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Insane state of today's advertising part 3

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Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#331

Post by oliv__ »

stordoff wrote: post #169
eveningcoffee wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Preroll ads are valuable because people are mostly paying attention. eg you went to youtube to watch X, and they show you 15 seconds of swiffer beforehand. Personal anecdote time. Preroll ads are the main force for me behind installing the adblocker. I just can not stand something that manipulates my flow. I call it televication of the Internet. It is unbearable. If for some reason I am not able to block them then…

> Preroll ads are the main force for me behind installing the adblocker They are certainly one of the most annoying classes of ads, which is why I was exceptionally annoyed when Amazon put one before a Prime video I was watching a few days ago. Granted it was for an Amazon product, but any sort of ad in a paid service is _extremely_ annoying.

I've always hated how you pay ~$8-15 for a movie ticket, and then have to sit through half an hour of ads. What the hell??

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#332

Post by thecrazyone »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #318
oiboabfljasbfo wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My claim is that it does work. Astoundingly well. My further claim is that it is not in the public interest.

I think people will always try to influence others, and I don't think advertising is the worst form of doing it. If you say that it's not in the public interest you'd have to compare it to alternatives that are. That said, I think there should be restrictions put on the methods that advertisers are allowed to use. What currently happens in online advertising hurts everybody, including those who rely on ad funded busi…

I'm a libertarian. And putting/enforcing rules on someone who's not aggressing you because you don't like it seems like needing coercion.

You're voluntarily consuming ad-based content, no one's forcing you. If you don't like their ad-supported content, shouldn't you use only content which paid for in different ways? Why should anyone be restricted in their actions because of your opinions?

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#333

Post by beagle3 »

efreak wrote: post #246
SimeVidas wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve switched to Ghostery, and it seems to work fine. Should I go back to uBlock Origin?

I personally prefer privacy badger over both. You can't add trackers to Ghostery, and I don't much care about ads that don't track me (I don't watch internet videos, I might not have this opinion if I did), and any particularly annoying ads just get blocked manually in privacy badger. On mobile, there unfortunately is no such thing (no user scripts on chrome or Firefox, no privacy badger either), so I usually just di…

Firefox Focus also applies its privacy features to Safari browsing; are there any benefits to actually using Focus as a browser?

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#334

Post by thecrazyone »

jiggunjer wrote: post #304
mozumder wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No shit. The world isn't your personal charity for you. Advertisers don't owe you anything. But if you really want to get blown away, it actually does serve the public interest, because it increases commerce, and any sale is an increase in the GDP. Did you thank advertisers for growing the economy?

So the only important thing is commerce? Let's deregulate everything then: drugs, sex, human trafficking, banks (shivers).

Let's indeed deregulate everything.

Picking from the items you've mentioned: drugs: if someone is putting substances in their own body, they don't need your permission and you don't have a say on what they can do with their body, they own it, its their property

next, sex (say even prostitution): Two consenting adults having sex. What's your problem? Same as above, you should've no interest in what others are doing with their bodies. You don't own their bodies.

Human Trafficking: Forced human trafficking is bad. Everyone should buy protection/insurance against this from private businesses (security agencies). Voluntary trafficking is none of your business.

Banks: banks are over-regulated. Let them run like other businesses. Don't bail them out if they fail (not with tax dollars at least). Let them fail as other businesses do. Let better banks take the positions of the ones which can't serve customer interest

I would appreciate/welcome any arguments against what I said

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#335

Post by thecrazyone »

ionised wrote: post #281
mozumder wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No shit. The world isn't your personal charity for you. Advertisers don't owe you anything. But if you really want to get blown away, it actually does serve the public interest, because it increases commerce, and any sale is an increase in the GDP. Did you thank advertisers for growing the economy?

Do you think people owe advertisers a living?

No you owe the content publishers a living if you're consuming their content else they go out of business. Ads is how content publishers make money.

Advertisers in fact pay money for publishing their ads.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#336

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

uuoc wrote: post #61
SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #24

I had to install an ad-blocker today because I got an ad trying to scam me served by Microsoft's news website. If they're not going to take any responsibility for what they're attaching to their pages, then I'm not going to load their random bag of crap.

I'm actually surprised it took you this long. I have had an ad blocker in one form or another continuously installed since the first ad blockers appeared on the scene. And I'll always have an ad blocker installed.

Well, normally I only use IE for intranet related activities, so it's less of an issue.

That'll teach me to read the news on the work browser. Back on HN on the other browser it is!

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#337

Post by petra »

beagle3 wrote: post #330
petra wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electronic engineers face a similar problem, everyday:finding the optimal components to build stuff with. And at least in the case of standard components, they do that via parametric search tools(poring over many details), combined with vendors exposing a lot of details about products. And it works very well. I wish we had that in more fields. Would provide huge value, but it's a hard problem. But i suppose if with t…

Can you point at such a search engine for EEs?

Digikey.com

for example, for microcontrollers:

https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/...

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#338

Post by belorn »

mozumder wrote: post #266
oiboabfljasbfo wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't deny this has occasionally happened to me, but look at your example: it's B2B when my claim is primarily for B2C. B2B ads tend to be more targeted, aimed at corporations, and purchases are for higher dollar amounts. The product being sold was also competing based on build quality, a material improvement. Businesses often make more rational decisions because they can assign someone to do research (like you did…

Yah your argument against adverting is bullshit. Even consumers love ads. Did you know that they even pay money because they want ads? Those 900 pages of Vogue that they buy every September, do you think they're filled with articles? Because they're about 870 pages of fashion ads. People specifically buy them because of the advertising. And did you know Sunday papers are a thing, filled with coupons, that are basical…

Most things are completely different if they are voluntarily or involuntarily. Trend magazines, price comparison sites, and coupons are all examples which people want to be exposed to advertise-like content.

Scam-like advertisement that use browser exploits to track you is not one of them. None would pay for that service, which is a good indication about which from of advertisement is wanted and which isn't.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#339

Post by thecrazyone »

vanderZwan wrote: post #214
fourneau wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why it's a bad thing? From my perspective, I've found various things via advertising that I would have never come across by other means. A lot of people argue that "you'll just search for what you want" except I'm tired of searching for "shirt" and then scrolling for days looking for something that may work. Every once in a while I'm hit with a really good ad, and I'll click it, and maybe even buy.

> From my perspective, I've found various things via advertising that I would have never come across by other means. If you want to make a fair comparison, that should be compared to all the things you didn't find because useless ads took up your time and mental space. Also, whether or not you found something through an ad is not the point; one isn't not going to convince a smoker to quit smoking by trying to convinc…

Advertising is not a public service. You don't need to weight benefits of it for it to exist.

This might seem harsh, but no one is weighing the benefits of your existence to decide whether you live or die. You own yourself and you can sustain yourself hence you exist. Similarly, advertisers exist because they can sustain themselves, they are not coercing you into viewing / using content laden with ads. You're voluntarily consuming content which has ads. If you don't like it don't use ad-laden products

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#340

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

exikyut wrote: post #58
SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #24

I had to install an ad-blocker today because I got an ad trying to scam me served by Microsoft's news website. If they're not going to take any responsibility for what they're attaching to their pages, then I'm not going to load their random bag of crap.

Wow. What was the ad about? I'm curious, I like filing away disasters like these.

Ad that redirected my page to some shady hosting site with a red background and scary text about how I had some virus and needed to call "Microsoft" at the number they provided with a bunch of personal information to fix it. (I assume a JS "vuln" to take over the page -- not that they really regulate ads from how often it happens.)

...Which is particularly goddamn egregious for a Microsoft website to be serving.

If advertisers want me to feel the least bit bad for them and their woes, they need to take some kind of responsibility for those antics. They wanna keep that up? I hope the whole industry dies: getting a warning like that from a Microsoft website could easily have caught my grandma.

tl;dr: Fuck ad networks, fuck Microsoft.

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