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I think this article doesn't go far enough with its championing of blocking certain ads. All ads should be blocked and web services which rely on them should f

I think this article doesn't go far enough with its championing of blocking certain ads. All ads should be blocked and web services which rely on them should find a better way of sustaining themselves profitably. The malicious nature of ads is not new. Ads have always been infested with malware, tracking, and hideous graphics. Taken to their logical extreme (as Facebook has done), ads can also manipulate users to a degree far more dangerous than a TV or radio ad could. Ads are just the surface of a much deeper problem with the Internet, which is that most massive web services are paid for with user data rather than a mutually agreed upon price. As far as I'm concerned, there is no reason to willingly view an advertisement to support a useful service. This amounts to a donation which you are not really in control of. Just circumvent the ad and buy from the company or send them money if you value their services.

mysterydip 9y ago
As a fellow ad-hater, I'd love to see a list of alternatives. I often hear "they should find a better way" but I don't know what that would be for the majority of "I'll use it if it's free" websites or services out there. Micropayments are a hassle most don't use, donations get forgotten about, and there's too many sites to have a subscription to each one.
- ashark 9y ago
  We see the alternatives in the handful of cases in which spying on users isn't a viable model (or, at least, just doing that isn't viable). Typically it's directly paying money for services, maybe with a free tier (Github) or something Free with a capital F and community-driven (Wikimedia). Take away spying and serving deceptive/harmful ads as an option for e.g. search, mapping/route-finding, voice recognition, and so on, and we'd see alternatives pop up, probably under those models, or possibly under more traditional less-invasive (and less malware-spreading/scam-promoting) advertising models (like magazines, or the early ad-driven web but with way more eyeballs).
grovegames 9y ago
So, say goodby to google? No thanks. I don't have money to pay for every service I want. Advertising allows people with no means to use the internet, and this value is worth more to society as a whole than ads. Yes let's kill malicious ads, but throwing the baby out with the bath water isn't good sense.
- xatan_dank 9y ago
  >this value is worth more to society than ads That's a bit of a lofty statement with no accompanying argument whatsoever. I think current technology has been wholly negative on society. >I don't have money to pay for every service I want So you've decided to exchange your personal data and (in some cases) your computers safety to use them on credit? Maybe you should rethink that. Also, there are services you can use which exist which do not sustain themselves with advertisements.
  - praneshp 9y ago
    > I think current technology has been wholly negative on society. That's a bit of a lofty statement with no accompanying argument whatsoever. We could go on and on, no? Also, he did say "Advertising allows people with no means to use the internet", so there was an accompanying argument.
    - accountyaccount 9y ago
      >That's a bit of a lofty statement with no accompanying argument whatsoever. That's a bit of a lofty statement with no accompanying argument whatsoever.
      - xatan_dank 9y ago
        I'm glad someone was able to figure out what I meant.
  - Broken_Hippo 9y ago
    That's a bit of a lofty statement with no accompanying argument whatsoever. I think current technology has been wholly negative on society. In all fairness, you didn't provide any either. Most things have a mixed outcome, some good and some bad. It can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. So you've decided to exchange your personal data and (in some cases) your computers safety to use them on credit? Maybe you should rethink that. Also, there are services you can use which exist which do not sustain themselves with advertisements. The safety counts for very little if advertising-free web browsing means you aren't truly using the internet.Sure, those services exist, but the free ones are few. HN wouldn't be very usable, for example, if I refused to click on sites that happen to have advertisements. So yes, between being short on cash and wanting to actually get use out of the internet - including being able to easily and cheaply talk to my family overseas - I'll deal with it. Something else might be right for you, and that's fine.
notacoward 9y ago
> there is no reason to willingly view an advertisement to support a useful service How about when the service can not exist otherwise? Even if you were willing to pay for it, many others might not be. If the value of the service is heavily based on network effects, the result is a network too small to reach the break-even point. I'm not saying you should view ads you don't want to, but demanding that people provide a free service you find useful while denying them any realistic way to pay for that service seems bit too entitled for me.
- mynewtb 9y ago
  Name one.
  - wmeredith 9y ago
    All Google services No ads = no Android, no Google Maps, no Gmail, etc...
    - ams6110 9y ago
      Those things are useful. I would pay for Google Maps. Lots of people bought Garmins and TomToms for their cars. I do pay for email. Apple has iOS and that is not ad-supported. Ads are not the only way.
      - bradjohnson 9y ago
        From the above poster: >Even if you were willing to pay for it, many others might not be. I'm not convinced that there is a way that google maps could be as big as it is without ad revenue. Most people just wouldn't pay and the only reason that you would consider paying now is because the infrastructure that ad money has paid for has made it worthwhile.
        anigbrowl 9y ago
        You're probably right, but: a) Ads on google tend to be much less annoying than from other vendors because google maintains relatively high standards for how it displays ads. I consider it a reasonable trade-off and don't block ads on Google services - they are usually relevant and not overtly annoying or distracting. b) the fastest possible growth isn't necessarily the highest good. You don't get a better plant by trying to pull it up out of the ground, and things that are grown fast don't always last that well. Wikipedia doesn't have advertising and while it's subject to many criticisms I would argue that its slower organic growth makes it more sustainable over the long term.
matt4077 9y ago
It's the article's raison d'être to advocate NOT blocking all ads, but to be discriminating so as to encourage better practices by the publishers/advertisers/ad networks. As it is right now, with ad blockers usually defaulting to blocking all ads, there are no incentives for better practices: the 5MB video overlay on <whatever.com> may play a small part in convincing someone to install an ad blocker, but it plays a comparative larger part to keep <whatever.com> in business–it's the tragedy of the commons, basically. It's somewhat irrelevant that you may be willing to pay money, because many schemes, from impermeable paywalls to voluntary micropayment have been tried, and users have generally been reluctant to adopt these.
- xatan_dank 9y ago
  I don't even agree with your first sentence. I don't see anything in this article about how we should collectively stop blocking ads in order to encourage better practices from publishers/advertisers/ad networks. The article is just a long rant about how bad ads are with the promise that "if they get better I will look at them". How are you going to be able to make this judgment call? It's already known that ad services track users and occasionally install malware on their machines. Will the ads simply become more pleasant-looking while becoming more nefarious, or will they actually be more respectful of users' freedoms? How will you know which is occurring? Also, are you seriously going to stop blocking ads periodically to see if you should keep blocking ads? I think asking the ad networks to be more polite is more than a little naive. Even if the article was actually encouraging people to work with the ad networks to find a reasonable common ground it would be severely misguided.
FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
>malicious nature of ads is not new. Not to mention that ads are a form of psychological warfare
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Most ads. I am OK with manufacturers, merchants and so on advertising the existence of their goods/ services/ pricing. Communicating the existence of your commercial offering to consumers is a legitimate business activity. But I agree that a great deal of advertising consists of psychological manipulation and that's bad, and the people who do it for a living should feel bad about themselves.
anigbrowl 9y ago
I was and am OK with Google's simple textual ads, although it's true that Google leverages them to push its own brand by controlling color schemes and so forth. But any marketing that relies on interrupting people can fuck right off.
Brockenstein 9y ago
I don't enjoy ads either, but we have decades of precedent at this point where the vast majority of things and services on the Internet are free. We've come to expect it. And the arms race between users and ad revenue has been going on nearly as long. What it comes down to is people want it all for nothing. And that shapes the world we live in. The Internet is the way it is because that's the way we want it. We as a group of consumers have proven for decades we're not willing to pay for every sort of thing. As a result we've shown ourselves more than willing to be the product and then grumble about it. But so long as things are still free we can just imagine a utopia where everyone pays enough to or enough people pay to keep things where we want them. However the market has already shown us who we really are, like it or not. And if you disagree, well welcome to the high minded minority or the deluded minority(probably majority).
- vijayr 9y ago
  Most of us won't think twice about dropping $5 on a shitty Starbucks coffee, but won't pay $5 for something super useful like Google search which we use every day multiple times. But on the other hand, most of these services don't even try selling a service instead of monetizing via ads, as they have trained their users to expect everything for free on the internet. So maybe people would pay, if there is a choice? What if there is a way to pay $5/month each for Facebook, Twitter, Google Search etc in return for no tracking, no ads, so selling of data etc. FB has one billion users, if just 50M of them pay $5 per month, that is $3B in revenue per year. This 50M people can subsidize the rest of the users, who can't/won't afford $5 and are willing to see ads.
  - anonred 9y ago
    It doesn't work like that. Companies have already tried (see: Google Contributor) with very limited success. The reality is that you're heavily in the minority of people who care about tracking and privacy and ads. There's no market for it, and the largest analogous service, YouTube Red, explicitly needs to offer exclusive content and access to streaming media just to entice people.
    - 9y ago

mysterydip 9y ago

As a fellow ad-hater, I'd love to see a list of alternatives. I often hear "they should find a better way" but I don't know what that would be for the majority of "I'll use it if it's free" websites or services out there. Micropayments are a hassle most don't use, donations get forgotten about, and there's too many sites to have a subscription to each one.

ashark 9y ago
We see the alternatives in the handful of cases in which spying on users isn't a viable model (or, at least, just doing that isn't viable). Typically it's directly paying money for services, maybe with a free tier (Github) or something Free with a capital F and community-driven (Wikimedia). Take away spying and serving deceptive/harmful ads as an option for e.g. search, mapping/route-finding, voice recognition, and so on, and we'd see alternatives pop up, probably under those models, or possibly under more traditional less-invasive (and less malware-spreading/scam-promoting) advertising models (like magazines, or the early ad-driven web but with way more eyeballs).

grovegames 9y ago

So, say goodby to google? No thanks. I don't have money to pay for every service I want. Advertising allows people with no means to use the internet, and this value is worth more to society as a whole than ads. Yes let's kill malicious ads, but throwing the baby out with the bath water isn't good sense.

xatan_dank 9y ago
>this value is worth more to society than ads That's a bit of a lofty statement with no accompanying argument whatsoever. I think current technology has been wholly negative on society. >I don't have money to pay for every service I want So you've decided to exchange your personal data and (in some cases) your computers safety to use them on credit? Maybe you should rethink that. Also, there are services you can use which exist which do not sustain themselves with advertisements.
- praneshp 9y ago
  > I think current technology has been wholly negative on society. That's a bit of a lofty statement with no accompanying argument whatsoever. We could go on and on, no? Also, he did say "Advertising allows people with no means to use the internet", so there was an accompanying argument.
  - accountyaccount 9y ago
    >That's a bit of a lofty statement with no accompanying argument whatsoever. That's a bit of a lofty statement with no accompanying argument whatsoever.
    - xatan_dank 9y ago
      I'm glad someone was able to figure out what I meant.
- Broken_Hippo 9y ago
  That's a bit of a lofty statement with no accompanying argument whatsoever. I think current technology has been wholly negative on society. In all fairness, you didn't provide any either. Most things have a mixed outcome, some good and some bad. It can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. So you've decided to exchange your personal data and (in some cases) your computers safety to use them on credit? Maybe you should rethink that. Also, there are services you can use which exist which do not sustain themselves with advertisements. The safety counts for very little if advertising-free web browsing means you aren't truly using the internet.Sure, those services exist, but the free ones are few. HN wouldn't be very usable, for example, if I refused to click on sites that happen to have advertisements. So yes, between being short on cash and wanting to actually get use out of the internet - including being able to easily and cheaply talk to my family overseas - I'll deal with it. Something else might be right for you, and that's fine.

notacoward 9y ago

> there is no reason to willingly view an advertisement to support a useful service How about when the service can not exist otherwise? Even if you were willing to pay for it, many others might not be. If the value of the service is heavily based on network effects, the result is a network too small to reach the break-even point. I'm not saying you should view ads you don't want to, but demanding that people provide a free service you find useful while denying them any realistic way to pay for that service seems bit too entitled for me.

mynewtb 9y ago
Name one.
- wmeredith 9y ago
  All Google services No ads = no Android, no Google Maps, no Gmail, etc...
  - ams6110 9y ago
    Those things are useful. I would pay for Google Maps. Lots of people bought Garmins and TomToms for their cars. I do pay for email. Apple has iOS and that is not ad-supported. Ads are not the only way.
    - bradjohnson 9y ago
      From the above poster: >Even if you were willing to pay for it, many others might not be. I'm not convinced that there is a way that google maps could be as big as it is without ad revenue. Most people just wouldn't pay and the only reason that you would consider paying now is because the infrastructure that ad money has paid for has made it worthwhile.
      - anigbrowl 9y ago
        You're probably right, but: a) Ads on google tend to be much less annoying than from other vendors because google maintains relatively high standards for how it displays ads. I consider it a reasonable trade-off and don't block ads on Google services - they are usually relevant and not overtly annoying or distracting. b) the fastest possible growth isn't necessarily the highest good. You don't get a better plant by trying to pull it up out of the ground, and things that are grown fast don't always last that well. Wikipedia doesn't have advertising and while it's subject to many criticisms I would argue that its slower organic growth makes it more sustainable over the long term.

matt4077 9y ago

It's the article's raison d'être to advocate NOT blocking all ads, but to be discriminating so as to encourage better practices by the publishers/advertisers/ad networks. As it is right now, with ad blockers usually defaulting to blocking all ads, there are no incentives for better practices: the 5MB video overlay on <whatever.com> may play a small part in convincing someone to install an ad blocker, but it plays a comparative larger part to keep <whatever.com> in business–it's the tragedy of the commons, basically. It's somewhat irrelevant that you may be willing to pay money, because many schemes, from impermeable paywalls to voluntary micropayment have been tried, and users have generally been reluctant to adopt these.

xatan_dank 9y ago
I don't even agree with your first sentence. I don't see anything in this article about how we should collectively stop blocking ads in order to encourage better practices from publishers/advertisers/ad networks. The article is just a long rant about how bad ads are with the promise that "if they get better I will look at them". How are you going to be able to make this judgment call? It's already known that ad services track users and occasionally install malware on their machines. Will the ads simply become more pleasant-looking while becoming more nefarious, or will they actually be more respectful of users' freedoms? How will you know which is occurring? Also, are you seriously going to stop blocking ads periodically to see if you should keep blocking ads? I think asking the ad networks to be more polite is more than a little naive. Even if the article was actually encouraging people to work with the ad networks to find a reasonable common ground it would be severely misguided.

FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago

>malicious nature of ads is not new. Not to mention that ads are a form of psychological warfare

anigbrowl 9y ago
Most ads. I am OK with manufacturers, merchants and so on advertising the existence of their goods/ services/ pricing. Communicating the existence of your commercial offering to consumers is a legitimate business activity. But I agree that a great deal of advertising consists of psychological manipulation and that's bad, and the people who do it for a living should feel bad about themselves.

anigbrowl 9y ago

I was and am OK with Google's simple textual ads, although it's true that Google leverages them to push its own brand by controlling color schemes and so forth. But any marketing that relies on interrupting people can fuck right off.

Brockenstein 9y ago

I don't enjoy ads either, but we have decades of precedent at this point where the vast majority of things and services on the Internet are free. We've come to expect it. And the arms race between users and ad revenue has been going on nearly as long. What it comes down to is people want it all for nothing. And that shapes the world we live in. The Internet is the way it is because that's the way we want it. We as a group of consumers have proven for decades we're not willing to pay for every sort of thing. As a result we've shown ourselves more than willing to be the product and then grumble about it. But so long as things are still free we can just imagine a utopia where everyone pays enough to or enough people pay to keep things where we want them. However the market has already shown us who we really are, like it or not. And if you disagree, well welcome to the high minded minority or the deluded minority(probably majority).

vijayr 9y ago
Most of us won't think twice about dropping $5 on a shitty Starbucks coffee, but won't pay $5 for something super useful like Google search which we use every day multiple times. But on the other hand, most of these services don't even try selling a service instead of monetizing via ads, as they have trained their users to expect everything for free on the internet. So maybe people would pay, if there is a choice? What if there is a way to pay $5/month each for Facebook, Twitter, Google Search etc in return for no tracking, no ads, so selling of data etc. FB has one billion users, if just 50M of them pay $5 per month, that is $3B in revenue per year. This 50M people can subsidize the rest of the users, who can't/won't afford $5 and are willing to see ads.
- anonred 9y ago
  It doesn't work like that. Companies have already tried (see: Google Contributor) with very limited success. The reality is that you're heavily in the minority of people who care about tracking and privacy and ads. There's no market for it, and the largest analogous service, YouTube Red, explicitly needs to offer exclusive content and access to streaming media just to entice people.
  - 9y ago