it when you're awake?
titzer wrote 1 day ago:
I'm just spitballing sci-fi here, but maybe subliminal ads work
better and their metric asston of computational models have
told them so.
Forgeties79 wrote 1 day ago:
They also do this with kidâs content on YT but they make it look
like a show basically. Might not happen on YT Kids, I basically
never use either, but the few times we pulled up YT proper Iâve
seen it happen. Get a few videos deep and they slip them in
i_am_jl wrote 1 day ago:
I've seen these advertisements too, also only when my phone had
been playing unattended for some time.
I have a (unsupported, unsubstantiated) theory that YT detects
phones of "sleepers" and pushes more profitable content with the
understanding it won't be skipped.
I've got a few spare phones, maybe I'll run an experiment.
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
I'm not sure why it would specifically be targeting "sleepers"...
there are a lot of reasons why someone might not skip ads...
people who are sleeping are probably the least valuable of them.
It could just as well be something super valuable -- like an
unattended kiosk device playing youtube to a crowd of people.
i_am_jl wrote 1 day ago:
Regarding the kiosk, I wholly expect that an unattended device
with YT on auto play will ratchet up the length/frequency of
ads as long as they're never skipped.
Someone who falls asleep watching YouTube will skip ads, unless
they're asleep.
The idea is that if YT can infer that someone is asleep
(location, no movement, no sound, low light, night) that they
can show the longest, most skip-inducing ads that they've got
since they know they won't be skipped.
The difference between the kiosk and the sleeper is that if the
sleeper gets a 20 minute ad at 2pm while they're eating lunch,
they'll skip it. YT is incentivized to show the most profitable
ad that someone won't skip.
The value in identifying sleepers isnt showing a long ad, it's
showing a long ad with the certainty that it won't be skipped.
intrikate wrote 23 hours 18 min ago:
Sure, but why would I, as an entity buying advertising space,
pay the same amount when YouTube is just going to try to show
them to people who are asleep, that can't see the ads, and
thus would have no effect anyway?
i_am_jl wrote 6 hours 15 min ago:
Your question boils down to "If I was buying a product from
a company, and they made it worse, why would I pay the same
price for it?"
Because YouTube has a functional monopoly on online video
advertising in a huge number of markets.
Enshitification is not just for YouTube's viewers and
creators.
Gabrys1 wrote 1 day ago:
I don't think they specifically target people who tend to go to
sleep. But, having worked in the ad engineering, I can imagine
they do know how often specific users skip ads and target ads
based on that property.
ksaj wrote 1 day ago:
With YT, it might be an account-specific metric. Ie: flagged as a
frequent sleeper. This would not surprise me, since they track
just about every other metric possible against your account.
You can have multiple YT accounts on a single gmail acct, but I
don't think that'll fool them. They know where you initially
logged in from. So you will likely need multiple gmail accounts
to do this kind of experiment.
i_am_jl wrote 1 day ago:
Good shout.
They don't have SIMs, they'll be connected to a VPN router, and
I'll create new Gmail accounts for each device, from each
device.
DrewADesign wrote 1 day ago:
My favorite most annoying ad tactic is the trick slowing down
progress bar. It starts off fast making it seem like itâs going to
be, say, a ten-second ad so you decide to suffer through it⦠but
progressively slows so you notice at like the 20 second mark youâre
only 2/3 of the way through the progress bar, so probably less than
halfway done. Murderous rage.
laurieg wrote 12 hours 39 min ago:
The positive version of this is clocks in escape rooms. You set
the countdown timer to be slightly faster for the first 45 minutes
and slightly slower for the last 10, so that people get more of a
taste of time pressure towards the end and a higher chance of a
"photo finish" which makes for a great fun story.
andrepd wrote 20 hours 24 min ago:
Uber (and many other apps probably) do a similar thing. A
completely deceptive progress bar that's basically an animation
that's AB tested for lowest perceived wait, rather than being an
actual progress bar in any sense of the word!
Everything is trying to scam you nowadays jfc
hiccuphippo wrote 1 day ago:
The Windows file copying progress bar prepared me for that one. I
don't trust progress bars anymore.
btown wrote 1 day ago:
As a full mea culpa, I once implemented this years ago for an
open-source project (non-ad-related) that could have an
unpredictable number of steps with unpredictable timing. We went
with an algorithm that would add a % of the remaining progress on
each status tick, so, while it would inevitably decelerate, at
least users would know that the processing wasn't just frozen.
It was a compromise that let us focus our limited attention on the
things our project could uniquely do, without needing to refactor
or do fast-and-slow-passes to provide subtask-count estimates to
the UI. I'd make those same choices again, in that context. But in
an ad context, it's inexcusable.
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
If the only purpose is to show progress and you donât known the
total number of steps in advance, itâs better to show
information about the current step and/or substep. Otherwise when
your processing actually freezes, the UI would still happily show
an advancing progress bar. Thatâs worse than even just showing
a spinner animation or similar.
btown wrote 22 hours 50 min ago:
If it froze and ceased emitting ticks, it wouldn't advance any
more - but the larger point is well taken!
SoftTalker wrote 1 day ago:
I've done something similar with a progress bar back in the early
days. The task needed to do 10 things, so when each one completed
the bar would move 10%. So the bar indicated completion in terms
of things that needed to be done but not really in terms of time.
It was quick and dirty and we had higher priorities but someone
insisted on a "progress bar" so that was the easiest thing.
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
Thatâs perfectly acceptable, in particular if you also
display âstep x of 10â, so the user knows the bar doesnât
indicate time.
wumms wrote 1 day ago:
Reminds me of Setup.exe
mrbonner wrote 1 day ago:
You mean like this:
URI [1]: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%...
Groxx wrote 1 day ago:
I'm fond of the ones with a fake close button, so tapping it just
launches the ad's site. Instant uninstall and 1-star.
(Yes, I know it's mostly the ad's fault, but there's no practical
way to punish them directly. So force apps to pick better-behaving
networks.)
thaumasiotes wrote 16 hours 12 min ago:
I'm not sure that is mostly the ad's fault. Hitting a target on a
touchscreen is hard to do. This seems like it's the phone's fault
first to me.
(If you're using a mouse, forget what I said. But I haven't run
into an ad where the close button didn't close it... if you were
able to click the close button.)
wsc981 wrote 16 hours 3 min ago:
On iOS I have seen ads with very small close buttons, so
clearly intended to cause people to miss-click. Buttons should
be 44x44 pixels, itâs recommended in the human interface
guidelines [0].
ââ
[0]:
URI [1]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-gui...
flexagoon wrote 19 hours 12 min ago:
This is usually against ad network rules, so if you're willing to
go out of your way a bit, you can screenshot those ads and report
directly to the ad network
kotaKat wrote 10 hours 21 min ago:
Difficulty is when you don't know what ad network it is, the
app hides the ad network they use, and refuse to disclose who
it is.
You got served an ad from "one of our partners". That's all
you'll get to know, and there's no mechanism to even report the
app's shitty behavior to Google or Apple (and they don't care
when the app becomes too large, either).
kaoD wrote 13 hours 3 min ago:
QA is something an employee should do, not me.
DrewADesign wrote 23 hours 48 min ago:
As a sometimes designer, i donât think thereâs any
distinction between punishing the ad and the company. The company
bought the ad, probably directed its creation, and decided what
its criteria was for success. 1-star away as far as Iâm
concerned.
josephg wrote 23 hours 8 min ago:
I feel the same way about newsletters.
âHey you bought socks that one time! Want more socks??â ->
Unsubscribe.
âHey itâs your weekly sock news! Whatâs new in socks!â
-> But I unsubscribed! Haha no, you only unsubscribed from the
âproduct releasesâ list. Not the âweekly newsâ list or
our 10 other fabulous mailing lists!
-> Report all emails from this domain as spam. May god have
mercy on your soul, cute socks.
rkomorn wrote 23 hours 1 min ago:
This is exactly something I hate about the current state of
things.
Interacting with a company/organization immediately turns
into a lifelong "legitimate relationship" that supposedly
entitles them to contact you forever and ever.
jdwithit wrote 16 hours 11 min ago:
I "love" the ones that randomly decide to reactivate
literally years after unsubscribing and never interacting
with the business again. The other day I randomly got an
email from a yoga studio I once bought my wife a gift card
from. We moved and neither of us has been there since 2021.
Why on earth am I suddenly getting spam 5 years later. I
get similar messages from hotels many years later too.
Sometimes ones I didn't even end up staying at, just
browsed. You can sense the desperation through the monitor.
hylaride wrote 11 hours 22 min ago:
I now militantly use appleâs âhide my emailâ
function for this reason, though it doesnât really work
when you âneedâ to give your email address in person
(I have a âjunkâ email address thatâs normally
turned off on my devices for those people)
brewtide wrote 19 hours 31 min ago:
Recently bought a GE oven. It had a minor problem and had a
few service appointments. Not a huge deal, life moves on.
Meanwhile, near immediately, they would love a review! They
want Participation in OUR new oven.
It's overwhelming, and most frustrating is it seems
'communication' is rapidly become a one way st.
nemomarx wrote 23 hours 32 min ago:
I think they mean they leave a 1 star review on the app that
was displaying the ad, who probably didn't directly do any of
that.
They did work with a bad ad network though so it's a valid
enough reason to complain imo.
DrewADesign wrote 22 hours 49 min ago:
Yeah, good call, but I honestly have no problem with that
1-star either. They canât say âwell we just opened the
garbage conduit and pointed it at your face⦠we didnât
actually MAKE the garbage.â Those ads are part of their app
experience, now. They published it, so theyâre âre
responsible for it. If it sucks I give it a sucky rating.
Groxx wrote 21 hours 43 min ago:
Yep. There's no other way to maybe-convince them to get a
different ad provider, because they're the ones that chose
it (probably because it paid the most).
immibis wrote 1 day ago:
IME it's a real close button but the ad opens the thing when it
closes, regardless of how it closes.
Groxx wrote 1 day ago:
No, I mean there are ads with a "close button" in the corner,
and then a few seconds later the real close button will appear
and it'll weirdly overlap it. Because the first one was fake,
just part of the image asset of the ad.
They're very very clearly click-fraud tricks, and most
platforms will ban them if they're caught. But by clicking on
the ad, it closes the ad, and there's no way to go back and
report them, nor incentive for ad-viewers to do so. By design,
IMO.
The whole industry runs on scams like this, there's no
incentive for large platforms to proactively block any of them
because they lead to money moving through them, where they can
extract their rent. They only move against the most egregious,
to keep fraud at the same barely-acceptable level as all the
others.
mbirth wrote 1 day ago:
> The whole industry runs on scams like this
Wasnât there an article here a few days ago about Facebook
specialising in hiding such malicious ads from testers and
law enforcement to maximise gains?
transcriptase wrote 17 hours 17 min ago:
Yes. Basically the internet version of the Volkswagen
emissions scandal.
if(testdetected == 1)
ecm.lowemissions
else
lmao.fuckyouregulators
red-iron-pine wrote 6 hours 59 min ago:
the difference is that the average rube and/or average
lawmaker have some basic understanding of how cars work.
petrol goes in, toxic gas comes out, so make toxic gas
less.
most of them have 0% understanding as to how data mining
works or how online ads (and scams) function
Groxx wrote 1 day ago:
Yep:
URI [1]: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-create...
mbirth wrote 10 hours 59 min ago:
And here's the HN discussion about it:
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46446838
jordwest wrote 1 day ago:
A common trick is that the first click on the X will go to the
ad, but if you return and click the X again it will close,
gaslighting you into thinking you just misclicked the first
time.
Another trick that Iâve noticed on the Reddit app is that the
tappable area is much larger for ads than normal posts. If you
tap even near the ad it will visit the ad
DrewADesign wrote 22 hours 45 min ago:
Also making the hit area smaller than the close graphic
itself is a popular one.
qwertox wrote 1 day ago:
Kind of like a genius idea. Though there should be a special place
in hell for app owners who want this in their app.
oneeyedpigeon wrote 1 day ago:
There's also the tactic of having different ad behaviours during
the same video. The first will be a 30s unskippable ad, the second
will be a single skippable one, the third will be 3 ads, one of
which you can skip, etc. It's ok on a mobile or if you're at your
desk, but if you're watching from a distance it gets really
annoying...
xoxxala wrote 1 day ago:
Mr. Beast on youtube is guilty of that. Matt Parker of Standup
Maths fame did an in-depth look at how that works. Whoever came up
with that type of progress bar must hate people in general.
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc0OU1yJD-c
transcriptase wrote 22 hours 47 min ago:
If you watch him on Joe Roganâs podcast he gives a full
overview of how every single tiny detail down to colors, length
of scene cuts, facial expressions, language, total length of
videos, time of day for release, thumbnails, sound effects, music
is extensively A/B tested to not only optimize for the algorithm
but for hijacking peopleâs attention as well. That weird creepy
face with the outline and uncanny smoothing arenât by accident.
Everything is intentional because he obsessively tests anything
that might give him even the slightest edge in a sea of videos.
The content itself barely matters.
jb1991 wrote 10 hours 47 min ago:
How do you A/B test on YouTube?
transcriptase wrote 1 hour 28 min ago:
A small number of creators have had testing tools provided by
YouTube for years.
He also changes the thumbnails and titles of videos once
published, sometimes up to dozen times in the first day.
He also has dozens of channels for different languages, so
can test thumbnails and other tweaks with those.
kotaKat wrote 10 hours 23 min ago:
Youtube lets you A/B test thumbnails as a creator and see
response rates, for instance.
URI [1]: https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/393332200/...
red-iron-pine wrote 7 hours 6 min ago:
posted 12/8/2025, 11:24:26 AM
So like a month ago. How did Beast A/B test before then?
kotaKat wrote 6 hours 52 min ago:
They give access to these features to their partners
before general release, but this A/B feature has existed
for quite some time now. Iâve seen various Patreon tech
creators run those A/B tests and see them discuss them in
their creator Discords.
intended wrote 6 hours 52 min ago:
Hasn't this been around for ages?
foresto wrote 19 hours 12 min ago:
It seems we're living a Max Headroom episode.
fooker wrote 19 hours 57 min ago:
Guests smoking weed A/B tested too? :)
everdrive wrote 21 hours 2 min ago:
>That weird creepy face with the outline and uncanny smoothing
arenât by accident.
I take your point, but I am still baffled why people find this
appealing.
GuB-42 wrote 18 hours 32 min ago:
It doesn't have to be appealing, it has to make you click.
Car crashes are not appealing, and yet it is something most
people are tempted to look at. Many people think of dopamine
as the pleasure hormone, not really, it is the motivation
hormone, pleasure is one way to achieve that, but so is
horror.
It makes evolutionary sense, if something horrible happens,
you better pay attention, to get prepared so that it doesn't
happen to you.
I don't know the details of the psychological response to Mr
Beast thumbnails, and I think neither does My Beast himself,
the analytics say it works and that the only thing that
matters to him.
DrewADesign wrote 18 hours 38 min ago:
Appealing isnât the goal. Catching someoneâs attention is
the goal. (Nobody thinks the balloons on the cars at the car
dealership look good but statistics prove that balloons sell
cars.) Then, triggering someoneâs curiosity, which is more
where the copy comes in. (You can increase your click count
with this one weird trick!)
Youâre subject to it every bit as much as me or anybody
else, but for whatever reason, we have different triggers
than the Mr. Beast crowd. People that think theyâre immune
to it after having it pointed out to them are likely just
less aware than most how their emotions are being manipulated
by things they donât even consciously perceive. Sales guys
love people like that.
eertami wrote 9 hours 38 min ago:
If you're aware of it and think you're susceptible then you
can make it impossible to be influenced by it. Ie, You can
disable all 'related videos'/feeds/home page on Youtube
with Unhook, and sponsored segments with SponsorBlock. I'll
probably never see a Youtube thumbnail for the rest of my
life, throw in Adblock and your exposure is extremely
limited.
> Sales guys love people like that.
You can also easily never speak to them. I know they exist,
but as a consumer I can't think of anytime I've had a sales
interaction with a salesperson. I understand that some
people do, and might even actively seek a salesperson - but
if I go to a physical store I already know what I want to
buy before I get there and the only interaction I might
have is to ask how to find the thing I want.
I know it's a common argument/appeal to authority that
advertising must work, because companies are still doing it
- but there are economists who think that it might not[0].
[0]:
URI [1]: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-...
andrei_says_ wrote 18 hours 40 min ago:
Maybe not appealing but interesting. Distinct enough from the
rest of the thumbnails on the page to trigger an impulsive
tap or click.
Retric wrote 20 hours 14 min ago:
Novelty goes a long way, old enough YouTube video are
optimized for their time period and end up looking stylized
in their own ways.
Fashion swaps styles fast enough most people canât afford
full wardrobes before it changes, which by default keeps each
style looking fresh.
Tanoc wrote 22 hours 25 min ago:
This seems like innately hostile behaviour. Not to other video
creators, but to his audience. Stripping as much as he can
using data and mathematics is the kind of thing engineers do to
pull more out of a machine, not something you do when you're
creating informal communications to other humans.
latexr wrote 20 hours 16 min ago:
> when you're creating informal communications to other
humans.
What heâs creating is fame and money for himself, the fact
that itâs by doing videos is incidental. Thatâs why he
also got into ghost kitchens, a game show full of corner
cutting, and a theme park in Saudi Arabia open for under two
months.
red-iron-pine wrote 7 hours 9 min ago:
in other words his business model is fuck you pay me
at least 50 cent, who got into rap strictly for the money,
made something fairly entertaining
mxkopy wrote 21 hours 14 min ago:
Itâs basically drug dealing. Which is fine if youâre
doing it for fun, but doing it to make money develops the
most antisocial parts of a person
orbital-decay wrote 22 hours 3 min ago:
Attention engineering is how the charts are topped. Media
producers knew this decades before the social media, and
perfected it by the late 90's. Avoiding extremely popular
stuff is just common sense if you want any real authenticity.
DrewADesign wrote 18 hours 41 min ago:
Oh, but then youâre the much-maligned hipster.
missingdays wrote 10 hours 22 min ago:
What's the downside?
cardiffspaceman wrote 3 hours 49 min ago:
If the right type of mate uses those traits to find
their type of mate thereâs no downside.
djtango wrote 11 hours 51 min ago:
I introduced myself to my now wife as an accidental
hipster:
- I brewed my own kombucha (I have GI issues and I am so
lactose intolerant that even kefir and yoghurt would give
me a reaction)
- I ride a bicycle everywhere (I exercise daily and like
to stay active, bicycle is often the fastest way around
London)
- I buy expensive locally farmed produce (the quality is
usually night and day vs other sources)
There were plenty of other signals by which I
superficially seem like a hipster but my wife would
attest I'm the opposite of an actual one.
In the words of my ever wise mother "keep the good bits,
leave the rest"
aembleton wrote 22 hours 10 min ago:
With enough humans, it starts to look like a machine
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
> Whoever came up with that type of progress bar must hate people
in general.
My first thought is that the person has a strong grasp of their
profession and they love money. A hack like that has to have a
really high value/effort ratio.
ghostbrainalpha wrote 22 hours 29 min ago:
I was forced to do this as a developer of Flash websites in the
early 00's.
I loved making custom progress bars really fun so people didn't
mind watching the huge sites download.
I HATED when they had me mess with the time so that it got to
90% really fast and then spent AGES finishing the last 10%.
consp wrote 21 hours 11 min ago:
We all know the Microsoft progress bars reached 99% easily
and had an infinite last % in the '90s. I'm still not
convinced that was by accident.
xeonmc wrote 20 hours 23 min ago:
Zenoâs progress bar.
cons0le wrote 1 day ago:
MrBeast is a hack, but its worth pointing out that all "progress
bars" are bad design. You could make the same complaint against
most of the progress bars in MsDOS. There was never a consistency
in timing so you can never really use them to gauge how much time
is left.
andy99 wrote 22 hours 23 min ago:
Many progress bars or other indicators lie, and the incentive
is always to make it look good at the beginning, so thatâs
what we end up seeing most, whether itâs these ad ones (which
thankfully Iâve never seen) or installers or especially
something like Uber that always lies about how quickly someone
is coming to make it appealing and then stretches it out. Even
the thing in your car that tells you how much range you have
left before refuelling (except it starts showing more than you
actually have). I think in all cases itâs probably possible
to give a more realistic estimate but itâs counter to the
goals of whoever designed it.
dspillett wrote 1 day ago:
The difference between a lot of OS/app progress bars for IO
(and sometimes CPU) operations and these timers, is that the
total length of time for a lot of IO operations is often
unknown with any accuracy so you have to use a heuristic to
guess the current % done.
For instance: when reading/writing/both many files of differing
sizes on traditional drives there is an amount of latency per
file which is significant and not always predictable. Whether
you base progress on total size or number of files or some more
complicated calc based on both, it will be inaccurate in most
cases, sometimes badly so. Even when copying a single large
file on a shared drive, or just on a dedicated system with
multiple tasks running, the progress is inherently a bit
random, the same for any network transfer. Worse are many
database requests: you don't get any progress often because
there is no progress output until the query processing is
complete, and the last byte of the result might arrive in the
same fraction of a second the first does¹. The same for
network requests, though IE (at least as early as v3) and early
versions of Edge did outright lie² there to try make
themselves look faster than the competition.
The progress bars in videos are a different beast (ahem): the
total time is absolutely known, any inaccuracy is either a
deliberate lie or gross incompetence.
--------
[1] I once worked on a system that kept logs of certain types
of query so it could display a guess of how long things were
going to take and a progress bar to go with it, but this was
actually more irritating to the users than no progress display
as it would sometime jump from a few % directly to done or sit
at 99% for ages (in the end the overly complicated guessing
method was replaced by a simple spinner).
[2] It would creep up, getting as far as 80%, before the first
byte of response is received. This also confused users who
thought that something was actually happening when the action
was in fact stalled and just going to time-out.
JadeNB wrote 19 hours 54 min ago:
> [1] I once worked on a system that kept logs of certain
types of query so it could display a guess of how long things
were going to take and a progress bar to go with it, but this
was actually more irritating to the users than no progress
display as it would sometime jump from a few % directly to
done or sit at 99% for ages (in the end the overly
complicated guessing method was replaced by a simple
spinner).
In the Tiger era, the OS X start-up progress bar worked this
wayâit kept track of how long boot-ups would take, and then
displayed its best guess based on that.
Vegenoid wrote 1 day ago:
Weâre not talking about a measure of computational progress
here. Weâre talking about visually representing how much time
has elapsed out of a fixed duration. This is exactly where
progress indicators shine, the total time for the thing to
happen is perfectly specified in advance.
x187463 wrote 1 day ago:
A fantastic video from Matt, as usual.
Yet another data point on why nobody should be wasting a second
watching Mr Beast content. Complete algorithmically optimized
garbage.
I recall Mr Beast showing up in a Colin Furze video for a few
minutes and Mr Beast was very clearly incapable of being a normal
person. He was obviously out of place, being in full makeup and
styled, and couldn't seem to be bothered to actually engage or
express real interest in the subject. I think the guy has
replaced his real persona with some manifestation of the YouTube
algorithm. If he's not actively making money, he's just a shell.
hermitdev wrote 1 hour 33 min ago:
Every time see Mr Beast (I don't watch any of his stuff, just
accidentally see promos on Prime sometimes), he reminds me of
Homer Simpson's forced smile in the Simpsons' espiode
"Re-Nedufication" [0].
[0]:
URI [1]: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c8/84/8e/c8848e81afa88a...
Hendrikto wrote 9 hours 42 min ago:
Mr Beast not looking like a normal person next to Colin Furze
is impressive.
That guy is so over the top that I cannot bear watching his
videos, despite them theoretically being exactly up my alley. I
like tinkering videos, I like his ideas, and the high-quality
results, but I hate his mannerisms.
climb_stealth wrote 23 hours 42 min ago:
Luckily the recommendation system does work to some extent. I'm
glad I don't get to see any of that stuff on my youtube.
Opening the front page in a private view is a scary place of
hyper-optimised drama and attention seeking.
It's scary imagining people getting sucked into that :/
Hendrikto wrote 9 hours 39 min ago:
It used to be very good, but now the personalized
recommendations kind of suck. Seems like they enormously
regressed, and basically do the 2009 move of just shoving the
last type of video you watched in your face 37 times.
red-iron-pine wrote 7 hours 4 min ago:
ahhh and i thought it was just me. cancelled my
subscription and figured YT was just not caring anymore as
a way to drag me back.
nah turns out it sucks for everyone.
thaumasiotes wrote 16 hours 15 min ago:
> Opening the front page in a private view is a scary place
of hyper-optimised drama and attention seeking.
Huh? Opening the front page of youtube in a private view
(with no existing youtube history) shows you a completely
blank page.
climb_stealth wrote 11 hours 4 min ago:
This must have changed at some point. It used to show
popular videos in a private window.
You can still get a glimpse of what is out there by
watching a specific video in a private window and looking
at the recommendations.
jasonfarnon wrote 15 hours 10 min ago:
The blank page where it asks you to enter a search? This is
a recent change I think. I want to say the last year or 2.
physicles wrote 21 hours 20 min ago:
If you turn off you watch history in account settings, then
youtube.com is just a passive-aggressive black screen telling
you to turn it back on. Itâs beautiful.
When you click over to subscriptions, you see only the stuff
that you subscribed to, and nothing else.
Recommendations on a video are based on you subscriptions and
the current video, and nothing else.
I could never go back.
andrepd wrote 20 hours 22 min ago:
This is basically what I do in NewPipe! Just a good ol'
chronological list of my subscriptions, nothing else. Ahh
if only everything could be this 2006...
mc3301 wrote 20 hours 30 min ago:
Fully agreed.
The day youtube disables the "turn watch history off," is
the day I'll stop using youtube.
I, too, could never go back.
duped wrote 23 hours 50 min ago:
They somehow got him doing a cameo on this upcoming Survivor
season and it's going to be terrible.
m4tthumphrey wrote 1 day ago:
That Colin Furze cameo was so weird.
x187463 wrote 2 hours 22 min ago:
From what I can tell, based on an excerpt of an interview
with Colin, Mr Beast had a bunker-related video and visited
Colin's bunker. As a viewer of Colin's channel and not Mr
Beast, it seemed very strange, but makes more sense if there
was a more substantial collaboration taking place in a
different video stream.
drcongo wrote 1 day ago:
Not the only thing he's guilty of.
red-iron-pine wrote 7 hours 3 min ago:
explain
drcongo wrote 3 hours 4 min ago:
It's all a scam.
throwaway2056 wrote 1 day ago:
- Google just needs to tell DJT
- Vietnam get 50 % tariffs
- Change the ban
- Easy peasy for Tech bros.
Vaslo wrote 21 hours 54 min ago:
Thank you for your zero value Reddit comment
datadrivenangel wrote 1 day ago:
Requiring skip is good, but the part about focusing on illegal ads is
better. If all ads were for soda, cars, and other legitimate products,
that would be one thing, but so many ads are for straight up scams
these days.
andriamanitra wrote 15 hours 23 min ago:
Marketing for cars and soda isn't that far off from actual scams. Ads
are a big part of why (especially American) car and food culture is
so toxic. The ad-driven demand for sugary drinks and large,
impractical, environmentally unconscientious cars has almost
certainly caused more death and misery than many actual scams.
wolvoleo wrote 1 day ago:
Soda ads are actually banned in some jurisdictions so it's not really
a cleanly legit product. You can make the same argument for ICE cars.
xoxxala wrote 1 day ago:
Considering how unhealthy soda is to consume, I'd ban those ads in a
heartbeat right along side tobacco and alchohol. The UK just banned
all TV and online junk food ads and I'm alright with that.
foolfoolz wrote 22 hours 23 min ago:
or maybe we can let people think for themselves
triceratops wrote 1 day ago:
> The UK just banned all TV and online junk food ads
Unbelievable, when you consider the sheer volume of betting ads
they have.
pacifika wrote 7 hours 21 min ago:
Yeah but the gov relies on that income. £2.0-£2.5 billion
triceratops wrote 6 hours 13 min ago:
Is that the income from gambling advertising or the income from
gambling?
This is also why taxes on vices should always, always, always
be revenue neutral. Lawmakers should never have to choose
between reducing demand for a vice and revenue.
glimshe wrote 1 day ago:
They shouldn't be surprised if ads are shown more often.
hoherd wrote 1 day ago:
This could turn into the online video equivalent of the Burma Shave
road signs.
> Typically, six consecutive small signs would be posted along the
edge of highways, spaced for sequential reading by passing motorists.
The last sign was almost always the name of the product.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burma-Shave#Roadside_billboard...
wrsh07 wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah - it seems like this will cause a series of 5 second skippable
ads that still sums up to >many seconds of unskippable ads (unless
that's banned, in which case they will just see ads more often, as
you say)
I expect it will make the experience worse rather than better because
the publishers will try to maintain their inventory (how many seconds
of ads they show per minute watched)
Tade0 wrote 6 hours 13 min ago:
Are advertisers just really dead set on making our lives harder?
It's a minor inconvenience, but I'm amazed anyone would go to such
lengths to do it.
I understand there's money involved, but surely those who offer
products must see that it's increasingly counterproductive?
oldjim798 wrote 1 day ago:
Then a new regulation is needed; one that caps the ratio of seconds
of ads to minute watched.
wrsh07 wrote 1 day ago:
And what do you think the consequence of that new regulation will
be?
tcfhgj wrote 23 hours 34 min ago:
Just ban unrequested ads altogether
wrsh07 wrote 19 hours 25 min ago:
Do you think YouTube will continue to be available in a
country that does this? Or free Spotify?
Is that good? Or bad?
tcfhgj wrote 12 hours 3 min ago:
Good
zeroonetwothree wrote 1 day ago:
You mean a regulation will cause unintended consequence? Color me
shocked
jason_s wrote 1 day ago:
In case you wanted a more reputable source:
URI [1]: https://theinvestor.vn/online-video-advertisements-in-vietnam-...
catapart wrote 1 day ago:
Not a great regulatory move, in my opinion. But I really wish ad
companies would implement this rule across the board. If you can't sell
me on your ad in 5 seconds, it's unlikely you can sell me on your
product in 15 or 30 seconds. And if your product is of any interest to
me whatsoever, I'm happy to continue watching the ad. I sit through
movie trailers and tech ads all the time, even with an option to skip.
But I have no use for seeing the entire Dawn dish soap's aw-shucks,
faux-folksy ad play out. In five seconds, you can remind me that dawn
exists, fulfilling the main purpose of the ad, and I can get on with
the content I'm actually interested in.
mattacular wrote 8 hours 44 min ago:
> Not a great regulatory move, in my opinion.
> But I really wish ad companies would implement this rule across the
board.
You don't see how these are conflicting viewpoints? What do you think
would compel a company to act in some way that is not in line with
its short term financial interests? Sheer luck?
catapart wrote 5 hours 25 min ago:
Long term financial interests, mostly. I know the ads run on my
network will never, under any circumstance, be allowed to appear
without a skip button within 5 seconds. Immediately, if possible.
The only conditional is when the skip button appears, not if. And
that's divorced from the copy; the component that plays the ad
doesn't care what copy is running, it controls the skipability.
If an advertiser does not like those terms and is willing to forgo
my users for that position, more power to them. I have every
confidence that I will still find advertisers and, in my
experience, they will be higher quality advertisers for the
demographics of my users. Artists tend to advertise in cheap space
that they know other artists will be viewing. You get the idea.
What has me curious is why you see those two as conflicting
viewpoints? I didn't need a government to regulate me. Just common
sense and care for my users. I'm not going to subject them to noisy
or obnoxious ads, nor am I going to subject them to content that
may not be suitable for everyone, and so I'm also not going to
subject them to overly long ads. It seems, to me, that you have a
profound lack of faith in the platforms you use. Which I can
understand as a practical realization about the current apex
platforms. But I don't know why it would blind you to the
possibility of reasonable people acting reasonably.
mattacular wrote 2 hours 55 min ago:
I see them as conflicting viewpoints because as a general rule
companies do not focus on
> Long term financial interests, mostly.
It's great that you as an individual feel otherwise (I do too),
but there are larger macro forces at work which compel firms to
act the way they do: pursue short term growth at all costs. The
counter-balance to this is either a strong regulatory
environment, or a hope and prayer that a majority of companies
suddenly gain a strong CEO who feels otherwise and is not
obligated to satisfy shareholders who don't. Only a few such CEOs
come to mind, and they're looking increasingly short for this
world.
catapart wrote 1 hour 55 min ago:
Well, you can already see my hope and prayer. I don't think
it's unlikely to come about as you do; rather I think that in
the long run the market will eventually reward the better
behavior, as any good capitalist believes. But rest assured
that I also want a strong regulatory environment. The only
winning long term strategy is to be twice as forgiving as you
are punitive. So that means forgive a lot, but still punish
when applicable. Given that, I think good laws derived from
sound reason, voted on by a free public are a great way to both
guide and punish all entities, including corporate ones. I just
don't think that this regulation is the kind that is derived
from sound reason.
I think there are so many issues with this type of regulation
that circumvention will be inevitable and, like with so many
other things, lead to a worse outcome overall. I think good
regulation will look different altogether, but it's hard for me
to imagine what it will look like. My best guess is that it
will target different choke points, or target them in different
ways. Maybe like... subsidies for content creators that enforce
a 5-second limit on ads? It's not something many have control
over now, but a platform would instantly become more attractive
to content creators if they were allowed to dictate that.
Seems like that would have some sour ramifications as well, but
it's just off the top of my head. The point is, I'm not against
regulating the hell out of these giant industries, or these
industry giants. I'm all for it. I just want it to actually
work/make things better.
hdgvhicv wrote 11 hours 17 min ago:
Iâll sit through a trailer. The first time.
When it comes up the 10th time though thereâs no way Iâll be
watching the film it advertises, no matter how much I might have done
after the first time.
johanyc wrote 19 hours 29 min ago:
Yeah. I'm happy to watch ads if I'm interested in the product.
Sometimes i even want to rewind to see a part i missed but youtube
doesnt let me. No idea why
rhplus wrote 1 day ago:
> Not a great regulatory move, in my opinion.
> But I really wish ad companies would implement this rule across the
board.
I genuinely donât know how you could get your wish without
regulation. You canât expect all players in the ad game to follow
self enforced rules if thereâs any possibility that not following a
self-imposed rule (âall ads must have a skip buttonâ) will bring
a competitive advantage. As soon as one player decides to take that
advantage, all will. Back to square one.
MSFT_Edging wrote 1 day ago:
Takes like this amaze me. It's like they've suddenly forgotten what
the entire advertisement industry is like. Ads are designed to take
advantage, manipulate, and even trick. Then this person comes along
and suggests the industry should do the right thing.
In what world would that ever be a possibility? It's like asking a
dictator nicely that they relinquish some of their power!
iuu666 wrote 1 day ago:
Regulation is only a policeman. It doesnât innovate.
Competitive markets do innovate. I watch YouTube live instead of
Twitch (many streamers double stream) precisely because the
former has skippable ads.
Iâm guessing you havenât taken even one semester of the
relevant economics. Isnât it great to be an internet commenter?
yibg wrote 16 hours 16 min ago:
> Isnât it great to be an internet commenter?
Said completely unironically...
cromka wrote 21 hours 35 min ago:
You think one semester of economics entitles you to belittle
people like that? What in a libertarian mind is doing that?
MSFT_Edging wrote 8 hours 31 min ago:
There are very real people who major in economics in college
and come in with their economic opinions they'd like to
confirm, and just argue with the professors.
"Economics" as we talk about it is basically a farce. It's
more vulnerable to confirmation bias than any other social
science.
tokioyoyo wrote 22 hours 49 min ago:
Both YouTube and Twitch have increased the amount of ads they
serve over the last 5 years, not decreased. So, Iâm not even
sure if the âcompetitionâ between those two makes ads
better for anyone. Imo, the objective of competition in adspace
is âwho can target better to increase click rateâ, not
âwho can make the experience better for the userâ.
dominicrose wrote 11 hours 6 min ago:
Even the technofeudalist lords have to deal with reality:
they add more enforced ad time, I reduce Youtube usage.
Disney+ puts long unskippable repeated ads, I watch what I
want then unsuscribe. They're supposed to play a long-term
game, but they're too greedy, and humanity can live without
Youtube or Disney+.
dmix wrote 7 hours 20 min ago:
You're free to pay for youtube and not see ads. I
personally don't know how people use it without paying.
It's no different from a streaming service like Apple TV
and it's clear Youtube wants to go that direction, but
people treat it like it should be entirely free or lightly
ad supported only.
dominicrose wrote 4 hours 11 min ago:
Netflix as a streaming provider was paid from the get go
and only provides professionally made content. It's
closer to the way we normally buy things or something
like an internet subscription.
For youtube, different people are going to have different
reactions to their business model.
aggregator-ios wrote 1 day ago:
LOL, it's because they started with "regulations bad" and then went
the usual technocrat/libertarian move of let the markets decide.
And then rehashed the exact same arguments in favor of regulation.
grayhatter wrote 1 day ago:
> But I really wish ad companies would implement this rule across the
board. If you can't sell me on your ad in 5 seconds, it's unlikely
you can sell me on your product in 15 or 30 seconds.
When talking about how ads "don't work on you"; it's very important
to remember that just like every single other human you're not immune
to propaganda.
catapart wrote 1 day ago:
I did not claim, nor imply, that ads do not work on me. In fact, I
alluded to the opposite in my closing line: " In five seconds, you
can remind me that dawn exists, fulfilling the main purpose of the
ad[...]"
> the main purpose of the ad
I recognize that showing me the name of the product is the most
valuable part of an ad, by far. It's entirely about repetition
which breeds enough familiarity for trial, and enough personal
affirmation if the trial is a positive one.
But, that aside, if I'm looking for a skip button before the 5
seconds is up, I either do not purchase the product (I'm not sold:
I don't buy), or I'm already a purchaser of the product and I'm
either a fan (Your ad didn't sell me: I was sold, beforehand) or
I'm not (I'm not sold: I don't buy it anymore). It wasn't a
statement about ads not working on me, it's a statement about a
personal, practical response to ads that I am conciously aware of
because I'm already looking for a skip button.
grayhatter wrote 1 day ago:
I think I was speaking equally to anyone else reading the thread,
but also I should have pointed out that the longer you watch an
ad, the more familiar you will become with accepting and
expecting the product being sold. There's no way to get around
the time spent. Just because the first 5 seconds have the largest
proportional impact, doesn't mean the last 25s won't also have an
impact.
But even if everything I said was incorrect, and you actually are
immune, just like you describe... everyone else isn't, and
they're being targeted as much as you are.
catapart wrote 23 hours 46 min ago:
I didn't describe being immune. Again, 100% the opposite.
dylan604 wrote 1 day ago:
I'm much less concerned about being sold in 15-30 secs as much as the
"ads" that are paid promotional programming that runs >30 minutes in
the middle of a video that is <30 minutes.
catapart wrote 1 day ago:
That stuff is so bizarre! I can understand how an advertiser might
try to sneak an infomercial onto an ad campaign, and I can
understand how it might be attempted on accident. But I can't
understand why an ostensible ad platform would ever allow you to
upload a 30 min. ad without lots of flags going up and needing some
approval.
dylan604 wrote 1 day ago:
> and needing some approval.
and here shows just how bad the rot is. I would assume that
buying that much "air time" to have your longer content played
would come a quite a premium. I would also not be surprised if
selling those premiums come with a bonus. There's a reason those
paid-programming shows run with no commercials. The cost of
airing it paid for all of the ad pods during that block of air
time, plus extra for being special snowflake.
If these long content "ads" are flukes, then that also shows the
rot of the ad market that this isn't handled as an exception.
matthewfcarlson wrote 1 day ago:
Nothing makes me quite as irrationally angry as a 30 second ad on a
one minute video
dylan604 wrote 1 day ago:
I don't know why you feel it is irrational at all. That a
perfectly rational reason to be angry about the state of ad
injection
austin-cheney wrote 1 day ago:
> Not a great regulatory move, in my opinion.
Why?
simplicio wrote 1 day ago:
Think the best argument against it is that it makes advertising
less valuable, which in turn limits the how many "paid for with
advertising" services will be available and how good those services
will be.
Especially in a developing country where consumers ability to pay
for such things is going to be limited, that will presumably
deprive some margin of the population of media/services that are
currently ad supported.
hdgvhicv wrote 11 hours 7 min ago:
Why would I an advertiser pay $1 to show an advert to someone
that doesnât have $1 to spend on my product.
If they do have a dollar to spend then why wouldnât they spend
it on what they wanted to watch in the first place rather than
spend it with me, the advertiser.
63stack wrote 1 day ago:
One of those mythical "win win win" scenarios
thinkingtoilet wrote 1 day ago:
Funny, I would say making advertising less valuable is big win.
pixl97 wrote 1 day ago:
Heh, advertizing, individually has become less valuable because
there are so many ads everywhere on every surface to the point
that people mentally adblock half their day away.
austin-cheney wrote 1 day ago:
I am fine with advertising becoming less valuable. I fully
appreciate there is a lot of media I take for granted due to
advertising. Yet, ever since I was a small child the goal of
advertising was to influence consumer behavior more than selling
products or brand identity, which is extremely toxic. Once
consumer gullibility wears off the dollars poured into
advertising always find a way into political lobbying and policy
influence campaigns, which is really just more of the same.
catapart wrote 1 day ago:
Just a hip-shot, not a considered position. When I hear
"regulation", I think "threat". Either of violence (any physical
touch), or financial garnishment. So, to me, ads that last longer
than five seconds do not rise to the level of threatening anyone.
But assuming that they did, the situation seems like one where
there could be any number or ways of following the letter or the
law, while flouting the spirit of it. I don't dare imagine the
creative ways these people will come up with to make entertainment
even worse than it already is. So for areas that seem to require
miles and miles of caveats and very specific rule-making, my gut
reaction is that the regulatory path isn't the right one until we
can break down the scope into something that simple regulations can
accommodate without loophole. Put more simply: if it seems like
people will just find ways around the problem, my assumption is
just that we're not targeting the right problem yet and we need to
break it down further, if regulation is the right solution at all.
But that is pretty assumptive, so - again - it's just a first
feeling. Doesn't pass my vibe check.
miki123211 wrote 1 day ago:
I personally like descriptive regulation over prescriptive
regulation.
Instead of prescribing exactly what you should do, describe the
outcomes you want, and let case law fill in the rest of the owl.
That's the only way to prevent violations like this.
To be fair, the main disadvantage of this approach is that law is
much harder to understand. You can't just read the law as it is
written, you also have to familiarize yourself with all the
rulings that tell you how that law should actually be
interpreted.
dnqthao wrote 1 day ago:
Vietnam does not follow common law (i.e. case law) , it follows
civil law (same as other Europe and Asia countries)
echelon wrote 1 day ago:
Second order effects.
Many advertisers may avoid advertising or lower their ad budgets.
This means the tech platform makes less revenue. This means the
platform and the video creator both make less revenue. This means
less videos get created.
All of these happen at the population level.
I hate ads, but regulations that are for things that aren't public
health (including mental health), anti-monopolization, etc. are
probably bad for innovation and growth.
You have to balance regulation and over-regulation.
thfuran wrote 18 hours 44 min ago:
>Many advertisers may avoid advertising or lower their ad
budgets.
Great. Once that happens, we can work on regulation to kill even
more advertising.
anigbrowl wrote 1 day ago:
If your revenue comes from parasitical strategies it's negative
sum and the economy is better off without it.
echelon wrote 1 day ago:
Are you seriously trying to argue the world is better off
without YouTube?
I derive incredible value from YouTube. It wasn't always great,
but it is recently full of extremely good educational content,
tech talks, independent journalism, how-tos, independent film
and animation, and so much more.
I'd wager that you use and benefit from a lot of services that
are paid for via advertising. Even public transit is subsidized
by advertising.
anigbrowl wrote 1 hour 33 min ago:
You know perfectly well that's not what I wrote. Putting
words in others' mouths is a form of lying, and not conducive
to discussion.
hdgvhicv wrote 10 hours 58 min ago:
In London public transport accounts for about 10% of the
ticket price. For 20p Iâm bombarded with flashing moving
images as I travel around. Itâs sickening and shouldnât
be allowed in public spaces.
There was a fight back at Euston station recently [1] I never
get a taxi in New York thanks to the adverts. Sadly the
general population thinks their time and attention is
worthless and accept adverts. People actually watch
commercial tv, which steals 20 minutes of your time every
hour to brainwash you.
URI [1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2987kvp3no
ranguna wrote 11 hours 45 min ago:
Parasitic strategies != ads
The regulation was about unskippable ads, not ads in general.
I agree with the op and I don't agree that we are better off
without YouTube. It's not hard at all to understand the op,
so I'm not sure why you misread them and jumped to
conclusions that all ads are parasitic and asked if we're
better off without YouTube. Was that rage bate or did you
really think the op was talking about all ads?
GuinansEyebrows wrote 1 day ago:
> Many advertisers may avoid advertising or lower their ad
budgets. This means the tech platform makes less revenue. This
means the platform and the video creator both make less revenue.
This means less videos get created.
this all sounds great. ideal, even.
keerthiko wrote 1 day ago:
I would argue that limiting the amount of unrequested product
evangelism shoved into users' eyeballs is a valuable public and
mental health initiative. I wish we could have seen the alternate
reality where ad-revenue was not the most lucrative business
model for the internet.
echelon wrote 1 day ago:
Regulation is always too slow and too stupid. By doing this,
you'll chase the ads into embedding themselves into the content
itself. And that's just the start. Creators are already doing
this, and now we're seeing tooling emerge to support it. Wait
until the platforms get in on the game.
I say this as a proponent of antitrust regulation against tech
giants and a privacy advocate against tracking, storing, and
correlating user activity.
Everything needs to be kept in balance. Regulation is a blunt
instrument and is better used to punish active rule breaking
rather than trying to predict how markets should work.
Break up Google. Don't tell content marketplaces how to run
ads. They know their customers far better than old politicians
do.
If ads become onerous, alternatives emerge. Different channels,
platforms, ad blocking. It's a healthier ecosystem that doesn't
grow ossified with decades old legalese. Regulations that
actively stymie the creation of new competition.
Now every new video and social startup in Vietnam has to check
a bunch of boxes.
keerthiko wrote 20 hours 34 min ago:
> By doing this, you'll chase the ads into
IMO regulation never was or is going to force this shift:
it's already happening in unregulated ad markets, and is
going to keep evolving in that direction because it's simply
more effective/lucrative than ads done other ways.
> Break up Google. Don't tell content marketplaces how to run
ads.
I'm all for breaking up megacorps, but there's no way a
government like Vietnam can effectively accomplish that. The
entire regulatory weight of the EU (90% of the non-US
first-world consumer base) can't break up Google, so
inflicting a series of wristslaps that hurt Google more than
any small startup is the best way.
I'm no expert on the region, but I can't imagine a small
video/social startup in Vietnam will be hurt more than Google
by being forced to show a skip button after 5s on their ads
â and generally speaking ads as a business model generally
doesn't work all that well or mean much for small startups
(<1M MAU), their survival and scalability hinges more on VC
money and product-market fit than ad arbitrage.
vitorfblima wrote 1 day ago:
I don't see how less video time for people would harm innovation.
If you, like me and most people I know, hate ads, why would it be
a bad thing to limit it?
What are we expecting to actually accomplish with all this
platform growth thing?
hdgvhicv wrote 10 hours 57 min ago:
Most people donât hate adverts, at least not enough to do
something about them (subscribe to YouTube premium, install an
adblocker, install a pi hole)
ApolloFortyNine wrote 1 day ago:
Too many people think removing ads means they'll still continue
to get content for free, they just won't have to watch ads.
At best, it's as you said, the platform and creator make less
money (Youtube gives 55% of ad revenue to the creator). This
would naturally lead to less content eventually.
At worst, video content becomes unsustainable without a
subscription.
BigTTYGothGF wrote 1 day ago:
> This would naturally lead to less content eventually
I, personally, am drowning in "content".
echelon wrote 1 day ago:
> I, personally, am drowning in "content".
Until the content is utterly captivating and speaks to your
soul in a way even your closest friends and partners can't,
we haven't hit peak content.
You know that one movie you see every decade or so that you
can't get out of your head? The one that left you
flabbergasted, that you've watched at least half a dozen
times, and that you frequently and fondly remember? It
touched your mind and soul and fit your tastes like a glove.
THAT is peak content, and until we are swimming in it, we're
not there yet. Most of what we have today is utterly
disposable and ephemeral - transient dopamine activation
instead of philosophically world shattering indelible
experiences.
We have a long way to go.
anigbrowl wrote 1 day ago:
Why would you ever expect or even want us to be 'swimming'
in such emotionally activating content? The reality is that
people will just get desensitized and there will be the
same proportion of dreck and the same discoverability
problems as ever. Your argument is dopamine junkie logic,
sitting around waiting for a dealer to bring you something
stronger instead of putting effort into searching out or
making things that satisfy you.
echelon wrote 1 day ago:
Because I want to.
I don't care what you want. I know what I want.
cm2012 wrote 1 day ago:
Its market distortionary and makes global advertisers have to
customize for the local audience, some might not bother
BigTTYGothGF wrote 1 day ago:
> market distortionary
So what if it is?
> makes global advertisers have to customize for the local
audience
My understanding of advertising is that there is already
substantial customization for local audiences.
einpoklum wrote 1 day ago:
Markets are not a natural phenomenon and are themselves the
result of complex social arrangements, involving coercion. So,
the market is the result of "distortions" before and after
various regulatory measures.
themaninthedark wrote 1 day ago:
I would assume that the global advertisers are already having to
customize for the local audience since the spoken language is
Vietnamese.
pbasista wrote 1 day ago:
> market distortionary
I am unsure what you are trying to say here. But if you mean to
refer to "market distortion", I cannot see how that can be
happening.
The reason is that these rules are supposed to be applicable
universally to every company in the same way. And as such, they
do not create any market distortion in one way or the other.
Because everyone has to play by the same rules. Those are as fair
market conditions as one can get, in my opinion.
> some might not bother
Why should that be a problem? If someone does not like the
regulation in a particular jurisdiction, it is fine. No one is
forcing them to operate there.
The main point is the following: If they want to operate, they
have to play by the local rules. Just like everyone else.
mystraline wrote 1 day ago:
Simply put, fuck the "market" (aka: uber-rich people). The market
should serve us humans, not the other way around.
Ive heard this garbage excuse since Reagan took a wrecking ball
to regulations. Not making effective regulations is ALSO a market
distorting thing, that encourages the absolute worst behaviors.
And now with Citizens United, its $1 = 1 vote.
But no, "marrrrrkeeeeetttttt"
bobro wrote 1 day ago:
Can you spell out more whatâs wrong with distorting a market or
customizing for local audiences?
hasperdi wrote 1 day ago:
why is it a bad thing if global advertisers have to customize? If
they're global, they should have the resources. Anyhow none of
our concerns
mjamesaustin wrote 1 day ago:
Ad skipping should be handled at the platform level and not left
to individual advertisers to control. Regulations like this make
such an outcome more likely.
Mobile ads in the US are heinous. Each one has a different
mechanism for skipping, the skip buttons are micro sized and
impossible to tap, some of them don't even work.
Standardization should have been up to the platforms selling ads,
but they haven't done it. It's past time for local authorities to
step in and protect consumers from predatory behavior.
MichaelZuo wrote 1 day ago:
Isnât that presumably the point of the Vietnamese government
whenever they set new requirements?
To make it harder for people who dont care about Vietnam to do
business.
oompydoompy74 wrote 1 day ago:
Good?
iknowstuff wrote 1 day ago:
Not as good when you just end up having to pay more for
services right
oompydoompy74 wrote 1 day ago:
Nope still good
mc32 wrote 1 day ago:
The incentives are better aligned though, so long as they are
not undermined (by moving the target) Ala cable tv.
_jab wrote 1 day ago:
I've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads. The
incentive to create services (especially in social media) that strive
to addict their users feels toxic to society. Often, it feels uncertain
whether these services are providing actual value, and I suspect that
whether a user would pay for a service in lieu of watching ads is
incidentally a good barometer for whether real value is present.
Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's fun to
think about sometimes.
fraboniface wrote 8 hours 28 min ago:
You're dead right, it would be the one killer move to remove a lot of
perverse incentives, fix the internet, possibly even social media,
and all live in a happier world. The whole economy would stop paying
the ad tax to Google and Meta.
And it's not that impractical : just make a consumer-run search
engine for products and services.
dmix wrote 7 hours 26 min ago:
People already complain about having 10 differently monthly
subscriptions for internet stuff. If you remove ads people will
need 30 to do the same stuff they do now.
tcfhgj wrote 5 hours 25 min ago:
or micro payments or something different which will work better.
goodpoint wrote 9 hours 57 min ago:
Of course it would be better.
BiteCode_dev wrote 10 hours 1 min ago:
It would be much, much better:
- Improved incentive for the IT and medias industry. Users and
viewers are the customers again.
- Removal of the culture of normalized lying that infects everyone to
the point people don't see it anymore.
- Natural selection of product by actually asking people for money.
Can't pay 2 euros / month for facebook? It deserves to die.
- Redirection of resources from marketing to useful things. Billions
going back to R&D, quality control, etc.
- Brand forced to rely on quality and word of mouth again. No more
temporary product trick. No more "one month brand lifetime" hack. No
more "PR will save this disaster".
- Improved skin in the game. And you will see less
reputation-damaging behavior because of this. Think twice about doing
A/B testing, fake sales, use too many notifications. You need those
saavy power users to spread the word now.
- Disappearance of old and new artificial social norms solely created
by marketing firms to sell stuff that parasites our reality. No need
for everybody to look the same, no need for diamonds for engagement
rings, no "whole white family having breakfirst in a big house and
everything is clean and they are all happy and hot" to sell coffee,
no "big red guy with a beard" created by coca cola.
- Getting back on specs. You can't sell perfume and cars on an vague
idea anymore.
- Children won't get conditioned from a young age to want stuff they
don't need, think ideas they don't really have, and adopt behaviors
that are harmful for them just so that a marketer can get 3% more
engagement.
- Creating massive volume of bad content will not be a successful
strategies anymore, since it's not about displaying ads. So content
quality go up.
- Streets get nicer, with no more ads display. Clothes as well, with
no more big logo making you look like a billboard.
- No more ads in your mail box! And you can redirect the money from
the gov marketing budget to actually find email spammers as well.
- Removal of a huge means of accumulation and centralization of
power. Right now, it's pay to win, and the more money you have, the
more you can run ads, the more you can sell. Which means a small
local shop cannot easily compete with a big one. But without ads,
it's actually close to its own clients, and has an advantage to get
their attention organically.
- People get back some part of their attention span.
The benefits are not superficial; they are immense!
Ads are a plague on our societies.
Evolving as humans requires us to find a way to ban them.
I doubt I will see it in my lifestyle, but we need to get rid of this
parasite if we want to go to the next level.
dyauspitr wrote 17 hours 0 min ago:
New businesses would never get off the ground. Advertising is
probably one of the things that will never go away in a capitalist
society.
meonkeys wrote 20 hours 33 min ago:
How about a world without money?
gherkinnn wrote 20 hours 37 min ago:
As an experiment, think of a space that is improved by ads.
aembleton wrote 9 hours 34 min ago:
I'm imagining a world where ads on screens generate enough revenue
to mean that rail and bus services are free. It would be annoying,
but free public transport would also reduce car volumes improving
transport for all.
sjw987 wrote 7 hours 17 min ago:
It's unlikely ads would ever actually fund any meaningful real
world product or service like public transport. The most they can
fund is some crappy apps, websites and digital platforms, and
most of the time they can barely do that.
It's only a matter of time before our ad-driven tech economy pops
when they realise how much fraud is committed by the adtech
companies, how little return these ads really give, and peoples
susceptibility to ads further declines, causing them to exhaust
even the most invasive and penetrative advertising techniques.
A nice idea I saw was a service where you can get a
free/discounted public transport ticket for doing some squats or
other exercise in front of a machine. Something like that would
shift a lot of money from handling healthcare for the inactive
over to providing free public transport.
adrr wrote 21 hours 10 min ago:
People don't care. Youtube has an option to watch it without ads,
most people don't. I refuse to watch ads and pay for the ad-free
versions of the streamers. Lots people won't pay. Would the average
person pay $10/m for ad free social media? Or pay for add free
search? Pretty sure there are search engines that you can pay that
are ad free.
What needs to be regulated is ads that you can't avoid. You can
avoid online ads by paying ad free versions or not browsing certain
sites(eg: instagram, FB). Billboards need to go away, and some
cities have outlawed them.
jiri wrote 9 hours 7 min ago:
I am often frustrated by ads/sponsored content on YouTube that I
cannot buy. Youtuber present me nice product targeted for US
audience. I am in Europe. No way I can use it or buy it. I would do
it sometimes, but I cannot.
Still I have to watch such ads.
I dont think there is a practical way to prevent this case.
dmix wrote 7 hours 28 min ago:
That's the funny part, ads would be less annoying if they were
hyper-targeted, which means there was more supply of ads and
worse privacy. There's been a number of times I've found useful
stuff from ads, but it's rare and almost never on Youtube.
Youtube is the one site worth paying for not to see ads and
sponsorblock extension skips the live reads.
globular-toast wrote 14 hours 36 min ago:
Yeah but people also get addicted to things like cigarettes and
gambling. Sometimes people need a little help to avoid harmful
things.
johnnyanmac wrote 18 hours 14 min ago:
>Would the average person pay $10/m for ad free social media? Or
pay for add free search?
At some point, yes. But by that point they switch to the next
service with ads and the cycle repeats.
Its also important to note that many can't pay for such services.
I.e. minors. So they don't get a choice unless their parents
sympathize. That helps indoctrinate the next gen into accepting
ads. I think that late Millenial/early Gen Z was a unique group
that grew up with minimal ads (or easy ways to block ads) before
smartphone hoisted most control from them.
throwawayk7h wrote 21 hours 36 min ago:
Instead of ads, we could have websites mine bitcoin in javascript. I
feel like this would be better for everyone, especially in a world of
AI agents.
mvdtnz wrote 22 hours 20 min ago:
My experience is that people who make sweeping claims like "all
advertising should be banned" have never run or managed a small
business. There is simply no way to survive as one of the little guys
without some kind of marketing.
tcfhgj wrote 5 hours 15 min ago:
people still would buy food in their favorite shops, so they
probably will survive - perhaps even with higher profits as
zero-sum ad spending is gone
nielsbot wrote 23 hours 29 min ago:
> Lei Cidade Limpa (Portuguese for clean city law) is a law of the
city of São Paulo, Brazil, put into law by proclamation in 2006 that
prohibits advertising such as outdoor posters.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
testing22321 wrote 21 hours 34 min ago:
Billboard ads are banned in cities in New Zealand. Have been for a
long time
sjw987 wrote 7 hours 27 min ago:
It'd be great if all public ads were banned and digital ads were
the only form. That way those who are savvy enough can also block
the digital ones and live a completely ad-free life.
My annoyance is that regardless of how I lock ads out of my own
home and devices, I will still always see ads for McSlop and Coca
Cola everywhere I walk in my city.
fsflover wrote 23 hours 52 min ago:
> whether the world would be better without ads
What if we made advertising illegal? (simone.org)
1975 points by smnrg 9 months ago | 1409 comments
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
JumpCrisscross wrote 23 hours 55 min ago:
> often wondered whether the world would be better without ads
Youâd probably have to compromise on free speech, since the line
between ads and public persuasion is ambiguous to the point of
non-existence.
Better middle steps: ban on public advertising (e.g. no billboards,
first-party-only signage). Ban on targeted digital advertising. Ban
on bulk unsolicited mail or e-mail.
tossaway0 wrote 21 hours 47 min ago:
I havenât given it enough thought, but would a ban on selling ad
space do the trick?
You can self promote, but you canât pay third parties to do it
for you and you canât sell it as a service.
JumpCrisscross wrote 21 hours 27 min ago:
> would a ban on selling ad space do the trick?
How would you define ad space?
> You can self promote, but you canât pay third parties to do
it for you and you canât sell it as a service
An acid test I've found surprisingly powerful is that of the
founders promoting the Constitution through pamphleteering. They
wrote the pamphlets themselves. The historical record is silent
on whether they paid for their printing or distribution. (The
papers could publish due to subscribers and paid advertising.)
If your rule would let them pamphleteer, it should be fine. If it
would not, it probably needs work. I have not yet seen a
definition of advertising that satisfactorily isolates this.
tossaway0 wrote 20 hours 52 min ago:
Someone who prints something for a third party isnât selling
ad space.
Everyone could self promote, they just couldnât contract
someone to do it for them. Employees could promote for their
employer, but it couldnât be subcontracted out. And you
canât pay a company to put up your ad on their billboard or
their website, etc.
Ignoring how this might be enforced, would it be enough to let
people express themselves while cutting out the impact of
negative externalities of advertising?
JumpCrisscross wrote 19 hours 1 min ago:
> would it be enough to let people express themselves while
cutting out the impact of negative externalities of
advertising?
I think it's doable. But I haven't seen the scalpel yet.
In the meantime, we have clean lines we can run up towards.
Banning ads (basically, commercial speech) in public space.
Banning commercial bulk mail. And banning targeted commercial
advertising (beyond the content it sits).
elevatortrim wrote 23 hours 57 min ago:
Absolutely. The world would be vastly better off without 2 things:
- Ads. Lower quality products/services perform better with
more/better ads.
- Venture Capital. Services out-compete others by using free money
early on, killing the free market.
socalgal2 wrote 1 day ago:
It's not ads IMO, it's just reality. Remove the ads, people
(instagram/tiktok/youtube) still get influence by "strive to addict
their users"
SchemaLoad wrote 22 hours 50 min ago:
Without adverts, the platform has less incentive to maximise
engagement. They won't send you push notifications, they won't
implement short form video, etc. My gym/ISP/email provider don't
design their services on making me spend the whole day using them.
If anything they don't want me using the service at all but I
myself want to.
Babkock wrote 1 day ago:
Billboards are outlawed in Alaska.
kelnos wrote 1 day ago:
No need to wonder: the world would certainly be better without ads.
Advertising is psychological manipulation. They should be illegal.
And don't whine about "how will new companies find customers?"
They'll figure it out. Capitalism always finds a way. Business
interests should always be secondary to the needs and safety of real
people.
jonplackett wrote 1 day ago:
Nice linguistic explanation of social media just been coined as
âultra processed languageâ
URI [1]: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQh50UKkt10/?igsh=MWx6ZW41ZHV...
amelius wrote 1 day ago:
> I've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads.
Of course. Ads make us buy more things. Things we don't need most of
the time.
Think of the environmental win if we banned ads tomorrow!
Zigurd wrote 1 day ago:
When I first visited Latvia, I thought it was a charming side effect
of communism that store names were quite small on the façades. Was
there an ethic of abjuring crass commercialism? Then I noticed the
shadows left by larger store names above the small Latvian store
names. It wasn't that Marxism Leninism called for demure commercial
logos. The Latvians had just taken down the Russian signs. Commercial
promotion is, I suppose, a condition of life,
carlosjobim wrote 1 day ago:
There is a huge chunk of companies who do not pay to advertise their
products or services, because their value offering is good enough to
not need to. And a huge chunk who does very little advertisement for
the very same reason.
For example, when was the last time you saw a TV or YouTube ad for a
motorcycle from any of the big Japanese brands? The products are so
mature and the value proposition is so good that they don't need to.
And that's a 70 billion dollar annual market.
redeuxx wrote 1 day ago:
I was just in the Philippines, tons of ads for Japanese motorcycle
brands. In places where competition and usage for the product or
service is high, there will be ads, and lots of it. You use
motorcycles as an example, but it probably isn't a very good
example.
keybored wrote 1 day ago:
Why not. Just run with it sometimes. Get people to argue for ads.
> Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's
fun to think about sometimes.
Yeah, sure. Get them to convince you how impractical it is. How the
economy relies on it. How things âwouldnât workâ without it.
Then you/they have just argued themselves into the position that
society relies on this shitty practice to sustain itself. Then in
turn: why ought we live like this?
maxglute wrote 1 day ago:
I think my tolerance for ads would be higher if algos stop showing
repeat ads, or limit same ad from playing more than X times to user.
TechSquidTV wrote 1 day ago:
When crypto was genuinely new, and I was young, I had hope that one
day we might actually embrace micropayments. Turns out I was not only
young, but stupid.
octoberfranklin wrote 17 hours 57 min ago:
Ignoring the cryptocurrency angle for a second (to avoid
distracting knee-jerks)...
Have you thought deeply about why micropayments have not been
embraced?
tcfhgj wrote 5 hours 32 min ago:
ads
thaumasiotes wrote 12 hours 12 min ago:
All transactions include several kinds of costs. Reducing the
monetary costs to zero does nothing for the other costs.
Enthusiasm for micropayments is very similar to enthusiasm for
cutting the price of something from $5.001 to $5.00000001. It's a
0.02% decrease in the price! They make about as much sense as
saying "hey, if I can buy 80,000 plastic ninjas for $500, I
should also be able to buy one ninja for $0.007".
bko wrote 1 day ago:
Better from whom? As a user, maybe. But if you're trying to compete,
it's incredibly useful to get exposure. For instance, suppose you run
a competitor to Salesforce and you want to buy the Salesforce keyword
because you provide a better product. I don't know how you would
bootstrap that otherwise.
If anything the big businesses use advertising as a protection moat.
As a small business, I would def prefer to be in a world that allows
me to advertise, even if I have to compete for things like my own
name
whazor wrote 11 hours 40 min ago:
A big part of advertising on Google is making sure your own brand
is the top result. This is essentially extortion from Google.
Companies are burning money on something that should be the default
result in Google.
elevatortrim wrote 23 hours 34 min ago:
In reality, even if I provide a better product than Salesforce,
they will outcompete me by their ad-buying power.
TeMPOraL wrote 1 day ago:
> For instance, suppose you run a competitor to Salesforce and you
want to buy the Salesforce keyword because you provide a better
product. I don't know how you would bootstrap that otherwise.
Why would you assume I'm providing a better product? Ads are
predominantly needed by those providing worse products, because
spending money on marketing has much better ROI than actually
creating a good product.
MiddleEndian wrote 1 day ago:
If I search for "Salesforce alternative" and something that isn't
Salesforce shows up, great! That's what I want!
If I search for Salesforce and something that isn't Salesforce
shows up above Salesforce, the tool I'm using is wrong and I will
assume that the promoted product is a scam.
This happened to me yesterday when installing the mobile version of
Brotato. Some other game appeared above Brotato in the Google Play
store. I already hate Android but this only makes me hate it more.
Google already gets an unjustified cut of the money I'm paying for
the game, yet on top of that they serve me the wrong result at the
top.
Anon1096 wrote 1 day ago:
>Google already gets an unjustified cut of the money I'm paying
for the game
Brotato is free to distribute their game outside the Play Store
as well, Android isn't locked down. If the cut was unjustified
why would they give money away to Google for free? The reasons
are actually extremely similar to the reasons ads benefit
society.
MiddleEndian wrote 23 hours 24 min ago:
They kinda created this fake locked down market that people
expect to be able to be used, same as Apple, compared to say,
just downloading apps normally like on a computer.
Also "sideloaded" apps cannot be automatically updated,
although personally I think it would be better if nothing could
automatically update lol
I'm also not the biggest fan of Steam. But at least on Steam if
I search for Brotato it's the top result, Steam is not tied to
the OS so if gamers and game makers decided they hate Steam
they could jump to some other market (as opposed to, say, the
built-in Microsoft store in Windows that thankfully seems to be
failing), and Steam has helped drag Linux into the 21st century
in a good way.
lkramer wrote 1 day ago:
It's infuriating, the other day I had to download an app to pay
for parking. What the fuck do I need the top choice to be a
competing parking app? That won't do me any good when the place
I'm parking need the one I searched for and who the hell goes
"oh, an exciting new parking app? I'm gonna drive around until I
can find a place that uses it so I can park there!"
Rygian wrote 1 day ago:
And if I am not searching for Salesforce or alternatives, and an
ad for Salesforce or an alternative gets pushed into my face, the
ad is wrong and the advertiser is wrong.
cramsession wrote 1 day ago:
âUsersâ are the only people who matter. Companies are
artificial constructs and, in an ideal world, would never be
prioritized over the public.
titzer wrote 1 day ago:
> If anything the big businesses use advertising as a protection
moat. As a small business, I would def prefer to be in a world that
allows me to advertise, even if I have to compete for things like
my own name
These two sentences are contradictory. Big business uses it as a
defensive measure, yet you think a small business can use it as an
offensive measure. It's an absurd outcome of the SEO of the last
two decades that people think it's fine to pay for get traffic
using your own keywords. Stockholm syndrome.
vel0city wrote 1 day ago:
I can see how it's contradictory on its face, but the reality is
pretty nuanced.
Large brands continue to run ads to enforce brand loyalty and
keep their image fresh. For a lot of companies, dropping
advertising will lead to reduced sales. [1] However, as a new
entrant to a consumer facing market, how is one supposed to drive
new customers to try their product? Just being a bit better or a
little cheaper isn't necessarily going to win over a lot of
people if they never bother trying it due to existing brand
loyalties. So you've got to do some amount of advertising to
build some kind of awareness to the product and get people to try
it.
That doesn't necessarily mean unskippable video advertisements or
whatever, but one should try and do some kind of marketing push
to get awareness of your product up other than hoping presence on
some store shelves will result in enough sales fast enough to
keep your company alive.
URI [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/cmo/2024/12/18/why-cutting-...
dcrimp wrote 1 day ago:
If you have to advertise - shove your product in people's faces
- to keep sales, your product is not supplying enough real
value, does not have staying power, and you should lose.
"Just being a bit better or a little cheaper isn't necessarily
going to win over a lot of people if they never bother trying
it due to existing brand loyalties"
This is a feature, not a bug. Brand loyalties are built when
products are reliable and good. Your product should be enough
of an improvement to make people move of their own accord.
If your new product solves frustrations present in an
incumbent, on a long enough timescale, your product will come
out on top.
If both products are presented equally in a marketplace, the
better one will win. If your company does not survive because
you can't shove it in people's faces, this is a good thing.
vel0city wrote 1 day ago:
> If your new product solves frustrations present in an
incumbent, on a long enough timescale, your product will come
out on top.
I've got numerous examples where this didn't happen because
of other brand awareness. Neato had a very competitive and
better bot vacuum to iRobot for years and yet they failed to
gain traction. A large part of that would be because everyone
knew about iRobot's offerings and yet ask any random person
if they've ever heard of Neato Botvac and you'll get
crickets. You're imagining an ideal world where clear better
performers always win. This doesn't often happen in practice.
dcrimp wrote 23 hours 39 min ago:
How did everyone know about irobot's offering?
What if in the stores, botvacs and irobots were presented
right next to each other with the same amount of real
estate?
vel0city wrote 5 hours 50 min ago:
First mover advantage, brand awareness, word of mouth,
early reviewers, etc. People then build a brand
connection of "robot vacuum" == "roomba", everything else
is just a fake imitation.
Imagine you're a normal random consumer and not an
electronics nerd. You've heard people on the morning TV
news show talk about these robot vacuums and showed a
Roomba. You have a friend that got one last Christmas and
said their Roomba was pretty cool. You go to the store,
and you see a few Roombas and some other brands you've
never heard of. You're probably only going to spend a few
minutes looking at the shelf. Which one are you likely to
get?
And in the end iRobot managed to coast on that brand
connection of "robot vacuum" == "roomba" for a lot of
people for nearly 20 years. It really only took until
competitors were way cheaper and way better that got
people to really start to switch. Their products have not
been competitive for over a decade and yet they've only
finally died. That power of linking a brand to a specific
item or service is powerful, and its not purely push
advertising and forced video ads that build it.
Its somewhat the same thing for Google. Sure, they do
some amount of advertising especially at top of line
events, but overall it seems their direct outbound
marketing is kind of low overall. They spend a bunch of
defaults and continue to build the connection that to
search the internet is to Google, even as they continue
to inject more paid results and the quality declines.
Other competitors are out there which are comparable or
better, but even with them heavily advertising they fail
to unseat that brand connection.
sensanaty wrote 1 day ago:
I mean, infinitely so. I don't give a shit that you (the royal you,
not literally you :p) and your business can't find their target
demographic without ads, they are psychological manipulation of the
worst kind and they should be eradicated from existence with
prejudice. There is NO type of advertisement that is okay in my mind,
whether it be a 5x5cm image in a black and white newspaper or the
ubiquitous cancer that we're inundated with daily on the internet,
none of it should exist. Moreover, if your business isn't possible
without ads, then good riddance. Maybe at some point in the past I
would've been okay with the "innocuous" ones like the newspaper ones,
but the advertising industry and the psychotic, soulless ghouls that
inhabit it have changed my opinion forever on it.
For every "innocent" and well intentioned ad out there, there are
quite literally a billion cancerous ones that rely on pure deception
to make the biggest buck out of you. Ads are the driving force behind
the cancerous entity that is Meta and all the ills that they've
brought upon the world such as actual fucking genocides. The "people"
I've had the displeasure of meeting that come from advertising
backgrounds have all been soulless psychopaths who would sell their
own family for a bit of cash.
I mean just look at the type of shit they come up with in this very
thread. It's all just games on how they can circumvent these kinda
rules. "Oh you'll force me to let people skip my brainwashing? I'll
just put up 20x more ads to make up for it!" Who even talks and
thinks like this other than ghouls?
squigz wrote 1 day ago:
The problem isn't fundamentally advertising - it's stuff like toxic
and anti-user advertisements, and the ad industry not knowing what
the word "privacy" means.
tcfhgj wrote 5 hours 12 min ago:
the fundamental problem is capitalism
thfuran wrote 1 day ago:
I think there is a fundamental problem with an ad-subsidized
service. Even ignoring the privacy issues inherent to the way
modern advertising works in practice (which you probably
shouldnât ignore), the mere presence of an advertiser as a third
party whose interests the service provider must consider creates
malign incentives.
I also think providing a service for free is fundamentally
anti-competitive. Itâs like the ultimate form of dumping. And
there are many studies showing that people are irrational about
zero-cost goods, so itâs even harder to compete against than
might be expected.
strogonoff wrote 1 day ago:
Arguably, the advertiser is not merely a third party whose
interests the service provider must consider, but rather the
actual paying customer (and much more of the second party) whose
interests the service provider must satisfy to make revenue. That
to me puts into perspective the absurdity of this business model:
the user is not the customer, the product or service itself is
not the product but only a means to keep offering the actual
product to the paying customer.
thfuran wrote 22 hours 3 min ago:
Yes, I mean from the consumer perspective. You're right that
the user of an entirely ad-funded service isn't the real
customer. They're still at least somewhat the customer when
they're still providing some of the revenue though.
somenameforme wrote 1 day ago:
I would disagree on this. The reason is that the main point of most
ads is to induce artificial demand. When successful this is
essentially making people think their lives are missing something,
repeatedly. I think it is fairly self evident that at scale this
simply leads to social discontent, materialism, and the overall
degradation of a society.
There are endless studies, such as this [1] demonstrating a
significant inverse relationship between ads and happiness. The
more ads, the less happy people are. And I think it's very easy to
see the causal relationship there. And this would apply even if the
ad industry wasn't so scummy. [1] -
URI [1]: https://hbr.org/2020/01/advertising-makes-us-unhappy
al_borland wrote 1 day ago:
I pay for YouTube Premium, which would in theory pull me out of the
perverse incentive structure around an ad-based model. Yet I feel
like I still get pushed toward all the same âfeaturesâ of
ad-funded accounts. I find it incredibly frustrating and keep sending
feature requests and reporting site issues as a result.
pyth0 wrote 1 day ago:
Can you explain what features you're talking about? Do you mean
stuff like "shorts"?
al_borland wrote 22 hours 6 min ago:
Autoplay keeps turning itself back on. Iâve probably turned it
off a dozen times now.
The other autoplay, where it starts playing stuff while browsing.
Iâve tuned this off many times too.
The massive thumbnails so I can only see 2 thumbnails on the
screen, Iâm not sure what the advantage is here other than
better tracking what you linger on. They also get bigger on the
active row, so if I see a video I might want on the 2nd cut off
row, then make it my active row, the thumbnails get bigger and I
canât see it anymore. I lose context due to this all the time
and it drives me nuts.
Shorts, yes, but not just Shorts in the Recommendations, but
Shorts dominating search results, where it almost doesnât show
traditional videos anymore. In the browser you can filter search
results for videos vs shorts, but not on the AppleTV.
It keeps showing big banners with a demo video next to it for
features Premium users can get⦠itâs an ad for something
Iâve already signed up for. I report these as spam.
The games. Iâve never once played one, yet they are prominently
displayed in my recommendations.
I think as a Premium user I should be able to choose what screen
the app opens into, or what is on my home page. Iâd like my
watch later list, for example. Instead, it just randomly mixes
some of those into the recommendations and it may or may not make
it clear which ones those are.
I know there is more, and some big ones Iâm missing, but those
are some of the things they come to mind.
layer8 wrote 23 hours 36 min ago:
The video feed, notifications, and the whole UI are still
structured to maximize engagement, instead of giving paying users
better control.
matthewsinclair wrote 1 day ago:
I've often wondered what would happen if we _taxed_ advertising [0].
The same rationale applies: it'll never work, and it'll never even be
tested, but I agree, it was fun to think about.
[0]:
URI [1]: https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-adver...
whs wrote 13 hours 46 min ago:
In Thailand signs are taxed based on its size, text language (Thai
only, No text or multilingual text and Thai text are placed lower
than other languages, Multilingual text), and static/dynamic (I
assume this applies to both digital and trivision).
This also not only for advertising but also normal signs like the
logo of the business on buildings. You'll see most people
circumvent the more expensive multilingual rate by adding small
Thai text at the top of the sign.
Unrelated, but another interesting fact is that some bus stops in
Bangkok are completely funded by an advertising company. Of course,
they'll get the ads space for free as a result, and they only offer
it in viable locations. The current governor doesn't like this idea
and settle for a less fancy bus stop paid by public money.
bee_rider wrote 1 day ago:
He talks about a Pigovian tax for ads, which is interesting. I
donât have any thoughts other than âyeah good idea.â
But, something I havenât fully worked out but have vague
suspicions about: are ads actually a tax-favorable business model
under the current system? We watch ads in exchange for some
service, if it wasnât an ad-supported service weâd have to pay
money for it, and that transaction would be taxed.
Of course, the transaction between the ad network and the company
placing the ad is taxed. But it seems like they could have a lot of
play, as far as picking where that transaction takes placeâ¦
Ads should at least be taxed as heavily as if we had paid for the
thing with money, IMO.
croemer wrote 1 day ago:
You're forgetting a very important problem: hard to implement.
Sugar in drinks and CO2 emissions are easily measured. The
definition of what's an ad is much harder.
pixl97 wrote 1 day ago:
>what's an ad is much harder.
Not really that much harder, and would immediately cover the
worst offenders. I mean we already have disclosure laws on
product placements and ads.
simplicio wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe, but on the otherside, ads make available a huge amount of
media and services to people who would otherwise be unable to afford
it. Like, I suspect a non-trivial percentage of people wouldn't have
email if it weren't for gmail and other free w/ads services.
abuob wrote 1 day ago:
Probably not too popular of an opinion on HN but email in my
opinion would be a great example of a service that could be run by
the government. Just like postal service (at least in some parts of
the world)
geek_at wrote 1 day ago:
There was something like that in Germany called de-mail. It was
official and receiving and reading a mail was considered legally
binding (invoices, etc.)
It could have been great but the implementation lacked encryption
and had wild security issues. So nobody used it and it was shut
down
stemlord wrote 1 day ago:
Then we'd be living in a world that didn't require you to have an
email in order to do anything like have a job or a social life,
which is probably a good thing
Aachen wrote 1 day ago:
> ads make available a huge amount of media and services to people
who would otherwise be unable to afford it.
They don't. Follow the money: why do ads power free services? The
advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the scenario where
they run the ad as compared to where they don't. The viewer must be
spending more money in response to having seen it
If the viewer doesn't have the money to pay the first party fair
and straight (say, a video website), they also don't have money to
splurge on that fancy vacuum cleaner in addition to the website and
advertisement broker getting paid, no matter how many ads you throw
at them
Ads are useful for honest products, like if I were to start a
company and believe that I've made a vacuum cleaner that's
genuinely better (more or better cleaning at a lower or equal cost)
but nobody knows about it yet. However, I don't see the point in
money redirection schemes where affluent people inefficiently pay
for public services (if they're indistinguishable and the company
shows ads to both, thereby funding the poor people's usage). Let's
do that through taxes please
simplicio wrote 17 hours 10 min ago:
"They don't. Follow the money: why do ads power free services?
The advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the scenario
where they run the ad as compared to where they don't. The viewer
must be spending more money in response to having seen it"
The first part is true, the second part pretty obviously isn't.
Advertizers expect to net $ from ad buys, but most advertising
isn't trying to increase a consumers total spending, its trying
to drive that spending towards the companies products.
To give the most obvious example, the largest category of
advertising is for food and beverage products. But no one thinks
that if those ads all suddenly disappeared, people would stop
buying food.
Aachen wrote 13 hours 36 min ago:
That makes sense, though you're still paying for the service or
product that includes advertising as part of buying the third
party product such as a beverage. If you can't afford the
service or product then you're down to off-brand products that
don't run ads
thfuran wrote 1 day ago:
>The advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the
scenario where they run the ad as compared to where they don't
They donât necessarily make more money from every user though.
Aachen wrote 1 day ago:
I addressed that above. If that's the point, the people with
disposable income who view the ad subsidise the ad broker and
the website as a hidden charge on a product which they probably
didn't need. It doesn't get less efficient than that. I'd
rather that people living under the poverty threshold get
subsidised directly
Advertisers/brokers will also do everything to optimise to whom
the ad is being shown to not waste they money. Poor people
can't turn it into arbitrary cash, they can just waste time on
video sites and freemium games while they barely (or don't)
have enough money to make ends meet
I guess I am very much in the "let's pay fair and square"
corner, both for websites/services and for taxes/subsidies
where needed. I don't see it working reliably or efficiently
any other way in the long run
iso1631 wrote 1 day ago:
If a company is willing to spend $5 to force you to watch an
advert, then they are expecting more than $5 from you in return.
simplicio wrote 1 day ago:
Sure, but a lot of that is 1) just influencing what type or brand
you get of products your going to buy anyways, and 2) only an
average, presumably wealthier consumers are "subsidizing" poorer
ones, since they have more spending to be influenced.
oneeyedpigeon wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe. Or maybe we could fund those services from all the money
we'd save without advertising.
pixl97 wrote 1 day ago:
Assuming a zero sum economy, which is a pretty poor assumption.
thuuuomas wrote 1 day ago:
We arenât even mining asteroids near Earthâs orbit. Space
colonization is a ketamine dream. Thereâs no extraterrestrial
economy. Earth is all we have. One pie.
twoodfin wrote 21 hours 12 min ago:
A pie that includes sand which is now turned into GPUs that
can solve complex problems described in English. Value that
was unlocked fairly recently from âone pieâ.
elevatortrim wrote 23 hours 37 min ago:
Because we are spending our resources on stupid shit like
tiktok virals funded by ads.
somenameforme wrote 1 day ago:
Most internet services are very low cost to offer for any company
that has some infrastructure setup already. So for instance 'back
in the day', before Google hoovered up everybody's email, what
would typically happen is you would get an email address with your
ISP.
thaumasiotes wrote 12 hours 5 min ago:
> So for instance 'back in the day', before Google hoovered up
everybody's email, what would typically happen is you would get
an email address with your ISP.
Well, no, not even close. You'd get an email address from your
ISP. You still do; nothing about that has changed.
Among the things that haven't changed is that you were more
likely to use a free online email service, most notably Hotmail
or Yahoo.
RHSeeger wrote 1 day ago:
But that also bound you to your ISP in a way, because switching
ISPs meant switching emails. It is better to have then separated.
layer8 wrote 23 hours 39 min ago:
ISPs could be required by law to allow the porting of email
addresses, just like it happens with mobile phone numbers.
RHSeeger wrote 4 hours 17 min ago:
How would that work? The email address generally has the
ISP's domain name in it.
layer8 wrote 4 hours 5 min ago:
Similar as it happens for phone numbers, where there is
internal routing of phone calls between providers. A
customer can be at a different provider with their phone
number than the provider who âownsâ the containing
block of numbers.
ThrowawayTestr wrote 1 day ago:
People won't pay a few bucks a month for YouTube. They won't pay to
keep their favorite sites online. They won't pay for their news.
Without ads, a lot of things wouldn't exist.
SchemaLoad wrote 22 hours 47 min ago:
They will actually. Youtube premium has had explosive growth after
YT started pushing more ads and blocking ad blockers. People pay
for streaming services quite regularly. And youtube has one of the
strongest platforms/content bases to sell a subscription.
dmix wrote 7 hours 21 min ago:
Youtube is more like modern Cable TV though, there's huge value
there for the price. I like visiting Twitter and Reddit
occasionally for news, I've been using both since they launched,
but I wouldn't pay for either of those. I could easily make the
choice to cut that out of my life.
godshatter wrote 1 day ago:
This makes me wonder how the system makes any money. Presumably the
same people that won't pay a few bucks a month for YouTube won't
buy things from ads either. So how do the ad companies make any
money on them?
somenameforme wrote 1 day ago:
There are already numerous competitors to YouTube. Of course they
have collectively like 1% marketshare, but that's because it's
basically impossible to compete against YouTube right now. But if
YouTube died, these sites would rapidly become fully competent
replacements - all they're missing is the users.
Barrin92 wrote 1 day ago:
>these sites would rapidly become fully competent replacements
they wouldn't. For two reasons. Without the capital (that to a
large extent comes from ads) nobody could run the herculean
infrastructure and software behemoth that is Youtube. Maintaining
that infrastructure costs money, a lot. Youtube is responsible
for 15% of global internet traffic, it's hard to overstate how
much capital and human expertise is required to run that
operation. It's like saying we'll replace Walmart with my mom&pop
shop, we'll figure the supply chain details out later
Secondly content creation has two sides, there aren't just users
but also producers and it's the latter who comes first. Youtube
is successful because it actually pays its creators, again in
large part through ads.
Any potential competitor would have to charge significantly
higher fees than most users are willing to pay to run both the
business and fund content creators. No Youtube competitor has any
economic model at all on how to fund the people who are supposed
to entertain the audience.
somenameforme wrote 15 hours 36 min ago:
A peer comment said something similar to which I responded to
here: [1] However, you brought up the distinction between
consumers and producers, but I'd argue that such a thing
doesn't inherently exist. YouTube was thriving before Google
when it mostly just a site for people to share videos on. Here
[1] is one of e.g. Veritasium's oldest videos. What it lacks in
flare and production quality, it makes up for in content and
authenticity.
You don't need 'creators', you simply need people. And I think
a general theme among many of the most successful 'creators',
is that they weren't really in it for the money. They simply
enjoyed sharing videos with people. Like do you think
Veritasium in that video could even begin to imagine what his
'channel' would become? [1] -
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46522719
URI [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2g1H5wPmUE
elevatortrim wrote 23 hours 29 min ago:
And that's extremely harmful. In theory we have democracies. In
practice, if you have the capital, you get to decide for what
products and services the world's resources are used for.
abenga wrote 1 day ago:
How would they pay for the infrastructure required to support all
those users? I can't stand ads, but when I was younger, no way
would I have paid for YT Premium (though to be fair, ads are
much, much worse now).
somenameforme wrote 16 hours 6 min ago:
Bandwidth transit prices, peering, and other data for for ISPs
and the like tend to be highly classified (lol), but it's very
close to $0. Take Steam for instance. They are responsible for
a significant chunk of all internet traffic and transfer data
in the exabytes. Recently their revenue/profit data was leaked
from a court filing and their total annual costs, including
labor/infrastructure/assets/etc, was something like $800
million. [1] Enabling on site money transfers (as YouTube does)
and taking a small cut from each transfer (far less than
YouTube's lol level 30% cut) would probably be getting close to
enough to cover your costs, especially if you made it a more
ingrained/gamey aspect of the system - e.g. give big tippers
some sort of swag in comments or whatever, stuff like that.
It's not going to be enough to buy too many [more] islands for
Sergey and Larry, but such is the price we must all pay. [1] -
URI [1]: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valves-reporte...
cons0le wrote 1 day ago:
Let me pay usage based, with full transparency in hosting,
infra, and energy costs. Like a utility.
Subscription services are like hungry hungry hippos, you give
them $10 a month and next year they want $100.
I honestly think if everyone starts paying, it will only make
them remove the free tier quicker. I think society is better
with youtube free, even if ads are annoying.
wolvoleo wrote 1 day ago:
No I won't pay for premium because even if I pay for it I still get
ads in the content itself.
Fix that and then I'll pay.
Until then I just block the ads and the sponsors.
platevoltage wrote 1 day ago:
I don't like ads either. Who does? I really don't mind unless
they are hard-cut and aren't made by the creator themselves.
What's your solution here? A new policy that prevents creators
from doing sponsor spots? We all know what the result of that
would be.
wolvoleo wrote 1 day ago:
> A new policy that prevents creators from doing sponsor spots?
We all know what the result of that would be.
Well or not show the sponsors to premium users. They could
simply upload a separate premium version. Don't forget, these
content creators are already getting a lot more money from YT
when a premium user views their vids. So they're not entitled.
They can walk away but where would they go?? Besides, more and
more people are using sponsorblock since it's become totally
insane with these.
anthonypasq wrote 1 day ago:
so you just dont think people making video content should make
money in any way? if you hate ads that much dont watch any
creators that have sponsored content. oh wait, the only way they
can make videos that good is because they make money and are
professionals. doh!
wolvoleo wrote 1 day ago:
No, I think they shouldn't be double dipping. If I pay for
premium I want no ads whatsoever. Not for the content creators
to sneak some in anyway.
And no I don't tend to watch many with sponsor crap in them
because they aren't actually very good (think the low-quality
crap from LTT etc). The best channels (EEVBlog is one notable
one) don't have sponsors at all because they're made for love.
What I am not doing is watching the sponsorship segments
anyway. So yeah I use sponsorblock. And I use Ublock origin or
revanced to remove the ads too because there's way too many
now.
anthonypasq wrote 22 hours 13 min ago:
ok so you actually dont think they should be single dipping
because you use ublock origin and sponsorblock?
wolvoleo wrote 19 hours 18 min ago:
No but if they weren't double dipping with the sponsors I'd
pay for premium.
It's just that as it stands it makes no sense to do so. I
still get ads so there's nothing in it for me. And if I use
sponsorblock I might as well go the full way.
It's really on YouTube that they have let this situation be
created. They should have stopped sponsor segments the
moment they arrived.
driverdan wrote 1 day ago:
YT makes it easy to skip embedded ads now. They mark places where
people skip past and shortcut it so you don't need to watch them.
Imustaskforhelp wrote 1 day ago:
Sponsorblock exists as well.
driverdan wrote 1 day ago:
Sponsorblock is great but only works in the browser. Most
people view YT on other devices.
Imustaskforhelp wrote 1 day ago:
Revanced Youtube's app support sponsorblock as well.
wolvoleo wrote 23 hours 46 min ago:
Yes and Tubular and SmartTubeNext (Android TV!) and
Grayjay too. Many options
Tubular is a clone of Newpipe by the way, newpipe's devs
didn't want to allow the sponsorblock plugin so it had to
be forked.
mock-possum wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs a well-established fact that my world would be much better
without ads.
master-lincoln wrote 1 day ago:
I think it would have been a better world without ads. There would be
more competition which would improve products and thus outcome for
customers.
Also most of the demand of goods is artificially created by ads, so
there would be less production of crap and thus less resources
wasted.
It would also mean a whole industry of people would do something else
that is potentially not as detrimental to society.
The money spend on the digital marketing industry was estimated at
650 billion USD 2025. For comparison that is equivalent to the whole
GDP of countries like Sweden or Israel.
jonny_eh wrote 1 day ago:
> I think it would have been a better world without ads. There
would be more competition which would improve products and thus
outcome for customers.
How would people learn about various choices?
amelius wrote 1 day ago:
> How would people learn about various choices?
By going to a website where they can learn about various choices.
It could be similar to ads, but with higher truth value to it.
AND most importantly, the user would view the information when
THEY want to see the information, not when the marketeer wants to
shove it in their face.
jonny_eh wrote 22 hours 36 min ago:
> By going to a website where they can learn about various
choices.
Who pays for the website? In the end, a world without ads gets
very pricey very quickly.
tcfhgj wrote 5 hours 34 min ago:
who paid for product catalogues in the past?
who gives free samples to journalists for testing?
amelius wrote 22 hours 18 min ago:
Millions of ad haters would gladly pay for the website!
But seriously, you think there is no money in a website for
showing ads?
vladms wrote 1 day ago:
While I agree that the world would be better without ads in their
current form, we should think why are ads required and what are the
benefits.
The main issue is how you discover a new product. The main benefit
to society is/could be faster progress. The main downside to
society could be unhappy people that consume crap.
I think smart people should think about alternative solutions, not
just think "ads are the problem".
I personally have the exactly same issues as above when I look for
example for open source libraries/programs for a task. There are
popular ones, there are obscure ones, they are stable ones, etc.
The search space is so big and complex that it is never easy.
My personal preference would be a network recommendation system. I
would like to know what people I know (and in my extended network)
are using and like - being it restaurants, clothes or open source
software. I have 90% of friends (or friends of friends) satisfied
with something - maybe I should try. Of course it is not a perfect
system, but seems much better than what we currently have...
layer8 wrote 23 hours 44 min ago:
Open source software (mostly) donât have ads, and that
doesnât seem to be a problem in practice. Good projects become
known by word of mouth, people blogging about it, etc. If
anything, it exemplifies that ads arenât required.
amelius wrote 1 day ago:
> The main issue is how you discover a new product.
We live in the information age.
How did you learn about your programming languages? Ads?
vladms wrote 1 day ago:
I learnt Basic, C++ in that order because at the time there
were the only options (Basic because of a computer like
Sinclair that only had basic, C++ because there was the only
thing offered as a course at a computer club around).
Programming languages are easier to discover because they are a
reasonable number (tens) you can asses, they are very important
(if you are in the field), so you can invest a lot of time in
choosing and following the trends.
I will not spend the same amount of time deciding about
everything...
One thing that I prefer something like ads/reviews (and in fact
works well enough in my case): cultural events in the city I
live.
amelius wrote 1 day ago:
Ok, but do you agree that we should put ads in designated
places (and out of sight, generally) where people can look
them up whenever they find it convenient rather than the
other way around where companies just shove them in your face
at random times?
ryandrake wrote 1 day ago:
I think it is largely a Marketer's fantasy that people get up in
the morning with a goal of "discovering new products." I don't
want to discover new products. I especially don't want to while
I'm trying to do something else that I actually WANT to do. If I
need a new product, I will deliberately go out and look for it. I
don't need marketers doing drive-by product announcements while
I'm just trying to live my life.
The question of "how do people spontaneously discover products"
is invalid. It's just not something people want in their lives.
manuelmoreale wrote 1 day ago:
> My personal preference would be a network recommendation
system.
Random question: do you have a personal site where you write
about things you recommend? Because that's the solution IMO. And
that's the network you're talking about: it's the web. You find
enough people you trust and you see what they recommend. The
issue is that in modern society 99% of the people consume and 1%
are fucking influencers getting paid to promote crap.
vladms wrote 1 day ago:
I was thinking (theoretically) we should strive for a more
efficient system that could include more people. There are
plenty of simpler and less efficient to achieve the same goal.
For example I have for example a list of restaurants that I
share with people that visit my city (plenty of tourist traps
around), but it is cumbersome to manage/share. Does not feel
like a solution.
Imustaskforhelp wrote 1 day ago:
> My personal preference would be a network recommendation
system. I would like to know what people I know (and in my
extended network) are using and like - being it restaurants,
clothes or open source software. I have 90% of friends (or
friends of friends) satisfied with something - maybe I should
try. Of course it is not a perfect system, but seems much better
than what we currently have...
I can think of a hacky solution where your friends can share
their (trustpilot?) or alternative accounts username and then you
can review what they are reviewing/what they are using etc.
The problem to me feels like nobody I know writes a trustpilot
review unless its really bad or really good (I dont know too much
about reviewing business)
I feel like someone must have built this though
Another part is how would you get your friends list? If its an
open protocol like fediverse, this might have genuine value but
you would still need to bootstrap your friends connecting you in
fediverse and the whole process.
And oh, insta and other large big tech where your friends already
are wont do this because they precisely make money from selling
you to ads. It would be harmful to their literal core.
iso1631 wrote 1 day ago:
> I personally have the exactly same issues as above when I look
for example for open source libraries/programs for a task. There
are popular ones, there are obscure ones, they are stable ones,
etc. The search space is so big and complex that it is never
easy.
And adverts don't help determine what the best tool for your
problem is. They determine which product spent the most on
adverts.
So yes, adverts do not help you with decision making at all.
owisd wrote 1 day ago:
> how you discover a new product
Buying magazines for trusted 3rd party reviews used to be way
more common, far better experience than trying to sift through
SEO slop these days.
oneeyedpigeon wrote 1 day ago:
That's a great idea for a dystopian sci-fi story: you can opt out
of ads, but your product choices are publicly broadcast instead.
Imustaskforhelp wrote 1 day ago:
Oh man this is a nice idea, I will try to add on somethings
which I can think about from the top of my mind
To be really honest, even if things were publicly broadcasted,
The amount of choices of products we make in each day would be
huge.
So no random stranger would go and look for your product
choices. What would matter are the close friends and family or
perhaps when one becomes really famous?
Would the fundamental idea of anonymity go away from all
internet? Like if someone posts a youtube video or even a yt
comment, would I get to know what they ate for dinner?
Can ads still be blocked? If my product choice is an LLM lets
say, would my prompts be choices as well that will get leaked
with the conversation to everyone?
To be really honest, Govt.'s (snowden showed us) already can
know about your product choices pretty good enough and the
internet/infrastructure behind it is pretty centralized
nowadays as well
Sure there are alternatives but how many people do you see
using beyond the tri-fecta of cloud and how those choices come
downstream to us consumers if services run there
I feel like this is gonna be a classic example of Hawthorne
effect (Had to look the term for that) meaning that people will
behave differently now that they are being observed.
Also do you know that its not any technical limitation which
limits it but financial incentives.
There is no incentive to having your product choices be
publicly broadcasted but for the services, there is an
incentive of money if they show you ads and which they end up
showing to ya.
If there was an financial incentive for the servers to create
this choice itself of opting out / public broadcasts option,
they probably would be reality.
arethuza wrote 1 day ago:
I don't think that's impractical - isn't it exactly what YouTube
Premium offers, ad free viewing for £12.99 a month.
I watch quite a lot of content on YouTube and really should sign up
for Premium but I feel that the shockingly irrelevant ads I get
presented with on YouTube are trying to drive me to sign for it -
they're certainly not going to get me to buy anything!
nalekberov wrote 1 day ago:
Yet, most content on YouTube these days are sponsored by the
companies trying to sell you a crap.
And with 'Native ads' it's nearly impossible to have ad-free
experience nowadays.
SchemaLoad wrote 22 hours 49 min ago:
At least on youtube premium it has a feature to "Skip commonly
skipped section".
pixl97 wrote 1 day ago:
>most content on YouTube these days are sponsored by the
companies trying to sell you a crap.
Because YT doesn't pay shit to content creators, hence being part
of creating this.
The people making the content need to make a living too, as much
as ads suck.
gordonhart wrote 1 day ago:
SponsorBlock works very well for skipping in-video ads.
jaapz wrote 1 day ago:
YouTube has been increasing both the amount, frequency and length
of ads in their video's for a long time now. They know people will
keep using them anyway because of the network effect, and people
who are really fed up with these ads will buy premium anyway. For
them it's a win/win.
mmmlinux wrote 1 day ago:
Don't pretend that its just YouTube forcing the ads on you. The
creators can choose where ads go in their videos.
TeMPOraL wrote 1 day ago:
The "creators" are complicit, and are in fact directly
responsible for the worst aspects of the platform. Especially
with most popular and well-known ones, the content itself is
typically a very long, insidious ad, which makes the
platform-supplied ad breaks a breath of fresh air in
comparison.
999900000999 wrote 1 day ago:
It's a decent deal.
Comes with YouTube Music for 15$.
I probably use YouTube more than any other website, for about 10
minutes my premium subscription had expired and u rushed to throw
money at Google to turn it back on.
Musicians complain about low streaming payouts, but 30 years ago
I'd pay $40 ( inflation adjusted) for 15 songs and only like 3 of
them.
Now I can listen to 500 or 600 unique songs a month + music that
would of had to be imported for that 15$.
If I actually like an artist I'll buy an album as a keepsake.
iammjm wrote 1 day ago:
The world would definitely be better without ads. All ads are
poisonous. All of them first convince you that you and your life as
it is is not good enough, and that in order to be happy again you
need to spend money to buy a $product.
Blikkentrekker wrote 14 hours 6 min ago:
Advertisement also more or less puts a wrench in the theory of
capitalistic competition in that companies would be incentivized to
create the best product for the lowest price supposedly. They're
now just incentivized to create the best ad campaign which costs
money and does not improve the product in any way.
Also, the existence of crippleware, where companies actually invest
resources into removing features from a product is interesting. It
would be interesting if we were to live in a world were both
advertisement and crippleware are forbidden. It's already forbidden
in many jurisdictions for various public function professions such
as medical services or legal services so it's not as though it
couldn't be implemented.
catlifeonmars wrote 16 hours 4 min ago:
> All ads are poisonous.
Yeah but the lethal dose is pretty high. 1 ad wonât kill you.
Unfortunately there can never be just 1 ad without regulation.
presentation wrote 17 hours 20 min ago:
Hard disagree, without any ads the only way to find out about new
things is via word of mouth, which would make many valuable
products never get off the ground. Ads done badly are poison but
ads done well educate people about new things they can benefit from
and drive the entire economy. I have had many experiences where
Iâve seen an ad that I genuinely think is interesting and was
enlightening to find.
shuntress wrote 23 hours 17 min ago:
The problem is not ads. The problem is SPAM.
There are plenty of legitimately well-intentioned ads that can
connect someone who needs a good/service with someone that supplies
it and everyone wins.
The problem is that we use a nearly totally free unregulated market
where anyone can advertise anything anywhere.
edit: I'm not saying we should necessarily try to optimize for good
ads over bad ads or even assuming that is possible. I would settle
for just somehow reducing the total volume of ads to help make
email, snail main, voice mail, and other methods of communication
more usable.
tzs wrote 23 hours 36 min ago:
How are the ads that local grocers and restaurants mail to me
telling me of sales or giving me coupons which let me get things
I'd be buying anyway for less money poisonous?
iceflinger wrote 23 hours 27 min ago:
If you were going to be buying it anyway why does it even matter
what the price is? Why can't they just list it at the coupon
price for everyone?
tzs wrote 21 hours 30 min ago:
Let me clarify. When I said I'm going to buy it anyway I didn't
necessarily mean at that time. There are many things that are
in the "do not need to go out and buy it now but I do need to
buy it in the near future" category.
I would normally get those at the store I normally buy that
kind of thing when I'm there to get other things. E.g., most
groceries come from the big Walmart Supercenter near my house.
If I get a flyer in the mail from the Safeway that is on the
other side of town, and see they have a good sale price on one
of those things, I might stop by that Safeway when I'm in that
part of town on other business and get it.
tcfhgj wrote 5 hours 42 min ago:
just get a list of shops and compare their prices instead of
waiting for an ad popping up in front of you for each product
you buy when you actually would prefer to watch something
else?
hoorayimhelping wrote 1 day ago:
>All ads are poisonous
This is a silly and short-sighted blanket statement. People used to
love getting catalogs, which are just big books full of ads. In the
right context, people appreciate being informed of products that
can help improve their lives.
elevatortrim wrote 23 hours 49 min ago:
Exactly. I hate seeing ads when I do not want to, and I love
going out and buying a furniture catalogue. The difference should
be obvious.
kibwen wrote 1 day ago:
Furiously seconded. Ads are just a tax that we pay both with our
attention and then with our wallets. Every dollar that a company
forks over to Google is a dollar they recoup by passing the costs
on to you, for absolutely no benefit whatsoever to the product
you're paying for. Destroy this heinous rent-seeking industry.
charcircuit wrote 22 hours 59 min ago:
You are ignoring the value of discovering a good or service.
Increasing the customer acquisition cost for a company to
infinity doesn't make them lower their prices. It makes them go
out of business because they have no customers.
tonyedgecombe wrote 9 hours 37 min ago:
>You are ignoring the value of discovering a good or service.
This has very little value to me. I'm buying my wife a new car
next year and I won't be perusing adverts to find what to buy.
If I did I would be thoroughly mislead as the adverts are full
of aspirational bullshit.
Adverts encourage people to eat unhealthy food, take unneeded
drugs, drink, smoke, buy more house than they need and replace
perfectly functional consumer goods. They make everybody's life
worse (apart from the advertisers).
Commerce won't stop without them. I've mostly eliminated them
from my life but that hasn't stopped me from spending my money.
kibwen wrote 21 hours 30 min ago:
People are really out here acting like we didn't have a
functioning economy before we invited ad companies in to
parasitize global commerce. I don't give a fuck if it means
"less discoverability", if I could snap my fingers and make
every ad company disappear tomorrow, the world would be a
better place.
charcircuit wrote 13 hours 48 min ago:
It is what enables global commerce.
tpmoney wrote 20 hours 48 min ago:
When did we have a functioning economy without ads? Was it
the 1980's when some of the most classic children's shows
were 30 minute commercials for toys? Was it the 1960s when
Charles Schultz was lamenting the commercialization of
Christmas in the Charlier Brown special? Maybe the 1910's
when Uncle Sam famously wanted you to join the army? Was it
the 1890's when Montgomery Ward and Sears were sending out
mail order catalogs? Was it the 1860's when you could learn
that "The Best Glass of Ale In the Globe" was available at
Isabella Nesbitt's Inn[1]? Town criers and traveling medicine
shows date back to at least the 1700's.
Less intrusive ads? Less frequent ads? Sure I can get behind
that (though, I can turn off a TV, can't turn off the town
crier). But ads have been a part of us since the first person
with something to sell wanted to sell it.
[1]
URI [1]: https://bailiffgatecollections.co.uk/gallery-categor...
Dylan16807 wrote 18 hours 24 min ago:
They said "ad companies" not the entire concept of ads.
tpmoney wrote 18 hours 16 min ago:
What is an "ad company" though? If it's someone you pay
to advertise your product for you, well that's something
town criers often did for merchants so "ad companies" are
at least that old.
Dylan16807 wrote 18 hours 4 min ago:
I don't know exactly what definition they meant, but
I'm confident that a crier doesn't count as an ad
company.
thaumasiotes wrote 12 hours 16 min ago:
Geez, if you think people don't like banner ads or
billboards, you should see what they think of town
criers.
Dylan16807 wrote 9 hours 29 min ago:
Criers are expensive. And I'd say that mattress
shop guy qualifies and he doesn't bother me that
much.
I would happily take a deal that gets rid of all tv
and video ads and replaces them with as many
independent criers as companies are willing to pay.
tirant wrote 1 day ago:
Definitely the world wouldnât be better without all ads, because
that would be a clear violation of free speech.
However ads should be limited only to communication channels that
are optional to engage in. As for example, an ad on YouTube, a
private video platform, should be perfectly fine. Thatâs part of
the product. On the other hand, ads on a highway, on the street,
should not be allowed. I have not given permission for them to
enter my personal mental space. Iâm fine with shops advertising
their presence, but not full fledged advertising on roads, streets,
etc.
tcfhgj wrote 5 hours 41 min ago:
ads aren't free speech, but corrupted speech
elevatortrim wrote 23 hours 51 min ago:
Free speech does not mean you get to yell at me. In the same way,
banning ads where they are shown to users without their consent
would not mean violation of free speech.
moffkalast wrote 1 day ago:
If free speech is you rolling up with a megaphone to yell
promotional nonsense at me, then it's my free speech to vote for
you to get banned I think.
citizenpaul wrote 1 day ago:
>The world would definitely be better without ads.
I don't have the proof but I'm guessing that this is provably
wrong. Without advertising in some existance it would be nearly
impossible to start a business which means everyone would be
peasants farming for subsistence living. I think the problem is
that the propose of ads has become divorced from product. The
issue is poor regulation not the existence of ads.
Think about it, how as a small or competitive business owner would
you get people to buy your soda vs coke/pepsi without advertising
in some way? The issue is that coke/pepsi know they have a simple
product so they blast ads not to sell their product but to
adversarially drown out competitors before they can exist. Tons of
advertising has counter agenda purposes like this rather than
selling a product, its propaganda not advertisement. There are
probably tons of unenforced laws already about this but IANAL.
elevatortrim wrote 23 hours 44 min ago:
Why would it be impossible to start a business? You would still
be able to list your business in mediums where potential buyers
willingly go and search for products and services. If anything,
it would level the playing field, paying more for ads would not
mean you getting your poorer services more visible buy paying
more for ads.
thenewnewguy wrote 1 day ago:
Obviously, if you could just delete the ads without changing
anything else the world would be better, but that's not how it
works.
Lots of businesses sustain themselves on ad revenue - would the
world be a better place if we had no ads, but
- TV was twice the cost
- Google, YouTube, etc. (insert your favorite ad-supported website
here) didn't exist or cost a monthly subscription
- All news was paywalled
- Any ad-supported website providing basic information (e.g. the
weather) was paywalled or didn't exist
- etc etc
Levitz wrote 23 hours 17 min ago:
Yes. I'm not even sure it's a question anymore. Yes it would be a
better world.
Not even because of the first order consequences of the ads, but
because since there are ads, we have an entire media ecosystem
based on grabbing your attention.
So that TV displays series and movies meant for people with the
attention span of a goldfish. This applies to Netflix and
Hollywood by the way. All of it. Even music changes for radio,
meaning more ads.
Google, Youtube, etc, along with news, along with social
networks, depend on ragebait, being the first to spout whatever
factoid, true or false, polarization of thought and basically a
good chunk of what is very evidently wrong in today's society.
I trust we could support a weather app with donations. For the
rest? If I could remove either ads or cancer from this world I
would sit a long time thinking about the decision, but gut
feeling? Ads. The actual cost of the ad industry is enormous and
incalculable, not even mentioning the actual purposes ads serve.
As for the rest, I'm very much a fan of the Bill Hicks standup
bit regarding the subject.
elevatortrim wrote 23 hours 47 min ago:
I actually think so, yes, the world would be better off with
everything you listed happening.
When we used to pay for newspapers, the informational value of
the news was a lot higher, news and news-like social media posts
were not the primary tool to spread stupidity.
taffer wrote 20 hours 9 min ago:
> When we used to pay for newspapers
Some newspapers were 50% advertising. You still had to pay for
them.
kelnos wrote 1 day ago:
Given that companies often spend a significant fraction of their
budgets on advertising, I wonder if some products would be
cheaper if advertising was banned. Sure, maybe some ad-supported
services would be paywalled, but it might end up being a wash in
the end.
At the very very very least, every ad-supported service should be
required to offer an option to pay and see no ads. I do pay for
services I use regularly when they offer it as an option to avoid
ads.
taffer wrote 19 hours 54 min ago:
Companies spending money on advertising is just another way of
acquiring customers. If they were unable to do that, they would
need to resort to other, more costly ways of acquiring
customers. I doubt that higher costs would result in lower
prices for customers.
serial_dev wrote 1 day ago:
Even as a consumer I am legitimately happy that Iâve seen ads for
some products.
Now sure, it probably happens about once a quarter, and for that I
watched probably hundreds if not thousands of ads, so was it worth
it, I donât know, probably not.
bigyabai wrote 1 day ago:
As a consumer, I am fully willing to swallow the opportunity cost
of blocking advertisements. I'm not afraid of having unspent
money sitting around.
iso1631 wrote 1 day ago:
Adverts I specifically request are fine. Trailers for example -- I
specifically go to youtube to find trailers.
Or I'll go to rightmove if I want to look at adverts for houses.
I'm happy to spend both time and even money on seeking out new
products.
But it seems that people have a parasitical relationship with
adverts, they can't imagine a world where there aren't wall to wall
adverts on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball
games and on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and
written in the sky.
Adverts should be for my benefit, i.e. I can turn them on or off.
charlieyu1 wrote 1 day ago:
As much as I hate ads, if you donât make yourself known to
potential customers youâre very screwed
cramsession wrote 1 day ago:
Thatâs not a problem for the customers though. Capitalism
twists our incentives toward prioritizing return on investment
over quality of life. Especially now with the internet, I
literally never need ads. I just search for the solution to the
problem Iâm having. No push needed (or wanted).
yibg wrote 16 hours 20 min ago:
How do you search? Google? That's typically part of marketing
spend. It may not be pure ads as in I pay google, they display
my ad. But it's still a company spending money to get their
result to the top so you are more likely to see it.
Ads solve the discovery problem. Without ads, people still try
to solve the discovery problem and try to get your attention.
Are those methods still ads?
tcfhgj wrote 5 hours 46 min ago:
> Without ads, people still try to solve the discovery
problem and try to get your attention. Are those methods
still ads?
examples?
yibg wrote 46 min ago:
- Paying for product placement on store shelves and movies
- SEO optimization to get to the top of the search result
page
- Paying influencers to use their product
- Paying people to post on forums about the product
- Sending / sponsoring reviewers
titzer wrote 1 day ago:
> I literally never need ads. I just search for the solution to
the problem Iâm having. No push needed (or wanted).
I want to agree with you, but you only think you're not seeing
ads. Obviously, the SEO corruption has made everything you
search for distorted by irresistible economic incentives of
tilting the search results and search engine in favor of
promoters.
tonyedgecombe wrote 9 hours 53 min ago:
Yes, and if you ban ads then you can expect a lot more
underhand marketing as the companies peddling their goods
will try and find another way to reach you.
cramsession wrote 1 day ago:
Oh I agree. I donât want or need to see ads, I currently do
though.
barbazoo wrote 1 day ago:
Is there not always some sort "marketplace" where people see
what's being offered one way or another?
I don't think we need ads for discovery, I see it more as a
nefarious way to occupy space in people's conscious.
pixl97 wrote 1 day ago:
>Is there not always some sort "marketplace"
How exactly does that work for virtual products?
TeMPOraL wrote 1 day ago:
Catalogs - offline and on-line, commercial and government.
Deprived of constant noise and overstimulation of
advertising, people will actively seek such information out,
whether because they have a problem to solve, or just out of
curiosity. All we're talking about here is switching from
current "push" model of advertising back to "pull" model.
Who here never browsed a product or company catalog they
found, just because they were curious?
barbazoo wrote 1 day ago:
I can almost feel the calm just imagining the world you're
describing.
barbazoo wrote 1 day ago:
Not that I ever use it but there are apparently services like
[1] people use to seek out new products.
But as sibling comment said, if it's really good, people will
find it eventually.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_Hunt
satvikpendem wrote 1 day ago:
Funny you mention Product Hunt because it's pay-to-play
too, there was a whole controversy a decade ago exactly
now:
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10739875
cramsession wrote 1 day ago:
If they provide value, people will seek them out.
taffer wrote 20 hours 18 min ago:
How? If you don't advertise, no one can see you.
barbazoo wrote 5 hours 6 min ago:
How did people that had something to sell do it before
advertising?
The problem again is greed. The organic way is too
inefficient so advertising needs to come in and make
people rich instead of letting the product do the
convincing naturally, word of mouth and so on.
cramsession wrote 5 hours 47 min ago:
If I need something, Iâll find it.
tcfhgj wrote 5 hours 48 min ago:
Just one counter example: gh.de
ksaj wrote 1 day ago:
Most of the YT ads are AI rubbish. I can't imagine those fake
"realistic puppy" ads generate any sales whatsoever. Same for the
monocular that can zoom into a book title from a mountain range
away. And nearly all the other YT and news feed ads one typically
sees.
Frankly, they should be illegal. If a physical store did that in
Canada, it certainly would be. I'm surprised Canada hasn't
reacted to these overabundant fake-product ads.
al_borland wrote 1 day ago:
As much as I hate ads, I donât know that itâs so simple.
There are products that do solve legitimate problems people have.
Maybe there is less of that now, but in this past this was very
true, and advertising helped make people aware that solutions to
their problems have been developed. The first washing machine, for
example.
The problem comes when the advertisement manufacturers problems
that didnât previously exist.
tap-snap-or-nap wrote 17 hours 3 min ago:
Ads should be centralised state department and run through only
approved and regulated bodies at regulated sites.
SergeAx wrote 20 hours 44 min ago:
Can you remember the last 3 times when ads showed you products
that solved your problem? I cannot.
The closest experience I have had was with ads for new
restaurants, of which two turned out good and one - not good.
Also, twice last year, I saw trailers of new movies I wasn't
aware of at the moment. However, I am sure I would later discover
it via reviews or word of mouth.
And mind that it was not problem solving, just an entertainment
suggestion. I can live comfortably without new restaurants, or I
will eventually discover them via other channels.
stubish wrote 21 hours 33 min ago:
Historically, yes. People in their 70s might remember that time.
But language has moved on. Advertising now means manipulation.
The ad market is priced for that. The rare cases of someone
wanting to use advertising channels to put out actual information
now have to pay a premium.
mrweasel wrote 23 hours 53 min ago:
Part of the issue may also be that to many companies rely on
selling ads as their main source of revenue and there simply
isn't enough money in "good ads" to fund all the services we've
come to expect to be free.
There simply isn't enough ads for soft drinks, supermarkets or
cars to reasonably fund the tech industry as it currently exists.
Ad funded Facebook, perfectly fine, but that's not a $200B
company, not without questionable ads for gambling, scams and
shitty China plastic products.
Platforms should have higher standards, accept lower profit
margins and charge users if needed, rather than resort to running
ads for stuff we all now is garbage.
pluralmonad wrote 1 day ago:
Word of mouth. It is okay for a system to be inefficient,
especially when the tradeoff for efficiency is a poison pill (ad
tech is definitely this).
tensor wrote 1 day ago:
The fix is actually fairly simple IMO, though will never be
implemented. Make all ads passive, e.g. require people to
explicitly ask to see them. For example, when I want to see what
new video games are around, I go to review sites and forums. It's
opt-in.
Making all ads only legal in bazar-like environments, banning all
other forms of "forced" ad viewing, and also banning personalized
ads completely, would go a very long way to fixing the issues.
Hell, we can start with simply banning personalized ads, that
alone would effectively destroy the surveillance economy by
making it illegal to use that data for anything other than
providing the service the customer purchases.
Aerroon wrote 23 hours 14 min ago:
But you are buying into viewing ads when you use services that
show you ads.
Also, ad bazaars sound great until you realize that every
locality needs to have their own bazaar. Seeing ads for New
York barbers is kind of useless when you're in Los Angeles. Now
you have a million ad bazaars and that's the only advertisement
allowed. A little bit of corruption and your ads outshine all
your competitors in that locality and they go out of business,
since signs are an ad too.
Also also non-personalized ads mean that the only things that
can be advertised online are digital goods or things that are
available globally. Basically, it will work for Amazon and
AliExpress but that's about it. And adsls in Russian or
Japanese or Korean or German or French or Swedish or Portuguese
aren't going to be that useful for you, are they? Ads in
English but for a product in another country might be even
worse.
lm28469 wrote 1 day ago:
If you waited for an ad to solve your "legitimate problem" you
didn't have a problem to begin with imho
al_borland wrote 22 hours 22 min ago:
Having a problem and having a solution to that problem are two
different things.
I occasionally get the hiccups. When it happens, itâs a
problem. There are many home remedies that exist, but nothing
has ever actually worked. I was watching Shark Tank one day,
which is basically a bunch of ads, and there was a guy selling
the Hiccaway. Several years after seeing this, I decided to
give it a shot. Iâve used it 2 or 3 times now and itâs
instantly stopped my hiccups. I feel a little weird for a while
afterward, but at least the hiccups stop.
This was a legitimate problem and I waited for an ad to solve
my problem, because nothing else I tried worked, and I didnât
know this thing existed until I saw the ad. Iâve also never
heard anyone talk about it outside of Shark Tank, so word of
mouth clearly isnât doing much either (at least in my
circles). The topic of hiccups doesnât come up that often.
Everyone gets hiccups, but they arenât out there actively
looking for solutions. Itâs just something that happens, and
it sucks.
lm28469 wrote 10 hours 31 min ago:
Man if hiccups are a "legitimate problem" then indeed we are
fucked... let's pollute everything irl and on the web with
ads to solve these "problems"... where do we draw the line ?
Because it sounds like we'll have an infinite amount of
problems and we certainly don't have an infinite amount of
resources
btw you can also try looking for solutions on your own, like
going to a doctor, searching online ? type "hiccups solution"
online and hiccaway is on the front page.
al_borland wrote 7 hours 39 min ago:
Humans are wired to have problems. If all your basic
problems are solved (shelter, food, etc), you will start
inventing problems. This finding and solving of problems
has led to all the development in human society, for better
or worse.
It has been this finding and solving of problems that led
to our standards for what solves a problem increasing as
well, for better or worse again.
I think everyone has looked for hiccups solutions at some
point in their life, found them not to work, and gave up.
Thatâs why I think this is a decent example. Adults
arenât actively searching for hiccup solutions. They gave
up long ago, and most of the time, it isnât something
they think about. But when they happen, they kind of suck.
Depending on when they happen, like before a big
presentation, they can also be a major problem. People tend
to overlook it, because they know there isnât a real
cure.
Iâm not arguing for more advertisements or hiccup
commercials 24x7. But there is value to some way of
creating awareness of new things that are actually useful.
Most advertising is trying to manufacture problems or just
keep a product you already know about in the front of your
mind. This is probably 95% of advertising. My argument is
for a way to surface that 5%.
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
No, there are very few markets in which all of the buyers have
perfect information.
It is extremely common in the science/technology sector that
buyers aren't looking for a solution to a problem they have
because they are under the impression that a solution doesn't
exist.
The archetypal business-school case study for this is the story
of Viagra. [1] But it applies to most new technology in a less
dramatic sense.
URI [1]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/03/27/...
lm28469 wrote 10 hours 38 min ago:
> No, there are very few markets in which all of the buyers
have perfect information.
This is solved by 5 minute of searches on the web in 99% of
cases really. I never in my life bought something because
I've seen an ad about it, meanwhile I solved countless of my
problems by thinking about the issue and looking for a
solution online or talking to people about it
kube-system wrote 5 hours 26 min ago:
Absolutely! But, you're missing the cognitive part of this.
People don't search for things that they don't think
exists.
kibwen wrote 1 day ago:
If the implication is that the ad industry helps to address
the problem of buyers having imperfect information, that
couldn't be more wrong.
The entire point of the ad industry is to muddy the waters
and psychologically manipulate consumers. It's not even
remotely interested in informing, it's interested in
propagandizing.
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
Obviously a gigantic industry has more than a singular
impact on society. I only mentioned the one impact above
because that was specifically the topic of discussion.
There are also many reasons that the ad industry needs to
be tightly regulated, of which your point is one.
hk__2 wrote 1 day ago:
You might not know it is a problem and that it is solvable.
lm28469 wrote 10 hours 29 min ago:
Why would I care then? If people lived until now without it
it can't be that big of a problem. Electricity, a car, a
fridge, &c. solve legitimate problems. 99% of things being
advertised today create the problem they solve and trick you
into thinking you really need to solve this problem in your
life
elevatortrim wrote 23 hours 54 min ago:
Yes but the amount of that happening is nowhere near enough
to justify the ad-world we are living in.
Panoramix wrote 1 day ago:
I have never in my several decades of life seen and ad for
anything and thought "I need to get that".
tpmoney wrote 21 hours 23 min ago:
I sincerely do not believe this. I suspect that you have a very
specific definition of ad that is far narrower than I do, but I
do not believe you never once saw a movie trailer and decided
to go see the film, or saw a billboard or sign for a restaurant
while out on vacation and decided to check it out. Or that you
never went to the grocery store to pick up the steak that was
on sale this week. Or that every single tech purchase you have
ever made in your life was exclusively and solely on the word
of mouth recommendation of your close friends, all of whom had
previously purchased identical products with their own money.
Look I'm not saying you can't live a low ad lifestyle. I don't
have cable or network TV and run ad-blockers on every device I
own. And yet I can look around my home and see numerous
products purchased at least in part due to an ad. The Retroid
Pocket sitting on my table, the M series laptop sitting in
front of me. The Sony TV across the room, the game consoles
under it. Heck the dog at my feet was the one I adopted because
I went to an adoption event being sponsored at a local
business. Even when I'm seeking a specific product out and then
seeking out information, I'm looking for reviews and a lot of
those reviews are given sample/free product for the purposes of
making their review. That's an ad. I might be able to place
more trust in that review if the reviewer doesn't give the
product manufacturer editorial control they way they'd have in
a sponsorship, but you can be damn sure if sending free product
to independent reviewers wasn't paying off in terms of higher
sales, the manufacturer wouldn't be doing it.
Aloisius wrote 1 day ago:
Not even movie advertisements like trailers? Or job ads?
Housing ads?
I've definitely investigated and eventually purchased things I
first learned about through an advertisement.
Mind, usually that was from print ads in things like
magazines/newspapers, the occasional direct mail ad like the
old Fry's electronics mailer or movie trailers. Online ads are
overwhelmingly ugly attention grabbers for things I have zero
interest in or no time for when displayed.
sjw987 wrote 7 hours 41 min ago:
It would be interesting to be able to define if an
advertisement is still an advertisement in the sense the OP
was referring if it is something sought out.
I myself usually choose to watch trailers for movies, look at
job ads and housing ads when I actually want to watch a
movie, change job or move house. What pisses me off is the
99% of ads in my life that are just blasted in front of me
online and in public.
It's probably silly and the answer is just that they are, but
they at least meet two different types of advert to me,
personally.
I would partially agree with OP in that I can't believe any
adverts I've ever seen have influence a purchase from me. I
actually quite often blacklist brands and products for
aggressively marketing to me.
meindnoch wrote 1 day ago:
I remember having that experience as a kid - seeing an ad for
Action Man⢠during my Saturday morning cartoon block, and
feeling that I need that toy right now. My dad then explained
to me that these advertisements are carefully crafted to elicit
this response from kids, and that I should always think
critically about the messaging in ads.
titzer wrote 1 day ago:
Magazines, phone books, friends, stores. You know you could go to
a store (or call them on the phone!) and talk to a person.
"Hello, I am trying to find a thing to help me with X."
Turns out that products that work well tend to get remembered,
and ones that don't get forgotten.
cortesoft wrote 21 hours 18 min ago:
Call what store? How do I know a store even exists to call it?
How do I find out the storeâs name and phone number? How do I
find out where the store is located?
You say products that work tend to get remembered, and sure,
for existing products with a market you might be rightâ¦
people would continue buying those things even with no
advertising.
But how did the FIRST person who bought the product find out
about it? Someone has to try it once before you can even know
the product works. How would a new product enter the market?
xigoi wrote 13 hours 32 min ago:
> Call what store? How do I know a store even exists to call
it? How do I find out the storeâs name and phone number?
How do I find out where the store is located?
Maps exist. Search engines exist. Have you been stuck in a
cave the last 50 years?
vel0city wrote 1 day ago:
Magazines and phone books are often largely ad-supported. They
largely wouldn't exist without some amount of advertising.
hackable_sand wrote 1 day ago:
Mmmmmno?
vel0city wrote 1 day ago:
Go to any bookstore and open practically any paid magazine.
Count how many pages are ads. It's far from a small
percentage. Some I've looked at recently were practically
1/3 to 1/2 ads. This isn't far from how things were decades
ago.
Yellow pages (phone books) were essentially entirely
advertising. They didn't just list businesses out of the
goodness of their heart, they took listing fees. This is a
form of advertising!
phantasmish wrote 1 day ago:
This is what a fucking store is for. They have catalogs. You
could ask for one. If they think people will want something they
will try to sell it and will tell you about it if you go looking.
I see this pro-ads argument all the time and itâs so
obviously-stupid that Iâm truly baffled. Is this the kind of
lie ad folks tell themselves so they can sleep at night?
Hnrobert42 wrote 8 hours 4 min ago:
Not everyone lives close to stores.
defrost wrote 7 hours 59 min ago:
Not a counterpoint to the comment re: catalogs .. even less
so in this modern age of ordering and shopping online.
I grew up 1,000 km+ from any significant stores and shopping
- everything we wanted we got via browsing catalogs, building
order lists, and either ordering in via road train or taking
a few days off to travel > 2,000 km with car and double axle
multi tonne capacity trailer.
yibg wrote 16 hours 34 min ago:
> I see this pro-ads argument all the time and itâs so
obviously-stupid that Iâm truly baffled.
If you're truly baffled by a view that many people share,
you're probably missing something.
How do you solve discoverability, especially of a new type of
product or category? I invented this new gadget call
"luminexel". People don't know what it is yet, because it's
new. How do people find it in a catalog?
Or the thing I sell is fairly technical and needs more space
for descriptions / photos to communicate what it is. Do I get
more space in the catalog?
xigoi wrote 14 hours 5 min ago:
> How do you solve discoverability, especially of a new type
of product or category? I invented this new gadget call
"luminexel". People don't know what it is yet, because it's
new. How do people find it in a catalog?
You make a post on Hacker News titled âShow HN: I made this
cool thing called Luminexel, check it out!â Some people
will think itâs really cool and tell their friends about
it. Eventually it will end up on some âcurated list of
awesome thingsâ website.
agoodusername63 wrote 5 hours 21 min ago:
My man thatâs an ad
Many posts on HN are ads. Weâve just collectively decided
that some of them are OK
magicalhippo wrote 8 hours 38 min ago:
> You make a post on Hacker News titled âShow HN: I made
this cool thing called Luminexel, check it out!â
So, place an ad in other words.
xigoi wrote 8 hours 0 min ago:
Itâs not an ad if youâre not paying someone to
forcibly show it to other people.
jonfw wrote 5 hours 52 min ago:
what if I payed a content marketing expert to craft my
blog post and title in such a way that drew attention?
Would that be paying for
magicalhippo wrote 6 hours 14 min ago:
So if I put up posters in my neighborhood for my PC
fixing service, it's not considered ads, but if I pay
someone else to put the same posters up, they're
suddenly ads?
zmgsabst wrote 15 hours 58 min ago:
Iâve yet to see a single product that isnât related to
domains existing products solve problems for. That is, Iâm
aware of any time in history a wholly new category emerged
suddenly.
So your question seems like pure fantasy to me â like
asking how weâll slay dragons without ads. I donât know,
but I donât think thatâs a thing which actually needs
doing, either.
New products within an existing category show up in catalogs,
review articles, etc just fine without ads. As does your
highly technical product, for which people in the relevant
industry already know the information and/or are already used
to narrowing their search to a few products and then
requesting additional information.
Your pro-ad arguments seem to be solving problems that
donât actually exist.
November_Echo wrote 16 hours 3 min ago:
Ideally discoverability would be wholly solved by organic
word-of-mouth recommendations. First from yourself as the
only person who knows this product category exist then from
the people who accepted your recommendation, had it solve
their problem and finally saw fit to recommend it themselves.
presentation wrote 17 hours 19 min ago:
So stores are just one form of ads then, letâs ban stores too
while weâre at it.
cortesoft wrote 21 hours 22 min ago:
I donât think all ads are the same, and I feel like you are
choosing to pretend the ads you donât mind arenât ads at
all.
You say âthat is what a store is forâ⦠well, how would
you even know a store exists to go check it out? In the
physical world, you would walk by and see the store and be
curious to check it out⦠well, what is a store front other
than an ad for the store? Putting your name, product, and
reasons you will want their product on the store front IS AN
AD. You wouldnât walk into a store front that was completely
blank, with no information about what they are selling.
And even that simple advertising is impossible online. If I
create a new online store, how will people ever know it exists?
There is simply no answer that doesnât in some way act as an
ad. I would love to hear how you would let people know your
store exists in a way that isnât just an ad in another form.
mulmen wrote 22 hours 44 min ago:
Catalogs are ads.
shuntress wrote 23 hours 9 min ago:
Yes, the store has a catalog. They want you to see the catalog,
so they pay someone to tell you that the catalog exists.
dangus wrote 1 day ago:
Isnât the catalog an ad?
The issue is that anti-ad zealots wonât acknowledge that
advertising is a spectrum. You can go full blown horrendous
dystopia or enter into a commerce-free hermit kingdom where
private property is banned and resources arenât traded
efficiently, with the end result being that everyone is poor
because nobody trades anything with anyone.
A sign for your store that identifies you is technically an ad.
A brand logo printed on your product is technically an ad. A
positive review is basically an ad. What lengths are we going
to go to ban ads?
Be honest: youâve never bought a single useful thing that you
found out about via an ad and ended up glad you saw an ad for?
That is important because the wealth of nations is often
predicated on the populace being able to trade their labor.
For example, in recent years North Korea has developed their
own Amazon-like delivery website for food and goods and has
expanded intranet smartphone service because, obviously, fast
communication and ease of transmitting a desire to buy or sell
is helpful for growing an economy and keeping the nation from
starving. Otherwise, why would they adopt an imperial
capitalist concept like that?
socialcommenter wrote 8 hours 37 min ago:
Just because something lies on a spectrum where some actors
are totally doing the right thing (and others, well...),
doesn't mean we shouldn't take a conservative approach to
regulating that thing. No-one can legally exceed 70mph in
their fancy new ADAS car with tiny stopping distance, just in
case someone tries to do so in their beat-up 1950's Dodge.
It's important to strike a healthy balance, even if it
inconveniences some honest people (although we're talking
about people who work in advertising...). I don't think you
can claim we have a healthy balance currently.
ETA: catalogs are not ads in this context; people seek out
catalogs when they want to find something, which already
makes a huge difference
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
There are no successful economies without ads.
Ads are a necessary evil for effective market discovery. They
should be heavily regulated but you can't effectively operate a
market economy without one.
Blikkentrekker wrote 14 hours 0 min ago:
All that can be regulated though. In many jurisdictions, it's
forbidden for lawyers or pharmaceutical companies to
advertise their products with it being regulated what counts
as an advertisement and putting oneself into the phone book
or putting a big sign with âLawyerâ on one's practice is
allowed but putting oneself into a magazine or on television
is not.
kube-system wrote 3 hours 24 min ago:
And it should be.
Dylan16807 wrote 18 hours 36 min ago:
There are no successful economies without blue paint, either.
As far as I'm aware, there hasn't been enough testing to say
much about the importance of ads.
And even if they're necessary at some level, what if the US
had 90% less ads, etc.
kube-system wrote 15 hours 51 min ago:
> There are no successful economies without blue paint
I don't think that is true. The oldest known mass printed
advertising is about 2000 years older than the oldest known
blue pigment.
> As far as I'm aware, there hasn't been enough testing to
say much about the importance of ads.
I think if you look at some early advertising (e.g. BCE),
you'll see that most have a painfully obvious functional
form of just simply announcing the existence of a
product/service for the world to observe.
Dylan16807 wrote 15 hours 26 min ago:
I mean even vaguely vaguely modern-style economy. And
you know that's not the point. The point is there's a
lot of things that are omnipresent but also not important
to the economy.
> I think if you look at some early advertising (e.g.
BCE), you'll see that most have a painfully obvious
functional form of just simply announcing the existence
of a product/service for the world to observe.
That doesn't tell us how important it is to have
advertising.
And it doesn't tell us how important it is to have
advertising anywhere near current levels.
gtowey wrote 23 hours 51 min ago:
I understand what you mean, but I would modify this statement
a bit:
There are no successful economies without information
exchange. Discovery can happen without advertising -- if you
consider that the main feature of ads is that it's unwanted
information distribution.
kube-system wrote 23 hours 14 min ago:
There is not any real-world economy that has implemented
that information exchange in the absence of activities that
would be accurately described as advertising.
Even thousands of years ago in illiterate societies people
would advertise their goods/services via verbal campaigns,
drawn pictures, songs, etc.
pluralmonad wrote 1 day ago:
Saying you want some sort of discovery mechanism is different
than saying the current ad tech malware landscape is a
"necessary evil." It certainly is not.
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
Not only did I not say that, but I also agree with you
completely.
matthewkayin wrote 1 day ago:
You're right, but I think this just highlights the issue with
market economies.
There is this capitalist lie that money is a stand-in for
"value provided to society". So, when you provide value,
society gives you money, and you can use this money to ask
society for value back.
Which sounds great. And truly, I do believe that people
should have to contribute to society if they expect society
to support them, but the problem with this lie is that,
despite how capitalists make it sound, the market was not
designed with this ideal in mind, instead we have imposed it
onto the market after-the-fact in order to justify why the
market is good and worth keeping around.
But the real truth is that money does not reward the person
who contributes the most value, it simply rewards the person
who makes the most money. Money is not "value", money is
power. And the system rewards profit no matter how it's
acquired.
This means that you can provide a good service that people
want, but you still need to advertise and compete in order to
be rewarded for your contribution.
It also means that you can do something valuable, like
cleaning up all the trash off of a beach, but that doesn't
mean that the market will reward you for your contribution.
And it also means that if you have a thing and you want to
make profit selling it, you can run a manipulative ad
campaign that convinces people that they truly need it, and
the market will reward you.
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
Alas, well-regulated market economies are the least-worst
option we have.
satvikpendem wrote 1 day ago:
> instead we have imposed it onto the market after-the-fact
in order to justify why the market is good and worth
keeping around
Not sure about that, markets existed since forever and are
still useful even without ads.
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
Advertising exists in some form even in ancient barter
economies. It is older than currency.
pluralmonad wrote 1 day ago:
I don't think very many people in this thread actually
mean markets when they say that. Sounds like they might
mean corporate controlled markets? Otherwise the comments
are gibberish. Markets are just a group of people
exchanging time and resources. Wanting that to go away
is... Bizarre and nonsensical.
rick_dalton wrote 1 day ago:
So instead of buying ad space we can now buy catalog space and
reinvent the wheel.
layer8 wrote 23 hours 55 min ago:
The principle would be that companies arenât allow to buy
placement. It would be like a phonebook.
yibg wrote 16 hours 33 min ago:
Which company is on page 1?
mulmen wrote 22 hours 39 min ago:
How do you sort the directory? Alphabetical can be gamed
with names like A1 Locksmith. Chronological favors
incumbents or spammers depending on direction.
al_borland wrote 23 hours 15 min ago:
That would require regulation, as a catalog maker isnât
going to turn down what is effectively free money. This
also doesnât translate well to a physical store with more
constraints on space.
I recently got a catalog where everything was on pretty
even footing. There was the occasional photo with someone
wearing stuff, but it was a smattering of random brands,
big and small. Nothing in it looked paid for. It was a
catalog of stuff made in the US. The meat of the catalog
was text that listed 1 item in a category per brand, when
the brand may have had hundreds. A brand with literally one
product was indistinguishable from a major brand. I
actually found this quite frustrating as a potential buyer.
If I was interested in a category I had to manually go to
every single website to see what they actually had and if
it was something I was interested in. There was no way to
cut through the noise, other than my own past experience
with companies that had some brand recognition (from
advertising elsewhere).
Aerroon wrote 23 hours 24 min ago:
Yes, instead they register 1 million businesses that will
all be listed in the phonebook.
carlosjobim wrote 1 day ago:
Brands pay stores for shelf space. How would you stop that in
practice?
layer8 wrote 23 hours 54 min ago:
By making it illegal? Brands can still compete on price and
quality.
mulmen wrote 22 hours 37 min ago:
Whatâs the legal way to arrange things on a shelf?
al_borland wrote 23 hours 11 min ago:
Grocery stores are a low margin business. If you make
selling shelf space illegal, they lose that revenue and
will have to raise food prices to stay in business. This
isnât a good outcome. I also question if the shelves
would even changes much. They will probably prioritize
their high margin products, which doesnât sound any
better.
phantasmish wrote 21 hours 28 min ago:
Where does the money to pay for shelf space come from if
not the money we pay for food?
al_borland wrote 18 hours 31 min ago:
In theory, sure. In practice, the food makers arenât
going to lower their prices to the stores, they will
just stop paying the shelf fees.
phantasmish wrote 1 day ago:
Impossible to solve Iâm sure. Probably lower priority than
stopping them from putting lead in bread and selling cocaine
snake-oil elixirs, or forcing them to list basic nutritional
information on food packaging. Alas, we lack the tools to
make businesses do or not do things.
AuryGlenz wrote 1 day ago:
There are also ads for services. I used to be a photographer,
and without my little Facebook/Instagram ads people would have
had to largely rely on word of mouth, meaning the more
established photographers would absolutely dominate my little
rural market even when their photography was worse.
Also, I'm not sure we want a world where only the largest
corporations get to sell things. That's what would happen if
people could only find things through stores and catalogs,
especially pre-internet.
trinix912 wrote 7 hours 52 min ago:
Back then you'd have physical bulletin boards where you could
either freely pin your handwritten note/"ad" onto or you'd
have someone do it for you. Still technically an ad though.
It's the big players who have the most money for ads, buy up
all billboards, internet and TV ads, etc. A small shop can't
afford to do that. If ads were completely banned (in all
forms including the bulletin boards) then everyone would have
to rely on the word of mouth not just small businesses.
I also think that fields like photography are just highly
competitive regardless of ads so it's then mostly a
networking game.
keybored wrote 1 day ago:
Capitalism always hides behind the petty business owner/store
owner/craftsman. Then the haute bourgeoisie takes the bulk of
the profits.
engineer_22 wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe every advanced social system has a propensity towards
totalitarianism. Similar criticisms can easily be foisted
on feudalism, mercantilism, socialism, anarchism, etc. I
think in Western Liberal Capitalism there's still space for
a middle class. More, it appears the peculiar features of
this system have enabled it to unlock tremendous social
vigor and provide for the People historic material wealth.
Perhaps what's missing in this system isn't material...
keybored wrote 1 day ago:
Iâm at a loss as to what these abstract to the heavens
responses even mean to reply to. What I commented on was
the propaganda tactics of capitalism. The topic in itself
wasnât even about the merits of it (but see the last
sentence). What you get in response though are these
chin-stroking platitudes about but maybe all social
systems have their faults, and ah but look at how full
and bountiful my fridge is because of this social system.
engineer_22 wrote 23 hours 46 min ago:
Cadre, I can't help you. If the guy says meta
advertising works for him, I'd take his word for it.
keybored wrote 23 hours 25 min ago:
Nobody is immune to propaganda.
kelnos wrote 1 day ago:
If I need a photographer, I'm going to go and search for one.
If no one is allowed to advertise to me, then both the small
and large players in the space are on an even playing field.
Your photography website or Facebook page will be just as
searchable or indexable as before, as will business directory
sites that can help people find services they need, along
with reviews and testimonials.
Banning advertising could actually make it easier for new
entrants.
phantasmish wrote 1 day ago:
If I go looking for a directory of [service, in my area]
thatâs hardly an ad! If those include, say, reviews and
pricing info, great! Yes, please!
I definitely donât want that directory to be skewed with
ads in favor of those with the most money, or who have
decided to burn the most of their limited resources on ads
instead of improving their services, lowering their prices,
or hell, just taking more profit. The ads were the biggest
problem with the good olâ yellow pages.
mvdtnz wrote 22 hours 18 min ago:
And who puts together this magic directory, without pay?
AuryGlenz wrote 1 day ago:
Who is maintaining and paying for this directory?
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
Those who are interested in knowing what services exist.
tpmoney wrote 21 hours 56 min ago:
They won't. Notice that Angies list doesn't operate on
the "customer pays for the list" model. That's because
any directory service that depends on the searcher
paying suffers from the problem that once you've found
what you're looking for, you have no reason to keep
paying for the directory. If I need a lawn guy, I only
need to find one, and then I have their number. Why am
I going to keep paying the "Lawn Guy Directory" $5 a
month after I found someone?
And if you're going to charge on a per-query basis, I
note that Kagi isn't nearly as well funded or well
known as Google, and that's with them offering an
"unlimited" tier. And a per-query model disincentivizes
me from using the service in the first place. The more
digging I do, the more it costs me, so the more likely
I am to take the first result I get back.
Even the most classic "direct to the people who are
most interested" advertising model where the consumer
pays money for the ads (magazine ads) still is almost
entirely subsidized by the advertisers, not the
consumer.
phantasmish wrote 22 hours 40 min ago:
It's absolutely wild to me that people can have
experienced any amount of the Internet and not think
"word of mouth" will absolutely wholly suffice to fill
the role of informing people about products. Of course
many, many people would create and maintain all kinds
of lists and review all kinds of products without being
paid to. We know this would happen because it has, and
it does, even with the noise of advertising around. The
early Web was mostly this, outside the academic stuff
and, I guess, porn & media piracy. Without ads clogging
everything up, it might even be possible to find these
folks' websites!
tpmoney wrote 21 hours 46 min ago:
The early web very quickly gave rise to curated
directories of information and stopped working on
word of mouth. Yahoo was a directory before it was a
"search engine". AOL was a curated walled garden. Web
rings were a thing, great for playful discovery,
terrible for finding a specific thing. Heck for that
matter, web ring banners are arguably just
interactive "banners ads".
Word of mouth also requires a high degree of trust in
the person spreading the word. Otherwise you get
things like youtube "review" channels that are just
paid reviews. Or the reddit bot farms where suddenly
everyone in a given part of the web is suddenly
dropping references to their new Bachelor Chowâ¢
recipes. You can't even trust the news. We all know
about submarine ads, but even without that, you can't
ever be sure if you're hearing about some new thing
on the news because it's really the best/popular, or
because they just happen to know a lot of the
reporters.
strbean wrote 14 hours 21 min ago:
> The early web very quickly gave rise to curated
directories of information and stopped working on
word of mouth.
Weren't those better before ads got involved?
> Web rings were a thing
Aren't those literally word of mouth?
> Otherwise you get things like youtube "review"
channels that are just paid reviews.
That would be illegal under the laws we are
discussing, presumably.
tpmoney wrote 13 hours 58 min ago:
> Weren't those better before ads got involved?
The directories? Ads were part of those pretty
early given that they were modeled on real world
directories like the Yellow Pages in the first
place. Here's a webarchive of yahoo from 1996[1].
Note the big broken banner at the top with the
link text "Click here for the Net Radio
Promotion". AOL was pretty much always full of
ads, and don't forget the old AOL "keyword"
searches which were ads by another name.
> Aren't those literally word of mouth?
Sure, and they were pretty lousy at helping you
find information, which is why people stopped
using them in preference to search engines, even
though search engines had ads. Heck one of the
selling points of Google originally was that
their ads would actually be relevant to you and
the things you were searching for.
[1]
URI [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/199610221756...
satvikpendem wrote 1 day ago:
Your definition of ad is too narrow then, because those are
all different types of ads. A store advertising its goods
or even having billboard ads saying the store is at such
and such street is, well, an ad.
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
Directories arenât ads. The crucial feature would be
that nobody would have to pay to get listed, or only a
small nominal fee that anyone can afford. Like in a
phonebook.
Paying for placement is what makes an ad. And thatâs
what would have to be prohibited.
daedrdev wrote 22 hours 13 min ago:
companies have to pay to get their products on shelve
in many grocery stores
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> The crucial feature would be that nobody would have
to pay to get listed, or only a small nominal fee that
anyone can afford
You see the contradiction.
Youâre essentially saying no bad ads, only good ads,
without defunding the difference. (Anyone can afford a
Google or Meta ad in the way they could a White Pages
listing.)
pharrington wrote 3 hours 31 min ago:
What does "defunding the difference" mean? layer8 and
phantasmish absolutely said what the difference was.
FridgeSeal wrote 17 hours 13 min ago:
I think theyâve made the difference pretty clear?
Rather than coverage being spend based, itâs a low,
static price to be listed in the directory, with near
zero extra differentiation other than what you choose
to put in your little square/rectangle.
Dylan16807 wrote 18 hours 45 min ago:
> Anyone can afford a Google or Meta ad in the way
they could a White Pages listing.
If I go buy a Google or Meta ad with the same
negligible budget, I can get my product shown to 50
people and then the money runs out.
That's completely different from getting onto a
phonebook-like list where everyone that visits can
see my company's offer.
gpm wrote 22 hours 38 min ago:
I'd interpret this as a proposal for two new laws:
1. No non-invited display of paid messaging, period.
If you go to a directory and ask for a list of people
who paid to be part of that directory, it can show
it. If you play a game, watch a movie, take the bus,
or search a non-paid directory of sites they simply
cannot show you things they were paid to show you. I
think I'd call this making attention-theft a crime.
2. No payment for priority placement in paid
directories. A paid directory has to charge the same
(small, nominal) fee to everyone involved.
YetAnotherNick wrote 16 hours 52 min ago:
Fixed fee highly favors big players. Not even sure
why you want fixed fee. Either remove fee at all or
charge higher for bigger players or charge based on
sale rather than listing.
gpm wrote 16 hours 46 min ago:
By the same I mean equal non-discriminatory
pricing - not necessarily "fixed" rather than "by
sale" or "by view" or what have you but that if
it's "by view" then it's "x cents per view" with
the same x everyone and if it's "3% of referred
sale revenue" it's that for everyone.
The purpose being that because every item in any
paid directory has paid the directory the same,
the directory has no (monetary, at least)
incentive to direct your attention towards
sub-optimal listings. As an attempt at forcing
the directory to sell itself as a useful
directory of services, rather than as an object
which sells its users attention to the highest
bidder.
JumpCrisscross wrote 21 hours 24 min ago:
> No non-invited display of paid messaging, period.
If you go to a directory and ask for a list of
people who paid to be part of that directory, it
can show it
How would you distinguish someone asking for the
directory versus asking for something else with
said directory (which are totally not ads, pinky
promise) displayed alongside?
> I'd call this making attention-theft a crime
Someone standing up to make a political speech in a
public square is now a criminal?
> A paid directory has to charge the same (small,
nominal) fee to everyone involved
This is just ads with a uniform, "small, nominal"
fee. Uniformity is objectively measurable.
Smallness and nominalness is not. Presumably you
mean these directories have to be published at
cost?
gpm wrote 21 hours 4 min ago:
> How would you distinguish someone asking for
the directory versus asking for something else
with said directory (which are totally not ads,
pinky promise) displayed alongside?
You making sending the directory with something
else unconditionally illegal, you either get the
directory or the something else, not both at
once. This is also necessary for the second part
where you require everything in the directory
paid the same amount.
> Someone standing up to make a political speech
in a public square is now a criminal?
Only if they were paid to do so.
> This is just ads with a uniform, "small,
nominal" fee. Uniformity is objectively
measurable. Smallness and nominalness is not.
Presumably you mean these directories have to be
published at cost?
Personally I think uniform is more important than
either small or nominal. It means that the person
creating the directory can't be bribed to direct
your attention to certain parts of the directory
- i.e. steal it. Rather it's your choice to get
the directory in the first place and pay
attention to it, and everything inside it is at
an equal playing level. I don't really care if
it's at cost or if making directories is a profit
making venture.
I'm not entirely sure what the original proposers
intent was with the "small and nominal" part
though. They might have wanted something more
like "at cost".
layer8 wrote 23 hours 31 min ago:
I see no contradiction. Google or Meta ads are not a
catalog. They are imposed on people who didnât
decide to browse a catalog, and also you canât
browse all Google/Meta ads as a catalog. A catalog
listing products or businesses doesnât constitute
ads, just as a phonebook doesnât.
tracker1 wrote 1 day ago:
Even in the phone books of old, you had ads as part of the
directories... Businesses paid for those listings... Even
today's equivalent, yelp, etc. are trying to sell add-on
services to the businesses and can harm your businss if you
don't pay up for the features.
kelnos wrote 1 day ago:
Right, and in this new ad-free world, those things works
not be allowed, and all businesses would be on a level
playing field, with none privileged over the others
simply because they have a larger advertising budget.
tracker1 wrote 1 day ago:
There's no such thing as a level playing field... you
think EVERY brand can fit on store shelves for
discovery?
shimman wrote 1 day ago:
This is entirely a human construct, we can absolutely
make it a level playing field if we collectively
choose so.
What a sad comment.
tpmoney wrote 22 hours 12 min ago:
You can make it more level, but in any system
constrained by the physical world, you can never
make it completely level.
Ever notice that there used to be a lot of
businesses with names like "A+ Heating and Cooling"
or "AAA Chimney Sweeps"? That was because being at
the top of the phone book's alphabetical listing
was more likely to get you business since a lot of
people would open to a section, start at the top
and start calling.
There's only so much shelf space to go around,
eventually decisions will be made about who can put
their products on a given shelf.
Any large business with the ability to produce
multiple different products will inherently have
the advantage of getting more shelf space assuming
you want to display all products.
But even assuming you just wanted your shelf space
to be a bunch of "per company" catalogs, businesses
with more money to spend on glossier catalogs, or
brighter inks, or more variations so thicker
catalogs will have an advantage.
Then there's names and numbers. Hooked on Phonics
gets a leg up on every other competing reading
program because they got the phone number that is
1-800-ABC-DEFG, no one else can have that number.
The lawyer who gets 1-800-555-5555 (or other
similarly easy to remember number) has a leg up on
anyone with a random number out of the phone
company's inventory.
But I'm curious, what would this perfectly level
field you envision look like? How would these sorts
of problems be solved?
mvdtnz wrote 22 hours 16 min ago:
Until you try to grapple with real world problems
like limited shelf space, limited directory space,
how the ads (ahem sorry, directory entries) should
be sorted, how to deal with setting boundaries
around local directories, etc.
shimman wrote 1 hour 51 min ago:
Good thing there is no fundamental law of the
universe forcing merchants to stock every single
good ever invented.
tracker1 wrote 1 hour 32 min ago:
Without advertising (or marketing of some
kind), how do you propose for any new product
to EVER reach a store shelf.
wizzwizz4 wrote 1 day ago:
I own ten thousand businesses, all of whom employ me as
a contractor. All businesses being on a level playing
field puts me at quite an advantage!
If people are using their advertising budget
unethically, you should expect them to find new
unethical ways to use their advertising budget once
you've eliminated the existing ones. Rather than
playing whack-a-mole, take a step back, and see if you
can fundamentally change the rules of the game. Why is
advertising bad? What do you want to happen? Fixing the
"how" too firmly, too soon, is an effective way to
produce bad policy, no matter how good your intentions.
stickfigure wrote 1 day ago:
Oh you sweet summer child.
Retail stores are basically rooms full of ads. Those end
isle displays? How much shelf space allotted? Eye level
shelf or bottom shelf? Distributors pay for that. The whole
damn store is advertising!
You mentioned catalogs above... catalogs are almost pure
advertising.
Looking for a directory of [service, in my area] ... you
mean like the yellow pages? That were a literal giant book
of advertising that companies paid for?
Spend some time in retail technology. The world does not
work the way you think.
phantasmish wrote 1 day ago:
Oh, I know how it works. You could have read my whole
comment and saved yourself typing anything about the
yellow pages. You sweet summer child.
haritha-j wrote 1 day ago:
I wonder if there's a middle ground, where you only have
statement based, textual ads. Amusing ourselves to Death (great
book btw), discusses how until the 19th century, ads were
basically just information dense textual statements. The
invention of slogans and jingles was the start of the slow
downfall in ads.
I interned at an ad agency once, and I really enjoy creative
advertising, but frankly there's just way too much advertising in
this world.
tpmoney wrote 21 hours 8 min ago:
> until the 19th century, ads were basically just information
dense textual statements.
I'm curious how does this account for "town criers" and the
like? And there seems to be quite a few examples of less
"information dense textual statement" in some of the articles
on Wikipedia about advertising [1] [2].
[1]
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising
URI [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_card
haritha-j wrote 11 hours 32 min ago:
I'm not an expert, but looking at those articles, most of the
illustrated and colour designs seem to have become popular in
the 19th century, though I do see a few illstrated examples
from the 18th century as well.
Gerard0 wrote 1 day ago:
Damn! I have been reading about Amusing Ourselves to Death on
here since weeks and I assumed it was a new book from a
contemporary author! I'll get it now, thanks for being the one
who finally got me to :)
vel0city wrote 1 day ago:
I just wanted to second recommend Amusing Ourselves to Death. A
very good and short read that I find continually relevant
applying the same ideas to social media.
wolvoleo wrote 1 day ago:
If a product is really that good than people will legit recommend
it. It's not a problem at all.
cortesoft wrote 21 hours 17 min ago:
How does the first person find the product to recommend it,
though? There has to be SOMEONE who tries the product without
being recommended by a previous customer.
kyralis wrote 1 day ago:
Depends on the niche, really. I despise ads, but I can also
admit to having learned about products from them that I have
subsequently purchased and been pleased with.
Sometimes the ad lets me know about an entire type of product
that I didn't know existed but found very useful, and I
probably didn't even by the actual brand that was advertised.
If you consider the general concept of "letting people know
what products are available for purchase", I think it's hard to
disagree that it's a reasonable thing to do. That doesn't
excuse the manner in which it is done today, of course, but
that core functionality is not fundamentally evil.
wolvoleo wrote 1 day ago:
I haven't really, most of the products I've bought after
advertising were low quality.
I do have some very high quality products that were
recommended to me through friends. Like one local lady that
makes really quality outfits. She doesn't advertise at all
because she's already overwhelmed with orders as she's so
good.
wat10000 wrote 1 day ago:
Advertising isn't the general concept of letting people know
what products are available for purchase. It's more
specifically doing this for money and showing it to people
who don't want to see it. One might quibble about exactly
what the word "advertising" encompasses, but that description
covers the bad stuff pretty well, whatever name you want to
give it.
I'd boil it down to: if you added a "don't show this" option,
would anyone use it?
A catalog that comes in the mail because you requested it is
not advertising, since you requested it. Products mentioned
on the front page of this site aren't advertising, because
they're organic, and it's part of what I'm here for.
Classified ads, despite the name, don't really qualify since
they're in a separate section that nobody reads unless
they're specifically seeking out those ads.
A useful product doesn't have "don't show this" buttons
because it would be completely pointless. I seek it out
because I want it. I don't get upset at the company that made
my office chair foisting it on me, because they didn't. I
ordered the chair and got what I wanted.
But ad companies don't resist "skip" buttons because they
think they're pointless because everyone loves their
products. They resist "skip" buttons because they know people
don't want to see their shit. Their entire business model is
based around forcing people to see things they don't want to
see, but might accept as part of a package deal for seeing
the stuff they do want to see.
That is the stuff that should be completely destroyed.
drdeca wrote 1 day ago:
> and showing it to people who don't want to see it.
So, do superbowl ads not count as ads because a
non-negligible portion of the viewership wants to see them?
Or are you saying that there needs to be a non-negligible
fraction of the viewers who donât want to see it for it
to be an ad?
Dylan16807 wrote 18 hours 29 min ago:
In the end it doesn't really matter. That's under 0.1%
of TV viewing and it's a unique situation. Yes edge
cases exist, edge cases always exist, but that's a very
tiny one.
wat10000 wrote 1 day ago:
There's a spectrum. Movie trailers are closer to the "not
ads" portion of the spectrum, although when shown in
theaters they are much more ad-like than when made
available online.
There are probably a decent number of football fans who
would use a "skip ads" button if they had one for the
Super Bowl, so they're still some way toward the "ads"
end of the spectrum. But they're certainly less
objectionable than most TV ads.
master-lincoln wrote 1 day ago:
There are still tests and reviews and content where people
can show products without being paid by the people producing
these products.
tpmoney wrote 21 hours 40 min ago:
Even without being paid, unless someone is advertising the
product somewhere the reviewer won't know it exists to
review. And if the reviewer is being sent free product or
solicited directly by the producer, that's still
advertising. It may be more trustworthy if the reviewer is
strict about not letting the producer have editorial
control, but you better believe that the company is sending
out free products to reviewers because that gets the
product in front of eye-balls just like any other ad. The
cost of the free review product is the price of the ad.
wolvoleo wrote 19 hours 15 min ago:
It does also happen that people get stuff to review and
have to send it back of course.
yibg wrote 16 hours 28 min ago:
So the company that can afford to send the most stuff
to the most reviewers win?
tpmoney wrote 19 hours 3 min ago:
Sure, but thatâs still not free. The company is
spending time, money and resources on soliciting the
reviews, sending units out, receiving units back and
then scrapping or selling those units as refurbs/open
box. Theyâre not spending that money unless they
think itâs going to drive sales / awareness. Itâs
still advertising.
spencerflem wrote 1 day ago:
And the worst part is, from a societal point of view - it doesnt
matter if $companyA wins over $companyB, if the reason they won is
that there was more Geico ads than Liberty ads etc.
We allow every space to be overrun with these things, wasting our
time and infecting our brains and in the end its zero-sum for the
companies and negative-sum for us. No value anywhere is created.
ksaj wrote 1 day ago:
The bigger problem is those fake "realistic robot dog" ads, and
all the other ai-faked products.
Why YT and Google in general would want to be associated with
such scammery, I do not know.
immibis wrote 1 day ago:
They get paid per ad. Whether the product actually works is not
their problem, unless they get a lawsuit. IIRC Facebook did
lose a lawsuit over scam ads, but continued doing the process
it was sued for, because it's so profitable, and just added a
check so those ads don't get shown to regulators.
pixl97 wrote 1 day ago:
>Why YT and Google in general would want
They want the numbers to always go up. Scam ads pay just like
non-scam ads.
Hence why companies have to be forced not to be assholes with
legislation.
energy123 wrote 1 day ago:
Higher volume of skippable ads incoming
nrclark wrote 1 day ago:
Interesting, I wonder if this will spike VPN traffic into Vietnam.
anvuong wrote 22 hours 52 min ago:
Yeah probably not. A large amount of posts and videos from social
medias are blocked in Vietnam, it's still a communist country with
very low level of free speech and press freedom, albeit still better
than China.
Source: I used to live there.
OsrsNeedsf2P wrote 1 day ago:
What's the subset of users with a VPN but no ublock?
acureau wrote 1 day ago:
NordVPN users sold by the "anti-hacker" ads?
mc32 wrote 1 day ago:
Thatâs not bad but better would be to require a default of
chronological order for showing content with an option for
âdiscoverâ other content but only on demand.
llbbdd wrote 1 day ago:
Poorly thought out and family subscription to YouTube premium in
Vietnam is $6/month USD. Google is just going to pull a different lever
to compensate, like just displaying more shorter ads per session.
Spivak wrote 1 day ago:
I don't think Google's gonna be hurting for this one given the fact
that hitting the skip button gives Google a strong signal that a real
human just watched the ad and it didn't just play to an empty room.
senkora wrote 1 day ago:
Yep. Ad viewability standards simply require that a video ad was
50% onscreen for a continuous 2 seconds in order for it to count as
an impression. Google probably usually gets that even for skippable
ads.
> Picture this: an advertiser pays premium rates for space on your
site, but their carefully crafted creative sits unseen at the
bottom of a page your readers never scroll to. Despite technically
delivering the impression you promised, you've essentially sold
empty air. This disconnect between ads served and ads seen is why
viewability has emerged as the cornerstone metric in digital
advertising's maturity.
> Video ads require at least two seconds of continuous play while
50% visible ... These seemingly arbitrary thresholds represent
extensive research into human attention patterns.
URI [1]: https://www.playwire.com/blog/ad-viewability
lenerdenator wrote 1 day ago:
Then there can be regulation of that too.
toomuchtodo wrote 1 day ago:
Indeed, just keep pulling the policy ratchet if tech tries to
subvert.
nickff wrote 1 day ago:
It likely wouldn't take much to get YouTube to just shut out
Vietnam; ads there are very cheap, so they probably weren't
making much money anyway.
toomuchtodo wrote 1 day ago:
Minimal loss, the content can still be ripped and shared
through other systems. Youtube is adversarial S3 imho. We can
collectively live without Google and Youtube, without getting
into the slop argument. I would take a different perspective
about social contract if Google did not do Google things, and
try to squeeze its users as hard as possible.
croisillon wrote 1 day ago:
missing a T
benatkin wrote 1 day ago:
I wondered if maybe it was about Vienna
verisimi wrote 1 day ago:
It doesn't bode well for the quality of the source, if it can't even
spell a country's name right!
joebig wrote 1 day ago:
Unyielding fidelity to the original article title.
winstonwinston wrote 1 day ago:
What is unyielding fidelity?
noun. A steadfastness in loyalty and support, characterized by a
firm and unwavering devotion to a cause, principle, or person,
demonstrating exceptional persistence and reliability despite
obstacles or challenges.
Without a t, it may as well be a streaming service.
otikik wrote 1 day ago:
Faithful "to a t"
hart_russell wrote 1 day ago:
viet fucking nam man - the dude
edm0nd wrote 1 day ago:
The T really ties the word together man
cm2012 wrote 1 day ago:
Basically banning brand advertising ads. Interesting. This will be a
pain for a bunch of developers to adhere to lol.
pif wrote 1 day ago:
> Basically banning brand advertising ads.
I don't get it. Could you please elaborate? Thanks in advance!
cm2012 wrote 1 day ago:
In marketing their is a distinction between direct response ads
(get people to take action) vs brand ads (force people to just
watch, no immediate action needed).
Unskippable ads are almost always brand ads focusing on total view
time.
DIR <- back to front page