Comment by snickerer
9 days ago
Ads are an attack, aimed at your brain. They try to inject malware into your thinking, manipulating your worldview and your actions.
That's horrible, worse than attacking a machine with malware, damaging persons and societies.
Decades of ad propaganda have tricked people into seeing them as something 'normal'. But we shouldn't accept being under constant attack of brain worms.
I propose a sane rule for all humans: if you see an ad somewhere, or if you suspect a hidden ad ('influencers' trying to promote something), close the tab immediately and never return to that site.
> I propose a sane rule for all humans: if you see an ad somewhere, or if you suspect a hidden ad ('influencers' trying to promote something), close the tab immediately and never return to that site.
But this very site has lots of ads on it. Up until a few days ago, there was an "Apply to YC Fall 2026" link at the bottom of every page, and the front page usually has ads on it too [0]. So it seems tricky to strictly follow your proposed rule while simultaneously posting here.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#:~:text=Another%20...
I draw a line on advertising for myself: if it's just letting me know a service or product exists, it's fine. It's a business necessity. If I ever start a business, I need a way to communicate to potential customers that my business exists, that's fair use.
When the ads start being misleading, manipulative, emotional, irrational - then we're out of the fair use field and into the "this should be a crime" field.
usage:
>I draw a line on advertising for myself
the typical phrase in English, "I draw the line at advertising for myself" would mean that is the thing that has gone too far, something you will not accept. you used a slightly different phrase, but it is still where I draw the line.
That ad has somebody accountable for it.
ads like whats on facebook have no such accountability, and facebook doesnt take accountability for what its algorithm pushes in the name of getting a higher click through rate.
That assumes there's no such thing as nuance.
The difficult thing is people don't want to pay for things. Ads are a way to mitigate that so that people/companies can capture some value that they create.
Even when you want to pay for things, the companies will find ways to extract more money from you.
Plex lifetime pass is now over $700 dollars
My dashcam that used to let me use the app to locally pull down videos now requires an account to view the files on my camera that is putting out it's own password protected wifi network, just so the company can harvest more data and track me easier. This device cost several hundred dollars.
Streaming services introduce ads anyway and increase the cost.
You used to be able to buy complete functional software like Microsoft Office and the Adobe suite.
All this is because companies cannot be statically profitable unless they're entirely privately owned. All companies need to constantly increase profit, which means even if you're happy to pay for something, eventually the company will squeeze you hard enough that you no longer want to pay for it anymore.
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I don’t think this is right. There are plenty examples of people happy to pay for things online.
But people also really like to get things for free. And there’s plenty of interest in exploiting this fact to get something out of those people without them knowing it.
Yes and no. It's hard to escape ads even by paying for things, with cable TV being a common (though increasingly outdated) example.
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Ads are progressive taxes in disguise.
If you make the kind of content that costs a lot to create but almost nothing to copy, you have a dilemma: Set the price too high, and you aren't getting any money from the poor at all at all, even though they're willing to pay far above your copying costs. Set the price too low, and you aren't extracting as much profit from the rich as you could be.
Ads let you serve the same product to everybody, regardless of income, because they pay for the product indirectly, by buying the advertised products. Rich people have more money and buy more products, so they, in effect, pay more for the same content. poor people pay less.
I think this is a beautiful system in many ways. Ads give us access to all the world's music, plenty of educational content (on Youtube), including from the world's topmost universities, international texting, picture messaging, phone and video calls of unlimited duration, even some movies and TV. And it's all free, which it wouldn't be if not for ads.
If we banned ads, many people just wouldn't be able to afford to talk to their family or listen to their favorite artists every day.
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Nobody wants to pay for anything, but if they have to pay to get what they want, they do.
Unpopular opinion but if people don’t want to pay for a thing, it’s probably not worth a whole lot to n the first place.
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> Ads are an attack, aimed at your brain.
Ads are an attack aimed at your computer too. They download malicious code to spy on you and gather intelligence data about everything you like, you visit, you buy,... it is malicious software hacking into your computer. The fact that some of the richest companies in the world are the criminals does not make it less of a crime.
The propaganda part is, of course, also totally true. Lies, manipulation, etc. has been normalized when a few years back will have been considered a crime.
On your resources too! Your electricity, processing power and network bandwidth are all being abused without any incentives to cover the costs.
But Zuck has to put high-quality beef on his table which involves raising Wagyu and Angus cattle on a diet of macadamia nut meal and local beer. Zuck is not gonna do charity.
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> Ads are an attack aimed at your computer too. They download malicious code to spy on you and gather intelligence data about everything you like, you visit, you buy,... it is malicious software hacking into your computer.
The ads themselves don’t do that. Some networks running those ads might.
The ads themselves have been known to do that on many an occasion.
There is some utility to ads. Knowing that my favorite shop has a promotion, that a movie, game or book I've been waiting for is out, or something other that might interest me has some usefulness. The problem isn't the ad per se, it's optimization through A/B-tests and the like, mass psychological experiments with all the rigor of scientific studies and none of the academic ethical safeguards for human subject experimentation.
I agree with this take. Sites used to sell banner space, negotiate a price and place the ad themselves. There was human review of what was being placed. Now apps and sites just let ad providers inject whatever they want, seemingly without oversight from the app owner and different ~~ads~~ payload depending on who's viewing. I have no issue with the tech blog I'm reading advertising the web host they use and support, or a wiki site advertising merch for the subject of the wiki. I'd bet those kind of ads get better returns on their investment too. What I find unconscionable is when my kids are playing some kids game on a tablet and they're bombarded with ads for GTA-like games idealizing violence and meaningless chaos interspersed with overly sexualized dress-up games or even political advertisements depending on your geolocation. Totally outrageous and I am eternally grateful for people like R. Gorhil (uBO) and Steven Black (for his curated hosts lists) that at least help me mitigate as much as I can, knowing that without 100% standing over the shoulder of my kids at all times when they touch a device it's almost impossible to otherwise avoid.
All those cases can be served you you voluntarily signing up to relevant notifications. The problem is the push model that incentivizes companies to show you things that will serve them and not you.
The way push notifications work today is a result of said optimization. Smartphones didn't start out with constant notifications, nor did any major desktop OS have them built in the way they do today.
We should also normalize paying for content at the same time then.
Nah. We should normalize public services and resources to develop knowledge and tools, that are made freely available. Provide incentive programs and reward those that take on such initiatives.
There are many such services where I'm from. And the feeling when using them is refreshing. You're not looking for an ulterior motive to be misinformed. They're responsive as they don't load a 10 MiB JavaScript blob to track your interactions "for marketing".
As an example, consider a service that gives you nutritional information of food. https://www.matvaretabellen.no/en/
The software solution and hosting is not remotely as expensive as the lab work needed to gather the nutritional information.
If this was made by a private company, it would be a subscription service, without a doubt. You'd find certain brands but not others because of deals under the table. It would have user profiles for collecting and selling data, not to mention integration with fitness and weight loss services. You might also wonder if part of the data is incorrect because of all that darn expensive lab analysis. Heck, maybe some CTO figured they could "predict" this information with an LLM.
Here, it is covered by taxes, benefit all, full page load in about 0.2 seconds (or 0.5 seconds for nutritional value). This is how the internet could be.
So, steal from everyone (taxation) whether they want to support or use government-run Facebook, give the money to government-run Facebook, and everything will be great because Government?
What incentive does that mechanism have to spur innovation for government-run Facebook? Does the government fund two Facebooks and scale funding based on market share? Or, like what virtually always happens in government, does it metastasize, realize it's actual "customer" isn't its "users" but is actually the government itself, and act accordingly to protect and grow its own budget?
Everything about a subscription model is better. If it sucks, don't pay for it, and if no one thinks its a worthwhile bargain then they run out of money and it dies. Efficient. If people do like it, then great.
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All that achieves is companies introducing ads to boost revenue for next quarter's earnings.
For a concrete example: LINE (most widely-used messaging app in Japan) has paid subscriptions, and even the highest tier subscription doesn't reduce ads. Other services (e.g. YouTube Premium) reduce ads, but do not eliminate them, no matter how much you pay.
Also, they still do the stalky part. Even if the paid service does remove the manifestation of ads on that site/service, chances are the tracking still happens so they can immediately target if you stop paying (instead of resuming collection at that point) and so the information can potentially be sold to 3rd parties or new owners (if the site/service itself is sold) or accidentally leaked (directly due to dumb decisions like sending the wrong data somewhere or indirectly due to dumb decisions resulting in poor security a black-hat can exploit).
> Other services (e.g. YouTube Premium) reduce ads, but do not eliminate them, no matter how much you pay.
Hmm curious to know where you live that you still get Youtube-supplied ads with YT Premium?
Because "ad-free" is literally the headline feature.
Unless you're talking about in-video ads and sponsorships added in by the video creators themselves, and then that's not something in YT's control (although they provide the "skip commonly skipped sections" feature in Premium that helps with this).
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Exactly this. The people willing to pay a subscription are also the most valuable to advertisers.
I pay for content: gig and cinema tickets, merch and digital albums from artists I like or know. I buy loads of books, magazines, digital and physical games, art I can hang on my wall. I've even started a bit of a CD collection.
At times I've had Spotify, Netflix and Mubi subscriptions. As a UK-resident with a TV, I pay for the BBC.
I feel I more than adequately contribute to cultural production.
In some ways, the current situation suits me fine. I take the free stuff where I'm technically capable. I'll block the ads, pirate to my hearts content, use yt-dlp, BPC, userscripts.
I'm not not paying for stuff, but I've enough financial pressures already, thank you very much. I don't see why I should send all my money to (mostly) US corporations, who've farmed and resold user-generated content.
Paying for quality content has been normalized, the price floor for payment is way above what Facebook and the vast majority of Web content offers.
That’s why movies and AAA games can clear a billion dollars, but the internet is still dependent on people failing to install ad blockers.
> That’s why movies (...) can clear a billion dollars,
And yet somehow I still get 30 minutes of ads before a watching a goddamn movie in a cinema.
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You must have grown up on the Internet during the
> Decades of ad propaganda have tricked people into seeing them as something 'normal'.
also wait, we're talking about a US company, should we be paying a US company, for "content"? Is all "content" produced by these US megacorps, I don't think so, they're purely extractive
what are you gonna do, make more Marvel movies? lol
Sure - why not ?
We are already paying for the externalities from ad tech. We’ve got entire worlds of predatory information behavior and near zero defenses for humans.
If you are on HN, you hopefully know enough to keep yourself clean and safe, but the rest of humanity is essentially getting mugged, defrauded and addicted 24/7.
You think Meta would spy less on us and show us less ads if we payed to access their services ? They would just keep doing what they've been doing for ages and they would have even more money to keep their enshitification going.
We are already paying too much for all the services with subscription. Like Spotify, Netflix and others...
It could be made a question of legislation. If it was forbidden, and the "cost of business" too high for them to dare, then it can work. We would need to do more than touch them with the satin gloves we are using now though.
If we say ads are an attack on our attention, time and money - then it’s a different ball game entirely.
Their incentives would be aligned to users, not advertisers.
The ideological changes alone would be like living in a different world entirely.
Heck, maybe micropayments would become viable at that point.
Plenty of other services (like Spotify) stop showing you ads if you pay them enough money.
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They stop showing ads if you pay for Instagram in the EU.
However they do not stop tracking you.
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I for one pay for content I enjoy, when it's reasonably priced and available to pay for. Two sources of print journalism, a few dozen patreons, paid youtube, etc - not to mention one-off purchases like books. [1]
And I'd encourage other people who can afford to, to do the same.
I'm not sure how scalable my approach is within the status quo, though - I've never seen a subscribers-only article go viral on social media, and almost all of my subscriptions began with me enjoying a generous free tier. And I've tried a number of micropayment systems but none of them seem poised to take off for various reasons.
[1] I don't pay for facebook, because fuck 'em
Same here.
I will add though, that the freemium model does not necessarily have to cease existing. Some platform for written articles can have articles available at no cost, and then put a paywall in front of other articles. I don't see the problem with that. It will be a careful balancing act of content creators, how much is in the freemium section, so that they attract a sufficient number of readers/fans/supporters.
Only if we can also normalize not double-dipping via payment and ads. Too often, paying money to avoid "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product" just turns it into "You're paying for the product and you're still the product".
How can we normalise it even MORE? We are paying for digital products MONTHLY and they get more expensive and lose features AND we have to watch the ads too.
What more do you want??
What does "normalize" mean here? I don't think consumers have to do anything in this situation. If a business model isn't making enough money, it's on the business to change.
If someday Google puts Youtube behind a hard paywall, no more "free with ads," I'd pay for it. I already pay for Nebula. But if I can get around the ads with uBlock, why wouldn't I? Just on principle? Because it's not fair that their business model doesn't make the revenue they want?
There is a large cohort of people who will complain about ads but also don't want to pay. My little microSaaS is monetised with ads but I offer option to pay if you don't like the ads. Still get plenty of complaints about the ads.
Yes. Anyone who has ever shipped a free mobile app can tell you that a $1 "remove all ads for life" offer will convert very poorly, even on sticky apps that people use every day.
(Disclosure: my employer owns an ad network. Opinions my own.)
> if you see an ad somewhere [...] close the tab immediately and never return to that site
I would even extend this: if you are bugged by an ad, avoid the product, the vendor and tell everyone why you do so. Also tell it to the vendor, why you avoid their product (aggressive, non blockable ads at facebook for example).
This doesn’t just apply to ads. It’s been a single piece of a larger systematic attack on your thinking.
Have people become more or less free over time as technology and progress came to help improve our lives and make things easier or more efficient? The average person, the same one most exposed to ad propaganda, are also exposed to propaganda in various forms in other areas of life. Even tv and music serve as propaganda for thinking malware and “worms”.
Spend a moment analyzing some popular mainstream music from the last decade for themes of culture, worldviews and others.
The big gotcha here is this: many people think OTHERS are under propaganda; and you yourself are not. And now you can get censored for pointing things out about this on social media.
In Covid I posted a nazi scientists quote on propaganda and got censored. Try it yourself.
> They try to inject malware into your thinking, manipulating your worldview and your actions.
Isn't your comment an attack as well by that line of thinking? Am I attacking you by arguing that people nowadays are way to quick to consider something "damaging" "attacks".
Then by OP's suggestion, you should close this page.
Wording aside, once you feel the other party is trying to force a certain line of thinking in you for their gain you should close the tool.
So your suggestion is to be a hermit?
What is the point of communication if not to change what others think?
It's way worse than that, it's an attack to the entire society.
The vast majority of ads lie; therefore, they are actively harmful. They create a situation where being surrounded by false things is normal. They promote the improvement of tools to make deception and tracking better and better.
On top of that, they install evil incentives for the medias, the news, and business models, influencing consumption, public options and opinions.
Finally, they concentrate power in those who already have enough money to pay for ads. You may have the better product, but a big player with better PR will win.
Ads are one of our most destructive creations. It's much, much more dangerous than it looks.
This. At least you can switch them off on the web but now big-ad is putting bright flickering digital billboards in sight of every public place. Politicians won't do a thing because they're some of the biggest customers. Obey.
> Obey.
We do have the technology to make those glasses now.
It's worse. You'll _have_ to use the glasses to block the billboard ads which will be replaced with more subtle ads.
It's insane to think how much brain power, computing power, electricity and component lifecycle wear have been wasted through the years, yelling random stuff at me; or even worse than random; often stuff that is directly harmful to me.
As somebody who – not entirely willingly – is working mostly remote, the only interruption in the day I have from the outside world is the sudden loud inane noises of commercials.
See also:
What if we made advertising illegal? (simone.org)
1975 points by smnrg on April 5, 2025 | 1409 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
I hate how normal ads seem to be to young people (under age 30). Just seeing TikTok videos secondhand on YouTube the videos seems stuffed with people pushing crap. YouTube channels none are without ads either by YouTube or by the channel owners.
Plus the "oh you have an add blocker!!" whining if you dare try to slow the firehose of ads coming at you. Yes I do have an ad blocker because it seems my entire existence is fodder for your website or app's ad machine to capture and use.
Lets be fair, here. Traditional TV was ~40 minutes of content with 20 minutes of ads. I still remember televised holiday movies "presented with limited commercial breaks by Folgers, where the best part of waking up..." or whoever was sponsoring it. Radio stations had to power their transmitters and pay their staff, so they had ads. Newspapers use ads to keep themselves affordable. This has always been a business model.
Also some TV shows had ads written in. USA network was pretty bad with this with ("White Collar" comes to mind - there are some pretty obvious Ford advertisements in a few eps, "Burn Notice" had very obvious alcohol placements.)
I believe radio across Europe was largely ad free and had a different business model. The BBC for example.
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Yes I was there it wasn't as bad as now. TV or radio it was never the same three ads over and over and over. And the media is now truncated so cram in more ads. Plus the time between ads is shorter. So it's basically ads with a brief TV show in between mostly ads.
>Traditional TV was ~40 minutes of content with 20 minutes of ads
That's generous. In less-privileged countries it was the other way round.
>Traditional TV was ~40 minutes of content with 20 minutes of ads.
No! This is utterly false! TV for much of American history was about 9 minutes of advertising per hour of content. Then Cable came out with no ads at all. The US does not have a legal limit, so as our culture got more and more hyped about squeezing every single dime out of counterparties, companies have been increasing advertising.
In the 60s, companies were willingly leaving money on the table.
In the UK, you are still limited to only 9 minutes per hour of advertising.
I grew up under communism. On TV, we had full movies without ads. There was 3-5min ad segment right before main evening news, that was it.
I could not understand how people can watch movie interrupted 10x by an add break.
Not wishing the return of communism, but yeah, I would simply ban all ads. No useful purpose to the society, whatsoever. Treat it like smoking and other drugs. Yes, can fill the coffers, but overall it is detrimental to the society.
If you want info about something you need, there are catalogues, consumer groups, enthusiast forums and internet search in general. Yes, the ads can be used to create new needs. Overall (if you really think what this achieves), that is a bug, not a feature.
Yes, there will be ways to sneak-in ads in a shady way, but that can be prosecuted. And the scale of exposure matters, a lot.
Bill Hicks on Marketing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0
alternatively, keep using ad blockers.
Facebook may have won this round, but AI tilts the balance overwhelming in favor of ad blockers.
consider: you can (in principle) scrape the entire screen, find the ads with machine vision and paste black rectangles over them. or simply have an AI use playwright to scrape the page and rerender it for you. these are excellent, pro-user use cases for AI.
Your first line is just as true of every single internet comment you have ever read, including your own.
> I propose a sane rule
You know this is untenable. You would be unable to use search engines for over a decade, or walk into a Target, or a gas station, or almost any public square if you truly believed this. You don't believe it. You're being hopelessly histrionic and that's not productive for anyone.
my least favorite part of flying is the part where i'm strapped to a chair during taxi with a screen and speaker inches from my face and they use that moment to force a few ads into my eye socket. it feels very Citizen Kane.
pumping gas is another one that takes advantage of captivity to force ads. i hate it.
Your comment is also an attack aimed to manipulate my worldview and actions. The only difference is the corporate ad is more sophisticated.
I just can't take this seriously. I grew up with TV being literally 1/3 ads and there was absolutely no way to skip them. People complained idly, but nobody really had a problem with it because we knew that TV isn't free. Nothing on the internet comes close to that level of ad intrusiveness, but I often hear unhinged statements like "They try to inject malware into your thinking, manipulating your worldview and your actions. That's horrible, worse than attacking a machine with malware, damaging persons and societies."
Ads are mind rape.
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That's quite paranoid, they surely are annoying, but certain ads can be relevant.
Actually, from what I've noticed X/Twitter ads are way worse than the ones on Meta platforms.
And I completely hate seeing ads on YouTube or when browsing random websites in general.
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Skill issue? Some people are clearly more vulnerable than others. You can occasionally get useful information from ads.
Just because some people are more resilient to opium, and some people can have a good time on it, doesn't mean you should get an opium injection when you're going for a regularly scheduled doctor's appointment.
Ads are being forced on you when you're trying to do something else, like you go to facebook to see your actual friend's pictures of their kids, you're not looking for ads, and yet you get some micro-brainwashing on the side.
The true "skill issue" is that governments are too unskilled to prevent these mass mental attacks to prey upon their citizens, and haven't gotten off their ass enough to make advertisement even more illegal than other similarly harmful substances like opium, tobacco, and online gambling (both sports gambling and gacha games).
Those apps where you share pics or whatever would not exist without ads if people had to pay for them.
So I am not sure if all is bad in that sense. Bc it lets the apps for sharing without people having to pay to exist in the first place.
I am not doing any assessment regarding to the toxicity of ads. I am just trying to objectively say that this also spreads "horizontally" software for free in some sense.
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This reminds me of how Scientology reportedly targets intelligent people because those people think they are too smart to be sucked in.
The advertising industry has hired some of the world's best talent (tech, psychology, legal) to make you more susceptible to it. They probably love those who AstroTurf thinking they are "less vulnerable" and "ads are useful actually"
You are not immune to propaganda.
Give me 1-2 examples of useful info we can get from ads?
There are some cases where ads are useful for sure.
For example, I found out about the local farmer's market in my city via advertisements being hung up around town, and that helped me get fresh produce and find some community. I'm not sure if I ever would have found that farmer's market otherwise.
I also found one job via a "Who's Hiring" hacker news post, and that's obviously an advertisement thread advertising open positions.
Of course, these do not balance out the negative impact of ads, such as advertising credit cards and sports gambling and gacha gambling games to get people into debt, advertising tv shows and movies to waste people's time watching garbage, and generally advertising garbage that makes people who were otherwise happy waste money and time for no real gain in life satisfaction.
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Like whenever/wherever there's a sale going on about something you were out to buy anyway, helping you save money.
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> You can occasionally get useful information from ads.
And flies eat horse shit because they occasionally get nutrients from it