Generally if all the ads you see are scammy, it means you probably are using some form of tracking/privacy protection.

When an ad network has a strong profile on you, legitimate companies pay good money for those ad slots. When they don't really know who you are, only bottom feeders bid on the ad slots you see.

In a way, it almost acts as retribution for not submitting to the anti-privacy machine.

> We should assume that all ads in general are scams. The noise to signal ratio is too large to care.

Completely agree.

> Word of mouth and maybe trusted communities like HN is the only way to reliably discover new things.

There is no evidence that HN is not being actively astroturfed though. Sadly community filtering cannot replace trust in individuals.

> Word of mouth and maybe trusted communities like HN is the only way to reliably discover new things.

Any sufficiently trusted (online) community will find many attempts to exploit its trust for profit.

The only way out of this is to make ad platforms liable for scam ads. At the moment it's simply too profitable to print lies.

That, unfortunately has pushed advertisers into guerrilla marketing tactics like posts and comments disguised as genuine user behaviour. It means we now need to parse whether what we're looking at is an ad or not.

Maybe they would have done that anyway though.

I can't say the AI scripted AI voiced "my wife bet my abs vs. a trip to Paris" and "I ordered this and was going to throw it away but then the heavens opened and angels descended and gave me this Alibaba tchotchke" are harbingers of the idiocracy. Because it's already here.

// Adblock at DNS used to kill these Apple News ads. They're no longer suppressed. Free with their Plus all the things and aggregated my content subs but I quit using it. Had loved Texture, this now sucks.

> maybe trusted communities like HN

Emphasis on maybe. HN is large enough that scammers will try to slip in. The moderation mechanisms probably catch a lot of it but not all.

My trust in anything online or in an app is very low and must be earned.

There’s plenty of scams on HN, people don’t notice the successful ones

In practice I mostly ignore ads too but it feels like an ecosystem-level tragedy

I have not had ads in my life in any form for two decades.

I don’t have a TV, don’t listen to the radio or read newspapers or magazines. I live in a small town with no metro, no billboards. I buy things I need like milk and vegetables, I don’t buy things that require ads for me to know about.

I Adblock the web aggressively.

> maybe trusted communities like HN

Especially on this site I would be very careful with trusting any recommendations. Probably more often than not it's the product/service of the person talking about it, so basically an ad.