Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

Thank you. I feel like ads have such a bad rap because of the state of the internet. Yet, what does everyone expect? Is it shocking that content providers want money for their product?

And yes, I know, some sites and ads do terrible things. The actively hurt viewership. BUT, isn't that the same with everything? Even my groceries are getting worse as companies seek ways to increase profits without pissing me off; they swap out quality ingredients with cheaper ingredients. They change the shape of the bottle to reduce volume and hope I don't notice that the price effectively went up. Etc.

My point is not in defense of these practices. Rather, I'm defending "no shit" in all of this; welcome to the real world. Everyone is going to try and take and make as much as they can before it starts to actively show a negative impact.

So who is to really blame? Us, of course. Consumers of these practices are largely okay with it as is.

So yea, I don't have a problem with ads. They sort themselves out because people will stop using the products. I do have a problem with selling out data though, as people are largely unaware of the consequences and severity of what is actually happening. Ads however though? Who cares.

edit: Sidenote, I imagine an argument could be made that all and any ads are terrible. I definitely could agree with that, but getting rid of all advertisements across all mediums online or offline seems a tall order, and out of scope for this discussion heh.

I choose to believe we could have a better world, where loading a local news site doesn’t look like a virus-ridden Windows 95 desktop, where just trying to talk with friends isn’t interrupted by.. (checks twitter) payday loan lobbyists. Where the smartest people of my generation are using every dark pattern in the world to take my attention away from what matters to me.

It's not shocking that content providers want money. It's shocking that pushing ads and selling data are the only ways they can conceive of doing it.

I think it is very possible, even with ads.

So ads are often a place where dark patterns happen and such.

But take Apple for instance. Apple seems to respect user privacy to a fairly far extent compared to say, Facebook, Google.

If apple wasn't around ... we would probably say something about "you can't have these fancy smartphones without someone stealing all your data". But clearly Apple can do it (for a lot of reasons)... so we know it is possible.

I feel the same way about ads, it might be different, but it can be done.

Then pay money for those services.

I run an old collaborative writing (roleplaying) forum populated mostly by teens that's paid for by a banner ad.

When I read HN comments about ads, I see people who are forgetting what ads have actually gotten us: more people able to create more things that are available to everyone for free.

HNers like to say "well, then adapt your business model," but look at the incredibly friction that exists for getting people to take their wallet out. On the frontpage of HN as we speak, there's an entire thread of people who justify why they won't even pay Spotify $10/mo. Where does that leave the rest of us who offer something much, much less than a ubiquitous, unlimited music-streaming platform?

Let's be more concrete and look at the forum that I run. I grew up on roleplaying MUD servers and forums, and it helped me develop the passion and habit for writing early on in my life. I started a forum as a teen to continue the interest, and eventually it was popular enough for ads to pay my rent through uni while running a community for young writers.

These days, my banner ad barely breaks even with server costs. It now makes less than 1/15th of what it did at the peak of its ad revenue with about the same traffic.

I'm left with a decision: can I afford to run the site as a charity?

How would the HN champion of "adapt or die" address my scenario? Ads are a middle ground between being a charity and paywalling your website, and the vast majority of websites don't fall at either extreme. Suggesting that this massive chunk on the internet doesn't deserve to exist, like my forum that gets teens into writing, seems incredibly extreme.

The writing is on the wall, though. Just seems like a damn shame.

It's called a subscription and even with that local newspapers were filled with pages of color soaked ads. Dark patterns existed before your generation..

>They change the shape of the bottle to reduce volume and hope I don't notice that the price effectively went up.

One of the memories that really sticks out for me from working in a grocery store was the time the Breyer's ice cream increased in price that way.

They came in a 5 case of 500g containers. They sold regularly for around $5 or something like that. They went on sale for 2 for $5 for about 2 weeks. After the first week they started showing up in 4 packs of 430g containers. I remember having to rearrange the shelves to get them to fit properly, theit shape was slightly different. After the sale ended they went to $6 for a 430g container. It was the first time I noticed and really thought about price increases by lowering the volume of containers.

That was also around the time they stopped putting handles on the big ice cream pails. A lot of people complained about it, they were no good for berry picking any more. One day I asked the dairy delivery guy about it. He said someone figured out that the handles added 2¢ to the cost of each bucked and some accountant figured out that by removing them they saved, I can't remember the exact number, but in the millions of dollars each year.

> Even my groceries are getting worse as companies seek ways to increase profits without pissing me off; they swap out quality ingredients with cheaper ingredients. They change the shape of the bottle to reduce volume and hope I don't notice that the price effectively went up. Etc.

If you stick to fresh produce and bulk dry goods, you're pretty much immune to those problems. Incidentally, those happen to be products that never get advertised for.

As I see it, the issue is that ads are being sold to us as something that is for our own benefit, and then go on to collect data for personalized ads that we do not even want.

It is not shocking that content providers want money, but perhaps it would be better if it would not be forced, and if developers would not actively try to make it more and more difficult for us to get rid of. You could just ask instead. Wikipedia seems to do fine.

I've run a similar role playing style site since middle school. It introduced me to more than just a habit of writing. It also introduced me to programming at a young age and in a community and school system where that would not have happened otherwise.

I run mine as a charity now. Its less than 200 dollars a year. The ads just aren't even worth keeping up. Before and during college, when I couldn't afford the 200, I solicited donations from former users who had used the site as a teen but since grew out of it. That worked really well.

Good luck.

To me ads are fundamentally about misleading you, manipulating you, or in short: making you do something that you wouldn't do otherwise. This to me is morally wrong on a base level. Advertisement is an attempt to attack/manipulate your vulnerable mammal brain to make you do something against your interest (be it buying a product, voting on someone, etc). In other words, to do something that you wouldn't do rationally, or wouldn't do without this prodding.

The problem isn't ads per se, it's all the crap around them:

  * invasive, industrial grade stalking
  * wasted screen real estate 
  * trackers
  * page load time 
  * bloated third-party garbage
  * blinkenlights
  * dark patterns
  * bandwidth hogging
  * CPU hogging
  * drive-by-malware potential (compromised ad network is an incredibly powerful attack vector)

And so on. Quite a long time ago I actually wrote down what I consider the minimum standard for acceptable ads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10521930 ; anything more intrusive is as good as toxic waste.

Apple makes massive profits on the hardware they sell you, that's how they can do it. The software companies that give it away "for free" (Facebook, Google) don't have any way other than advertising or selling/using data to make money.

People love to complain about giving up money when they don't understand the value they'll get from something. Make it clear what you're selling and why it's worth $10 / month, and people will pay you. It's not as big of a problem as you think.

We can still create a world of free products that enable what your forum has -- it just needs a simple business model like, Hey, do you enjoy writing here? Send me $5! Then subsidize your free users with paid ones. If you have a day job, you can consider it a success when the servers are paid for every month.

There is nothing inherent about the internet that says it must be run on ads. That's just what ad-powered platforms want you to think, to justify their own terrible existence. Get creative, put on the tiniest of marketing hats, and just ask people. There is no quick and easy lunch, but I think you'll be surprised by what you find.

Gladly. Its not an option.

Exactly. I don't remember the words but my parents were like "it's an ad, don't believe it." It was the time of TV commercials and little else but I think it's still a good piece of advice now.

Your point that ads have always existed is well taken, but if newspapers looked like a local news site today people wouldn't have bought them (its more akin to the free weekly tabloids than a real newspaper). Newspapers used to make money through classifieds in addition to subscriptions. If only there were local-oriented services newspapers could provide - I hope someone figures out a better model soon.

Thing is though, the state of the internet—all that shady stuff Facebook does—is because of ads. Ads aren’t something you can pluck out of a social/technical context and talk about as though they’re in a vacuum. When a site’s existence depends on ad revenue, every single product decision becomes tainted by “how can we hook people?” I can’t find the article now but there was a great one a while back about this very topic. The thesis was that the environment produced by advertising—not the ads themselves, but their effect on everything around them—is nothing short of psychological warfare.

So it’s not just whether “ads” are good or bad. And it’s not enough just to block them. They are like a virulent symbiote. They seep into every aspect of the platform they live on, because the platform’s survival depends on them. And then the infected platforms poison their users, ad blockers or no.

Privacy is one of the features that helps the iPhone sell for over a thousand dollars.

I remember one of the Amazon Kindles sold 2 versions: one with ads that was cheaper, and one without ads that was more expensive. So people do pay at least to get rid of ads (I'm sure both versions collect your data), it just costs more, and most end up not being able to afford it.

For all the good in the iPhone, year after year android gains ground worldwide by virtue of being cheaper and more flexible.

Newspapers had a monopoly on distributing written information back in the day: printing presses, typesetters, journalists, delivery staff, etc are all expensive. Now anyone can self-publish on Medium. Technology has changed the game, and we whatever business models work in the future probably won't be the same as those in the past.

This is a very immature view of advertising, that, unfortunately many advertisers share -- and it leads to scummy ads, with no eye on the long term relationship with the person viewing the ad.

However, many ads are not deceptive in any way, and instead simply offer something of value to people who may be interested, without any deceit, psychological trick, or ulterior motive.

Just because there are bad ads does not mean that all advertising is bad.

Where do I sign up for a free android phone?

Many local news sites now have online subscriptions available. Combined with an ad blocker, it seems as though you can generally get a pleasant local news experience, while still supporting the publisher.

And just imagine all the fun manufacturers can have when ice cream is sold by volume instead of weight...

That is not necessarily true, as industrial food companies increasingly push for larger yield per acre, they do not account for the objective quality of the product. They're looking to maximize their profit; and quality is just one metric among many others that have an impact on this.

Ads in their current manifestation are inseparably connected to both the surveillance practices and the security-busting delivery of potential malware to user devices. Google and others could put a stop to both of these, but there is zero possibility they will do so.

Ads themselves are .. not innocent, but not in-and-of-themselves evil. I rather like turn of the century advertising because it's mostly statements about products and their advantages. It wasn't until the Bernays/Freud era that ads switched from trying to persuade you as to the product's merits to trying to manipulate the consumer by essentially selling an identity. That practice is comparably dark.

Just had to replace a Kindle. They sell one version now, with ads, and you can turn them off permanently by making a one-time payment though your Amazon account. They also offer it as a check box during checkout.

Not sure you can conclude that most can’t afford the ad free version from what’s publicly known.

They still sell both versions, presumably if only very very few people bought the ad free version then they would have stopped selling it.

It is us that's the problem. We keep using these services.

Your groceries getting worse remind me that I used to enjoy Blue Diamond almonds. I'd get them at the local Walgreens. Then Walgreens decided to replace them with their own "Nice" brand. They were crap. Not even remotely the same quality, first bag was barely cheweble, and of course not the same flavors. They did the same with Q-Tips, replacing them for "Nice" cotton swabs. Again, complete crap, cotton falls off, not as thick, sticks break easily.

But even worse, almost no one except me cared. If people cared it wouldn't last because people would stop buying the crap brand and Walgreen would get the message but most people don't care

This came up with my roommate who basically always bought the cheapest spaghetti sauce. When I asked her if why that one she said effectively "any spaghetti sauce is the same as another so I just always get the cheapest" to which I was shocked. They aren't remotely similar to my taste buds and also now understanding why everything gets worse, because most people apparently are fine with anything or can't tell the difference or don't find the differences important.

It's the same for FB. Most of my friends are unlikely to ever leave. Whether it's because it doesn't bother them or because they don't think about it or because they just take it all for granted, it seems to be a combination of all of those which effectively means FB gets no signal to make things better.

Heck, as another example the complaints are loud here about the MacbookPro's keyboard/touchbar/weight etc but sales are higher than ever which means the complainers are not remotely a signal to change things.

I'd say the ads are still deceptive even if they weren't created with that intention. It doesn't need to be sneaky, but if it's unsolicited then the consumer didn't opt for their attention to be steered toward it.

edit: removed example as it distracts from the point.

> I imagine an argument could be made that all and any ads are terrible.

And I'll be happy to make it.

Advertising in its most optimized form is terrible, and it's terrible in ways that most people aren't even conscious of. Even in the relatively plodding print and television markets, modern advertising relies on numerous principles of human psychology to subtly alter the way you think about a product, a company, or yourself [1] [2]. Worse still, these tactics are being used on children, in a society which otherwise broadly accepts that mind-altering substances are especially harmful to youth [3].

Advertising is furthermore in a codependent relationship with the content it's injected into. For the advertising to be successful, it has to compete against the content for your attention. Likewise, the content needs to compete against its ads for your attention too. The natural result of this co-opetition between ads and content has been the clickbait headlines and junk content that are ubiquitous now, that everyone hates but can't seem to avoid [4], and this is having deep and powerful impacts on how we all view the world.

Recently, other organizations -- like nation-states -- have realized that they can use all of the psychological effects understood by the advertising industry against a population which willingly accepts advertising while believing that it's immune to its effects. These organizations are weaponizing advertising, making us hate each other over our politics [5] and further dividing us ideologically [6].

And these are just advertising's intentional effects, the stuff that works the way that the advertising industry wants it to work, or as well as they can figure out right now anyway. Sometimes they get it wrong, especially when it comes to trying to market products to people using the vast wealth of personal information that we unknowingly provide with every page view. When this data model makes mistakes, it ends up marketing an endless stream of baby-related products and services to parents whose child didn't survive birth [7].

The future of the web is not dependent on advertising. Some are arguing that the future of the web, and maybe even the health of our society, depends on weaning ourselves off of the advertising tit [8]. Some of us grew up along with the web and remember what it was like before its unfortunate marriage to advertising, and we hope that it comes to its senses and gets a divorce while it still has a chance at a healthy relationship with society.

Advertising is inherently unhealthy for our psychology. It can't help it. Like everything else, it wants to be as successful as it can, and its success depends on how effectively it can manipulate us while fooling us into believing we're not being manipulated at all.

[1]: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ulterior-motives/201...

[2]: https://prezi.com/2cekh73hothi/psychological-effects-of-adve...

[3]: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/140/Supplement...

[4]: https://medium.com/@tobiasrose/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511...

[5]: https://fathom.info/fakebook/

[6]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-ads/majority-of-...

[7]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18665048

[8]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/adver...

Exactly. I've taken to buying 'organic' carrots that are smaller and have had the leaves left on simply because they taste like.. well, carrots. The huge carrots in the 2 lb bag mass-market bag are tasteless in comparison.

I'm otherwise as far away from the normal target audience of 'organic' foods as you can get; I'm decidedly pro-GMO, etc.

You are still using the reasoning of "Here is an example of a bad ad, therefore all ads are bad."

If "no shit" is an appropriate response to advertiser behavior, I'd want "no shit" to also be an appropriate response to users installing ad blockers, instead of whining: https://www.adweek.com/digital/yahoo-exec-calls-out-mobile-a...

> Make it clear what you're selling and why it's worth $10 / month, and people will pay you. It's not as big of a problem as you think.

If only all buyers were as rational as you. IMO the problem is bigger (by far) than just make a case and people pay.

> if it's unsolicited then the consumer didn't opt for their attention to be steered toward it.

Isn't that everything in the world, always?

Why do I have to walk past the cereal to get to the milk on a supermarket, why I am being so deceived? After all, I didn't consent to being bombarded by all those car emblems on the highway on my way to work, and I definitely didn't agree to see the orange bar at the top of this page, that "Y" is hunting me I say! why is my attention being stolen away?

Agree 100%. Ad blockers are akin to piracy which has been a natural force on the consumer side. Legalities aside, if you make consumers UX miserable enough they often work through it - and I support that.

My comment was mainly in the context of ads being discussed as some anti-consumer device. Where as I view them as a natural part of the payment ecosystem. Too many ads are akin to products being too expensive - and unsurprisingly shift consumers towards "piracy".

It's a natural battle.

If I were king, all ads would have to be black text on white background, containing ONLY the name of the product/service, its description and advertised merits. The description would have to consist of well-defined and falsifiable statements only.

Kinda seems like you just wanted to assert the person you're responding to is ignorant, when in actuality news papers advertisements are very inherently less "dark" than ads on websites. News papers are static content - they are in no way interactive, which is normally where "dark" advertisements live. Click a thing, see an add. News papers cannot dynamically throw ads into your face, where websites can.

But yes, in previous generations bad things were bad, too.

> Isn't that everything in the world, always?

If you're saying advertising is a thing in the world, that's correct.

We have the ability to adjust this particular aspect of our landscape but your questions illustrate it pretty well. Most people don't seem to get very upset about advertising, and therefore it continues to surround us. I don't think there's anything that any one of us can do at this point, we're collectively shaping this world into the one with all the cereal and car emblems and have been for a while.

I guess my point was that parent shouldn't assume defeat based on some HN comments and the fact that "everybody just does ads." My statement is a simplification of what it takes to sell a product, yes, but IMHO this still isn't a big enough obstacle to justify the idea that "ads are the only way."

What are some of the bigger problems you see?

People don't act against their self-interest unless deceived. There are misleading ads that are immoral like "payday loans can get you out of debt", but the vast majority of ads (that I see) are informational, like "store X is having a sale". That's just giving me information to make a decision about ("$N is a reasonable amount for me to spend on this thing I didn't previously want").

I could make a similarly wrong blanket statement about news articles. "The news is fundamentally about misleading you into believing something against your interest". I could make a blanket statement about conversations between two people. "Listening to someone talk is letting them manipulate your brain into thinking something it wouldn't without this prodding". There are deceptive ads, news articles, and people, but you don't have a good moral argument against all ads, news articles, or people.

"Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket."

Gordon Comstock - George Orwell's protagonist in Keep the Aspidistra Flying

>I run an old collaborative writing (roleplaying) forum populated mostly by teens that's paid for by a banner ad.

I know this is going to sound like heresy nowadays, but you could always just run your forum and pay for it out of pocket. Believe it or not, once upon a time, a huge portion of the web was made up of labors of love like that!

And the product's non-obfuscated cost.

Prediction: in your kingdom, product names would evolve to become "World's Best Hair Tonic" with "World's Best" being the company's brand/trade name...

I'm not the biggest fan of advertising, but "here's a funny quote that a fictional person said" doesn't really bring much to the discussion

Say you develop some really cool new product that will really help people's lives be better... how would you suggest you get people to know about it?

I think advertising has value, but there is a really good article about why targeted advertising is bad:

https://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/

The tl;dr is basically that one of the key aspects of advertising is signaling (i.e. we stand behind our product so much that we can waste this much money advertising it to you)... with targeted advertising, it becomes so cheap display an ad to only a few people that you lose that signal, and you have no way of knowing if a product is total crap or not.

As a question of curiosity, roughly how much traffic does your site get and how much are you paying for your servers? I run a few sites to do various minor personal things. None of them get much traffic, and my monthly hosting costs are in the neighborhood of $20 or so, and that's probably using servers that are more powerful than what's really needed.

Apple's a little better, but anecdotally speaking after deleting facebook from my phone I switched to Apple's News application for reading news on my iPhone, and there are dark patterns in play, or maybe it could be called 'curating' the feed. Point is, there's algorithms and sponsored content hiding inside that app that I don't have much control over. I'd like to read a newspaper like there used to be where we're viewing the same version and the same ads. Apple's not completely innocent they're just not direct about it. I wish they were.

> People don't act against their self-interest unless deceived.

They can also be stupid.

My problem is that even with a sold, demonstrable value-prop and 100s of solid references it's not trivial to get paid by clients. Getting customers is Hard Work(tm).

I hate intrusive ads but totally see why some folks "need" that for their revenue, selling is hard, dropping bulshot ads on my site is trivial.

For my own blog/content I've generated more revenue selling consulting labour from prospects finding my blog than from ads.

What if I took your argument, and instead of making it about ads, made it about all human communication? Isn’t all communication intended to influence the thoughts of the listener? I don’t think attempting to influence someone’s behavior to your gain by providing them with information is inherently immoral - we all do it constantly (eg. when messaging a friend to ask them over for a drink, I am manipulating them so I can enjoy their company).

Unlike a lot of communication, advertising is paid, which is certainly relevant. I get it if you’re against commerce as a whole - if you believe that any interaction motivated by money is inherently exploitative, I’m sympathetic.

But if you aren’t willing to go there, advertising is a healthy part of a well-functioning economy. If you’ve invested to develop a good product, one that users would happily pay for, one that has positive value (ie. you can make it for $10, it provides $30 of utility to the user, so you can sell it to the user for $20 and you and the user both gained $10 in utility), what is wrong with paying to inform people about it? Organic word of mouth is slow - if that were the only way we could find out about changes in what is available in the market, much less investment could be profitably made in improved products. Positive investment ROI requires a reliable pathway to tell people that you have something they might want, and advertisement is perfectly suited to fill that role.

What Google AdWords used to be, just plain text that was generally pretty relevant to whatever you were viewing, clearly defined as an ad.

> If I were king, all ads would have to be black text on white background, containing ONLY the name of the product/service, its description and advertised merits. The description would have to consist of well-defined and falsifiable statements only.

Sorry, but for a lot of products this approach is simply ridiculous. I want to know what I'm buying looks like before I buy it in many cases. E.g., clothes, sportswear, footwear, furniture, electric guitars - even food.

I bought a Kindle a few years ago. At the time I wasn't working regularly so didn't have much cash. As a result I didn't check the box and have ads on my Kindle.

The ads are almost entirely irrelevant but seem benign enough since they're always for other books (mostly self-published, I suspect) in the Kindle store. They're also limited to the lock screen so hardly intrusive.

It's only recently that I've occasionally considered paying the £10 (?) to get rid of them and the reason is pure vanity: I'm now (fortunate to be) in a fancy job with a fancy title and I don't want to look like a cheapskate.

A lot of communication is about honest expressions of one's experience, and reflecting others' such experiences, as well as asking for feedback, or asking for another's input.

These modes are all very foreign to advertising.

Except it would be: World's Best(tm) Hair Tonic -- I think I could parse that correctly.

> Many local news sites now have online subscriptions available. Combined with an ad blocker

It's kind of disappointing that news website still have ads even after I decide to pay for access.

Yes, absolutely, but this typically feels like companies responding to market preferences of consumers for the cheapest/brightest fruits/vegetables, rather than the feeling I get from companies marketing typical packaged products, which is of malicious deception.

I'm surprised this comment hasn't gotten more attention. This is an extraordinarily succinct take down of the evils of advertising as it relates to our mental health and well- being as a society.

Didn't newspapers do the same thing? You paid for a (physical) subscription to the newspaper which also had ads in it.

I don't believe so.

Advertisements done right should be a passive consumption model.

I want this -> bunch of leads for what you are looking for.

Advertisements nowadays are focused around an active attention-consuming model. You have companies fighting for any in they can to get themselves situated at the forefront of your attention.

There is really no excuse for it, and the dark paths attach has opened in terms of advancing surveillance technology, and harboring an insatiable appetite for as much information on potential buyer's as possible has frankly ruined any credibility or claim to benignity that I could be bothered to extend to the industry.

I could even tolerate blatant puffery if advertising would just cut out all the 1984-tier privacy destroying behavior.

I don't mind ads. I mind mental intrusiveness and privacy invasion 24/7/365.

If you go to your local supermarket, you will see many branded items with varied fonts and pictures. This packaging is essentially an ad for the item. If you removed that, which you could do, as some brands like Brandless have done, people would not know what to buy. The packaging itself provides value. So too with ads online.

The _software_ companies give [their _software_] away for free.

You can build a phone if you want, install Android on it, and sell it without paying Google anything. There's a ton of Chinese companies doing just that; Amazon does it too.

Perhaps a webpage that people can go to to browse products (an “adstore”).

You’re right - we should allow one photo - presenting product only (i.e. without pictures of scandily clad women used to sell for example wallpaper paste, as is common in my country), against a clear background.

Yep that was pretty cool, I respected Google for it.

Facebook ads are among the most reasonable of ads. They appear like normal content and are easy to scroll past. You can even hide ads that aren’t relevant or that you don’t like seeing. You guys are crazy.

It's not shocking content providers want money. It is somewhat shocking that their way of making money is making user experience worse and essentially engaging in low-grade war with their users - not outright war, but sneaky cold war stuff, where you officially friends with them but unofficially spy on them, steal their secrets, subvert their actions to your benefit, make their life worse if it can make yours a bit better, and so on. It's not exactly how we commonly view customer-provider relationship.

If I remember correctly, calling products "best" or similar is illegal in Sweden unless you can point to verifiable neutral source such as product tests etc. I'm sure it's corruptible to some extent, but at least it is possible to prevent these things at large.