alt Hacker NewsThe problem isn't fundamentally advertising - it's stuff like toxic and anti-user advertisements, and the ad industry not knowing what the word "privacy" means.
Replies
I would disagree on this. The reason is that the main point of most ads is to induce artificial demand. When successful this is essentially making people think their lives are missing something, repeatedly. I think it is fairly self evident that at scale this simply leads to social discontent, materialism, and the overall degradation of a society.
There are endless studies, such as this [1] demonstrating a significant inverse relationship between ads and happiness. The more ads, the less happy people are. And I think it's very easy to see the causal relationship there. And this would apply even if the ad industry wasn't so scummy.
the fundamental problem is capitalism
I think there is a fundamental problem with an ad-subsidized service. Even ignoring the privacy issues inherent to the way modern advertising works in practice (which you probably shouldn’t ignore), the mere presence of an advertiser as a third party whose interests the service provider must consider creates malign incentives.
I also think providing a service for free is fundamentally anti-competitive. It’s like the ultimate form of dumping. And there are many studies showing that people are irrational about zero-cost goods, so it’s even harder to compete against than might be expected.