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by sensanaty·2y ago·view on hn ↗
Morally, I consider ads to be outright evil, especially the modern day cancer we call advertisement where they track every singular molecule of your existence. As soon as these scumbags stop hiring psychologists and other similar professionals to make the most addicting and psychologically impactful advertisements possible, then maybe I'll consider them less than pure evil.

I still have uBlock turned off on a few sites, though that list is becoming vanishingly smaller. 4Chan, funnily enough, has the best ads, where it's just old school banner ads on the top of the page and the very bottom of the page. No click hijacking, no embedded ads made to mimic organic content, no fucking audio and flashing lights ads. The only type of targeting those ads have is that the general audience that goes on 4Chan is into anime and Japan, both of which I don't care about. If the internet still had these kind of ads, I think adblockers would be much less of a "problem", but since 99% of them are invasive garbage, whoever is pushing them and whoever argues it's "immoral" to block them can go fuck themselves.

1 comments
a counter take from me, as someone who uses adblocks everywhere possible but used to work for facebook ads department:

ads aren't inherently bad, irregardless of much data do they track. What really bad is how this ads is targeted and how much ads is delivered. I would LOVE to see relevant to my interested and situation ads. I like fpv drones and often see interested ads on instagram and led to a purchase. The problem after that I can't just edit the vector of my interests for ads targeting and keep bombarded with something not relevant to my situation anymore, and boy so much of it I see.

I really don't know why big ads network didn't move forward with user controlled ads mechanics - because we all humans buy something anyway, it's okay of being aware of the options on the market. It's not okay to mentally torture users with irrelevant, annoying and overwhelming amount of ads.