Insane state of today's advertising part 3 • Hacker News Board

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#351

Post by wyager » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 1:05 PM UTC

thecrazyone wrote: post #329

jalk wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So perhaps you need to find paywalled news/review outlets without ads. Someone has to pay for the articles being written, servers, bandwidth etc

You're so on-point. All these rants about ads don't think about who'd pay for the content you're consuming if not for the ads. You can't have high quality content and not pay for it - with ads or otherwise. If you want ad-free, keep your credit card ready every time you open your browser I'm not necessarily speaking in favor of ads. I'm just pointing out the shallow analysis which characterizes these companies as gre…

> If you want ad-free, keep your credit card ready every time you open your browser

I'm hopeful we can smooth this experience quite a bit. In the near future, we have (as the current best extant example) in-browser Apple Pay backed by an HSM (either the touch bar or an Apple Watch). Presumably other vendors could implement something similar since at least the payment part isn't proprietary.

In the slightly more distant future, we could improve efficiency/privacy/reliability by using Bitcoin micropayment channels instead of credit cards, but same idea.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#352

Post by pbhjpbhj » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 1:07 PM UTC

Sir_Substance wrote: post #248

C4stor wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But most persons actually want to be influenced in their behaviours, it's the whole point of researching any subject in the first place. Any decision we make is the result of a lot of stuff influencing our behaviours, and the border between researching information on a product and being targeted by an ad for this product is not really black and white. If I had to chose, I'd rather be influenced by logical arguments t…

>But most persons actually want to be influenced in their behaviours, it's the whole point of researching any subject in the first place. No, people research to make informed decisions.

I think the point is: "informed decisions [about their behaviour]".

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

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Post by mej10 » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 1:07 PM UTC

sdenton4 wrote: post #110

mej10 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave is getting around that with built-in support for their "Basic Attention Token" which will be rewarded to users just for using their browser. It will be interesting to see how it works out. Personally I am just sad that it takes so much energy to maintain the current cryptocurrency networks and they are already too slow for really interesting stuff -- which is why I wouldn't want to add more waste by mining in a…

That sounds like a great target for automation abuse? Rev up a bunch of virtual machines, each with a bit of attention to distribute.

I am sure they've thought of that, but I am not familiar enough with their product to know how they deal with it.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

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Post by Super_Jambo » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 1:08 PM UTC

oasfboasbfos wrote: post #148

jdangu wrote: post #76

Awesome to see that subject #1 on HN. At my startup Confiant [1], we block bad ads in stream on behalf of publishers. Cedato aka Algovid aka TLVMedia is one of our prime targets, we block millions of their ad impressions daily. They are essentially buying cheap display ad placements to resell them as fake video preroll ad placements. They sell on video exchanges like AOL's AdapTV and others. To maximize their yield,…

The only good ad is a dead one. With very few exceptions, especially in the consumer space, you won't need advertising if you actually need something. You'll search it out or your friends will tell you what to buy. Advertising serves as a way for the capitalist class to exert veto power over other aspects of society by yanking funding at opportune moments (see the current Google snafu or Bill O'Reilly's departure fro…

The solution is to nationalize the advertising industry and force everything possible into a genuinely competitive market.

Have a government run product listing. Think Amazon reviews, Yelp & Companies house. But with government ID to verify reviewers and harsh police enforcement against fake reviews or miss-leading product descriptions. Make it clear there will be prison time for systematic abuse.

We're at a point where this is technologically trivial & the first country to do it properly will get a big advantage over any that doesn't follow suit quickly.

Any person or company offering a product or service can create an account & list their product (with a price & links to where to buy it). Anyone who's bought the product / service can create a review. Throw in some sensible rules about major product changes requiring listings to be updated.

But what about the advertising industry? Fund a massive nudge campaign to improve citizen behaviour. Tail the funding off over a few years, this is really just welfare for all the anti-workers to give them time to switch into doing something economically productive.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#355

Post by megous » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 1:09 PM UTC

TorKlingberg wrote: post #283

oasfboasbfos wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only good ad is a dead one. With very few exceptions, especially in the consumer space, you won't need advertising if you actually need something. You'll search it out or your friends will tell you what to buy. Advertising serves as a way for the capitalist class to exert veto power over other aspects of society by yanking funding at opportune moments (see the current Google snafu or Bill O'Reilly's departure fro…

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but your comment is not relevant to the one you are replying to. You are just hijacking the top comment to rant (albeit a popular rant).

It hints at the blacklist vs whitelist approach to security. I'd rather whitelist good content, then try to detect and blacklist bad content, as that is a game of whac-a-mole.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

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Post by boyce » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 1:12 PM UTC

bnolsen wrote: post #298

_pmf_ wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or Brave on Android; it's basically indistinguishable from Chrome (or whatever the Android standard browser currently is called).

Just tried this. Other than having to redo all my forums passwords again this browser looks to be a winner. On my phone firefox ran very slowly and hogged too many resources.

Try nightly - 57 feels like it has big performance gains on my ageing 1+

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

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Post by ionised » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 1:13 PM UTC

thecrazyone wrote: post #335

ionised wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Show me the contract that states what you just did and I'll agree.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

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Post by kuschku » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 1:14 PM UTC

cft wrote: post #156

oasfboasbfos wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only good ad is a dead one. With very few exceptions, especially in the consumer space, you won't need advertising if you actually need something. You'll search it out or your friends will tell you what to buy. Advertising serves as a way for the capitalist class to exert veto power over other aspects of society by yanking funding at opportune moments (see the current Google snafu or Bill O'Reilly's departure fro…

An anecdote from 2010: my company had racks of Rackable Systems servers. Every month a server went dead- power supply, board or some such. Rackable Systems were unreliable. Then on Slashdot I saw a square ad for IBM System X servers (unfortunately they have been sold to Lenovo a couple of years ago). That somehow made me do research- although I was aware of IBM System X before. Between 2010 and 1013 we bought perhaps…

That’s why we need independent testing, and you should always check the independent tests before buying something.

For example, whenever I need a new product, be it anything from a spoon to a car seat for a child, I’ll check Stiftung Warentest for full tests of that category.

I’ll take the top 2 or 3, enter them on idealo or preispiraten or günstiger.de or hardwareschotte, and then I’ll take the cheapest of those.

At no point in this purchasing process come ads into play, and I get the best results.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

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Post by kuschku » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 1:15 PM UTC

thecrazyone wrote: post #339

vanderZwan wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 volunta…

Advertising is something that could easily be banned. You do need to weight benefits to decide if that’s a good decision or not.

Many places have made that decision.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#360

Post by pbhjpbhj » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 1:15 PM UTC

beefield wrote: post #237

mattmanser wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crikey, guy shares an anecdote of how an ad helped him and all you can do is be really nasty about it, it's completely unnecessary. I bought a piano course from Udemy because of advertising on FB (and then spent an additional £150 on a keyboard). I'm really enjoying it. Please tell me what a horrible human being I am.

My gut feeling is that for every advertisement induced purchase you actually want and enjoy, there are several orders of magnitude more marketing/advertisement (directly or indirectly) induced purchases that are unnecessary or harmful.

And everything you buy costs more because of advertising. A few years ago a paper I read said the pharma industry was spending as much on advertising as on R&D.

The idea we couldn't find good products without advertising seems pretty moot with internet search available. The greater problem is seeing through the advertising to assess the product - there's a lot of things like market segmentation based only on different packaging (more wasteful, 'oppulent'). The Capitalist notion of value optimisation might work with false representation and coercion removed from the equation.