You don’t notice ads when they pop up in front of content? When they lead to nearly full page breaks between paragraphs in an article? When they contain auto-play videos? When the video resizes itself and moves to stay in the viewport as the user scrolls? When so many ads load that the page crashes? When you do a Google search and there is only a single organic result without scrolling?
They introduced ads like a frog into tepid water. The water is now boiling and many still think everything is fine, because at this point it’s all they know.
It’s not a fear, it’s annoyance and a resentment. I’m annoyed that the ads make web pages so much worse. I resent that everything being “free” with ads has made it next to impossible for other business models to take hold and that new companies need burden themselves with investors, because the expectation is that things online should be free. I’m annoyed that a profile of who I am has been built and sold without my consent and without giving me a cut of the profit. I resent the companies that do this and have no respect for them or their leadership. It’s most certainly not fear of advertisements.
The fear is what will happen to that data, or what may already be happening, if it is controlled by some deceitful individuals or groups.
The fear doesn’t come from the ads, it comes from the invasive data collection that increases the profit of the ads. It’s compounded by the extremely frequent hacks and data leaks that have made it very clear that most of these companies cannot keep the data they collect secure. As such, they have no business collecting and storing it in the first place.
A billboard is an advertisement, so is a magazine ad. The world would be a more aesthetically pleasing place without them, sure, but I don’t go out of my way to avoid them like with the online ads. Billboards and magazines aren’t monitoring me and using hyper-targeted ads. A knitting magazine is going to show ads for knitting stuff. A billboard in Orlando is going to point a driver toward Disney. That’s just fine. Those ads meet people where they are, they don’t follow them around.
I don’t like shopping at Target due to what I’ve read about their data collection and how it’s used. I don’t fear big box stores, I just don’t want to be part of their data set. A store should be a store that profits from the margins of the products they sell. Now, the retail arm is just the front of their advertising or credit card arm of the business, where all the real money is. I don’t want to play that game. I’m a simple man, I want things to be what they are and that’s it.
Excuse the rant.
When I look up diaphimisticophobia, it seems specific about the commercial and their content being the fear. I think most people on HN have an issue with the data collection and use, not the content of the ads themselves.