It isn't just okay but mandatory!
2015, 10 years later things got so much worse, only know some minority are realising all the problems behind an AD.
With the rise of privacy being breached by American companies and now AI, the way we deal with technology should change altogether.
Basics first, if you only use your PC to access the internet, YouTube, office/excel(LibreOffice) and alike, Mint Cinnamon Linux to replace Windows. No money wasted with licensing and its AI flooding you with ADs
Android and iPhone are such major issue with targeted ADs, GrapheneOS running on Pixel phones are the only way to have a phone and life without having all your personal life leaked, plus ADs.
At home, I run Pihole + Unbound as recursive DNS, OPNSense to force all the DNS traffic to them, and WireGuard to connect to home when I am out.
Pihole blocked traffic goes brrrrrrrrrrr
If people knew how much crappy their phones, Windows/Mac PCs are sending out to Microsof, Apple, Meta, Google, etc, to be exchanged into targeted ADs, people would lose their mind lmao
I has gotten better security-wise at least, malicious ads can't infect your OS anymore just by being loaded. The browser sandbox is much more secure these days.
I have found most people have just given up. I have in various conversations with people been told they will find out anyway, that I am naive if I think it is possible to maintain privacy, and similar.
It's an open access book, you should have a "open full book pdf" button (a couple down from the blue "export citation" button).
I haven't the time to read it myself at the moment, but the gist appears to be about "attention economy" and how technology affects our lives. There's a blurb and some discussion on goodreads [1].
I accidentally turned off my adblocker on youtube today, and I immediately got 2 ads, both of which were AI deepfakes of some celebrities selling "supplements" of dubious legality.
So, um, is this what internet ads are now? Because even if it weren't "ok" to block these ads, I'm sure as shit going to keep blocking them.
Happenned two days ago for me, the rule to block shorts from appearing in my feed caught a bit too much, and I mistakenly deactivated ublock while trying to refine them.
YouTube ads are terrifying. Probably others are to, but my opinion to avoid any product showed on internet if possible is vindicated. How can I trust an Axe ad if it's advertised side by side with an obvious scam?
I actually use a full blown desktop computer as media center specifically because it can run adblock (and games). I got one of those "fly-mouses" (like a wii-remote pointer to control the mouse cursor), works really well and it is nice to be able to pull a wireless mouse+keyboard when you want to do more complex things.
We often use our TV to plan trips using google maps or do some planning using excel sheets with this setup.
Mate, you've had since 1995 to come up with a functioning micropayments system, and you're unhappy that I am not requesting every image referenced by your web page? I think that we are long past the point where we can safely say that this is a "you" problem.
Applying ads to the real world makes it clear: blocking ads is always ok.
If you were given free pizza and a stack of ad flyers, do you have to read the ads? Do you have to even acknowledge them? Can you accept the free food while putting the flyers directly in the trash?
Obviously yes you would toss those ads in the garbage, because what fool would give away food and expect you to look at ads in exchange? So it is with ads online: their business model is not your responsibility and you can ignore stuff (even automatically) if you want, they're your eyes.
For me, it is a straight forward proposition. There is literally nothing online so far that has ever interested me enough to pay money or with my eyeballs. I either see it without ads or move on without even a moment of thought.
It very very sad that some people will even say "I like to see ads, it might have something I want...".
They are not just dumb, they are dangerous.
This ads companies have been online for too much time. It is time to bring them down. Fast.
And with them all those parasites of ads associations and marketing.
We do need to bring the level of ads to 0. Then start new.
To take this a step further, I have had people argue with me that tracking and profiling online is a good thing, because it provides more relevant ads for things they want to buy. There are people who actively want ads that can better target and manipulate them into giving up their money.
I would like to say I've only run into one person like this, but no. I've lost count of how many of these people I've run into. I like to think I'm pretty good at understand other people's point of view, even if I don't agree with it. This is one I have a lot of trouble with.
I'm fine with relevant ads, but I think they should be relevant based on the context around them, not on the viewer. If I go to a website about trout fishing, show me ads that would be useful to a trout fisherman. There is no need to track anyone to do that.
They're imagining a benevolent system that will match them to the personal best deals for them despite all evidence that megacorporations are not in fact benevolent, and will in fact use that knowledge to find the worst possible (i.e. most profitable) deals that they'll still accept, or abuse their psychology to get them to buy things they shouldn't, etc.
They think the system is thinking "ohh! I bet X will like this pair of shoes! And this is a great deal on them!" when in fact a more accurate model is "Who is willing to pay the most to put a message in front of someone with the following detailed list of characteristics?" and then people bid for the right to manipulate you, so even if 2 companies are trying to sell you the exact same thing that you do want, the one that thinks they can extract more from you will pay more and win the spot.
My partner got upset when I added a pihole to our network because she wouldn't see ads in google search. She said most of the time she doesn't mind the pihole but when she is actively looking for things to buy she wants the ads.
What I ended up doing is setting up two separate wifi networks, one with the pihole DNS server and one without it. So she can opt to turn it on.
But yeah overall I agree with you, the ads skew the research by whoever is paying the most for marketing BUT they also work as a filter so you only see stuff that people actually spend money to market on. For _some_ types of products the "barrier to entry" in the ad space can guarantee a certain level of quality (or at least reduce the change for scams).
Profit driven targeted content of any kind, especially ads, are poison. I could never knowingly enable anyone in my household to harm themselves with something so toxic to brain health and quality of life.
In terms of things I want far away from my home and family, surveillance capitalism driven technology ranks up there with meth.
People paying money for things is a win win situation. People are not just "manipulated into giving up their money", they get something they value more than money in return.
The advertisements convince them it is something they value. Most of what people buy becomes clutter and trash almost instantly.
A lot of this stuff is being purchased with debt. People aren’t happy about their debt, their inability to buy a house, or all the clutter that consumes their home. Yet, in the moment, they are led to believe that a Labubu is what they really desire. It’s not.
My mom has been getting some supplement ads and asking me to buy them (she can't do online shopping, too computer illiterate). Man just yesterday she wanted to buy a supplement that was basically a redbull in pill form...
Ads would be ok if they were non-personalized. Just buy ads for places that show similar content. Put ads for videogames on twitch streams, that sort of thing.
These tracking system: it’s just stalking, but done on such a massive scale that, unfortunately, law enforcement and politicians don’t see it that way.
every hackernews thread on this topic has like 10 of those people and it genuinely baffles me. like in the year 2025 the idea that you need to see an ad to know to buy something you were otherwise unaware of is genuinely insane to me
How much do you value your time? A lot of people think like this and I'm not judging you or saying this applies to you. But I find it kind of odd when people I know who earn hundreds to thousands of dollars an hour won't pay even $0.10 for something that took them say 15 minutes to read. If their own time is worth $200 / hr, they thought it was valuable enough to use up $50 of their time. If they refuse to pay anything for the content, then in their mind the content was worth exactly $50, not a cent more to spare to the author of said content (eg $50.10, if you paid the author $0.10 and paid $50 of your time).
Back in the old days, people would share useful information in the internet of their own accord. That still happens a lot today, too! In my opinion, most of the stuff that's ad-supported is not worth my time, as the "content creator" is trying to sell something or otherwise has an angle they're pushing. How can I trust what they have to say when I know they're only doing it to make some money? They will be less interested in helping me than helping themselves!
I think if you take ads away from the internet, you'll also take away a lot of the bullshit and inaccurate or misleading information. If no-one is making any money off of it, you'll be left with largely relevant information.
The internet today is like a free to air television network, but I remember a time when it was nothing like that.
> I think if you take ads away from the internet, you'll also take away a lot of the bullshit and inaccurate or misleading information
Just a gut feeling, but I doubt it. You'll still get a lot of bullshit inaccurate/misleading information, just only pushed by those with the budgets to keep pushing it.
Right-wing podcasters that take money from the Russian government to spread disinformation[0] will still get their checks even if their supplement sponsorships get outlawed.
You can take away all of Alex Jones' money and he'll still find some way to put his nonsense out there.
Sure, you'll never get rid of all misleading information; however, without advertising the volume of shit will reduce radically, as much of the modern internet is built around profiteering and get rich quick schemes (influencers), which breed swathes of hopeful emulators.
I think most sensible people are quite competent at ignoring the bullshit, so I would love it if there was less bullshit to wade through to get to the nuggets of useful information which are out there. For those too stupid to look past misleading information, there's no helping them anyway.
Not quite. Generally "content" from people trying to monetize their writing online (or who describe it as such) is not worth the time spent reading it, so in fact you're already in the hole before being asked to compensate them somehow. That I read/watched the stuff at all is often more a reflection of poor time management on my part than some high value of theirs (the OP essay mentions a similar point, and it's captured by the modern idea of "doomscrolling" recognizing "content consumption" as a potential behavioral addiction). So it's more that I think it takes a fairly high level of audacity for some rando to think people would not just be interested to hear what they have to say, but actually pay to hear their thoughts.
Generally the most useful information on the web is freely given. Turns out actual experts frequently like nerding out about their thing and trying to get other people interested in it/to understand some facet of it.
There is no universal, easy and feeless option to send money to people though.
Sure, I could pay for Hackernews or Github or whatever else (these may be bad examples due to the lack of ads) but lets even say the blogpost linked above.
If I could easily send 0.20$ to someone instantly, without much thought, I would.
I was hoping cryptocurrency would solve this, although the complexity and immense fees with most networks really rule that out.
I used to subscribe to the washington post before the most recent election. Im willing to pay for the content I see or read, but I can't possibly pay for ALL the content that crosses my vision. Like streaming services, I used to have just one, and now there are like 100. If I paid for every show I watched I'd be paying over $100/mo in streaming services. Now I pay for NPR'S premium subscription. If every writer on the internet paywalled their content behind some content network's subscription model, I would happily just not read it
Get a library card! My local library card includes free digital access to newspapers " from 100 countries in 60 languages" as well as streaming video, audiobooks etc. They also have a makerspace with 3d printing, green screen, recording studios, video games, tool rental etc. all at low or no cost. I let my card expire but I see it's still free in my city.
every website that stops me from viewing it because i am blocking ads will never get a visit from me again. i don't watch television because of unavoidable advertisements. i will never accept advertisements as anything other than deception.
I have a lot more respect for pages that block me outright than those that try to circumvent my blocking or whine about it.
The standard on the internet is that people send what they want and the recipients render it however they want. That’s how it’s always been, and how it always will be. That includes the possibility that they won’t want to send me anything. But once it is sent, it is my bits in my RAM, to do with what I will.
I work for an adtech company and we recently discovered that we were serving ads to some users using ad blockers, but the impression tracker endpoint had bbeen blocked. We decided the best course of action is to just submit our bidders domain to whatever lists we can (easylist, ublock, whatever).
My project manager wanted to try just changing our endpoints periodically to evade the list. I said to him "You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia,' but only slightly less well known is this: 'Never go up against a software pirate or ad blocker when privacy is on the line!'
I run AdNauseam to click as many ads as possible randomly simulating ad-addicted humans, just to waste as much money of adtech companies and ad buyers as possible. This year I caused something like $10k to likely be paid for ads to be delivered to my computer that I sent to /dev/null and never saw.
I see no way adtech will reform unless conversion rates plummet to the point that the business model becomes unsustainable.
Genuine question: If millions of people ran automated ad-clicking bots, how would your industry survive?
Wait, these people are clearly not just saying: Do Not Track me, they're also saying: Don't show me ads!
Which is a demand that any ad-tech company must take very seriously! We can't ignore the privacy implications of our ad networks. We better avoid any such privacy concerns and comply with the user's expressed priorities.
That's exactly how the meeting went. The CTO agreed that the best thing we can do is help comply with user's wishes about ads and privacy as best we can, so we are in the process of adding our domains to the block lists of common ad blockers
Out of curiosity, how do you feel working on something that is zero-sum (does not produce positive value for society, only changes where the money goes)? Would you change jobs if a positive-sum job became available?
It's easy to find plenty of counterexamples: cigarettes, Teflon pans, soda, cheap children's clothing with elevated lead, etc. And that's before we get into crypto scams, MLM schemes, etc.
Products should compete on their cost vs value for the customer, not on which is better known.
Yes, advertisements make customers aware of a particular category of product but by pushing one specific brand instead of the whole category. I would OK with advertisements which push the whole category, that is positive-sum.
But currently we have an arms race where you have to invest in ads to compete with other products of the same category and that is zero-sum. Inter-category competition should be based on quality/longevity/cost.
>I would OK with advertisements which push the whole category, that is positive-sum.
This doesn't get rid of people buying what is most well known. In fact without the possibility of being exposed to more niche options people will just go with the incumbents. Advertising allows new competitors in a space to be able to acquire customers based off their value for customers instead of being a wellknown thing.
I work in retail media. There is a large difference in the kind of value we capture - rather than creating incentives for annoying or addictive behavior, we only show advertisements on ecommerce pages. If you are seeing our ads, you already have the intent to buy a kind of product, but the kinds of ads we show are trying to convince you to buy a specific brand of product.
Perhaps you searched "laptops". You see a handful of results, and at the top a banner says "Dell XPS - 20% off!"
Have we manipulated you in any way? Have we lied to you? The fact that a laptop is 20% off is valuable information to a user who might consider price in their purchase. What we sell is not advertising, but real estate on your screen
Am I in love with what I do? No. But we dont engage in the kind of advertising market described in the OP's article. What we do is the equivalent of a grocery store putting products on the end cap of an aisle and getting paid extra for the valuable real estate
If you're taking money from X to try to push people to buy X instead of saying "our honest opinion is that Y is the best-value product and we recommend it" and putting that front and center, it's safe to say that you are manipulating people. The non-manipulative use of that real estate is showcasing high value products such that you feel it reflects well on your business to point them out. If they were organically there already, they wouldn't need to pay you.
Other ads just take up screen space and bandwidth: they displace more useful uses of these scarce resources, but they don't cause any direct harm. By contrast, ads targeting people in the market for a good or service actively displace quality signals. In doing so they make quality uneconomical and thus destroy it. They make the world a worse place.
That seems less evil, at least in the sense that it doesn’t require staking people and collecting dossiers about their personal information.
I’m surprised your business model doesn’t completely dominate over the social media algorithmic nonsense. I’d expect people who searched for something to be actually interested in it.
It actually does, in a way. Amazon.com (not AWS) doesnt make any money on product sales - it makes almost all of its revenue from sponsored products. Walmart as well makes a huge percentage of its money from promoting products.
My company operates only on small ecommerce sites. Because we have a huge catalog of products, advertisers can come to us and launch a campaign, and we can automatically deliver across dozens of sites. We can connect small ecommerce sites to large advertisers so that they dont need first party relationships with those advertisers. The way I see it, we are helping smaller retailers be more competitive against Amazon by helping them squeeze more blood from the stone, as we like to say in advertising.
What keeps me up at night is who our customers are. Among our advertisers, we sell ads for alcohol. While those who see our ads generally already have high intent to buy alcohol in the first place, I know from family history that even the slightest temptation can put an alcoholic back at step 0. We dont run too many of those but im still struggling with it
> Amazon.com (not AWS) doesnt make any money on product sales - it makes almost all of its revenue from sponsored products
So you see, it is exploitative. Amazon has an advantageous position thanks to its brand name and it allows it to extract money from companies who want their product sold which in turn is extracted from customers. Meanwhile if a better (in terms of quality/longevity/cost) product existed, it would be unable to compete without also being forced to advertise. It has to spend money on ads which would be better spent improving the product (or making it cheaper in the complete absence of advertising).
EDIT: Btw, I do appreciate the honesty. There are absolutely different levels of severity of anti-social / anti-consumer behavior - the exploitation I pointed out has lower severity but a higher scale/prevalence and your alcohol example is a good example of low scale/prevalence but high severity.
I remember reading this closer to 2015. I'm convinced that these sorts of mental gymnastics and philosophizing are an info-hazard for otherwise smart and thoughtful people. Not a particularly dangerous one, but time that you won't get back.
Unless you are a psychopath, your human instincts will alert you to when you need to show respect or gratitude, or reciprocity is expected from you. You don't need to try to think your way in or out of those things, especially when the other party is a large corporation bothering you over the internet. The whole premise of the article is just nuts.
TLDR: You should blocks ads because they are annoying. Don't overthink it.
> You don't need to try to think your way in or out of those things
I think the danger is the opposite. Normal (non-psychopathic) people are prone to being manipulated into feeling for inanimate objects, such as corporations, especially if those are driven by exploitative incentives where humanizing _itselves_ is beneficial.
It’s literally what you experience in your life. I’d say I value my life a lot, in the end it’s all I actually own.
On the other hand, others value my attention because they can make fractions of a cent by making me look at stuff, because there’s a minimal chance they’ll convince me to spend money on stuff of probably little value.
Seems to me they don’t value my attention a lot, and I don’t get much of value out of it.
Its fuel for your life goals, lets you think about where, what and how you want to do things for yourself. As opposed to being led along by what other's tell you you want. I'm not a philosopher but this seems like a good reason for why its valuable.
It isn't just okay but mandatory! 2015, 10 years later things got so much worse, only know some minority are realising all the problems behind an AD.
With the rise of privacy being breached by American companies and now AI, the way we deal with technology should change altogether.
Basics first, if you only use your PC to access the internet, YouTube, office/excel(LibreOffice) and alike, Mint Cinnamon Linux to replace Windows. No money wasted with licensing and its AI flooding you with ADs
Android and iPhone are such major issue with targeted ADs, GrapheneOS running on Pixel phones are the only way to have a phone and life without having all your personal life leaked, plus ADs.
At home, I run Pihole + Unbound as recursive DNS, OPNSense to force all the DNS traffic to them, and WireGuard to connect to home when I am out. Pihole blocked traffic goes brrrrrrrrrrr
If people knew how much crappy their phones, Windows/Mac PCs are sending out to Microsof, Apple, Meta, Google, etc, to be exchanged into targeted ADs, people would lose their mind lmao
I has gotten better security-wise at least, malicious ads can't infect your OS anymore just by being loaded. The browser sandbox is much more secure these days.
If we do not count the multiple sandbox escape vulnerabilities that happen every year, sure. https://issues.chromium.org/issues/405143032
I have found most people have just given up. I have in various conversations with people been told they will find out anyway, that I am naive if I think it is possible to maintain privacy, and similar.
Yes, it is not only OK to block ads, but should be done.
Just for the context, in 2015 world's most used browser still had a sophisticated adblocking.
And a year or so later, the article's author went on to write this:
* https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108453004
What is it? The website doesn't say much other than the name of the book.
It's an open access book, you should have a "open full book pdf" button (a couple down from the blue "export citation" button).
I haven't the time to read it myself at the moment, but the gist appears to be about "attention economy" and how technology affects our lives. There's a blurb and some discussion on goodreads [1].
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38364667-stand-out-of-ou...
I accidentally turned off my adblocker on youtube today, and I immediately got 2 ads, both of which were AI deepfakes of some celebrities selling "supplements" of dubious legality.
So, um, is this what internet ads are now? Because even if it weren't "ok" to block these ads, I'm sure as shit going to keep blocking them.
Happenned two days ago for me, the rule to block shorts from appearing in my feed caught a bit too much, and I mistakenly deactivated ublock while trying to refine them.
YouTube ads are terrifying. Probably others are to, but my opinion to avoid any product showed on internet if possible is vindicated. How can I trust an Axe ad if it's advertised side by side with an obvious scam?
I actually use a full blown desktop computer as media center specifically because it can run adblock (and games). I got one of those "fly-mouses" (like a wii-remote pointer to control the mouse cursor), works really well and it is nice to be able to pull a wireless mouse+keyboard when you want to do more complex things.
We often use our TV to plan trips using google maps or do some planning using excel sheets with this setup.
Mate, you've had since 1995 to come up with a functioning micropayments system, and you're unhappy that I am not requesting every image referenced by your web page? I think that we are long past the point where we can safely say that this is a "you" problem.
Applying ads to the real world makes it clear: blocking ads is always ok.
If you were given free pizza and a stack of ad flyers, do you have to read the ads? Do you have to even acknowledge them? Can you accept the free food while putting the flyers directly in the trash?
Obviously yes you would toss those ads in the garbage, because what fool would give away food and expect you to look at ads in exchange? So it is with ads online: their business model is not your responsibility and you can ignore stuff (even automatically) if you want, they're your eyes.
For me, it is a straight forward proposition. There is literally nothing online so far that has ever interested me enough to pay money or with my eyeballs. I either see it without ads or move on without even a moment of thought.
It very very sad that some people will even say "I like to see ads, it might have something I want...". They are not just dumb, they are dangerous. This ads companies have been online for too much time. It is time to bring them down. Fast. And with them all those parasites of ads associations and marketing. We do need to bring the level of ads to 0. Then start new.
To take this a step further, I have had people argue with me that tracking and profiling online is a good thing, because it provides more relevant ads for things they want to buy. There are people who actively want ads that can better target and manipulate them into giving up their money.
I would like to say I've only run into one person like this, but no. I've lost count of how many of these people I've run into. I like to think I'm pretty good at understand other people's point of view, even if I don't agree with it. This is one I have a lot of trouble with.
I'm fine with relevant ads, but I think they should be relevant based on the context around them, not on the viewer. If I go to a website about trout fishing, show me ads that would be useful to a trout fisherman. There is no need to track anyone to do that.
They're imagining a benevolent system that will match them to the personal best deals for them despite all evidence that megacorporations are not in fact benevolent, and will in fact use that knowledge to find the worst possible (i.e. most profitable) deals that they'll still accept, or abuse their psychology to get them to buy things they shouldn't, etc.
They think the system is thinking "ohh! I bet X will like this pair of shoes! And this is a great deal on them!" when in fact a more accurate model is "Who is willing to pay the most to put a message in front of someone with the following detailed list of characteristics?" and then people bid for the right to manipulate you, so even if 2 companies are trying to sell you the exact same thing that you do want, the one that thinks they can extract more from you will pay more and win the spot.
My partner got upset when I added a pihole to our network because she wouldn't see ads in google search. She said most of the time she doesn't mind the pihole but when she is actively looking for things to buy she wants the ads.
What I ended up doing is setting up two separate wifi networks, one with the pihole DNS server and one without it. So she can opt to turn it on.
But yeah overall I agree with you, the ads skew the research by whoever is paying the most for marketing BUT they also work as a filter so you only see stuff that people actually spend money to market on. For _some_ types of products the "barrier to entry" in the ad space can guarantee a certain level of quality (or at least reduce the change for scams).
You are more accommodating than me.
Profit driven targeted content of any kind, especially ads, are poison. I could never knowingly enable anyone in my household to harm themselves with something so toxic to brain health and quality of life.
In terms of things I want far away from my home and family, surveillance capitalism driven technology ranks up there with meth.
It’s because they view the world with a consumerist mindset and buying things gives them pleasure.
People paying money for things is a win win situation. People are not just "manipulated into giving up their money", they get something they value more than money in return.
The advertisements convince them it is something they value. Most of what people buy becomes clutter and trash almost instantly.
A lot of this stuff is being purchased with debt. People aren’t happy about their debt, their inability to buy a house, or all the clutter that consumes their home. Yet, in the moment, they are led to believe that a Labubu is what they really desire. It’s not.
My mom has been getting some supplement ads and asking me to buy them (she can't do online shopping, too computer illiterate). Man just yesterday she wanted to buy a supplement that was basically a redbull in pill form...
Ads would be ok if they were non-personalized. Just buy ads for places that show similar content. Put ads for videogames on twitch streams, that sort of thing.
These tracking system: it’s just stalking, but done on such a massive scale that, unfortunately, law enforcement and politicians don’t see it that way.
every hackernews thread on this topic has like 10 of those people and it genuinely baffles me. like in the year 2025 the idea that you need to see an ad to know to buy something you were otherwise unaware of is genuinely insane to me
How much do you value your time? A lot of people think like this and I'm not judging you or saying this applies to you. But I find it kind of odd when people I know who earn hundreds to thousands of dollars an hour won't pay even $0.10 for something that took them say 15 minutes to read. If their own time is worth $200 / hr, they thought it was valuable enough to use up $50 of their time. If they refuse to pay anything for the content, then in their mind the content was worth exactly $50, not a cent more to spare to the author of said content (eg $50.10, if you paid the author $0.10 and paid $50 of your time).
Back in the old days, people would share useful information in the internet of their own accord. That still happens a lot today, too! In my opinion, most of the stuff that's ad-supported is not worth my time, as the "content creator" is trying to sell something or otherwise has an angle they're pushing. How can I trust what they have to say when I know they're only doing it to make some money? They will be less interested in helping me than helping themselves!
I think if you take ads away from the internet, you'll also take away a lot of the bullshit and inaccurate or misleading information. If no-one is making any money off of it, you'll be left with largely relevant information.
The internet today is like a free to air television network, but I remember a time when it was nothing like that.
> I think if you take ads away from the internet, you'll also take away a lot of the bullshit and inaccurate or misleading information
Just a gut feeling, but I doubt it. You'll still get a lot of bullshit inaccurate/misleading information, just only pushed by those with the budgets to keep pushing it.
Right-wing podcasters that take money from the Russian government to spread disinformation[0] will still get their checks even if their supplement sponsorships get outlawed.
You can take away all of Alex Jones' money and he'll still find some way to put his nonsense out there.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/two-rt-employees-ind...
Sure, you'll never get rid of all misleading information; however, without advertising the volume of shit will reduce radically, as much of the modern internet is built around profiteering and get rich quick schemes (influencers), which breed swathes of hopeful emulators.
I think most sensible people are quite competent at ignoring the bullshit, so I would love it if there was less bullshit to wade through to get to the nuggets of useful information which are out there. For those too stupid to look past misleading information, there's no helping them anyway.
Not quite. Generally "content" from people trying to monetize their writing online (or who describe it as such) is not worth the time spent reading it, so in fact you're already in the hole before being asked to compensate them somehow. That I read/watched the stuff at all is often more a reflection of poor time management on my part than some high value of theirs (the OP essay mentions a similar point, and it's captured by the modern idea of "doomscrolling" recognizing "content consumption" as a potential behavioral addiction). So it's more that I think it takes a fairly high level of audacity for some rando to think people would not just be interested to hear what they have to say, but actually pay to hear their thoughts.
Generally the most useful information on the web is freely given. Turns out actual experts frequently like nerding out about their thing and trying to get other people interested in it/to understand some facet of it.
There is no universal, easy and feeless option to send money to people though.
Sure, I could pay for Hackernews or Github or whatever else (these may be bad examples due to the lack of ads) but lets even say the blogpost linked above.
If I could easily send 0.20$ to someone instantly, without much thought, I would.
I was hoping cryptocurrency would solve this, although the complexity and immense fees with most networks really rule that out.
Its a neat and rational way of looking at things but does it always make sense to give your time a monetary value?
I used to subscribe to the washington post before the most recent election. Im willing to pay for the content I see or read, but I can't possibly pay for ALL the content that crosses my vision. Like streaming services, I used to have just one, and now there are like 100. If I paid for every show I watched I'd be paying over $100/mo in streaming services. Now I pay for NPR'S premium subscription. If every writer on the internet paywalled their content behind some content network's subscription model, I would happily just not read it
I'd love a Netflix for newspapers. I'd pay to be able to read a bunch of local papers' content if the site was good.
Get a library card! My local library card includes free digital access to newspapers " from 100 countries in 60 languages" as well as streaming video, audiobooks etc. They also have a makerspace with 3d printing, green screen, recording studios, video games, tool rental etc. all at low or no cost. I let my card expire but I see it's still free in my city.
every website that stops me from viewing it because i am blocking ads will never get a visit from me again. i don't watch television because of unavoidable advertisements. i will never accept advertisements as anything other than deception.
I have a lot more respect for pages that block me outright than those that try to circumvent my blocking or whine about it.
The standard on the internet is that people send what they want and the recipients render it however they want. That’s how it’s always been, and how it always will be. That includes the possibility that they won’t want to send me anything. But once it is sent, it is my bits in my RAM, to do with what I will.
There's no good argument for not blocking ads with so many of them pushing literal malware for criminals.
I work for an adtech company and we recently discovered that we were serving ads to some users using ad blockers, but the impression tracker endpoint had bbeen blocked. We decided the best course of action is to just submit our bidders domain to whatever lists we can (easylist, ublock, whatever).
My project manager wanted to try just changing our endpoints periodically to evade the list. I said to him "You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia,' but only slightly less well known is this: 'Never go up against a software pirate or ad blocker when privacy is on the line!'
I run AdNauseam to click as many ads as possible randomly simulating ad-addicted humans, just to waste as much money of adtech companies and ad buyers as possible. This year I caused something like $10k to likely be paid for ads to be delivered to my computer that I sent to /dev/null and never saw.
I see no way adtech will reform unless conversion rates plummet to the point that the business model becomes unsustainable.
Genuine question: If millions of people ran automated ad-clicking bots, how would your industry survive?
And then you keeled over while your project manager went on about their business?
Maybe they lost sleep over it, thinking
That's exactly how the meeting went. The CTO agreed that the best thing we can do is help comply with user's wishes about ads and privacy as best we can, so we are in the process of adding our domains to the block lists of common ad blockers
I'm beginning to suspect there isn't even a princess in your version of the story.
Out of curiosity, how do you feel working on something that is zero-sum (does not produce positive value for society, only changes where the money goes)? Would you change jobs if a positive-sum job became available?
And to risk being seen as preaching, have you read https://drewdevault.com/2025/04/20/2025-04-20-Tech-sector-re... ?
It produces a lot of value when products are actually used as opposed to unused
It's easy to find plenty of counterexamples: cigarettes, Teflon pans, soda, cheap children's clothing with elevated lead, etc. And that's before we get into crypto scams, MLM schemes, etc.
No, it produces money, not value, and not for society but for the company which spends on advertising instead of spending on improving the product.
Meanwhile this forces other brands in the same category to also spend on advertising even if they have a better product, thus increasing the cost.
import more land fill
Connecting people with goods or services they may find valuable provides a positive value to society.
Products should compete on their cost vs value for the customer, not on which is better known.
Yes, advertisements make customers aware of a particular category of product but by pushing one specific brand instead of the whole category. I would OK with advertisements which push the whole category, that is positive-sum.
But currently we have an arms race where you have to invest in ads to compete with other products of the same category and that is zero-sum. Inter-category competition should be based on quality/longevity/cost.
>I would OK with advertisements which push the whole category, that is positive-sum.
This doesn't get rid of people buying what is most well known. In fact without the possibility of being exposed to more niche options people will just go with the incumbents. Advertising allows new competitors in a space to be able to acquire customers based off their value for customers instead of being a wellknown thing.
I work in retail media. There is a large difference in the kind of value we capture - rather than creating incentives for annoying or addictive behavior, we only show advertisements on ecommerce pages. If you are seeing our ads, you already have the intent to buy a kind of product, but the kinds of ads we show are trying to convince you to buy a specific brand of product.
Perhaps you searched "laptops". You see a handful of results, and at the top a banner says "Dell XPS - 20% off!"
Have we manipulated you in any way? Have we lied to you? The fact that a laptop is 20% off is valuable information to a user who might consider price in their purchase. What we sell is not advertising, but real estate on your screen
Am I in love with what I do? No. But we dont engage in the kind of advertising market described in the OP's article. What we do is the equivalent of a grocery store putting products on the end cap of an aisle and getting paid extra for the valuable real estate
If you're taking money from X to try to push people to buy X instead of saying "our honest opinion is that Y is the best-value product and we recommend it" and putting that front and center, it's safe to say that you are manipulating people. The non-manipulative use of that real estate is showcasing high value products such that you feel it reflects well on your business to point them out. If they were organically there already, they wouldn't need to pay you.
This is the worst kind of advertisement.
Other ads just take up screen space and bandwidth: they displace more useful uses of these scarce resources, but they don't cause any direct harm. By contrast, ads targeting people in the market for a good or service actively displace quality signals. In doing so they make quality uneconomical and thus destroy it. They make the world a worse place.
That seems less evil, at least in the sense that it doesn’t require staking people and collecting dossiers about their personal information.
I’m surprised your business model doesn’t completely dominate over the social media algorithmic nonsense. I’d expect people who searched for something to be actually interested in it.
It actually does, in a way. Amazon.com (not AWS) doesnt make any money on product sales - it makes almost all of its revenue from sponsored products. Walmart as well makes a huge percentage of its money from promoting products.
My company operates only on small ecommerce sites. Because we have a huge catalog of products, advertisers can come to us and launch a campaign, and we can automatically deliver across dozens of sites. We can connect small ecommerce sites to large advertisers so that they dont need first party relationships with those advertisers. The way I see it, we are helping smaller retailers be more competitive against Amazon by helping them squeeze more blood from the stone, as we like to say in advertising.
What keeps me up at night is who our customers are. Among our advertisers, we sell ads for alcohol. While those who see our ads generally already have high intent to buy alcohol in the first place, I know from family history that even the slightest temptation can put an alcoholic back at step 0. We dont run too many of those but im still struggling with it
> Amazon.com (not AWS) doesnt make any money on product sales - it makes almost all of its revenue from sponsored products
So you see, it is exploitative. Amazon has an advantageous position thanks to its brand name and it allows it to extract money from companies who want their product sold which in turn is extracted from customers. Meanwhile if a better (in terms of quality/longevity/cost) product existed, it would be unable to compete without also being forced to advertise. It has to spend money on ads which would be better spent improving the product (or making it cheaper in the complete absence of advertising).
EDIT: Btw, I do appreciate the honesty. There are absolutely different levels of severity of anti-social / anti-consumer behavior - the exploitation I pointed out has lower severity but a higher scale/prevalence and your alcohol example is a good example of low scale/prevalence but high severity.
I remember reading this closer to 2015. I'm convinced that these sorts of mental gymnastics and philosophizing are an info-hazard for otherwise smart and thoughtful people. Not a particularly dangerous one, but time that you won't get back.
Unless you are a psychopath, your human instincts will alert you to when you need to show respect or gratitude, or reciprocity is expected from you. You don't need to try to think your way in or out of those things, especially when the other party is a large corporation bothering you over the internet. The whole premise of the article is just nuts.
TLDR: You should blocks ads because they are annoying. Don't overthink it.
I'm not blocking ads.
I'm blocking unaccountable third party advertising networks that let random javascript code run in my session.
If site operators want to put their ads inline then there really isn't anything I can do about it and I doubt I would even try.
I would make no effort to block ads if they were either static images or text, required no js, and were clearly marked as ads.
When one is (in 2015) a doctoral candidate in ethics at Balliol, there is not really any such thing as overthinking this. (-:
> You don't need to try to think your way in or out of those things
I think the danger is the opposite. Normal (non-psychopathic) people are prone to being manipulated into feeling for inanimate objects, such as corporations, especially if those are driven by exploitative incentives where humanizing _itselves_ is beneficial.
> In the 1970’s, Herbert Simon pointed out that when information becomes abundant, attention becomes the scarce resource.
Attention is scarce, but what makes it valuable?
It’s literally what you experience in your life. I’d say I value my life a lot, in the end it’s all I actually own.
On the other hand, others value my attention because they can make fractions of a cent by making me look at stuff, because there’s a minimal chance they’ll convince me to spend money on stuff of probably little value.
Seems to me they don’t value my attention a lot, and I don’t get much of value out of it.
> Attention is scarce, but what makes it valuable?
Attention's value lies in its scarcity and its ability to drive action, connection, and influence.
Every moment you spend focusing on something comes at the cost of not focusing on something else.
Its fuel for your life goals, lets you think about where, what and how you want to do things for yourself. As opposed to being led along by what other's tell you you want. I'm not a philosopher but this seems like a good reason for why its valuable.