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990 points smitop | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.212s | source
1. kerkeslager ◴[] No.44336396[source]
ITT: advertisers, pretending there's something that could be changed about ads that would make them not ads.

Fundamentally, ads are bad. There just isn't a change you can make to ads that makes them okay.

At a personal level, ads distract us, they tell us we don't have enough, aren't attractive enough, just generally aren't enough. They don't inform us: a one-sided view of a product absent criticisms or comparison to competing products is effectively just a lie.

At an economic level, ads break any benefit to capitalism. Instead of companies competing to provide the best product at the lowest cost, ads make it so a worse product at a higher cost can become the market leader. Ads are one of the primary drivers of the enshittification of everything. Ads allow companies to launch with garbage products that nobody would ever pay money for, slap ads on them to monetize, and thereby prevent competing products actually worth paying for from ever even coming to market.

The only answer is to refuse, on principle, to view ads. If a company receives money from advertisers, you're the product, not the user. If a product has a "free" tier paid for by ads, paying to hide ads doesn't help because you're still competing with advertisers for that company's loyalty, and advertisers will always win in the end (i.e. ads in cable TV--mark my words, there will be ads in all the premium-tier streaming services eventually).