We should assume that all ads in general are scams. The noise to signal ratio is too large to care. Word of mouth and maybe trusted communities like HN is the only way to reliably discover new things.
Generally if all the ads you see are scammy, it means you probably are using some form of tracking/privacy protection.
When an ad network has a strong profile on you, legitimate companies pay good money for those ad slots. When they don't really know who you are, only bottom feeders bid on the ad slots you see.
In a way, it almost acts as retribution for not submitting to the anti-privacy machine.
Any ad provider that is going to serve up scams to anyone is an ad provider I don’t trust. Giving more information to an untrustworthy company seems like a losing plan. Those more target ads also mean more effective manipulation to get people to buy things they likely don’t need.
I am very certain that these don't describe me well, or I am classified wrong in some categories (without using any tracking/privacy protection! But I won't actively correct this misclassification).
My experience is rather that some people have very niche interests (among hacker-minded people, the proportion of these people is in my experience much higher than in the general population), and are hard to target using ads, so advertising networks and companies don't make the effort to target these users.
Also, when I google about prices for some product category, I often have other reasons than a buying wish. For example I recently googled about the prices of products in some category because some work colleague claimed that someone else bought a product of a specific vendor for a specific price, but I really felt that the claimed price was off; to substantiate my claims, I did some googling.
Or I google about products in a specific category because I am exactly not satisfied with what some established players that love to advertise have to offer.
I consider even "legitimate" ads scams. My products are more expensive (the marketing budget doesn't fall out of the sky, after all), and I am rewarded by being forced to view extremely annoying content in my day-to-day life? As a consumer, that sounds like a horrible deal to me!
On top of that, most ads provide no value whatsoever. Take the classic Coca-Cola vs Pepsi: they are fishing from the same pool so ads are primarily going to steal customers away from the other brand. Both sides spending billions on marketing would result in roughly the same outcome as both sides spending nothing on marketing, so the ads are a net negative for society.
There is also of course advertising in order to inform your potential market that your product exists at all. But if your product is so great, why haven't I heard about it via things like independent reviews or personal recommendations already? And if two products seem to have the same features for the same price, the one which isn't heavily advertised is probably the better choice: it is likely already more popular for a reason, and there's a decent possibility that the money they aren't spending on advertising is going towards useful things like quality and customer support.
I completely understand why companies in a heavily capitalist society are spending money on ads, but you can't convince me that the world wouldn't be a more pleasant place without them.
This sounds brilliant, makes too much sense, and suggests a new kind of ad blocker to escalate and reflect retribution back.
Unrelated: Once upon a time it was believed ads should pair with content, not with users. It's been proven to still be more effective. Problem (for advertisers) is reach vs. cost of producing ads that content-align. In any case, Apple has enough reach they could easily bring ad sales in-house. Plenty TV shows, the show owner retains rights to ad slots partly to ensure no brand damage to show and partly to make more money per slot.
In my case I was kinda OK with Google ads until around 2010 and IIRC only began blocking them actively after they had been feeding me trash ads for years.
Maybe you are right in most cases and I was the victim of a fluke.
But from what I have seen from Google after that I don't think so.
Facebook however, a company I disliked then and dislike now are scary good with their ads and have often been even even when I actively tried to avoid them.
All this to say that your theory sounds interesting but I am convinced it is far from the whole story.
Why would a less legitimate company not pay more money to give you a worse deal with better margins? The intuitive dynamics to me would be that any way to trick consumers will be applied, and the bulk of the resulting spread will be captured by the ad companies via their auction systems. So we all get worse products with worse deals, and the difference goes into spying on people and convincing them to become more consumptive, i.e. to turn them into worse versions of themselves.
Never allow ads in your life. They're malicious in every way.
I see a lot of people saying things like this. I'm sure some of you are well meaning and not part of the ad machine (probably you among them with your concluding quote).
But no. I could argue that hypothetically scammers would know exactly what I would fall for, but I have real evidence: Facebook knows everything about me and serves me mostly scams, since ever. My Google ads (mostly in Youtube) actually became less scammy when I opted out of all targeting that I could find (went from crypto scams and 5G protection to car commercials and big brands reminding me they exist).
This is an interesting position that I hadn't encountered. It would shift my understanding of the ad business online, if true. I've had ad blockers since they became available and have a very low opinion of ad-content. This would change that by explaining why the few that get through are actually different from what someone without an ad-blocker would see.
Is there a link that confirms what you said here? There were "click the monkey to win an ipod" scam ads before we had ad-blockers. I think scams have always been around. I do want to update my mental model if I'm out of touch from what people actually see.
I don’t think that it’s possible to not have a strong profile on you. I’m using Librewolf with a ton of anti fingerprinting tools, separate sessions for everything, blocking any ads, social media SDKs, Google things, like Analytics, don’t even use Google anywhere for search etc on a Debian. Yet, Google knew immediately when I started to play Minecraft. The only connection was embedded YouTube videos on Minecraft wiki, and my ip. On paper.
Since then I gave up. I tried everything which was reasonable, even some unreasonable. Yet, I couldn’t stop them not knowing. Maybe if I had blocked JavaScript completely, maybe, but I’m not sure at all anymore.
I used to run YouTube with “ad targeting” turned off.
The ads were 100% scams. Lots of AI slop. Deepfakes of celebrities pitching all sorts of scams. Lots of nsfw products and even occasionally illegal things like drugs or guns. Also lots of ads in languages I do not speak.
I recently learned that if you turn on ad targeting you can block certain ads and never see them again. So I’ve turned it on just to block the worst of the ads. But googles ad targeting still can’t target ads to me. It’s maybe only 70% scams now. But their targeting still sucks and I still get ads in foreign languages that I do not speak.
On my desktop I just use Adblock. I really try to avoid YouTube on mobile at all costs because the ads make it completely unusable.
I'm pretty sure the only ad that would work on me would be an ad for an indie game, but indie game developers don't buy ads, they buy blue checkmarks on twitter then they try to game the algorithm. Even if I did see an ad for an indie game, I would probably not click on it, but just google its name instead.
What I mean to say is that there is a type of person that will never click on an ad, even if they want to buy the product. Worse yet, most of the time I do click on an ad, it's a misclick.
But I don't see this as a failure of the ad industry. I just think I'm the edge case.
Non-personalised ads might indeed be more scammy, but it should be the ad network’s responsibility to vet and monitor their advertisers. (Imagine Don Draper making ads for penis enlargement companies.)
Let’s also not pretend that personalised advertising is that great. Our Tizen runs the crappiest ads (can’t opt out in some cases). And I just have to take a look at my partner’s phone to see what personalised means, and which advertisers can _afford_ to get placement. (No, she doesn’t need another of the last 10 things we’ve purchased.)
In theory user behavior to serve you ads you want to see for stuff you might be interested in is a feature. The problem comes because the same technology to power that can also power the—much more lucrative—industry of serving ads that are optimally designed to fry your brain and scam you. And then on top of that, it creates a business incentive for you to use a lot of psychological tricks and dark patterns to foster increasingly addictive and anti-social behavior to keep people stuck in a feedback loop of doomscrolling.
Facebook knows I graduated with a degree in comp. science and when (since I told them). They could therefore infer that I am into nerdy things - but I get bottom of the barrel ads.
Part of the problem as far as I can see is that there is no way to mark an add as insultingly matched.
Pre LLMs I would have said the all-text format of HN probably kept the astroturfing low, but these days I'm less sure. It's still a much less engaging format than almost any other place on the web, although again, with LLMs you can even cheaply target the lowest value returns.
Yep, one of the big problems is the penalty for any corporate crime today is not enough. Often the crime is more profitable than the penalty hurts.
If you want to fix ads, make a malicious ad cost the ad network triple the amount they got paid to display it. Corporations are psychopathic by design, if you want to fix them you need to make it an actual financial risk to do something bad.
And then heck, if you want to make stopping the original bad actors more effective, make the platforms pay up those damages but empower them to recover that loss if they can get it from the malicious advertiser.
You'll see platforms doing more vetting of content, doing more KYC, and focused on reducing their own risk.
One only needs to look at the Grok-generating-nudes fiasco to see that potential financial liabilities are a pittance to huge companies. We need to jail CEOs whose companies break the law.
You can just get away with fraud:
Former CEO of Volkswagen AG Charged with Conspiracy and Wire Fraud in Diesel Emissions Scandal
> He remains a fugitive in the United States and is wanted by the Environmental Protection Agency on charges including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to violate the Clean Air Act, and multiple counts of wire fraud.
I think that the most fundamental issue with ads and more generally with provider-curated content is that they represent what the advertiser or the provider wants. Not what you want.
Even if the ads are heavily personalized, the advertiser is still the one who is trying to push an idea onto you. Similarly, even if your social media account has a lot of personal information on you, the provider is still the one who is selecting which content will appear in you "feed".
I believe that these practices make people less self-aware of what they actually want. Because they mostly respond to suggestions. They do much less research into what is possible. They just say yes or no to the things they see in their ads or in their "feed". While becoming more and more distant from the reality that is happening outside the provider-managed ads or "feeds".
I think that a safe way out of this is to ignore ads and "feeds" completely. And actively search for the things or content you want. Curate your interests in a way you like. Not in a way advertisers or providers want.
I have not had ads in my life in any form for two decades.
I don’t have a TV, don’t listen to the radio or read newspapers or magazines. I live in a small town with no metro, no billboards. I buy things I need like milk and vegetables, I don’t buy things that require ads for me to know about.
That, unfortunately has pushed advertisers into guerrilla marketing tactics like posts and comments disguised as genuine user behaviour. It means we now need to parse whether what we're looking at is an ad or not.
I can't say the AI scripted AI voiced "my wife bet my abs vs. a trip to Paris" and "I ordered this and was going to throw it away but then the heavens opened and angels descended and gave me this Alibaba tchotchke" are harbingers of the idiocracy. Because it's already here.
// Adblock at DNS used to kill these Apple News ads. They're no longer suppressed. Free with their Plus all the things and aggregated my content subs but I quit using it. Had loved Texture, this now sucks.
Especially on this site I would be very careful with trusting any recommendations. Probably more often than not it's the product/service of the person talking about it, so basically an ad.
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
WarmWash|23 days ago
When an ad network has a strong profile on you, legitimate companies pay good money for those ad slots. When they don't really know who you are, only bottom feeders bid on the ad slots you see.
In a way, it almost acts as retribution for not submitting to the anti-privacy machine.
al_borland|23 days ago
digiown|23 days ago
aleph_minus_one|23 days ago
I have looked what interests for example Google stores about me
> http://google.com/ads/preferences
I am very certain that these don't describe me well, or I am classified wrong in some categories (without using any tracking/privacy protection! But I won't actively correct this misclassification).
My experience is rather that some people have very niche interests (among hacker-minded people, the proportion of these people is in my experience much higher than in the general population), and are hard to target using ads, so advertising networks and companies don't make the effort to target these users.
Also, when I google about prices for some product category, I often have other reasons than a buying wish. For example I recently googled about the prices of products in some category because some work colleague claimed that someone else bought a product of a specific vendor for a specific price, but I really felt that the claimed price was off; to substantiate my claims, I did some googling.
Or I google about products in a specific category because I am exactly not satisfied with what some established players that love to advertise have to offer.
crote|23 days ago
On top of that, most ads provide no value whatsoever. Take the classic Coca-Cola vs Pepsi: they are fishing from the same pool so ads are primarily going to steal customers away from the other brand. Both sides spending billions on marketing would result in roughly the same outcome as both sides spending nothing on marketing, so the ads are a net negative for society.
There is also of course advertising in order to inform your potential market that your product exists at all. But if your product is so great, why haven't I heard about it via things like independent reviews or personal recommendations already? And if two products seem to have the same features for the same price, the one which isn't heavily advertised is probably the better choice: it is likely already more popular for a reason, and there's a decent possibility that the money they aren't spending on advertising is going towards useful things like quality and customer support.
I completely understand why companies in a heavily capitalist society are spending money on ads, but you can't convince me that the world wouldn't be a more pleasant place without them.
Terretta|23 days ago
Unrelated: Once upon a time it was believed ads should pair with content, not with users. It's been proven to still be more effective. Problem (for advertisers) is reach vs. cost of producing ads that content-align. In any case, Apple has enough reach they could easily bring ad sales in-house. Plenty TV shows, the show owner retains rights to ad slots partly to ensure no brand damage to show and partly to make more money per slot.
eitland|23 days ago
Maybe you are right in most cases and I was the victim of a fluke.
But from what I have seen from Google after that I don't think so.
Facebook however, a company I disliked then and dislike now are scary good with their ads and have often been even even when I actively tried to avoid them.
All this to say that your theory sounds interesting but I am convinced it is far from the whole story.
dooglius|23 days ago
ndriscoll|23 days ago
Never allow ads in your life. They're malicious in every way.
nkrisc|22 days ago
All the fine print, exceptions, limited dates, etc. often hidden from you as best they can makes it scam-like.
sean2|19 days ago
But no. I could argue that hypothetically scammers would know exactly what I would fall for, but I have real evidence: Facebook knows everything about me and serves me mostly scams, since ever. My Google ads (mostly in Youtube) actually became less scammy when I opted out of all targeting that I could find (went from crypto scams and 5G protection to car commercials and big brands reminding me they exist).
alsetmusic|22 days ago
Is there a link that confirms what you said here? There were "click the monkey to win an ipod" scam ads before we had ad-blockers. I think scams have always been around. I do want to update my mental model if I'm out of touch from what people actually see.
ruszki|23 days ago
Since then I gave up. I tried everything which was reasonable, even some unreasonable. Yet, I couldn’t stop them not knowing. Maybe if I had blocked JavaScript completely, maybe, but I’m not sure at all anymore.
snailmailman|23 days ago
I recently learned that if you turn on ad targeting you can block certain ads and never see them again. So I’ve turned it on just to block the worst of the ads. But googles ad targeting still can’t target ads to me. It’s maybe only 70% scams now. But their targeting still sucks and I still get ads in foreign languages that I do not speak.
On my desktop I just use Adblock. I really try to avoid YouTube on mobile at all costs because the ads make it completely unusable.
AlienRobot|23 days ago
What I mean to say is that there is a type of person that will never click on an ad, even if they want to buy the product. Worse yet, most of the time I do click on an ad, it's a misclick.
But I don't see this as a failure of the ad industry. I just think I'm the edge case.
port11|22 days ago
Let’s also not pretend that personalised advertising is that great. Our Tizen runs the crappiest ads (can’t opt out in some cases). And I just have to take a look at my partner’s phone to see what personalised means, and which advertisers can _afford_ to get placement. (No, she doesn’t need another of the last 10 things we’ve purchased.)
naravara|23 days ago
tomjen3|22 days ago
Part of the problem as far as I can see is that there is no way to mark an add as insultingly matched.
ivanjermakov|23 days ago
DudeOpotomus|23 days ago
matheusmoreira|23 days ago
Completely agree.
> Word of mouth and maybe trusted communities like HN is the only way to reliably discover new things.
There is no evidence that HN is not being actively astroturfed though. Sadly community filtering cannot replace trust in individuals.
threetonesun|23 days ago
chasebank|23 days ago
pjc50|23 days ago
DudeOpotomus|23 days ago
ocdtrekkie|23 days ago
If you want to fix ads, make a malicious ad cost the ad network triple the amount they got paid to display it. Corporations are psychopathic by design, if you want to fix them you need to make it an actual financial risk to do something bad.
And then heck, if you want to make stopping the original bad actors more effective, make the platforms pay up those damages but empower them to recover that loss if they can get it from the malicious advertiser.
You'll see platforms doing more vetting of content, doing more KYC, and focused on reducing their own risk.
alsetmusic|22 days ago
You can just get away with fraud:
Former CEO of Volkswagen AG Charged with Conspiracy and Wire Fraud in Diesel Emissions Scandal
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-ceo-volkswage...
> He remains a fugitive in the United States and is wanted by the Environmental Protection Agency on charges including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to violate the Clean Air Act, and multiple counts of wire fraud.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Winterkorn
giraffe_lady|23 days ago
pbasista|22 days ago
Even if the ads are heavily personalized, the advertiser is still the one who is trying to push an idea onto you. Similarly, even if your social media account has a lot of personal information on you, the provider is still the one who is selecting which content will appear in you "feed".
I believe that these practices make people less self-aware of what they actually want. Because they mostly respond to suggestions. They do much less research into what is possible. They just say yes or no to the things they see in their ads or in their "feed". While becoming more and more distant from the reality that is happening outside the provider-managed ads or "feeds".
I think that a safe way out of this is to ignore ads and "feeds" completely. And actively search for the things or content you want. Curate your interests in a way you like. Not in a way advertisers or providers want.
testing22321|23 days ago
I don’t have a TV, don’t listen to the radio or read newspapers or magazines. I live in a small town with no metro, no billboards. I buy things I need like milk and vegetables, I don’t buy things that require ads for me to know about.
I Adblock the web aggressively.
rgblambda|23 days ago
Maybe they would have done that anyway though.
SoftTalker|23 days ago
Emphasis on maybe. HN is large enough that scammers will try to slip in. The moderation mechanisms probably catch a lot of it but not all.
My trust in anything online or in an app is very low and must be earned.
dddddaviddddd|23 days ago
Any sufficiently trusted (online) community will find many attempts to exploit its trust for profit.
Terretta|23 days ago
// Adblock at DNS used to kill these Apple News ads. They're no longer suppressed. Free with their Plus all the things and aggregated my content subs but I quit using it. Had loved Texture, this now sucks.
unknown|23 days ago
[deleted]
askl|23 days ago
Especially on this site I would be very careful with trusting any recommendations. Probably more often than not it's the product/service of the person talking about it, so basically an ad.
TimByte|23 days ago
an0malous|23 days ago
direwolf20|22 days ago
wasmainiac|23 days ago
Please don’t. I’ve been here for a years under different usernames. I feel more and more bots or other actors are starting to infiltrate.
MaxBarraclough|22 days ago
The guidelines ask that you don't do this. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html :
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
unknown|23 days ago
[deleted]