Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44026722

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

I've been on the internet for over 25 years and there wasn't a time in which ads were more than a mild annoyance. Sure, a 5-second ad before watching a video, or a porn ad in The Pirate Bay, or an ad in a news site - I could do without them. But it's a nothingburger, and I'm grateful for those ads, as many of the sites I use would not exist without them. For anyone who's really bothered by them, there are ad blockers.

Furthermore, user data and tracking is a huge bogeyman, and it's extremely overblown. I'm yet to see any evidence of anyone having any relevant data about me AT ALL. With any luck they can profile me in that I use certain sites, or that I'm a male in my 30s and I live in X country. Generic shit at best. Relevant read: https://archive.is/kTkom

If anything, so-called targeted ads have been failing on me because I'm never suggested producs or services I'd actually buy.

So, what's the issue here? For all the issues we currently have, ADS are the worse? No.

What I think is:

a) This is an elitist in-group "luxury belief". It's like saying I hate ads signals a sort of superiority, as if you're part of people in the know, and ads are for normies or NPCs. That's for inferior people, I'm above that.

b) This is a problem for people in the autist spectrum, in which those who say they hate ads are overrepresented.

But I think there's a darker undercurrent since this view has been lobbyied and astroturfed to oblivion:

c) This is a propaganda effort to distract you from more nefarious things, or to encourage them. Such as normalizing banning and prohibiting things. Normalizing strict state-enforced regulation of the internet.