I just uninstalled a game from my mobile phone this morning that had heavy ad usage. It was interesting to note the different ad display strategies. From least to most annoying:
- display a static ad, have the "x" to close appear soon (3-10 seconds)
- display an animated ad, have the "x" to close appear soon (3-10 seconds)
- display a static ad, have the "x" to close appear after 20-30 seconds
- display an animated ad, have the "x" to close appear after 20-30 seconds
- display several ads in succession, each short, but it automatically proceeds to the next; the net time after which the "x" to close appears after 20-30 seconds
- display several ads in succession, each lasts for 3-10 seconds but you have to click on an "x" to close each one before the next one appears
I live in the USA. The well-established consumer product brands (Clorox, McDonalds, etc.) almost all had short ads that were done in 3-5 seconds. The longest ads were for obscure games or websites, or for Temu, and they appeared over and over again, making me hate them with a flaming passion. The several-ads-in-succession were usually British newspaper websites (WHY???? I don't live there) or celebrity-interest websites (I have no interest in these).
It seems like the monkey's-paw curse for this kind of legislation is to show several ads in a row, each allowing you to skip them after 5 seconds.
My favorite most annoying ad tactic is the trick slowing down progress bar. It starts off fast making it seem like it’s going to be, say, a ten-second ad so you decide to suffer through it… but progressively slows so you notice at like the 20 second mark you’re only 2/3 of the way through the progress bar, so probably less than halfway done. Murderous rage.
Mr. Beast on youtube is guilty of that. Matt Parker of Standup Maths fame did an in-depth look at how that works. Whoever came up with that type of progress bar must hate people in general.
As a full mea culpa, I once implemented this years ago for an open-source project (non-ad-related) that could have an unpredictable number of steps with unpredictable timing. We went with an algorithm that would add a % of the remaining progress on each status tick, so, while it would inevitably decelerate, at least users would know that the processing wasn't just frozen.
It was a compromise that let us focus our limited attention on the things our project could uniquely do, without needing to refactor or do fast-and-slow-passes to provide subtask-count estimates to the UI. I'd make those same choices again, in that context. But in an ad context, it's inexcusable.
There's also the tactic of having different ad behaviours during the same video. The first will be a 30s unskippable ad, the second will be a single skippable one, the third will be 3 ads, one of which you can skip, etc. It's ok on a mobile or if you're at your desk, but if you're watching from a distance it gets really annoying...
The positive version of this is clocks in escape rooms. You set the countdown timer to be slightly faster for the first 45 minutes and slightly slower for the last 10, so that people get more of a taste of time pressure towards the end and a higher chance of a "photo finish" which makes for a great fun story.
Uber (and many other apps probably) do a similar thing. A completely deceptive progress bar that's basically an animation that's AB tested for lowest perceived wait, rather than being an actual progress bar in any sense of the word!
I can tell you how the ad companies will implement this. For Rewarded ads (the longest ones, that are at least 30 seconds, and sometimes as high as 60 seconds), they'll move to that succession model, but the succession will take you at least 30 seconds. Oh you skipped an ad after 5 seconds? No worries, here's another ad. You watched the first ad for the full 30 seconds? No more ads for you.
Some "news" sites are so annoying about their ads, I just close the tab and google for someone else's version of the story. I block sites that show up in my news feed often but display more nag than content.
I'm sure in their mind, they don't care about me leaving. Apparently more than enough people put up with it to keep the site viable.
> It seems like the monkey's-paw curse for this kind of legislation is to show several ads in a row, each allowing you to skip them after 5 seconds.
We should just ban all online ads then. I honestly think we would be better off. Yes, some things that used to be completely free would start costing a little bit, but I don't think we would lose much of value, really. And there would still be lots of different ways that consumers could discover goods and services if we didn't have online ads, it would just be via directories where consumers could go and search for products instead of consumers being bombarded with information noise all the time.
The freemium ad-revenue model is a local maximum which results in a whole lot of shittiness.
they appeared over and over again, making me hate them with a flaming passion
I wonder how much risk there is to brands due to this sort of thing? I tend to feel the same way; are we just uncommon?
The only place I see ads is Amazon Prime Video (b/c I'm still irked they changed the deal and added ads). I've come to hate those companies whose ads I see over and over and over again and I've resolved to never buy anything from them. I even used one of their products regularly and switched to a competitor due to their ads.
The latest was "I Love Hue". It let me play 10 levels (nice) and then put ads in. If they had just asked for $1 before showing the first ad I might have paid but as soon as I saw the ads I just uninstalled.
Note: IMO "I Love Hue" is a $1 game. I'm happy to pay $$ for bigger games and often do though on Switch/Steam, less on mobile.
My wife played one of those unscrew games which showed lots of ads in between runs. I convinced her to buy the ad-free package for $5, so she doesn’t have to endure those ads.
While the game indeed was ad-free after that, there was no progress possible anymore as everything suddenly cost 3x the virtual coins than before. Basically forcing you to shell out even more money to buy their stupid coins.
And just so we're attacking the problem from both sides: the dark pattern on the advertisers side is the inability to easily opt out of in-app ads when advertising on Google's display network. For the reasons you listed, in-app ads generate an incredible amount of low quality clicks, yet Google makes it very hard to exclude yourself from that ad inventory.
The only way I've found to do it so far is to manually exclude yourself from every individual app category. IIRC there are over a hundred categories and you need to manually go through and select every category to exclude your ads from mobile apps.
There's also the tactic where the layout of the page/app reflows after a second or two, changing where the ads are. It drives me up the wall. Go to tap on a button, SURPRISE, an ad popped in where the button used to be 10ms before you touched the screen and now you're forced into some company's site whether you wanted to see it or not.
I discovered that the samsung good lock sound assistant lets you mute all sound from specific apps and allow specific apps to never have their sound be interrupted. So it mute games and have audiobook players to always play audio and this lets me listen to audiobooks while playing games and never have the adds interrupt audio.
My absolute favorite is the smaller “picture in picture ad” that gives you a way to immediately dismiss it with a “X” that looks like microfiche - the cynic in me assumes that this is so the average user will fat-finger it by mistake making it look like a conversion.
I have a turn-based game that I play with remote family and after I play my turn, I swipe the app off (force close) so I don't have to see the ads. It used to be that I could just switch away to skip the ads but they must have gotten wise to that because one day it stopped working.
I know plenty of folks here make lots of money off it, but ad tech is straight up malware. I got lucky and found uBlock Origin many years ago so I did not get slowly boiled in worsening ad tech. I can't believe what people put up with just to not pay a few dollars for software they use daily. Not to even mention that the worst part of it all is ad tech has ruined the internet beyond repair.
My favorite mobile game ad was for Jeep, which was 3 seconds of the word JEEP on a black background. My wife and I laugh about it, but we remember it. It was actually really effective in that regard.
My second favorite was for some pirate game, but the ads were basically the setup for an adult movie, with tons of hammy overacting. I thought they were so funny, I was really sad when they stopped.
You missed one of the worst: mandatory interactive ones.
My wife is a sucker for these horribly generic flashy F2P puzzle-ish games. There are these ads that pop up every N action or something; some of these look like a mini-game and are actually an ad for another of those F2P games, and you have to play the mini-game that showcases some dumb simple mechanic of the game it advertises for a little bit before you can dismiss the ad.
Some come complete with two trivially easy levels ONLY 20% OF PLAYERS CAN PASS SOLVE THIS that glorify you OMG YOU HAVE SUCH HIGH IQ then one impossible that taunts you into installing the game.
The predatory dark patterns are so obvious they should be trialed to oblivion but no apparently this kind of abuse is legal.
I don't think I'm especially stupid and I try very hard not to interact with ads more then I have to, but I have often found it impossible to escape those ads without ending up being delivered to the app store page.
Maybe I didn't notice the X in some part of the display or whatever, but even if by making a concerted effort to not do it, you still "convert", their click though stats must be crazy.
You don't have to play it. You can but you don't have to. The skip or close button will appear after a set amount of time (like in any video ad). It feels like you need to play or you'll be stuck but you won't.
I'm OK with a unobtrusive banner ad. I hate forced ads that get in the way of my flow (whether it's gaming or reading or work). I hate forced ads that can't be skipped.
I understand the reason for these (they often have an IAP that will remove ads, so the more annoying the ads the more likely folks will be tempted to buy it). But doesn't make it ok. I usually just leave a one star review and uninstall.
Some time ago, Google AdMob started using a new format ads - two videos, one immediately after another, unskippable for the first 60s, sometimes more. You know how they called them? "High-engagement ads".
On some level, it's hilarious.
My most favorite annoying thing about ads is the 'x' close button. They make it very small almost impossible to be perfect. I end up clicking the ads 50% of the times. Been running PiHole at home network for almost 8yrs happily. The ads come into play only when I am traveling.
If are using Android, it's easy to block these ads with apps like Netguard or even PCAPDroid
Then can use the game without annoyance of ads
As it happens, the data collection, surveillance and ad serving strategies of the mobile OS vendors and their unpaid "app developer" independent contractors are still subservient to application firewalls and/or user-controlled DNS
This could change one day, it's within the control of the mobile OS vendors, but I have been waiting over 15 years and it still hasn't
This is why instead of specific legislation that winds up being a cat-and-mouse game with companies, the practice of creating specialized agencies with a general charter and delegating the specifics to them is often employed.
But it's also why this administration is dismantling those agencies as fast as it can -- without them the legislature will always be hopelessly behind on proper regulation.
For people with iPhones I recommend an "Apple Arcade" subscription, especially if you have kids. All games included in Arcade are ad free. They have a big enough collection.
I have fallen asleep watching youtube many times. I swear i have woken up in the middle of 20+ minute ads. I thought it was a news article about china when it was an ad. Who knows when the skip button appeared. The few times i have seen these, it has always been a literal fake news show about china.
> I have fallen asleep watching youtube many times.
Interesting new opportunity for YouTube here. Detect your usage patterns and near bed time show you increasingly boring content until you fall asleep, then fill your head with subliminal messages in these long ads.
I've seen these advertisements too, also only when my phone had been playing unattended for some time.
I have a (unsupported, unsubstantiated) theory that YT detects phones of "sleepers" and pushes more profitable content with the understanding it won't be skipped.
I've got a few spare phones, maybe I'll run an experiment.
Shortly before I started paying for YouTube, I remember seeing one of those ultra-long ads. The ad seemed interesting, so at first I didn't want to skip it. As soon as I saw that it was a looooong ad I got into the habit of checking the length of an ad before I even considered if it's worth watching.
Now I just pay for Youtube. I'm a lot happier that way.
They also do this with kid’s content on YT but they make it look like a show basically. Might not happen on YT Kids, I basically never use either, but the few times we pulled up YT proper I’ve seen it happen. Get a few videos deep and they slip them in
I've seen bands release music in those long ads, a complete movie, a 2 hour podcast, and tons of the fake news stuff. I think for some its a unique way to advertise and get exposure, others is just YT farming adtime.
> It seems like the monkey's-paw curse for this kind of legislation is to show several ads in a row, each allowing you to skip them after 5 seconds.
As is often the case I think that means the restrictions should just get even more strict, e.g., "no ad may ever be longer than X seconds and no app may ever show more than Y seconds of total ads within any 24-hour period". Then add some extra clause like "any attempt to circumvent or subvert these rules is punishable by fines up to 10x the company's gross annual revenue, plus asset forfeiture and prison for executives". People at companies should be deathly afraid of ever accidentally crossing the line into abusive behavior.
What about the ones that automatically open the Play Store to the app they're advertising after the ad? I would've thought it's against Play Store ToS to manipulate view count, but clearly Google has a conflict of interest.
I've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads. The incentive to create services (especially in social media) that strive to addict their users feels toxic to society. Often, it feels uncertain whether these services are providing actual value, and I suspect that whether a user would pay for a service in lieu of watching ads is incidentally a good barometer for whether real value is present.
Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's fun to think about sometimes.
The world would definitely be better without ads. All ads are poisonous. All of them first convince you that you and your life as it is is not good enough, and that in order to be happy again you need to spend money to buy a $product.
As much as I hate ads, I don’t know that it’s so simple.
There are products that do solve legitimate problems people have. Maybe there is less of that now, but in this past this was very true, and advertising helped make people aware that solutions to their problems have been developed. The first washing machine, for example.
The problem comes when the advertisement manufacturers problems that didn’t previously exist.
Adverts I specifically request are fine. Trailers for example -- I specifically go to youtube to find trailers.
Or I'll go to rightmove if I want to look at adverts for houses. I'm happy to spend both time and even money on seeking out new products.
But it seems that people have a parasitical relationship with adverts, they can't imagine a world where there aren't wall to wall adverts on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and written in the sky.
Adverts should be for my benefit, i.e. I can turn them on or off.
And the worst part is, from a societal point of view - it doesnt matter if $companyA wins over $companyB, if the reason they won is that there was more Geico ads than Liberty ads etc.
We allow every space to be overrun with these things, wasting our time and infecting our brains and in the end its zero-sum for the companies and negative-sum for us. No value anywhere is created.
Even as a consumer I am legitimately happy that I’ve seen ads for some products.
Now sure, it probably happens about once a quarter, and for that I watched probably hundreds if not thousands of ads, so was it worth it, I don’t know, probably not.
Furiously seconded. Ads are just a tax that we pay both with our attention and then with our wallets. Every dollar that a company forks over to Google is a dollar they recoup by passing the costs on to you, for absolutely no benefit whatsoever to the product you're paying for. Destroy this heinous rent-seeking industry.
There are plenty of legitimately well-intentioned ads that can connect someone who needs a good/service with someone that supplies it and everyone wins.
The problem is that we use a nearly totally free unregulated market where anyone can advertise anything anywhere.
edit: I'm not saying we should necessarily try to optimize for good ads over bad ads or even assuming that is possible. I would settle for just somehow reducing the total volume of ads to help make email, snail main, voice mail, and other methods of communication more usable.
Hard disagree, without any ads the only way to find out about new things is via word of mouth, which would make many valuable products never get off the ground. Ads done badly are poison but ads done well educate people about new things they can benefit from and drive the entire economy. I have had many experiences where I’ve seen an ad that I genuinely think is interesting and was enlightening to find.
How are the ads that local grocers and restaurants mail to me telling me of sales or giving me coupons which let me get things I'd be buying anyway for less money poisonous?
Advertisement also more or less puts a wrench in the theory of capitalistic competition in that companies would be incentivized to create the best product for the lowest price supposedly. They're now just incentivized to create the best ad campaign which costs money and does not improve the product in any way.
Also, the existence of crippleware, where companies actually invest resources into removing features from a product is interesting. It would be interesting if we were to live in a world were both advertisement and crippleware are forbidden. It's already forbidden in many jurisdictions for various public function professions such as medical services or legal services so it's not as though it couldn't be implemented.
This is a silly and short-sighted blanket statement. People used to love getting catalogs, which are just big books full of ads. In the right context, people appreciate being informed of products that can help improve their lives.
>The world would definitely be better without ads.
I don't have the proof but I'm guessing that this is provably wrong. Without advertising in some existance it would be nearly impossible to start a business which means everyone would be peasants farming for subsistence living. I think the problem is that the propose of ads has become divorced from product. The issue is poor regulation not the existence of ads.
Think about it, how as a small or competitive business owner would you get people to buy your soda vs coke/pepsi without advertising in some way? The issue is that coke/pepsi know they have a simple product so they blast ads not to sell their product but to adversarially drown out competitors before they can exist. Tons of advertising has counter agenda purposes like this rather than selling a product, its propaganda not advertisement. There are probably tons of unenforced laws already about this but IANAL.
Definitely the world wouldn’t be better without all ads, because that would be a clear violation of free speech.
However ads should be limited only to communication channels that are optional to engage in. As for example, an ad on YouTube, a private video platform, should be perfectly fine. That’s part of the product. On the other hand, ads on a highway, on the street, should not be allowed. I have not given permission for them to enter my personal mental space. I’m fine with shops advertising their presence, but not full fledged advertising on roads, streets, etc.
I think it would have been a better world without ads. There would be more competition which would improve products and thus outcome for customers.
Also most of the demand of goods is artificially created by ads, so there would be less production of crap and thus less resources wasted.
It would also mean a whole industry of people would do something else that is potentially not as detrimental to society.
The money spend on the digital marketing industry was estimated at 650 billion USD 2025. For comparison that is equivalent to the whole GDP of countries like Sweden or Israel.
While I agree that the world would be better without ads in their current form, we should think why are ads required and what are the benefits.
The main issue is how you discover a new product. The main benefit to society is/could be faster progress. The main downside to society could be unhappy people that consume crap.
I think smart people should think about alternative solutions, not just think "ads are the problem".
I personally have the exactly same issues as above when I look for example for open source libraries/programs for a task. There are popular ones, there are obscure ones, they are stable ones, etc. The search space is so big and complex that it is never easy.
My personal preference would be a network recommendation system. I would like to know what people I know (and in my extended network) are using and like - being it restaurants, clothes or open source software. I have 90% of friends (or friends of friends) satisfied with something - maybe I should try. Of course it is not a perfect system, but seems much better than what we currently have...
People don't care. Youtube has an option to watch it without ads, most people don't. I refuse to watch ads and pay for the ad-free versions of the streamers. Lots people won't pay. Would the average person pay $10/m for ad free social media? Or pay for add free search? Pretty sure there are search engines that you can pay that are ad free.
What needs to be regulated is ads that you can't avoid. You can avoid online ads by paying ad free versions or not browsing certain sites(eg: instagram, FB). Billboards need to go away, and some cities have outlawed them.
I am often frustrated by ads/sponsored content on YouTube that I cannot buy. Youtuber present me nice product targeted for US audience. I am in Europe. No way I can use it or buy it. I would do it sometimes, but I cannot.
Still I have to watch such ads.
I dont think there is a practical way to prevent this case.
>Would the average person pay $10/m for ad free social media? Or pay for add free search?
At some point, yes. But by that point they switch to the next service with ads and the cycle repeats.
Its also important to note that many can't pay for such services. I.e. minors. So they don't get a choice unless their parents sympathize. That helps indoctrinate the next gen into accepting ads. I think that late Millenial/early Gen Z was a unique group that grew up with minimal ads (or easy ways to block ads) before smartphone hoisted most control from them.
When crypto was genuinely new, and I was young, I had hope that one day we might actually embrace micropayments. Turns out I was not only young, but stupid.
I pay for YouTube Premium, which would in theory pull me out of the perverse incentive structure around an ad-based model. Yet I feel like I still get pushed toward all the same “features” of ad-funded accounts. I find it incredibly frustrating and keep sending feature requests and reporting site issues as a result.
> often wondered whether the world would be better without ads
You’d probably have to compromise on free speech, since the line between ads and public persuasion is ambiguous to the point of non-existence.
Better middle steps: ban on public advertising (e.g. no billboards, first-party-only signage). Ban on targeted digital advertising. Ban on bulk unsolicited mail or e-mail.
You're dead right, it would be the one killer move to remove a lot of perverse incentives, fix the internet, possibly even social media, and all live in a happier world. The whole economy would stop paying the ad tax to Google and Meta.
And it's not that impractical : just make a consumer-run search engine for products and services.
People already complain about having 10 differently monthly subscriptions for internet stuff. If you remove ads people will need 30 to do the same stuff they do now.
Maybe, but on the otherside, ads make available a huge amount of media and services to people who would otherwise be unable to afford it. Like, I suspect a non-trivial percentage of people wouldn't have email if it weren't for gmail and other free w/ads services.
> ads make available a huge amount of media and services to people who would otherwise be unable to afford it.
They don't. Follow the money: why do ads power free services? The advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the scenario where they run the ad as compared to where they don't. The viewer must be spending more money in response to having seen it
If the viewer doesn't have the money to pay the first party fair and straight (say, a video website), they also don't have money to splurge on that fancy vacuum cleaner in addition to the website and advertisement broker getting paid, no matter how many ads you throw at them
Ads are useful for honest products, like if I were to start a company and believe that I've made a vacuum cleaner that's genuinely better (more or better cleaning at a lower or equal cost) but nobody knows about it yet. However, I don't see the point in money redirection schemes where affluent people inefficiently pay for public services (if they're indistinguishable and the company shows ads to both, thereby funding the poor people's usage). Let's do that through taxes please
Probably not too popular of an opinion on HN but email in my opinion would be a great example of a service that could be run by the government. Just like postal service (at least in some parts of the world)
Then we'd be living in a world that didn't require you to have an email in order to do anything like have a job or a social life, which is probably a good thing
Most internet services are very low cost to offer for any company that has some infrastructure setup already. So for instance 'back in the day', before Google hoovered up everybody's email, what would typically happen is you would get an email address with your ISP.
People won't pay a few bucks a month for YouTube. They won't pay to keep their favorite sites online. They won't pay for their news. Without ads, a lot of things wouldn't exist.
They will actually. Youtube premium has had explosive growth after YT started pushing more ads and blocking ad blockers. People pay for streaming services quite regularly. And youtube has one of the strongest platforms/content bases to sell a subscription.
There are already numerous competitors to YouTube. Of course they have collectively like 1% marketshare, but that's because it's basically impossible to compete against YouTube right now. But if YouTube died, these sites would rapidly become fully competent replacements - all they're missing is the users.
This makes me wonder how the system makes any money. Presumably the same people that won't pay a few bucks a month for YouTube won't buy things from ads either. So how do the ad companies make any money on them?
I don't think that's impractical - isn't it exactly what YouTube Premium offers, ad free viewing for £12.99 a month.
I watch quite a lot of content on YouTube and really should sign up for Premium but I feel that the shockingly irrelevant ads I get presented with on YouTube are trying to drive me to sign for it - they're certainly not going to get me to buy anything!
YouTube has been increasing both the amount, frequency and length of ads in their video's for a long time now. They know people will keep using them anyway because of the network effect, and people who are really fed up with these ads will buy premium anyway. For them it's a win/win.
> Lei Cidade Limpa (Portuguese for clean city law) is a law of the city of São Paulo, Brazil, put into law by proclamation in 2006 that prohibits advertising such as outdoor posters.
Better from whom? As a user, maybe. But if you're trying to compete, it's incredibly useful to get exposure. For instance, suppose you run a competitor to Salesforce and you want to buy the Salesforce keyword because you provide a better product. I don't know how you would bootstrap that otherwise.
If anything the big businesses use advertising as a protection moat. As a small business, I would def prefer to be in a world that allows me to advertise, even if I have to compete for things like my own name
If I search for "Salesforce alternative" and something that isn't Salesforce shows up, great! That's what I want!
If I search for Salesforce and something that isn't Salesforce shows up above Salesforce, the tool I'm using is wrong and I will assume that the promoted product is a scam.
This happened to me yesterday when installing the mobile version of Brotato. Some other game appeared above Brotato in the Google Play store. I already hate Android but this only makes me hate it more. Google already gets an unjustified cut of the money I'm paying for the game, yet on top of that they serve me the wrong result at the top.
> If anything the big businesses use advertising as a protection moat. As a small business, I would def prefer to be in a world that allows me to advertise, even if I have to compete for things like my own name
These two sentences are contradictory. Big business uses it as a defensive measure, yet you think a small business can use it as an offensive measure. It's an absurd outcome of the SEO of the last two decades that people think it's fine to pay for get traffic using your own keywords. Stockholm syndrome.
> For instance, suppose you run a competitor to Salesforce and you want to buy the Salesforce keyword because you provide a better product. I don't know how you would bootstrap that otherwise.
Why would you assume I'm providing a better product? Ads are predominantly needed by those providing worse products, because spending money on marketing has much better ROI than actually creating a good product.
A big part of advertising on Google is making sure your own brand is the top result. This is essentially extortion from Google. Companies are burning money on something that should be the default result in Google.
The problem isn't fundamentally advertising - it's stuff like toxic and anti-user advertisements, and the ad industry not knowing what the word "privacy" means.
I think there is a fundamental problem with an ad-subsidized service. Even ignoring the privacy issues inherent to the way modern advertising works in practice (which you probably shouldn’t ignore), the mere presence of an advertiser as a third party whose interests the service provider must consider creates malign incentives.
I also think providing a service for free is fundamentally anti-competitive. It’s like the ultimate form of dumping. And there are many studies showing that people are irrational about zero-cost goods, so it’s even harder to compete against than might be expected.
I would disagree on this. The reason is that the main point of most ads is to induce artificial demand. When successful this is essentially making people think their lives are missing something, repeatedly. I think it is fairly self evident that at scale this simply leads to social discontent, materialism, and the overall degradation of a society.
There are endless studies, such as this [1] demonstrating a significant inverse relationship between ads and happiness. The more ads, the less happy people are. And I think it's very easy to see the causal relationship there. And this would apply even if the ad industry wasn't so scummy.
When I first visited Latvia, I thought it was a charming side effect of communism that store names were quite small on the façades. Was there an ethic of abjuring crass commercialism? Then I noticed the shadows left by larger store names above the small Latvian store names. It wasn't that Marxism Leninism called for demure commercial logos. The Latvians had just taken down the Russian signs. Commercial promotion is, I suppose, a condition of life,
I've often wondered what would happen if we _taxed_ advertising [0]. The same rationale applies: it'll never work, and it'll never even be tested, but I agree, it was fun to think about.
In Thailand signs are taxed based on its size, text language (Thai only, No text or multilingual text and Thai text are placed lower than other languages, Multilingual text), and static/dynamic (I assume this applies to both digital and trivision).
This also not only for advertising but also normal signs like the logo of the business on buildings. You'll see most people circumvent the more expensive multilingual rate by adding small Thai text at the top of the sign.
Unrelated, but another interesting fact is that some bus stops in Bangkok are completely funded by an advertising company. Of course, they'll get the ads space for free as a result, and they only offer it in viable locations. The current governor doesn't like this idea and settle for a less fancy bus stop paid by public money.
He talks about a Pigovian tax for ads, which is interesting. I don’t have any thoughts other than “yeah good idea.”
But, something I haven’t fully worked out but have vague suspicions about: are ads actually a tax-favorable business model under the current system? We watch ads in exchange for some service, if it wasn’t an ad-supported service we’d have to pay money for it, and that transaction would be taxed.
Of course, the transaction between the ad network and the company placing the ad is taxed. But it seems like they could have a lot of play, as far as picking where that transaction takes place…
Ads should at least be taxed as heavily as if we had paid for the thing with money, IMO.
You're forgetting a very important problem: hard to implement. Sugar in drinks and CO2 emissions are easily measured. The definition of what's an ad is much harder.
No need to wonder: the world would certainly be better without ads. Advertising is psychological manipulation. They should be illegal.
And don't whine about "how will new companies find customers?" They'll figure it out. Capitalism always finds a way. Business interests should always be secondary to the needs and safety of real people.
I'm imagining a world where ads on screens generate enough revenue to mean that rail and bus services are free. It would be annoying, but free public transport would also reduce car volumes improving transport for all.
Without adverts, the platform has less incentive to maximise engagement. They won't send you push notifications, they won't implement short form video, etc. My gym/ISP/email provider don't design their services on making me spend the whole day using them. If anything they don't want me using the service at all but I myself want to.
I mean, infinitely so. I don't give a shit that you (the royal you, not literally you :p) and your business can't find their target demographic without ads, they are psychological manipulation of the worst kind and they should be eradicated from existence with prejudice. There is NO type of advertisement that is okay in my mind, whether it be a 5x5cm image in a black and white newspaper or the ubiquitous cancer that we're inundated with daily on the internet, none of it should exist. Moreover, if your business isn't possible without ads, then good riddance. Maybe at some point in the past I would've been okay with the "innocuous" ones like the newspaper ones, but the advertising industry and the psychotic, soulless ghouls that inhabit it have changed my opinion forever on it.
For every "innocent" and well intentioned ad out there, there are quite literally a billion cancerous ones that rely on pure deception to make the biggest buck out of you. Ads are the driving force behind the cancerous entity that is Meta and all the ills that they've brought upon the world such as actual fucking genocides. The "people" I've had the displeasure of meeting that come from advertising backgrounds have all been soulless psychopaths who would sell their own family for a bit of cash.
I mean just look at the type of shit they come up with in this very thread. It's all just games on how they can circumvent these kinda rules. "Oh you'll force me to let people skip my brainwashing? I'll just put up 20x more ads to make up for it!" Who even talks and thinks like this other than ghouls?
There is a huge chunk of companies who do not pay to advertise their products or services, because their value offering is good enough to not need to. And a huge chunk who does very little advertisement for the very same reason.
For example, when was the last time you saw a TV or YouTube ad for a motorcycle from any of the big Japanese brands? The products are so mature and the value proposition is so good that they don't need to. And that's a 70 billion dollar annual market.
I was just in the Philippines, tons of ads for Japanese motorcycle brands. In places where competition and usage for the product or service is high, there will be ads, and lots of it. You use motorcycles as an example, but it probably isn't a very good example.
My experience is that people who make sweeping claims like "all advertising should be banned" have never run or managed a small business. There is simply no way to survive as one of the little guys without some kind of marketing.
- Improved incentive for the IT and medias industry. Users and viewers are the customers again.
- Removal of the culture of normalized lying that infects everyone to the point people don't see it anymore.
- Natural selection of product by actually asking people for money. Can't pay 2 euros / month for facebook? It deserves to die.
- Redirection of resources from marketing to useful things. Billions going back to R&D, quality control, etc.
- Brand forced to rely on quality and word of mouth again. No more temporary product trick. No more "one month brand lifetime" hack. No more "PR will save this disaster".
- Improved skin in the game. And you will see less reputation-damaging behavior because of this. Think twice about doing A/B testing, fake sales, use too many notifications. You need those saavy power users to spread the word now.
- Disappearance of old and new artificial social norms solely created by marketing firms to sell stuff that parasites our reality. No need for everybody to look the same, no need for diamonds for engagement rings, no "whole white family having breakfirst in a big house and everything is clean and they are all happy and hot" to sell coffee, no "big red guy with a beard" created by coca cola.
- Getting back on specs. You can't sell perfume and cars on an vague idea anymore.
- Children won't get conditioned from a young age to want stuff they don't need, think ideas they don't really have, and adopt behaviors that are harmful for them just so that a marketer can get 3% more engagement.
- Creating massive volume of bad content will not be a successful strategies anymore, since it's not about displaying ads. So content quality go up.
- Streets get nicer, with no more ads display. Clothes as well, with no more big logo making you look like a billboard.
- No more ads in your mail box! And you can redirect the money from the gov marketing budget to actually find email spammers as well.
- Removal of a huge means of accumulation and centralization of power. Right now, it's pay to win, and the more money you have, the more you can run ads, the more you can sell. Which means a small local shop cannot easily compete with a big one. But without ads, it's actually close to its own clients, and has an advantage to get their attention organically.
- People get back some part of their attention span.
The benefits are not superficial; they are immense!
Ads are a plague on our societies.
Evolving as humans requires us to find a way to ban them.
I doubt I will see it in my lifestyle, but we need to get rid of this parasite if we want to go to the next level.
Why not. Just run with it sometimes. Get people to argue for ads.
> Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's fun to think about sometimes.
Yeah, sure. Get them to convince you how impractical it is. How the economy relies on it. How things “wouldn’t work” without it. Then you/they have just argued themselves into the position that society relies on this shitty practice to sustain itself. Then in turn: why ought we live like this?
Not a great regulatory move, in my opinion. But I really wish ad companies would implement this rule across the board. If you can't sell me on your ad in 5 seconds, it's unlikely you can sell me on your product in 15 or 30 seconds. And if your product is of any interest to me whatsoever, I'm happy to continue watching the ad. I sit through movie trailers and tech ads all the time, even with an option to skip. But I have no use for seeing the entire Dawn dish soap's aw-shucks, faux-folksy ad play out. In five seconds, you can remind me that dawn exists, fulfilling the main purpose of the ad, and I can get on with the content I'm actually interested in.
> But I really wish ad companies would implement this rule across the board.
I genuinely don’t know how you could get your wish without regulation. You can’t expect all players in the ad game to follow self enforced rules if there’s any possibility that not following a self-imposed rule (“all ads must have a skip button”) will bring a competitive advantage. As soon as one player decides to take that advantage, all will. Back to square one.
Takes like this amaze me. It's like they've suddenly forgotten what the entire advertisement industry is like. Ads are designed to take advantage, manipulate, and even trick. Then this person comes along and suggests the industry should do the right thing.
In what world would that ever be a possibility? It's like asking a dictator nicely that they relinquish some of their power!
LOL, it's because they started with "regulations bad" and then went the usual technocrat/libertarian move of let the markets decide. And then rehashed the exact same arguments in favor of regulation.
Think the best argument against it is that it makes advertising less valuable, which in turn limits the how many "paid for with advertising" services will be available and how good those services will be.
Especially in a developing country where consumers ability to pay for such things is going to be limited, that will presumably deprive some margin of the population of media/services that are currently ad supported.
Many advertisers may avoid advertising or lower their ad budgets. This means the tech platform makes less revenue. This means the platform and the video creator both make less revenue. This means less videos get created.
All of these happen at the population level.
I hate ads, but regulations that are for things that aren't public health (including mental health), anti-monopolization, etc. are probably bad for innovation and growth.
You have to balance regulation and over-regulation.
Just a hip-shot, not a considered position. When I hear "regulation", I think "threat". Either of violence (any physical touch), or financial garnishment. So, to me, ads that last longer than five seconds do not rise to the level of threatening anyone.
But assuming that they did, the situation seems like one where there could be any number or ways of following the letter or the law, while flouting the spirit of it. I don't dare imagine the creative ways these people will come up with to make entertainment even worse than it already is. So for areas that seem to require miles and miles of caveats and very specific rule-making, my gut reaction is that the regulatory path isn't the right one until we can break down the scope into something that simple regulations can accommodate without loophole. Put more simply: if it seems like people will just find ways around the problem, my assumption is just that we're not targeting the right problem yet and we need to break it down further, if regulation is the right solution at all.
But that is pretty assumptive, so - again - it's just a first feeling. Doesn't pass my vibe check.
> Not a great regulatory move, in my opinion.
> But I really wish ad companies would implement this rule across the board.
You don't see how these are conflicting viewpoints? What do you think would compel a company to act in some way that is not in line with its short term financial interests? Sheer luck?
Long term financial interests, mostly. I know the ads run on my network will never, under any circumstance, be allowed to appear without a skip button within 5 seconds. Immediately, if possible. The only conditional is when the skip button appears, not if. And that's divorced from the copy; the component that plays the ad doesn't care what copy is running, it controls the skipability.
If an advertiser does not like those terms and is willing to forgo my users for that position, more power to them. I have every confidence that I will still find advertisers and, in my experience, they will be higher quality advertisers for the demographics of my users. Artists tend to advertise in cheap space that they know other artists will be viewing. You get the idea.
What has me curious is why you see those two as conflicting viewpoints? I didn't need a government to regulate me. Just common sense and care for my users. I'm not going to subject them to noisy or obnoxious ads, nor am I going to subject them to content that may not be suitable for everyone, and so I'm also not going to subject them to overly long ads. It seems, to me, that you have a profound lack of faith in the platforms you use. Which I can understand as a practical realization about the current apex platforms. But I don't know why it would blind you to the possibility of reasonable people acting reasonably.
I'm much less concerned about being sold in 15-30 secs as much as the "ads" that are paid promotional programming that runs >30 minutes in the middle of a video that is <30 minutes.
That stuff is so bizarre! I can understand how an advertiser might try to sneak an infomercial onto an ad campaign, and I can understand how it might be attempted on accident. But I can't understand why an ostensible ad platform would ever allow you to upload a 30 min. ad without lots of flags going up and needing some approval.
> But I really wish ad companies would implement this rule across the board. If you can't sell me on your ad in 5 seconds, it's unlikely you can sell me on your product in 15 or 30 seconds.
When talking about how ads "don't work on you"; it's very important to remember that just like every single other human you're not immune to propaganda.
I did not claim, nor imply, that ads do not work on me. In fact, I alluded to the opposite in my closing line: " In five seconds, you can remind me that dawn exists, fulfilling the main purpose of the ad[...]"
> the main purpose of the ad
I recognize that showing me the name of the product is the most valuable part of an ad, by far. It's entirely about repetition which breeds enough familiarity for trial, and enough personal affirmation if the trial is a positive one.
But, that aside, if I'm looking for a skip button before the 5 seconds is up, I either do not purchase the product (I'm not sold: I don't buy), or I'm already a purchaser of the product and I'm either a fan (Your ad didn't sell me: I was sold, beforehand) or I'm not (I'm not sold: I don't buy it anymore). It wasn't a statement about ads not working on me, it's a statement about a personal, practical response to ads that I am conciously aware of because I'm already looking for a skip button.
When it comes up the 10th time though there’s no way I’ll be watching the film it advertises, no matter how much I might have done after the first time.
Yeah. I'm happy to watch ads if I'm interested in the product. Sometimes i even want to rewind to see a part i missed but youtube doesnt let me. No idea why
As much as this may have unintended consequences, I can appreciate the motivation. I can't let my kids play iPhone games unless I turn the device into Airplane mode. Almost all these pay to play mobile games have 60 second interstitials after each level that can't be skipped. It's insane. I've taught my kids how to force kill the game and reload to get out. Definitely depressing compared to the PC shareware days I grew up with.
As a fellow parent, I cannot recommend Apple Arcade enough. My son is only allowed to play games that come from AA. These games aren't allowed to have any ads or in-app purchase. In return, you pay seven measly bucks a month (though I have it included as part of a package since we use iCloud and Apple Music and Apple TV+ anyway).
The games in AA are either made for Apple Arcade (some great indie type games) or, very commonly, they are basically 'de-fanged' ones from the regular App Store, with all the IAPs and ads ripped out. Where there is an in-game currency that normally is scarce without paying, they'll either just give you a bunch of it to start with, or you will earn it naturally while playing.
I agree with you that the number of ads and purchase-pushing mechanics in all regular App Store/Play Store games is insane. It's all because a few whales who do buy these purchases are what pays for the whole thing.
I'm leaning towards letting the kid play games only on an XBox and never on the phone. Even if I get rid of the ads, I don't want the games to be accessible wherever they are. Whereas with a TV, they need to situate themselves in a dedicated place to play games.
At this point, I've just decided that I'm going to actually pay for my games on iPhone.
Stardew Valley cost me $15 on iPhone a few years ago, which is a lot for an iPhone game, but I don't regret it at all. It's a direct port of the PC version, meaning it's a complete experience, but also not a single ad. No attempts to get me to spam my friends, no prompts for me to buy gems to make my crops grow faster, no need to watch an ad to unlock fighting in the mines. It's a game that I paid some money for and then I got to play. What a concept!
I have a borderline-irrational hatred for ads and will very actively go out of the way to avoid them. I understand the whole "no free lunch" economic theory, so you could argue that they're a necessity in some cases, but at this point I'm in a stable enough position to justify paying a few bucks to play games uninterrupted.
Outside of Stardew Valley, I play Binding of Isaac and Organ Trail. Both of them cost a few bucks but both also give you a complete, ad-free experience.
Requiring skip is good, but the part about focusing on illegal ads is better. If all ads were for soda, cars, and other legitimate products, that would be one thing, but so many ads are for straight up scams these days.
Considering how unhealthy soda is to consume, I'd ban those ads in a heartbeat right along side tobacco and alchohol. The UK just banned all TV and online junk food ads and I'm alright with that.
Marketing for cars and soda isn't that far off from actual scams. Ads are a big part of why (especially American) car and food culture is so toxic. The ad-driven demand for sugary drinks and large, impractical, environmentally unconscientious cars has almost certainly caused more death and misery than many actual scams.
Is this just a really ubiquitous typo (google finds multiple headlines with the same spelling), or is the rendering of "Vietnam" into English spelling somewhat unstable?
Did you search "vienam" with the quotes? duck duck go turns up a number of articles (albeit in at least one case the typo is in the metadata, not the article itself)
About a decade ago, a mobile gaming company I was at, accidentally shipped a full-screen ad without the art asset for the close button, so the button was invisible. The ad basically forced users to visit the in-app store for a moment before they could close it.
The sad part is that day we broke all previous daily revenue records.
I don't understand why we don't have a law that specifies an operating-system level input that will always close an ad.
No hunting for tiny X's. No shifting DOM to dodge clicks. Hit Esc and it stops. For iOS and Android force it as part of the UI, like the volume buttons, back/home buttons.
It seems that quite a few mobile gaming companies make this mistake. Or they "accidentally" set the click area of the button offset from the graphic, or very very small.
Online advertisements only. I was curious how they were going to implement that on TV!
It doesn't mention how much time must be in between ads
The law also prohibits advertisements that harm "national security" or "negatively affects the dignity of the Party Flag, leaders, national heroes [etc.]". Wonder if that's the real purpose here
I don't think so. Vietnam has been making great progress with privacy and digital rights laws, at least in paper. I haven't been following how well they actually enforce them though.
More likely there's a split in the government between a progressive faction who created this law and the old school side, and they probably had to add that text to get it into law.
An aside: One of the best uses for AR that I can imagine is real life ad-block. I’d wear AR glasses all the time if it would automatically replace billboards and other ads with landscapes.
What a shit world but hey I'd probably buy that if I had to live there.
I can't stop thinking about this rental apartment building in my city that's on indigenous land so regulation around advertising doesn't apply (BC) and they have a huge electronic billboard right in front facing probably couple dozen windows.
I feel bad for the people living there, negatively about anyone advertising there and negatively about otherwise very environmentally conscious land owners for allowing this.
Yeah - it seems like this will cause a series of 5 second skippable ads that still sums up to >many seconds of unskippable ads (unless that's banned, in which case they will just see ads more often, as you say)
I expect it will make the experience worse rather than better because the publishers will try to maintain their inventory (how many seconds of ads they show per minute watched)
This could turn into the online video equivalent of the Burma Shave road signs.
> Typically, six consecutive small signs would be posted along the edge of highways, spaced for sequential reading by passing motorists. The last sign was almost always the name of the product.
I am shaken to my core (sorry, wife hates that phrase, so I have to use it everywhere) at how many posters here see ads.
I'm of the opinion that if you're seeing ads on your hardware, which you paid for, your computer is broken. That advertisements are always evil, always wrong, and never morally just. And everything possible should be done to avoid, remove, or deface them.
To that end:
Andriod:
- Root your damn phone! And install AdAway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdAway)
- Firefox + uBlock
- Don't install malware/spyware (Arguably, Android is spyware, but custom ROMs fix it.)
iOS:
- AdGuard (free, works well, but not perfect, enable the "extra" filters)
- Don't install malware/spyware (Arguably, iOS is spyware, but Apple thinks you're a simp, so Good Luck.)
Windows (note, I don't actively use Windows, so these are the things I've collected and used in the past, no idea of their current state):
- Seriously, you probably shouldn't be using Windows, but I "get it" sometimes you have to.
- Don't install malware/spyware
- https://christitus.com/windows-tool/
- https://old.reddit.com/r/WindowsLTSC/wiki/index
- https://windhawk.net/
- https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
- https://wpd.app/
- https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
Linux:
- Firefox + uBlock and done.
- OpenSnitch if you run random executables from the Internet.
PiHole is fine, I guess. I'm not a huge fan of it personally because:
- It's local network only, and while I can VPN home, I don't always want to
- It has a high maintenance overhead, at least for me. It would block too much, then my wife would complain, and I'd have to spend time figuring out the magic rule that was breaking.
- It's DNS-level blocking only, which is helpful but doesn't cover nearly as much ground as just uBlock can.
- The DNS server has annoying preconfigured caching rules, that, while I can work around, it was just more effort for something I don't want to put more effort into.
It's far easier to just install uBlock and tell my wife, if something breaks, just click the red shield icon, then click the giant power button.
I used to think this. and I do run some of your suggestions.
But how is the internet economy supposed to function without these micro transactions, in the form of ads.
A lot of the abundance in software and technology we've seen in the past decade is possible only through this mechanism.
> But how is the internet economy supposed to function
If the existence of a given industry requires the annihilation of individual privacy and the elimination of free thought, then that industry does not deserve to exist. Kill the ad industry.
I too struggle with this. It's not like people can't publish things on the web without ads. If the author/artist wanted it to be free, the ads wouldn't be there. So people who use ad blockers are either making a moral choice to consume a paid service for free, or are ignorant of how the internet economy works.
There is an argument to be made that advertisements are so detrimental to the user experience and mental health of the recipient that they are morally justified in blocking them. However, that is debatable when you consider the alternative, which is that the medium you are consuming may not exist at all if not for the advertisements published along with it.
Most things worth doing on the internet are either A) paid for B) garner enough good will that they can be supported via some polite pan-handling or C) cheap enough to operate that it's a perfectly acceptable hobby expense for 1 person in your community.
Streaming services and E-commerce are the classic examples for A. Wikipedia is the quintessential example for B. C includes pretty much all the social outlets: Web forums, a Matrix server, private game servers (public game servers fall under A), blogs, etc.
Behavioral (invisible) analytics alone is the secret trillion dollar industry that online advertisers want to distract you from by focusing on the morality of ad blocking.
A good blocker should block many of those scripts too, but there's no stopping server-side analytics at scale.
I struggle with this too. I struggle less when I remind myself of how much the tech sector has grown in the past 20 years. Not even just in power and control over critical infrastructure, but in wealth.
Market Cap by Year
Year 0 1 2 3 4
2025 Nvidia (4.6T) Apple (3.9T) Google (3.8T) Microsoft (3.5T) Amazon (2.6T)
2020 Apple (2.3T) Microsoft (1.7T) Amazon (1.6T) Google (1.2T) Meta (777M)
2015 Apple (598M) Google (534M) Microsoft (440M) Berkshire (324M) Exxon (325M)
2010 Exxon (369M) PetroChina (303M) Apple (296M) BHP (244M) Microsoft (239M)
Some Billionaires...
Year Musk Page Bezos Ellison Zuck Buffett
Current 714B 257B 251B 244B 227B 148B
2024 195B 114B 194B 141B 177B 133B
2023 180B 79B 114B 107B 64B 106B
2022 219B 111B 171B 106B 67B 118B
2021 151B 92B 177B 93B 97B 96B
2020 25B 51B 113B 59B 55B 68B
2016 11B 35B 45B 44B 45B 61B
- There are currently 19 people worth more than $100bn!
- 4 of them are not American (Arnault, Ortega, Ambani, Helu)
- 27 of the top 50 richest are non-Americans
- 57 of the top 100 are non-Americans
- Bill Gates was first worth $100bn in 1999, becoming the first centibillionaire
It is hard to feel bad when we've seen such an explosion of wealth, especially over the last 5 years. I mean we had a fucking pandemic and all the big players doubled (or nearly) their market caps. We constantly hear about how these companies are having "money issues" but then keep announcing record profits and record bonuses to CEOs.
> A lot of the abundance in software and technology we've seen in the past decade is possible only through this mechanism.
So I don't agree that it is *ONLY* through this mechanism. Or that if it is that it needs to be done to this degree. It is hard for me personally to take pity when we're on the verge of having the first trillionaire. Honestly, I don't care about a wealth cap and I don't think there should be. It isn't a zero-sum game. But I do care about the wealth floor. It is hard to think of that floor when just the top 5 richest made $887B last year and $1.47T in the last 5 (2024 was a "good" year. Musk is 519B/689B so 368B/781B excluding) and average people are feeling the pressure.
If times were good for the rest of us I honestly couldn't care less if Musk became a trillionaire. Good for him ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. But while wages are stagnant, while the job market is very competitive, we have major layoffs, while inflation is hitting average people hard, and while they keep pretending they can replace us all with AI; then hell fucking yeah I do care.
It ends up being a question about what is more right, than what is right. I'd feel more conflicted if we all, or the majority of us, were benefiting from the advancements. But sympathy is difficult when we look at those numbers.
P.S. here's a fun game for understanding how much a billion dollars is. It's difficult because that level of money generates so much interest.
Imagine you have a billion dollars. You put it in an investment account that earns 10% yearly interest, compounded daily. On day 1 you need funds, so sit on your ass and do nothing. After than, on each weekday you hire a new employee at the cost of $250k/yr and is also paid daily.
How many employees can you hire before you have less than a billion dollars?
There's a lot of variants you can run on this kind of thought experiment and I think they're helpful for understanding that level of wealth.
> If not, how do you think they should make money?
Figure it out or go bankrupt, for all I care. They're the ones who chose a business model directly adversarial to their users.
Plenty of games, mail and other services work without ads already, I'm sure if we're one day lucky enough to see Google go belly up someone will fill that hole as well.
> iOS:
- uBlock Origin now exists
- Settings > Apps > Safari > (General) Extensions > uBlock Origin Lite
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id6745342698
- Alternatively, use Orion Browser (Kagi)
- Pros: a bit better ad blocking
- Cons: more buggy
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/orion-browser-by-kagi/id1484498200
I'd also recommend installing Firefox, logging in, but use Safari. That way you can export a tab to Firefox where you can still get the send tabs feature.
> Firefox as a whole:
Also check out BetterFox
- https://github.com/yokoffing/BetterFox
Side Note:
Phones are also general computer systems. Fuck this bullshit of pretending they're anything less. If you don't have control over your computer, your computer is broken. You don't have to be forced to adhere to Big Tech's short comings.
> Andriod:
- Install Termux (from F-droid, not Playstore)
- It is trivial to write scripts to handle a lot of things that work through third parties. Less than 100 lines. I find these scripts *better* than many app alternatives and infinitely more trustworthy. We're on HN, everyone here should be able to write basic scripts. Hell, the AI could probably do these things easily (make it use functions! Bash needs functions!)
Some ideas to show scope of what you can do:
- Automated backups: just a fucking rsync to your folders (god fuck Apple, why can't I rsync my pictures on an iPhone!!!!)
- I have my script check for WiFi. If on my SSID I rsync locally. If not, I go through Tailscale. If not on WiFi I don't backup, minimizing my data usage. I'm lazy and just set the cron job to run once a day, making each backup usually pretty small but can cause larger backups when traveling
- rsync can also remove files from your phone if you're concerned about storage.
- You can backup to multiple locations! Even if you use google drive or whatever you should still rsync to your local machine. Remember, Google photos doesn't save full resolution.
- Loss Prevention: Your phone hasn't accessed a set of predetermined WIFI SSIDs in a set time period? Send a file to a known computer (Tailscale), email yourself, or something else with the device's coordinates. Add an easing function, check battery health, and whatever info you want. Hell, even take pictures. You can also make it play music or whatever to help find it.
- Replicate Apple's Check In:
- You can read GPS coordinates, SSIDs, and send SMS messages. This is a lot easier than you think
- Enforce the actual WIFI SSID you want!
- Phone sometimes jumping on the wrong SSID? Have no fear a few lines of code can tell it to fuck off!
- I had this issue living in graduate housing where a university AP was near my unit. My phone would randomly decide to join the uni's connection despite sitting a few feet from my router and having better signal strength...
- Install Tailscale and get access to your local machines remotely
- Setup a raspberry pi at home and make an exit node that uses pihole (suggestion: check out systemd-nspawn)
Yeah, it's crazy. Imagine if you let people into your home every day to slap advertising posters on to your walls. This is obnoxious shit and I don't understand how people tolerate it.
I'm beginning to wonder if many people are not comfortable with simply being content. They actually want someone to come and tell them why they aren't happy. Ads do that for them.
In marketing their is a distinction between direct response ads (get people to take action) vs brand ads (force people to just watch, no immediate action needed).
Unskippable ads are almost always brand ads focusing on total view time.
Yeah probably not. A large amount of posts and videos from social medias are blocked in Vietnam, it's still a communist country with very low level of free speech and press freedom, albeit still better than China.
Interesting coming from a developing nation. One thing I've always thought is, it may be vible to replace ad-funded free services with paid services in developed nations where residents may be able to afford it, but developing nations may be much more reliant on such free services and could get priced out.
While on the subject, does anybody know any good ad-blocking solutions for mobile phones?
So far I have experimented with NetShield from ProtonVPN and https://nextdns.io/ with varying results. There are also features baked into certain browsers like the cookie blocker with DuckDuckGo which works extremely well, and UnTrap for Safari on iOS which allows for heavy Youtube web customisation.
Also, shout out to Playlet on Roku. A privacy focused YouTube proxy for the TV which blocks ads and even can identify sponsors, filler and credit segments and allow you to skip these.
I am not involved in any of these projects, I just think they're cool.
I often blacklist sites that cover content with unremovable ads or has unrelenting ads. They need a clear button that acknowledges I've seen it and to stop annoying me.
And this is why I run an ad blocker in my browser on top of a pihole for my home. The whole situation sucks, and I'm often willing to pay for an ad-free experience.
I still would never buy an X10 camera or any other of their products given how they abused pop-over/under ads. Same for Sony for other reasons... I can carry a product grudge for decades.
Oh, thank God, there’s someone with common sense who hates ads and is in a position of power to push this law through. Even if it’s only in Vietnam, it sets a precedent for other countries to follow.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with ads themselves; the problem lies with the platform owners. YouTube, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime Video, HBO, etc., use dark patterns to force users to upgrade to ad free plans. These manipulation tactics are designed to push people into more expensive subscriptions.
My prediction is that once platform owners can no longer make money from unskippable ads, they’ll simply get rid of ad supported subscription tiers altogether, like we had before.
> Online platforms must add visible symbols and guidelines to help users report ads that violate the law and allow them to turn off, deny, or stop seeing inappropriate ads.
The fact that this even needs to be written into law to force companies into taking more responsibility with their advertisments is incredible.
Any advance in JavaScript and outrageous browser complexity is cheered at here on HN, but waking up to the fact that their actual purpose is unskippable ads and browser monopolies is not so funny.
I hate ads with all my heart. And I go out of my way to religiously block them. I employ DNS blocking (through my own adguard home server) on my whole network (I use this DNS server connected to unbound to act as recursive DNS on all devices even when I am outside home). I use ublock origin on Firefox browser (one of the forks that guts Firefox ads and privacy settings by default) and on my iPhone I use wipr + uBlock Origin lite. I have several userscripts to block ads one some websites (i.e I block HN jobs posts).
I have a mental view that gets disrupted by ads and sometimes even angry. In the rare moments which I use a computer or phone of a friend or family without those, I really can't tolerate the suffering they go through. My single best advice to people about using ublock origin and Firefox resonated with everyone of them. I use it on my parents devices as the best security measure that could be used.
Am I overreacting, maybe but I find my level of tolerance for ads is zero no matter how much I agree that some of them are good or not. Maybe this is the result of decades of self imposing dark patterns and intrusive ads do to some people. I really feel sorry for majority of internet users that do not use adblockers.
They are free to block me if they detect I am using adblocker. It is on by default. And for most services paying does not guarantee that I do not get ads.
I am not under any obligation to let my client serve their ads which is usually the number one malware vector.
Poorly thought out and family subscription to YouTube premium in Vietnam is $6/month USD. Google is just going to pull a different lever to compensate, like just displaying more shorter ads per session.
I don't think Google's gonna be hurting for this one given the fact that hitting the skip button gives Google a strong signal that a real human just watched the ad and it didn't just play to an empty room.
Yep. Ad viewability standards simply require that a video ad was 50% onscreen for a continuous 2 seconds in order for it to count as an impression. Google probably usually gets that even for skippable ads.
> Picture this: an advertiser pays premium rates for space on your site, but their carefully crafted creative sits unseen at the bottom of a page your readers never scroll to. Despite technically delivering the impression you promised, you've essentially sold empty air. This disconnect between ads served and ads seen is why viewability has emerged as the cornerstone metric in digital advertising's maturity.
> Video ads require at least two seconds of continuous play while 50% visible ... These seemingly arbitrary thresholds represent extensive research into human attention patterns.
This is slightly off topic, but something I find myself wondering pretty regularly: if ads are pretty much universally hated by every human on earth, why do companies continue running them?
I get the obvious answer: "they work"
But do they? Do big companies have a real data-driven model to demonstrate annoying ads leading to sales?
While anecdotal, I can think of a number of specific times ads slipped through my ad blocker and I went out of my way to avoid buying anything from those companies.
I recently read about 'in thread' ads, like on Twitter, as being not as effective unless they are 'brand recognition' ads. Like, they will help you decide which one to pick when you are staring at two fungible brands on the shelf, but they will not convince you to buy something you have never heard about before, especially not from a direct click through. So while Ads work is true, in many ways, they don't in many others. The brand damage you can get from having those in-thread ads is also real: Ads target the user, not the thread, but by showing up, users associate advertisers with the thread. If you were in some argument about dictators taking over, and suddenly a product pops up, you may assign the negative energy you have toward dictators to that brand as well.
The main app I use with unskippable ads (usually for crappy games, ugh) is FlightRadar24 - since it remembers where you were on the map, I will always just swipe up and kill the app, and it's usually not to hard to find what I was looking at again after re-opening. Of course that wouldn't work with something with more state but I'm glad I can do that.
I love the picture of politicians sitting by themselves, annoyed by something as all other people are, and thinking "there's nothing I can do about it". Good on Vietnam for actually doing something about it.
I got a taste of this from an EU MEP that I proposed something to, and they replied "it can't be done because of the law". I then replied "but you make the law, it's literally your job!" - and they looked at me, blank faced. Imagine large rooms filled with people who mindlessly act within a framework they dislike, whilst being the only people who could actually change it, and not having the will to do so. It sounds like some special type of hell.
I shudder to think how many people sitting in positions of power just mindlessly continue doing a thing because of some form of complacency. Madness.
When I was traveling in Asia I was sometimes on VPN and sometimes not. I noticed that when I was not on VPN I got a lot more unskippable youtube ads than when I was, even though I was using the same browser and adblockers.
Apparently Google knows how to circumvent adblockers, and they're testing these tools in certain markets.
Note that this is most likely on paper only as they have zero power to enforce this on Youtube / Facebook which are the most popular ads-serving consumer services in the country currently.
The regulation will be enforce on domestic companies only.
I not too long ago received an ad on YouTube that was an entire episode of the UK reality TV program 'Made In Chelsea'. I think it was skippable but I couldn't believe that a) someone set up an ad campaign to do this, and b) YouTube didn't detect it.
Pet peeve: Skip/close button appears after a few seconds - bht it only leads to another view whose close button is hidden for a few seconds too, and sometimes in a different corner.
That’s not bad but better would be to require a default of chronological order for showing content with an option for “discover” other content but only on demand.
What is unyielding fidelity?
noun. A steadfastness in loyalty and support, characterized by a firm and unwavering devotion to a cause, principle, or person, demonstrating exceptional persistence and reliability despite obstacles or challenges.
Without a t, it may as well be a streaming service.
It's nice to read a case of government intervention making things better for the public rather than just more surveillance and control. And from Vietnam of all places.
nope but freeTV is limited to 10% total ad time, and payTV limited to 5%.
Maximum ad time per hour is 4 times 5 minutes and a single movie cannot be interrupted more than two times, a show not more than 4 times.
News cannot be interrupted at all and programs shorter than I think 10 minutes neither.
So I have only one subscription: Youtube because of family/kids and bonus YT music.
For the rest: adguard phone/pihole home, frosty instead of twitch, newpipe instead of youtube(I hate the interface), infinity instead of reddit and a lot more alternatives for social media. Also using xmanager for some apps ;). I have zero ads on my phone or my pc. I disabled the ads once for my wife, she instantly yelled at me to enable it again :).
I saw one where it was 20 seconds before the skip/x appeared, then when you hit X it pushes you to the app store, then when you hit back the x button moves to a new location, then when you hit it, it puts you into a 5 second "hey we're not done yet" ad cta... combine that with the fact the ad is showing soap opera gameplay that doesn't exist in the game - how is this even allowed?
Actually, there should not be ads to begin with. They always waste my time. Thankfully there is ublock origin - which Google killed while lying about why they did so. Everyone knows why Google killed ublock origin (it still works on Firefox, but how many people still use Firefox?).
I wish the US led with stuff like this. More and more I feel like our politicians just care about enriching themselves without trying to improve our quality of life.
I always wondered about traditional television. People like my dad still have it. It still has a shitload of ads. They're unskippable. People don't really seam to care about those for some reason though.
A television commercial hasn't been unskippable since the advent of the DVR in 1999. If you do care about avoiding commercials, that's where you have the most power to avoid it. It's streaming where the service has full power to restrict control of navigation through the video stream.
At some point, I would imagine we will be able to request content and have an agent skip or otherwise remove advertisements, right? We'll have to wait for that, just like with a DVR, but it seems worth it to me.
My mum has a DVR so she tends to watch things later and skip the ads. For this reason our TV provider is pushing a new box which has no DVR capability and can only access things from streaming... they bill this as an advantage since you don't have to explicitly record anything. But it's all about adverts.
So I really hate ads and either block them or avoid the product altogether. My tolerance is very close to zero.
But is it the government's job to regulate good user experience? Are unskippable ads a social problem that must be regulated away? I am the polar opposite of a libertarian, but to me ads are the alternative to other means of monetisation. They support things that are free to use but not free to operate. The transaction is consensual and not unavoidable.
I know this is a deeply unpopular opinion, but I don't get humans sometimes. Why does this need regulating? Am I the only person who just doesn't use services which do this?
This is so obviously a free-market problem. The reason these ads exist is because there's a significant percentage of people who are happy to put up with them and those people mean that products can be better funded without requiring subscriptions.
If people want to use products with unskippable ads, then who cares? This "I want X without Y" regulation is so stupid. You can't have X without Y. Just go buy Z product and stop asking regulators to find ways to keep you coming back to products of consumer-hostile corporations.
If you were giving out free cookies at the front of your store intended to thank shoppers for coming in, and someone reaches in and grabs one while running past, that's an ad-blocker. Not the most ethically justifiable[1], but legal. This law though is saying that if you have a person at the door who makes sure you are at least browsing the store before giving you a free cookie, that practice is now illegal. This is utterly nonsense to me. Does the Vietnam constitution contain a right to free VOD? How do TV broadcasters get away with it, given they're riddled with "non-skippable ads" -- about 17 minutes per hour of them!
[1] if you want to dispute this, is it just because you're thinking the store is run by a big company you don't like and that you feel rips people off? Does it change though if your mom baked those cookies to give out to try to get people to shop in her little boutique that barely makes enough money to cover rent? The point is just that it's not universally justifiable. I don't care if you block ads (I block them too) or take free samples from stores.
Ad driven internet content is at least 25 years old, so it’s had time to settle into the equilibrium the market will converge to. The current state of things is precisely where the market drove it to, so it seems pretty clear that the “invisible hand” isn’t going to make it better and appears to favor making it worse. This seems like an obvious case where an external force is required to push the market in a direction it doesn’t naturally want to land at.
Beyond the ad driven internet, ad driven content has been at least 150 years old. Ever seen a photo of a pre-WW1 baseball stadium? Or soccer stand? Covered in ads. Old newspapers are awash in ads. Day time TV soap operas are so named because they were sponsored by soap companies.
All a giant waste. Just propaganda blasted at our eyes and ears all day, a drum beat of distraction attacks on our attention. Almost all forms of advertising should be banned or regulated till they are as quiet and unobtrusive as possible.
How, as a user, do I avoid getting ads shoved in front of my eyes on buses? on billboards? on subways? on tv channels? at movies? in my mail? in my email? in my search results? in my map app?
i'm just wondering what you want the "market" to do and how.
They aren't even regulating the ads, they're mandating that video platforms show content without monetization.
Live TV had unskippable ads for like the last 80 years, and somehow YouTube is different? Why?
I hate ads, I block ads, and even I think this is stupid. Idk what Vietnam's constitution is like, but I think it's absurd from a free country perspective. If I'm paying to serve you videos, why don't I get to set the terms of that deal? Nobody is forcing you to go to a specific website. If you think they're crap because of all the ads, I likely would agree with you. I think blocking them can't be criminalized, because after all it is your device you're using to remove the ads. But how can you fine or punish a company for not explicitly letting you take the content without complying with their terms?
Best argument I can think of is the fact that half of ads on American TV have the words "ask your doctor about ___" in them. Drugs ads should be banned.
I just uninstalled a game from my mobile phone this morning that had heavy ad usage. It was interesting to note the different ad display strategies. From least to most annoying:
- display a static ad, have the "x" to close appear soon (3-10 seconds)
- display an animated ad, have the "x" to close appear soon (3-10 seconds)
- display a static ad, have the "x" to close appear after 20-30 seconds
- display an animated ad, have the "x" to close appear after 20-30 seconds
- display several ads in succession, each short, but it automatically proceeds to the next; the net time after which the "x" to close appears after 20-30 seconds
- display several ads in succession, each lasts for 3-10 seconds but you have to click on an "x" to close each one before the next one appears
I live in the USA. The well-established consumer product brands (Clorox, McDonalds, etc.) almost all had short ads that were done in 3-5 seconds. The longest ads were for obscure games or websites, or for Temu, and they appeared over and over again, making me hate them with a flaming passion. The several-ads-in-succession were usually British newspaper websites (WHY???? I don't live there) or celebrity-interest websites (I have no interest in these).
It seems like the monkey's-paw curse for this kind of legislation is to show several ads in a row, each allowing you to skip them after 5 seconds.
My favorite most annoying ad tactic is the trick slowing down progress bar. It starts off fast making it seem like it’s going to be, say, a ten-second ad so you decide to suffer through it… but progressively slows so you notice at like the 20 second mark you’re only 2/3 of the way through the progress bar, so probably less than halfway done. Murderous rage.
Mr. Beast on youtube is guilty of that. Matt Parker of Standup Maths fame did an in-depth look at how that works. Whoever came up with that type of progress bar must hate people in general.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc0OU1yJD-c
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As a full mea culpa, I once implemented this years ago for an open-source project (non-ad-related) that could have an unpredictable number of steps with unpredictable timing. We went with an algorithm that would add a % of the remaining progress on each status tick, so, while it would inevitably decelerate, at least users would know that the processing wasn't just frozen.
It was a compromise that let us focus our limited attention on the things our project could uniquely do, without needing to refactor or do fast-and-slow-passes to provide subtask-count estimates to the UI. I'd make those same choices again, in that context. But in an ad context, it's inexcusable.
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I'm fond of the ones with a fake close button, so tapping it just launches the ad's site. Instant uninstall and 1-star.
(Yes, I know it's mostly the ad's fault, but there's no practical way to punish them directly. So force apps to pick better-behaving networks.)
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There's also the tactic of having different ad behaviours during the same video. The first will be a 30s unskippable ad, the second will be a single skippable one, the third will be 3 ads, one of which you can skip, etc. It's ok on a mobile or if you're at your desk, but if you're watching from a distance it gets really annoying...
You mean like this:
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
The Windows file copying progress bar prepared me for that one. I don't trust progress bars anymore.
The positive version of this is clocks in escape rooms. You set the countdown timer to be slightly faster for the first 45 minutes and slightly slower for the last 10, so that people get more of a taste of time pressure towards the end and a higher chance of a "photo finish" which makes for a great fun story.
Kind of like a genius idea. Though there should be a special place in hell for app owners who want this in their app.
Reminds me of Setup.exe
Uber (and many other apps probably) do a similar thing. A completely deceptive progress bar that's basically an animation that's AB tested for lowest perceived wait, rather than being an actual progress bar in any sense of the word!
Everything is trying to scam you nowadays jfc
You likely turned off any privacy invading feature and didn’t let the app track across apps.
The fact you are getting irrelevant ads is a good thing that indicates that is probably working.
I can tell you how the ad companies will implement this. For Rewarded ads (the longest ones, that are at least 30 seconds, and sometimes as high as 60 seconds), they'll move to that succession model, but the succession will take you at least 30 seconds. Oh you skipped an ad after 5 seconds? No worries, here's another ad. You watched the first ad for the full 30 seconds? No more ads for you.
It'll probably be a win for them.
If it's a win they would do it already, no? There's no law against it, is there.
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Some "news" sites are so annoying about their ads, I just close the tab and google for someone else's version of the story. I block sites that show up in my news feed often but display more nag than content.
I'm sure in their mind, they don't care about me leaving. Apparently more than enough people put up with it to keep the site viable.
lite.cnn.com is the best lightweight news site I know of, though it is still CNN and probably more US-focused.
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> It seems like the monkey's-paw curse for this kind of legislation is to show several ads in a row, each allowing you to skip them after 5 seconds.
We should just ban all online ads then. I honestly think we would be better off. Yes, some things that used to be completely free would start costing a little bit, but I don't think we would lose much of value, really. And there would still be lots of different ways that consumers could discover goods and services if we didn't have online ads, it would just be via directories where consumers could go and search for products instead of consumers being bombarded with information noise all the time.
The freemium ad-revenue model is a local maximum which results in a whole lot of shittiness.
they appeared over and over again, making me hate them with a flaming passion
I wonder how much risk there is to brands due to this sort of thing? I tend to feel the same way; are we just uncommon?
The only place I see ads is Amazon Prime Video (b/c I'm still irked they changed the deal and added ads). I've come to hate those companies whose ads I see over and over and over again and I've resolved to never buy anything from them. I even used one of their products regularly and switched to a competitor due to their ads.
Can't measure it thus does not matter
(It absolutely matters imo)
I uninstall all games with any ad usage.
The latest was "I Love Hue". It let me play 10 levels (nice) and then put ads in. If they had just asked for $1 before showing the first ad I might have paid but as soon as I saw the ads I just uninstalled.
Note: IMO "I Love Hue" is a $1 game. I'm happy to pay $$ for bigger games and often do though on Switch/Steam, less on mobile.
My wife played one of those unscrew games which showed lots of ads in between runs. I convinced her to buy the ad-free package for $5, so she doesn’t have to endure those ads.
While the game indeed was ad-free after that, there was no progress possible anymore as everything suddenly cost 3x the virtual coins than before. Basically forcing you to shell out even more money to buy their stupid coins.
We’ve refunded the IAP and that was that.
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And just so we're attacking the problem from both sides: the dark pattern on the advertisers side is the inability to easily opt out of in-app ads when advertising on Google's display network. For the reasons you listed, in-app ads generate an incredible amount of low quality clicks, yet Google makes it very hard to exclude yourself from that ad inventory.
The only way I've found to do it so far is to manually exclude yourself from every individual app category. IIRC there are over a hundred categories and you need to manually go through and select every category to exclude your ads from mobile apps.
There's also the tactic where the layout of the page/app reflows after a second or two, changing where the ads are. It drives me up the wall. Go to tap on a button, SURPRISE, an ad popped in where the button used to be 10ms before you touched the screen and now you're forced into some company's site whether you wanted to see it or not.
This is my biggest frustration with ads. It will surely cause fake statistics for ad campaigns too: 99% of time when I click ad, it is by mistake.
I discovered that the samsung good lock sound assistant lets you mute all sound from specific apps and allow specific apps to never have their sound be interrupted. So it mute games and have audiobook players to always play audio and this lets me listen to audiobooks while playing games and never have the adds interrupt audio.
My absolute favorite is the smaller “picture in picture ad” that gives you a way to immediately dismiss it with a “X” that looks like microfiche - the cynic in me assumes that this is so the average user will fat-finger it by mistake making it look like a conversion.
I have a turn-based game that I play with remote family and after I play my turn, I swipe the app off (force close) so I don't have to see the ads. It used to be that I could just switch away to skip the ads but they must have gotten wise to that because one day it stopped working.
I know plenty of folks here make lots of money off it, but ad tech is straight up malware. I got lucky and found uBlock Origin many years ago so I did not get slowly boiled in worsening ad tech. I can't believe what people put up with just to not pay a few dollars for software they use daily. Not to even mention that the worst part of it all is ad tech has ruined the internet beyond repair.
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A particularly egregious offender is Kalshi ads. They regularly play for a minute, sometimes up to two minutes before they can be closed.
I would not be surprised if the incentives are in place for ad networks to push for longer ads and for advertisers to create longer ads.
My favorite mobile game ad was for Jeep, which was 3 seconds of the word JEEP on a black background. My wife and I laugh about it, but we remember it. It was actually really effective in that regard.
My second favorite was for some pirate game, but the ads were basically the setup for an adult movie, with tons of hammy overacting. I thought they were so funny, I was really sad when they stopped.
You missed one of the worst: mandatory interactive ones.
My wife is a sucker for these horribly generic flashy F2P puzzle-ish games. There are these ads that pop up every N action or something; some of these look like a mini-game and are actually an ad for another of those F2P games, and you have to play the mini-game that showcases some dumb simple mechanic of the game it advertises for a little bit before you can dismiss the ad.
Some come complete with two trivially easy levels ONLY 20% OF PLAYERS CAN PASS SOLVE THIS that glorify you OMG YOU HAVE SUCH HIGH IQ then one impossible that taunts you into installing the game.
The predatory dark patterns are so obvious they should be trialed to oblivion but no apparently this kind of abuse is legal.
whoa -- I've never run into these. I've seen interactive puzzle ads, but the "X" to close always pops up in 20-30 seconds.
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I don't think I'm especially stupid and I try very hard not to interact with ads more then I have to, but I have often found it impossible to escape those ads without ending up being delivered to the app store page.
Maybe I didn't notice the X in some part of the display or whatever, but even if by making a concerted effort to not do it, you still "convert", their click though stats must be crazy.
Some of these ads are annoying, almost all of the them are dumb, but if you think they're abusive, I don't think you know what the word abuse means.
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You don't have to play it. You can but you don't have to. The skip or close button will appear after a set amount of time (like in any video ad). It feels like you need to play or you'll be stuck but you won't.
The funny thing is that any company that has their ad displayed to me like this makes me just hate them.
So what? People hate lots of companies but still they give them their money.
I'm OK with a unobtrusive banner ad. I hate forced ads that get in the way of my flow (whether it's gaming or reading or work). I hate forced ads that can't be skipped.
I understand the reason for these (they often have an IAP that will remove ads, so the more annoying the ads the more likely folks will be tempted to buy it). But doesn't make it ok. I usually just leave a one star review and uninstall.
Some time ago, Google AdMob started using a new format ads - two videos, one immediately after another, unskippable for the first 60s, sometimes more. You know how they called them? "High-engagement ads". On some level, it's hilarious.
My most favorite annoying thing about ads is the 'x' close button. They make it very small almost impossible to be perfect. I end up clicking the ads 50% of the times. Been running PiHole at home network for almost 8yrs happily. The ads come into play only when I am traveling.
If are using Android, it's easy to block these ads with apps like Netguard or even PCAPDroid
Then can use the game without annoyance of ads
As it happens, the data collection, surveillance and ad serving strategies of the mobile OS vendors and their unpaid "app developer" independent contractors are still subservient to application firewalls and/or user-controlled DNS
This could change one day, it's within the control of the mobile OS vendors, but I have been waiting over 15 years and it still hasn't
In a lot of these games you need the 'coins' you get from watching the ads to progress.
This is why instead of specific legislation that winds up being a cat-and-mouse game with companies, the practice of creating specialized agencies with a general charter and delegating the specifics to them is often employed.
But it's also why this administration is dismantling those agencies as fast as it can -- without them the legislature will always be hopelessly behind on proper regulation.
"This administration" being the US, I assume. Note that the article is about Vietnam.
For people with iPhones I recommend an "Apple Arcade" subscription, especially if you have kids. All games included in Arcade are ad free. They have a big enough collection.
I have fallen asleep watching youtube many times. I swear i have woken up in the middle of 20+ minute ads. I thought it was a news article about china when it was an ad. Who knows when the skip button appeared. The few times i have seen these, it has always been a literal fake news show about china.
> I have fallen asleep watching youtube many times.
Interesting new opportunity for YouTube here. Detect your usage patterns and near bed time show you increasingly boring content until you fall asleep, then fill your head with subliminal messages in these long ads.
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I've seen these advertisements too, also only when my phone had been playing unattended for some time.
I have a (unsupported, unsubstantiated) theory that YT detects phones of "sleepers" and pushes more profitable content with the understanding it won't be skipped.
I've got a few spare phones, maybe I'll run an experiment.
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Shortly before I started paying for YouTube, I remember seeing one of those ultra-long ads. The ad seemed interesting, so at first I didn't want to skip it. As soon as I saw that it was a looooong ad I got into the habit of checking the length of an ad before I even considered if it's worth watching.
Now I just pay for Youtube. I'm a lot happier that way.
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They also do this with kid’s content on YT but they make it look like a show basically. Might not happen on YT Kids, I basically never use either, but the few times we pulled up YT proper I’ve seen it happen. Get a few videos deep and they slip them in
I've seen bands release music in those long ads, a complete movie, a 2 hour podcast, and tons of the fake news stuff. I think for some its a unique way to advertise and get exposure, others is just YT farming adtime.
> It seems like the monkey's-paw curse for this kind of legislation is to show several ads in a row, each allowing you to skip them after 5 seconds.
As is often the case I think that means the restrictions should just get even more strict, e.g., "no ad may ever be longer than X seconds and no app may ever show more than Y seconds of total ads within any 24-hour period". Then add some extra clause like "any attempt to circumvent or subvert these rules is punishable by fines up to 10x the company's gross annual revenue, plus asset forfeiture and prison for executives". People at companies should be deathly afraid of ever accidentally crossing the line into abusive behavior.
What about the ones that automatically open the Play Store to the app they're advertising after the ad? I would've thought it's against Play Store ToS to manipulate view count, but clearly Google has a conflict of interest.
I've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads. The incentive to create services (especially in social media) that strive to addict their users feels toxic to society. Often, it feels uncertain whether these services are providing actual value, and I suspect that whether a user would pay for a service in lieu of watching ads is incidentally a good barometer for whether real value is present.
Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's fun to think about sometimes.
The world would definitely be better without ads. All ads are poisonous. All of them first convince you that you and your life as it is is not good enough, and that in order to be happy again you need to spend money to buy a $product.
As much as I hate ads, I don’t know that it’s so simple.
There are products that do solve legitimate problems people have. Maybe there is less of that now, but in this past this was very true, and advertising helped make people aware that solutions to their problems have been developed. The first washing machine, for example.
The problem comes when the advertisement manufacturers problems that didn’t previously exist.
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Adverts I specifically request are fine. Trailers for example -- I specifically go to youtube to find trailers.
Or I'll go to rightmove if I want to look at adverts for houses. I'm happy to spend both time and even money on seeking out new products.
But it seems that people have a parasitical relationship with adverts, they can't imagine a world where there aren't wall to wall adverts on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and written in the sky.
Adverts should be for my benefit, i.e. I can turn them on or off.
And the worst part is, from a societal point of view - it doesnt matter if $companyA wins over $companyB, if the reason they won is that there was more Geico ads than Liberty ads etc.
We allow every space to be overrun with these things, wasting our time and infecting our brains and in the end its zero-sum for the companies and negative-sum for us. No value anywhere is created.
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Even as a consumer I am legitimately happy that I’ve seen ads for some products.
Now sure, it probably happens about once a quarter, and for that I watched probably hundreds if not thousands of ads, so was it worth it, I don’t know, probably not.
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Furiously seconded. Ads are just a tax that we pay both with our attention and then with our wallets. Every dollar that a company forks over to Google is a dollar they recoup by passing the costs on to you, for absolutely no benefit whatsoever to the product you're paying for. Destroy this heinous rent-seeking industry.
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As much as I hate ads, if you don’t make yourself known to potential customers you’re very screwed
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The problem is not ads. The problem is SPAM.
There are plenty of legitimately well-intentioned ads that can connect someone who needs a good/service with someone that supplies it and everyone wins.
The problem is that we use a nearly totally free unregulated market where anyone can advertise anything anywhere.
edit: I'm not saying we should necessarily try to optimize for good ads over bad ads or even assuming that is possible. I would settle for just somehow reducing the total volume of ads to help make email, snail main, voice mail, and other methods of communication more usable.
Hard disagree, without any ads the only way to find out about new things is via word of mouth, which would make many valuable products never get off the ground. Ads done badly are poison but ads done well educate people about new things they can benefit from and drive the entire economy. I have had many experiences where I’ve seen an ad that I genuinely think is interesting and was enlightening to find.
How are the ads that local grocers and restaurants mail to me telling me of sales or giving me coupons which let me get things I'd be buying anyway for less money poisonous?
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> All ads are poisonous.
Yeah but the lethal dose is pretty high. 1 ad won’t kill you.
Unfortunately there can never be just 1 ad without regulation.
Advertisement also more or less puts a wrench in the theory of capitalistic competition in that companies would be incentivized to create the best product for the lowest price supposedly. They're now just incentivized to create the best ad campaign which costs money and does not improve the product in any way.
Also, the existence of crippleware, where companies actually invest resources into removing features from a product is interesting. It would be interesting if we were to live in a world were both advertisement and crippleware are forbidden. It's already forbidden in many jurisdictions for various public function professions such as medical services or legal services so it's not as though it couldn't be implemented.
>All ads are poisonous
This is a silly and short-sighted blanket statement. People used to love getting catalogs, which are just big books full of ads. In the right context, people appreciate being informed of products that can help improve their lives.
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Obviously, if you could just delete the ads without changing anything else the world would be better, but that's not how it works.
Lots of businesses sustain themselves on ad revenue - would the world be a better place if we had no ads, but
- TV was twice the cost
- Google, YouTube, etc. (insert your favorite ad-supported website here) didn't exist or cost a monthly subscription
- All news was paywalled
- Any ad-supported website providing basic information (e.g. the weather) was paywalled or didn't exist
- etc etc
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>The world would definitely be better without ads.
I don't have the proof but I'm guessing that this is provably wrong. Without advertising in some existance it would be nearly impossible to start a business which means everyone would be peasants farming for subsistence living. I think the problem is that the propose of ads has become divorced from product. The issue is poor regulation not the existence of ads.
Think about it, how as a small or competitive business owner would you get people to buy your soda vs coke/pepsi without advertising in some way? The issue is that coke/pepsi know they have a simple product so they blast ads not to sell their product but to adversarially drown out competitors before they can exist. Tons of advertising has counter agenda purposes like this rather than selling a product, its propaganda not advertisement. There are probably tons of unenforced laws already about this but IANAL.
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Definitely the world wouldn’t be better without all ads, because that would be a clear violation of free speech.
However ads should be limited only to communication channels that are optional to engage in. As for example, an ad on YouTube, a private video platform, should be perfectly fine. That’s part of the product. On the other hand, ads on a highway, on the street, should not be allowed. I have not given permission for them to enter my personal mental space. I’m fine with shops advertising their presence, but not full fledged advertising on roads, streets, etc.
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I think it would have been a better world without ads. There would be more competition which would improve products and thus outcome for customers.
Also most of the demand of goods is artificially created by ads, so there would be less production of crap and thus less resources wasted.
It would also mean a whole industry of people would do something else that is potentially not as detrimental to society.
The money spend on the digital marketing industry was estimated at 650 billion USD 2025. For comparison that is equivalent to the whole GDP of countries like Sweden or Israel.
While I agree that the world would be better without ads in their current form, we should think why are ads required and what are the benefits.
The main issue is how you discover a new product. The main benefit to society is/could be faster progress. The main downside to society could be unhappy people that consume crap.
I think smart people should think about alternative solutions, not just think "ads are the problem".
I personally have the exactly same issues as above when I look for example for open source libraries/programs for a task. There are popular ones, there are obscure ones, they are stable ones, etc. The search space is so big and complex that it is never easy.
My personal preference would be a network recommendation system. I would like to know what people I know (and in my extended network) are using and like - being it restaurants, clothes or open source software. I have 90% of friends (or friends of friends) satisfied with something - maybe I should try. Of course it is not a perfect system, but seems much better than what we currently have...
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> I think it would have been a better world without ads. There would be more competition which would improve products and thus outcome for customers.
How would people learn about various choices?
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People don't care. Youtube has an option to watch it without ads, most people don't. I refuse to watch ads and pay for the ad-free versions of the streamers. Lots people won't pay. Would the average person pay $10/m for ad free social media? Or pay for add free search? Pretty sure there are search engines that you can pay that are ad free.
What needs to be regulated is ads that you can't avoid. You can avoid online ads by paying ad free versions or not browsing certain sites(eg: instagram, FB). Billboards need to go away, and some cities have outlawed them.
I am often frustrated by ads/sponsored content on YouTube that I cannot buy. Youtuber present me nice product targeted for US audience. I am in Europe. No way I can use it or buy it. I would do it sometimes, but I cannot. Still I have to watch such ads.
I dont think there is a practical way to prevent this case.
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>Would the average person pay $10/m for ad free social media? Or pay for add free search?
At some point, yes. But by that point they switch to the next service with ads and the cycle repeats.
Its also important to note that many can't pay for such services. I.e. minors. So they don't get a choice unless their parents sympathize. That helps indoctrinate the next gen into accepting ads. I think that late Millenial/early Gen Z was a unique group that grew up with minimal ads (or easy ways to block ads) before smartphone hoisted most control from them.
Yeah but people also get addicted to things like cigarettes and gambling. Sometimes people need a little help to avoid harmful things.
When crypto was genuinely new, and I was young, I had hope that one day we might actually embrace micropayments. Turns out I was not only young, but stupid.
Ignoring the cryptocurrency angle for a second (to avoid distracting knee-jerks)...
Have you thought deeply about why micropayments have not been embraced?
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I pay for YouTube Premium, which would in theory pull me out of the perverse incentive structure around an ad-based model. Yet I feel like I still get pushed toward all the same “features” of ad-funded accounts. I find it incredibly frustrating and keep sending feature requests and reporting site issues as a result.
Can you explain what features you're talking about? Do you mean stuff like "shorts"?
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> often wondered whether the world would be better without ads
You’d probably have to compromise on free speech, since the line between ads and public persuasion is ambiguous to the point of non-existence.
Better middle steps: ban on public advertising (e.g. no billboards, first-party-only signage). Ban on targeted digital advertising. Ban on bulk unsolicited mail or e-mail.
I haven’t given it enough thought, but would a ban on selling ad space do the trick?
You can self promote, but you can’t pay third parties to do it for you and you can’t sell it as a service.
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You're dead right, it would be the one killer move to remove a lot of perverse incentives, fix the internet, possibly even social media, and all live in a happier world. The whole economy would stop paying the ad tax to Google and Meta.
And it's not that impractical : just make a consumer-run search engine for products and services.
People already complain about having 10 differently monthly subscriptions for internet stuff. If you remove ads people will need 30 to do the same stuff they do now.
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Maybe, but on the otherside, ads make available a huge amount of media and services to people who would otherwise be unable to afford it. Like, I suspect a non-trivial percentage of people wouldn't have email if it weren't for gmail and other free w/ads services.
> ads make available a huge amount of media and services to people who would otherwise be unable to afford it.
They don't. Follow the money: why do ads power free services? The advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the scenario where they run the ad as compared to where they don't. The viewer must be spending more money in response to having seen it
If the viewer doesn't have the money to pay the first party fair and straight (say, a video website), they also don't have money to splurge on that fancy vacuum cleaner in addition to the website and advertisement broker getting paid, no matter how many ads you throw at them
Ads are useful for honest products, like if I were to start a company and believe that I've made a vacuum cleaner that's genuinely better (more or better cleaning at a lower or equal cost) but nobody knows about it yet. However, I don't see the point in money redirection schemes where affluent people inefficiently pay for public services (if they're indistinguishable and the company shows ads to both, thereby funding the poor people's usage). Let's do that through taxes please
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If a company is willing to spend $5 to force you to watch an advert, then they are expecting more than $5 from you in return.
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Probably not too popular of an opinion on HN but email in my opinion would be a great example of a service that could be run by the government. Just like postal service (at least in some parts of the world)
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Then we'd be living in a world that didn't require you to have an email in order to do anything like have a job or a social life, which is probably a good thing
Maybe. Or maybe we could fund those services from all the money we'd save without advertising.
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Most internet services are very low cost to offer for any company that has some infrastructure setup already. So for instance 'back in the day', before Google hoovered up everybody's email, what would typically happen is you would get an email address with your ISP.
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Nice linguistic explanation of social media just been coined as ‘ultra processed language’
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQh50UKkt10/?igsh=MWx6ZW41ZHV...
People won't pay a few bucks a month for YouTube. They won't pay to keep their favorite sites online. They won't pay for their news. Without ads, a lot of things wouldn't exist.
They will actually. Youtube premium has had explosive growth after YT started pushing more ads and blocking ad blockers. People pay for streaming services quite regularly. And youtube has one of the strongest platforms/content bases to sell a subscription.
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No I won't pay for premium because even if I pay for it I still get ads in the content itself.
Fix that and then I'll pay.
Until then I just block the ads and the sponsors.
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There are already numerous competitors to YouTube. Of course they have collectively like 1% marketshare, but that's because it's basically impossible to compete against YouTube right now. But if YouTube died, these sites would rapidly become fully competent replacements - all they're missing is the users.
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This makes me wonder how the system makes any money. Presumably the same people that won't pay a few bucks a month for YouTube won't buy things from ads either. So how do the ad companies make any money on them?
I don't think that's impractical - isn't it exactly what YouTube Premium offers, ad free viewing for £12.99 a month.
I watch quite a lot of content on YouTube and really should sign up for Premium but I feel that the shockingly irrelevant ads I get presented with on YouTube are trying to drive me to sign for it - they're certainly not going to get me to buy anything!
Yet, most content on YouTube these days are sponsored by the companies trying to sell you a crap.
And with 'Native ads' it's nearly impossible to have ad-free experience nowadays.
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YouTube has been increasing both the amount, frequency and length of ads in their video's for a long time now. They know people will keep using them anyway because of the network effect, and people who are really fed up with these ads will buy premium anyway. For them it's a win/win.
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> Lei Cidade Limpa (Portuguese for clean city law) is a law of the city of São Paulo, Brazil, put into law by proclamation in 2006 that prohibits advertising such as outdoor posters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
Billboard ads are banned in cities in New Zealand. Have been for a long time
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Better from whom? As a user, maybe. But if you're trying to compete, it's incredibly useful to get exposure. For instance, suppose you run a competitor to Salesforce and you want to buy the Salesforce keyword because you provide a better product. I don't know how you would bootstrap that otherwise.
If anything the big businesses use advertising as a protection moat. As a small business, I would def prefer to be in a world that allows me to advertise, even if I have to compete for things like my own name
If I search for "Salesforce alternative" and something that isn't Salesforce shows up, great! That's what I want!
If I search for Salesforce and something that isn't Salesforce shows up above Salesforce, the tool I'm using is wrong and I will assume that the promoted product is a scam.
This happened to me yesterday when installing the mobile version of Brotato. Some other game appeared above Brotato in the Google Play store. I already hate Android but this only makes me hate it more. Google already gets an unjustified cut of the money I'm paying for the game, yet on top of that they serve me the wrong result at the top.
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> If anything the big businesses use advertising as a protection moat. As a small business, I would def prefer to be in a world that allows me to advertise, even if I have to compete for things like my own name
These two sentences are contradictory. Big business uses it as a defensive measure, yet you think a small business can use it as an offensive measure. It's an absurd outcome of the SEO of the last two decades that people think it's fine to pay for get traffic using your own keywords. Stockholm syndrome.
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> For instance, suppose you run a competitor to Salesforce and you want to buy the Salesforce keyword because you provide a better product. I don't know how you would bootstrap that otherwise.
Why would you assume I'm providing a better product? Ads are predominantly needed by those providing worse products, because spending money on marketing has much better ROI than actually creating a good product.
“Users” are the only people who matter. Companies are artificial constructs and, in an ideal world, would never be prioritized over the public.
A big part of advertising on Google is making sure your own brand is the top result. This is essentially extortion from Google. Companies are burning money on something that should be the default result in Google.
In reality, even if I provide a better product than Salesforce, they will outcompete me by their ad-buying power.
The problem isn't fundamentally advertising - it's stuff like toxic and anti-user advertisements, and the ad industry not knowing what the word "privacy" means.
I think there is a fundamental problem with an ad-subsidized service. Even ignoring the privacy issues inherent to the way modern advertising works in practice (which you probably shouldn’t ignore), the mere presence of an advertiser as a third party whose interests the service provider must consider creates malign incentives.
I also think providing a service for free is fundamentally anti-competitive. It’s like the ultimate form of dumping. And there are many studies showing that people are irrational about zero-cost goods, so it’s even harder to compete against than might be expected.
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I would disagree on this. The reason is that the main point of most ads is to induce artificial demand. When successful this is essentially making people think their lives are missing something, repeatedly. I think it is fairly self evident that at scale this simply leads to social discontent, materialism, and the overall degradation of a society.
There are endless studies, such as this [1] demonstrating a significant inverse relationship between ads and happiness. The more ads, the less happy people are. And I think it's very easy to see the causal relationship there. And this would apply even if the ad industry wasn't so scummy.
[1] - https://hbr.org/2020/01/advertising-makes-us-unhappy
the fundamental problem is capitalism
When I first visited Latvia, I thought it was a charming side effect of communism that store names were quite small on the façades. Was there an ethic of abjuring crass commercialism? Then I noticed the shadows left by larger store names above the small Latvian store names. It wasn't that Marxism Leninism called for demure commercial logos. The Latvians had just taken down the Russian signs. Commercial promotion is, I suppose, a condition of life,
I've often wondered what would happen if we _taxed_ advertising [0]. The same rationale applies: it'll never work, and it'll never even be tested, but I agree, it was fun to think about.
[0]: https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-adver...
In Thailand signs are taxed based on its size, text language (Thai only, No text or multilingual text and Thai text are placed lower than other languages, Multilingual text), and static/dynamic (I assume this applies to both digital and trivision).
This also not only for advertising but also normal signs like the logo of the business on buildings. You'll see most people circumvent the more expensive multilingual rate by adding small Thai text at the top of the sign.
Unrelated, but another interesting fact is that some bus stops in Bangkok are completely funded by an advertising company. Of course, they'll get the ads space for free as a result, and they only offer it in viable locations. The current governor doesn't like this idea and settle for a less fancy bus stop paid by public money.
He talks about a Pigovian tax for ads, which is interesting. I don’t have any thoughts other than “yeah good idea.”
But, something I haven’t fully worked out but have vague suspicions about: are ads actually a tax-favorable business model under the current system? We watch ads in exchange for some service, if it wasn’t an ad-supported service we’d have to pay money for it, and that transaction would be taxed.
Of course, the transaction between the ad network and the company placing the ad is taxed. But it seems like they could have a lot of play, as far as picking where that transaction takes place…
Ads should at least be taxed as heavily as if we had paid for the thing with money, IMO.
You're forgetting a very important problem: hard to implement. Sugar in drinks and CO2 emissions are easily measured. The definition of what's an ad is much harder.
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No need to wonder: the world would certainly be better without ads. Advertising is psychological manipulation. They should be illegal.
And don't whine about "how will new companies find customers?" They'll figure it out. Capitalism always finds a way. Business interests should always be secondary to the needs and safety of real people.
As an experiment, think of a space that is improved by ads.
I'm imagining a world where ads on screens generate enough revenue to mean that rail and bus services are free. It would be annoying, but free public transport would also reduce car volumes improving transport for all.
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It's not ads IMO, it's just reality. Remove the ads, people (instagram/tiktok/youtube) still get influence by "strive to addict their users"
Without adverts, the platform has less incentive to maximise engagement. They won't send you push notifications, they won't implement short form video, etc. My gym/ISP/email provider don't design their services on making me spend the whole day using them. If anything they don't want me using the service at all but I myself want to.
I think my tolerance for ads would be higher if algos stop showing repeat ads, or limit same ad from playing more than X times to user.
> I've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads.
Of course. Ads make us buy more things. Things we don't need most of the time.
Think of the environmental win if we banned ads tomorrow!
It’s a well-established fact that my world would be much better without ads.
I mean, infinitely so. I don't give a shit that you (the royal you, not literally you :p) and your business can't find their target demographic without ads, they are psychological manipulation of the worst kind and they should be eradicated from existence with prejudice. There is NO type of advertisement that is okay in my mind, whether it be a 5x5cm image in a black and white newspaper or the ubiquitous cancer that we're inundated with daily on the internet, none of it should exist. Moreover, if your business isn't possible without ads, then good riddance. Maybe at some point in the past I would've been okay with the "innocuous" ones like the newspaper ones, but the advertising industry and the psychotic, soulless ghouls that inhabit it have changed my opinion forever on it.
For every "innocent" and well intentioned ad out there, there are quite literally a billion cancerous ones that rely on pure deception to make the biggest buck out of you. Ads are the driving force behind the cancerous entity that is Meta and all the ills that they've brought upon the world such as actual fucking genocides. The "people" I've had the displeasure of meeting that come from advertising backgrounds have all been soulless psychopaths who would sell their own family for a bit of cash.
I mean just look at the type of shit they come up with in this very thread. It's all just games on how they can circumvent these kinda rules. "Oh you'll force me to let people skip my brainwashing? I'll just put up 20x more ads to make up for it!" Who even talks and thinks like this other than ghouls?
Instead of ads, we could have websites mine bitcoin in javascript. I feel like this would be better for everyone, especially in a world of AI agents.
Billboards are outlawed in Alaska.
> whether the world would be better without ads
What if we made advertising illegal? (simone.org)
1975 points by smnrg 9 months ago | 1409 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
There is a huge chunk of companies who do not pay to advertise their products or services, because their value offering is good enough to not need to. And a huge chunk who does very little advertisement for the very same reason.
For example, when was the last time you saw a TV or YouTube ad for a motorcycle from any of the big Japanese brands? The products are so mature and the value proposition is so good that they don't need to. And that's a 70 billion dollar annual market.
I was just in the Philippines, tons of ads for Japanese motorcycle brands. In places where competition and usage for the product or service is high, there will be ads, and lots of it. You use motorcycles as an example, but it probably isn't a very good example.
Of course it would be better.
How about a world without money?
My experience is that people who make sweeping claims like "all advertising should be banned" have never run or managed a small business. There is simply no way to survive as one of the little guys without some kind of marketing.
people still would buy food in their favorite shops, so they probably will survive - perhaps even with higher profits as zero-sum ad spending is gone
It would be much, much better:
- Improved incentive for the IT and medias industry. Users and viewers are the customers again.
- Removal of the culture of normalized lying that infects everyone to the point people don't see it anymore.
- Natural selection of product by actually asking people for money. Can't pay 2 euros / month for facebook? It deserves to die.
- Redirection of resources from marketing to useful things. Billions going back to R&D, quality control, etc.
- Brand forced to rely on quality and word of mouth again. No more temporary product trick. No more "one month brand lifetime" hack. No more "PR will save this disaster".
- Improved skin in the game. And you will see less reputation-damaging behavior because of this. Think twice about doing A/B testing, fake sales, use too many notifications. You need those saavy power users to spread the word now.
- Disappearance of old and new artificial social norms solely created by marketing firms to sell stuff that parasites our reality. No need for everybody to look the same, no need for diamonds for engagement rings, no "whole white family having breakfirst in a big house and everything is clean and they are all happy and hot" to sell coffee, no "big red guy with a beard" created by coca cola.
- Getting back on specs. You can't sell perfume and cars on an vague idea anymore.
- Children won't get conditioned from a young age to want stuff they don't need, think ideas they don't really have, and adopt behaviors that are harmful for them just so that a marketer can get 3% more engagement.
- Creating massive volume of bad content will not be a successful strategies anymore, since it's not about displaying ads. So content quality go up.
- Streets get nicer, with no more ads display. Clothes as well, with no more big logo making you look like a billboard.
- No more ads in your mail box! And you can redirect the money from the gov marketing budget to actually find email spammers as well.
- Removal of a huge means of accumulation and centralization of power. Right now, it's pay to win, and the more money you have, the more you can run ads, the more you can sell. Which means a small local shop cannot easily compete with a big one. But without ads, it's actually close to its own clients, and has an advantage to get their attention organically.
- People get back some part of their attention span.
The benefits are not superficial; they are immense!
Ads are a plague on our societies.
Evolving as humans requires us to find a way to ban them.
I doubt I will see it in my lifestyle, but we need to get rid of this parasite if we want to go to the next level.
New businesses would never get off the ground. Advertising is probably one of the things that will never go away in a capitalist society.
Why not. Just run with it sometimes. Get people to argue for ads.
> Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's fun to think about sometimes.
Yeah, sure. Get them to convince you how impractical it is. How the economy relies on it. How things “wouldn’t work” without it. Then you/they have just argued themselves into the position that society relies on this shitty practice to sustain itself. Then in turn: why ought we live like this?
Absolutely. The world would be vastly better off without 2 things:
- Ads. Lower quality products/services perform better with more/better ads.
- Venture Capital. Services out-compete others by using free money early on, killing the free market.
Not a great regulatory move, in my opinion. But I really wish ad companies would implement this rule across the board. If you can't sell me on your ad in 5 seconds, it's unlikely you can sell me on your product in 15 or 30 seconds. And if your product is of any interest to me whatsoever, I'm happy to continue watching the ad. I sit through movie trailers and tech ads all the time, even with an option to skip. But I have no use for seeing the entire Dawn dish soap's aw-shucks, faux-folksy ad play out. In five seconds, you can remind me that dawn exists, fulfilling the main purpose of the ad, and I can get on with the content I'm actually interested in.
> Not a great regulatory move, in my opinion.
> But I really wish ad companies would implement this rule across the board.
I genuinely don’t know how you could get your wish without regulation. You can’t expect all players in the ad game to follow self enforced rules if there’s any possibility that not following a self-imposed rule (“all ads must have a skip button”) will bring a competitive advantage. As soon as one player decides to take that advantage, all will. Back to square one.
Takes like this amaze me. It's like they've suddenly forgotten what the entire advertisement industry is like. Ads are designed to take advantage, manipulate, and even trick. Then this person comes along and suggests the industry should do the right thing.
In what world would that ever be a possibility? It's like asking a dictator nicely that they relinquish some of their power!
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LOL, it's because they started with "regulations bad" and then went the usual technocrat/libertarian move of let the markets decide. And then rehashed the exact same arguments in favor of regulation.
> Not a great regulatory move, in my opinion.
Why?
Think the best argument against it is that it makes advertising less valuable, which in turn limits the how many "paid for with advertising" services will be available and how good those services will be.
Especially in a developing country where consumers ability to pay for such things is going to be limited, that will presumably deprive some margin of the population of media/services that are currently ad supported.
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Second order effects.
Many advertisers may avoid advertising or lower their ad budgets. This means the tech platform makes less revenue. This means the platform and the video creator both make less revenue. This means less videos get created.
All of these happen at the population level.
I hate ads, but regulations that are for things that aren't public health (including mental health), anti-monopolization, etc. are probably bad for innovation and growth.
You have to balance regulation and over-regulation.
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Its market distortionary and makes global advertisers have to customize for the local audience, some might not bother
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Just a hip-shot, not a considered position. When I hear "regulation", I think "threat". Either of violence (any physical touch), or financial garnishment. So, to me, ads that last longer than five seconds do not rise to the level of threatening anyone.
But assuming that they did, the situation seems like one where there could be any number or ways of following the letter or the law, while flouting the spirit of it. I don't dare imagine the creative ways these people will come up with to make entertainment even worse than it already is. So for areas that seem to require miles and miles of caveats and very specific rule-making, my gut reaction is that the regulatory path isn't the right one until we can break down the scope into something that simple regulations can accommodate without loophole. Put more simply: if it seems like people will just find ways around the problem, my assumption is just that we're not targeting the right problem yet and we need to break it down further, if regulation is the right solution at all.
But that is pretty assumptive, so - again - it's just a first feeling. Doesn't pass my vibe check.
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> Not a great regulatory move, in my opinion. > But I really wish ad companies would implement this rule across the board.
You don't see how these are conflicting viewpoints? What do you think would compel a company to act in some way that is not in line with its short term financial interests? Sheer luck?
Long term financial interests, mostly. I know the ads run on my network will never, under any circumstance, be allowed to appear without a skip button within 5 seconds. Immediately, if possible. The only conditional is when the skip button appears, not if. And that's divorced from the copy; the component that plays the ad doesn't care what copy is running, it controls the skipability.
If an advertiser does not like those terms and is willing to forgo my users for that position, more power to them. I have every confidence that I will still find advertisers and, in my experience, they will be higher quality advertisers for the demographics of my users. Artists tend to advertise in cheap space that they know other artists will be viewing. You get the idea.
What has me curious is why you see those two as conflicting viewpoints? I didn't need a government to regulate me. Just common sense and care for my users. I'm not going to subject them to noisy or obnoxious ads, nor am I going to subject them to content that may not be suitable for everyone, and so I'm also not going to subject them to overly long ads. It seems, to me, that you have a profound lack of faith in the platforms you use. Which I can understand as a practical realization about the current apex platforms. But I don't know why it would blind you to the possibility of reasonable people acting reasonably.
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I'm much less concerned about being sold in 15-30 secs as much as the "ads" that are paid promotional programming that runs >30 minutes in the middle of a video that is <30 minutes.
Nothing makes me quite as irrationally angry as a 30 second ad on a one minute video
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That stuff is so bizarre! I can understand how an advertiser might try to sneak an infomercial onto an ad campaign, and I can understand how it might be attempted on accident. But I can't understand why an ostensible ad platform would ever allow you to upload a 30 min. ad without lots of flags going up and needing some approval.
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> But I really wish ad companies would implement this rule across the board. If you can't sell me on your ad in 5 seconds, it's unlikely you can sell me on your product in 15 or 30 seconds.
When talking about how ads "don't work on you"; it's very important to remember that just like every single other human you're not immune to propaganda.
I did not claim, nor imply, that ads do not work on me. In fact, I alluded to the opposite in my closing line: " In five seconds, you can remind me that dawn exists, fulfilling the main purpose of the ad[...]"
> the main purpose of the ad
I recognize that showing me the name of the product is the most valuable part of an ad, by far. It's entirely about repetition which breeds enough familiarity for trial, and enough personal affirmation if the trial is a positive one.
But, that aside, if I'm looking for a skip button before the 5 seconds is up, I either do not purchase the product (I'm not sold: I don't buy), or I'm already a purchaser of the product and I'm either a fan (Your ad didn't sell me: I was sold, beforehand) or I'm not (I'm not sold: I don't buy it anymore). It wasn't a statement about ads not working on me, it's a statement about a personal, practical response to ads that I am conciously aware of because I'm already looking for a skip button.
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I’ll sit through a trailer. The first time.
When it comes up the 10th time though there’s no way I’ll be watching the film it advertises, no matter how much I might have done after the first time.
Yeah. I'm happy to watch ads if I'm interested in the product. Sometimes i even want to rewind to see a part i missed but youtube doesnt let me. No idea why
As much as this may have unintended consequences, I can appreciate the motivation. I can't let my kids play iPhone games unless I turn the device into Airplane mode. Almost all these pay to play mobile games have 60 second interstitials after each level that can't be skipped. It's insane. I've taught my kids how to force kill the game and reload to get out. Definitely depressing compared to the PC shareware days I grew up with.
As a fellow parent, I cannot recommend Apple Arcade enough. My son is only allowed to play games that come from AA. These games aren't allowed to have any ads or in-app purchase. In return, you pay seven measly bucks a month (though I have it included as part of a package since we use iCloud and Apple Music and Apple TV+ anyway).
The games in AA are either made for Apple Arcade (some great indie type games) or, very commonly, they are basically 'de-fanged' ones from the regular App Store, with all the IAPs and ads ripped out. Where there is an in-game currency that normally is scarce without paying, they'll either just give you a bunch of it to start with, or you will earn it naturally while playing.
I agree with you that the number of ads and purchase-pushing mechanics in all regular App Store/Play Store games is insane. It's all because a few whales who do buy these purchases are what pays for the whole thing.
Know of an equivalent for Android?
I'm leaning towards letting the kid play games only on an XBox and never on the phone. Even if I get rid of the ads, I don't want the games to be accessible wherever they are. Whereas with a TV, they need to situate themselves in a dedicated place to play games.
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At this point, I've just decided that I'm going to actually pay for my games on iPhone.
Stardew Valley cost me $15 on iPhone a few years ago, which is a lot for an iPhone game, but I don't regret it at all. It's a direct port of the PC version, meaning it's a complete experience, but also not a single ad. No attempts to get me to spam my friends, no prompts for me to buy gems to make my crops grow faster, no need to watch an ad to unlock fighting in the mines. It's a game that I paid some money for and then I got to play. What a concept!
I have a borderline-irrational hatred for ads and will very actively go out of the way to avoid them. I understand the whole "no free lunch" economic theory, so you could argue that they're a necessity in some cases, but at this point I'm in a stable enough position to justify paying a few bucks to play games uninterrupted.
Outside of Stardew Valley, I play Binding of Isaac and Organ Trail. Both of them cost a few bucks but both also give you a complete, ad-free experience.
> Organ Trail
Sounds interesting :)
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Could consider getting them one of those retro handheld emulators and giving them real games.
Requiring skip is good, but the part about focusing on illegal ads is better. If all ads were for soda, cars, and other legitimate products, that would be one thing, but so many ads are for straight up scams these days.
Considering how unhealthy soda is to consume, I'd ban those ads in a heartbeat right along side tobacco and alchohol. The UK just banned all TV and online junk food ads and I'm alright with that.
> The UK just banned all TV and online junk food ads
Unbelievable, when you consider the sheer volume of betting ads they have.
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or maybe we can let people think for themselves
Marketing for cars and soda isn't that far off from actual scams. Ads are a big part of why (especially American) car and food culture is so toxic. The ad-driven demand for sugary drinks and large, impractical, environmentally unconscientious cars has almost certainly caused more death and misery than many actual scams.
Soda ads are actually banned in some jurisdictions so it's not really a cleanly legit product. You can make the same argument for ICE cars.
Is this just a really ubiquitous typo (google finds multiple headlines with the same spelling), or is the rendering of "Vietnam" into English spelling somewhat unstable?
The only real results on Google are the article and this HackerNews post...
Did you search "vienam" with the quotes? duck duck go turns up a number of articles (albeit in at least one case the typo is in the metadata, not the article itself)
Never seen it before today...
Definitely a typo, see "vietnam-news" in the same URL.
It is just this article.
ubiquitous? "Vienam" (with quotes) shows this page as the first result.
About a decade ago, a mobile gaming company I was at, accidentally shipped a full-screen ad without the art asset for the close button, so the button was invisible. The ad basically forced users to visit the in-app store for a moment before they could close it.
The sad part is that day we broke all previous daily revenue records.
Pretty sure this is a form of ad fraud and the people who paid for those ads would be really mad at you e.g. if it were a CPC campaign
I don't understand why we don't have a law that specifies an operating-system level input that will always close an ad.
No hunting for tiny X's. No shifting DOM to dodge clicks. Hit Esc and it stops. For iOS and Android force it as part of the UI, like the volume buttons, back/home buttons.
"accidentally".
It seems that quite a few mobile gaming companies make this mistake. Or they "accidentally" set the click area of the button offset from the graphic, or very very small.
Translated source: https://thuvienphapluat-vn.translate.goog/phap-luat/ho-tro-p...
Online advertisements only. I was curious how they were going to implement that on TV!
It doesn't mention how much time must be in between ads
The law also prohibits advertisements that harm "national security" or "negatively affects the dignity of the Party Flag, leaders, national heroes [etc.]". Wonder if that's the real purpose here
> Wonder if that's the real purpose here
I don't think so. Vietnam has been making great progress with privacy and digital rights laws, at least in paper. I haven't been following how well they actually enforce them though.
More likely there's a split in the government between a progressive faction who created this law and the old school side, and they probably had to add that text to get it into law.
An aside: One of the best uses for AR that I can imagine is real life ad-block. I’d wear AR glasses all the time if it would automatically replace billboards and other ads with landscapes.
What a shit world but hey I'd probably buy that if I had to live there.
I can't stop thinking about this rental apartment building in my city that's on indigenous land so regulation around advertising doesn't apply (BC) and they have a huge electronic billboard right in front facing probably couple dozen windows.
I feel bad for the people living there, negatively about anyone advertising there and negatively about otherwise very environmentally conscious land owners for allowing this.
They shouldn't be surprised if ads are shown more often.
Yeah - it seems like this will cause a series of 5 second skippable ads that still sums up to >many seconds of unskippable ads (unless that's banned, in which case they will just see ads more often, as you say)
I expect it will make the experience worse rather than better because the publishers will try to maintain their inventory (how many seconds of ads they show per minute watched)
Are advertisers just really dead set on making our lives harder? It's a minor inconvenience, but I'm amazed anyone would go to such lengths to do it.
I understand there's money involved, but surely those who offer products must see that it's increasingly counterproductive?
Then a new regulation is needed; one that caps the ratio of seconds of ads to minute watched.
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You mean a regulation will cause unintended consequence? Color me shocked
This could turn into the online video equivalent of the Burma Shave road signs.
> Typically, six consecutive small signs would be posted along the edge of highways, spaced for sequential reading by passing motorists. The last sign was almost always the name of the product.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burma-Shave#Roadside_billboard...
I am shaken to my core (sorry, wife hates that phrase, so I have to use it everywhere) at how many posters here see ads.
I'm of the opinion that if you're seeing ads on your hardware, which you paid for, your computer is broken. That advertisements are always evil, always wrong, and never morally just. And everything possible should be done to avoid, remove, or deface them.
To that end:
Andriod:
iOS:
Windows (note, I don't actively use Windows, so these are the things I've collected and used in the past, no idea of their current state):
Linux:
Firefox as a whole:
> Root your damn phone!
I did for many years, and finally gave up. With recent Androids, life in the rooted world is much more difficult:
Netflix automatically drops to a lower quality tier.
Many apps now just refuse to work on a rooted phone.
But the worst thing: If I want to update the ROM to get the latest security benefits, I have to wipe my data.
Surprised you didn't mention something like PiHole.
PiHole is fine, I guess. I'm not a huge fan of it personally because:
It's far easier to just install uBlock and tell my wife, if something breaks, just click the red shield icon, then click the giant power button.
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I used to think this. and I do run some of your suggestions.
But how is the internet economy supposed to function without these micro transactions, in the form of ads. A lot of the abundance in software and technology we've seen in the past decade is possible only through this mechanism.
> But how is the internet economy supposed to function
If the existence of a given industry requires the annihilation of individual privacy and the elimination of free thought, then that industry does not deserve to exist. Kill the ad industry.
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I too struggle with this. It's not like people can't publish things on the web without ads. If the author/artist wanted it to be free, the ads wouldn't be there. So people who use ad blockers are either making a moral choice to consume a paid service for free, or are ignorant of how the internet economy works.
There is an argument to be made that advertisements are so detrimental to the user experience and mental health of the recipient that they are morally justified in blocking them. However, that is debatable when you consider the alternative, which is that the medium you are consuming may not exist at all if not for the advertisements published along with it.
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Most things worth doing on the internet are either A) paid for B) garner enough good will that they can be supported via some polite pan-handling or C) cheap enough to operate that it's a perfectly acceptable hobby expense for 1 person in your community.
Streaming services and E-commerce are the classic examples for A. Wikipedia is the quintessential example for B. C includes pretty much all the social outlets: Web forums, a Matrix server, private game servers (public game servers fall under A), blogs, etc.
Behavioral (invisible) analytics alone is the secret trillion dollar industry that online advertisers want to distract you from by focusing on the morality of ad blocking.
A good blocker should block many of those scripts too, but there's no stopping server-side analytics at scale.
Other types of micro transactions and payments are possible
I struggle with this too. I struggle less when I remind myself of how much the tech sector has grown in the past 20 years. Not even just in power and control over critical infrastructure, but in wealth.
It is hard to feel bad when we've seen such an explosion of wealth, especially over the last 5 years. I mean we had a fucking pandemic and all the big players doubled (or nearly) their market caps. We constantly hear about how these companies are having "money issues" but then keep announcing record profits and record bonuses to CEOs.
So I don't agree that it is *ONLY* through this mechanism. Or that if it is that it needs to be done to this degree. It is hard for me personally to take pity when we're on the verge of having the first trillionaire. Honestly, I don't care about a wealth cap and I don't think there should be. It isn't a zero-sum game. But I do care about the wealth floor. It is hard to think of that floor when just the top 5 richest made $887B last year and $1.47T in the last 5 (2024 was a "good" year. Musk is 519B/689B so 368B/781B excluding) and average people are feeling the pressure.
If times were good for the rest of us I honestly couldn't care less if Musk became a trillionaire. Good for him ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. But while wages are stagnant, while the job market is very competitive, we have major layoffs, while inflation is hitting average people hard, and while they keep pretending they can replace us all with AI; then hell fucking yeah I do care.
It ends up being a question about what is more right, than what is right. I'd feel more conflicted if we all, or the majority of us, were benefiting from the advancements. But sympathy is difficult when we look at those numbers.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...
https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/
P.S. here's a fun game for understanding how much a billion dollars is. It's difficult because that level of money generates so much interest.
Imagine you have a billion dollars. You put it in an investment account that earns 10% yearly interest, compounded daily. On day 1 you need funds, so sit on your ass and do nothing. After than, on each weekday you hire a new employee at the cost of $250k/yr and is also paid daily.
How many employees can you hire before you have less than a billion dollars?
There's a lot of variants you can run on this kind of thought experiment and I think they're helpful for understanding that level of wealth.
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You paid for your hardware. But did you pay for all the services you use (like search engines, games, mail, other services)?
If not, how do you think they should make money?
(I don't like ads myself).
> If not, how do you think they should make money?
Figure it out or go bankrupt, for all I care. They're the ones who chose a business model directly adversarial to their users.
Plenty of games, mail and other services work without ads already, I'm sure if we're one day lucky enough to see Google go belly up someone will fill that hole as well.
I'd also recommend installing Firefox, logging in, but use Safari. That way you can export a tab to Firefox where you can still get the send tabs feature.
Side Note:
Phones are also general computer systems. Fuck this bullshit of pretending they're anything less. If you don't have control over your computer, your computer is broken. You don't have to be forced to adhere to Big Tech's short comings.
How reliable are cronjobs in termux?
Does they get killed if you're low on memory?
Perhaps you could share these scripts somewhere? I'm sure other people would find inspiration from them.
Personally I use Nextcloud for all my phone and computer backups, it's working well for me.
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Yeah, it's crazy. Imagine if you let people into your home every day to slap advertising posters on to your walls. This is obnoxious shit and I don't understand how people tolerate it.
I'm beginning to wonder if many people are not comfortable with simply being content. They actually want someone to come and tell them why they aren't happy. Ads do that for them.
In case you wanted a more reputable source: https://theinvestor.vn/online-video-advertisements-in-vietna...
Basically banning brand advertising ads. Interesting. This will be a pain for a bunch of developers to adhere to lol.
> Basically banning brand advertising ads.
I don't get it. Could you please elaborate? Thanks in advance!
In marketing their is a distinction between direct response ads (get people to take action) vs brand ads (force people to just watch, no immediate action needed).
Unskippable ads are almost always brand ads focusing on total view time.
[dead]
Interesting, I wonder if this will spike VPN traffic into Vietnam.
What's the subset of users with a VPN but no ublock?
NordVPN users sold by the "anti-hacker" ads?
Yeah probably not. A large amount of posts and videos from social medias are blocked in Vietnam, it's still a communist country with very low level of free speech and press freedom, albeit still better than China.
Source: I used to live there.
Interesting, the link title was revised, but "Vienam" spelling remains? What?
Interesting coming from a developing nation. One thing I've always thought is, it may be vible to replace ad-funded free services with paid services in developed nations where residents may be able to afford it, but developing nations may be much more reliant on such free services and could get priced out.
Higher volume of skippable ads incoming
Was this posted automatically or why it reads Vienam? Without the T! And the title also reads so?
I posted it with the original article title. I'm not sure who changed it, but yeah, there is a typo which also exists in the linked article.
Indeed it first had no T, and s.o. changed it. Also raises questions reg the original title.
While on the subject, does anybody know any good ad-blocking solutions for mobile phones?
So far I have experimented with NetShield from ProtonVPN and https://nextdns.io/ with varying results. There are also features baked into certain browsers like the cookie blocker with DuckDuckGo which works extremely well, and UnTrap for Safari on iOS which allows for heavy Youtube web customisation.
Also, shout out to Playlet on Roku. A privacy focused YouTube proxy for the TV which blocks ads and even can identify sponsors, filler and credit segments and allow you to skip these.
I am not involved in any of these projects, I just think they're cool.
https://blokada.org/
Blokada 5 is free. It blocks ads and trackers system wide. It works in all games and apps I checked for the last 4-5 years.
Used to work with YouTube as well, but not any more. I use New Pipe for that.
You're experience may vary depending on block lists you subscribe to, but vanilla set up is already quite good.
Firefox on Android has UBlock Origin available. But that covers the browser only. I guess AdGuard and VPN might help here?
I am using Brave and YouTube Revanced on my android and I completely forgot what ads look like
Firefox Focus has an extension build in that works with Safari
Adguard works great. UBlock on Firefox also does the job.
Both here and on the source post there is a typo in the title (Vietnam instead of Vienam).
I often blacklist sites that cover content with unremovable ads or has unrelenting ads. They need a clear button that acknowledges I've seen it and to stop annoying me.
And this is why I run an ad blocker in my browser on top of a pihole for my home. The whole situation sucks, and I'm often willing to pay for an ad-free experience.
I still would never buy an X10 camera or any other of their products given how they abused pop-over/under ads. Same for Sony for other reasons... I can carry a product grudge for decades.
Obligatory "We Must Destroy X10" moment! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF8NK6eruUs :D
So instead of one minute-long ad, I'm going to get 12 I have to manually skip? Thanks, Vietnam.
No, "thanks, company that is pushing 12 ads at you." The law is not forcing companies to treat you badly.
Oh, thank God, there’s someone with common sense who hates ads and is in a position of power to push this law through. Even if it’s only in Vietnam, it sets a precedent for other countries to follow. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with ads themselves; the problem lies with the platform owners. YouTube, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime Video, HBO, etc., use dark patterns to force users to upgrade to ad free plans. These manipulation tactics are designed to push people into more expensive subscriptions. My prediction is that once platform owners can no longer make money from unskippable ads, they’ll simply get rid of ad supported subscription tiers altogether, like we had before.
This is such a good step.
> Online platforms must add visible symbols and guidelines to help users report ads that violate the law and allow them to turn off, deny, or stop seeing inappropriate ads.
The fact that this even needs to be written into law to force companies into taking more responsibility with their advertisments is incredible.
Any advance in JavaScript and outrageous browser complexity is cheered at here on HN, but waking up to the fact that their actual purpose is unskippable ads and browser monopolies is not so funny.
I hate ads with all my heart. And I go out of my way to religiously block them. I employ DNS blocking (through my own adguard home server) on my whole network (I use this DNS server connected to unbound to act as recursive DNS on all devices even when I am outside home). I use ublock origin on Firefox browser (one of the forks that guts Firefox ads and privacy settings by default) and on my iPhone I use wipr + uBlock Origin lite. I have several userscripts to block ads one some websites (i.e I block HN jobs posts).
I have a mental view that gets disrupted by ads and sometimes even angry. In the rare moments which I use a computer or phone of a friend or family without those, I really can't tolerate the suffering they go through. My single best advice to people about using ublock origin and Firefox resonated with everyone of them. I use it on my parents devices as the best security measure that could be used.
Am I overreacting, maybe but I find my level of tolerance for ads is zero no matter how much I agree that some of them are good or not. Maybe this is the result of decades of self imposing dark patterns and intrusive ads do to some people. I really feel sorry for majority of internet users that do not use adblockers.
Companies are not obligated to provide you with services for free. You are free to solely use non ad supported services.
They are free to block me if they detect I am using adblocker. It is on by default. And for most services paying does not guarantee that I do not get ads.
I am not under any obligation to let my client serve their ads which is usually the number one malware vector.
And he is free to use free ad-supported services and not watch ads.
Poorly thought out and family subscription to YouTube premium in Vietnam is $6/month USD. Google is just going to pull a different lever to compensate, like just displaying more shorter ads per session.
I don't think Google's gonna be hurting for this one given the fact that hitting the skip button gives Google a strong signal that a real human just watched the ad and it didn't just play to an empty room.
Yep. Ad viewability standards simply require that a video ad was 50% onscreen for a continuous 2 seconds in order for it to count as an impression. Google probably usually gets that even for skippable ads.
> Picture this: an advertiser pays premium rates for space on your site, but their carefully crafted creative sits unseen at the bottom of a page your readers never scroll to. Despite technically delivering the impression you promised, you've essentially sold empty air. This disconnect between ads served and ads seen is why viewability has emerged as the cornerstone metric in digital advertising's maturity.
> Video ads require at least two seconds of continuous play while 50% visible ... These seemingly arbitrary thresholds represent extensive research into human attention patterns.
https://www.playwire.com/blog/ad-viewability
Then there can be regulation of that too.
Indeed, just keep pulling the policy ratchet if tech tries to subvert.
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This is slightly off topic, but something I find myself wondering pretty regularly: if ads are pretty much universally hated by every human on earth, why do companies continue running them?
I get the obvious answer: "they work"
But do they? Do big companies have a real data-driven model to demonstrate annoying ads leading to sales?
While anecdotal, I can think of a number of specific times ads slipped through my ad blocker and I went out of my way to avoid buying anything from those companies.
I recently read about 'in thread' ads, like on Twitter, as being not as effective unless they are 'brand recognition' ads. Like, they will help you decide which one to pick when you are staring at two fungible brands on the shelf, but they will not convince you to buy something you have never heard about before, especially not from a direct click through. So while Ads work is true, in many ways, they don't in many others. The brand damage you can get from having those in-thread ads is also real: Ads target the user, not the thread, but by showing up, users associate advertisers with the thread. If you were in some argument about dictators taking over, and suddenly a product pops up, you may assign the negative energy you have toward dictators to that brand as well.
The main app I use with unskippable ads (usually for crappy games, ugh) is FlightRadar24 - since it remembers where you were on the map, I will always just swipe up and kill the app, and it's usually not to hard to find what I was looking at again after re-opening. Of course that wouldn't work with something with more state but I'm glad I can do that.
I love the picture of politicians sitting by themselves, annoyed by something as all other people are, and thinking "there's nothing I can do about it". Good on Vietnam for actually doing something about it.
I got a taste of this from an EU MEP that I proposed something to, and they replied "it can't be done because of the law". I then replied "but you make the law, it's literally your job!" - and they looked at me, blank faced. Imagine large rooms filled with people who mindlessly act within a framework they dislike, whilst being the only people who could actually change it, and not having the will to do so. It sounds like some special type of hell.
I shudder to think how many people sitting in positions of power just mindlessly continue doing a thing because of some form of complacency. Madness.
"Hurr durr we're monitoring the situation."
When I was traveling in Asia I was sometimes on VPN and sometimes not. I noticed that when I was not on VPN I got a lot more unskippable youtube ads than when I was, even though I was using the same browser and adblockers.
Apparently Google knows how to circumvent adblockers, and they're testing these tools in certain markets.
Time for a military intervention by the US.
Note that this is most likely on paper only as they have zero power to enforce this on Youtube / Facebook which are the most popular ads-serving consumer services in the country currently.
The regulation will be enforce on domestic companies only.
I feel no one really clicks on ads. I don't understand about it, but they just feel to be there so they can have a tracker for your habits
I not too long ago received an ad on YouTube that was an entire episode of the UK reality TV program 'Made In Chelsea'. I think it was skippable but I couldn't believe that a) someone set up an ad campaign to do this, and b) YouTube didn't detect it.
Such ban, even if copied in other places, will probably lead companies to display more small ads per showing.
It might also lead to more intrusive ads, as each user now has at most 5 second to see.
Good for them, now they need to take it one step further for an even shorter and better title. And we should all follow suit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
Feels appropriate: What if we made advertising illegal?
This will push CPMs down, and therefore companies will make up for the lower earnings-per-ad by showing more ads.
You can rearrange the deck chairs, sure, but more ads might be more annoying than fewer longer ones.
I like how the country is taking bold steps. This is a great move.
Pet peeve: Skip/close button appears after a few seconds - bht it only leads to another view whose close button is hidden for a few seconds too, and sometimes in a different corner.
That’s not bad but better would be to require a default of chronological order for showing content with an option for “discover” other content but only on demand.
What's with the weird duck that flies out from the top right into the bottom left of the screen when you first open the article?
5s is still too long. Immediate skip.
5 seconds... too slow. Ublock's better.
This is primarily targeting mobile gaming which is huge in Vietnam.
Ah yes, thanks.
Are there a total ad time percentage metric in this law too, or will they simply be watching many more smaller ads?
missing a T
Unyielding fidelity to the original article title.
Faithful "to a t"
What is unyielding fidelity? noun. A steadfastness in loyalty and support, characterized by a firm and unwavering devotion to a cause, principle, or person, demonstrating exceptional persistence and reliability despite obstacles or challenges.
Without a t, it may as well be a streaming service.
It doesn't bode well for the quality of the source, if it can't even spell a country's name right!
I wondered if maybe it was about Vienna
viet fucking nam man - the dude
The T really ties the word together man
AdGuard as a local VPN also bans unskippable Ads without the pesky legal enforcement baggage.
I love this, I hope the rest of the world adopts it :)
So, is it vietnam or vienam ? because the headline says vienam.
It's nice to read a case of government intervention making things better for the public rather than just more surveillance and control. And from Vietnam of all places.
I'd make the case that turning their citizens into consumers like America has done could be considered a national security risk.
I live an ad-free lifestyle and it is very serene.
How does television work in Vietnam? Is it all adfree?
nope but freeTV is limited to 10% total ad time, and payTV limited to 5%. Maximum ad time per hour is 4 times 5 minutes and a single movie cannot be interrupted more than two times, a show not more than 4 times. News cannot be interrupted at all and programs shorter than I think 10 minutes neither.
This "Vienam" sounds like a nice place!
Where is Vienam? Probably next to Camboia?
On the South Chia Sea
VPN use via Vietnam is about to go global.
Not sure it will be worth the 300ms latency penalty.
300ms is a lot less latency than an ad
And then I thought the poster skipped a t
Vietnam, not "Vienam"
So I have only one subscription: Youtube because of family/kids and bonus YT music.
For the rest: adguard phone/pihole home, frosty instead of twitch, newpipe instead of youtube(I hate the interface), infinity instead of reddit and a lot more alternatives for social media. Also using xmanager for some apps ;). I have zero ads on my phone or my pc. I disabled the ads once for my wife, she instantly yelled at me to enable it again :).
I saw one where it was 20 seconds before the skip/x appeared, then when you hit X it pushes you to the app store, then when you hit back the x button moves to a new location, then when you hit it, it puts you into a 5 second "hey we're not done yet" ad cta... combine that with the fact the ad is showing soap opera gameplay that doesn't exist in the game - how is this even allowed?
We need this too in the EU.
Actually, there should not be ads to begin with. They always waste my time. Thankfully there is ublock origin - which Google killed while lying about why they did so. Everyone knows why Google killed ublock origin (it still works on Firefox, but how many people still use Firefox?).
Refreshing to see. Makes you wonder what we could achieve if we all just started to say no to enshitification of the world.
It's Vietnam.
Unfathomably based
I <3 Vienam
Socialists countries, always in the forefront of basic human rights.
I wish the US led with stuff like this. More and more I feel like our politicians just care about enriching themselves without trying to improve our quality of life.
I always wondered about traditional television. People like my dad still have it. It still has a shitload of ads. They're unskippable. People don't really seam to care about those for some reason though.
A television commercial hasn't been unskippable since the advent of the DVR in 1999. If you do care about avoiding commercials, that's where you have the most power to avoid it. It's streaming where the service has full power to restrict control of navigation through the video stream.
At some point, I would imagine we will be able to request content and have an agent skip or otherwise remove advertisements, right? We'll have to wait for that, just like with a DVR, but it seems worth it to me.
My mum has a DVR so she tends to watch things later and skip the ads. For this reason our TV provider is pushing a new box which has no DVR capability and can only access things from streaming... they bill this as an advantage since you don't have to explicitly record anything. But it's all about adverts.
Finally. I've seen the ad. I never want the product or service or (most often) shitty misrepresented mobile game.
Advertising standards agencies in most Western countries are scum.
*Vietnam mandates 5 second ads
Running ads unskippably: unspeakably sad.
(I managed to improve it.)
Running ads unskippably: unspeakably sad earning.
2 words. adblock
US companies respond with 100 skippable ads per minute
Vie(t)nam
Another step towards Blipverts from Max Headroom.
So I really hate ads and either block them or avoid the product altogether. My tolerance is very close to zero.
But is it the government's job to regulate good user experience? Are unskippable ads a social problem that must be regulated away? I am the polar opposite of a libertarian, but to me ads are the alternative to other means of monetisation. They support things that are free to use but not free to operate. The transaction is consensual and not unavoidable.
'Vienam'? 'this like "Quality Learing Center"?
vie*t*nam?
Title should be "Vietnam", not "Vienam". I would downvote the submitter just for the reason that he posted this without correting it first.
The article title reflects the typo, it's an issue with the original publication.
So what? If something is obviously wrong it should be fixed.
"correting" lol
Ironic. But mine is just a dumb comment, not the title of the post.
I know this is a deeply unpopular opinion, but I don't get humans sometimes. Why does this need regulating? Am I the only person who just doesn't use services which do this?
This is so obviously a free-market problem. The reason these ads exist is because there's a significant percentage of people who are happy to put up with them and those people mean that products can be better funded without requiring subscriptions.
If people want to use products with unskippable ads, then who cares? This "I want X without Y" regulation is so stupid. You can't have X without Y. Just go buy Z product and stop asking regulators to find ways to keep you coming back to products of consumer-hostile corporations.
And just like that, millions of disillusioned youth embraced communism ...
Original title was
> Vienam Bans Unskippable Ads, Requires Skip Button to Appear After 5 Seconds
If we need to edit titles, could we at least take the opportunity to correct obvious typos? (Missing the t in Vietnam)
Yikes! not sure how we missed tha.
Fixed now.
Paging @dang
Also submission titles can be edited in the first 5 minutes of posting or so.
[dead]
[dead]
- Google just needs to tell DJT
- Vietnam get 50 % tariffs
- Change the ban
- Easy peasy for Tech bros.
Thank you for your zero value Reddit comment
fuck yes, fuck APPLOVIN
If you were giving out free cookies at the front of your store intended to thank shoppers for coming in, and someone reaches in and grabs one while running past, that's an ad-blocker. Not the most ethically justifiable[1], but legal. This law though is saying that if you have a person at the door who makes sure you are at least browsing the store before giving you a free cookie, that practice is now illegal. This is utterly nonsense to me. Does the Vietnam constitution contain a right to free VOD? How do TV broadcasters get away with it, given they're riddled with "non-skippable ads" -- about 17 minutes per hour of them!
[1] if you want to dispute this, is it just because you're thinking the store is run by a big company you don't like and that you feel rips people off? Does it change though if your mom baked those cookies to give out to try to get people to shop in her little boutique that barely makes enough money to cover rent? The point is just that it's not universally justifiable. I don't care if you block ads (I block them too) or take free samples from stores.
I'm just wondering why governments think it's a good idea to regulate ads. IMO that is something the market (e.g. the users) should take care of.
Ad driven internet content is at least 25 years old, so it’s had time to settle into the equilibrium the market will converge to. The current state of things is precisely where the market drove it to, so it seems pretty clear that the “invisible hand” isn’t going to make it better and appears to favor making it worse. This seems like an obvious case where an external force is required to push the market in a direction it doesn’t naturally want to land at.
Beyond the ad driven internet, ad driven content has been at least 150 years old. Ever seen a photo of a pre-WW1 baseball stadium? Or soccer stand? Covered in ads. Old newspapers are awash in ads. Day time TV soap operas are so named because they were sponsored by soap companies.
All a giant waste. Just propaganda blasted at our eyes and ears all day, a drum beat of distraction attacks on our attention. Almost all forms of advertising should be banned or regulated till they are as quiet and unobtrusive as possible.
How, as a user, do I avoid getting ads shoved in front of my eyes on buses? on billboards? on subways? on tv channels? at movies? in my mail? in my email? in my search results? in my map app?
i'm just wondering what you want the "market" to do and how.
The market inevitably trends toward the lowest common denominator. We deserve better.
You can make better. But there's a reason non-ad-supported businesses barely ever work out.
They aren't even regulating the ads, they're mandating that video platforms show content without monetization.
Live TV had unskippable ads for like the last 80 years, and somehow YouTube is different? Why?
I hate ads, I block ads, and even I think this is stupid. Idk what Vietnam's constitution is like, but I think it's absurd from a free country perspective. If I'm paying to serve you videos, why don't I get to set the terms of that deal? Nobody is forcing you to go to a specific website. If you think they're crap because of all the ads, I likely would agree with you. I think blocking them can't be criminalized, because after all it is your device you're using to remove the ads. But how can you fine or punish a company for not explicitly letting you take the content without complying with their terms?
Best argument I can think of is the fact that half of ads on American TV have the words "ask your doctor about ___" in them. Drugs ads should be banned.